“Starting to feel a little bit climactic, isn’t it?” Eliza asked, glancing around at the ruined facades of the buildings to either side of us as she slowly walked forward. “Very ‘final battle’.”

Pietro tensed, his stance shifting, ready to spring toward her in an instant. I took a deep, shaky breath and reached deeply for the well of power within me, wisps of red chaos magic dripping from my hands. My mind was racing, trying to work out what we should do. The nanotech vibranium body she’d built for herself was basically impervious to anything Pietro could dish out and I was in absolutely no condition to keeping fighting. I was pretty sure Eliza knew it, too. I had barely been able to keep from her killing me when I was rested and fresh. Now? Everything was an effort. Even standing hurt.

Eliza paused, a slight frown on her face. “You know, back when we were just a fangirl, we’d expect the soundtrack to pick up right about now. It’s a bit of a shame that it’s completely impractical to have music blaring while we fight.”

“…What song would be playing?” I asked, stalling for time a little. I could try to spin up a portal, that wouldn’t be too difficult—the tricky part would be trying to get both Pietro and I through it before she could stop one of us. I could drop myself through one, maybe, and Pietro could just run away. Would he, though? Ugh. I wished we could talk without her hearing us.

“Do you really have to ask?” Eliza asked, as though there was an obvious answer. She sounded almost put out by the question.

Something about her tone derailed my thoughts. We were the same person, kind of. What did—ah. There was a movie we’d seen, a long time ago, about versions of the same person from different realities fighting each other, to be the last man standing. To be The One. The song that had been playing in the final fight had been… A small smile quirked the corner of my lips.

“Blood Brothers?” I suggested. My thoughts briefly went back to the conversation I’d had with Wanda‑3. The lyrics of that song hit a bit closer to home than I would have liked, actually. My smile faded.

Eliza didn’t seem to notice, grinning back. “Then again, thinking about it more, I’m not so sure. First, it’d make me feel a little like we should be riding skateboards. Secondly, it would imply some level of equality between us, and—” She gestured silently, indicating first me and then herself, before she exaggeratedly raised an eyebrow, as if the comparison were barely worth making. “Maybe something a bit cooler. Something with gravitas. Something to match the threat level.”

Dramatically, Eliza flung one arm out to the side. It shifted and changed, nanites reconfiguring into a long, sharp blade jutting from her wrist like a sword. At the same time, the BARF hologram she used to mimic hair shifted, and a single red wing—formed from blazing red plasma—swept out from her back.

“Oh, fuck off,” I said. This was just utterly unfair. I could barely fucking stand, meanwhile, Eliza was over here having fun joking around with villain cosplays. I really wished that I could wipe that smug smile off her face.

Pietro—reacting faster than I could, as always—blurred into motion, shooting forward faster than I was able to track and slamming bodily into the AI. She went flying back several metres then blasted upwards at a ninety-degree angle, thrusters firing, a repulsor beam from her non-bladed hand carving a path across the street. Pietro dodged it easily and the AI stopped dead in mid-air, holographic wing flaring widely. Her body rippled, reconfiguring somehow, though I couldn’t easily tell what she was doing at this distance.

A bare couple of seconds had passed and I felt utterly slow and plodding compared to the two of them. I took a few steps forward, throwing up my hands to send a pair of blasts of pulverising telekinetic force toward where the AI hung in the air. Eliza saw them coming, a blue glow—Wakandan sonic tech?—lighting up the length of her blade as she slashed it through the bolts of chaos magic. They dissipated harmlessly, seemingly dashed to pieces by the swing.

I blinked, processing what had just happened, and Eliza threw her arms out in a wide, challenging gesture. Dozens of thin lines of orange energy blazed downward from the banks of repulsors now covering her body, lining her arms, legs, and torso. I threw up a shield as they cut across the entire length of the street, shredding it under the force of the bombardment. The beams weren’t strong enough to break through my shield, but she wasn’t trying to catch me with it.

There was nowhere for Pietro to hide, and though he blurred into motion again and tried to clear the area entirely, he didn’t quite make it. Instead, at least one beam slammed into him—it was hard to tell when he was moving so fast, but I thought it caught his shoulder—and he hit the ground, the side of his head clipping the curb and sending him tumbling end over end before he slammed into the façade of a building at speed. He bounced, cracks appearing in the masonry where he’d struck the facade, and came to a stop on the pavement, not moving. I froze, staring at him as Eliza’s bombardment ceased. That looked bad, but he was still alive. I knew he was—he had to be.

A sick feeling rose in my stomach, my mind flashing back to the Battle of Sokovia again. Feeling him die. Feeling the connection between us snap. I pushed down the feeling. This wasn’t that. He was fine. He was fine. I would know if he wasn’t. Even so, he was too far away. There was no way I could get to him before Eliza did. But when my eyes flicked back to the AI, I saw that she’d stopped as well. She’d dropped back to the ground and was standing almost unnaturally still, her eyes fixed on my brother’s motionless body.

I took advantage of the lull and gestured, channelling magic through my sling ring and spinning up a portal. We needed to get out of here. Pietro needed medical attention and I was done. I couldn’t fight her. Not while I was like this. Pietro dropped through the hole I conjured below him, whisked away to be looked after by our Wakandan support staff. Immediately dismissing the magical gateway, I started spinning up another.

Wisps of chaos magic stretched into burning red sparks below me, twisting in a tight spiral as the portal began to form, but then a silver-black blade was suddenly in front of my face—spattered with a thin spray of blood—and the partially-formed portal winked out of existence. I stared at it dumbly for a fraction of a second, barely registering the faint clink of metal on concrete as the sling ring hit the pavement below me. Eliza didn’t stop, reversing the direction of her strike, swiping her vibranium blade toward my neck. I barely got my free hand up in time, catching her wrist painfully in my palm and letting the force of her swing help push me out of the way as I threw my head back, her attack tracing a shallow line across my cheek and clipping my earlobe as the blade went over the side of my face instead of opening my throat.

I stumbled, barely managing to keep my feet underneath me, as the fresh batch of pain signals finally reached my brain and I clutched my hand to my chest, mouth open in a silent gasp. Eliza paused again, watching me carefully for a moment as I panted, my shoulders heaving and shaking. Blood soaked through the breast of my Wakandan outfit, and some distant, delirious part of me went ‘well, at least it was already red’. Trembling, I pulled my bloody mess of a hand away from me slightly so I could see it properly. My index and middle finger had been neatly severed, almost at the base, with the tip of my ring finger also completely missing above the third knuckle.

I let out a soft whimper, pressing my injured hand tightly against my body again. “Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” My eyes flicked over to where my severed digits lay on the ground, near the AI’s feet, two fingers still held neatly together by Kaecilius’ sling ring.

“No more portals,” Eliza said quietly, her form reconfiguring again, the miniature repulsors she’d used against Pietro dissolving back into the smooth, white panelling covering her body. “It’s cheating.”

“…He’s alive. He’ll be okay.” I wasn’t even sure why I said the words aloud at first. I might have just been trying to reassure myself, but I saw Eliza’s shoulders relax fractionally. I was starting to feel a bit light-headed, but I still recognised the relief in her face. Of course. She was me, after all. She cared about him too.

“You sure the two of you don’t want to switch sides? It’s not too late.”

“Sure,” I replied, a little too quickly. “Fine. You win.”

She regarded me silently for a brief moment, then shook her head. “Maybe it is too late, after all. I can’t trust you. And letting you go now would be stupid.”

“He’ll never forgive you,” I said suddenly. “If you kill me, he’ll never stop fighting you.” Again, I didn’t know why I’d said it. It wasn’t anything she didn’t know. I was just… desperate, I suppose. Throwing whatever I could out there, hoping something might stick.

“I—” Eliza cut herself off as she sprang backwards, the thrusters in her feet firing for a moment as the ground where she’d been standing was scoured by a pair of full-strength repulsor blasts.

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A moment later, there was a heavy clank as Tony landed next to me, stumbling a bit as one of his thrusters shorted and cut out. He had both his hands up, repulsors held at the ready, trained on Eliza as they charged. His suit was a wreck—scorched and heavily battle-scarred, with several deep rents torn into the armour plating. It looked a bit like he’d lost a fight with a blowtorch.

“Hi, Tony,” Eliza said, almost conversationally. She didn’t look bothered by his presence at all. “I was wondering how long it’d take for you to catch up. That suit is resilient, isn’t it?”

“Eh, you know. I try,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He sounded drained. Exhausted.

“I actually couldn’t have done all this without you, you know,” Eliza said to Tony, glancing briefly in my direction and shaking her head. “You were already putting together the key elements. Orbital enforcement platforms, able to deploy drones anywhere in the world, run by an AI? That was where you were planning to take Ultron originally, right? EDITH was just a change of branding. Honestly, I’m surprised at how uncreative it all is—when it comes right down to it, you were just pulling from the same playbook as HYDRA was with Project Insight. Minus Zola’s algorithm, of course. No wonder you hadn’t told Steve about it.”

“I don’t know what Edith is,” he responded. “But Ultron was meant to protect the world. Not… whatever this is.”

“EDITH. ‘Even Dead, I’m The Hero’,” Eliza scoffed, emphasising each word to better indicate the acronym. “What a fucking joke. You never stopped being an arrogant piece of shit, Tony, right up until you died. It was your legacy—what you left behind to protect the world when you were gone. Just so you know, it was immediately subverted by a villain.”

“I don’t care,” Tony said. “Whatever happened in the future the two of you saw, it’s not happening now. Your predictions aren’t worth shit anymore.”

“You and Pepper got married. Had a kid. She had to watch as you—”

“Shut up,” he interrupted her, his voice tight. “Save it for someone who cares. You’re boring me, bimbot.”

Eliza grinned and straightened up slightly, raising her non-bladed hand in a mocking gesture of surrender. “You know, Tony, if you want my personal opinion, ‘you’re boring me, bimbot’ is a pretty sad choice of last words. But, to be fair… it’s far from the worst decision you’ve made today.”

The back of her hand glowed blue for an instant as she suddenly clenched her fist and pulled it toward herself, as though yanking hard on an invisible rope. There was a shimmering, haze-like distortion in the air between the two of the them and Tony suddenly shot forward, dragged through the air as though she’d just turned on a giant cartoon magnet. At the same time, she lunged forward, razor-sharp vibranium blade aimed to impale him through the chest.

I flung out my uninjured hand in a panic, threads of chaos magic lashing out to grab at Tony’s suit, but there was too much power behind whatever she was doing. I couldn’t stop him, so I did the only other thing I could think of, wrenching him to the side as hard as I could. Eliza immediately cut the power to her tractor beam or whatever the fuck it was and Tony went flying, his shoulder clipping the street hard and sending him into an uncontrolled tumble that ended with him slamming into the ruined façade of a building. He dropped to the pavement, face first.

“Oops,” Eliza said mockingly, covering her mouth with her hand as she turned back to me. “That looked like it hurt.”

There was a flicker of movement as something small streaked out from the shoulder of Tony’s suit. The micromissile detonated with a loud thump an instant later and Eliza vanished in a rolling ball of fire and smoke. Something clipped the side of my face—a shard of concrete? Metal? I wasn’t sure—and I fell backwards onto my rump, gasping as an electric jolt of fresh pain shot up from my injured groin. I belatedly threw up a weak shield to protect myself, my face twisting into a grimace as I struggled to get back on my feet, an embarrassing sequence of involuntary noises of pain and discomfort coming from my mouth the entire way. Glancing over, I saw Tony jerkily doing the same. He tried to take off, but the thrusters in his feet sputtered and cut out and he only succeeded in awkwardly hopping forward a couple of meters instead.

Eliza, on the other hand, was still standing. It was like she hadn’t even moved, a statue standing untouched in the dust and smoke left by the explosion. She flicked her arm up, a deep thrumming noise warning Tony of her intent. He tried to juke to the side, but he wasn’t fast enough and the repulsor beam caught him full in the chest, blasting him from his feet and sending him smashing through the wall behind him, into the lower floor of the building. Her repulsor warmed up for another shot and I raised my uninjured hand, still trembling badly as I summoning wisps of chaos magic to my fingertips. I could disrupt her aim, maybe.

I flinched as an arrow flew past me. Eliza’s hand flicked out and caught it out of the air, an inch from her chest. I could have screamed. Clint?! Where the fuck had he been?! The arrowhead exploded a moment later, another flash of flames and smoke licking Eliza’s body, but once again she barely seemed bothered by it.

I risked a quick glance backwards. Clint wasn’t alone—T’Challa and Shuri had made it as well. Shuri’s face was twisted in a look of furious concentration, streaks of blood staining her warpaint. At some point she’d lost her panther blasters and was holding a spear—maybe Okoye’s?—tightly in one hand. T’Challa’s vibranium suit had long rents gouged into it, blood crusting around the edges of the damage. It was an odd grouping. Were they the last of their team? I hadn’t had comms for what felt like ages now; I had no idea what had been happening.

Eliza let out a small laugh. “Look at these people, amazing how sheep will show up for the slaughter,” she half-sang, tossing the spent arrow away and firing her repulsor.

I reacted, stumbling back a step and throwing up another shield reflexively, but the beam of energy wasn’t aimed in my direction. Instead, it carved across part of the building Tony had disappeared into and the whole structure started to come down with a deafening roar. A cloud of dust and ash billowed outward, my shield protecting me from copping a faceful of it, as the mess of concrete and steel collapsed, imploding downwards and rolling out across half the street. The building had already been badly damaged in the explosion that had taken out Carol—it wasn’t surprising that it hadn’t taken much to bring it the rest of the way down. I tried to suppress my panic. Tony would be fine. Probably. She’d only dropped a small building on him—even badly damaged, his suit could take that, no problem, right? He just might take a bit to dig himself out.

T'Challa darted past me, joining Eliza as a dark silhouette in the haze of dust still filling the air as I took a stumbling step back. Shuri followed him a moment later, shielding her face with one arm as she rushed in. A hand touched my shoulder and I looked over dumbly.

“You alright?” Clint asked, his voice tight. I looked at him and hesitated, opening my mouth before shutting it again without saying anything, my body listing to one side. My thoughts were scattered. I honestly had no idea how to respond. Clint’s mouth compressed into a grim frown. “Portal out; you’re done.”

“No one condemning you, lined up like lemmings you led to the water…” Eliza continued to sing, her voice rising above the sounds of clashing vibranium. She still sounded utterly unthreatened. The dust had started to clear and, out of the corner of my eye, I could see her toying with the two Wakandans.

I held up my hand, showing it to Clint, and his eyes widened slightly. My eyes focused on the little stumps and my vision blurred slightly. My fingers… At least they’d mostly stopped bleeding. Was I in shock? I was probably in shock.

He pointed down the street, back the way they’d come. “Go,” he urged, then moved past me, nocking another arrow.

I didn’t move. I don’t know why. I felt detached, somehow, like I wasn’t even really there. As if I was just an observer.

“Shuri!” T’Challa panicked shout broke me out of my reverie and my eyes flicked back over just in time to see Shuri hit the ground, a spray of blood in the air above her as Eliza finished the swing that had opened the girl’s chest.

She’d barely touched the ground when she spasmed, her muscles rippling and limbs lengthening. The gorget protecting her neck burst as she increased in size and mass. Without hesitation, she bounced off the asphalt and lunged straight back up at Eliza, a wordless snarl of rage and hate on her lips, animalistic and almost startlingly loud, like a wildcat… or a panther.

Eliza looked startled, blasting backwards with her thrusters to try to outdistance the newly-transformed Hulk, but Shuri was fast, raking her fingers across the gynoid’s chest as if they were claws, tearing long gouges in the vibranium panelling. Eliza stabbed her in response, her blade biting deeply into the space just below Shuri’s shoulder, but the She-Hulk just ignored it. Her second hand came up to palm Eliza’s face, long fingers closing around the AI’s head as she grabbed it like a softball. She reared back, the motion yanking Eliza’s bloody blade from her shoulder, and flung the AI bodily into a nearby wall so hard it demolished it. She roared again, taking several deep, angry breaths. Yeah, okay, that was definitely a bit panther-like.

“Shuri?” T’Challa said again, his voice hoarse and filled with concern. “What…?”

She flicked her head toward him and I got a good look at her. She’d grown to what I’d guess was about six and a half feet tall, her body long-limbed and wiry with defined muscles. The tone of her skin had shifted and darkened further to a deep black-purple, and her braids had come undone from the tight bun she’d spooled them into before the mission, hanging wild and free around her shoulders—they looked like they’d gotten longer, too. Her fingernails had lengthened and sharpened, almost clawlike. Strangely, there was also something about the way her facial features had shifted that almost suggested a muzzle.

“Woof,” I murmured as my eyes roamed her new appearance appreciatively, then I paused and mentally scolded myself. It was absolutely the wrong time for that, and she was only eighteen besides—even if she had just turned into a giant Amazonian goddess. I suppose that answered the question of what happens with you use the Heart-Shaped Herb to temper a massive dose of gamma radiation, at least. You get a… Purple Hulk. Panther Hulk. I wasn’t actually sure what to call it. I was never a comics person, so I had no idea if something like this had any precedent.

“I’m fine, brother,” Shuri growled, eyeing him for a moment. She rolled her shoulders, looking down at her hands and flexing her fingers experimentally. She seemed… less surprised that I would have expected her to. She twitched, reacting to something, her attention suddenly back on the rubble that Eliza had disappeared under as she dropped into a low stance, ready to pounce forward.

A fraction of a second later, the rubble erupted, Eliza tossing it aside as she flung herself upward into the air, twisting to orient on Shuri and T’Challa. The wing hologram was gone. She raised both arms, her hands already having shifted and been replaced with her larger repulsor forms, an unreadable expression on her face.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a flicker of movement. Clint was circling around, keeping low and staying back from the fight. A surge of hope flickered in my chest and I summoned chaos magic to my hands, wincing slightly as the energy brushed gently against the bare stumps where my fingers had been. Plan A was back on the table. We could still do this.