Everyone's expression changed instantly.
Tony Stark reacted first, stepping directly in front of Thor to block him.
"Back off, Point Break."
Thor didn't even slow down.
One swing of Mjolnir sent Tony flying sideways through the Quinjet cabin.
Thor snorted coldly, grabbed Loki by the collar, and launched himself out of the aircraft.
"It's Thor," Natasha said imdiately.
"Relax. He's technically on our side."
That did absolutely nothing to calm Tony.
"Oh, really?" he snapped while climbing back to his feet. "Because right now the only guy who knows where the Tesseract is just got kidnapped by Space Conan."
Then he rocketed straight into the storm clouds after them.
Natasha rubbed her forehead.
Tony's mouth alone could probably start an interstellar diplomatic crisis if left unsupervised long enough.
With a sigh, she reported the situation back to the Helicarrier and set the Quinjet to automated holding patterns nearby.
…
Tony caught up to Thor almost imdiately.
And without wasting a second, he punched him directly in the face.
The symbiote armor had elevated Tony Stark's combat capabilities to a terrifying level.
Even on a cosmic scale, he qualified as a serious powerhouse now.
Compared to the Bleeding Edge armor from later years, this suit was vastly superior. That older technology had already beco obsolete in Tony's eyes.
Thor absorbed the punch.
Then casually retaliated with Mjolnir.
BOOM!
Tony got launched backward through the trees.
"Sir," JARVIS reported calmly, "the target's durability exceeds projected estimates. One hundred tons of striking force produced negligible damage."
Tony stared.
"You're kidding ."
Thor raised Mjolnir toward the sky.
Lightning exploded downward.
Tony barely had ti to complain before natural thunderbolts slamd directly into him.
These weren't the later god-infused lightning attacks Thor would eventually wield after fully awakening his divine power, but ordinary targets still wouldn't survive being hit by them.
Thor clearly didn't expect the tal man in front of him to survive either.
But the silver-white symbiote armor held firm.
Electricity surged wildly across the suit's surface while insulation systems redirected most of the current harmlessly away.
Tony grinned.
Then both his arms transford into massive energy cannons.
"Smile for the caras."
BOOM!
This ti Thor got blasted backward.
Nearby, Loki sat against a rock watching the entire scene unfold with obvious enjoynt.
"Iron man!" Thor roared furiously.
He leapt forward and smashed Mjolnir directly against Tony's raised arm.
The armor reacted instantly.
Liquid secondary kryptonite tal surged outward, forming a shield just before impact.
KRAAAAASH!
The collision created a deafening explosion.
The liquid tal shield visibly dented inward under the force of the strike.
Fortunately, Tony twisted aside in ti.
Otherwise that hamr would've landed directly on his body.
At close range, Thor completely dominated him.
Within seconds Tony was getting beaten into the ground.
"Dammit!"
The symbiote armor shifted imdiately.
Liquid tal surged across Tony's fra in massive quantities.
Then the armor expanded.
A colossal chanized giant erupted from the forest.
Giant Slayer Mode.
The sa anti-Hulk combat configuration Tony had designed for fighting monsters capable of flattening cities.
And suddenly the montum reversed.
In this form, Tony could physically wrestle the Hulk head-on.
Thor took a massive punch directly across the jaw hard enough to split his lip open.
Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.
Still, Thor had centuries of combat experience fighting giants and monsters across the Nine Realms.
The two powerhouses tore through the forest around them like natural disasters.
By the ti Ben Grimm finally arrived, most of the trees were simply gone.
Ben stared at the battlefield.
"So… Stark's fistfighting Thor now."
He pressed a hand to his rocky forehead.
"Do I jump in?"
Natasha's voice ca through the comms imdiately.
"Stop them. This fight is completely unnecessary."
At this point Natasha was spiritually exhausted.
Every single person on this team had authority issues.
Ben charged forward without hesitation.
Thor noticed him imdiately.
"A stone giant?"
Without overthinking it, Thor hurled Mjolnir.
The hamr smashed directly into Ben Grimm.
BOOM!
Ben got launched backward instantly.
For the first ti in a very long while, visible cracks spread across the Thing's nearly indestructible stone skin.
Ben stared blankly.
Hold on.
Were Thor and Loki seriously brothers?
Because the power difference between them felt ridiculous.
Still, once Ben rejoined the fight, the chaos ended quickly.
Even Thor couldn't comfortably handle both Giant Slayer Iron Man and the Thing at the sa ti.
…
Night passed quickly.
Loki was eventually imprisoned aboard the Helicarrier inside a specially designed containnt cell.
The public version of the "Avengers" had officially scored their first major victory.
Loki's scepter was confiscated and delivered to the gamma research lab, where Bruce Banner and Tony Stark began attempting to use it to locate the Tesseract.
Thor inford everyone that Loki's true objective involved using the Tesseract to summon an extraterrestrial invasion force and conquer Earth.
The warning created so urgency.
But only so.
After all, two genius scientists were now working the problem together.
Finding the Tesseract was just a matter of ti.
And ti was sothing they believed they had plenty of.
Loki was locked in a reinforced cell playing the role of defeated prisoner while the so-called Avengers slowly assembled themselves.
On the surface, everything looked promising.
But everyone aboard the Helicarrier understood the truth.
This was the illusion Nick Fury needed to present to the World Security Council.
Yes, Loki had been captured.
But Hawkeye and Erik Selvig were still missing.
And more importantly, the Tesseract itself remained completely unaccounted for.
Those were only the obvious problems.
The deeper issue was internal.
The team itself was a disaster waiting to happen.
The greatest problem was trust.
Nick Fury's reputation as the "King of Spies" already explained why nobody fully trusted him.
Thor trusted absolutely no one except Loki.
And after Loki taphorically stabbed him in the kidney enough tis, even that trust had started eroding.
Beyond Fury, the heroes themselves had almost no chemistry.
Every single one of them was powerful, stubborn, and used to operating independently.
Strong personalities made terrible soldiers.
Everyone wanted to lead.
Nobody wanted to listen.
A collection of elite superhumans sounded perfect in theory.
In reality, the entire structure felt unstable enough to shatter at any mont.
Worst of all, Fury had assembled the team without finding soone capable of truly leading it.
And sitting right in the middle of all this chaos was Loki himself.
Pretending to be captured.
Watching.
Manipulating.
Stirring the cracks wider from the inside.
The situation would've been completely different if Drex Valen had actually shown up.
Whether hero or civilian, everyone acknowledged Drex's terrifying competence and overwhelming capability.
He was the kind of person who only appeared once in a century.
Unfortunately, the director of S.W.O.R.D. was currently continuing his long-standing tradition of disappearing whenever people needed him most.
And without him there…
The proto-Avengers began falling apart almost imdiately.
Ironically, the loudest source of conflict ca from the man constantly preaching justice, freedom, and progress.
Tony Stark.
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