The drone swarm hit the facility's airspace like a breaking wave.
Tony's jaw set. Six repulsor cannons deployed from his back in a fan formation, the palm emitters in his gauntlets cycling to orange, and he was already choosing targets when—
A line of gold tore across the sky.
Not an energy beam. Not a projectile. A person, moving at the velocity of something that had decided terminal speed was a suggestion, and the drone formation between her and Infinity Ultron was an obstacle rather than a wall.
The golden light carved a path through the swarm the way a hot wire cuts foam. Ultron units — dozens of them — came apart at their midpoints, the severed halves tumbling away, oil and hydraulic fluid and shattered limbs raining down on the facility grounds below.
The light didn't slow.
It hit Infinity Ultron.
The sound it made was not a clash — it was a thud, the specific sound of an irresistible force meeting an object that, apparently, was not immovable. Infinity Ultron left his position in the sky. His trajectory was backward, and it was not voluntary.
Every drone in the swarm stopped.
One full second of silence, mechanical and absolute, the entire formation suspended in mid-air above the facility.
On the ground, twelve heroes and one raccoon asked, internally and in perfect simultaneous unison:
...Whose side is she on?
Star-Lord's helmet visor was still up. He was staring at the red-and-blue streak reforming above the impact point.
"Is she..." He turned slowly to Rocket. "Is she always like this?"
"How would I know?" Rocket was holding a weapon roughly the size of a small car with no apparent difficulty. "I'm seeing this for the first time too." He looked at Thor. "Do you know?"
"I don't know," Thor said.
A beat.
"I like her."
The delivery was sincere. It was also delivered through a specific kind of clenched jaw that only appeared on Thor when something had just challenged his operational self-concept. His eyes and the axe in his hand were already lighting up with blue-white lightning. He launched off the ground into the sky, not willing, manifestly, to be the third most impressive person in this engagement.
Once, a voice in the back of his mind said, I was the strongest among the Avengers. Then Jordan arrived, and I told myself: he's from somewhere else, he's leaving eventually, it doesn't count. He broke through a cluster of drones with a thunder-strike. And now here is this woman—
What Thor did not know — and what the universe had, mercifully, declined to tell him — was that the only reason Captain Marvel had not single-handedly resolved the Thanos crisis was an active choice to be elsewhere. If she had felt one tenth of the concern for Earth that Thor felt for Asgard, Thanos would never have reached a Gauntlet.
The sky above the facility erupted.
Carol and Infinity Ultron's engagement was not subtle. It was the sound of someone hitting someone else who was also hitting them back, both at speeds the surrounding air couldn't handle, the shockwaves arriving at ground level as a continuous rolling pressure. Some of the drones that had been waiting for orders redirected to chase her. The rest remembered their original mission and resumed coming down.
The heroes on the ground answered.
Drax's roar was the signal nobody had coordinated and everyone responded to anyway.
Iron Man's cannons opened up. Thor's lightning arced through drone formations from above. The Avengers moved with the practiced rhythm of people who had done this before — not these specific drones, but the category, the calculus, the spatial awareness that came from fighting together enough times that the coordination didn't need to be spoken.
Not far from the main Avengers formation, Star-Lord activated his helmet and the built-in energy armor cycled up around him — and then something beside him caught his eye, and he forgot what he was doing.
Jordan stood with both arms out, slightly wide, and something happened in the air around him that was not quite a transformation and not quite a materialization — more like the world acknowledging a design it had been shown once and was now reproducing from memory. A black combat suit assembled itself across his frame in a cascade of controlled energy, understated where Tony's armor was expressive, every surface precisely calibrated. At the chest: a golden letter J in lightning-stroke calligraphy, bright enough to be briefly unpleasant to look at. At his shoulders: a scarlet cape that didn't wait for wind before it started moving.
He took off from the ground without any particular ceremony, joined the drone-clearing operation in the sky above, and did not look back.
Star-Lord watched this from inside his considerably more modest helmet.
"Has Earth's technology—" he started.
"Don't." Rocket's voice came from his left. "Don't mess with him. I'm not joking. The man could put your head somewhere that requires a serious rethink of basic anatomy."
Star-Lord processed this.
"That's—"
"With one hand," Rocket added.
Three meters away, Drax drove a dagger through an Ultron unit and watched it come apart, then turned.
"So what about taking a dump?" he asked, with the expression of someone following a conversation thread to its logical conclusion.
"That was a metaphor," Mantis said, from behind him, her antennae twitching. "Stop it! The image is disgusting!"
"But—"
"Stop."
Doctor Strange, some distance behind the front line, had his eyes closed and both hands moving through an incantation sequence that was, frankly, going to be spectacular when it finished. The pre-cast animation for a working of this scale was not brief, and he had not apologized for that.
He opened his eyes.
His hands went forward.
Golden sparks bloomed across the sky at a dozen points simultaneously — not in sequence but all at once, the Dimensional Gates expanding from particle to aircraft-carrier-scale in the space of a second. The circular portals threw amber light down onto the facility grounds, and through them came the sound of footsteps and engines before the first figures were visible.
Wakanda's forces came through first, T'Challa at their head — vibranium-plated and already in full combat configuration, warriors in formation behind him, as if they'd been standing at the portal's edge waiting for the moment it opened.
Behind the Wakandan contingent, the Kamar-Taj sorcerers arrived in a moving wall of amber-lit robes — and at the front of that wall, leading it with the energy of someone who had made a unilateral decision about his schedule and would not be discussing it further, came Wong.
The current Sorcerer Supreme had one hand already raised, a golden magical barrier assembling itself around his forearm with the specific incantation the library catalogued under Ring of Ragnadore. He pushed through the portal and immediately started walking toward the highest concentration of drones with an expression that suggested anyone who wanted an explanation could wait.
Don't ask, his posture communicated with full confidence. I'm here. Front line. That's the whole answer.
Strange, watching, allowed himself a brief, private acknowledgment of the current Sorcerer Supreme's operational style.
Among the Wakandan forces coming through the portal, a teenage tree moved his head left and right with the wide-eyed interest of someone who has been unconscious for weeks and found the new location confusing.
He spotted familiar shapes. His face split open.
"I am Groot!"
He ran — "ran" being a generous description of the enthusiastic treeward lumbering — toward the cluster of Guardians.
Rocket blasted an Ultron drone out of his path, pivoted on one heel, and jumped. He caught Groot's shoulder and stayed there, one hand gripping a branch-like protrusion, the other still holding his weapon.
"Hey! Groot! You're—" His voice was doing something. He didn't mention it. "Back."
Groot turned his head and pressed it gently against Rocket's chest — a motion that was too large to be called nuzzling and too deliberate to be called accidental.
"I am Groot."
Scarlet Witch Wanda Maximoff had come through the Wakandan portal with the others, unsteady, weeks condensed into a blink.
She found the battlefield and she found the sky. And in the sky, through the smoke and the drone fire and the intersection of a dozen different powers — she saw a shape.
A familiar silhouette. A certain red visible through the gaps in a metal frame. A face she knew.
"...Hallucination?"
The word came out before she could stop it, small and involuntary, the specific vulnerability of someone who knows better and hopes anyway.
"Hey, lady." Rocket was beside Groot, eight feet off the ground, looking in the same direction. "That's not Vision. That's a villainous robot that invaded this world."
Something moved across Wanda's face — a struggle too complex to summarize, the compressed grief of someone who has been given hope and had it withdrawn in the space of one sentence. Then it settled.
"You really aren't him."
An Ultron drone had locked onto her during the three seconds she'd been standing still. The energy beam it fired covered a significant portion of the space between them.
Wanda's eyes ignited.
Not red — crimson, a specific deep and violent shade that was the color of chaos magic in full release. The beam hit the wall of that light and ceased to exist. The drone that had fired it discovered, very quickly, that chaotic magic was not a force it had parameters for — its systems tried to run countermeasures, its ability fields tried to engage, and both processes were interrupted by the same fundamental problem, which was that Wanda had already ended them.
She raised her hand.
A wave of crimson covered a wide arc of sky. Every drone inside the radius stopped — not damaged, not disabled, but interrupted, their operational logic suddenly unable to reference the physics it had been relying on. Then the energy changed quality and the drones dissolved. Not broke. Not exploded. Dissolved, softened from coherent metal into something that wasn't coherent and wasn't metal, and wasn't anything afterward.
A substantial sector of the drone formation no longer existed.
Star-Lord, elevated on Groot's shoulder with a good view, stared.
"Wow," he said, at a volume that didn't carry. "The one in red — she's something else."
Mantis's voice arrived from somewhere below and to his left.
"Scumbag."
"I just said she was impressive—"
"Scumbag."
"—that's not even the same—"
"Scumbag!"
On the ground, forty meters from the nearest portal, Steve Rogers was doing what Steve Rogers did in conditions like these — the shield in a continuous arc, drone heads disconnecting from drone bodies at a rate that had started to feel like a rhythm he could maintain.
One drone. Clean. Ricochet catch.
Second drone, flanking. Clean.
Third drone—
Something fast and low came out of his peripheral vision and didn't slow down. It hit him at waist height with the specific enthusiasm of something that had locked onto a target and committed completely, wrapping its arms around his midsection and driving forward, lifting him, pinning his shield arm to his side.
Steve's feet left the ground.