Lucius stood in the lab and looked over the twelve giants lined up before him with the proprietary satisfaction of a man admiring his success.
Each construct stood a little over thirteen feet tall and was built from pure uru, transmuted from the wood the rest of the soldiers brought in. Their frames carried the same broad lineage as the Destroyer, but he had corrected the idiocy where it mattered. The faceplates no longer opened in one theatrical panel arrangement like a sanctimonious furnace preparing to sing. Each head had six fixed apertures cut like eye sockets, which gave the beam system cleaner firing lines and spared the design the embarrassment of its original ceremonial nonsense.
Instead of Odinforce, he had packed them with cosmic energy under a structural discipline his own mind could hold in place. A little telekinetic addition completed the arrangement and made flight possible without any of the clumsy divine posture that Asgard seemed to take for dignity.
He walked down the line with his hands clasped behind his back, checking each one in turn. He checked power routing, stability, structural stress, beam containment, and telekinetic lift. None of them was weak to anything in humanity's armoury. For the rest, he was not sure yet; he might make some changes in the future. They were instruments built to make a statement to one specific old bastard.
He wrapped them in his telekinetic grip and teleported to some godforsaken land near the Tennessee River. From there, he sent them all at once.
The twelve constructs rose from the grounds as one and angled southwest towards the Hulkbuster Base Ross had been using as one more fortified promise to himself that the world still made sense. Lucius watched them go for a moment and decided it was all dandy. Now and then, it was only fair to let people enjoy the visual feast provided by his new team of twelve.
-
General Thaddeus Ross was having one of the better days of his recent life.
Banner had slipped away again, which was irritating, but irritation came with the job. What mattered more was that Stryker had finally delivered something useful.
If Noctis could really be broken and placed under proper control, then several long-standing problems would become productive assets. Ross had already begun thinking in quantities.
Strengthening Potions without rationing.
Variant Research without negotiation, without the mutant's personal feelings muddying the process.
He took his stance on the golf course with the settled confidence of a man who had already converted someone else's torment into future supply.
The green was clipped hard and short. The summer light sat clean over the range. A caddy stood a few paces off with his aides and bodyguards watching over him.
Ross addressed the ball, drew the club back, and drove through it with a crisp, satisfying strike. The shot flew straight enough to improve his mood immediately.
There it was.
A clean line, a proper sound, measured force producing a measurable outcome. More of life should have behaved that way.
He lowered the club and took the cigar that one of the aides was already offering him. Before he could light it, one of the base soldiers came sprinting across the edge of the course with panic that made Ross angry on sight.
The man was running badly too, pumping his arms too high, boots hacking at the turf, discipline gone somewhere between the first alarm and the second sighting.
Ross did not turn fully. He waited for the soldier to reach speaking distance and let impatience sharpen his face.
"What is it?"
The soldier stopped too hard, bent once at the waist to catch breath, then forced the words out anyway.
"Sir, the base is under attack."
Ross's hand tightened around the cigar.
"By what?"
That was where the report stopped sounding military and started sounding impossible.
"Twelve giant robots, sir. They came in from altitude. They're flying."
Ross stared at him.
The soldier kept going because, at that point, sounding insane no longer ranked among the top three problems.
"They have energy weapons. Plasma or something similar. We lost the outer batteries in under a minute. The labs are gone, sir. The armoury and storage blocks, too. Nothing's left standing."
Ross's jaw locked.
The Hulkbuster base was his life. The labs there contained too much sensitive information. Information he did not dare to even backup out of fear they would be stolen.
Every file, every project, every sample, every stupid, expensive metal dream tied to the Hulkbuster programme, every one of Stryker's little cooperative exchanges, every line of future leverage he had imagined stretching out from this single acquisition, all of it ran through that installation.
He turned sharply towards the laptop that one of the aides was already carrying forward. The live feed showed exactly enough to make rage useless.
One of the constructs descended through smoke and shredded reinforced concrete with the calm certainty of something that did not recognise fortifications as a category. Another swept a beam across a hangar line and erased the wall with the casual cruelty of a man crossing out a failed sentence. Two more rose over the main lab block and fired down through the roof in perfect sequence. Fire punched out the windows half a breath later. Personnel ran. Vehicles tried to mobilise. Somebody attempted to launch a missile platform and died before the system fully elevated.
Ross took one step towards the screen.
His chest tightened.
At first, it felt like anger was concentrating. Then the pressure sharpened into something colder and more internal, as though a fist had reached inside him and decided his heart needed to be crushed in punishment for having a good day.
He tried to draw air and got too little of it.
The cigar dropped from his fingers.
The club went next.
A wave of heat and pain ran through his chest, up into his jaw, down his arm, and under his shoulder blade all at once. His knees softened without permission. One of the aides said something, but the voice had moved too far away.
Ross put a hand to his chest, took another breath and then the whole golf course tilted.
He hit the ground hard on his side.
For a second, nobody moved; disbelief was faster than training in people who had not yet seen a general collapse like badly anchored furniture.
Then the soldier nearest him swore, dropped to a knee, and barked for medical support. The caddy backed away. One aide shouted for a medic twice before realising the shout itself would not treat a cardiac event. Ross's face had gone a frightening colour. His eyes were open, furious, and increasingly unable to hold the scene in front of them steady.
Across the monitor beside him, one of Lucius's giants put a beam clean through the central lab and turned years of military optimism into a pillar of orange light.
The soldier calling for medical aid glanced once at the screen, once at the fallen general, and privately decided the day had become far above his pay grade.
--
Lucius, for his part, was lying out in the sun at the mansion with a drink beside his hand and no idea at all that his main target had chosen golf over command responsibility.
He had sent the constructs out, stretched himself on the lounger, and allowed himself the sort of lazy afternoon only mass murder of his enemies and good weather could properly justify.
The sea moved below the private beach. Sebastien kept the household in perfect order through the grim professionalism of a man who had given up hoping normality would ever revisit the property. The news of the base did not reach Lucius until later, after he came back inside, changed, and let one of the television channels start babbling at him from across the room.
The anchor had no real understanding of what she was describing, which made the segment funnier.
Twelve giant flying constructs, similar to the one that decimated the town of Puente Antiguo. Military installation destroyed. Casualty estimates were unknown. Emergency response ongoing. General Ross was hospitalised after suffering an apparent cardiac episode during the unfolding crisis.
Lucius paused with one hand on the decanter.
Then he shrugged.
"Well, as long as the man kicks the bucket."
It was not the perfect result, but it would do for the moment. Dead was dead, whether the heart attack happened in the base or on a golf course, like a pensioner's final humiliation.
He poured himself another drink and watched the footage again, mainly to admire the way the beam fire had improved the architecture.
-
At the Triskelion, admiration was not the dominant mood.
Nick Fury stood over the screen in one of the secure analysis rooms and watched the footage of the flying constructs tearing Ross's base apart.
The recordings had already been slowed, enhanced, replayed, and overlaid with structural estimates. The result did not please him.
Twelve giants. Their beam weapons were much more powerful than the original Destroyer's visible output and flight capability. Coordinated target priority. No clear pilot signatures. No obvious command vehicle and definitely no hesitation.
For one ugly second, he thought Stark had done something spectacularly irresponsible.
Then the design settled into focus and ruled that out. Too close to the damaged Asgardian machine, they were already hauling to one of the deeper sites. Too deliberate in the similarities. Too much like somebody had looked at the Destroyer and decided the problem with divine war architecture was insufficient multiplication.
The Asgardians themselves were gone. They had arrived like gods and left like trespassers who assumed nobody would touch the machinery they had abandoned. Fury had not wasted the opportunity. The original Destroyer was already on its way to a secure facility under orders for immediate reverse engineering. He intended to know exactly what it was, how it worked, and whether it could be pointed at the right enemies later.
They were not gods.
He would never grant them that in his own head, much less aloud.
They were aliens.
Aliens with better metal, better engines, and a deeply irritating habit of wrapping advanced technology in mythology. That did not make humanity lesser. It made humanity late to the same party.
The mutants, in his view, belonged in a separate category of problem. Xavier, Magneto, Noctis. None of them counted as a natural political fact. They were instabilities. Power centres out of control. That alone made them intolerable.
Fury's eye moved to the folders on the desk beside him.
The Avengers Initiative sat nearest his hand. Project Insight rested beside it, cold, bureaucratic, and absolutely sincere in the monstrousness of its premise. Two different responses to the same fear. Build a team powerful enough to answer threats the old order could not answer. Build a system brutal enough to erase threats before they move at all.
In Fury's own mind, these were precautions.
In practice, this instinct to control everything brought more harm than it prevented.
It was that instinct that had led him to keep poking at the Tesseract long after the object had started attracting the attention of things larger and worse than he wanted to admit. It was that instinct that would help bring the invasion of New York down onto the planet's head, because men like Fury always mistook access for mastery until the sky opened and corrected them.
It was also that instinct, allied to years of institutional blindness and patriotic vanity, that had allowed HYDRA to sit inside SHIELD like rot inside a wall. Fury had not built the infection. He had, however, spent years treating the house as if his presence alone made it clean. That was a different kind of stupidity, but not a smaller one.
He watched the footage again.
The lead construct descended through the broken hangar smoke with mechanical calm and fired through another reinforced section that had once held military hardware Ross would have preferred nobody discuss in public. The wall disappeared. Men ran. Fire followed.
Fury's face did not move.
Uncontrolled power. That was the phrase that mattered. Mutants, aliens, machines, geniuses, monsters. The category shifted. The problem did not.
No power outside SHIELD's control felt tolerable to him for long.
That was the flaw sitting under all the plans, all the folders, all the contingencies, secret budgets and hidden sites. Fury looked at chaos and concluded that the answer must be tighter hands, deeper compartments, more reach, more control, more machinery, more leverage. He would keep drawing the same lesson from every disaster until one of those lessons finally ate him.
For tonight, however, he kept his attention on the screen.
"Get me every piece of footage from every angle," he said.
One of the analysts moved instantly.
"Already pulling it, sir."
"I want comparison overlays with the original Destroyer. Structural, thermal, energy output, everything."
Another analyst nodded and turned back to the terminal.
Fury looked once more at the twelve machines on the playback, then at the Destroyer file in transport, then at Ross's medical note on the side monitor.
The old general might survive. He might not. Fury did not especially care.
What mattered was simpler.
Somebody had looked at an alien war machine, multiplied it, and pointed it at a military base in broad daylight.
That somebody was now a strategic problem of the first order.
He wished he had a team with the telekinetic might of Noctis at the ready.