The bombardment from the sky was only the beginning.
The great warships slid into position above the city, and the landing craft began to fall. They came down like massive dropped anvils, smashing into the boulevards and courtyards. The heavy ramps blew open instantly, and the Dark Elves poured out into Asgard by the hundreds.
They made no sound.
That was the thing the Einherjar would remember afterward. There were no blood-curdling battle cries, no blaring horns, no primal roars. Just bone-white masks, dark, jagged armor, and total, working silence. They moved with the efficiency of a machine that was built for exactly one task and also made to wait five thousand years to perform it. They raised their rifles and fired into the golden shield-lines without hate and without hurry.
And so the land war began, and Asgard reminded the universe exactly why it had ruled it for so long.
The Einherjar did not break. The golden shield walls locked tight, street by street, forming an impenetrable phalanx across every major approach. The red alien fire beat uselessly against them like heavy rain on a roof. Then the lines went forward in unison. When they came up against the elves, the wall opened just wide enough for the spears to thrust, and closed again instantly, and the army marched on over what the spears left behind.
Behind the infantry lines, the Asgardian mages stepped into the fray.
They worked in choirs, hands sweeping, golden runes assembling in the air in front of them. Barriers flared across whole intersections, catching elven grenades mid-flight and returning the blasts to their senders with interest. Mages chanted in Old Norse. Their magic washed over the Einherjar battalions in waves of light, enchanting the soldiers' weapons so their swords and axes cut through the alien plating like hot knives through butter.
For one shining stretch of minutes, the line held everywhere, and it looked as though Asgard would win this war easily.
Then the elven ranks parted silently, and something older came walking through.
They stood taller than the soldiers, and leaner, and their bone masks were etched with jagged crimson runes. They carried no rifles. They carried staffs of twisted black metal, and the light around them did not reflect so much as drain away, as though each one walked in his own small local midnight.
Shadow Weavers. The elite sorcerers of Svartalfheim, who had gone into the dark with their king and come out of it with him.
They raised their twisted staffs in unison and slammed them into the streets.
What came off them was not fire, and it was not force. It was rot.
It rolled up the boulevard and touched the golden barriers, and the barriers did not shatter. They sickened. The light went grey, and flaked, and crumbled into black ash. The glowing enchantments on a hundred Einherjar blades sputtered and died instantly with it.
The Dark Elves had never been only an army of foot soldiers. They were an ancient civilization built on dark magic. Asgard was not fighting fire with fire today. It was trying to fight fire with shadow.
For the first time in living memory, the unbreakable Asgardian line wavered.
Then, blinding lightning hit the middle of the street.
The thunderclap threw a dozen Shadow Weavers off their feet and blew the encroaching ash-wave apart. Thor came up out of the crater already swinging, with Volstagg and Hogun charging out of the palace gates behind him. The flagging line saw its prince and instantly stopped wavering.
Sif came into the flank of them a heartbeat later, glaive turning in a lethal blur, with Fandral at her shoulder. For the first time since the sky went black, all four of them were fighting in the exact same street at the exact same time.
"You are late," Fandral called out cheerfully, running a Shadow Weaver cleanly through the chest and stepping over him without slowing.
"And already ahead of you." Thor put another elf through a stone wall with Mjolnir.
—
Through the chaotic middle of all of it, Pietro Maximoff was having the time of his life, and being extremely useful, in that order.
The eastern market was a horror of plasma fire and trapped families, and Pietro went through it at four hundred miles an hour without once stopping to actually fight anybody. That was the trick of it. He did not need to beat the armoured elves in a fistfight. He only needed to be somewhere they were not, which was everywhere.
Families were pulled out of the path of beams that arrived where they had just been standing. Rifles fired and found their energy magazines mysteriously absent, their owners left holding a length of suddenly ornamental metal. One elf was relieved of his rifle, his knife, both boots, and, on a third pass conducted purely out of spite, his mask.
The market emptied, family by family, safely into the shelter stairs.
And then, predictably, with the last civilians clear and his adrenaline absolutely singing, Pietro got cocky.
He stopped moving. For one whole, arrogant second he actually stopped, standing out in the wide open, to throw a mocking, theatrical little two-finger salute at an elven grunt who had just swung a blade through the empty space he had left.
He never saw the Shadow Weaver standing quietly on the balcony directly above him.
It had been watching the silver blur for some time, unhurried, reading the pattern, and its hands were already finishing a curse woven for fast things. A black tendril of rot, built to latch onto motion itself.
It let the curse go.
The curse crossed twenty feet in a blink and hit a silver shield that had not existed a fraction of an instant earlier, hissed violently like water on a hot pan, and died instantly.
Pietro jumped in the air and spun around.
Winky stood in the ruined market ten feet away, one hand holding the shield, the other on her hip in a way that every child in the Hayes house could have identified from the far end of the garden.
"Pietro must look where he is stepping." She pitched it over the noise of the battle without seeming to raise her voice at all. "And Pietro must stop performing for people who are not watching."
"I had it under control!"
"Pietro had nothing under control." She flicked her wrist without looking. A bolt of silver took the Shadow Weaver off the balcony and through the wall of the building behind it. "Keep running."
Pietro opened his mouth, looked at the smoking hole in the stone wall, reconsidered his life choices, and became a silver blur again.
—
Above the ground war, Wanda floated like a vengeful scarlet goddess.
She had stopped chasing fighters. The soldiers and the ships were not what was breaking Asgard. It was the elites, and so the elites were hers.
A full circle of Shadow Weavers had gathered in a plaza on the palace approach, staffs planted, chanting something that was pulling a storm of darkness together above the gates. A slow black whirlpool that the anti-air batteries fired into without any effect at all. Wanda came down over them with her hair floating and her hands dripping red.
They saw her. Lances of necrotic black came up from nine staffs at once.
She did not dodge. She met their rot with Chaos, and Chaos was the older sister. The scarlet mist swallowed the black lances whole and unmade them, not blocked, not deflected, unmade, and for the first time all night, bone-white masks tilted upward in something that was not calm.
Wanda brought both hands down.
The scarlet hit the plaza, and it did not simply break the circle. It reached into the working itself and turned it inside out. The storm those nine had spent their lives learning to summon folded in on top of its own summoners, and the plaza became, briefly, a very small and very selective place of enormous gravity.
Then, it was perfectly quiet.
She was efficient, and untouchable, and it did not matter.
Because for every circle Wanda crushed, and every street Pietro cleared, and every wave Thor and the warriors blew apart, and every wreck Winky swept out into the sea, two more landing craft came down.
The Dark Elves were taking losses that would have broken any sane army with a future to protect.
But they did not have one.
The Dark Elves were not here to take the city. They were not here to hold it, or rule it, or empty it. They walked past objectives any conqueror in the Nine Realms would have stopped to secure, and left the outer defences intact behind them, and pushed inward through casualties that should have been unthinkable without one of them so much as slowing down.
Foot soldiers and sorcerers alike went forward over the bodies of their own kind.
They were going to the palace.
And they would burn anything at all that stood between them and it.