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Manhattan

–Jack Sullivan–

He threw the phone into the river once he replied to Tony’s message. He had conveyed the seriousness of the situation and had actually asked for him to tag along because Loki was not exactly someone like Thor or Hulk, who would use mainly brute force before using strategy. Tony had reviewed some of the footage and was convinced that while Loki himself was probably completely bat-crap insane, he was also cunning and ruthless. That, combined with the historical lore surrounding Loki, which Tony had to take seriously now because of the uncanny resemblance with the real-life Thor, Tony was of the opinion that Loki’s magic might give them somewhat of a hard time, and at that point, having an unbreakable barrier surrounding them would be beneficial for everyone involved.

Basically, it was just a long assed way of asking him to join him at SHIELD, mainly because he believed that this time SHIELD was actually up to something good rather than the shady activities Jarvis had flagged down for him.

After confirming that he would be joining him as well as telling him not to inform anyone about his identity or real age, he threw the phone in the river and after opening a portal, entered the courtyard of Kamar Taj.

“Here for advice?” He turned around as he heard her speak as soon as he arrived. It would seem that she had expected this visit, which was to be expected.

“Less for advice and more for assurance,” He said as he floated over to stand right next to her as they looked at the training apprentices. He was actually still of the opinion that he should just get over to Germany where Loki would look for the Iridium and then crush his scheme right then and there. Clint could be taken care of later anyway. Even if they did lose him, it was a sacrifice he was willing to make if it meant thousands of people would not die.

“I have assurance,” He looked at her as she spoke those words. He did not understand what she was getting at when…

“I have you there. That is all the assurance you or anyone else might need,” She said and then raised her arms toward him. He looked at it to see a small coin in her hand, that was tied to a small string. It looked very ancient and very important as well. He looked at her in confusion as he took the surprisingly heavy coin in his hand and felt the inscriptions cast on it.

“The city might not need assurance because of you but you might end up needing that. Keep it,” She said and then looked back at the initiates, all the while maintaining the same calm serene expression on her face.

He looked at the coin and after looking back at her, clenched it in his fist and turned around, determined to end the fight without there even being a single casualty on his side.

If she was so certain that the reason it was fine for an Invasion to happen, was because of his mere presence, he would do all he could not to fall short of those expectations.

He opened a portal and entered his loft, blazing in green as he took a bath and then warned Pops not to leave the area. After that, he did his usual routine of opening a portal in the Alps, and then after admiring the view for a moment, he opened another portal, this time leading straight to the Beach, the place where the Helicarrier is docked, when not in flight.

As soon as he started floating down, blazing in green, alarms began ringing but they soon faded away as he slowly landed on the concrete surface of the helicarrier. He could see the Captain and Dr.Banner heading their way, along with Natasha Romanoff, someone who was probably on her way to seduce him.

As flattering as that would be, he was not here to mingle. While getting to interact with his childhood heroes would be magnificent, he had something else to do at the moment. The burden placed on him was heavy at the moment so he was not really in the mood.

So, before The Widow could get a word in, he extended one of his giant arms towards the Captain, “Captain America. Never thought I would see you again outside that gym of yours,”

The Captain gripped his hand, “I wish we didn't have to meet again in such circumstances.”

Me too, Captain. Me Too, he thought to himself as he mused on the possible consequences of his actions.

He then extended his hand towards the average-looking person who could grow up to dwarf his current size and smash everything in sight, “Dr.Banner. I hope they did not pressure you to come here. If you ever feel the need to get away from the situation, just tell me and I’ll make it happen,”

Dr.Banner shook his hand as his eyes then widened in realisation, “Ah, your portals. That is…nice. Really nice of you to offer that but I am hoping that we won’t have to witness any unpleasantness during my, hopefully, short stay here?”

“Nevertheless, the offer’s open whenever you want to,” He said and stepped back and then looked to the side as the entire ship jerked as if some ancient beast had been awoken from its slumber.

Well, to normal humans, this might as well be the biggest monster that they had ever made or laid eyes on. A flying aircraft carrier, something like this back home would have ironically been the cause of World War III, especially with the stealth tech.

“Boys, might wanna get inside. The air thins a little bit after this,” Romanoff said and then walked towards the comms tower, her hips swaying hypnotically behind her. He was sure she was doing that on purpose but eh, who’s to say that you cannot enjoy that which cannot (and should not) be touched?

“Shall we?” The Captain asked him and he nodded as he followed Romanoff.

“So, your portals. How do you keep them from falling apart? How do you know the location is the one you wished it to be?”

He sighed as all of them headed inside as the helicarrier began taking flight.

“Dr.Banner,” He stopped the babbling man in his tracks, “Once this is over, I will be more than happy to answer all your questions. For now, let’s focus on stopping a megalomaniac from using something that our resident megalomaniacs would have used to make weapons anyway,” He said and walked ahead.

He noticed Romanoff faltering a bit at his words and even the Captain pausing a bit. He would have to be daft not to warn them about SHIELD and the dirt they were hiding.

Ugh, this is so dumb. He could have just opened a portal to Stuttgart and then waited for him there but he could not be sure about the butterflies flapping their wings. He was not sure about the future and would like to be close to the action so that he could be deployed at a moment’s notice.

He was also reasonably certain that Thanos had not noticed him on Earth yet and must not have given Loki some counter weapon for him so he was safe in that regard. What he was worried about was Clint or rather, the intelligence access Clint had. He surely knew everything SHIELD knew about him and so Loki looking for something to take him out of the picture was not impossible.

He would have to be on his most alert as he apprehended Loki. He was reasonably seasoned in the art of illusions and how to see through them but all of that training was done with other fellow sorcerers, not an Asgardian god with the potential to become a multiversal god-like entity. In short, he was not sure if he could see through Loki and his illusions, and if Loki had something that could pierce through his barriers, he would not be able to save himself in time let alone others.

He had a strategy in that regard but it was kind of a foolish one. For one, staying above ground meant that he would have to command all his barriers remotely and secondly, Loki could cloak not just himself but others as well. What’s to say he would not be using one of the Chitauri chariots to float right beside him and stab him through his heart?

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

He might be enhanced by the Super Soldier Serum to levels he had not really found the limits of, but even he would not survive if he was stabbed through the heart or the brain. That would be a sure-shot way of killing him.

“Gentlemen!” The voice of Nick Fury greeting them brought him out of his reverie as they finally reached the bridge, the center of command of arguably the most advanced weapons ship on the planet, well, after whatever Namor has in the ocean, anyway. Walanda had yet to come up with something of that size mainly because they were very inexperienced in the art of war and thought that just their army, armed with their ridiculous weapons, would be enough in war. Well, they would have been in quite a rude awakening if war happened but thankfully, that would never happen….hopefully.

“Captain, Dr.Banner, and you, what do I call you?” Fury arrived in front of him and glared up at him with his one eye, making him quite an intimidating figure, for an average-sized human maybe. For someone like him, who was currently over 8 feet tall and was built like the Hulk with a pump, it made a hilarious sight.

Still, he controlled himself and replied in kind as he made a show of looking around the bridge and all the people who looked at him with undisguised interest, fear, and some hidden hate as well. Well, can’t expect everyone in SHIELD to be good guys then, especially with the snake hanging over all of them.

“You can call me Green Guardian. That is the moniker I go by. Now, is there somewhere around here where Dr.Banner can work and I can stay with him there,” He said and gestured to Banner who looked uncomfortable at the sudden attention of the entire room. Standing next to him, he looked quite small and unthreatening but then people remembered the utter destruction he could cause and then he was subjected to the same looks of fear and judgement.

Looking at the shrinking man, he gestured to Fury who was currently impotently glaring at him.

Gritting his teeth, he ordered Romanoff, “Widow will show you to the lab,”

“You will love it, Dr.Banner, we have all the latest toys,” Widow’s voice faded over the distance as she and Banner left the bridge.

The Captain looked at him and then at Fury who refused to stop glaring at him and then, after a moment of hesitation, left to go to the Lab as well.

“Well, what do you want, Fury?” He crossed his arms as he sensed the way they were taking through the labyrinth of rooms in the carrier through his enhanced senses until they too faded away and then he focused his attention on Fury.

Credit to the man, he didn’t back down even when two burning flames of green which were his eyes in the current form, bored into him with all their might.

“What I want to know is how you came to be. How did someone of your might remain unnoticed in all the time between your last sighting and the day you choose to literally prop up the Eiffel Tower? I want to know how you seemed to have grown exponentially stronger in a matter of months and also gained the ability to make portals capable of transporting not just you but even entire cars through them. Do you have any idea of the danger you represent by your mere existence? In the wrong hands, your powers would spell the end of national security.” Fury’s tirade went on as he listened to his questions that had been burning a hole in his gut.

He scoffed at the last bit, “Wrong hands? I can assure you, Fury, my powers are in my hands. If not me, then who is supposed to be the right hands? You? That’s a nice joke,”

“What Directory Fury means to say is that when someone of your powers just pops up in a major city without anyone knowing anything about you, the people in power get nervous and when they get nervous, they tend to do spectacularly stupid things,” Coulson, ever the peacemaker, flashed him a disarming smile as he subtly positioned himself between Fury and him.

Fury scoffed behind Coulson but did not correct him or make any effort to stop him. Well, two can play the game then.

“Well, Agent Coulson, might I remind you that the supposed people in power just lost something that has the potential energy to crack the planet in half? And for something so powerful, where the hell did you guys get the guts to try and tamper with it? If it were truly in the “right hands” as your Director here states, that thing should have been on the first space flight, on its way to the Sun or something, not here on Earth, being experimented on, to do God knows what. Don’t give me that crap about clean energy, I am not a child.”

His words seemed to have struck a chord in Coulson as he too stopped arguing. Fury looked pensive as well, as the entire bridge was shrouded in silence at his statements.

“If you’ll excuse me,” He nodded at Coulson and then left in the direction of the lab. Midway through, multiple minuscule barriers exited his back and scurried their way through all the possible ways and looked for Banner until he found him. He then dissipated all his barriers and then quite literally floated his way straight to the lab, at speeds that made a gust of wind appear in the bridge.

_________xx_____

In an undisclosed location, a person of Asian descent was whistling as he was standing on the edge of a tree that was only rooted to the ground by its old withering roots as it hung over a valley. There was a shallow river at the bottom of the valley which ensured that the man would meet a swift end if he found himself slipping off the tree trunk.

He was tottering on one of its edges, as if drunk, then at the last moment, as he was just about to fall down to his death, he stumbled back on the tree trunk. This went on for a while before the man, as if realising something, jerked and then jumped off the tree to gracefully land back on land, right in front of a slowly landing Quinjet.

The man leaned forward as he looked at the jet in intrigue, completely alien to his previous drunkard behavior.

“Well well well, what do we have here? It has been ages since somebody came to entertain me,” He whistled and said as he looked at the people alighting from the jet in interest.

He could feel some of their strength and he had never felt someone so far out of his league before. Well, aside from their leader but she was not strong, her power was. One shot and you were dead. Bah! Where was the fun in that? Where was the long passionate fight that nobody knew the outcome of? The fight where both of them would titter on the edge of victory and defeat, life and death, only for the just party to win, right as he was about to drop dead.

“Is this the one? Doesn’t seem to be much,” The strangely dressed person, who held some sort of ancient cosplaying staff in his hand, looked at the person standing behind him and asked him in an incredulous tone. He would have dismissed him had he not seen his eyes and seen the madness that resided inside.

No, it was not just some crazy strong person. It was a kindred spirit he was meeting.

Ah! How exciting!

“I assure you, my Lord. This person has the highest chance of solving our biggest problem. He just needs a push in the right direction,” The ass-kisser bowed and the cosplayer (haha!) nodded and then pointed his staff at him.

He was about to laugh at him when his eyes widened as a blue blast came out of it, souring past the place where his head would have been. It was his luck that he ducked, otherwise little Wei would have been a headless corpse today.

“Hmm, he will do,” The cosplayer nodded imperiously as he looked down at him with his chin up.

He looked kinda funny. Just as he was about to point that out, his heckles rose as he immediately jumped from his place. He jumped full throttle and managed to jump almost 10 feet in the air and then landed with his guard raised against the cosplayer who somehow appeared right behind him with the outstretched staff.

What in the world was that? He could not even sense him until the last moment. That had never happened before. Even dear ol Gordon was unable to escape his senses this much.

What in the world had he stepped into? The danger of the situation became apparent to him and that only served to fuel his excitement.

“Finally, someone worthy,” He said and lunged at the cosplayer, two daggers suddenly appearing in his hand as his hands took on a ghastly appearance as if they were dissolving right in front of him.

The cosplayer raised an eyebrow and that was all the warning he got before the cosplayer appeared in front of him like he had teleported and the staff he was wielding was stabbed straight through his chest.

Ha, no worries. He had taken pre..caut..

That was the last thing that went through his mind as darkness overtook his vision.

“Hmm, Interesting,” Loki commented as he pulled the sceptre out of the man’s chest which didn’t feel like pulling it through flesh, disgustingly weak that it was anyway. It felt more as if he was pulling the sceptre through sludge.

The man’s chest lost the dissolving aspect as it returned to its normal appearance. He tried to stab the person once again and was proven correct in his assumption that the man could not be stabbed to death, even with his sceptre.

“Hmm, how amusing,” He muttered and then stopped stabbing the sceptre into the man. Instead, he pointed it at the man’s head and after charging the spell longer than normal, due to the unexpectedly hardy (compared to humans) constitution that the person had, let loose the small blue orb that had accumulated at the edge of the sceptre.

The result was a small blue cloud that dissipated, to reveal the now naked person.

“Your will is my command, my Liege,”

Gone was the laidback look in the eyes of that man, replaced by an unyielding, almost rabid worship of the person in front of him, along with a healthy fear of his master.

“Rise, my servant. We will see mortals freed from their perils as I have done with you,” Loki said and was satisfied to gain another powerful (once again, compared to regular humans) minion who would help him conquer this dirtball of a world.

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Word Count - 3322

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