"The mine?"
Nick Fury frowned.
The S.W.O.R.D. agent beside him nodded and handed over a file.
"The tunnels were abandoned years ago."
Decades of excavation had nearly drained the surrounding ore veins dry. One by one, the miners left after work dried up.
McCormack Mining had only managed to stay afloat by selling off old stockpiles. According to financial projections, the company had maybe three months left before total collapse unless they discovered a new deposit.
Fury's single eye narrowed instantly.
His instincts leaned toward conspiracy before anything else.
Insurance fraud.
That was his first thought.
Monster-disaster insurance had exploded in popularity recently. If McCormack Mining had purchased a large enough policy beforehand, staging an incident wasn't impossible.
The company mainly extracted pyrite and copper. No associated gold deposits had ever been discovered.
The United States' decentralized law enforcent system complicated things further. Local sheriffs often wielded enormous authority over their jurisdictions, handling everything from parking violations to homicide investigations.
But when monsters were involved?
S.W.O.R.D. bulldozed through bureaucracy like a tank through drywall.
The governor of Arizona had personally ordered every agency to cooperate fully.
Honestly, the efficiency shocked Fury.
Back in the S.H.I.E.L.D. days, even with all their influence, evacuating civilians and establishing a containnt periter for sothing like this would've taken nearly a week.
S.W.O.R.D. had done it in under twenty-four hours.
The local police had even organized evacuation efforts themselves.
Tis had changed.
Fast.
Then gunfire erupted inside the quarantine zone.
Screams followed imdiately after.
Fury drew his weapon without hesitation.
As a high-ranking S.W.O.R.D. operative, his sidearm wasn't so outdated ballistic handgun.
Traditional firearms were practically worthless against serious monster threats.
Instead, he carried one of Drex Valen's newest inventions:
An Atomic Gun.
According to Drex, the weapon utilized miniature nuclear fission principles. Each shot carried enough destructive power to obliterate a tank.
Only agents with clearance codes below three digits were authorized to carry one into the field.
Fury still had concerns about long-term radiation exposure, but after witnessing the thing vaporize armored targets during testing, he had reluctantly admitted sothing to himself:
Having a genius psychopath running your organization felt surprisingly reassuring.
"What happened?" Fury barked.
The nearby agent touched his earpiece, listened briefly, then paled.
"Our teams were attacked while inspecting the mine tunnels!"
Both n sprinted through the containnt line.
And then Fury saw them.
Spiders.
Hundreds of them.
Human-sized spiders poured across the desert terrain in a chittering tidal wave.
"What the hell..."
Fury stopped dead for half a second.
So were the size of large dogs.
Others were bigger than motorcycles.
Their legs hamred against the dirt like sharpened spears.
"Tiger-level threat?" one agent shouted.
"Hell no," another snapped. "This is Demon-level if those things spread into a city!"
Fury imdiately called for reinforcents.
The personnel stationed here weren't enough. Not even close.
Then he saw one of the giant spiders lunging toward a little girl.
Fury fired instantly.
The Atomic Gun released a pale blue beam with almost no recoil. It looked like concentrated light, though technically it wasn't. The projectile traveled at supersonic velocity, tearing through the air with a shriek.
The beam hit the spider center mass.
The creature exploded.
Not taphorically.
Actually exploded.
The blast shredded the spider into burning fragnts while superheated energy flash-vaporized most of its bodily fluids. What little remained hit the ground already on fire.
The surrounding civilians scread and scattered in panic.
"Get those people moving!" Fury shouted at the nearby agent before charging forward himself.
"Yes, sir!"
Nick Fury had seen aliens, assassins, rogue super soldiers, gods, and enough classified nightmares to fill a graveyard.
But swarms of giant spiders crawling out of a desert mine still ranked unusually high on the list.
The spiders moved faster than humans despite their massive size. Gravity clearly limited them sowhat, but not enough.
Several civilians trying to fight back were dragged screaming into the swarm.
Fury kept firing while covering the evacuation.
The timing couldn't have been worse.
Another hour and the town would've been fully evacuated.
Instead, chaos erupted halfway through the operation.
Above them, five Black Hawk helicopters spread out across the sky.
Originally they'd only been deployed to monitor the periter and prevent any monsters from escaping.
Now they had permission to engage.
Five trails of fire streaked downward.
Hellfire missiles.
BOOM!
Explosions rolled across the desert in waves of heat and smoke. Spiders near the impact zones were either vaporized outright or hurled through the air by the shockwaves.
The mounted M134 miniguns mounted on the Black Hawks opened fire next.
The Vulcan cannons tore through the air like industrial shredders.
From above, streams of tracer fire rained downward, ripping apart the ground and everything crawling across it.
Spider bodies burst apart in sprays of green fluid.
Chunks of legs and shattered carapaces flew everywhere.
Even so, the spiders kept attacking.
So leaped toward the helicopters with horrifying speed.
They were shredded midair before they got close.
One creature exploded so violently under concentrated gunfire that by the ti its remains hit the ground, it no longer resembled anything biological.
"Honestly? These things aren't that bad," soone muttered over comms.
"The numbers are the real problem."
Watching Black Hawks massacre the swarm so efficiently cald everyone down considerably.
The helicopter pilots grew bolder too.
Sure, the spiders could jump absurdly high, but helicopters could always fly higher.
Far away, Drex Valen watched the operation unfold remotely.
"These Eight-Legged Freaks were never supposed to be difficult for ard humans."
The creatures had been inspired by an old monster movie.
Terrifying visually.
Not especially dangerous against organized military forces.
Honestly, if Drex hadn't modified them personally by increasing their biological density enough to support their enormous size, ordinary rifle rounds would've shredded them instantly.
As things stood, small-caliber weapons still struggled to penetrate their exoskeletons.
Even then, the spiders probably wouldn't have wiped out this town.
This was Arizona.
Half the civilians were ard already.
Humanity no longer lived in the age of swords and axes.
Then the ground started shaking.
THOOM.
THOOM.
THOOM.
A massive silhouette slowly erged from the mine entrance.
Every conversation stopped.
The thing looked like a monstrous tarantula... or maybe a bird-eating spider.
At that size, species classification stopped mattering.
Normal giant spiders in the swarm ranged from bathtub-sized to roughly human-scale when their legs fully extended.
This thing was the size of a truck.
Its body was covered in thick black bristles. Each leg looked powerful enough to punch through concrete.
The creature lood over the battlefield like a living siege weapon.
And suddenly, the smaller spiders didn't seem very frightening anymore.
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