The child's innocent expression was the most terrifying thing any of them had ever seen.
"Stop right there—or I shoot!" Harry leveled his gun, hands slick with sweat.
The bowl-cut boy's brow furrowed slightly. Then, in full view of all of them, he dissolved. His body lost cohesion like sand through fingers, pooling and spreading flat across the ground—and then more sand rose from all around, reassembling itself.
Same smile. Same clothes. But this version was a young man, and his malice was no longer even slightly disguised.
"He's not human—shoot!" Lorna shouted. Harry was already firing. They pulled triggers together, six shots between them.
The bullets hit the young man in the chest. He didn't react. No blood, no cry of pain. Just six punctures with fine sand trickling out.
"My turn!" A fresh Light Dagger materialized in Dagger's palm. She wound up like a baseball pitcher and threw.
Pure energy worked considerably better than a bullet.
The Light Dagger punched straight through the man's chest and blew out the other side, and the detonation that followed knocked him back a step.
His expression twisted. He looked at the group of teenagers with nothing in his eyes but cold, flat murder.
"You're all bad people." His voice was absolute. "You all deserve to die."
He dropped the pretense entirely. He collapsed back into the earth, and when he rose again he was three meters (ten feet) tall—a giant assembled entirely from sand.
"Run!" Dagger called it. Against three meters of monster with legs thicker than her torso, her abilities weren't enough. She could punch holes in it, but he'd pull fresh sand from the ground a second later and fill himself back in. Infinite supply, infinite patience.
"Damn it!" Lorna tried her powers. The sand resisted completely—no ferrous content, nothing magnetic to grab. The trees and boulders nearby were useless. All she could do was call out to Daisy while she ran.
The first gunshot had already reached Zephyr One.
Black Widow reacted before anyone else. She wasn't omniscient—she had no special sense to tell her what was happening beyond the aircraft walls. All she had were gunshots coming from somewhere in the dark. She crossed to Daisy's cabin and knocked. "Sounds like trouble outside. You should probably take a look."
From inside: a brief scramble. Thirty seconds later, Deputy Director Johnson threw the door open. She'd put on a button-down over her shorts and hadn't bothered with the rest. Long legs bare, face thoroughly annoyed.
She'd figured it was SHIELD HQ reaching out about something.
"What is it?"
"The island has a problem. I heard gunshots."
Daisy switched on her super-hearing—and immediately caught the chaos the kids were in.
"Damn it." Being interrupted at exactly the wrong moment was the kind of thing that put a person in a genuinely foul mood.
Hill had been marginally slower. She emerged without bothering to obscure how things stood. Black Widow's expression settled into something that was absolutely, entirely not a smirk.
Hill was even more put out than Daisy. So close. She turned to Daisy with what could generously be called a grievance: "You said this island was clear!"
Daisy was baffled. From what she was hearing—was that actually the Sandman? How in the world had he ended up here?
"How would I know? I'm getting the kids. Get the aircraft in the air, and find out who put the scenic designation on this island. If that person is still breathing, I want words."
She quickly finished dressing. She was on vacation—no special ops gear anywhere near her. As for the Asgardian armor, she didn't need to rush for that either; a Sandman wasn't worth the bother. She launched herself out the hatch. Several hundred meters of dark beach disappeared in seconds.
By the time she arrived, the Sandman had grown to over ten meters—his lower body merged with the island's sandy floor, every loose grain for hundreds of meters now part of him. Above the surface: a rough approximation of a human upper body, two arms, a head sculpted from constantly shifting sand.
His speed was theoretically nothing to underestimate. But like every villain worth the title, he preferred the game of cat and mouse. The teenagers' panic was feeding something deep and broken inside him. He'd raised an enormous sand maze from the island floor and was taking his time following them through it.
A dull thud—and a flaming fist hammered down from above. Half the Sandman's torso and one complete arm flashed red and fused to glass, then shattered under Daisy's follow-up kick, exploding into glittering fragments.
Losing a third of his mass at once forced him to drop the maze and redirect sand to repair himself.
"ROAR—ROAR!!" He was in pain. Technically he had no nervous system anymore—but the arm had been an extension of his core, and having it demolished hit differently. He was livid.
"WHO ARE YOU!"
His roar was like a crack of thunder rattling your eardrums. But the voice, filtered through all those layers of compacted sand, came out so muffled and distorted that the whole thing sounded almost unreal—like badly dubbed audio from a monster film.
To Daisy's ears, it registered as impossibly fake. She answered without thinking, matching his hollow register. "I'm Batman."
Her mind snapped back. She waved the kids toward the aircraft.
"Come on—back to the plane."
She wasn't going to dress them down for it. Sneaking off in the middle of the night without waking anyone—bold as hell—but she'd let that one slide.
SHIELD agents fell into position. Pilots to the cockpit, weapons crew to the guns, the rest to passenger management.
"I knew this island had secrets." Tony Stark arrived in the portable Mark V, arms crossed, thoroughly vindicated. "Is this big thing some kind of secret SHIELD experiment?"
The classic Stark flavor: I-told-you-so, with a side of genuine suspicion.
Daisy looked the armor over. The Mark V was barely rated for combat—no missiles, no heavy lasers. She hadn't expected him to bring it on vacation.
She pointed at the sand giant below. "Anything in there that shoots fire? I'm running low."
"I dropped the flamethrower after the Mark I." He said it with considerable pride.
Daisy stared. So that was a no.
The island was too large. Virtually every grain of sand on it had become part of the Sandman—there was no containing him through brute force alone, and she had no fire. She'd have to do this the hard way.
"Watch the kids. Before they board, everyone changes clothes and shakes out for sand—this thing's abilities are strange. You might want to scan your suit too."
She gave Tony the summary, then dove back down and punched the Sandman flat again to buy time. Then she flew to the water's edge.
Both palms pressed to the surface.
Her powers activated.
The calm ocean began to churn. A deep rotation built pressure beneath the surface—and within two seconds it had become a spiral current, drawing upward. The water began to rise.
She was making a tsunami.
Sharon and Hill got the kids changed, checked them over, and guided them aboard. Hawkeye was already in the cockpit. Once the last person was through the hatch, he hauled back on the controls.