"I want to avenge my family."
The words ca out through gritted teeth, low and hard. The girl's hands were shaking at her sides, the scarlet energy curling at her fingertips like sothing alive that had been startled, and she was pulling against her brother's grip with the controlled desperation of soone who understood why she was being held back and resented it anyway.
Pietro did not let go.
"Tony Stark deserves to answer for what his weapons did. I am not saying otherwise." He kept his voice even, close to her ear, the words precise rather than soothing. "But the others out there are not him. And Wanda, you know what happens when the ability runs past what you can hold. You felt it last ti. We both did."
She stopped pulling. Not agreent: just the decision to stop.
Pietro's grip loosened slightly but did not release.
"Soone else has gone to deal with Hydra for us tonight. Our plan was never going to survive this kind of chaos unchanged. The city is in motion, there are soldiers everywhere, the streets are not ours. While everything is still moving, leaving is the right choice." He looked at her face until she looked back at him. "We need more ti. More training. Stark can live a few more years. When we are ready, we will"
The wall ca in.
Not an explosion, not a blast, just the wall choosing to stop being a wall in a section roughly the size of a doorway, rubble tumbling forward and dust billowing out across the floor, and through the opening ca the shape of an Iron Legion suit, not Tony's configuration, one of the others, moving with the careful deliberateness of sothing that has been instructed to be non-threatening.
The voice that ca from it was calm and clearly articulated.
"Please do not be alard. I am Jarvis, the artificial intelligence assistant operating within the Iron Man system. I have been directed to locate civilians in this area and escort them to safety. You are not in danger from . Please trust enough to co with and I will ensure you are clear of the battlefield."
Pietro's free hand had already moved behind his back, the fingers flickering through a vibration that was not quite visible, slowing again as Jarvis finished speaking.
He drew a breath. Pulled Wanda a little closer with the arm already around her shoulders.
"Thank God," he said, with exactly the right amount of relief. "We have been trapped in here since the shooting started. Thank you, really, Iron Man, thank you so much."
The drones swept the city streets in coordinated patterns, their anti-gravity engines producing a low collective hum that underscored the sharper sounds of combat below. The lascannon bursts they fired were quick and precise, suppressing the Hydra positions that the ground elents were pressing against. Between the drones and the Scyllax Guardian-automata moving at street level, chainswords running and ceramite shrugging off the fire that ca back at them, the Hydra foothold in the city was collapsing inward toward the fortress hill.
Nolan ca through a cleared intersection with David alongside him, the power armour's sensors reading the engagent geotry through the smoke and light, and he found Thor's position from the structural damage pattern in the nearest building before he actually saw Thor.
Tony was helping him walk. Thor was walking, which was the important thing, and he was doing so with the expression of a man who has decided that his current situation is embarrassing and is managing that embarrassnt through sheer force of dignity.
"Thor." Nolan looked him over through the eyepiece as he got closer. "Your condition."
"Adequate." Thor straightened slightly, which produced a brief expression that was not wincing, strictly speaking, but was in the sa neighbourhood. "Asgardian constitution. I was careless. It will not happen again."
He was holding Mjolnir perhaps slightly tighter than the grip required.
David stepped forward with a panacea capsule from its dical kit and offered it without comnt. Thor accepted it with the expression of soone accepting help and choosing not to make remarks about it, and within a minute the colour had begun to co back properly into his face.
He dropped a hand onto Tony's armoured shoulder, which produced a sound like soone slapping the hood of a car.
"Thank you. Both of you."
Tony had his faceplate up. The expression underneath it was doing several things at once, most of them related to how close the calculation had apparently been.
"It should be thanking you. If you hadn't been standing where you were when that shell ca through, it would have been my back it hit. And I do not think a panacea capsule would have covered my particular situation." He closed the faceplate again. "So. Yes. Thank you."
David's eyes pulsed once.
"My lord. Chapter Master Tyberos has breached the fortress entrance and is engaged inside. Doom's forces have reached the cliff approach behind the hill and are advancing on the rear fortifications. Hydra's capacity to hold both points simultaneously is unlikely to last long."
Nolan settled the grip on his Warscythe.
"Pull the Intelligent Control Corps from the city streets to the fortress. The city is clear enough. Concentrate everything on the final push."
He turned toward Tony and Thor.
"Second half," he said simply. "Let's finish it."
The lascannon beams from the Intelligent Control robots ca down from the hill's approach and went through the secret fortress's outer defensive positions with the particular decisiveness of weapons that had been designed for exactly this kind of work. The tal bunkers that the Hydra elite soldiers had been using as fire positions beca, in sequence, very hot, and then were not usable as fire positions anymore. The Defence Force companies ca out of their own cover in the wake of the beams, lasguns up, advancing in the disciplined rushes they had been trained to execute, the Intelligent Control Corps units moving with them in the coordinated pattern that David's remote managent made possible.
On the far side of the fortress, above the cliff, Doom was working.
He was standing in the air above the rock face, the dark green cape moving in the night wind that ca off the hills, and every ti his ceramite palm swept outward the hellfire that answered the gesture found another cluster of Hydra soldiers on the fortress's upper levels and removed them from consideration with a thoroughness that fire is particularly suited to. He was not hurrying. He was thodical, which was more efficient than hurrying.
Through his eyepiece, he read the casualty distribution in his Defence Force companies, noted the pressure on the approach route, and opened a channel to the first company captain.
"Demolitionists, forward with one team of Scyllax-class Guardian-automata. Proceed to the base of the fortress wall on the eastern face. You are to place high-explosive charges on the foundation and create an entry breach for the assault elent."
The captain's voice ca back imdiately, clear and without hesitation.
"Understood. Demolitionists, on , bring your charges."
He looked up toward Doom's position in the air for a fraction of a second, laspistol in his hand, and then he turned back to his soldiers.
"For the glory of the Imperial Aquila!" The words ca out of him at full volu, the kind of volu that is ant to be heard, that is ant to carry past the sound of weapons and reach the people who need to hear it. "For Lord Doom! Charge!"
He was out of the bunker before the Scyllax units had fully moved to cover him, the demolitionists behind him with the sa montum, not waiting, not calculating, just going.
Doom saw it. He was already moving his palm before the captain had cleared the bunker's edge, the defensive spells falling across the running figures like a second layer of armour, taking the deflected rounds and the near misses and redirecting them into the ground or the rock or anywhere that was not a person who had chosen to run first.
Three minutes later, the explosion from the eastern wall base lit the surrounding hillside briefly white and threw debris across the approaches in a wide scatter. When the sound finished rolling back off the mountains, the hole in the fortress wall was large enough to drive a vehicle through.
Doom's voice went out across every channel simultaneously.
"All Defence Force elents and Intelligent Control Corps: advance on the breach."
A pause of exactly the weight a pause needs to be before the words that follow it.
"For the glory of the Imperial Aquila. For Primarch."
"All units: attack."
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