Chapter 109: Space Stone Acquired — and the System Upgrades
Fury's face had the quality of a man who had made a decision and was going to live with it without visibly suffering.
"Three days," he said. "The Tesseract comes back in three days. If it doesn't—" He paused, choosing his words. "Hell's Kitchen has a lot of infrastructure that could be classified as a security risk."
He knew threatening Ethan directly was useless. He'd watched Ethan stop guided missiles with his hands. The leverage was the neighborhood.
Ethan filed this for later and nodded agreeably.
The items arrived five minutes after the call.
An agent with a silver case. Four more agents carrying something longer, heavier, horizontal.
Tony had the lid open before they'd finished setting it down.
He looked at the face inside.
Bucky Barnes. The Winter Soldier. A man who had been Steve Rogers's closest friend, then a HYDRA weapon for seventy years, then an assassination tool aimed at Ethan's family, then a body on a table in SHIELD's storage. Tony looked at him for a long moment without speaking.
He didn't know what he felt. Something with too many components to sort quickly.
"Just the body," he said quietly, when Ethan asked. "Not the box."
Ethan looked at the coffin with the expression of someone who had strong cultural feelings about transporting corpses and was keeping them to himself. He opened a portal with his right hand — gold sparks, circular aperture, the Lucky Dragon's entrance visible on the other side in the afternoon light — and used Chaos Magic to lift Bucky's body through it.
Tony followed immediately.
Fury stared at the portal. At the restaurant sign visible through it. At the architectural specificity of a location he could now add to his operational map.
"One more thing," Ethan said, from the other side of the threshold.
Fury looked at him.
"Carol Danvers," Ethan said. "I know you're waiting for her to come back. She's not going to change the outcome." He held Fury's gaze for exactly long enough to let it land. "Just so you have accurate information."
The portal closed.
Steve dropped six inches to the floor, the Chaos Magic holding him releasing as Ethan's attention went elsewhere. He landed on his feet, which was something.
He stood in Fury's office and looked at the space where the portal had been.
Then he sat down on the floor, which was not something he'd planned to do, and put his face in his hands.
Fury looked at him. Looked at the space where Bucky's body had been. Looked at Coulson, who had appeared in the doorway at some point.
He didn't say anything.
There was nothing useful to say.
On the floor below, in the room where the Fantastic Four had been waiting with the specific patience of people who had been told to stand by for an engagement that never materialized, Ben Grimm was looking at the ceiling.
"So that's the guy," he said.
"That's the guy," Reed confirmed.
"He walked out with two things Fury didn't want to give him."
"Yes."
"And we sat down here."
"Yes."
Ben thought about this. "And that was the right call?"
Reed was quiet for a moment. "We don't know what he's building yet. Fighting him now, before we understand it, would be premature."
"He took Steve's shield."
"Tony Stark took Steve's shield. Ethan Cross took the Tesseract." Reed looked at the ceiling the way he looked at problems — with the attentiveness of someone who had already filed the relevant variables and was now waiting for the right formula. "Different categories of acquisition."
"The shield's still out there."
"Yes," Reed said. "That's going to be a conversation."
Fury stood at his window.
He was thinking about Carol. About the distance between where she was and where he needed her to be, and the time that gap represented, and what Ethan Cross would have done to Hell's Kitchen in that time if the three-day deadline was a real one, which he didn't think it was.
She's not going to change the outcome, Cross had said.
Fury had spent his career being the person who was right about things other people couldn't see yet. He recognized, in Ethan's voice, the quality of someone who had the same habit and had already run the scenario.
He picked up the phone.
Come home faster, he thought. I want to find out if he's right.
The Lucky Dragon, late afternoon.
Tony left quickly — Pepper had sent a car, and he was already on the phone with the lab while he walked, the specific focused energy of a man who had something important to do and was finally going to do it.
Ethan watched him go, then went upstairs.
The silver case sat on his desk.
He opened it.
The Tesseract looked exactly as described — a translucent cube, no larger than a brick, sitting in foam casing that SHIELD's engineers had presumably spent significant resources designing. It caught the light from the window and did something with it that ordinary glass wouldn't do.
This is the Space Stone, Ethan thought. One of six Infinity Stones. The one that Loki is going to use to open a portal to let an army into Manhattan, except that can't happen because Loki hasn't acquired it yet, and right now it's in my apartment.
And Thanos is eventually going to come looking for it.
He reached into the case and touched it.
The system chimed.
「DING!」
「Significant energy source detected!」
「Automatic absorption initiated!」
「System upgrade in progress — estimated completion: 48 hours.」
Forty-eight hours.
The last upgrade had taken twenty-four and had overhauled the gacha system. This one was double that. Ethan sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling and thought about what required twice the time to implement.
He thought about the Friend Point system. The Gacha. The Family cap.
He thought about On Your Right, and what Lv.3 might look like, and whether the upgrade touched the compatibility requirements for Growth Templates, and whether the System had been waiting for an external energy source of this magnitude to unlock something that had been sitting there in the background the whole time.
Forty-eight hours, he thought.
He put the Tesseract back in the case, closed it carefully, and put it on the shelf between his Kamen Rider belt and a stack of books he'd been meaning to read.
Let's see what you do.
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you