Jemma Simmons
Jemma’s eyes opened. For a moment, she didn’t register what she was seeing. A large orange colored mandala was floating above her. She stared blearily, then coughed heavily when her body decided to painfully eject the dust that had entered her lungs. Confused, she struggled to her feet.
Whatever had hit the Behemoth had done a hell of a lot of damage. The roof had caved in places, fires had erupted along the walls, wires hung out of walls and sparked. Jemma coughed, then reached for someone who had fallen out of a bed. She lifted the poor man off the floor with a scream of pain, then carefully lowered the man to the bed. She reached for a medical cart and pulled it over, mentally cataloging his wounds.
“This is Jemma Simmons in the Behemoth medical wing,” she said, hoping the quantum radio Stark gave her was still working. “I need a report on the damage the ship has taken. We’ve taken multiple casualties. I need a full report and a record of who is still able to help the wounded.”
The man’s arm was broken, but not bleeding. She ignored it to focus on the massive slash across his abdomen, cleaning it with alcohol and covering his body with her own. to keep more dust from falling into the wound. A warm red light floated over her, helping her in her task.
“You are tougher than you look, young lady,” Jemma looked over at Agatha Harkness, coughing out another bit of wet dust.
Agatha Harkness looked almost completely unfazed. While the world around her was burning, the fire that came near faded to nothing. She had a bright red mandala floating above her, keeping any rubble from falling. She was missing her right sleeve, but looked otherwise fine.
“Have you seen any other survivors?” Jemma asked her.
“Yes. However, I’m afraid I first had to deal with several intruders,” Agatha looked over her shoulder. Jemma snapped her gaze behind her.
On the floor beside a massive hole in the wall, sat five men. Two of them were passed out on the wall. One was staring openly at the ceiling, laid on the floor with a blank look on his face. The last two were openly weeping, one of them in the fetal position.
“They apparently wanted to kill those here while we were ‘weakened’,” Agatha scoffed.
Jemma sealed the cut on the man’s chest with some bandages, glancing up at Agatha. “What did you do to them?”
“Sent them into a mirror world. One where men confront the truth within themselves, the horrors they brought on others magnified and turned in on themselves, hunted by their own desires, fears, and rage as they scream for eternity in a mere moment,” Agath smirked. “The last time I did it was while I went abroad and had to teach someone a lesson. I think he used it as inspiration for one of those newfangaled ‘video games’. He was far braver than I assumed at first.”
“Really?” Jemma rose to her feet, Agatha helping her. The two women began walking, trying to get to the next problem.
“Oh yes. I believe it was called ‘Silent Hill’.”
Jemma blanched, flickering her gaze back to the men, one of which was screaming silently now. Before she could ask any more questions, she was interrupted by a sound from their earpieces.
“This is Melati Kusuma! I have a man with a broken back here, I need help!”
Jemma touched a finger to her earpiece. “This is Jemma with Agatha Harkness, we’re on our way! Put up a beacon so all teams can join up on you!”
“O-On it!” Melati said.
“That’s an order. All survivors link up on Melati’s beacon. This fight isn’t over yet!”
Agatha gave Jemma a smile, then continued to help her along. They found their way to a clearing, where dozens of people were gathered. Several soldiers ringed the area, guarding the patients and doctors.
“Dr. Simmons!” One doctor said, rushing over. “Are you okay-”
“Yes, now help people who need it!” Jemma shoved the man aside and rushed to a computer at a hobbling pace. She quickly tapped at it, bringing up the holoscreen displaying the Behemoth’s status. She ignored the large amount of red spots indicating damage, as well as the alerts that the ships weapons were firing at high speed, and instead focused on the running tally of available supplies.
“Jemma!” she looked up to see Melati, who was wrapping bandages around a man’s head. “Otto needs you.”
“I’ll be right there to help him with the patient-”
“He is the patient,” Melati said.
Jemma stared at her, only now realizing Melati was covered in blood in places where her clothes had been shredded. Signs of immense healing.
“What happened?” Jemma asked.
“His back is broken,” Melati half-snarled. “I don’t have any more of my serum, and I need extra supplies to work on him.
“Let’s do it then,” Jemma snapped a hand to the side, grabbed a laptop, and nodded to Melati, who finished bandaging. “Come on.”
The Komodo woman and British doctor walked as one to their next patient.
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Clint Barton/Hawkeye
Allies, targets, enemies, inconsequential. Barton kept those in mind as he flitted across the battlefield. It was something a Japanese assassin with a Thompson Contender once taught him. He tried not to think of things in such absolutes. But then and there, in a battlefield covered in powerful soldiers, he was unintentionally following that adage.
Allies were the people actively helping his cause. The Avengers fell into that. Hawkeye sped past Nomad and Mockingbird at one point, the two fighters back to back as they battled. Nomad broke the neck of one of the blue aliens that had joined the battle, only to stagger when another one punched him in the face. Mockingbird hit the offending blue alien with an electric baton, forcing him back enough for Bucky to fill his stomach with bullets. They weren’t losing, but numbers were against them.
Hawkeye, sitting in the shadows of a pine trees branches, pulled out his bow and sighted on the aliens surrounding his friends. Initially, they had been enemies. Tougher, capable of taking arrow after arrow without dying. Not as invulnerable as the Hydra-Hulks running around, but tough.
Hawkeye was holding three arrows in his hand, two of them in the palm and one that he placed to his bow. He pulled back, fired, pulled back, fired, pulled back, fired. The process took less than a second, the arrows hitting three aliens at once. The ends of them were covered in a chemical derived from Goop’s chemical makeup, making sure that they were attached to each alien’s neck. Then, as the aliens staggered in surprise, the breaching charges within the arrows exploded, carving out gaping holes in their necks.
The difference between enemies and targets was simply how easy it was to take them out.
A few other aliens spun around to shoot at his position, but Hawkeye was already leaping into the air, his cloak snapping out behind him to allow him to glide along the wind. He fired four more arrows this time, all flash-bangs. The blinded and deafened aliens would prove to be far easier for Nomad and Mockingbird to deal with, but Hawkeye wasn’t focused on that. He kept moving, rushing along through the forest, taking out targets of opportunity, aiding allies, and ignoring what was inconsequential or far too powerful for him to take down, though he did sometimes work to inconvenience the latter.
He was rarely noticed, but his effects could be seen. When an enemy tanks turret was eaten through by a catom arrow, when a commander died from a blow to the heart, when a group was left devastated.
Men, women, and monsters on both sides died. For all the Avengers tried to help, for every arrow that Barton fired, nothing could stop that. His heart felt for them.
But his goal was not the battle. As Clint Barton wreaked havoc, his thoughts remained on his main objective. He needed to get there soon. And at the right moment, when they least expected him, he would fire his shot.
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Qovas
“How far have they gotten?” Qovas asked one of his men, watching on a camera as his men rushed through the halls of his ship.
“They’re almost here!” One of his men snarled.
There were sixteen men in the room, all of them working at the controls or preparing for the breach. Qovas narrowed his eyes as he stared at the screen before him, his mind rushing through possibilities.
Dial, Creel, and Fantasma were in his ship, causing chaos. Carl Creel was in front, taking the appearance of a man made of metal, taking the claws of Remorath soldiers with barely a scratch before punishing them with insanely powerful blows, his metal fists breaking bones. The foul magic user was using him as a shield while blasting beams of pure violet energy from her palms, eyes alight with dark power and sickening energy. Dial had taken the form of a small red alien, firing blades from a weapon nearly his own size. As a blade sliced into one of his soldiers, Qovas snarled.
“Our own weapons. He makes a mockery of our traditions,” Qovas snapped his head to the side. “Tell them to take the Odium. And prepare the ship for our final plan.”
Once, before Strucker, his soldiers might have momentarily hesitated before following his orders. But now, their minds had been awakened to a new purpose by Lord Strucker. Qovas breathed deeply, taking in the sensation of his master in the back of his mind, forever blessing him with strength and wisdom beyond his lowly station.
Yes. The three Avengers would arrive soon. And when they did, they would realize how futile their rebellion truly was.
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Maria Hill/Director of BRIDGE
“What the hell is that?” Buckler asked, staring at camera footage of a Tesla tank. Maria barely noticed General Greshkov walking over to him. She was instead focused on her conversation with General Lo Chien, though she could still overhear the others.
“Ah. That would be one of our Tesla Tanks,” Greshkov said proudly. The general had a gruff smile on his face. “Created by Crimson Dynamo! More advanced than any tank ever made.”
As if to prove his point, one of the tanks fired a blast of pure lightning at one of the Hydra-Hulks. The female gamma monster screeched in agony, reeling back under the assault before another massive green figure, this one the real Hulk, dropped out of the sky to knock her out with a punch.
“Packs a wallop,” Buckler said reluctantly. “Still, give me a regular bullet any day.”
“Oh really?” Greshkov pointed at a different screen. There, an M1 Abrams could be seen blasting laser fire at a small group of aliens, trading fire with yellow blasts of energy.
Buckler grumbled a bit. Then he looked at the other screens while Maria and Lo Chien joined him. “We’re losing.”
That was true. Despite all they were doing to Hydra’s forces, they were taking a pounding.
The problem was the alien ships. The gamma-mutates running around were an issue, as were the actual aliens and their weaponry. But the ships flying about right then were the real issue. The Enterprise had to focus it’s full power on firing back at the three vessels above while their fighters buzzed about, battling the various heroes and aircraft BRIDGE had brought to the fight. The Behemoth had taken tremendous damage, the Enterprise’s own defenses were taking a pounding, and the missiles and laser blasts hitting the battlefield were causing casualties beyond what they could absorb. Dial’s Diamondhead crystals were working for shelter, but it wouldn’t be enough.
“It’s okay,” Maria said, narrowing her eyes. “The reinforcements have arrived.”
She raised a hand and a new holoscreen appeared. It displayed the mountains on the sides of the battlefield. She twisted her hand and the screen zoomed in. Greshkov and Buckler gaped at the sight.
A tank. But a tank the size of a two story building. Three of them, rolling down the mountains. They dwarfed the soldiers beside them, the treads higher than the jeeps rolling next to them. The turret on top had two cannons one on each on either side, giving the tanks appearance of an enraged group of animals of steel plowing down the forest.
“The FUCK is that!?” Buckler asked.
“The Overlord Mark 1,” Lo Chien said with a slow smile, eyes alight with a dark glee.
The cannons of the frontmost tank fired, two barrels bigger than anything Maria had seen not mounted on a battleship swung upwards and roared. The rounds smashed into an alien fighter plane, sending it careening from the sky. It was possible that the alien metal the ship was made of could withstand the shots. But sheer weight and force of the shots put physics in the tanks favor. The ship tore apart before smashing into the forest floor.
The tanks were so distracting that one might have not noticed the army that surrounded them at first. Soldiers and vehicles from all across the world, wearing the symbols of their nation, firing as they rushed into the battlefield, challenging aliens and superhumans as an army. Thor and She-Hulk dropped in to join them, while Scarlet Witch floated above.
“Yeah, put some of our units in to join the reinforcements,” Buckler, a soldier to the core, had recovered his surprise, and was now speaking to the commander of the United States tank units, Greshkov speaking into his own comm while Chernobog flew in to join Thor and She-Hulk.
Greshkov met eyes with Lo Chien, who gave him a smug smile that the Russian returned with a reluctant nod of acknowledgement. "Form up on those Chinese supertanks. We need them intact to engage the other big enemy flyers and heavy units."
‘Reinforcements aren’t enough to guarantee a win,” Maria thought to herself with a small smile. “But it’s a start.”
Still… Maria’s eyes panned upwards as one of the supertanks took down another alien fighter before it was swarmed by more. Beyond them, the alien destroyer vessels loomed like gods over the battlefield. The Enterprise shook beneath her feet as it traded fire, reports flashing across the BRIDGE displaying the damage they were taking. She looked over at Natasha.
“Have Dial’s team and Tony made any progress on taking down the ships?”
“Not yet,” Natasha said grimly from the console she was working at. “And anyone who can help is going to take a bit.”
“Then we’ll keep the ships busy,” Maria said.
Internally however, she wasn’t sure how long they could survive doing it.
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Mahmoud Schahed/Dial
My gun was getting big. I ripped out another section of wall and expertly placed it along my gun, stitching it into the main battery. The hall behind me was already littered in parts of ship, dead bodies of these aliens we were fighting, and small bits of magical energy. I probably should have been more worried about the bodies. I may have gotten more hardened as time passed, but killing still left a disgusting feeling in me. But as Jury Rigg, my mind was naturally inclined to ignore that sort of thing. To see it not as something sad, but as a fact of life that didn’t matter as much as the next great invention. I wasn’t crueler as Jury Rigg or anything, but it did make it easier to focus on my job.
I lifted my gun, now more of a rocket launcher, and pointed it forward, just over Creel’s head as he right crossed an alien. With a pull of the trigger, a large round ball of twisted spikes stuck to my Magnomatto 5Bil™ spat out of the barrel of my weapon.
“Hehehehehe!” I giggled as I watched it bounce behind the group of enemies in front of us. The ball briefly glowed a bright yellow. Then it released a pulse, sending the spikes across it out at lightning speed. I laughed in glee, chills across my red skin, as the spikes sliced through the aliens to ricochet off the walls and bounce right back into them again. “HAHAHAHA!”
Fantasma facepalmed. “You are enjoying this too much.”
Creel smashed another man to the ground, the last of the people in our way. “At least we know we’re going the right way,” he said, his voice reverberating a bit as his words left vibranium lungs. “More bad guys is a good thing.”
“Like in video games,” Fantasma said with a smile as we started running again. I hopped onto Creel, sitting on his shoulder as we ran. We turned a corner and saw a room at the far end of the hall with a window beyond displaying the battlefield below. The bridge.
Creel and Fantasma started running, while I pointed my gun down the hall. Just as we reached the middle of the hall, a side panel opened next to Fantasma. A large arm wrapped around her neck and pulled her into the dark room, the panel sliding shut behind her. Creel slid to a stop as I felt a chill run up my spine.
Fuck!
“Fantasma!” I shouted, bouncing to the floor and landing in front of the panel. Beyond the door, I heard her scream. I grabbed onto the wall and began ripping it apart. “Come on, come on, disassemble you fucking wall!”
“Hold on!” Creel punched the door, ripping into the wall next to me. We heard a sound beyond the door. That sound… It felt like a nightmare. It seemed to call out to the deep instinct in all living things that cry out in fear, smothered all hope. Creel punched the door harder, and I dug deeper, shredding metal and wires apart. “We’re coming!”
Then, the sound of masculine screaming. A noise like flesh being ripped asunder. As I ripped through a final inch of metal, a beam of light sliced over my head. A voice I barely recognized as Fantasma roared. In a burst of panic, Creel and I shredded the door apart, and stared at what we found beyond.
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Fantasma stepped out of the room, shock in her eyes. Her arms were covered in blood up to her elbows, some of it black with that strange liquid the alien soldiers had been using to boost their strength. Her dress had been ripped to near shreds, leaving it near useless. She stared at us. Then she scowled. “Come on.”
“Are you okay, what-” I said.
“Not now!” she shouted, prowling past us. “We need to get this done!”
Creel and I watched her, then looked into the room. After a second, we ran to follow her.
But the inside of that room… It looked like hell. The fires that burned in there, the bodies. I pushed it in the back of my mind for later. But for the first time in a while, I was scared for Fantasma.
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We smashed into the bridge of the ship like an avalanche. The soldiers within started shooting at us, with human guns and alien rifles, which surprised me. Not enough that I didn’t start shooting back.
“Avengers!” the clear leader shouted as he turned to look at us. He was tall, with the appearance of black man in a way dope leather coat and a sweet scar on his face just beside one of his eyes.
I’d like to say I recognized him as the leader because of his demeanor, charisma, or the badass claws that appeared as he swung his arms out. In truth, it was because I’d seen an actor similar to him appear a bunch of times before. Important people being portrayed by actors in this universe was kind of a rule.
“What’s up, bad guys!” I fired a spike grenade round, the projectile exploding against a wall. The leader surprised me by deflecting the projectiles on his claw. Creel stepped forward to punch at Qovas, who blocked the fist on one of his claws. The tall man snarled.
“I am Qovas! The leader of the Remorath! Follower of Strucker!” he spun and swiped at Creel, his claws bouncing off the larger man’s skin, leaving small trails of pale silver where Creel’s skin shifted a bit to match Qovas’ claws. “And your destroyer!”
Creel grabbed his arm on the next claw swipe and kicked Qovas, sending him sliding along the floor. “Yeah? I’m Creel. An Avenger. And that’s the only title in this room that matters.”
“Show-off,” I chuckled, rushing to the center of the room. Off to the side, I could see what Jury Rigg recognized as a teleportation device of some sort, but I ignored that to focus on the main console. I began working at it, ignoring my powerful instincts to tear it apart to instead rip apart my gun and attach various ports to it. Fantasma blasted a guy who tried to attack me while I worked.
Okay. My gun was made from, what had Qovas called themselves, Remorath? Remorath parts. So they naturally had bits of the ship's code floating in them. So if I combined the pieces the right way, I could turn this ship on its fellow ships.
“Tony!” I shouted into my comm unit as I worked. “I’m taking over the controls of the ship we’re on, which one did you hop on?”
“The one with the weird spinning garbage on it,” Tony said, the sound of lasers in the background.
------
Tony Stark/Iron Man
Moments Earlier
A Kree soldier swung his battleaxe at Tony. He parried it off his gauntlet, then fired a repulsor at the guys chest, sending him flying, before he ducked under a laser blast, rising up to give the guy shooting at him a blast with both palms. Then Tony looked around.
“What the hell are these things spinning for?” he said, eyeing the gigantic wheels poking out of the floors and spinning continuously. Likely for some form of power generation, but they were massively exposed in this large room.
He’d gotten a good handle on the ship by now. Sure, the place was a little out of his depth at first. Smart as Tony was, he still had a bit before he could catch up to alien tech. Give him a couple weeks.
But the main thing that worked against him was the culture. The ship wasn’t designed by humans, so it didn’t have any of the sort of aesthetics that could have given Tony easy clues for where everything was. Still, he had gotten a good crash course. Enough to know-
“This thing looks like a shitty Dracula castle,” Tony floated off the ground, speeding through the halls. “Seriously, all black hallways? You guys really leaned into the evil empire shit.”
As he mused that, his eyes traced along the walls. He found an opening in the floor and floated down, soon hovering in a new area of the ship. “Okay, so, these power lines lead over to this room… of weird spikes coming down from the ceiling?”
It was true. There was a walkway going along the room right down the middle. On either side of the walkway, dozens of long round spikes came down. Tony walked up to one, noting the line around the bottom, and pulled it. It opened up and lowered, a cylinder sliding out from the main pylon to reveal a series of wires and chips held in a glass canister surrounded by green energy.
“Huh… Looks important…” Tony thought about that for a long moment. Then he raised his fist and punched the green glass. The material shattered, spilling green energy and circuits everywhere. Without any software running on his armor, Tony had no way to read energy readings, so he had no real proof to prove what he’d done had an effect except the loud warning alarm. Still, that was enough for him. “Let’s make some fireworks!”
Tony raised his arms and started shooting. Repulsor blasts smashed apart the spikes, destroying them in bunches. He smirked within his suit as he heard the ship beginning to scream, alarms ringing throughout. “How about that?”
Now, if these things were attached to this section of the ship, then up above must have been…
He raised his hands up and shot the ceiling, flying up into the hole he’d created.
Dozens of Kree, several of them pressing frantically at consoles that were no longer working, stared at him.
“How’s it going guys?” Tony said, landing on the ground with a grin under his helmet. “Mind showing me Papa Smurf?”
“Kill him!” one of the Kree shouted, an older one with black make-up around his eyes. Tony shot that guy.
Lasers started firing soon after. Tony fired back as he flew upwards, taking the high ground.
He took a few blasts, scarring his armor further, but kept shooting back, grunting. As he fought, Dial’s voice filled his ears.
“Tony! I’m taking over the controls of the ship we’re on, which one did you hop on?”
“The one with the weird spinning garbage on it,” Tony said over the sound of lasers. “I’m about to take it out, how about you?”
“I’m going to redirect the weapons on this thing on every bad guy in the sky I can,” Dial said in that weird caffeinated voice he had whenever he was Jury Rigg.
“Nice,” Tony took down another Kree soldier, then was hit by a big beam of energy. He cursed in pain at the rise in heat. Ever since he’d fought against the Chitauri, those extremis guys and the Melter, all his suits had been more and more hardened against laser weapons and high-heat attacks, but enough hits would still mess with his suit. Tony grit his teeth however, and dropped down to punch a soldier in the face, taking a battleaxe attack that skittered across his shoulders with a loud screeching noise. He spun to kick the battleaxe guy, grabbed his axe as the blue man went flying back, and tossed the axe at another man before enough fire started hitting him that he had to take cover behind a console.
“Well, I’m gonna be a bit,” Tony said with an odd sense of calm. “So let me know when you’re about to bring the heat, okay Gremlins 3?”
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Mahmoud Schahed/Dial
I grinned at that. “Don’t worry, we got this!”
Qovas and Creel smashed into a wall together. The tall black man had that black liquid running through him now, his lips soaked in it. His version must have had an extra kick, because he was giving Creel a way better fight than he should have been. Fantasma had erected a wall of fire in front of the door, firing blast after blast of weird magic powers.
Meanwhile, I had my own fight. The system was raging against me. I’d dragged the teleporter over and tore it apart to smash together with the central console, wires, metal, and clear material mashed into a makeshift computer just for me. A computer that was fighting what had to be about a hundred crazy AI at once.
“What the hell did they do to this thing, torture a buncha normal AI until they all broke?” I winced. “Ah. That might be what they did. Fuck.”
That had to be it. I could see it in the code as I fought the AI, sending a wide stream of cat videos, DuckTales episodes, and porn in to distract and fight back while trying to take control. There was a desperation to their antics. The kind you didn’t tend to see outside of victims of abuse. HYDRA just… Whatever.
I pushed my anger aside to focus. I was about to get full control of the ship. Once done, I’d be able to shoot down the fighter ships that were out-
“heed my words!UR-025-ABOMI-@heed my words!”
I stopped my thought process when the computer I was at started screaming through the speakers. “What the hell?”
“What is it?” Fantasma asked me, looking at me with eyes of pure violet power.
“The AI in the system have stopped fighting me, but they’re starting to shift the controls for the reactor?”
“Await my sentence!”
“I’m not awaiting shit, what are you doing?” I said to the computer.
“Bringing your final judgement!” Qovas said as he struggled with Creel, more black spit leaving his mouth.
“What does that mean!?” Creel asked me.
“Fuuuuck,” I stared at the screen before me. The AI. They were messing with the reactor for the ship all right. They were trying to make it-
“It’s a self-destruct sequence!” I shouted back at Creel, who let go of Qovas to give him a jab, then leapt up and Superman punched him across the chin.
“They wanna take us out with them?” Creel asked.
“Not us,” Qovas laughed, eyes glowing that bright blue all people mind controlled by the Scepter displayed. “Strucker’s bunker will survive. And in the ashes of our sacrifice, a new age will-”
Creel picked him up and spun around, tossing him through the windows of the bridge. They cracked at the impact, Qovas letting out a gasp of agony. Creel walked up to him and punched him across the face, knocking him out.
“Can you stop it?” Fantasma asked me.
“Not in the next minute!” I grabbed a set of wires and shoved them into another part of the console, trying to redirect the AI. “Come on you daft bastards, you can’t be so far gone-”
A bunch of sparks exploded from the console, and the lights began to flicker. I felt my heart sink.
I would survive the explosion. Fantasma and Creel might. Hulk, Thor, Jen, they could survive. But so many more would die. If this ship went off, it would be an explosion that would dwarf the Tsar Bomba. At least 120 megatons of TNT worth. And I couldn’t stop it. Not in time. I could absorb a portion of the explosion as NRG or Feedback, but not enough to keep people from dying. I had to take out the ship in it’s entirety, all at once. If I could destroy the whole thing before the AI could set off a controlled reactor explosion, I could turn a super-nuke into a normal explosion. But it had to be physical in nature. Based on the readings, an energy attack might set it off…
I grabbed the Omnitrix symbol, taking a deep breath. I needed a form that could destroy the entire ship in one solid physical blow. Maybe Diamondhead could do it. Make a crystal big enough to smash the whole thing at once. Long shot, but I had to try something.
“How can we stop this?” Creel asked me, as red lights snapped on.
The reactor began to go critical.
“One big hit. The entire ship at once,” I pressed the Omnitrix, praying. Not for myself, but for the soldiers below that we were trying to save.
There was a green flash. Crystals grew over my back, coming from my own body. My eyes and red skin shifted colors as my blood was replaced with a silicone-carbon fluid. I felt my organs become thousands of times more durable. I took a deep breath.
And then… I started to grow. It all happened in less than I second, but to me it felt like it was happening in slow motion. I felt a long tail sprout from my spine. My hands become long and savage claws. I wrapped Fantasma and Creel in my hands as I continued to grow.
“What the fu-!” Creel shouted before I grew too large for the bridge, smashing up through the ceiling. The entire ship shuddered, the front beginning to lean down as it fought against my ever growing weight.
“Dial!?” Fantasma shouted up at me.
I didn’t answer. I was trying to understand what I was becoming. My mouth opened. And a noise left my body.
“SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE,” I reared back, sonic waves visibly shaking the air. The ship tore apart before my roar, metal shattering and flying off in hurricane-force winds, the mountain behind it shaking as the sonic waves blasted it. I felt more power enter the roar, my entire body on fire, the crystals on my back resonating and increasing my power! “OOOOOOOoOrrRrRRrrnNK!”
The ship shattered like glass, tearing apart. Hallways flew apart. Remorath soldiers went flying. Explosions went off only to be smothered out. And we fell to the forest below. I landed just a second later.
The ground shattered under my bulk, cratering underneath me, trees splintering under my clawed feet, dust, ice, and shattered stone rising into the air as I gazed upon the land around us as pieces of the destroyed Remorath ship fell around us, a rain of fire that flickered light across my violet crystalline form.
The forest was up to my ankles. I towered over the hills around me. I opened one of my palms. Creel and Fantasma stared at me. I could barely make out their faces, they looked like moving D&D statuettes in my palm. But I could hear Fantasma as she called up to me.
“Vhat!?” her Russian accent got a bit stronger as she stared up at me.
“Ruuuuuuu,” I rumbled, my voice echoing and blowing her hair back. Huh. Can’t talk in this form. Not human language at least. But then, I didn’t need to. I looked up at the ships that were left. Tony had said he went into that one with the spinning sections. The other one, more of a traditional warship, turned slowly to face me, missiles coming off of it to shoot towards me. I opened my mouth.
“SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-oOoOrrRrRRrrnNK!”
In front of me, the trees and stones below were blown apart. The missiles shattered. The sound of my voice struck the ship with crippling force, cracking the side of it. I released another blast, turning the air into a weapon, and ripped the ship in front of me apart.
As the ship fell apart, as my voice’s echo began to fade and the battlefield gazed up at me, I felt like a Titan.
I stared down at myself, still holding Creel and Fantasma gently in my hand. My eyes widened, a sound like stones tumbling down a mountain as I inspected myself. Good lord. I was Kaiju-sized. No, more than that. I looked… well, with crystals, yeah, but…
My tail waved back and forthce, sending gusts of wind up. My mouth opened, teeth as large as Hulk grinding. I wanted to laugh. Instead… well, yeah. I knew what I had to do.
I took a step to widen my stance. My tail snapped behind me. I reared my head back and released a cry I’d heard thousands of times before, the clouds above blowing away and allowing the sun to shine down on me. My rage, my joy at this new power, echoed across the landscape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnQ-ecP37Kc
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Maria Hill/Director of BRIDGE
“When were you going to tell us we had fucking Godzilla on our team!?” Buckler shouted in shock.
Maria took in the sight of Dial. The Omnitrix symbol glowing in the center of his chest made that clear. But the rest of him was just… He was enormous. Bigger than the ships around him. Except for the ones he’d taken out without a single problem.
“If I’d known he could do that,” Maria said slowly. “We’d have opened up with that.”
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Baron Wolfgang von Strucker/Leader of HYDRA
In the middle of his base, standing in a large amphitheater, Strucker stared at the 8 foot screen in front of him. Around him, scientists and soldiers were staring at the same screen. He cocked his head to the side as he watched Dial stretch his head back. The sound that came from the crystal giant echoed in the base, shaking the concrete beneath his feet.
“...Holy shit,” Strucker chuckled, shaking his head. He looked to his right. Laura looked back at him, still as dull as ever. “It seems your ‘father’ still has many surprises.”
He chuckled again, turning and walking away. “Begin plans for when they invade the base. No need for subtlety now, clearly. I want Zola’s creations released, and we-”
His voice faded away. He never saw Laura look back at the screen. She stared at it as the ground continued to shake. The echoing voice of a monster reverberated through her body, her blood… right into her crystal bones.