Smith looked down at the city below him.
Chitauri soldiers were everywhere — in the streets, on the building faces, pouring through windows, firing indiscriminately at anything that moved. The ground engagement had spread across a dozen city blocks in every direction from the portal's base.
He raised his right arm.
What came from his open palm was not a single technique. It was dozens of them simultaneously, Ki blasts blooming outward like a firework detonating in all directions at once — each bolt threading through the aerial grid of the city with the precision of something that had already decided where it was going. They spread across the Manhattan skyline and the streets below in a single, continuous blast.
Every Chitauri soldier the blast touched died on the spot. Infantry dropped from their hoverbikes. A Leviathan that had been making a run at a residential block was torn apart in midair, the concentrated impacts working through its armored segments faster than it could process the damage. A second one came apart the same way.
Even Loki's commandeered skiff took a direct hit. The blast caught it and sent him tumbling off the vehicle and down onto a nearby rooftop, where he hit hard and lay still for a moment.
Tony hovered fifty meters away and watched all of this.
"Is this your true strength?" he said, to no one in particular.
On the street below, Rogers stood in the middle of a cluster of Chitauri soldiers that had simply stopped — because the bolts had reached them before anything nearby had registered the threat vector. He looked at the soldiers dropping around him and lifted his eyes to the sky.
"That's simply inhuman strength."
Jessica Jones watched a Chitauri heavy trooper — something that had taken two of her best hits and kept moving — get punched through by a single blast and collapse. She looked up at the figure above the skyline.
"This," she said, "is the God on Earth."
Natasha was on the street near the downed Quinjet. She looked up in disbelief. She had known Smith was in a different category from the beginning. She had not known the category was quite this different.
Every superhero and enhanced individual on the battlefield looked up at Smith Doyle at the same moment. Even the Fraternity's fighters, who had been operating in their own lanes, paused.
Loki picked himself up from the rooftop. His expression was dark in a way that had nothing performative about it. He had warned the Chitauri commander that Earth had powerful defenders. He had been told not to worry. He had apparently not been specific enough.
Smith looked up at the portal.
The ground was clear. Through the portal's column of light, the Chitauri army was still flowing — soldiers cycling through in a continuous stream, Leviathans banking into position for another pass. Beyond them, in the void of space, the mothership hung like a dark continent, its scale making everything between here and there feel provisional.
He raised one finger.
The energy gathered at its tip — not quickly, deliberately. Condensing. Compressing. The air around his hand bent in the particular way that very dense things make the air around them behave, the light taking slightly longer to travel through the space immediately adjacent. A sphere formed, small at first, then growing as more ki fed into it, until it was large enough that the people on the street below could see the distortion around it from two thousand feet down.
The ki bomb that now floated in front of him had enough concentrated destructive output to do what its name suggested it could do. Smith had calculated the yield carefully. Enough to cross the portal and reach the mothership. Enough that the soldiers still flowing through the aperture would not survive contact with it.
He threw it straight up.
The Chitauri infantry in its path ceased to exist. Not destroyed — disintegrated, instantly, the way matter ceases to exist when it encounters something that is categorically not interested in its continued arrangement. The Leviathan that was directly in the bomb's trajectory vaporized before its nervous system could register what was happening. The bomb passed through the portal without slowing.
Through the portal, in the space beyond, it continued on its trajectory toward the Chitauri mothership.
The light that came back through the portal a moment later was bright enough to cast hard shadows across every building in midtown Manhattan simultaneously.
BOOM.
The stream of Chitauri soldiers stopped.
The portal held open, empty. Nothing more was coming through.
Smith descended slowly toward Stark Tower's roof. "It looks like the war is over."
Selvig was conscious again, sitting up against the equipment housing with one hand pressed to a cut on his forehead. Whatever the Mind Stone had done to him had broken during the energy backlash from the shield collapse, and he was looking at the machinery around him with the disoriented horror of someone seeing their own work clearly for the first time in months.
He looked at Smith and said, urgently, "The scepter — the scepter is the key to closing the portal."
The Mind Scepter was lying on the roof surface where Loki had dropped it when he'd fall. Smith walked to it and picked it up. He stood in front of Selvig's device and pressed the scepter to the Tesseract housing.
The portal closed.
Smith took the Tesseract and stored it.
On the Helicarrier, every operations station had someone watching a screen.
The analysts had been transmitting the battle feeds from a dozen simultaneous sources — camera drones, news helicopters, street-level surveillance, satellite downlinks — and all of them had been playing the same thing for the last two minutes. Smith clearing the ground engagement with a single coordinated blast. Smith gathering a planet-destroying energy bomb at the tip of one finger. Smith sending it through the portal into the assembled Chitauri fleet. The portal closing.
The operations floor was on its feet and loud.
Nick Fury stood apart from it and looked at the screens with an expression that was not celebratory.
The kill count from that single blast was not calculable in the time available. The energy output the sensors had recorded from the ki bomb was not a number he had been prepared to see attached to a human being — or whatever the correct classification was. In the brief window before the portal closed, the sensors had registered the bomb's detonation against the Chitauri fleet as something that did not correspond to any yield in any weapons database S.H.I.E.L.D. maintained.
He reached into his windbreaker and found the pager. Looked at it. Thought about Carol Danvers.
He put it back.
If Smith Doyle is already doing this, he thought, what exactly is Carol Danvers going to add to the calculation?
He looked at the screens for a moment longer. Then he straightened.
"The war is over," he said, loudly enough to carry across the floor.
With the Chitauri's silence, the Avengers converged on Stark Tower from every direction.
Thor had found Loki on the rooftop where the ki blast had deposited him. The former prince of Asgard, who had watched the last few minutes from that location, had made a thorough reassessment of his position during that time. He offered no resistance. Thor secured him without discussion.
The Fraternity's supernatural assets were already pulling out. The werewolf and vampire units moved their casualties with the quiet efficiency of organizations that had done this before and had protocols for it. No fanfare, no lingering. They disappeared back into the city's infrastructure the way they'd arrived, leaving nothing behind except cleared streets. The Paragons assembled at the Red Ribbon Corporation building, conducted their personnel count, and began triage.
What remained at Stark Tower was the Avengers, one bound prisoner, and the debris of an afternoon.
Thor looked at the assembled group and said, "Smith. Everyone. Loki is a member of Asgard. His crimes will be judged by Asgard's laws. I will take him back for trial."
Rogers's jaw set. Natasha's expression didn't change but her posture did.
The damage to Manhattan was not abstract. The ruins of the central island were visible from the rooftop — smoke columns, collapsed facades, streets that had been ordinary streets six hours ago and were something else now. The casualty numbers weren't in yet, but the rough shape of them was visible in the fires still burning. And Thor was standing here asking to extradite the person responsible with a single statement, no conditions, no process.
Both of them knew the counter-argument. They'd seen what came through that portal. Asgard produced that. Asgard also produced Thor, and the Bifrost, and everything that suggested the scale of power available to Odin's kingdom if it chose to be uncooperative. Going to war with Asgard over Loki's custody was a specific kind of bad math.
Everyone in the group looked at Smith.
Smith said, "Thor. Take him back to Asgard for trial."
He held Thor's gaze for a moment. "I trust that after this, Loki won't have another opportunity to do evil."
Thor said, "He'll be imprisoned in Asgard for at least several hundred years. He will pay for what he's done."
Smith heard this and kept his expression neutral. He knew things about Loki's timeline that the room didn't — specifically, that several hundred years in Asgard's prison was, for an Asgardian lifespan, a relatively manageable sentence, and that it was only ever as permanent as Odin decided to keep it. He also knew that in a certain version of events, Loki would eventually die saving Thor from a threat that hadn't arrived yet.
But this universe wasn't running that track. Thanos had no clear path to Thor without the circumstances that track required. Loki, in prison in Asgard, was not becoming the god of stories. He was not becoming the Sorcerer Supreme variant. Whatever he was becoming, he was doing it away from Earth, and that was sufficient for Smith's current purposes.
Thor caught something in Smith's expression — a quality of awareness that suggested the other man had considered this from several more angles than he'd shown. He smiled with the slightly uncertain quality of someone who suspects they've been seen through. "Smith, I'll need you to use the Cube to take Loki and me back to Asgard."
"No problem," Smith said.
The only S.H.I.E.L.D. asset still on the roof was Barton, bound and sitting against a wall, conscious but still processing where the afternoon had gone. Tony's palm cannon had knocked him out cleanly, and by the time he'd woken up, the portal was closed and Smith had already secured the scepter. He hadn't fought the capture. There wasn't anything left to fight for.
Smith turned the Mind Scepter over in his hands.
He had two options with it. Keep it himself as a war trophy — the same way he was keeping the Cube. Let Wanda and Pietro find their own path without the scepter's involvement, trusting that chaos magic and speed physiology were robust enough to emerge independently.
Or loan it to S.H.I.E.L.D. under some pretense, let HYDRA access it for their experiments, take it back after Wanda and Pietro had been activated. Let someone else do the work and inherit the consequences.
He thought about it for approximately three seconds.
Why do I need to rely on anyone else? He'd already decided to find the twins himself. He had the scepter. He knew what it could do, and he knew how to use it carefully rather than exploitatively. The only reason to hand it to HYDRA's research program was if he had no better option.
He had a better option.
He stored the scepter.
Tony looked at the debris of the Chitauri ground engagement spread across the rooftop and the visible blocks below. "The Chitauri left behind weapons, vehicles, biological material from the Leviathans, and a substantial quantity of other technology. I'm calling it Avengers salvage — we were here, we did the work, we collect the spoils." He looked at the group. "The base has storage. We catalogue everything, research what's valuable, sell what isn't. The proceeds go to the cleanup operation. And anyone who came out to support today gets a stipend from the sale."
Rogers said nothing against it. Banner said nothing against it. Ivan Vanko nodded.
Thor had no interest in Chitauri scrap, which he communicated through the particular expression of a man being offered someone else's garbage.
"The structural damage across Manhattan is unprecedented," Ivan said. "Is our superhero property fund sufficiently capitalized to survive the payout?"
Tony's expression did something complicated. "We aren't holding the bag on this. Six months ago, I spun off the New York casualty portfolio to a syndicate of global reinsurers. The liability is completely off our books." He looked out at the smoking skyline. "Their actuaries ran the risk models on superhuman incidents. High premium yield, contained threat vectors, historically low catastrophic payout. They thought it was a cash cow."
He paused. "I imagine margin calls are going out as we speak."
Everyone looked at the city below. Several people nodded.
No one said anything else.
The group began to disperse. Thor was already thinking about Jane, and it was visible in the way he was standing.
Smith smiled slightly. "Thor. You're going back to Asgard. Don't you want to say goodbye to your girlfriend first?"
Thor said "Jane" almost before Smith had finished the sentence. Then he collected himself. "Smith — would that be enough time?"
"Don't worry," Smith said.
Thor looked at him with the uncomplicated gratitude of someone who has been given something they didn't ask for and needed badly. "Thank you, Smith Doyle."
The next morning, Smith ate breakfast in the base's dining area and watched four television channels simultaneously.
Every major network had the same story. The alien invasion. The Battle of New York. The teams.
"Two groups emerged as the primary response force in this confirmed alien engagement," the anchor said, with the practiced gravity of someone delivering the most important news of their career. "The first is called the Avengers, composed of GOD Smith Doyle, Iron Man Tony Stark, Blue Dynamo Ivan Vanko, Black Widow Natasha Romanoff, Jewel Jessica Jones, the Hulk, Thor, and Captain America Steve Rogers."
"The second group is the Paragons."
"In addition to these two teams, numerous enhanced individuals and civilian volunteers joined the engagement, providing vital support across the city."
The anchor continued with a segment on the Baymax units — a remarkable and touching phenomenon: the healthcare robots across the city spent the duration of the battle ensuring their owners reached safety, often at the cost of the units themselves. The footage of a Baymax carrying an elderly woman out of a building while laser fire scorched the wall beside them had apparently become the defining image of the engagement within hours of its capture.
Survivor interviews followed. Most people were grateful — for the Avengers, for the Paragons, for the anonymous figures who had shown up with rocket launchers on the rooftops and apparently not asked anyone's permission to do so. There were outliers: a man who felt that heroes were responsible for the damage to his car and ought to pay for it; a woman who believed the government was concealing information about the nature of the aliens; someone who found the whole thing suspicious.
Smith turned the volume down and looked at his coffee.
He was thinking about the dead. Not the Chitauri — they had made their choices. He was thinking about the ordinary people who had been in the wrong location when the portal opened, and about the Fraternity assets who had come out to join the fight. Werewolves and vampires who had taken Chitauri laser fire through the vitals and died.
The Dragon Balls would reactivate. When they did, he had two wishes.
One wish went to the tournament winner. One wish went to him.
He thought about what his wish was going to be.
He thought about the scale of that resurrection — not two or three people, but everyone who had died in this battle. Every ordinary person caught in the wrong block. Every supernatural fighter who had come at his call. He thought about the logistics, about what large-scale resurrection did to the people who returned and the people who'd been grieving them, about whether the Dragon's current rules created complications that didn't exist with small-scale resurrections.
It was different from the snap. The snap had kept people gone for years, and the return had been chaotic and traumatic because of the time gap. A Dragon Ball resurrection would not carry that weight.
He made the decision before he finished his coffee. The second wish was already decided.
Thor came in with Jane Foster a half-hour later, her face still slightly flushed. He walked to Smith's table and sat down, Jane beside him, and said, "Smith. Thank you for the time to say goodbye to her."
Jane said, "Thank you," and meant it in the simple, direct way of someone who had been given something they hadn't expected to get.
Smith waved a hand. "We're friends, Thor. It's nothing."
Thor said, "There are things that need attention in Asgard. I don't want to stay away longer than I have to. Could we leave this afternoon?"
Jane said nothing, but she looked at Thor with the expression of someone who has had this conversation already, in private, and has made her peace with it. He'd told her last night. He'd promised to come back to Earth as soon as the Bifrost was functional.
She believed him. The expression on her face said she believed him.
Smith looked at Thor, then at Jane, then back at Thor. "This afternoon," he said. "No problem on my side."