The entire briefing room went dead silent for a second.
"Just... watch?" Tony raised an eyebrow incredulously. "An alien armada of twenty to thirty thousand is knocking on our front door, and you're going to sit in the back and just watch?"
"What else would I do?" Peter spread his hands in absolute righteousness.
"If I step in, the battle wraps up in three minutes flat. Do you really think you guys would still have any chance to stretch your muscles and get some combat training?"
The entire conference room collectively fell into silence.
Boss... what you're saying makes so much damn sense, we can't even find a single word to refute it...
"Relax. All you need to do is go all out," Peter rested his feet casually on the edge of the conference table like an absolute lord.
"When you genuinely can't hold the line anymore, I'll step in. But before I do—"
He swept his gaze across everyone present, his tone turning noticeably serious:
"—I want to see just how much you can accomplish on your own."
Once the meeting concluded, the first thing Peter did was place a call to George Stacy.
On the other end of the line, the President of the United States nearly fell out of his chair.
However, he quickly gathered himself. Driven by his absolute trust in Peter, George decisively agreed to orchestrate the government's response around Peter's directives.
With the President on standby, SHIELD reoriented every orbital surveillance satellite, locking all high-resolution lenses onto a singular vector: the outer perimeter of the Solar System.
At 1:03 PM, the first batch of high-clarity imagery beamed back to the command center.
Five colossal, pitch-black silhouettes drifted into view near Jupiter's orbital path. Shaped like ancient, primordial leviathans of the deep sea, their hulls were armored in dark metallic plating, surfaces pulsing with sinister bands of dark-red light.
Chitauri Whale Carriers.
The moment the feed was projected onto the main display in SHIELD's command center, every operative in the room halted their work in unison.
Stepping forward as the chief technical consultant, Tony was the first to speak:
"Extrapolating from their current velocity, they will pierce Earth's upper atmosphere in twenty-three hours and seventeen minutes. Descent coordinates... mathematically unpredictable."
"No need to predict it," Peter took a casual sip of his Coke, speaking offhandedly:
"An extraterrestrial armada crossing intergalactic space to suddenly drop in on Earth is almost certainly coming straight for us."
"Us?" The room blinked in confusion. "What do we have that could possibly draw their greed?"
Peter didn't reply. He merely exchanged a brief, knowing look with Tony.
The Tesseract—an authentic font of infinite cosmic energy. What sentient civilization in the universe wouldn't covet such a prize?
Within sixty seconds, the intelligence reached the Oval Office.
George didn't hesitate for another breath. Exercising presidential emergency broadcast protocols, a crimson alarm flashed simultaneously across every television screen, smartphone terminal, and outdoor LED billboard in New York City.
"Attention, all citizens of New York—"
George's voice resonated from every speaker and device across the metropolis. His expression was stern, but his cadence remained remarkably steady. The former Police Captain who had once stared down Stark Industries' missiles without flinching displayed the exact calm and fortitude expected of a head of state at a critical hour.
"Intelligence has confirmed that an extraterrestrial armed force is currently moving toward New York airspace, projected to make planetfall tomorrow afternoon."
"Do not panic. I give you my solemn word that we are fully prepared for this day."
"All citizens are instructed to follow the navigation routes pushed to your mobile devices over the next twelve hours and proceed in an orderly fashion to your nearest underground fallout shelters."
"I repeat—do not panic."
Had this announcement come without prior precedent, the public would have dismissed it as an April Fools' prank or assumed President Stacy had lost his mind.
Yet having endured the crisis of the Inheritors, the populace not only kept their heads, but responded with unprecedented efficiency and speed.
Moving according to established civic drills, citizens gathered systematically, filing into nearby fortified shelters.
By noon the following day, not a single civilian remained out on the streets.
The avenues of Manhattan lay eerily empty, with the towering displays of Times Square silently looping evacuation diagrams into the quiet air.
Scattered across New York's primary strategic high points, the superheroes stood ready in small fireteams.
Captain America stood tall on the Brooklyn Bridge, vibranium shield strapped to his back, eyes scanning the firmament.
Tony hovered at the spire of the Empire State Building, his Mark 47 armor primed and locked in full combat mode.
Gwen perched on the ledge of a high-rise apartment roof, swinging her legs over the drop with an air of casual calm—though the Shun Shun Rikka hairpins at her temples were already glowing with a faint, pulsing light.
Felicia stood dead center in Central Park, the Ten Rings spinning along her arms, gleaming with ambient energy.
Lady Sif took a seat atop the torch of the Statue of Liberty, dual Asgardian blades resting across her knees.
William and Alexei guarded the banks of the Hudson River.
Natasha and Hawkeye locked down the rooftop of the United Nations Headquarters.
The Hulk paced heavy circles through the avenues of Lower Manhattan, shaking the pavement with every thunderous step.
And Peter himself?
He had dragged a recliner onto the open helipad of SHIELD Headquarters, sitting back comfortably with a fresh cup of coffee in hand.
Meanwhile, at the far reaches of deep space, a colossal holographic display projected real-time imagery of Earth before Thanos's floating throne.
Loki sat quietly in the corner, his fingers gripping the armrests white, remaining completely silent.
Ebony Maw bowed with deep reverence behind Thanos: "My Lord, the vanguard fleet has crossed the gravitational threshold of the target star system. Estimated planetfall in three hours."
Thanos gave no reply, merely fixing his cold, calculating gaze onto the blue marble within the projection.
This time, he would use absolute, unyielding martial supremacy to make Loki understand: before the might of Thanos, every living entity had only one purpose—to kneel, submit, and embrace the balance he dictated!
At 3:17 PM—
The thick cloud blanket over New York was torn open by a colossal atmospheric rift.
Five massive Chitauri Whale Carriers punctured the stratosphere, trailing towering plumes of fire as they descended directly above Manhattan.
The carrier hangars opened wide in mid-air.
Tens of thousands of Chitauri shock troopers alongside countless armored Leviathan beasts dropped from the hulls, their burnished metal armor gleaming harshly under the afternoon sun.
Wielding heavy energy rifles, the troopers opened fire the instant their boots hit the pavement, blasting building facades into rubble, detonating parked cars, and gouging deep craters into the asphalt with scorching plasma bolts.
Manhattan was transformed into a warzone in under three minutes.
Yet what baffled the invading shock troopers was that... they couldn't find a single trace of local sentient life.
The streets were entirely barren.
Before the Chitauri vanguard could process the strange anomaly—
WHISTLE—!
A red, white, and blue circular shield tore through the air from the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge, taking off a Chitauri trooper's head with pinpoint precision.
In the next breath, figures emerged from every vantage point across the cityscape.
Against the backdrop of tens of thousands of Chitauri invaders, their numbers seemed almost negligible.
Yet the raw, terrifying power that erupted from their ranks stunned even Black Dwarf and Supergiant aboard the command craft!
Wherever the defenders swept past, Chitauri infantry collapsed in heaps like wheat before a scythe.
Up on the SHIELD helipad, Peter casually observed the unfolding chaos while sipping his coffee, asking into his comms:
"Freddy, pull up the real-time kill feed! I want to know who's taking the MVP slot before I have to step in!"
"Understood, Boss. Current leaderboard:"
Mr. Stark: 53 kills
Ms. Hardy: 102 kills
"A hundred and two?!" Tony's eyes widened behind his HUD as he yelled over the private channel: "Are you running cheat codes over there?!"
CRACKLE—CRUNCH!
Before his words could settle, a freezing glacial tempest suddenly erupted from the distance, flash-freezing several hundred Chitauri shock troopers into solid crystalline statues in an instant.
Right through the comms channel came Natasha's slightly breathless yet playfully smug voice:
"Catch up if you can, boys~ I'm taking the lead!"
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