In the time it took me to raise my head and recognise that she’d intercepted us, Makkari had already darted behind Pietro. She had a small smile on her face as she danced around him—honestly, I’m not even sure how I saw the expression, a freeze-frame caught between flickers of movement so swift I had no chance of following them properly.
At the same time, Pietro fell into a loose, easy stance, his weight on the balls of his feet. Makkari reached out a hand and tapped him on the shoulder—it seemed pretty clear that she was playing instead of fighting properly, like a cat might toy with an especially interesting bug before going for the kill.
Pietro, on the other hand, was taking this seriously. More seriously than I think I’d ever seen him fight before. He shifted his stance half a step to the side before turning, his fist snapping out as part of the same fluid motion. The Eternal flowed easily out of the way, like an adult evading the obvious, telegraphed swing of a toddler, but Pietro hadn’t expected the punch to land. He pivoted, following through into a hook that would’ve caught basically anyone else.
Credit where credit was due: it seemed like Pietro’s combat drills with Steve and Bucky had been paying off. They’d turned him into a much more well-rounded fighter, instead of someone who relied solely on his speed advantage to overwhelm people. My brother had never liked to lose, and he’d probably been gaming out how he’d fight Makkari ever since I first told him she was faster than he was.
The Eternal was still too fast for the attack to connect fully, of course, but her eyes widened as my brother’s knuckles grazed her shoulder. She bounced back a few steps, pausing for a brief instant to weigh him appraisingly before deciding on her next move.
My hand was only halfway up. I felt so slow. My awareness was in hyperdrive, enhanced senses straining to keep up with her even just a little bit. The immediate instinct was to burst into astral form again, to dive deeply enough that my perception of time would stretch to the point where I could match her, but I knew that would be pointless. I could only maintain independent control of my body and touch the physical world with my magic if I stayed in the shallowest shoals of the Astral, so all that would accomplish would be rendering me a helpless observer.
The asphalt cracked under Makkari’s feet as she lunged forward, intending on slamming into Pietro the same way she would hit a Deviant. It seemed like he was expecting it, immediately dropping his centre of gravity and dashing toward her, aiming for her legs. The manoeuvre caught Makkari by surprise for a second time. Reflexively, she hopped up and over him, springing cleanly over the counter-charge. For the tiniest fraction of a second, she had to check herself as she landed, decelerating enough to reorient and remember where the ground was and Pietro wasn’t.
Pietro capitalised, bouncing off the street to reverse his momentum and driving an elbow backwards into her—it wasn’t a full hit, just a sharp bump as she scrambled out of the way. Makkari whipped around, her brow furrowed, and tried again—this time blurring in an arc, whipping past Pietro’s flank.
He didn’t try to match her speed or chase her. Instead, he feinted backward, baiting her into the space he’d left open, and when she darted in, he snapped forward with a fist aimed where she would be at the end of the movement.
Makkari twisted around it anyway—she was still too fast for him—but she’d flinched, like she’d felt the idea of the hit even if it hadn’t actually landed. Her hand locked around his forearm, yanking him off-balance, then she drove an open palm into his stomach so hard it lifted him bodily into the air before he crashed down onto his hands and knees, winded and gasping for air.
Even distracted, the Eternal still noticed the glimmers of red energy as they lit up along her limbs. All at once, she let go of Pietro and lunged toward me so fast it was like the intervening space didn’t even exist. I somehow barely managed to hoist her in the air, her feet flailing as she lost purchase on the ground, one of her outstretched hands an inch from my face. She scowled silently, her brow furrowed in annoyance and frustration as she fought against my telekinetic power, straining impotently to try to reach me.
“Air jail,” Pietro wheezed, struggling to recover from the hit, “is the worst. She always does it. It’s basically cheating.”
“I can put her down again if you want; let you have a little round two?”
My brother held up a hand in a helpless gesture of surrender. “No, that’s fine, this is fine.”
“Alright.”
I clenched my fist. The chaos magic along Makkari’s limbs glowed brighter in response, squeezing, then I slammed her into the street hard enough to shatter the asphalt. A moment later, she was back in the air as I cocked my hand back for a repeat performance. I didn’t really have any other plan here, except to try to bash her into unconsciousness like a child slamming a doll into the ground.
Pietro moved, blurring forward to slam into me in a diving tackle. An instant later—we hadn’t even hit the ground yet—I felt the shuddering impact as something cratered the street where I’d been standing, missing us by inches, falling from the sky like an orbital strike. My brother’s tackle knocked the wind out of me and I fumbled my magic as we hit the ground, a bolt of agony running up my leg from my broken ankle as both of us scrambled to roll back into rough approximations of combat-ready crouches.
Ikaris rose from the knee he’d tried to splatter me with, staring impassively at us with gold-clouded eyes. Makkari was still on the ground, dazed and blinking, and she looked up at him with a bleary, confused expression. Ikaris tore his gaze away from us to glance in her direction for a moment, and she moved her hands, signing something, but I didn’t understand what.
Ikaris’s mouth opened as Druig started to respond through the puppeted Eternal, but he was cut off as Pietro seized the momentary distraction to push off from his crouch like an Olympic sprinter. The air cracked. He twisted his body mid-stride, using his entire frame to drive an elbow strike into the other man’s collarbone. The force of the blow knocked Ikaris from his feet, sending him tumbling a dozen metres down the street, but as he bounced off the asphalt, he spun and recovered smoothly in midair, golden beams blasting a furrowed path back across the ground toward us. Pietro turned to the side, trying to dodge the beams of cosmic energy, but one grazed his shoulder and he let out a yelp of pain as he staggered back, trying to recover.
I hadn’t remained still. When Pietro had lunged, I’d been drawing deeply on my well of personal power. One outflung hand hit Makkari with a powerful bolt of chaos magic just as she managed to scramble to her feet, sending her careening into a shopfront in a shower of splintering wood. My other hand tracked Pietro’s movement, glimmers of magical energy yanking him to the side out of the path of Ikaris’s attack.
Of course, with my focus divided between keeping Makkari out of the fight and Pietro out of harm’s way, that left me wide open as Ikaris—eye beams still blazing—dived forward through the air toward me. I had no time to do anything but brace myself and trust that my protection spell could tank the hit. As I cringed internally in anticipation, however, the Eternal was ripped from the air by a large, powerfully-muscled purple-black shape: Shuri pouncing on him, seemingly from nowhere, with a panther-like cry.
The brawl quickly devolved into chaos, a blur of action and counteraction, with too many combatants all moving and attacking too fast for me to do anything but rely on my instincts.
Phastos dropped out of the sky with an orbiting array of metallic ring structures, peppering the battlefield with cosmic energy blasts and repulsor beams. I threw up a barrier as Pietro circled around in an instant to try to land a hit on him, but Makkari was suddenly there to intercept. I slapped her away again, only to be brought up short by Ikaris, who was suddenly knocked aside by a set of vibranium-enhanced repulsor beams from Tony, before he was driven back by a series of cosmic blasts from Kingo’s fingertips. Pietro tackled Kingo, slamming him to the ground in a rugby tackle, as Shuri once again leapt toward Ikaris, only for her to be blasted off course by a concentrated barrage of repulsor fire from Phastos.
The flow of the battle took us back through the walls of Kamar-taj, the Eternals pressing us forward with their attacks. I heard Sersi cry out incredulously—“Ikaris?!”—but they had no time for anything more than that as the fight continued. The Eternals slotted into neat patterns of coordinated attacks, using their strongest member as the tip of the spear.
A half-dozen sorcerers on one of the remaining walls unleashed a shower of arrowlike slivers of shimmering power, which were summarily blocked by one of Phastos’s barriers. I ripped a black stone statue from its place in the gardens and flung it at him, several tons hitting his shield at the speed of sound, distracting him momentarily while Kingo returned fire on the sorcerers. A giant, rotating mandala of burning sorcerous energy, jagged teeth along its edges, tore across the battlefield a moment later like a buzzsaw blade that had torn free of its moorings. The Bollywood actor was yanked out of the construct’s path by Makkari, and it sliced a neighbouring building in half before dissipating.
Lances of golden energy raked through the sky, tracking Tony as he tried to take evasive manoeuvres. Just before they caught him, he spun in the air and slammed his forearms together, a blue-tinged, semi-translucent energy shield springing into existence in front of him. The force behind the beams slammed him backwards, but they failed to crack through his protective barrier before I hit Ikaris with a pair of powerful bolts of chaos magic from above, forcing him to break off and reorient on me again. He swept upwards, fists outstretched, but I was already rolling to the side, telekinetically hammering him away as I deliberately dropped out of the sky and let myself plummet back to what was left of Kamar-taj’s main courtyard.
I landed gently on top of a wide, black-silver span of rough metal—the shape of rippling ridges and splashing waves frozen across its surface—between Gilgamesh and the Hulk, both of whom appeared to have been trapped by an exercise of Sersi’s power.
“Hey guys,” I said breathlessly. “You gonna join us, or…?”
As I spoke, I dropped to my hands and knees on the surface, red wisps of magic spilling out from my fingers to trace the contours of the solid chunk of vibranium, pooling in the frozen whorls and creeping around the edges to peel the dirt and fragments of broken paving stones away from the metal’s edges. A small hiss of pain escaped my lips as I inadvertently put a bit of pressure on my swollen ankle. Annoying.
Gil shot me a frustrated look—he was lying in an awkwardly prone position on his side, head barely above the surface of the slab, one shoulder and both legs caught in place. “Oh, I dunno, maybe? I’m pretty comfortable. I might need a hand getting up.” His eyes flicked over to the Hulk and his tone briefly spiked with worry. “Easy! Please don’t hit it again. My ears are still ringing.”
Saying that the Hulk looked extremely angry would have been an understatement. His veins were standing out against his skin, both fists clenched in what seemed like a supreme act of willpower as he deliberately held back from slamming them into the metal. Bloodshot, unblinking eyes were locked on me, and he was huffing so hard that, if it were anyone else, I’d be afraid they might hyperventilate.
“Hold tight, big guy. Give me a second,” I told him, injecting a bit of gentleness into my tone.
He acknowledged me with a violent grunt of frustration, nostrils flaring.
Taking firmer hold of the chunk of vibranium, I felt it shift slightly beneath me as I began to wriggle it free of the earth, pouring more power into my telekinetic efforts. Vibranium was light as far as metals went, but this thing was enormous—at least a metre thick at the deepest point and solid all the way through. I had no idea how many tonnes it weighed, but it had to be in the triple digits and I wasn’t exactly in peak condition. I might’ve been lowballing the difficulty of crashing the Domo into the Himalayas, earlier.
The Hulk was almost certainly still strong enough that he could have lifted and carried his prison with him, but the metal expanse was wide enough that he simply hadn’t been able to get the leverage to do so. Even so, feeling out the vibranium with my telekinesis, I could detect deformations and the beginnings of stress fractures that told me he probably could have pried himself out of it if he’d had a bit more time.
“Wanda,” Gil’s voice was quiet, warning, his eyes fixed on something beyond me.
Keeping my body still, I watched him carefully out of the corner of my eye as I reinforced my grip, pouring as much magic as I could into it.
“Move.”
I threw myself into a sideways roll as the word left his lips, heaving with all the force I could bring to bear. The massive hunk of metal exploded out of the ground and I pitched it over the top of me, letting out a strangled gasp as my magic seized up in a backlash that felt like the witchy equivalent of pulling a muscle by pitching a ball too hard.
I caught a brief glimpse of Ikaris, diving down toward me in another attempt to smush me into paste, before my wild swing intercepted him. The wide slab of vibranium swatted him out of the air like a ping pong paddle and there was a deep, resonant bong as the impact reoriented his descent by ninety degrees. He disappeared from view, his passage punching a hole through one of the remaining walls of the monastery.
“Woah, hey!” Gil yelped in protest, though the Hulk’s wordless snarls drowned him out. The big guy was flailing his arms around like a toddler, grunting and snorting with anger.
Somehow, I still shakily managed to keep a hold of the vibranium mass despite the green giant’s struggles, hoisting it above me with strained threads of magic as I floated back up into the air, trying to get some distance to take a second to breathe and reassess. I hadn’t really realised that my magic could ache until now.
I was immediately denied. Bolts of chaotically-charged cosmic energy smashed into my midsection, staggering me in midair. The metal slab once again almost slipped from my grasp and I awkwardly tried to use it as cover, interposing it between Kingo and me.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
There was a sudden burst of automatic gunfire—the first I’d heard in a little while, I realised… what had happened with the helicopters?—and Kingo flinched back, throwing up a hand to protect his face as the bullets bounced off. They weren’t enough to properly hurt him, of course, but the kinetic energy they imparted was enough to knock him off-balance. He turned just in time to see a red, white and blue shield fly toward him, Steve and Bucky sliding down a half-collapsed monastery wall as they joined us.
Kingo reacted quickly, twisting out of the shield’s way. Sersi was behind him—I hadn’t even noticed her—and the movement left her in the projectile’s path instead, hand already outstretched. I acted without thinking, scrabbling at it as I stretched my magic thinner. Weak wisps of red flared into being along the rim of the shield and I flicked my hand upwards at the last instant. It jerked in midair like it had ricocheted off something, changing direction to bounce off the side of Kingo’s head, knocking him off his feet as it clanged back around.
“Are you trying to lose that?” I yelled at Steve. I was panting, my throat raw, but my eyes were still fixed on Sersi.
I was hovering in the air above her, still just barely holding onto the chunk of vibranium with my fraying telekinetic power. She was looking back up at me, and there was a moment where our gazes locked together. She looked… upset? But not at me, if that made any sense. Like she was struggling with something, though I didn’t know what.
Oh well. I took a breath and dropped the slab on her, letting gravity do most of the work as I released my hold. Instead of splattering her—or hammering her into the ground like a nail, which I thought was the more likely outcome of an actual impact—the Eternal put her hand up and the massive hunk of metal splashed into liquid as it came down on her like a giant water balloon.
Of course, Gilgamesh and the Hulk were unaffected by her power, maintaining their inexorable downward momentum. Instead of being crushed by metal, Sersi instead disappeared under ten feet of rippling green muscle, the Hulk bellowing in triumphant rage at his newfound freedom and a target to vent his frustration on.
“Sersi!” Kingo yelled, an edge of panic in his voice. Bolts of cosmic energy exploded across the Hulk’s back and shoulders, knocking the giant stumbling forward, but the movie star’s attack was cut short as Gilgamesh charged into him, a golden-gauntleted fist sending him flying.
A pair of golden beams suddenly cut through the partially-collapsed masonry nearby, catching me off-guard as they slammed into my chest and shoulder. My protection spell held, mostly, but I lost my grip on my positioning as it flipped me into a wild tumble, and I dropped toward the broken courtyard.
My ears picked out the sound of something skidding across the ground an instant before I landed on something softer than expected, strong arms catching me out of the air as I fell. Well, some of it softer, at least—solid, metal fingers dug into my thigh a little bit as I blinked and looked up to see Bucky’s face above me, Steve at his side.
“Ugh,” I grunted my appreciation, not really able to form words right away. I glanced around, feeling a little dazed and wrung out.
Gilgamesh and Kingo were clashing, the movie star barely managing to keep the heavy fighter from pinning him down for a solid hit with a constant barrage of blasts. There was the sudden crack of air as Makkari arrived nearby. A shock of raw force blasted the Hulk backwards off of Sersi. The speedster started pinballing around the gamma mutate, keeping him off-balance and reeling with repeated superspeed charges. Beyond a collapsed wall, I heard a pantherlike yowl and the repeated whine of repulsors. A heavy feeling settled in my stomach. Were we losing?
Golden cosmic energy lanced toward us again. Feeling a little feeble, I belatedly scrabbled at my magic, trying and failing to conjure a barrier in time. My stomach clenched with worry as Steve darted in front of Bucky and me, shoulder braced against the inside of his shield.
He was driven back a step—jaw set, brow furrowed, eyes focused—and the beams were deflected to either side, bouncing off the shield to carve through already-ruined stonework instead. The attack cut out abruptly a moment later and Steve didn’t hesitate, taking a step forward to hurl his shield as hard as he could.
Ikaris casually slapped the projectile out of the air, redirecting it downwards with the palm of his hand. The force of the blow buried it two-thirds deep into the ground at his feet. The Eternal stepped over the rim of the shield, taking a few paces menacingly toward us. I hadn’t really gotten a proper look at him before, but now that I did, it looked like Shuri had managed to do a bit of damage to him at least. His armour was stained red in a few places, and I could see jagged claw marks cutting a bloody path along the left side of his head; nothing remained of the ear on that side but a few flaps of shredded meat.
Bucky put me down, metal hand flexing and settling into a fist as he and Steve stared down Ikaris.
I grabbed weakly for my magic, struggling to draw on the dregs of my pool of personal power as I tried to stand. It came slowly, in fits and starts. I’d pushed myself too hard earlier and now I was paying for it. “Wait—” I started to say, my head still scattered, but the word cut off with a choking sound as I accidentally put my weight on my broken ankle. Stupid.
Ikaris didn’t wait.
Steve managed to dodge narrowly under Ikaris’s initial swing and slammed his fist into the Eternal’s ribs, doing almost nothing but bruising his own knuckles. Bucky feinted into a powerful haymaker with his metal arm, but Ikaris caught his fist in an open palm. He squeezed, the vibranium starting to deform slightly under his grip. Bucky lashed out again with his free hand, catching Ikaris in the jaw, but the Eternal barely flinched. Steve jumped on his back, locking a bicep around the man’s throat in a chokehold, attempting to wrestle him to the ground.
Ikaris let go of Bucky’s metal hand. As Buck went to lash out again, the Eternal was quicker, backhanding him hard enough that he was violently dashed to the ground, smashing through a piece of fallen masonry. My heart leapt into my throat. Ikaris reached up, grabbed the bicep around his throat, and squeezed—I heard Steve’s grunt of pain as fingers dug into the meat of his arm through his armoured suit. A moment later, the Eternal wrenched his arm back, immediately breaking the super soldier’s grip, then flicked his head back to smack Steve in the face. Steve staggered back a couple of paces as Ikaris let go of his arm and turned to face him.
I realised what was about to happen just before the glow in Ikaris’s eyes started to intensify. Throwing myself toward them in a burst of sudden panicked adrenaline, I flung what magic I’d been able to gather into a wild burst to accelerate myself forward. I used myself like a battering ram, slamming my shoulder into Ikaris’s back as hard as I could and throwing off his aim—instead of blasting Steve full in the chest, it was a glancing hit that sent him flying backwards to land in a tangle of limbs. I clawed at the injured side of Ikaris’s head with my fingers, glimmers of red energy gathering again in my palm as I blasted him point-blank with a bolt of chaos magic to the temple.
Ikaris fell forward a half-step, then stopped and turned back toward me. I was right in his face, panting and listing to one side as I tried not to put weight on my broken ankle again, my heartbeat pounding in my ears. I had no time to check to see if either of the super soldiers were okay, but I really, really hoped they were. Steve had only caught a really glancing blow—a graze, really—I tried to tell myself. He was fine.
But Bucky wasn’t moving.
“Druig,” I snarled, my voice rasping unsteadily in my throat. “When I get my hands on you, I’m gonna pull your trachea out through your fucking dickhole.”
He gave me a smarmy, lopsided grin in response, the expression weirdly incongruous on Ikaris’s face. “You know, I’m honestly incredibly impressed with how well you’ve done so far, but—”
Gilgamesh slammed into him, charging past me like a freight train.
“Oh, thank God,” I mumbled, whipping my head around to track them. Ikaris tried to fly upwards, but Gilgamesh snagged him by the ankle and used it as leverage to fling himself upwards, uppercutting the other Eternal with a golden-gauntleted fist.
I tried to take advantage of the distraction, hesitating in indecision only briefly before stumbling in Bucky’s direction. I half-dragged my injured foot behind me, ignoring the sharp, throbbing pain. I wanted to fly, but my magic had been strained by the stunt I’d pulled earlier—it felt like I’d thrown something out of alignment. Even just maintaining the thread of magic that kept my protective spell up was piling more and more stress on my personal well of power. What I needed was the chance to rest for a few minutes so I could recover, but I knew I wasn’t going to get it.
Falling to my knees next to Bucky’s unmoving form, I reached out with trembling hands and carefully rolled him over onto his back. He was limp, his eyes closed, a pattern of angry black and purple bruising across one side of his face, blood seeping down through his hair. I felt a small spike of relief as I realised that he was still breathing, but the feeling sharpened into worry as I noticed the visibly swollen lump on his scalp. Ikaris had hit him hard—a skull fracture, maybe? Maybe worse. I felt my face burning, hot tears prickling at the corners of my eyes. I didn’t know what to do.
Above, Gil latched onto Ikaris, punching the other Eternal again and again with his free hand as the two of them swooped drunkenly through the air. Ikaris was fighting back, however, and managed to twist in the other man’s grip, eyes blazing with power as he blasted Gilgamesh point-blank in the face with his energy beams. Gil let out a bellow of anger and pain as he lost his grip, tumbling backwards. Before he could fall to the courtyard, Ikaris darted forward and struck him mid-air, punching hard enough to send the other Eternal flying out of sight, beyond the shattered monastery walls.
Ikaris turned toward me again, eyes glowing, and an icy shock of fear jolted through my system as I hobbled to my feet again to face him. I had no idea if my protection spell could even take another hit. With Bucky right there, though, I couldn’t afford to dodge out of the way, either. Instead, a fraying thread of my magic touched the Mind Stone at my throat as Ikaris opened fire, golden lances burning a path toward me only to be intercepted and cancelled out by a matching beam from the Stone.
The Eternal was seemingly expecting it. His attack cut out almost immediately as he dropped from the air, springing off the ground hard enough to send up a spray of churned earth and fragmented stone as he lunged toward me. I raised a hand in an utterly futile attempt to ward him off, but my protection spell shattered. The arm I’d thrown up in front of him snapped like a twig as he slammed into me. I didn’t even have time to cry out.
There was a brief instant of weightlessness, a bone-crushing impact, and everything went black.
--
Kingo groaned, wincing as he pulled himself up out of the shattered rubble that Gilgamesh had left him in. He hadn’t been hit like that since, well, he actually couldn’t remember ever being hit that hard before. It was a miracle Gil hadn’t taken his head off. He really did have a mean left hook when he was using his power. Speaking of… he watched his friend sail out of sight, knocked flying by a double-fisted hammerblow from Ikaris.
Ikaris…
Ikaris joining the battle had been unexpected. More worryingly, peppered amongst the familiar moves and maneuvers they’d developed together through thousands of years of fighting side by side, were actions that Kingo didn’t recognise. Moments where the other Eternal surged forward with reckless abandon when Kingo was expecting him to back up, or when he suddenly disengaged and switched targets when Kingo was expecting him to focus. There was enough familiarity there that it hadn’t caused any issues, exactly, but it still threw Kingo off. A vague feeling of apprehension was building in his stomach.
As he watched, taking a moment to breathe and recover, Ikaris reoriented again on Wanda Maximoff.
The witch stumbled back to her feet, interposing herself between the Eternal and one of her fallen comrades. Ikaris tried to blast her. A similar beam erupted from the Infinity Stone at her throat, blocking the attack, but it had only been a feint—Ikaris hadn’t committed, dropping from the air and driving forward in a wild lunge instead. Kingo flinched a little at the impact, the woman’s body ragdolling limply into a pile of rubble. She didn’t get back up. Was she dead? She was probably dead.
Makkari blurred into existence in front of him, a look of annoyance on her face as she signed. A little help? Her movements were punctuated by a particularly loud bellow of rage from behind him.
Kingo snapped out of it, nodding numbly in response, but she’d already blurred away again. Charged cosmic energy gathered at his fingers as he turned to join her attack on the Hulk.
As Makkari darted in, the giant brought his hands together as hard as he could with a sound like a clap of thunder. A visible shockwave blasted out from the impact, carrying with it a rain of stone shards as it knocked the speedster off her feet and sent her tumbling across the ground.
Kingo recovered quickly, most of the force dissipating over the distance between them, and snapped off a few shots in response before the Hulk could capitalise on the disruption and get his over-muscled hands on Makkari. There was a rush of air past Kingo and suddenly Ikaris joined the fray as well, slamming a fist into their opponent’s jaw in a punch that knocked the Avenger reeling backwards.
At first, it seemed like there was little difference between fighting a Deviant and fighting the Hulk, but actually putting the angry green giant down for the count was proving much harder than expected. Kingo’s off-the-cuff blasts had enough power behind them to knock the Avenger back and off-balance, but he was durable enough that they didn’t do much in the way of actual damage. Then again, Kingo hadn’t been in a good position to hit the giant with a proper, double-handed Deviant-killer yet—or at least, that was the excuse he kept mentally giving himself.
Kingo knew it was incredibly stupid and dangerous to be holding something back in a fight like this, but part of him was still desperately, stubbornly clinging to the idea that the Avengers were the good guys. He felt a tight queasiness in his stomach, pointedly avoiding the thought that he’d probably just watched Ikaris kill the Maximoff woman, and that others might have died earlier, too.
The Eternals had won already, in any case. Even with Gilgamesh taking the Avengers’ side, between Ikaris, Makkari and Phastos, this just hadn’t been a fair fight. If Ikaris hadn’t rejoined them, the Avengers might have stood a fighting chance, but now? They were done.
A wildcat-like yowl, short and sharp, heralded the arrival of the bestial, dark purple giantess from Wakanda—Shuri, Phastos had called her. Even so, it was still two on three.
Makkari broke from the fight with the Hulk, darting in to distract the new arrival with a couple of lightning-fast strikes before she started circling around her. Immediately, the speedster’s passage whipped up a howling wall of dust and shards of broken stone. A tightly-localised tornado formed, lighting up with occasional flashes of static lightning and pulses of golden cosmic energy, with winds so strong Kingo had seen them flay unprotected flesh from bone.
While Makkari distracted Shuri, Kingo and Ikaris squared up against the Hulk. It was Deviant-fighting tactics 101. Separate. Isolate.
Destroy.
It happened so fast. On instinct, really. Ikaris twisted one of the Hulk’s arms behind the giant’s back and braced up against him. The gamma mutate let out another roar of rage as they wrestled, free hand scrabbling awkwardly backwards to try to dislodge the Eternal.
“Kingo!” Ikaris shouted, short and sharp. A command.
The Avenger was wide open. Kingo was already holding his hands apart, letting power collect between the golden traceries that lit up his palms. He clasped his hands together, the cosmic energy coalescing and concentrating at his fingertips, forming a sphere of rippling destruction ten times the size and power of one of his smaller blasts.
He darted forward as the Hulk struggled free of Ikaris’s grip. It wasn’t clear if he’d broken out, or if Ikaris had deliberately let him go, but it didn’t really matter either way—it was too late. The Hulk turned, furious eyes focusing on Kingo. Massive, oversized hands reached for the movie star.
Kingo fired.
He was knocked away by the explosive discharge of energy, slammed to the ground and skidding across broken stonework on his back. The point-blank blast shattered the Hulk’s chest, a wide arc of bright green blood splattering the earth around them as the giant’s head snapped back and he let out a surprised bellow of anger and pain. The force behind the shot took the giant from his feet as well, sending him flying backwards.
Ikaris met him coming in the opposite direction like a spear.
As Kingo watched, the other Eternal erupted out of the Avenger’s chest in a shower of green gore flecked with yellow bone and black organ-meat, almost ripping the giant in half.
The Hulk collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
Ikaris came to a halt, floating several feet above the mangled body. Kingo lay staring at the other Eternal for a moment as he caught his breath, a sick feeling tying his stomach in knots. Ikaris was dripping with blood, the gamma-tainted green liquid matted in his hair, staining his face and hands, and tracing bright runnels against the blue and gold of his armour. And his eyes… his eyes were clouded over with the telltale golden mistiness of Druig’s power.
Makkari broke off from her attack on Shuri, the artificial tornado dissipating almost instantly as she backed up. The Wakandan woman staggered a little and shook her head, braids whipping angrily around her before she focused on Ikaris. Then she saw the bloody green body below him and froze.
