Nat blocked a strike with the flat of her arm, following up with a swift kick that sent the Hand ninja attacking her spinning into the wall. The Widow’s Bite on her wrist flared to life, a burst of blue energy sending another convulsing to the ground. Two more closed in, slashing at her from both sides. She ducked under their blades and retaliated, dropping the first one with an elbow strike to the jaw. Unhooking one of her collapsible electroshock batons from her waist as she moved, she flicked it out with a simple motion and slammed the tip into the second’s throat. Without waiting for him to fall, she darted backwards, retreating behind a stacked set of steel crates as a repulsor beam scoured the floor where she’d been standing a moment earlier.
Not too far away, Clint blocked the exit of two of the Hand’s Fingers—Madame Gao, the elderly Chinese woman who had been present at the attack on the Great Mound, and a tall, nondescript businesswoman that Natasha guessed was Alexandra Reid, the overall leader of the Hand. Both of them were unarmed, unless you counted Gao’s cane, but Wanda had warned them that the small, unassuming woman was more dangerous that she looked.
Madame Gao dropped her cane and raised her trembling hands above her head in a gesture of surrender as Clint levelled his bow at her, an arrow nocked and at the ready. “Sorry, ladies,” the archer said, taking a tentative step forward. “Get down on the floor, hands behind your backs.”
“If I might give you some advice?” Reid said, her warm, calm tone at odds with the chaos unfolding around them. “You really shouldn’t give your enemies any warning before you attack them.”
Gao’s expression hardened and she moved, fluidly falling into a wushu stance before springing forward to close the distance—she was fast, far faster than she looked capable of. Nat saw the barest hint of hesitation, Clint feeling a little conflicted at shooting an old woman at nearly point-blank range, before he loosed his arrow. It was enough. Gao’s hand was a blur, slapping the arrow out of the air before reversing direction to knock Clint’s bow violently aside, creating an opening. A split-second later, both of her hands slammed into the archer’s midsection and he went flying like he’d been backhanded by the Hulk, slamming into the wall next to the corridor’s entrance.
Nat was already moving, tucking into a roll as she dodged repulsor fire before coming up next to him. The Fingers hadn’t waited either, having already fled down the corridor Clint had been blocking by the time she got to him. A pair of ninja closed, attempting to finish what their leaders had started, and Natasha blocked a descending blade that was meant for Clint’s throat with her baton.
“You’re getting slow! Can’t even catch an old lady?” she chided him. Before he could respond, she discharged a Widow’s Bite again, blue energy arcing from her wrist into the chest of the nearest attacker. The ninja crumpled, his body twitching as the electricity coursed through him. Without missing a beat, she spun low, sweeping the second ninja off his feet before slamming him into the concrete floor.
“She was tougher than she looked,” Clint grumbled in response, wincing as he started to sit up.
His eyes widened a fraction and he rolled to the side instead, narrowly avoiding a repulsor blast directed his way. He rose to his feet and drew another arrow in a single, smooth motion, loosing it without taking any time to aim. It hit the Iron Legion drone dead centre, electricity arcing from the tip to short out the robot’s systems and send it crashing to the ground in a heap of sparking metal.
The archer was already nocking another arrow, eyes locked on another pair of drones that had swooped in with a whine of charging repulsors. He fired, the arrow lodging itself in one of the robots’ torsos. A split second later, the explosive tip detonated, sending the machine spiralling down in flames. “You know,” he grunted, dodging behind a crate as the remaining one returned fire. “I liked this better when it was just ninja.”
At his words, another group of Hand foot soldiers descended on them, rapidly closing to melee range. Nat twisted to parry two more attackers, flicking out her second baton to give her more options, her movements precise and lethal. Clint fought beside her now, his bow transforming into a staff-like weapon with a quick flick of his wrist. A blade came dangerously close to his side, but Nat grabbed the assailant by the wrist, discharging her Widow’s Bite again, the electrical jolt sending the ninja tumbling into a stack of crates. The last one lunged at her exposed side, but Clint was already there, blocking the attack with his staff before using it to sweep her attacker off his feet and following up with a lethal strike to the face.
“Go,” Nat urged him, tipping her head toward the corridor. “The loading dock.” He nodded, shooting one last look over the chaos unfolding across the main warehouse floor before turning and sprinting away.
Clint had been put on the team for the main entrance because it was roughly equidistant from the other two breach points—they hadn’t known where the Mark 45 would be and, given that the two loading docks were further away from each other, theoretically this had been the best place for him to be able to close with either of the other locations.
On the opposite side of the cavernous room, Wong, one of the sorcerers from Kamar-taj, was holding his own against the remaining Hand leadership, who’d broken off to flee in the opposite direction to Reid and Gao. Meanwhile, two Hand fighters wearing visored masks and wielding stolen Wakandan weapons harassed the Hulk, darting in to strike at him while he focused on the Iron Legion drones peppering him with potshots from their repulsors before retreating again whenever they caught his attention. The Hulk roared a challenge, snatching an errant drone out of the air and hurling it at the two skilled fighters, but they easily danced out of the way. It was pretty impressive—they had to be enhanced in some way to move that fast.
At Nat’s count, there were five of the vibranium-suited ninjas. Three had stayed, but she’d caught a glimpse of another pair vanish down a side corridor. There could have been more—they’d scattered, along with the rest of Eliza’s allies, as the Avengers had breached the warehouse’s main entrance—but Natasha hoped not. The third that had stayed was currently on the other side of the room, matching Steve blow for blow with a pair of pointed Wakandan shields that were strapped to their forearms.
“This works as a decent trial by fire for the Extreme Taskmaster concept, at least.” Eliza’s voice came through in Nat’s ear—Wanda had left her comms open so that everyone could hear their conversation which, of course, had let her subtly tip off Clint that Eliza had built a new body to use as her primary avatar.
“Extreme Taskmaster?” Wanda was panting, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps. “Sounds like an over-the-top spinoff of the TV show.” Presumably they were still fighting while she talked, but it was hard to tell exactly what was happening over there—honestly, Wakanda’s tech’s ability to isolate voices at the range that it could and filter everything else out was pretty impressive.
“They’re still a work in progress, okay?” Eliza snapped defensively. “I wasn’t ready and I don’t have a good name for them yet.”
“It’s Extremis,” Steve said tersely through the comms. The Taskmaster he was fighting had grabbed the edges of his shield, both hands flaring orange with heat, and he struggled to free it for a moment. Changing tack, he tucked his shoulder into the hollow of the shield and slammed it forward, breaking his opponent’s grip and knocking him back a few steps. He winced, pausing for a moment to roll his arm, holding the shield slightly away from his body—there were still dully-glowing fingerprints visible on the metal. The enhanced ninja recovered quickly, though, and he didn’t have much room to breathe as his opponent bore down on him once again.
Wanda didn’t respond directly to Steve, instead continuing to address the AI. “Eliza, what did you do?”
“Oh, not much. Chemical mind control, full Extremis treatments and the Taskmaster Protocol, with some vibranium fits to top it off,” Eliza responded, sounding a little smug. “This is a little early, so they haven’t had as much data to go on as the real Taskmaster, but our little outing to Wakanda definitely made up for that.”
“Mind control? You turned them into slaves?” Wanda sounded genuinely upset.
“Hey, I’m just a copy, remember? This doesn’t reflect great on you either, when you think about it.”
Nat ducked behind cover again as a pair of Iron Legion drones swooped in and unleashed a barrage of repulsor fire. Dodging back, she tucked into a tight roll as a Hand foot soldier lunged at her. She was faster, ducking beneath his blade and slamming an elbow into his ribs that sent him staggering into the path of a drone’s blast.
The drones circled, coming in to try to attack from another angle, but Nat was already moving, leaping onto a stack of crates and vaulting upward. Mid-air, her Widow’s Bite snapped to life with a sharp crackle of electricity. A quick flick of her wrist sent a jolt into one drone, frying its circuits instantly. At the same time, she spun in the air, using the momentum to whip out a grappling line. It caught the second drone around its neck, pulling it down as it tried to fire. She yanked hard, dragging it to the ground using her body weight, where a swift strike with her baton disabled it in a shower of sparks.
On the other side of the warehouse, the African Finger was lying unmoving on the ground—unconscious or dead, Nat wasn’t sure which—while Wong faced off with the two that remained. The first, a man with Puerto Rican features that Nat guessed was Bakuto, darted in at the sorcerer with his katana. Wong caught the edge of the blade on the horned skull of his wand, slapping it to one side as orange energy flicked across the mystical weapon’s surface. An instant later, a two-dimensional, flat cone of energy shot out of it, the edge slamming directly into Bakuto’s chest and sending him flying into the wall of the warehouse with bone-crushing force. He crumpled and lay still.
Wong turned to face the last Finger, a Japanese man holding a pair of metal tonfa in a guarded stance. “Kusotare majutsushi,” the man spat at him angrily, before lunging in with a dizzying series of rapid strikes.
Meanwhile, in the middle of the warehouse, a dozen Iron Legion drones converged on the Hulk, wrapping themselves around his arms and legs, thrusters firing at full throttle in a vain attempt to restrain him. It barely seemed to impede him at all—he bellowed and grabbed two of the robots, easily crushing them in his hands before flinging away the twisted, sparking wreckage. While he was distracted, however, one of the Taskmasters darted in, using the back of the Hulk’s calf as a foothold as he ran up the green giant’s body.
The ninja flattened himself against the back of the Hulk’s neck, locking his arms together in an attempt at a rear naked chokehold—the arms of his vibranium suit were already glowing a dull red, flaring into a brighter orange as he secured his grip. There was a sizzling sound, the stench of burning flesh filling the air as the Hulk roared in rage and pain, the Extremis reaching temperatures hot enough to liquefy steel. The giant scrabbled at his back with both hands, the Iron Legion drones temporarily forgotten, as he attempted to dislodge his attacker.
The second Taskmaster used the distraction to run up the Hulk’s front, lunging in toward the giant’s eyes with a pair of red-hot vibranium daggers, but the Hulk swiped him away with an easy backhand, sending him sailing across the room to crash into some nearby machining equipment. The one on the Hulk’s back managed to hold on for longer than Nat expected, the giant staggering and flailing around as he huffed and snorted, getting angrier and angrier. After a few seconds, however, he managed to get enough of a grip on the man to rip him free—judging from the unnatural angles the ninja flopped at for a brief moment, Nat was pretty sure that the motion that had broken both of his arms.
The Hulk slammed the man into the concrete floor with enough force to crater it, then raised both fists and brought them down on him in a two-handed hammerblow that caused the whole ground to shudder, cracks spreading at least a dozen feet from the impact point.
There was a deep thrumming sound, almost like a repulsor but deeper, and a second later a massive column of energy—at least ten feet wide—blasted through the warehouse wall, slamming into the Hulk. The green giant was blasted away, slamming through the opposite wall and out of sight. What the hell was that? Nat laid out two more ninja, keeping an eye out for the source of the attack, then paused to catch her breath.
A flicker of movement caught her eye, and she turned just in time to see the Taskmaster that the Hulk had flattened into the ground levering himself out of the concrete and back to his feet. His head immediately flicked toward her, meeting her gaze evenly, and her breath caught in her throat. While his mask had been cracked and damaged, the rest of him seemed unsettlingly intact. He flexed his limbs for a moment, joints popping, then started moving quickly toward her. That seemed… bad.
“How are we supposed to put these things down?” she asked into her comms.
“Destroy the brain,” Tony responded, sounding distracted. “Hit the base of the skull; sever the brainstem.”
“Huh. Zombie rules,” Nat acknowledged, nodding to herself. As the Taskmaster advanced on her she made as if to meet him, stepping forward and to one side in a double feint. He took the bait and, as he closed in, she flicked her hands toward him and fired two full-strength blasts from the Widow’s Bites on her wrists.
The ninja twisted his body, trying to dodge, but electrical energy arced across his chest and shoulder as one found its mark. He flinched back a half-step, muscles spasming as he powered through it, but it did a lot less than Natasha had hoped. She backed away rapidly, charging two more shots—she knew she was outmatched here, but the longer she could keep him occupied the more chance someone else had to swing the battle in their favour.
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A moment later, Wong was there, gesturing with a practiced motion. The air in front of the Taskmaster shattered into a multifaceted, crystal-like barrier before sweeping forward. The ninja sprang backward, narrowly avoiding the portal to the Mirror Dimension and circling around quickly, hand glowing red as he ran in to close the distance between them. Nat tried to hit him with another blast from her Widow’s Bite, swearing under her breath as he dodged that, too.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Hulk stampede into the middle of Steve’s fight against his own Taskmaster, smashing the ninja aside. Steve paused, nodding at the green giant appreciatively, before turning on his heel and sprinting toward the one threatening Nat and Wong.
The ninja noticed, too, but reacted too slowly, Steve slamming into his waist and tackling him to the ground. With the Taskmaster lying prone on his stomach beneath him, Steve took his shield in both hands and slammed the edge down into the base of the man’s skull as hard as he could before scrambling away again. The Taskmaster tried to stand but failed, barely managing to get to his knees as he listened drunkenly, head swaying from side to side. Had that been enough?
The ninja hunched over, shoulders shaking, and a red glow traced flickering paths all across his vibranium suit. Nat’s eyes widened as his chest brightened to orange and then a searing white.
“Get back!” Steve barked, moving away even as he raised his shield to interpose it between himself and the unstable Extremis user. “He’s gonna blow!”
Nat turned and started to run, but she was too close and she knew it. Guaranteed fatal range of an Extremis explosion was thirty feet, and she was less than twenty. In the split-second she had, she braced herself, a frisson of fear and regret passing through her. She squeezed her eyes shut. There was a blast of heat and light that knocked her from her feet… and it hurt. Huh. If it hurt, then that meant she wasn’t actually dead yet.
She opened her eyes, blinking away the afterimages that had seared themselves into her eyelids, and saw the Hulk crouching in front of her, facing the direction of the blast, streaks of molten concrete to either side of them. The green giant straightened up, turning to look back at her as he flexed his chest muscles and huffed, blinking reddened eyes. The entire front of his body was blackened and scorched, tiny trails of embers crawling along his cracked skin. The giant’s pants hadn’t survived the blast, either, though this was hardly the first time Nat had seen a naked Hulk.
“Everyone alive?” Steve called and the Hulk twitched, turning his head toward the sound. His eyes looked unfocused. The way he was moving his head… had the blast blinded him, or was he just a bit stunned?
“I’m good,” Nat responded, a little concerned as she picked herself off the ground and took a cautious step toward the giant.
“I am fine,” came Wong’s grumbled response.
Nat winced slightly as she flexed her arm—she had jarred it pretty badly when she’d hit the ground—and looked at the destruction the explosion had wrought across the middle of the warehouse and the gaping hole melted into the roof above. A couple more drones and Hand foot soldiers had regrouped in the wake of the explosion and were heading toward her. She wasn’t sure where her batons were, either… She’d lost her grip on them in the blast. Steve and Wong oriented on her, the three of them lining up next to the slightly-crispy Hulk, and Nat sighed, settling into a combat stance as the remaining Taskmasters emerged from the twisted wreckage of the warehouse’s machining equipment to face them.
One down, two to go.
--
There was a deep thrumming as Eliza’s blaster charged for a second before firing, similar to the sound that had preceded the earlier blast that had nearly swatted Tony from the air. I was ready for it, but the orange beam, edged in blue, ripped violently across my shield with much more force than I was expecting—despite its size, it seemed to have even more power behind it than the scaled-up repulsors that the Hulkbuster used. The shield buckled and failed almost immediately and I dodged to one side, hitting the deck and narrowly evading the sizzling, violent energy as Eliza swept it downward to try to catch me before it cut out.
“What the fuck?” I spat, almost involuntarily, as I scrambled back to my feet, eyes wide. Okay, new plan, I couldn’t outright block those, I’d need to angle my shields to deflect them instead.
“Oh, you like?” the AI grinned, already lunging in toward me again.
There was another deep thrum as her weapon charged and I flung out a hand, wisps of telekinetic red energy clinging to her arm and forcing the blaster away so she couldn’t draw a bead on me. I took hold of her and yanked up and away from me, pulling her into the air—like I’d ragdolled other people before—in order to get a bit more distance between us. In response, she raised her free hand, fingers splayed, and five thin orange lines of energy blasted forth from them. I was forced to let go of her, bringing both my hands around to weave a shield to protect myself again.
“Stark’s repulsors enhanced with Wakandan sonic technology as a stabiliser. Really concentrates the power of the blast. I haven’t had time to incorporate it into the Legion, yet, but I’ll get there,” Eliza said as she darted in toward me, her metal fist aimed for my stomach.
I scrambled back, defending myself desperately as she continued to push forward. I couldn’t even really attack her back effectively—it felt like it was all I could to do just to keep her off of me. The Heart-Shaped Herb had let me keep up with the Winter Soldier in hand-to-hand for a few seconds when I’d fought him, despite the vast gap in our respective skill levels, but Eliza was on another level entirely. She was faster than me, stronger than me, and a better fighter than me—my only advantage over her was my chaos magic, but she knew that and refused to give me an opportunity to really cut loose with it.
I just couldn’t get space to breathe. I tried to spin up a portal, but she immediately pounced in, forcing me to abort—I still wasn’t fast enough at making them to use them effectively in this sort of pitched combat. When I tried to widen the distance between us or use my telekinesis offensively, she switched to rapid, long-range blasts that were more powerful than anything I could throw back at her. But if I threw up a shield and started deflecting her attacks, she’d use the break as cover to close back to melee, where I also couldn’t match up to her.
She would just not shut up, either.
“What’s with that face, Wanda? Why so serious-looking?” she laughed as I blocked a swing from her arm on a shield of telekinetic energy. “Having trouble keeping up?” She reversed direction almost faster than I could track, her knee coming up to strike at my midsection. I caught it with both hands on a cushion of energy, using the momentum and a burst of power to send myself bouncing back a step.
She did a little shuffle as we reoriented on each other, bouncing back and forth on her feet. Was that a fucking dance move? I felt my earlier anxiety returning. I really was not dealing well with her flexing on me like this. Of course, from her perspective it seemed like she was never in any actual danger here—as far as she knew, we had no weapons that could actually hurt her. The worst that could happen would be some setbacks as we denied her assets and resources, so she was taking the opportunity to have some fun with this new body she’d built for herself.
I had no good options and everyone else was seemingly distracted with their own fights… where the fuck was Clint? I wanted to make sure he was getting into position to take his shot but I couldn’t really check in or say anything without potentially tipping Eliza off.
I risked a quick glance to the side to try to spot any of my allies and was immediately punished for it—the instant I took my eyes off her, she twisted and lunged. Suddenly, her blaster was a centimetre away from my face, my entire vision taken up by the blue glow in its mouth. Without thinking, I thrust my hand out, shoving her as hard as I could. I wasn’t strong enough to push her off-balance, but I wasn’t trying to. Instead, I was pushing myself backwards, falling over as the blaster fired, the beam of energy missing my face by millimetres. The stench of ozone and burning hair filled my nose as I landed hard on my rump.
“Hey!” she yelped, putting on a mock scandalised tone and draping an arm across her chest. “Watch where you’re putting your hands! Consent! If you want to cop a feel, you have to ask nicely first.”
A little belatedly, I realised that I’d inadvertently fully palmed one of her boobs with that move and shook my head, exasperated—was this what it was like for everyone else when they were dealing with me? I lashed out with my foot as I scrambled backwards, kicking her in the shins and receiving an immediate painful reminder that she was a robot and didn’t have shinbones that could be injured.
The blaster on Eliza’s arm rippled and changed, turning into a more normal hand with a central repulsor in the palm—along the same lines as the ones Tony used in his suits—and she darted forward again, raising a foot to try to stomp me into the ground. “Will you just stop wriggling around and let me kill you?” she complained, a touch of playful annoyance in her tone. “There are people who’d pay good money to have me step on them!”
I rolled to the side, summoning chaos magic to my hands and using it to bounce myself off the floor and back onto my feet, but the motion meant Eliza was in my blind spot for a split-second. As I turned, my hands dripping with red energy, she lunged in again and grabbed me. Metal fingers clamped firmly around my face, painfully digging into my skin, her palm pressed against my mouth as she squeezed my jaw to hold me in place. Both of my own hands came up reflexively to try to pry her off, my lips tingled as the repulsor thrummed against them—I scrabbled at her with telekinetic energy, but an icy frisson of panic shot through me. With sudden clarity, I knew she was too strong, that I wouldn’t be able to pry her off me before she managed to fire her weapon.
Eliza knew it too, grinning at me triumphantly. “Have you ever wond—”
There was a woosh of air and a loud ‘whunk’—Eliza’s fingers blazed painful trails across my face as they were wrenched away, the AI suddenly gone. I blinked and rubbed at my jaw, looking around just in time to see Carol slam her into the floor a dozen meters away, cratering the concrete beneath them. The ground shivered beneath my feet.
I giggled, a little delirious. “What? Have I ever wondered what?” I called after them. “You didn’t finish!”
My quip was met by a pair of repulsor blasts from another two Iron Legion drones diving in from the ceiling—I deflected the attacks, seizing one in a telekinetic grip and using it as a bludgeon to smash the other from the air before crushing it contemptuously and discarding the wreckage.
“I gotta say, Wanda,” Tony’s voice came through the comms. “The gynoid with big boobs and high heels is certainly a choice.”
“…R2 double-D2,” I said, looking around to see if I could spot him. Reaching up to touch my cheek, my fingers came away bloody. I gingerly probed the inside of my mouth with my tongue but, thankfully, it didn’t seem like she’d actually torn a hole in my face. “Where are you?”
“Busy!”
Carol suddenly jerked back up into the air—Eliza had wrapped her legs around her waist to hold on and was clawing at her, vibranium fingers shredding the shoulders of her outfit. Grabbing the robot firmly with both hands, glimmering orange and blue fire danced across Carol’s body as she pried it off her and pulled. Eliza came apart in her hands, falling back to the floor in two halves, and I swore under my breath. I was pretty sure I could see blood on Carol’s shoulder. She couldn’t afford to hold back too much if Eliza could actually hurt her, but if we damaged the body too much before Clint got here, then Eliza would jump ship and…
I blinked as another pair of limbs sprouted from the bottom of Eliza’s ribcage and her top half scuttled, spiderlike, along the ground for a moment before launching herself back up into the air at Carol. At the same time, the severed bottom half sat up, the stomach shifting and changing form. There was a deep thrumming sound as the blaster that now occupied the space above its pelvis—at least three times the size of the one she’d been used on her arm earlier—charged up and fired.
Carol dodged the blast and another wide portion of the roof above her disappeared. She wrestled for a moment with what was now a six-armed monstrosity flailing at her with knife-like fingers before managing to get it off again and hurling it back to the ground. She followed up the throw with a pair of photon blasts, blowing chunks of concrete out of the ground even as Eliza scuttled around to reunite with her bottom half. That was… okay. That was a thing.
I was about to rejoin the fight against her when Bucky’s voice came through the comms. “I’m pinned down but I’ve got eyes on the witch. They’re evac-ing on one of the flyers.”
I glanced over to the other side of the loading dock, where the two remaining dragon flyers had just started to take off, and hesitated for a moment. Bucky was pinned down, I had no idea where Mordo or Pietro were, Tony was ‘busy’, Carol was fighting Eliza… I was the only one clear.
Intellectually, I knew that I didn’t actually have to fight Eliza myself. Carol could keep her busy until Clint got here, he’d take the shot, and we’d hopefully all go home happy. Stopping the witch and Beck from getting away was objectively the smarter play. Still, making the choice rankled at me. I really wanted to be there when Wanda-3 took her shot at Eliza.
“On it,” I said. Making a frustrated noise in the back of my throat, I flung my hands downward, using a pulse of chaos magic to catapult myself toward the aircraft as they started to pull upwards and away, landing a bare dozen meters short. Reaching out both hands toward the vehicles, I seized them both with telekinetic power, binding them in red tendrils of energy. The flyers jerked and shuddered in the air, control surfaces angling outwards as their engines flared bright blue, fighting against me, but I held fast and started dragging them back to the ground. One looked empty, but I saw a pale, frightened face looking at me through the cockpit glass of the other that I thought I recognised—was that Quentin Beck? Did Eliza have him working on BARF for her?
I briefly considered trying to smash the two aircraft into each other, but dismissed it. Beck and the witch might be worth interrogating, so I didn’t want to kill them if I didn’t have to. Plus, I figured that the witch probably had the things that had been stolen from Kamar-taj with her and the Ancient One would probably be annoyed if I accidentally destroyed them. Instead, I focused on forcing the flyers to the ground.
“Wanda!” Carol barked in my ear, something in her tone making me immediately fling myself to the ground without a second thought.
A violent beam of orange and blue energy tore through the space where I’d just been standing and carved downwards toward me. I rolled, losing my grip on the dragon flyers as I moved to protect myself—luckily, with the wide angle, it was relatively simple to deflect the beam away from me, skipping it across a hastily-woven shield before it cut out.
I looked back the way the attack had come in time to see Carol grab hold of Eliza and hit her with a point-blank photon blast to the face. Her head split apart like the fucking T-1000, tendrils of vibranium nanites flailing for a moment before rapidly reassembling. Movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention and I saw the two dragon flyers peeling away through the gaping hole in the ceiling of the loading dock, having taken the momentary distraction as an opportunity to flee.
A half-dozen Iron Legion drones swooped inside after the flyers cleared the roof, interposing themselves between me and the rapidly-retreating Wakandan aircraft as they raised their hands and started blasting. I swore under my breath, annoyed. I was going to have to chase them. My shield held up under the hail of repulsor fire for a few seconds as I focused and spun up a portal flat against the concrete below me.
I dropped through, angling myself as I fell using a small burst of telekinetic energy and landing directly atop the glass cockpit of the dragon flyer I’d seen Beck in. The aircraft’s engines flared and hummed as it started to peel away from the warehouse, turning from the waterfront to head deeper into the city instead. I paused to steady myself, holding on with one hand, feet finding purchase along the small shelf formed by the metal reinforcement that ran along the middle of the cockpit.
Inside I could see Beck strapped into the pilot’s seat, with at least one dark shape I couldn’t quite make out moving in the space behind him. The witch. Beck looked terrified, his lips moving as he shouted something I couldn’t hear, his unshaven face haggard and sallow, but it was the reflection I saw in the glass that gave me actual pause. Were those stars, flashing and moving through the sky? I turned my head to look behind me and froze, the bottom dropping out of my stomach.
Oh.
Tony really was busy.