Chapter 162: The Chitauri Are Coming.
"So you're telling me you ran into Matthew's friend on the way back."
"Got into a fight. Then became friends." Tony sat in the conference room, looking at Thor, who had arrived alongside Loki.
"That's correct." Steve nodded.
Thor, who had been catching up with Matthew, turned his head to look at Soldier Boy, who was still out cold.
"I'll say this much: that man takes electricity well. It took a full five minutes before he went down."
"Legendary durability," Matthew said, deadpan, then shifted gears. "On another subject: I heard you recovered your powers after I left. How does that feel?"
"It feels..." Thor considered it. "Good."
"There's more responsibility that came with the strength. I didn't expect that part, but I understand it now."
He had clearly done some growing since Matthew had last seen him.
"Though I did bring up the lessons my father gave me when I returned to Asgard. And he told me he'd never said any of those things."
"Odin probably wanted you to work those out for yourself," Matthew said, with complete seriousness.
"Yes. Very likely!" Thor nodded with conviction. "My father's wisdom always runs deeper than it appears on the surface."
The catch-up was interrupted by Steve at the conference table.
"The reunion can wait. We need to establish what Loki actually wants."
"Thor. Do you know what he's after?"
The question brought Thor's expression down. "From what I know, Loki has an alien army at his disposal. The Chitauri."
"His plan is to lead them against Earth and take control of it."
"As payment, I believe he intends to give the Tesseract to whoever commands that army."
"An alien army. From space." Steve's jaw tightened.
Dr. Banner cut in from his seat. "If he wants to bring that army here, he'll need a portal. There's no other way to close that distance in any reasonable timeframe."
"Which is why he needs the Tesseract."
"The Tesseract — what the hell does that even — somebody give me a cigarette. And where is the son of a bitch who kept electrocuting me?"
Soldier Boy surfaced from unconsciousness, pressing a hand against his head, and interrupted the briefing.
"I have cigarettes. Come with me." Natasha removed him from the room.
Matthew didn't have strong feelings about staying for the rest of the discussion either.
While the briefing continued, he slipped away to the room Fury had assigned him.
He had points to spend.
He opened the System panel.
He looked at the G-Virus evolution options he hadn't touched in some time.
His current physical output benchmarked against a standard-rage Hulk and the Abomination, and that was entirely because of how many times the G-Virus had pushed him through staged evolutions. For the current chapter of the story, that was enough. Against the full scale of what the world contained, it wasn't close to enough.
The answer was more evolutions. A few hundred more, maybe a few thousand, and the Nine Realms might need to reconsider what they were naming themselves.
"I remember there were other options besides the Targeted Evolution last time."
He opened the custom evolution interface.
Three options came up.
[Dynamic Adaptive Evolution: Evolution activates continuously. The body adapts in real time to incoming attacks during combat and develops counter-responses. Cost: 30,000 System points.]
[Immunity Evolution: Each near-death event provides immunity to the specific attack that caused it. Cost: 150,000 System points.]
[Consuming Evolution: Consuming a target's body, living or dead, extracts beneficial evolutionary directions from them and absorbs the target's own capabilities. Cost: 200,000 System points.]
Matthew looked at his current balance: 70,000 points, accumulated across a significant stretch of careful operation.
He had genuinely believed he had entered the category of people with real money. As it turned out, money ran short at exactly the moment you needed it.
"Dynamic Adaptive Evolution will have to do for now." He thought through it.
The ability looked modest from the outside. In practice, it was structurally close to what the Sentinels had demonstrated in the timeline before the X-Men reversed it in Days of Future Past. Real-time adaptation to incoming attacks, evolving counter-responses on the fly.
Given enough time against any given attack type, he would eventually reach immunity. Then reversal. Even if the opponent was using an Infinity Stone.
Those were the ideal conditions, naturally. But the framework was correct.
"Dynamic Adaptive Evolution."
Thirty thousand points left the balance.
The evolution that had previously only activated when he was near death now had a second trigger condition.
He tested it immediately. He extended one finger and applied a gravity field to the interior of that finger, directed inward, compression-focused.
The initial result: the finger deformed. Visibly. The tissue twisted under the applied force, briefly producing something that looked like the inside trying to become the outside.
About thirty minutes later, the adaptation began.
Red light enclosed the damaged area. When it cleared, the injury was gone. The tissue had restructured to withstand the specific gravitational stress it had just experienced.
The G-Virus, which had been monitoring the result, picked up the signal and propagated the adaptation outward through his entire body.
A deep fluorescent red moved through him. His physical frame, which had already been well past any human baseline, pushed forward another increment.
When it settled, he could run the same gravity field through his whole body at the same intensity without any reaction at all.
He was considering running a Heat Vision test on himself when an explosion in the corridor interrupted him.
He didn't need to check what it was. The plot was running on schedule, without his involvement, exactly as it was supposed to.
Which was what he needed. Loki had to open the portal. The Chitauri had to arrive. That was the event that generated the kind of volume from which you accumulated real System points.
Umbrella Corporation, always rescuing people from disaster. Where that disaster came from was not a question anyone needed to ask. You just ask whether the rescue happened.
He opened his door.
The corridor had become a different kind of environment.
One of the Helicarrier's engine units had been blown out on one side, and the whole ship was listing. Through gaps in the hull where the explosion had breached it, a continuous stream of mercenaries was pouring in and spreading through the corridors.
At least two hundred of them, from what Matthew could see. More than the original timeline's figures by a significant margin, and the count was still climbing.
A short distance away, Soldier Boy looked at the group that had raised weapons at him, dropped the cigarette he'd been smoking, and didn't bother moving out of the way. He just walked into the incoming fire and worked through them, breaking necks, depositing the bodies against the wall with the detached efficiency of someone clearing a blocked drain.
Matthew looked across to the other side of the corridor.
Peter Parker was engaged with several dozen mercenaries. His commitment to not killing anyone, even in an environment that had dispensed with most other rules, was still holding. He was managing it, but he would have been through the entire group in moments if that restriction weren't in place.
Two webs launched from his wrists, pinning two mercenaries flat against the wall.
Matthew stepped out into the corridor.
Soldier Boy, who had just finished his section and seen Matthew emerging from the room at a calm pace, was about to make a comment about sleeping through combat.
He didn't get to it.
Matthew's gaze landed on him.
The air beside Soldier Boy compressed without warning. The force that arrived was the kind that didn't have a negotiating stage. It pressed him directly into the wall, the way you press a hand flat against a surface.
"What the f—"
Matthew raised one finger to his lips.
The jaw that had been opening was closed by the same force.
"Mr. Benjamin."
"Which one of us is the flower arrangement now?"
He moved his finger.
Soldier Boy came off the wall like a sandbag thrown at speed, went down the corridor, went through the walls at the end of the corridor, and arrived in the middle of the ongoing engagement between Thor and the Hulk. A super-soldier at a Hulk-level combat scene.
The Hulk, who had been working with what was available, immediately identified a new target.
Behind Matthew, a squad of ten mercenaries rounded a corner and came into the corridor at a run.
They raised their weapons.
At the same moment, his radio came to life. Fury's voice.
"Motherfucker! Hill! Get people to the breach in the hull, the mercenaries are pouring through!"
A half-second pause.
"Sorry, Mr. Lawrence. That wasn't directed at you."
"I figured. Did you need something?"
"Nothing serious. Just a brief reminder, Mr. Lawrence."
"I paid a considerable amount for this engagement. I'd appreciate seeing a return on that investment."
"A professional doesn't let a client feel they overpaid."
"Wouldn't you agree?"
Click.
The radio went dead before Matthew could respond.
He took in the corporate client energy coming through the transmission.
Well. He was the contractor here. That was the position.
He looked at the mercenary squad working their triggers.
"Why won't it fire?!"
"Mine either. Feels like it's seized up."
"What is this garbage equipment? They send us in with this?"
None of them had identified the cause: Matthew had applied a field to every trigger mechanism in the corridor simultaneously.
While they were still working through the equipment complaint, an invisible red mist moved through them at neck height.
The conversation stopped.
The heads came off.
The blood that should have gone everywhere was held in place by gravity, locked inside the vessels, until Matthew had walked past. Then it came out all at once.
Peter Parker, watching from the far end of the corridor, felt his stomach make a sound. He had seen worse. He kept it together this time, which was progress.
With Matthew in the fight, whatever balance the corridor had been holding before ceased to exist.
The Helicarrier's interior became something else.
A squad rounded a corner at the far end and the corridor walls moved. They closed together without any audible mechanism, a hydraulic press made of steel and bulkhead plating, and the squad became what happens to things that get between two large moving surfaces.
The blood hadn't reached the gap before the wall section, along with everything it had compressed, was picked up by the same invisible force and sent out through a hull breach into open air.
Another group, having seen enough, tried to reverse. The gravity field found the structural material inside them before they took the second step. Bones fractured simultaneously throughout each body, the fragments driven by competing forces through tissue and organ. The bodies came down the way wet material comes down: without any resistance to falling.
Matthew stepped over them.
He checked the aerial cell where Loki had been held.
Empty. Hawkeye had gotten there first and released him.
Coulson was on the floor against the wall with a penetrating wound through his chest. The focus was leaving his eyes, but he found Matthew coming through the door and pulled it back.
"Mr. Lawrence... Loki... he..." A wet cough. Blood on his lips.
"I can see he's gone," Matthew said, looking at Coulson.
"I couldn't stop him..." Coulson's voice was not doing well. "I should have been able to—"
"It's not on you." Matthew crouched beside him. "There's a gap between a trained human and a god that training alone doesn't close. You did your job."
The hand he put on Coulson's shoulder was brief.
Coulson managed something that was meant to be a smile. "If there's a next time, I'll stop him."
"I don't think you will. But since you want a next time, I'll give you one."
He took a syringe from inside his jacket and set it on the floor in front of Coulson. Trauma Repair Agent. The stripped-down version.
"Whether you use it is up to you."
Coulson looked at the syringe. Then at Matthew. "Does this cost anything?"
"Your Director already covered it."
A pause.
"In that case." Coulson picked it up. "I suppose I'm not dying today."
He pressed the needle in.
The wound closed. The tissue rebuilt from the edges inward. By the time the compound had finished, there was no wound. No scar. Nothing at all to show where the penetration had been.
Coulson pulled his shirt open and looked at his own chest.
"Umbrella Corporation. This is past the normal category of medicine, isn't it."
"Coulson. This is not the moment for pharmaceutical commentary."
"If you have a moment, you might want to look at that."
Matthew pointed toward the horizon.
A pillar of blue light had reached into the clouds. At the point where it met the sky, a portal had opened. It was larger than the original timeline's figures by several multiples.
The Chitauri army came through it. Behind the infantry, the Leviathans emerged one by one, the mechanical dragon-shaped warships twisting their enormous frames through the opening, and began taking apart everything they could reach.
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