ATP53...Sort of. (Patreon)

Hey all! Here is the portion of the next ATP chapter I was able to finish in the last week. I wish it was the full chapter, but it isn’t. I wanted to get the European theaters completely covered here, then switch to space/China/and the US in the next one. Those would be followed by a final chapter covering events near the main Chitauri aperture, and the final showdown. Unfortunately, all I have here is what’s been going on while Harry and company try to come to grips with Loki and his brainwashing.

Chapter 53: Invasion: First Strikes

While Harry was attempting to question Loki, Wrecking Crew had accomplished their mission. The number of teleportation was not ideal in terms of pushing through the majority of the Chitauri forces all at once. But the Chitauri were old hands at this, and the Black Order members were extremely adaptable. Indeed, for the six teleportation areas, there were seven members of the Black Order. All but Black Dwarf, who was more enforcer than general, was quickly given a command. Thanos himself would wait until the second wave of the Chitauri.

This was not because he did not want to be involved or as a sign of the Mad Titan’s ego. Rather it was a well-thought-out strategic move, made as the six gates opened around the monstrous, gas-giant-sized artificial planet that was the Chitauri’s homeworld. “I will remain here, where I can most easily move to counter the one called Potter… or to assault the Phoenix Force,” Thanos explained to his generals.

Behind Thanos, a viewing port the size of a sports stadium showed the Chitauri mobilization splitting up already, the race’s own commanders more than up to the task of taking command of this movement. “Remember, the Phoenix Force is mine. I must be the one to kill it, to kill the being imbued with the opposite Force of My Lady Death.”

As one, Gamora, Nebula and the Black Order knelt, and Thanos raised his hand, the gesture half-benediction, half gesture of dismissal. “GO! Cleanse this world in my name and the glory of Death!!”

This was why Black Maw had come through the main teleportation window. He was one of the best generals among the Black Order, but unlike the others, his powers and abilities leaned to the defensive just as much as offensive actions.

Now as Black Maw and Wrecking Crew watched, the gash in the sky leading into the zone between dimensions expanded slowly, and out came several hundred large metallic… creatures. Very obviously a an amalgamation of flesh and metal, it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. They looked like a kind of piscine for the most part, although many seemed more eel-like, having far longer bodies than their fellows, their joints covered by iron plates that shifted and moved like scales on a fish. Regardless of size, they had canning strapped to

“…What are we looking at here,” Bulldozer asked, frowning in puzzlement. While huge, those things looked more like, well aerial tanks than jetfighters.

His concerns on that score were answered seconds later as hundreds of hoverboard-like objects flew out and around the larger creatures, with a group of three aliens on each. Two manned guns of some kind each of them set to the side of a central raised area on pintle mounts, while the third flew the device. And around each flyer up there flickered an energy field of some kind.

Which probably means it will take a lot of firepower to knock down, which in turn is pretty good considering I don’t think they have the range of missiles or rockets, Bulldozer thought to himself, bulldozer thought to himself, scratching his chin thoughtfully. And while they seemed more mobile than jetfighters, if they don’t have the range… He had been a marine at one point, and understood warfare and modern weaponry far more than the others who didn’t care about weapons and vehicles unless they were somehow dangerous to them.

“You see, the Army of the Displaced, the Chitauri. The army of my Lord Thanos. A whole race, who have taken the extremely logical position that he is a god, and worship him as he deserves to be, the final Arbiter of life and death,” Black Maw answered. “You see our armored fist. Tremble, and be very grateful that you have chosen the right side.”

All three Wrecking Crew members nodded, watching as From behind the first echelon came what looked like pyramids, almost, until they turned slightly, showing that they were not one pyramid, but two pyramids stuck to the sides of a floating sphere. As it floated through the portal, the sphere emitted some kind of diffuse yellow energy beam down into the ground. It didn’t seem to do anything, and all three of Wrecking Crew thought perhaps it was some kind of scanner.

Moments later, the strange thing touched down, and thousands of the mechanical arms protruded from the sides of the pyramid, reaching down. Soon the sides of the triangle opened, and out came several conveyor belts which dug down into the ground. Metallic saws of significant size, and hundreds of other tools began to appear, stabbing devices into the ground, or moving into position all around the initial landing area, setting up what looked like some kind of construction zone.

Meanwhile other skimmers were touching down, hundreds of them, carrying large, human-sized balls of metal, on top of which eight-barreled guns could be seen. The skimmers touched down, and the creatures started to move, coming out of their ball-shape, revealing snouts and large claws at the front, looking for all the world like cyborg stink beetle perhaps. They instantly dug into the ground all around the main portal, seeming to not care whether they dug through dirt or stone. Soon only the guns themselves could be seen, twisting this way and that as they stared up into the sky.

“Anti-air guns. Out here, with the mountains to move through, air’s the only area you’re possibly vulnerable,” Bulldozer opined, his military training letting him analyze what was happening.

With a snort, Black Maw gestured the Wrecking Crew to step onto a series of skimmers that had just touched down in from of the trio. Each of them came complete with a driver, but with space at the back for one of Wrecking Crew at the back instead of the traditional two gunners. “You and myself will serve as an outer guard for now along with the first wave from this portal. Soon still more portals will be created nearby, expanding this landing zone outward by order of magnitude as soon as they are set up. When that occurs, still more of the Chitauri will come through, and we will begin offensive operations from this point.”

Wrecker nodded, smiling faintly to himself. Seeing all this and knowing it was just the beginning, Wrecker felt like they were going to be on the winning side of this. And that’s without meeting this Thanos guy. Who knows how powerful he is if he was able to force this guy, others like him, and Loki into submission?

“So you’re just using this portal as your invasion point?” Thunderball demanded somewhat confused and very angry. “What was all the effort of setting up other portals then?!”

“Oh no,” Black Maw laughed condescendingly, a supercilious sneer appearing on his face for a moment. “We are using those as well.” His laugh was perhaps the least humorous sound that any of Wrecking Crew had ever heard.

But all of them knew by this point that the diet was truly cast. The new overlords of the world would take over, and the three of them would live like kings. Or they wouldn’t, and Wrecking Crew would be remembered as quislings, traders to their race, rather than a single nation alone. It was literally all of nothing for the three of them, and they knew it.

OOOOOOO

True to Black Maw’s words, the other portals that Wrecking Crew had set up were being used as well, lightning strikes launched through each almost simultaneously. Commanded by Thanos’ Black Order, each group was slightly different, although that hardly mattered to the civilians of the cities in which Wrecking Crew had set those portals up.

And although the placement of the other five portal beacons was somewhat random, that didn’t mean they were without any merit. The one in Paris for example let the Chitauri target not only a huge civilian population in the millions, but also the capital of France.

In charge of this invasion route, Nebula was ambivalent to this at first. As she came out of the portal, she shrieked at the top of her metallic lungs, “KILL them all, slay the humans for Lord Thanos!”

All around her, Rippers, the massive flying beast-like cyborgs appeared first, dove down into the city. Screams rose in a cacophony, drowning out the normal background noise of the city as they crashed into buildings, smashing them down slaying hundreds of civilians in the first few seconds. Then they began to fire, plasma bolts from their attached guns and larger beams coming from the Rippers. Fire spread, civilians were gunned down, cars exploded, carnage raged. And Nebula smiled, finding it good.

Yet even as the first group through the portal began the culling, Nebula knew that she had a large task before her, and she snarled as information started to flash across her eyes, pulled from the local communications structure. She, all of them knew the price of failure most keenly. I will not fail, not here, not again!

With the information thus far gleaned,, Nebula knew she was in a city called Paris, which was in the country of France.

The knowledge the invaders had gathered on the humans through captured radio signals and chasing down old light was quite a lot. They knew this species was divided into different nations, which would each individually fight off the invasion if given the opportunity. It was best to quell that kind of thing quickly if possible, and this nation had one of the larger, most professional armies on the planet. This portal had put her within France, which was one of the better militaries from her own analysis.

Although, strangely, the humans themselves didn’t think so. There was a strange dysfunction there Nebula didn’t quite understand, but she didn’t need to in order to achieve her objectives. Even better, this put her close to the island nation called Great Britain, which they had discovered was one of the first allies of the most dangerous of the humans, Harry Potter, and his faction of superpowered individuals.

Nebula hastily sent a signal back into the portal, demanding further troops and the Super-Skrull. This particular Skrull had mastered their shape shifting power to such a degree he could take on the aspect of four super-powers, which would make him extremely useful here. Meanwhile, she dove down to join the slaughter, shooting down any of the humans she saw, of which she was quite spoiled for choice. I must show my father that I am eager for this work, I must!!

Landing on the ground, she swung her power staff around, bolts of plasma flashing out even as she physically smashed several humans around her with the ends of her staff. So powerful was the strike that the humans she struck, a middle-aged man, a young woman, and a child, just came apart, sending blood and viscera everywhere. Another young man astonishingly charged forward and tried to grapple with her but died to a single punch.

Three others followed his example, shouting in the local language. Two grabbed up pieces of debris to use as weapons, as a third hurled a brick at Nebula. Another, one of the local military forces perhaps, fired at her with a small handgun.

Nebula, caught the brick with ease in one hand, crushing it, laughing in glee as the bullets bounced off her, killing two people trying to run away. She then launched herself forward, slaying both of the pair closing with her before firing at the other two, killing them with precise shots from her power staff. “Fools! No matter how many of you attack me, it will not matter. The cleansing is here!”

Within a minute, the brave among the immediate crowd of Parisians were slain, along with dozens of others. She stalked through the streets, slaying any she saw while around her the Chitauri did the same. Above, more and more of the Chitauri came through spreading out quickly.

Download complete. Military analysis commencing… complete. Data will now be displayed. Grimacing at the sudden interruption from the computer part of her brain, Nebula turned away from her fun, taking to the air once more. She glanced down at the now burning city, staring at one of the Rippers as it smashed into and through some strange arch like object in the center of a transportation hub. All around it hundreds of the military within the city had gathered and had been slaughtered. I commend their speedy response, but not their common sense.

Shaking that thought off, Nebula turned her mind to the data her hacking gear had automatically pulled from the local communication net.

The Skrull super soldier appeared then, and Nebula moved over to his skimmer, which could move faster in a straight line than the Skrull, whose name she had not bothered to learn, could move on his own. Connecting to it’s onboard computer, she downloaded the information her own computer had discerned. “You take a force to this base, then move towards the ocean. This next base is naval in structure, destroy the ships there.”

The man slammed his fist into his chest in salute, and raced off, followed by more than a hundred skimmers. With him gone, Nebula turned over control of the forces within the city to one of the Chitauri officers, ordering him to continue the slaughter. “Slay them all, slay them all and protect the portal. Send the skimmers out to attack any response force sent, use the Rippers to destroy the city and the portal. I will engage the nearest military base myself, but others will undoubtedly respond soon.”

The Chitauri bowed obsequiously, and Nebula gathered her own strike force of several hundred skimmers, racing away from the city.

But as she raced away from Paris, Nebula spotted something in the distance. And as her enhanced eyes saw a glint of metal just over the horizon, rockets flashed towards her and the skimmers around her. “Evade!”

Missiles flashed towards them and four skimmers exploded, their shields unable to take two missiles. Nebula barely dodged one that went over her head, while the second exploded against her skimmer’s shields, which collapsed in a flare of actinic energy. “Evade, evade, spread out and close, use your Over Drive!”

The missiles of the jetfighters gave them a very nasty edge in range, but at Nebula’s command, the Skimmer’s Over Drive activated, they shot forward, instantly hitting Mach 3. The French jets were stunned, with one of them crashing into the ground below, having been sent out of control by a Skimmer’s close pass. Others reacted faster, evading the charge, but Nebula and the Chitauri fired on them with their energy based weaponry. And in close, the French Mirage 2000s had no shielding like the invaders did.

As the last jet fighter rocketed away from them on an angle, Nebula scowled, calling her troops back to her and radioing back to the Super Skrull. “Triple the size of the cutting out forces and add a Ripper to each. The blasted humans are reacting far too damn fast, and while their weapons are primitive, they can still pack a punch.

OOOOOOO

In the Russian closed city of Severomorsk, the attack was led by Proxima Midnight. She was a blue-skinned alien who wore an extremely skintight clothing over an equally extremely svelte body. Her clothing was mostly black with a white chest area and gold highlights. Proxima also wore a helmet, with something that looks like horns or perhaps strange plumage, curving upwards from her head.

But perhaps Proxima’s most striking feature was her glowing white eyes. They looked somewhat like Storm’s when she used her powers. But unlike Storm, whose eyes were always warm even when she was using her powers in battle, Proxima’s eyes were simply blank white. There was no window to the soul here. There was instead… nothing. Not Nebula’s psychopathic joy in destruction, nor Thanos’ elation in death, nor even simple delight in her own power. If these eyes truly showed the soul of the being behind them Proxima Midnight’s soul came from the Abyss itself.

After all, Hell was fire and brimstone, filled with the souls of evil people who enjoyed what they did. But what was perhaps worse than someone who enjoyed causing pain and death was someone who felt absolutely nothing about doing the same thing.

Proxima had not been involved in the war against the Brood, as she, along with Corvus Glaive, were amongst the most intelligent members of the Black Order, as well as the most dangerous physically. One or the other was often left in charge of various other matters, as Thanos could trust them to quote all of his tics, and intelligent and ruthless matter without direction.

Whereas the Nebula actually became distracted by the death and destruction she brought to Paris, Nebula was more controlling, something that began with the mix of troops she brought in. Only four large Rippers came in, which Nebula sent not into the city, but out to destroy the shipyards and the remnants of the Northern fleet, such as it was. They would then return to the city and aid the follow-on waves. Since this city was, according to the local data and the severe nature of the fighting below, the center of this country’s local military, it made sense to Proxima that the locals would be desperate to regain control of it. This would let the Chitauri turn the city into a killing ground.

But beyond that, Proxima instead brought in thousands upon thousands of skimmers of all sorts, including the Chitauri version of large hover-trucks.  These aerial units were far slower than their smaller brethren, but they could carry quite a lot of material. As infantry units stepped off onto the streets of Severomorsk some of them began to corral the locals or shoot anyone who tried to fight back, others began to emplace anti-air guns.  Those civilians who didn’t fight back would make for hostages to keep the humans from using weapons of mass destruction, or even fight back at all within the city.

Seeing that, Proxima smiled even as she let out nearly half of her available force of faster skimmers in a single wave. They would destroy the nearest military bases, as well as enter the underground cave system, the existence of which Lord Thanos and the others only knew very little about up. It was only so much information about that kind of thing from chasing down old light after all.

The fighting down there would no doubt be particularly violent, but neither Proxima or the Chitauri cared. This was a holy quest to the Chitauri, a religious act devoted to Lord Thanos. I will build a mountain of skulls! And I will do it the old-fashioned way, skull by skull, Proxima thought coldly as she led her forces forward.

OOOOOOO

However, while Russia had been badly battered by the Eurasian war, that did not mean that they were without their protectors. And as it might lead her forces out from the protected city, those defenders were also rallying quickly. While they hadn’t been able to put as many of their forces on guard as France or America had, what Russia did have was an already existing hidden industrial base in the tunnels, and two preexisting powered armor programs: the Crimson Dynamo, the Titanium Man suits.

Neither were as easy to make as the ODM suits, as powerful as the Iron Man suit, nor could they be as uniquely suited for the wearer as the suits that Carol and Wyatt used. Yet the Russians could still make them, even if doing so went against agreements made with other powers after the Eurasian War.  he fact that several suits of each had still been built would be no surprise to anyone.  After all, since when had Russia ever kept any agreement they weren’t forced to at gun point?

So it was that two Titanium Men and four Crimson Dynamos flew through the air toward the attackers. As they did, they were getting radar readings of the aliens pushing out from the city until they reached some kind of point where a radar began to turn to hash. “I’m not getting any more radar, are any of you?” The leader, callsign Rasputin, stated.

“Negative,” came the response from the others, and he cursed. “Is it something portable, or something to do with this strange teleportation portal. Spread out, and head upwards to the sky.”

“Should we write for normal reinforcements?” Asked one of the Titanium Men. “If we are being ordered to reclaim a city we need more boots on the ground. We can’t be in more than one place at once.”

“Reports from the Northern Join Strategic Command stated that enemy troops had been seen leaving the city via their own flight units, some kind of odd hover-type device. Those troops are our primary target right now. When we destroy them, we can spearhead a force to retake the city,” Rasputin reminded everyone.

The airwaves fell silent for a moment then one of the other Crimson Dynamo’s, callsign, New-boy (he wanted to be called Lenin, but had to been vetoed most harshly by his more senior fellows, and was lucky not to be called Chernozopi or FNG) “Do you think it is the Potter? Has he finally begun the conquest of the world as we have feared?”

“Nyet, and you need to stop listening to that magazine tripe you like to read. Besides, why would the Potter need military force to take over the world? His politics and economic might are doing that job for his new Empire all too well,” The second Titanium Man, Wall, growled out.

“Then it is aliens,” sent another member of their six man team, callsign Sonja, for she was the only woman in the Armored Arms Corps.  “Another group of aliens have decided Mother Russia makes for good target.”

“We will know when we—” Rasputin began, only to be interrupted.

“Contact! Contact, numerous small craft in the distance, eight o’clock.”

All six of the line powered armor troopers turned their heads in that direction, staring towards the contact the last member of the Dynamos, callsign Spinner.

Flying out from Severomorsk were things that were clearly aliens on strange floating disks. They had two gunners on the back, with a pilot at the front, and were moving quite fast, perhaps just above Mach one, despite not looking at all aerodynamic or even having any defense against the wind pressure.

“Crimson Dynamos, I want us to get some altitude. Titanium Men, get their attention. Drag them further down to the ground. Fall back slowly if possible to allied forces.” There weren’t many of those, but some tank and infantry divisions were out there, and all of them had anti-air capability. Rebuilding their anti-air units had been a priority for Russia after the Eurasian War.

With that, the six man team broke apart along its natural divisions. The Titanium Men dove down, flying closer to the ground and pushing their speed forward while the Crimson Dynamo’s flew straight upward gaining as much altitude as they could. Power suit or plain, height was life in a dogfight.

Moments later, the Titanium Men engaged. First, pulling from over their shoulders large Rotary cannons that looked as if they were made of some anti-air gun from the soviet era. The routes they fired were large, not very quick, but had extremely good range.

As they came forward they started to fire, downing two while causing energy shields to flare up around several of the other alien devices. The only exception was a woman, who dived through the fire, as if she barely felt it, speeding along towards them so quickly that they had trouble adjusting their aim.

“Keep firing, I’ll take her own,” Wall growled, dumping his gun and using his suit’s inbuilt energy guns, blasting out at the woman.

But once more she ignored his fire, and a moment later, her spear crashed into his hastily raised arm. The blow hurled wall downward into the ground, where he rolled, bursting back up towards the alien bitch, snarling as he fired again, while also releasing constrictive force rings to try and incapacitate the woman.

Snarling the woman grabbed up a thin ovoid object from her waist which enlarged into a spear. The spear’s edge had barely formed before it cut through the constrictive ring and then she was whirling under Wall’s punch, and he barely blocked a blow that would have taken him in the chest.

As his partner continued to fire at the flying aliens above the alien woman, Wall once more found himself hurled off his feet, his arm dented badly, his real arm throbbing in pain despite the armor and inner padding. Then his eyes widened and he shouted, “Bunker, watch out!”

Wall’s warning came to late. The end of the woman’s spear glowed, and a blast of blue-green energy flashed out, cutting one of his legs off from just above his thigh as if a laser had hit a chunk of butter.

“ARGGHHHhhh!!!” Bunker screamed, falling out of the sky to crash to the ground, the pain of his wound having

At that point, the Crimson Dynamos finally arrived from above.  Diving down into the aliens, they scattered the group, knocking more than half out of the sky.

“Attack the woman from long-range, she has superstrength and durability!” Wall bellowed. “Bunker is down!”

Seeing this, Rasputin ordered his fellows to fire their smoke rockets as dashed forward and downward, grabbing their injured fellow. “How durable is she?”

“She barely noticed any of my weapons,” Wall growled.

Cursing at that, Rasputin watched beams of energy blast out from the woman. She was seemingly firing blindly but still nearly clipped Sonja and New Boy. “Damn it!” Retreat. We will need to work with…”

That was as far as he got before the woman appeared in front of him, having crossed the distance between where she had been and Rasputin within an instant. His armor proved no defense as her spear stabbed straight through his chest. “GUUUGGQ!!”

Desperately, Rasputin reached forward, but the woman was already pulling her spear back, and the shaft of the spear was too long for him to reach her. He fell out of the sky, watching as his life’s blood dripped out of the gaping hole in his chest as the woman turned on his fellows.  “R, Run…” he rasped. “Run…”

They didn’t.

OOOOOOO

A third assault was led by Supergiant, another one of Thanos’ Black Order, who strangely was also a blue-skinned alien woman, much like Nebula or Proxima, although her features were slightly more robotic-looking than even her associate Nebula. Like Proxima, she too had not been a part of the military side of the campaign against the Brood but had been very busy behind the scenes as her powers of cani-telepathy served best in that realm.

A human might well have thought of Nebula as a comrade in arms, or an acquaintance. Such terms had no place among the Black Guard beyond the relationship between Proxima and Corvus. All of them competed against one another in hopes of proving themselves more to Lord Thanos.

Yet the first few minutes of her campaign against China would definitely not have pleased Thanos if he had been watching her particular portal. Not that it was entirely her fault. Because instead of opening over the city of Hangzhou, the portal open over the nearest army base, belonging to the 28th Attack Division.

And although they had responded to any information about the possible alien invasion passed on to them from the Avalon Empire with derision, China had not stood down its military forces from the recent conflict with the Wrecking Crew. This meant constant drills, and lots of trigger-happy anti-air units moving around their military bases.

“FIRREEE!!!” came the shout from many officers and noncoms, and Type-63 anti-aircraft guns opened up into the air the instant the portal began to open there. With two 37 millimeter these guns, these ugly, somewhat blocky self-propelled guns could fire a surprising amount of solid-state ammunition into the air, which around four companies of quick reaction forces and guns currently being used in various exercises did barely a few seconds after the dimensional doorway opened. These were soon joined by the base’s own immobile anti-aircraft guns. These were a very eclectic group, some just simple flak cannons, others nearly modern guns, but thanks to the state of paranoia in China, they were soon all filling the air with lead.

In contrast to these older guns were a series of weapons designed by the Chinese Prime Minister himself. For anti-air work had developed two different systems and had them evenly distributed in groups of four squads each to the various important military bases across China. Since this army base served as a backup to the nearby naval base at Ningbo and protected the city of Hangzhou itself, this was one such.

One system was based on missile technology. The Dragon’s Fangs were small, truck-portable missile launchers with twenty missile tubes. One out of every six missiles would lock onto the actual target, while the others would either follow into that target homing in on the first’s signal or explode at precisely the same distance spread out in a line. The gunner made the decision of which was necessary.

Here, the local officers lost some control, as the individual gunners hastily made those decisions for themselves. This meant that there were several skimmers that were struck by several missiles smashed out of the sky almost at once, while other missiles exploded in midair, doing little damage but scattering the incoming Chitauri skimmers who led the attack.

The second system developed by the man who had once been called the Mandarin was called a Sparkling Spear design. Say what you would about his past, and few Chinese would willingly say anything at all about the man, but he did have a flare for nomenclature. The Sparkling Spear was essentially a lightning gun that fired a net of highly charged particles into the air.  More anti-rocket defense, the range of this system was quite a bit higher than anticipated, and now it came into play, hitting and weakening the shields of the Chitauri skimmers.

On her own skimmer, Supergiant wasn’t among the first groups through the portal. Instead she was leading from the back as she felt that was the correct position. Nonetheless, Supergiant could see the carnage in the air in front of her through the dimensional portal and snarled out orders. “Let me through! Give me cover as I enter, they cannot be allowed to bring up still more guns!”

On the other side of the portal, alarms were going out from this base to the rest of China, and jets were slowly getting airborne. But enough of the Skimmers were getting through the ready defense anti-air units to hit the jets as they tried to take off. And neither the jets nor the attack helicopters or even the tanks and anti-air guns had shields like the defenders did. Humans began to die, their fire slowly being suppressed, while elsewhere in China jetfighters and ballistic missiles were fired.

One such missile arrived just as Supergiant was able to get through the portal. Luckily for the Chitauri, it simply kept on going through the void between dimensions, easily dodged by the forces arrayed around the portal. The jets though instantly began to have an impact, and one of the few Rippers Supergiant had deigned to add to her force died within seconds of their arrival. The Ripper had wiped out several of the anti-air units though, and slagged numerous buildings across the base.

Worse for the defenders though was Supergiant being there. On her lone skimmer, she dove down, getting below the Chinese defensive envelope. There, she raised her hands, and with a growl, thrust out her hands, sending forth her telepathic powers.

Normally, Supergiant preferred to use her personal version of telepathy as it was meant to be used, only on one mind at a time, as this was what her power was originally, parasitic telepathy. With it, Supergiant could find the most intelligent or driven minds among those of her enemies and literally eat them, absorbing everything within the person’s memories, leaving their mind a husk which she could then control.

But Lord Thanos was not only a master of engineering but biotics and genetics. He had perfected her power to the point that Supergiant could use regular telepathy as well, if in a far more blunt manner than a true telepath. This she did now, reaching out to the minds of the humans with a simple command of “STOP FIGHTING!”

Her telepathic powers blasted out from her, creating a bubble more than twenty miles across, catching even a few of the jetfighters. The fighting instantly stopped on both sides as more Chitauri came through above them, although seeing no violence, they refrained from attacking the Chinese, as that would have broken Supergiant’s telepathic control.

With the battle thus paused, Supergiant sent out another command. It was a simple one, but it still overrode the free will of the Chinese soldiers she had caught. “Attack any human you see beyond those of your own units! Do not attack the aliens among you!”

Yet even as this occurred, jetfighters from farther away fired their missiles from outside Supergiant’s range. One such pilot was a man named Wen Shiang, and he had just seen his wing mate halt his fire. One moment they had been exchanging radio calls, and the other pilot had just shouted “SPLASH!” before falling silent, and was even now turning around, making to come back towards him. “Cobra 5, what is your status?”

There was no response and Wen hastily pulled up, flying above his comrade as he came back towards him. Anticipating that his friend had seen something coming up behind them Wen turned his head over his should but saw nothing. Instead Cobra 5 shot past the pairs of Cobra 7 and 8, and then…

Wen stared in horror as Cobra 5’s missiles locked on and flashed out from under his wings towards Cobra 9 and 10. Both of them hadn’t even evaded all that far, and 9 exploded, while 5 moved to follow 10, coming up behind him.

Before Wen could comprehend what was going on, Cobra 1,2,3 and even 4 all turned back on the rest of the ready squadron of the 71stAir Defense Brigade. For a moment, all Wen could do was dodge, ducking down towards the ground, going nap-of the earth for a time before pulling the stick of his J-10A upward, zooming up through the combat as his friends turned on one another before hastily twisting down and back towards the ground trying desperately to throw off anyone trying to lock onto him. What, what happe… it must be some kind of mental domination. I must call it in, the Party must be warned!

Before Wen could do so however, fire from the enemies he was actually here to fight caught him. Having left the rest of the human-on-human fight behind, his plane was easy pickings for the Chitauri skimmers who had flown out under the rest of the battle.

While this little drama was playing out in the air to one side of the previous battle, Supergiant stumbled, grabbing at the controls of her skimmer and cursing herself for not having a driver as she desperately tried to concentrate through a now blinding headache. Curse it, am I so weak? Even with Lord Thanos changing me so I can be a true telepath rather than a mere telepavor,e I still cannot sustain long term use of my power… not without a source of food…

Scowling, Supergiant moved into the base, searching for the local commander through half-closed eyes, a team of skimmers moving above her. Moments later they spotted a high ranking officer rushing out of a bunker in the base along with several others. He was even now turning around, ordering his troops to be ready to move in order to assault the nearby city, as her telepathic orders demanded, and whereas normally he would have remained there to command the base, Supergiant’s mental orders did not allow for that.

Seeing this, Supergiant waited, trying to ignore the pain watching as missiles continued to streak in towards her troops, shot out of the sky either by their own defenses, or the humans’, turned on their own hardware now.

Once the officer’s orders were being carried out, Supergiant gestured, ordering the Chitauri above her. “Kill his guards.”

The Chitauri above her fired down into the humans, who had not previously seen them as threats thanks to her mental orders. Now the soldiers around the general all fell, causing him to scream out in fear, rushing to the nearest shelter. But he was too slow.

Supergiant reached him quickly, grabbing at his head from behind. Desperately he wrenched away, one hand going down to his pistol. Yet Supergiant’s grip on his head was impossible to break, and she smiled thinly, smacking the pistol out of his hand, pulling him into the air to look into his suddenly horrified, shocked eyes. “Don’t worry, the pain will be over soon,” she crooned, opening her mouth.

From Supergiant’s mouth a black mist flowed out, enveloping his head even as he started to scream. The black mist entered the man’s eyes, ears, mouth and nose, and Supergiant shuddered in delight, feeling the flow of the mans mind into her via the mist, the visible representation of her telepathic cannibalism. A low hum of delight left her as the migraine she had been dealing with left her.

Moments later she released the man’s body to slump to the ground. While his body still stood there, the man who had commanded this base was no more. Supergiant had eaten his mind, subsuming all the memories within. Now she could look into those memories almost as if they were her own, like a series of books she could pull of the shelf and read at any time. She had it all, command codes, callsign cycles, everything.

“Ahh…. Now to cause some chaos…” Supergiant enthused, before communicating with the local Chitauri officers. A series of orders flashed out, and the invaders instantly obeyed. The other two rippers that Supergiant had brought with her through the dimensional doorway landed in the base. Both of them would remain there, providing defensive fire, for the portal, while the Skimmers would spread out, hugging the ground now in order to get enemy radar.

This meant they would very obviously be seen much more easily by civilians, but here in China, it would take time for civilians, even hundreds of thousands of people to get their warnings out to the government. Especially if I muddy the waters further. “You,” She growled out, gesturing to the empty husk. “Get up.”

Without a mind of it’s own, those orders acted almost like a web inside a cave, connecting all of the walls representing the body’s functions together. But really the cave was still there, still empty, and the web was extremely fragile, brittle. It would eventually collapse, leaving nothing behind. But for now, Supergiant could give this thing that was once human a series of orders.

With Supergiant’s orders driving him, the former human reentered his command building, finding it empty. Supergiant’s previous orders were absolute, and soldiers who would normally stay behind to take care of the base or communications needs of the troops were also leaving the base, eager to attack their own kind elsewhere. Regardless, after a few minutes, the general in charge of the base was dialing up a connection, getting in contact with the nearby naval base.

Meanwhile, Supergiant herself traveled there as fast as possible, also hugging the ground as best she could a guard of five other skimmers around her. Her destination was the Ningbo Naval Base. Two were felled by enemy fire coming from detached units of the army out on maneuvers but Supergiant ignored this and moved on swiftly.

Upon arriving at the base in Ningbo, Supergiant left her command outside. From there, she continued on, using her suit’s cloaking technology to pass straight the guards there into the base despite how on edge they were, rumors having spread about what was going on elsewhere. Once within, Supergiant headed to the central command building, eager to dine on her second human victim.

Like with any military, there were some things that local commanders did not know or could not command. But after eating his brain, Supergiant knew her first victim was more senior than the officer commanding this base or the naval units that used it as their operational headquarters. She also knew, however, that some orders would need to come from higher up in the command chain. That was unless she could turn several officers here in the naval base to her designs.

Thanks to the cloaking technology built into her suit by Lord Thanos, Supergiant was able to pass entirely through the base, entering the command center. Here, dozens of people were moving around, trying to get to grips with what was going on further inland, while the main officer was shouting into the LAN-line phone in his hand.

Supergiant’s powers allowed her to translate what she was hearing, and she actually let out a hastily covered giggle at how angry the local officer sounded. “I do not fucking care if you keep parroting the call signs back to me. Dammit, I am asking why, did the chairman… You, your base was under attack, and I recognize that you are the man on the ground, but without the Chairman’s orders, this and all the reports about these aliens sound like a giant prank. I am not so low down the party as you, damn it, why are you just repeating your orders, it’s almost… almost like…”

Feeling this was her cue, Supergiant stepped further into the room, locking it behind her for a second. The sound of the lock had several of the communication specialists turning toward her, but Supergiant held up a hand, a telepathic command flowing out from her to envelop the room. “Silence and cease all movement!”

The main officer had also turned seeing his people doing so, and looked at Supergiant as her cloaking tech faded, his mouth agape. “Ah, that makes this easier.”

With that, Supergiant opened her own mouth, breathing out. For the second time that day, her original power reached enveloping the man’s head, seeping his orifices easily. And once more, Supergiant shuddered in place for a few seconds, delighting in the treat. Unlike Supergiant’s first victim, this man actually had something of a brain, although quite constrained by a severe, almost fanatical devotion to the rules of the Communist Party, and his inner turmoil based on the fact he could not rise higher without playing the patronage game.

Yet Supergiant could not linger over her meal as much ash she liked. Instead she finished quickly, and then with a smile went from one of the officers in the room to another. Like so many flies trapped in a spider’s threads, none could move, cry out or fight back as she went around the room, eating their minds. Not thirty minutes later, her series of flesh puppets and had called in the captains of various ships in port and over the radio, with specific callsigns to back their words.

The play Supergiant’s flesh puppets performed was both easy and entirely made out of wool cloth. To these men and those who heard the orders being passed on, the Taiwanese had apparently released some kind of virus into China that made those exposed to it hallucinate and eventually go mad. That the entirety of the upper echelons of the party had been caught by one such attack, and that others had spread throughout the country.

Thise was precisely the kind of doomsday scenario that the Chinese Communist Party fed it’s folk. Especially once Taiwan had reached out to the magician Harry Potter and he had practically guaranteed the wayward county’s independence. That actually helped the officers thus contacted believe Supergiant’s tale.

Soon, the Chinese navy would start to attack Taiwan and with several minutes’ worth of effort, her flesh puppets here were programmed to a degree that would allow them to act like themselves for a time. It would fade quickly, especially once battle was joined and there was a very clear limit to how many different scenarios Supergiant could program into them.

Yet that was all right. By the time their lack of true life was discovered, the first shots would be fired. And as someone who had started wars and conflicts on hundreds of different planets, primitive and sophisticated alike, Supergiant knew that once the first shots were fired, both sides would have every reason to continue.

With the Chitauri spreading out in small bands to target various infrastructure points throughout the country, Supergiant and her remaining guards moved on. There was one other kind of base that she was going to visit in order to cause still further disorder among the humans. I will show Lord Thanos, I will show my fellow Black Order. It is not about raw violence, vitriol, or brute power like Black Hole uses, nor cold cruelty like Midnight or Glaive. All you need is deviousness, and access to the right toolset.

OOOOOOO

The most randomly chosen city among those the Wrecking Crew and Loki left beacons was perhaps Debrecen, Hungary. This attack was led by Gamora and like Nebula and Proxima Midnight, she led from the front. Skimmers were the first units through, spreading out quickly, with orders not to engage, but radio back whatever they saw as they spread out quickly over the city and beyond while Gamora remained near the portal.

The lack of defenses around the city was astonishing to Gamora, who could only shake her head, shocked at what she was seeing. A whole city like this, with no material defenses? But these humans are supposed to be warlike? Is this just local stupidity, or were the reports we looked at wrong? Gamora was leaning heavily towards the latter, but it didn’t really matter.

Gamora wasn’t nearly as bloodthirsty as her sister or the other Black Order commanders. She had no wish to mindlessly slaughter, to build pyramids of skulls for her father. Rather, she would conquer. In that, Gamora was very much a pragmatist. Lord Thanos, her father, would be happy enough with the death of the Phoenix avatar, Harry Potter and enough of the humans to add to his glory in the eyes of his mistress, Death itself.

If such a creature even exists, and it isn’t just his nihilism at play. She thought, not for the first time. And like all such thoughts, it was quickly buried very deeply indeed.

Regardless, many of the humans might well remain, to be added to Thanos into growing collection of empires that he had begun to gather. She hoped that Lord Thanos was pragmatic enough to not simply slaughter all. I could be wrong, but I hope I’m not. I have no desire to add still more blood to the gallons I have already spilled, Gamora thought, shaking her head slightly, while in the background, large scale hovercraft the likes of which Proxima was using in Russia appeared. These were carrying not more troops, but massive communication devices, high tech megaphones really.

As shrieks and shouts of shock abounded throughout the city below, these units moved out, spreading into a formation to cover the entire city. Once they were done, Gamora began to speak into the microphone, her voice carried throughout the city. “Do not resist. Resistance will be met with deadly force. Remain in your homes. The invaders will not enter your home unless fired upon. I repeat, remain calm and not resist. If you are caught outside, keep your hands visible and place them on your head and continue about your business. Once inside a building, you will remain there until the provisional government has been set up to replace any rebellious elements within your own which will reveal themselves.”

Of course, Gamora wasn’t so naïve as to assume this would work entirely. No matter how hard she tried, this was still going to be coming down to these humans, and some would undoubtedly resist. Their militaries would certainly do so, their governmental bodies, less so. Most of the time those with power would be too terrified of losing that power to fight for it, amusingly. But this way at least Gamora would not need to kill anyone. My hands might not be clean, but they will not be as black with dried blood as the others.

More troops came through behind Gamora as she made her speech spreading out over the city and away, dealing with a few instances of resistance from the locals. Between her brief speeches, Gamora listened intently, and she could tell it had only been a few projectile type shots fired, which was probably examples of the local entire constabulary. That was more than enough. Meanwhile more loaders came through, although this time they carried further Chitauri and anti-air guns.

They would pass over the city to defensible terrain in various places and build up fortresses there, hard points that could defend against land and air units. Once the city was surrounded, its citizen pacified and the portal thus protected, Gamora would push forward as fast as possible. Mobility and retaining the high ground is key. Destroy any military forces that march on us, but otherwise simply retain command of the air and spread out. That is enough.

OOOOOOO

One beacon whose location Loki had chosen deliberately was the beacon set into the city of Washington, DC. As the nation which could project force beyond its borders the most easily of all the nations on Earth, Loki had decided America needed special care, and targeting it’s capital was an obvious choice.

Such was their research into the humans that Thanos and his commanders could tell from that first glimpse of the opening that this was indeed Washington. And since they had no idea where the Avalon Empire’s capital was – they had looked for it extremely closely, but Potter’s magic kept any who did not come through the runic doors from even knowing about Camelot at all, let alone attack it – Black Glaive, chief of the Black Order came through with the first troops.

He was easily Thanos is best Among the Black Order, and was assigned the be the largest assault force outside the main force lead by Black Maw.

As he appeared, Black Glaive could already see why. In the distance, jet fighters were already moving to intercept. And below, several hundred troopers were racing around, bringing anti-air guns online from around the capital.

With a gesture, Glaive sent a group of Rippers out towards the incoming aerial units. As they went, anti-air guns lining their sides and backs opened up in a display of all plasma power.

Meanwhile, Chitauri troopers dropped from their skimmers all across the city. Rippers too lowered themselves into the city’s laying waste with their main cannons to a few buildings, but more concentrating their guns below into the streets, slaying thousands.

Yet even that, and now the battle going on in the distance with the first jets to react, were a side show. This was the head of the American government, and the more carnage they could create here, the better. That was why Corvus himself lead the assault into the so-called White House. By the time I am done with it, it will be called the Crimson house, he thought to himself, knowing the joke really wasn’t all that funny, but rather very prophetic.

With the Chitauri troops breaking off and engaging the local defenders, Glaive charged forward.

Human soldiers wearing strange uniforms of black pants and black jackets with white shirts underneath attempted to stop Glaive but Glaive knocked them aside as if they were bowling pins. Their bullets bounced off Corvus Glaive’s skin and the rags he wore as a uniform with no effect, even when two of them brought out larger0rifle like weapons, rather than the paltry handguns previously in use.

He stormed through the White House’s front door, carrying within the body of one of the soldiers in his way speared onto his scythe, before hurling it to one side smashing it into two soldiers having hurled so hard that the collision broke their legs. Twisting in the other direction, Corvus lashed out with a wave of energy bisecting four troops there who had been racing towards him.

Marching forward, Glaive smashed down doors as he came to them, lashing out within and then slaughtering those within guard or civilian. Above, a Ripper positioned its directly over the White House, while another one moved into what was called Congressional Hall, as troopers descended, rushing into the buildings there.

Corvus’s orders were very, very clear. Anyone withing those buildings would be slain, a sacrifice to Lord Thanos.

Glancing out the window, brief second, Glaive took a moment to stare across the lawn to the area around the White House, nodding some approval. Local resistance had arrived to fight his troops, and were now trying to force their way into the cordon the Chitauri had thrown up around the governmental buildings. It was a viable tactic, but they lacked the weaponry needed to fight his people on an even footing.

Glaive’s musings were interrupted by a spattering of bullet fire hitting his back, and Corvus turned, flipping his staff around sending out further energy bolts to one side as he marched down the court door, leaving three more dead. Eight dead guards later, Corvus was in front of the so-called Oval Office. Knocking down the door, Glaive discovered that was a bit of a misnomer as the office was not oval, but more importantly there was no one within. “Blast, so much for this being easy.”

As he turned back, his communication device went off. “Lord Glaive, we have assaulted the so-called Senate and Congress buildings. In total, we have killed at least eight hundred people between the two buildings so far, with more to come. Several are in hiding, and others have forted up, but we will slay them quickly. I do not have enough data to tell you if we should have found them there. But there are some signs that some have escaped. There seems to be a secret tunnel underneath the building. I have sent troopers down already.”

There was a momentary pause from the other voice, before he went on. “We are taking losses. Their projectile devices are not without their merits, if they hit in unarmored places. Their rockets are also proving dangerous once our shields are down. Two Rippers have been destroyed already.”

“Bring in a further fifty. Continue the cleansing,” Glaive ordered, dispassionate as always. His people would prove themselves worthy to Lord Thanos once more. What mattered a few dozen, a few hundred, a few hundred thousand, when compared to that. “We will cleanse the earth! Release divisions five through twelve to continue the slaughter throughout the city. Have you hacked into the local data-net as yet?”

Instantly, a line of text and a map appeared in the iris of one eye, even as he came under fire as still more of the strangely garbed soldiers defended this place.

Three of them went down in quick succession, although their current fire was extremely precise, an oddity in this place. These special service people evidently come in various levels of training.

The next instance, however, Glaive rounded the next corner and bolts of plasma came towards him, yellow and brighter than the energy weapons of his people. The blow struck him in the thigh with enough impetus to knock him sideways into the far wall. Five more defenders appeared behind, and Glaive hissed as he was caught in a crossfire. Plasma rained down from both side, burning through his clothing in various places, and actually causing a slight bit of injury. They weren’t quite hot enough to burn through his skin, but they certainly were going to leave Glaive with a few burns.

“You useless gnats!” With a roar of anger, Corvus turned, and charged towards the five who had appeared from seemingly nowhere behind him. Once within reach, his scythe lashed out, slicing one man in half as he kicked out another one, crushing his chest. A third fell to a kick to his leg, which almost tore his leg off, so powerful was the strike. The other end of his scythe came up, in a crushing blow that burst the fourth man’s head like a ripe watermelon.

Throughout this, the troops who had previously been in front of him kept firing, ignoring their allies well-being. One of the wounded men went down with a plasma bolt through the chest, and yet the continued shots to his back caused Glaive some actual pain now.

The last man standing hastily pulled out a dagger, thrusting it forward. Glaive caught it on his forearm contemptuously, only to stare in surprise as the blade cut into his skin. Corvus noted that he would need to examine that sword later, as his hand, now bleeding slightly smacked that man aside, his scythe coming up and cutting. The last man fell, and he turned, sending out a blast of energy that seared the last two standing guards into so much char.

Kneeling down, Glaive reached for the dagger that had hurt his arm although his clothing was already mending itself, melding over the injury. Feeling the lightness of it, despite the fact that it looked almost like kit should be a short sword he scowled in irritation. Wherever this had come from it had hurt him, and the implications of finding such a weapon here, even only one was something he needed to pass on.

Reaching to his belt, he switched com channels for a moment, connecting to the rest of the Black Order elsewhere. “Black Order, the humans have developed a metal that was able to penetrate my skin. They seem to only use it in tiny quantities, perhaps given to their best warriors? But even so, that is a worrisome sign.”

With that, Glaive cut off the communication, amused as he had heard his wife about to go on a tirade. Proxima would no doubt be annoyed that someone else other than herself had hurt him.

Strapping the dagger to his side, Glaive stood and connected with the information his command had gleaned from the local data network, searching for the relevant information, and swiftly barked out commands, sending others segments of his troops toward different areas. The so-called Pentagon and accompanying military base, and to the nearest naval base of any significant size. He also ordered a doubling of the amount of antiaircraft guns being drawn through the portal. America was a real superpower that could project that power over long distances, which meant airpower.

With his task force sufficiently organized, Glaive continued on his way, assured by another quick question that nothing had left the White House since their arrival.

However, his search was in vain. No one seemed to be around, beyond the security guards he’d already dealt with some of whom had been knocked out rather than slain. Scowling in annoyance, Glaive wound his way from there back towards the entranceway. Finding two unconscious guards he grabbing them one after another, dragging it together to lie against the wall of the White House shoulder to shoulder.

Once the two were in position, he slapped them each once across the face.

This woke them up and after staring at Corvus’ glorious visage, they both tried to reach for their sidearms. Snorting in disdain, Corvus put his scythe against their throats, the blade more than long enough to touch both necks at once. “You will answer my questions, or you will die. Do not posture, I have seen such before and it ceased to be amusing several hundred years ago.”

Neither man answered, simply clamming up and Glaive had to smile slightly. Whatever else these humans were and there was a lot of negative things he could say about them, they did not lack courage. Still he had questions.

Still smiling, Glaive reached down and without any effort, he tore off one of their legs, tossing it aside like it was a chicken leg.

“ARGGHHHH!!!” The man screamed, grabbing at his leg right above where his leg had been torn away.

Snorting, Glaive brought his scythe down, pressing it against the wound, searing the wound shut.

“GRAAAHHHHAGHH!!!” The man’s screaming increased dramatically during this procedure, and he fell unconscious swiftly.

This left Corvus looking over to the other man, whose other leg he had held in place while he used his scythe with his other hand. “That one got off easily. You will not, should you not answer my questions. First I will remove your arms and legs. Then I will remove that which makes you a man, always being careful the pain itself does not kill you. Then I will start to flay your skin, from that point outward across your body. Eventually you will talk. What condition you are in is the true question.”

The man still glared at him, but there was now more than a bit of fear in that gaze. Glaive smiled when he saw it and made good his boast.

It was only when the first man was down to one working limb that the man finally broke. “Wait, wait, waag, wait! I, I’ll talk!”

“Good. Where is your leader, you call him president,” Corvus snarled. Although amusing this had taken overlong. Every combat instinct he had was telling him that the human’s real defenders, Potter and his folk, would be on the move soon.

“I, I don’t know where, he’s been going around frantically in Air Force One, ever since….” At that, astonishing to Glaive, the man clamped up, but that wass enough.

Moments later Corvus was walking away from the now quite dead pair, moving over to a fountain set in the backyard of the White House. He plunged his hands inside, washing them clean of blood, smiling very slightly at the sight of the red staining the formerly pristine water. Once more, clean, he raised one hand to his temple again, connecting to the Black Order. “Black Order, be aware, primary target knew we were coming, be prepared for heavy resistance.”

OOOOOOO

As the militaries of the world began to mobilize, the Skrull fleet popped into existence in the outer edge of the system. Some of the information they had about the defences of this solar system showed the impact of some kind of gravity weapon that seemed able to pull ships out of hyperspace diverting their route towards the prepared fortress planet of Mars. Since one of the most foolish things a commander could do was to fight on the battlefield of his enemy’s choosing, Len’Dok had decided to jump in well out of the inner system and moved in via their realspace drive.

That this allowed his own sensors to reach out ahead of him and start to create a real picture of the system of their own was also part of his thinking. Old light was, after all, not as accurate as you might think.

At first, Thanos had argued with the Len’Dok or rather demanded an explanation as to why his first steps into the solar system would be so cautious. But the Len’Dok had convinced him that being cautious was better overall, regardless of numbers.

“Shock and awe can come in two different forms, My Lord. It can come in the form of precise, swift and ruthless action, the application of force into areas where the enemy is vulnerable and did not even recognize it. That is the way your Chitauri allies can fight this war. Then there is the other way. Slow, methodical, the unstoppable approach of an overwhelming force, grinding away the will to resist until the enemy breaks. That is what my fleet will provide. And if we can break the morale of the humans, or even the majority of their fighting force, you will have a much easier time dealing with their superpowered elements.”

Thanos had acquiesced to that, although warned that in the future, he might not be so kind to a dissenting voice. “The humans will probably surprise you with their tenacity. And if the Phoenix Avatar or Potter ignores the threat of the Chitauri, your fleet will burn like the feathers of an avian in a bonfire. Still, it is your command. Do what you will.”

Alas, Thanos had not taken into account Len’Dok’s opinion on what kind of fleet they needed to create for this operation. Thus, the fleet was a little too top-heavy for his tastes in such an engagement. It was the kind of fleet he would take against an equivalent opponent, like the Kree. An enemy Len’Dok knew how to fight, knew what to expect. The humans, for all the information they had gleaned on them, there were still a LOT of questions. Thus he would have preferred more ships rather than heavier units.

His fleet’s composition would work better in terms of shock and awe than his own preference, admittedly, but it wasn’t quite as flexible. Nor, admittedly, did the various different aspects of the fleet work together in a manner that was fit to be called such. Len’Dok had been utterly appalled by the number of flag officers Thanos had seen fit to cull, seemingly uncaring that it destroyed the fleet’s efficiency.

Two hundred and thirty-one Equalizers, the super-dreadnought class of the Skrull Fleet. These were not Doom Bringers or Worlds Breakers, the Skrull didn’t go into having specialized designs like that. Instead, the Equalizers were able to do both tasks almost as well as their Kree counterparts.

Or at least it was supposed to work out like that. It didn’t quite, but the Skrull made up for that by having better shielding overall than their enemies, and somewhat better onboard repair resources. Alas, in modern space warfare that didn’t really matter much under a normal commander, but the best officers could rotate their ships out of a battle, and the Skrull damage control teams would make it so that those ships could return to the same battlefield in a useable condition.

Three hundred seventy-seven battleships. Normally, those units would be split off to attack from different angles, to peel off enemy defenders to deal with them, and thus weaken the enemy for the main attack. But here, with the gravity trap Lord Thanos’ information had told Len’Dok that was on the fourth planet out from the sun, that wasn’t advisable.

Nonetheless, these ships were the second largest ships in the fleet. They bristled with the same kind of energy weapons as the larger ships, as much like their traditional enemies, the Skrull had moved away from missile-based weaponry.

Seven hundred and fifty-one cruisers. Unlike their opponents or the Shi’ar who somewhat specialized in the midrange class of combatants and relied on their far better specialized units, the Skrull barely used cruisers at all save for commerce protection and raiding. They were good for flanking enemy battlelines, destroying strategic targets when their defenders had been pulled away, but could not take much of a pounding in comparison to their larger brethren.

Nine hundred and seven destroyers. Normally, these ships would be sent forward of the main fleet to engage any soft targets available, investigate anything or anywhere their sensors could not discern enough information for the commanding officer, or to attack already weakened targets, prior to the main engagements. Here, despite their hyper-expensive dual hyperdrive engines, that ability was useless. They were, however, extremely well-armed, having a few weapons but larger type, mobile, and durable for their size.

For now, the Fleet Overlord kept them close, but he envisioned being able to send them forward to deal with any orbital defenses over the planet that the humans had possibly cobbled together, while he used the rest of the fleet as a massive hammer, destroying whatever space-based mobile units the humans had captured from the Kree. Maybe even deal with any space-based for space going superpowered elements that dares to faces fleet.

We know there are things in orbit over the planet, but we don’t know their capability. We know how many ships the Humans have somehow brought back to fighting trim, but not much about their armaments. We know they have a lot of strange shuttle-sized ships, but not what they are for. I refuse to believe that the humans use all of those shuttles as part of their, admittedly growing, material infrastructure.

That was the problem facing him really. Their information they had on the humans was mostly based on two sources: radio waves captured from the work around ‘Fortress Mars’ and Earth, and captured old light recorded by Lord Thanos’ spy ships well out of the system. Both had issues, and the humans didn’t seem to send important military information via radio waves anymore. Not the Avalon Empire and not between the two planets, anyway.

Worse was how patchy the information was. Lord Thanos had only had a few ships that could go into the long dark between systems and find the old light to give them any idea of what they were facing. So while Len’Dok knew they had beaten a Kree fleet by pulling them into range of Fortress Mars and knew that the humans had beaten off a flotilla of Badoon, they had no idea how that second battle had occurred while they had near play-by-play recordings of the battles against the Kree.

And as they began to puss through the spherical Nalve Sphere (Oort Cloud) to where it shifted into the Nolj Circle (Hills cloud), Len’Dok’s concerns grew.

“What do you mean you don’t know where their fleet is? Either they are out on maneuvers and we should be picking them up on our sensors, or they are near Fortress Mars, and we should be able to at least tell us they are there. Are you telling me they are on the other side of the star from us?”

They could be on maneuver on the other side of the star, but that would be rather… suspicious timing. The Fleet Overlord though, gazing at his sensor specialist as his thoughts whirled. Could the humans have known we were coming? And what are they using as scanners or communication devices over inter-planetary range? Too many blasted questions. I know lord Thanos and his ilk are powerful, but it is our people who will die in our thousands if this goes poorly.

His flag bridge’s senior sensor analyst shrugged his shoulders, knowing that the Fleet Overlord wasn’t the type to shoot the messenger. So long as the messenger was competent at least, and the man would not be on his flagstaff if there were any questions on that score.

“There are no starship-sized energy readings within our sensor range, sir, and as you know while we wouldn’t get much detail, we can see into the inner planetary zone. We have several dozen space stations identified around the gas giants, a few of what we assume are satellites in various places both there and scattered over other inner system worlds, particularly, the primary target. Small scale we have fourteen different energy signals moving around. None are large enough to be more than those oversized shuttles we were informed about.”

The officer waited as two technicians began to fill in more information on the various energy readings. Some were instantly designated HE3 refineries, others defensive installations. The information on Fortress Mars grew as well, although at this range not anywhere near as detailed, but the energy readings there were impressive to say the least, and the overall gravity of the solar system had changed significantly, signaling what was going on there. The same went for the large human shuttles.

As for the primary target, from this position, they had begun to get a reading on the local energy infrastructure, but nothing specific from the third planet. Or where their sensors said the planet was, anyway. Some of the information gleaned from past battles which had occurred in this system seemed to indicate that the Badoon had been either woefully inaccurate with their fire or had been tricked to attack an empty segment of space with their long range bombardment weapons. The same went for the Kree fleet whose battle in this system they had been able to watch from beginning to end, before that fleet had been destroyed in orbit over fortress Mars. The fleet had launched planetary bombardment missiles towards the third planet, only for most to miss before they corrected.

When the staff officer saw that they had reached the point where they would need to get closer – as in past the seventh planet at least - to get any information, he continued. “I can send out more probes, but it will take time, as we can already tell that Fortress Mars gravity trap is activated. They’d be pulled out of hyperspace just as easily as we would have been.”

“Could they be hiding within one of the Jovians?” Using gas giants to hide from invaders is a time honored tactic because it works,” Len’Dok asked.

“Perhaps the innermost gas giant, but not the outer. And if they do, sir, we have enough ships to interdict the planet and still continue with our primary objectives.”

Len’Dok grunted at that, but said nothing to it. “Order the fleet forward. I want the destroyers split into four, two to the side, and then one behind us, merged into the cruiser divisions. The other will be below us. From our information, the humans are new to space warfare, and most such always prefer to attack from below in fleet engagements if they can. The rest of the fleet will form Formation Puncture. I want you, Tactical to keep an eye on our inter-ship communications network. Our firing arcs and interlocked defensive network needs to be perfect.”

At his order his officers leaped to obey. Moments later, the fleet moved forward, the heavier ships form into what looked like the head of a x-shaped screwdriver. Broken into divisions, the Equalizer divisions were surrounded by their smaller brethren. Each ship was within the defensive firing envelop of at least its division mates and two other divisions. Around the main portion of the fleet, the destroyers provided almost wall-like formations to either side and below, while the cruisers and last group of destroyers provided the shaft of the ‘screwdriver’.

The mystery of where the human fleet fell to the wayside however as alarms began to blare a second later as another sensor specialist shouted out, “We have incoming! I’m reading a growing number of small icons coming towards us both from our right and left flanks. Numbers aren’t solid, they are too interspersed, They look like the oversized shuttles from our warbook.”

“Hmm… disposable scout ships maybe? Or something similar anyway?” the senior sensor specialist mused. “If they could maybe send targeting data back… but there are no ships in sight. Do the humans have some kind of interplanetary weapons system?”

“Unknown,” Len’Dok grunted. “But you’re thinking too small. If those are probes, they don’t need to be limited to simply sending back information, but blocking our own sensors, and maybe communications signals too.”

“Their power readings are quite large for something so small,” sirs,” the specialist who had been watching the scanners said.  “But their straight ahead speed isn’t so good. Maneuverability might make even the Shi’ar ships looks slow, but anything else I can’t sell yet. But…”

“But?” Len’Dok growled. “But is not a term I like to hear at anytime soldier, let alone when going into battle.”

“Sorry sir. I… I’m not reading anyplace that could have been a base or launch platform for them.”

At the grunt from his senior officer, the sensor analyst quickly took over the main hologram, showing the area where the signals began to appear. Between on moment and the next, the red rash of icons appeared, so suddenly it was beyond startling. Not at all like they had just shut down cloaking devices of some kind, rather, this almost looked as if they had burst out of nowhere.

“Do the humans have a cloaking system as good as our own?” the senior specialist murmured.

“I doubt it, sir. From this many angles, it should have been almost impossible for anything to hide from us. They appeared barely outside of the destroyers weapons range.

“Look at how they are moving,” the tactical specialist murmured. “They almost look like they are moving under power and individual control rather than control. But why send their people to their deaths on what is obviously some kind of suicide mission. They have to be weapons of some kind.”

“Perhaps. Regardless, bring the fleet to battle stations,” The Fleet Overlord ordered, unwilling to assume that anything his enemies did was not purposeful in some manner.

Yet even he was astonished when they creatures entered range of his weapon systems and began to evade fire coming. They really were manned devices of some kind, kamikaze craft? He murmured.

“They could be some kind of suicide craft, but our information on the humans seems to indicate that such an act would be anathema to them,” the intelligence officer argued.

“We will know what they are shortly. Watch, and be prepared to give me your opinions after the battle,” Len’Dok ordered, cutting through the argument before it could begin.

“The numbers of the enemy have increased… possibly some kind of highly advanced decoy?” Skrull ships used similar devices, and even as the man manning the sensors position said this, similar decoys began to appear, ghost like around each ship. And a moment later, the destroyers on the flanks started to fire.

OOOOOOO

Commander Jack Marshall, callsign Reaper Man, clenched his control stick with both hands so hard his knuckles turned white as he dodged incoming fire, while behind him, his fellow Ravens tried to keep formation. Well, calling it formation was something of a misnomer. They weren’t flying in such an organized manner, rather keeping close enough so that each squadron’s tac net could remain in constant contact.

Around him, his crew went about their business quickly. “Activating decoys! Decoys released.  They are online, slaving to our systems.”

“Gravity cannon and particle beam are both online, we are good to go,” his fellow veteran, Oscar Harper, announced from the weapon’s officers position.

“Random walk, you useless shower!” Jack announced into the pickup, putting action to word as he bounced his plane in various ways to throw off the enemy’s targeting systems. “Hesitation gets you killed!”

Thankfully, the training they’d done up to this point seemed to be enough, and all the Ravens were dodging wildly as they zoomed in toward the first segment of the enemy fleet, something he was very grateful for. Few of his troops were actually combat veterans, and while this wasn’t exactly a dogfight like they showed from World War II, the firepower coming towards him was far greater than in any battle the old-timers had ever faced.

Luckily for them, this enemy, like the Badoon, didn’t believe in homing type weapons, simply because of the amount of defensive fire that their ships could put out. In tests against the captured Kree vessels, however, the Raven’s had shown that their weapon’s range could keep them out of the most dangerous defensive zone. Yes, the closer you got to the ship, the deadlier the fire was, but there was what the Raven pilots and crews called the sweet spot, an area where most of the main batteries on capital ships wouldn’t be able to target you, and where you were still just barely out of the range of their secondary systems. On most of the vessels anyway. The larger ships still will be able to range on us with their secondaries, Jack thought grimly.

Closing to that zone cost at least twenty of his attack force, the one attacking the enemy fleet from their right flank, along with a vast majority of their decoys. His ECM officer’s words of, “activating decoys, decoys online,” became a mantra, one where the numbers slid by Jack’s consciousness, not sinking in.

But those decoys were life here, and Jack feared that once they all started to run out of decoys, there Ravens would be torn apart. We are eggs armed with nukes, but… we’re about to show these fuckers the nuke side of the equation. “Activate ECM!”

At his orders, across the battlefield the Ravens all activated their ECM packages. These were designed to disrupt the computer network linking one enemy ship to another. And within seconds, this had an impact. The fire from the smaller ships shielding this flank of the enemy formation instantly began to flounder, and the efficacy of the decoys grew immeasurably.

“Fucking about time!”  His Electronics man grunted. “We’re down to six of our ten decoy duos, boss.” Each decoy pod the Ravens launched carried two decoys within it.”

“Noted. Tell me when we are down to our last two duos,” Jack ordered, grimacing. Maybe we should have waited until the enemy fleet was right on top of one of the rings?

The teleportation rings themselves couldn’t be seen, and maybe already being with in their firing range would have given them more of a chance to get all the way into the enemy’s formation all their own? Or is the nesesity of firing off our decoys on this side of the portals too important to our survival?” While the ECM suite could be used during the portal jump, the connection to the decoy duos was lost during the jump, and it was awfully hard to regain it afterward.

As he watched, another hundred decoys disappeared, coupled with seven actual Ravens spread across the combat group. God, we are taking so many casualties already. Jack took a moment to pray that the magical teleportation arrays on their suits worked as they normally did, or else there would be a lot of empty bunks back in the Nests later on.

Then they were close enough to the enemy fleet to start their own harvest. “Blue squadron, fire on my signal!”

Gravity beams struck out, crushing to the shielding of the enemy ship. After only three strikes from various Raven’s the target’s shields gave way. With practiced ease, Jack’s weapons officer switched to their secondary weapon, the particle beams. The paired twin beams of silver light struck. The beams tore down the bindings of solid matter struck on the atomic level, turning the enemy ship’s own armor against it, tearing the ship into pieces with atomic fire.

“Hell yeah, take that you assholes!” Oscar shouted. “Get some!”

“Secondary target coming up,” Jack warned, and his friend quieted down quickly. The next ship was another destroyer, one who was trying to roll away from the Ravens, taking their fire on different sides of their shields.

It didn’t save it. Another Raven, this time from Jack’s own squadron died, but the destroyer exploded, and then they were on to the next ship, which had been so close the cloud of debris from the second ship was actually able to shield them for a second, allowing them to reposition all of their decoys before hitting the next ship.

When that ship felt, Jack and the rest of the wing on this side of the battle were past the destroyers, diving down into the fire of the larger vessels. “Get those decoys out, keep the ECM up!” Jack ground out, appalled as he saw whole waves of decoys and ten more Ravens wink out of existence.

Still more died, but then the Ravens were within the enemy formation. The shields on these ships took far longer to knock down, several passes for the battleships, and more for the larger Doom Bringer-sized ships. And in so doing, still more of the ravens went down, although the ECM jammers worked against the attackers too. Twice Jack saw the invaders shoot one another, so badly was their interlinked network being hashed. And from the other side of the enemy fleet came the other wing of this assault.

When the idea of a two-pronged assault was explained to him, Jack, like many others, argued that it was too complicated. Many of the older historically inclined pilots had shouted about Leyte Gulf and other disasters. But here, it seemed to have worked so far. The attacks from both sides seemed to be pulling the enemy ships in either direction, as if they were uncertain where to fire. The ravens were still taking losses, but nowhere near what they should have without that tactic, the decoys and the ECM jammers.

“Boss, we’re down to our last four decoys!”

At that, Jack nodded, and shouted, “Bug out, bug out!”

With that order, the ragged remnants of his squadron joined others, pushing on through the battlespace. They had no need to turn around or decelerate and flee back along the route they had followed. This would have been deadly, as even Ravens couldn’t bleed off their inertia well enough to do that on a dime, and the decoys which had spelled life up to this point were nearly depleted across the entire force. Worse, with their loses so far, the ECM jammers were having a harder time disrupting the enemy’s network. Defensive fire had risen steadily as the fight went on, and now for every five decoys destroyed, a real Raven went with them.

Instead, Jack and his squadron moved through the enemy formation and out the other side, which had been smashed into equal disarray by the other wing. This saved them from a certain amount of fire from the ships of the line, but the destroyers had time to reform, and had been bolstered by cruiser-class vessels and more of their brethren from the back of the enemy formation.

The fire was withering from the moment they left the main enemy formation behind them and it was here Jack and his crew’s collective luck ran out.  The pilot had barely a second to register his ECM officer’s shout of, “The last decoy just went--!” When the enemy’s next shots crashed into them, and his senses exploded, a feeling of intense, debilitating disorientation going through them.

When the world made sense once more, Jack Marshall and his people found themselves laid out in the receiving area of their Nest in orbit over the fake earth.

Groaning, Jack pushed himself to his feet, his stomachs growling, a feeling of weakness and exhaustion going through him as if he hadn’t had any food or drinks for weeks. Knowing this feeling from training, Jack knew that if he looked at himself in the mirror, his face would reflect that feeling. Any excess fat he might have had was just burned off in an instant to pay for the emergency runic array.

But Jack was still alive. Hastily, he grabbed at some of the protein drinks and energy bars that were scattered around the room in small mounds. Around Jack, his squad mates all did the same, all of them began to scarfing the food down hurriedly.

Fifteen minutes later Jack had enough energy to think of moving, and made his slow, shambling way over to the nearby doorway, avoiding the medical officers already seeing to the wounded. He needed to get a tally of how many people they’d lost, and how much damage they had done, although despite that, Jack knew the campaign for him was over. There was no way his body would be able to fuel another emergency teleportation.

OOOOOOO

“Well?” Len’Dok growled out, while around them, the flag bridge was a scene of frenetic activity as the officers tried to reorganize the fleet. “What the hell did the humans hit us with!?”

“Sir!” the tactical officer quivered. “The, the strange shuttles we had seen in our espionage package were very obviously not shuttles. I could almost call them gunboats, perhaps, although small ones. They were highly maneuverable, but also kept a significant stock of scanner decoys. Their ECM suite is also incredible, but while we can filter out the decoys now that we’ve seen them, the ECM suite will continue to impact our defensive network. We’ll need to concentrate on shotting them down the instant they start interpolating with us. I would recommend pulling the destroyers into the center of the formation, use them to counter this.”

“We, we detected two different types of energy beams, sir. One was a kind of gravity-based energy destabilizer. That is about all I can say about it,” the sensor specialist took up the analysis. “The gun seems to have a wide beam visible in the natural light, mid-range, matching our secondary systems on the Equalizers. Speed is somewhat slower, but still hard to dodge. The second weapon system, of which each raven seems to have two, is an entirely different kind of energy sort. Even shorter ranged… maybe, that is unknown. What it would do against shielding is also unknown as it was used only against targets once their shields were down. And after that, they kill. No armor we have stopped those beams. The thickness of the armor didn’t matter at all. Once our shields fell, every ship struck was either badly damaged or destroyed in a matter of seconds.”

“And how many ships did we lose?” Len’Dok ground out, turning his glare onto one of this other officers.

That worthy was the Damage Control and SAR (Search and Rescue) coordinator for the fleet, and of all the officers he looked the most shocked. “Sir, only four of the Equalizers attacked were able to survive being struck by those cursed silver beams, and even they are dead in the water. It’s almost like someone set of nuclear devices inside the hulls. Multiple nukes.” He shivered. “One battleship survived somehow, but we’ve had to evacuate the remaining crews from all five ships. Beyond that…”

“It was very much an if this, then that, type of battle sir. Once our shields went down, only those five ships survived,” another tactical officers said, shivering a bit. The flagship, Silence, had lost some of its shielding, but thanks to the efforts of the crew on the bridge had not been struck by the silver beams in turn. “We lost twenty Equalizers outright, seventy-two battleships, three hundred destroyers, near to a full third of our complement. The cruisers lost one hundred and eighty-four.”

“But we destroyed nearly nine-tenths of the attackers,” the first tactical officer declared. “If these were the human’s main defense, then they have shot their bolt.”

“That kind of supposition is what kills fleets, Jro’toc!” Len’Dok roared, leaping to his feet. For a moment it looked like he would add a blow to the head to the curse he addressed the man with, a curse that, if translated to English, would read as someone who is so moronic he would eat his own clutch’s eggs, a grave insult to Skrull who, in their normal bodies, were egg laying.  But he gathered his self-control and simply continued to upbraid the man, his tone withering. “Assumptions let them strike us like that, and I will never allow them to do so again!”

Suitably chastened his officers all bowed his head, and he went on more coldly, looking over at the sensor specialists. “Tell me you have something report?”

The Skrull had very obviously sent out destroyers to try and run down the last of the attackers. This had worked in the main, but from the shaking of the sensor teams heads, it evidently had not worked as well as he had hoped. “We, we don’t know where the attack craft went, sir. It, its like they disappeared. And there is no chance they could have activated any kind of cloaking system with our ships so close. I, I am at a loss, Sir.”

“They seemed to congregate around one point, as if they were, well, the shuttles we thought they were entering a space-station’s hanger bay in groups of ten. But then… nothing,” the other analyst added.

Growling in fury, Len’Dok strode over to the tactical plot, watching the rest of the system for a moment, almost ignoring the efforts of his fleet to reform. In total that assault hadn’t done enough damage to cause him to rethink his plans, but if they could attack again… “Leave sensor probes behind where those ships disappeared. Then I want the destroyers broken up and spread out around the rest of the fleet in division sized packets, with the cruisers to back them up. They are to push out to the edge of our secondary sensors.”

Those were the scanners the Skrull ships used to actually fight, rather than survey the system. Doing this would remove the destroyers from any chance of being aided by the guns of their larger brethren, but Len’Dok was willing to sacrifice those ships for the majority. That was, after all, what they were for.

“The remaining cruisers will form a globe around the battleships and Equalizers which will assume Formation Zed.” Formation Zed was much like the previous formation except it had no depth to it. The ships within basically assumed the shape of a solid X shape, three ships thick in most places bar the center of the X, with no tail to the formation.

For a moment the tactical officers frowned, but then understood. With the larger ships just as susceptible to the strange silver beams as their smaller brethren, they had to be defended from any kind of contact with it. And let us hope that the repaired ?Kree ships they have don’t have the capital grade equivalent of that hell weapon. “The fleet will advance thus. And I want every eye on our scanners as we do. We cannot afford to be caught in a battle against the human’s super-powered troops and the Skrull fleet if they have more of those attack craft.”

OOOOOOO

Due to extensive use of the time dilation chambers and the sheer amount of Doom-designed repair droids the Avalon Empire had built up, the Empire had indeed built up a surplus of Ravens. They had to shift a lot of their priorities around, and even that would have been impossible without Harry’s newest trading partners, the so-called Inhumans. Thus, they had around three-thousand ravens, eight hundred of which, the ready CAP (Combat Air Patrol) had been practically wiped out.

Yet the human cost was far lower than that, something that brought wry, wary grins to Whitaker’s face as he reported, “We only lost around forty-two crewmen. Forty-two scattered across eight hundred Ravens. The emergency teleports functions still works even in a battle like this.  We’ve got a lot more injured, but even there, we’re doing far better than I anticipated in such a strike. The survivability of our ships also played a major factor.”

“However, I doubt we can assume our next strikes will be as effective. Assuming your opponents are stupid is a great way to get dead.”

Whitaker then highlighted the new enemy formation on the main strategic hologram in front of them, watching as they cut a course to intercept the fake earth. “We… can be a little sneaky here. The teleportation rings are invisible to them, and so we can maybe jump their main fleet, but to do that we’ll need to wait until the reach the mid-system range. But I think leaving them to their own devices that long is not the best idea. Powers?”

“I’m reluctant to take my fleet in against them alone sirs. I might be willing to try, if we can somehow convince them to hyper after us,” Admiral Powers replied. He was the fleet admiral currently operating as the field officer, while Whitaker had switched over to overall commander. Murphy was in charge of Fortress Mars and it’s defenses.”

“We can maybe shut down the hyperspace trap, make them think we can only hold it in readiness for a short amount of time before we run out of energy,” Murphy mused.

“Again, I don’t know if they would be willing to do that. Best to split up our Ravens then. Load up half of them, get the crews back into fighting shape, and prepare them to strike just in case when the fleet goes in. That won’t happen though until we get some Custodes type help up here,” Whitaker decided.

“The Human Torch is already here on Fortress Mars, and the others should be on their way soon,” Murphy soothed. “Powers, prepare your fleet to jump in. We’ll let you do that and get fully engaged with their destroyer screens before my people shut down the hyperspace trap and you retreat. That retreat will be up to you.”

OOOOOOO

By the time Whitaker, Powers and Murphy were hammering out their Ops plan, Harry and his officers were in the loop, communicating with local commanders in various places, not only within the Empire, but in their allied countries. This included a few that they weren’t formally allied with but had good relations with,or a mutual defense treaty, such as with Taiwan.

“Somehow, someway, the alien invaders have convinced the Chinese military to go crazy. Air Force and naval units are on the move attacking all of their neighbors bar North Korea. Thankfully, North Korea doesn’t seem to have been infested with the same madness, and they are hunkering down, shouting out about how it is some kind of direct threat to them, but doing nothing,” Dennis reported. “That’s all that we can ask for right now, and the local American forces were already responding as well.”

“And the Chinese prime minister is still saying that this is an internal matter and they’ll handle it!?” Harry growled out, as the last of his officers, Scott, who had been out on a shopping expedition/date with Rogue, joined them in the main hallway of Camelot.

Nor was it only the officers thus assembled who were sitting around, staring at a globe of the world to one side and a hologram showing the rest of the star system on the other. The Fantastic Four, bar Johnny Ororo, who had been on fortress Mars already, Thundra, and every team that looked to Harry for leadership was here, ready to face a larger, if not more dangerous threat than anything most of them had encountered before.

“Yes he is, but he is also calling the naval forces that bombarded Taiwan and fired missiles at Japan and the American Pacific fleet ‘rogue elements’, which means the defenders and Americans can deal with them as they wish. Why he did so we don’t know, although I will say that our sensors haven’t detected any communication between the fleet and China proper.” Dennis answered, shaking his head.

Sage took up the tale then, gesturing at the world map hovering in the center of the hallway. “Meanwhile in China, have Chinese units fighting one another, Chinese units fighting the invaders, and Chinese units sitting on their hands. Mandarin has taken command of one of the local military bases himself and seems to be directing some kind of response against invaders from there. From what we can discern Mandarin’s doing a good job, but he’s also moving around the place. He seems to think, and I agree, that the aliens somehow headhunted officers around the first portal they opened, gained access to various codes and phrases to give out orders and used that to cause this chaos we’re seeing. Mandarin’s even ordered all of the nuclear silos to be shut down. Only an in person command from him will be allowed to reopen them.”

“According to open radio signals we’ve intercepted, any officer who suggests otherwise is to be shot. I don’t know how effective that will be though,” Mystique mused. “This is the kind of operation I could have done if I had my own powers and that of a telepath. That’s a deadly combination.”

“Let’s leave China for now, what about the rest of the globe?” Harry ordered.

“The biggest attack so far, or at least the one that has the most units already in our world, is the one in Washington. They are spreading out quickly, but they are also coming under heavy attacks from Air Force and local military units, more, they tried to take out Puget Sound’s Naval Shipyard, and failed, badly,” Sir Dennis said, looking over to Enterprise.

That worthy stood up, smiling slightly. “My little side project, the revamping of the Black Dragon, was completed a week ago. Her AI was not as yet brought online, but I have no doubt that it is now, and the various antiair defenses we sold to the U.S. Navy no doubt came as a supreme surprise.”

“Our rockets and missiles give us more range than their weapons, but even the small skimmers seem to have shielding. It takes two missiles to knock them out of the sky. We’ve only downed three of the larger fish-like creatures yet,” Steve reported.

“The president is safe under mount Cheyenne, and local military commanders are handling this about as well as can be expected. We’ve war-gamed things like this before, when someone attacks Washington in force. The Pentagon and the Senate and Congress, though…” He shook his head slowly. “Whichever congressman and senator was on Capitol Hill at the time, they’re gone now. That includes the vice, the speaker, the Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate. The secretary of state is missing. The president is the only one who wasn’t there. The enemy tried to decapitate our government, and only failed because of the warnings the Custodes have been giving everyone.”

“The same occurred in Paris, although the French were not as willing to thank us as the Americans are for those warnings. They are now screaming for help to reclaim Paris. The cities entirely under the command of the aliens by this point,” Ororo murmured, shaking her head slightly. She had been handling that line of communication. “The aliens began destroying the city almost immediately, and any fight went out of the Parisians.”

Harry nodded, staring at the images on the map for a moment, highlighting them one after another as Steve cut in again, saying that Nick fury was on the ground in Washington, leading a group of police, special forces, CIA, and other operatives to try and cause as much damage to the invaders as they could within Washington. At this point, that wasn’t much beyond ambushing any of them they could find without air cover. Air superiority over the city definitely was in the hands of the aliens.

But considering that these aliens didn’t seem to be after anything other than killing people as many people as they could find, any little bit helped. Harry shuddered to think of the number of dead already, and a feeling of deep guilt washed through him.

“All right. We need to split up our forces, unfortunately. I wish we could concentrate on each place in detail, but if we do that, were going to lose thousands more civilians in every other theater. We’ve already lost too many,” Harry said aloud, shaking his head sadly. “We should have anticipated this kind of shotgun approach to invasion the moment we were told about the Chitauri.”

“And what could we have accomplished then, my love?” Ororo interjected firmly, poking Harry in the shoulder. “We had no way of tracking Loki, no way of knowing where he had been unless we arrived on his heels hard enough to discover his magical residue. Nor did we have any idea the Chitauri would be so wildly violent in their approach, deliberately targeting civilian targets. So I will hear no self-recrimination on your part.”

Harry smiled at her wanly, taking her hand and squeezing it briefly, trying not to look over at Hela who he could tell was also glaring his way, before turning back to the matter at hand. “Jean, we can’t afford to send in too large a force into China without being invited, the last thing we need is to add still more kindle to that powder keg. Do you think you can head in and deal with them? On your own I mean?”

Of all of his people, only Jean had both the telepathic ability to fight something that apparently could take people over, and the raw power to work on a countrywide scale like this.  Indeed, before the China issue was fully explained, Harry had been tempted to send her after the attacking fleet. Released of restrictions like taking prisoners or nearby civilians, Jean could slaughter that whole fleet in short order.

So could Harry, obviously, but he was going to be busy elsewhere. The Chitauri aren’t our only enemy here, and if the shouts of their leaders are any indication, well, it seems like it’s time to bite the bullet and fight Titan with Titan.

“If Emma and Charles are willing to back me up if I need it, yes,” Jean answered firmly. This kind of mission was why she had rushed to get back into shape after giving birth to the twins, this was why she was part of the world guard in the first place, and Jean ignored the small twinge of fear for her two little ones. They were hidden away in Camelot, up in the headmaster’s tower in fact. Here they were under so many magical defenses it would take an orbital bombardment fit to crack the planet and then some to get through, and no one would be able to find Camelot or them.

Harry gazed into Jean’s face for a few seconds, then slowly nodded. Worry was clear in his emerald eyes, but he couldn’t address it now. He had orders to give.

“That’s China, then. As for America, Scott I’m sending you and all the X-men in. Cannonball, you go with them, they might need more aerial type help. Steve, you’re in overall command of that battle. We’ll send in one of the battalions of ODMs as well. Beyond that, I will leave that battle entirely up to you and the locals.” Harry smiled a little wintry smile. “Just don’t let me hear about tanks entering urban environments without accompanying infantry please, or anything equally stupid? That would hurt my heart.”

Steve snorted, but also said that Tony would be willing to help.” He and the president are already talking about getting his house arrest, officially lifted, rather than unofficially going around it through use of his runic doorway that you gave him.”

Harry nodded, then turned to Colossus. “Severomorsk is yours. You’ll lead the majority of the world guard bar Ororo, Danielle and Amara. Another Battalion of orbital drug Marines will go in with you, commanded by Sean. He’s our most senior field officer among them, and I imagine that Sam will want to be in with Steve in America?”

But the Falcon shook his head, gesturing to the map. “Paris. They’ll need my help more than Washington will in America with everyone else already heading there. Who all were you thinking of sending to Paris?”

“Thunderbird, Cortez, Mystique, Thing, Thundra. Along with another company of orbital Drop Marines to drop directly into the city of lights.”

“The British Home Fleet is already moving as well and is coordinating quite well with the local French resistance, both naval and army. Somewhat surprising, frankly,” Sir Dennis added to Harry’s words.

The fantastic four, looked at one another, then nodded, indicating without words that they understood why Harry was willing to break the team up further like that. While Reed was a decent fighter, he wasn’t really a soldier, so killing the enemy might not come easily to him on this kind of battlefield. And while she had somewhat recovered from her pregnancy, that was a far cry to being combat ready.

“I’m good with that. Heck, maybe when all this is over, I can take Thundra to Paris and have a bit of a date there. It is supposed to be super romantic, right?” Thing questioned, causing his girlfriend to roll her eyes.

“Hopefully it will again after the distractions been repaired. They haven’t knocked over the Eiffel Tower, but they have destroyed the Arc de Triumph,” Harry answered, shaking his head sadly at what he saw as something near to sacrilege.

With a growl, Harry once more concentrated on the here and now, pointing over to Dark Star, Nikolai’s sister Laynia, who had agreed to help once more in this war. “I want you to help up in orbit alongside the Human Torch. Jean will join you there once she’s dealt with whatever force the invaders have who can control other people’s minds. Don’t overstay your welcome in China, Jean.”

He then smiled slightly. “Although, if you do discover that the Chitauri or Black Order telepath’s are attempting to take over any of the nuclear silos, feel free to… neutralize the threat in any way you wish.”

Jean smirked at that, nodding her head.

“Ororo, Hela, Danielle, you, Fenrir and Garm will have to hold the main enemy force in Nepal,” Harry went on, looking at his mocha-skinned lover, the two hounds.

Honestly, Harry would probably have preferred to send Fenrir or Garm in with Jean but knew that they couldn’t really be of any use anyplace with a civilian population. Both monstrous wolves exuded an aura of fear to those who did not know them, and with everything so chaotic in China already, there was one thing that didn’t really need. It’s quite ironic, given that Garm actually plays well with others, and Fenris is surprisingly gentle if you don’t get him angry. And they can go wild in the mountains of Nepal as much as they like.

Hela nodded firmly, rubbing at Garm’s eye ridges. “We will do aught we can, my love. But if the mad Titan does appear, even ones so doughty as we may become overmatched.”

“You’re just supposed to hold them until help arrives. Either me or our allies,” Harry reminded her fiercely. “It Thanos himself shows up, retreat as best you can.”

Skadi had already been sent through the Rainbow Bridge to Asgard to request her people’s aid. This kind of assault was precisely the type that the alliance between Lord Odin and Harry had been created to meet.

“Wait, if you’re sending all of them into the main invasion point and note I’m not arguing with that, and the rest of us to Paris, Russia and Washington, doesn’t that mean there’s no one left to the city in the Balkans?” Scott asked in confusion.

Ororo Harry and Jean exchanged glances, looking over to Reed who winced, knowing what they were about to say. “Doctor Doom has created mutual defense treaties with many of his neighbors, including Hungary. He’s already on the move, and bluntly ordered us to not stick our noses in.”

“Ah. I almost feel sorry for them, I mean Doom’s been acting all nice lately, stands to reason that he has a lot of nasty saved up…” Murmured Ben Grimm, then shook his head. “Wait, no, no I don’t feel sorry for them at all.”

End Chapter…for now.

There you have it guys. Sorry it ends so abruptly, but I just didn’t have enough time to work on it after finishing Stallion and Making Waves. Both of which will be up here soon. The small story poll will follow tomorrow.

In other news, would anyone be interested in seeing me write up a Death Battle kind of omake between the original Galadriel and the RoP Karendriel? Had a dream about it a few nights back, tickled my funny bone.