The walker heaved over from the impact of my Right Cross, gyros unable to save it as it crashed into the street heavily. I chopped down on the front legs of the odd vehicle, and metal screamed as I mangled the one and completely blew through the other one on the ground.

A squad of troopers in water-breathing helms came racing towards me, not at all inhibited by their heavy armor. All that breast-stroking, no doubt.

In return, they were not expecting me to move as quickly as I could, literally zipping up on them as I dodged their popguns, and then a slender figure in dark red and voltage smashed them every which way like hapless children as I bounced between them with Repulse, sending them flying into walls and abandoned cars and stairs with bone-crunching impacts that took all the fight out of them.

A horn started to blow as some brute who didn’t need a water helm and was wielding a crackling axe took a swing at me. I leapt up and over the blow, grabbing onto his head and blowing some voltage through his skull as I flipped over him, plucking him off the ground as I did so. As I landed I threw the four-hundred pounds of brute and his armor back into another squad of Atlanteans coming this way with tridents and shooters and stuff.

They scattered awkwardly, and before they could recover, one was flying into the second-story side of a brownstone, and I was bouncing to the second-

A REALLY loud horn blew from the north, ranging over the city. The Atlanteans all froze when they heard it.

I had one guy’s chest sticking to the bottom of my foot, lifted three feet off the ground and about to get head-slammed. My right hand was dragging in another while my Left Cross was all powered up to give him and his nice sturdy bulletproof armor a really bad day.

“” the Atlanteans shouted quickly, and I kind of froze there in mid-move, doing near-vertical splits while balanced on one leg as I stopped myself from dropping these guys. The third guy, who’d I’d been about to slam my foot-catch into, almost dropped his rifle in his haste not to be brained by his compatriot.

He probably hadn’t realized he’d spoken in his own tongue, but I was me, and Polyglot was on the job. “” I demanded, lifting my punch target off his feet slightly, and not letting the one in the air down. A crackle over my foot warned him not to grab my leg as he started to clutch for it.

He seemed amazed I could address him in his own tongue. “” he blurted out as hastily as he could, staring at the odd tableau.

I had no idea who had sounded that thing, or who could, but the techno-barbarian tribes of the Atlanteans had weird rules and customs.

“Huh.” I dropped him, Repulsed the one above my head off my foot so he crashed heavily to the ground, and straightened up as I brought my foot down with a dancer’s grace. “” I asked them menacingly, voltage sizzling around my gauntlets, feet tensed artistically just so, ready to send me into a careening explosion of movement between them all.

They looked past me, and at the ruin of every walker and hovercar that had been making its way up Broadway, along with literally hundreds of sprawled Atlantean troops, smashed through like a wrecking-ball had played ping-pong with them.

The shooting ahead of us, where the Avengers and Shielders were doing battle with the heavier ships of the Atlantean Navy, was letting off. The Patriot was coordinating the defense, with Thor having been drawn off fighting some large sea monsters that required some major muscle to control, and Iron Man was being chased all over by missiles obviously designed to target him. I gathered the new recruits of Arrow, Scarlet, Quicksilver, and Wonder Man were acquitting themselves well, while Giant-man was changing sizes a lot to avoid being shot, and Wasp was stinging the crap out of the infantry who couldn’t hit her, probably not really doing much more than irritating them.

I’d seen Nova streak past a couple times, smashing some of those missiles out of the air, and reports were the Spiders were keeping the other side of the river clear, while Danny and Luke were messing up things around the Hudson River with SHIELD troopers and Director Carter directing the defense there.

The shooting seemed to be dying down, and the vehicles ahead of me were pulling back, as were the Atlantean infantry with them. There might have been a lot of cautious eyes directed my way as I stood there with crackling Fists.

“” my target agreed quickly. I set him back down on his feet, hard.

“” He obligingly turned around and hurried away, after collecting his squad member who was sprawled below the impact site on the brownstone’s wall. “Dynamo here. Alright, who can tell me what’s going on with the horn?” I asked into coms.

“It was blown from the top of the Chrysler Building, but there’s no sign of who did it,” Hank McCoy responded instantly. I bounced sixty feet into the air, gliding along above the retreating Atlanteans now that I didn’t need to worry about being picked off in the air with my lousy maneuverability.

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I saw the detached Fantasicar zipping around the skyscraper, with Angel higher up taking a spin around it, too.

“The Atlantean forces are breaking off fighting all along the shore,” Dr. Richards reported. “Was that a retreat signal?”

“The trooper I asked said it was a call for a duel of honor to resolve the fighting quickly, Doc,” I answered.

“Oh,” he acknowledged. “Well, that might not be good...”

“How’s that, Doc?” I asked for everybody.

“Well, if we lose the duel, they might just claim all of New York City as their prize.”

---------

The Atlantean army, or rather, the tribes of invading Atlanteans, had drawn up in good order out on Victory Island, the great statue to the ‘unwavering spirit’ of the New Yorkers who had rebuilt their city after the firebombing by the Tribes still standing there, torch upraised and unsullied.

They could probably appreciate a good military statue.

Their leader was Attuma. The hulking warlord of the undersea tribes was someone as strong as Ben Grimm and a rival to King Namor, clutching a massive three-pronged sword and looking both excited and confident as he stood there talking to the Patriot.

“” the warlord exploded irritably. “” the warlord berated the Patriot loudly and brashly.

“” General Steve Rogers asked directly, completely unafraid of the bigger guy in blue.

Attuma could only scowl down at him, because the Patriot’s name was made on honor, and a personal duel of honor would be a very different thing than the challenge horn being blown. His eyes flickered to that Shield, and remembered the reputation of the man who held it, stilling his tongue as he realized he was probably suddenly on dangerous ground.

“I was the one who blew it.”

The voice carried clearly, and everyone looked up as the woman in green descended from the sky, a long spiraling horn in her hand. She spun it once before everyone’s eyes, and it vanished into nothingness.

“Flux!” Even the Atlanteans blurted it out. They weren’t stupid enough not to know the High Guard’s members, and Attuma instantly stepped forward. “” he demanded quickly... but there was a careful note of respect in his voice, and the word for woman was basically almost the same as calling her a queen.

He probably doesn’t want to end up a minnow, I mused to myself.

“The entertainment value had worn thin. Certainly you will agree that a duel of champions will resolve this matter more quickly, Warlord?” she asked archly.

His hand clenched on that big-arse trident sword of his. “” he agreed. “” he declared confidently, and turned scornful eyes on those assembled. “”

“Let me at ‘im, Stretch. I’ll give ‘im a pounding he won’t forget!” Grimm volunteered promptly. The FF had rather frequent dealings with Atlanteans, usually about as friendly as they were right now.

“Whoa, whoa, there, Grimm. We’ve got a literal divine champion sitting right here,” Iron Man broke in confidently, gesturing at the watching figure of Thor.

“This is a matter for mortals, Mister Stark. Unless Poseidon or one of his sons takes to the field, Thor will not intervene, any more than I,” the Lady Sersi corrected him.

“Oh.” A bit nonplussed about that, he had the sense to ask, “So, uh, any other special conditions we should know about?”

“Each side gets to choose one restriction that is fair and reasonable to both parties. Such as, oh, no armor,” she replied, batting a sexy eye at him.

His hand was about to go up, and suddenly went back down. “Well, that’s a little inconvenient...” he said to nobody in particular.

“Or the fight will take place underwater,” Sersi continued, looking at Grimm.

And that’s when The Mountain slammed down into the open space between the two forces. A lot of guns snapped up in astonishment as he straightened, dusted off his coat, and turned around to look at the Atlantean forces. “I’m the champion,” he more snarled then declared, glaring at Attuma.

I noticed him put the crystal phone away in his pocket, and whistled to nobody in particular as his eyes swept past me. He’d gotten a call...

“You? What does The Mountain have to do with this matter, mercenary?” Attuma immediately attempted to deny... and in Human. “Your place and home are not here, Mountain!” His voice had the air of someone who’d done business with Mr. Hill before.

“Huh. Well, I’ll tell you what. One of your little land-crabs there put its goddamn leg through my van, and trashed my ride. Your little group of trigger-happy knuckleheads half-collapsed a building I was putting up on the Hudson when they used it for target practice.” Oh, no shit, they’d shot the storage bins? “And,” his voice dropped to a menacing growl, “your opening shelling fell on my house, and you killed my dog!”

“Clover’s dead?” I blurted out, despite myself. The dog I’d brought from the pound as a house-warming present for him was dead? He’d been having a good time training her to fetch him a beer!

“Hey, isn’t this the guy who beat the crap out of us last year? He had a dog?” Spidey asked, but nobody was listening.

“Now, you can either make this a proper challenge, or this is gonna get personal,” Mr. Hill growled, as a nastily-spiked ball of gray-black adamantine on a chain hit the sands of the beach. The air seemed to hum and get just a little heavier.

Attuma realized that Mr. Hill was indeed very serious about this, and getting flattened by a heavy gravity burst and taking a spiked flail to the skull was probably not a good way to end this battle.

“I accept this,” he agreed quickly, trying to appear magnanimous in the face of how pissed Mr. Hill looked, his stony carven face frozen into a mean, angry frown. “The prize we demand is the entirety of New York City!” he bellowed, throwing out his arms, and his soldiers all cheered behind him.

“For how long?” Flux’s voice cut through the cheers, and Attuma froze. “Said length of time can be claimed by your opponents, too.” She turned to Mr. Hill, who rounded and looked at the Patriot.

General Rogers glanced at his wife. “Complete and total withdrawal of Atlantean forces from the territory and waters of the United States, along with reparations for damages!” he countered with only a moment’s hesitation.