Chapter 298: Poor Hawkeye's Rotten Luck
Corvus Glaive and his companions' arrival cut through the already tense, brutal battlefield like a bolt of lightning out of the dark.
It marked the moment the Chitauri offensive shifted into a full-scale assault — no longer content with probing attacks, they threw everything they had into the fight, determined to seize an outright victory.
Their numbers surged. Their firepower intensified dramatically.
Soldiers poured out in wave after relentless wave, seemingly endless.
Their firepower alone was staggering — explosions rolling across the sky, smoke choking the air, the entire battlefield swallowed in a rolling sea of fire.
Everyone on the field — Avengers and Illuminati alike — felt the pressure shift, immediate and unmistakable.
Where they'd been holding their own moments ago, even starting to push back through sheer willpower and skill, they now found themselves getting driven back, step by grinding step, against an enemy suddenly far more formidable.
Natasha, breathing hard, growled in frustration. "Damn it — why does it feel like they just got a whole lot stronger?"
She stared out at the swarming, endless tide of aliens, a headache building behind her eyes. These weren't ordinary soldiers anymore — clearly far stronger than anything they'd faced up to this point.
She thought back to the fighting earlier — one punch, one clip of bullets, and these things went down easy.
Now, though, they seemed considerably tougher, taking far more effort and time to put down.
Confused, she called into her earpiece. "What the hell changed?"
Steve and Hawkeye answered from the other end.
Steve had noticed the shift too — as a man who'd lived through World War Two, he recognized this pattern immediately: the enemy's real main force had just entered the field. Which meant everything they'd cleared out up to this point had been little more than grunts and scouts.
"Their main force just showed up. I'm seeing three aliens down on the street — all different, all clearly strong," Hawkeye reported.
He stood perched atop a high building, eyes locked sharply on the battlefield below.
His face had gone rigid, carved from stone. Even from a hundred meters out, he could feel the overwhelming presence radiating off Corvus Glaive and Ebony Maw, pressing down on him like an invisible weight. He drew a slow breath, voice grim. "These aren't ordinary soldiers. Their strength is way beyond anything we've faced so far. Powerful, and ruthless. We need to be extremely careful."
Hawkeye's eyes tracked Corvus Glaive's group as they moved, and everywhere they passed, silence followed — as if even the wind itself had stopped breathing.
He could see it clearly: places that should have been full of life now stood empty, nothing left but wreckage and rubble. Every living soul that had been there was gone, cut down without mercy.
Just as Hawkeye focused every ounce of attention on tracking Corvus Glaive's movements, a chill shot up his spine without warning. He looked up — and found one of the female aliens staring directly at him, eyes gleaming with cruel amusement, a vicious smile spreading across her face.
His stomach dropped. He understood instantly: he'd been made.
The realization hit hard. He hadn't imagined that watching from several hundred meters away, being this careful, would still be enough for these three to sense his presence.
Across the field, Proxima Midnight spoke up first, apparently having noticed him too. "Seems there's a rat spying on us."
Ebony Maw drifted lazily through the air, his voice low and indifferent. "Just an insect. Not worth our attention. Let's keep moving — we still have the Tesseract to find."
Proxima Midnight, predictably, had no intention of listening to him.
She'd gone this whole stretch without a single decent opponent to fight, and the boredom had started to grate on her.
Now that she'd finally spotted something worth her time, she wasn't about to let it slip away.
She shot forward instantly, a streak of black lightning bearing straight down on Hawkeye.
Corvus Glaive, seeing his wife take off, wasn't about to be left behind. He followed right on her heels.
Together, the two of them bore down on Hawkeye, fully intent on taking this particular rat down.
Watching Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive charge off like children chasing a toy, Ebony Maw's face twisted with distaste.
He had no real interest in indulging his colleagues' little detour — but he also wasn't about to let them wander off alone and create more trouble for him later.
With a resigned sigh, he trailed after them toward Hawkeye.
Hawkeye hadn't gotten far at all before a black shape came bearing down on him at terrifying speed, seeming ready to swallow him whole.
He felt the crushing pressure of it instantly, every nerve firing, every muscle tensing for the hit he knew was coming.
Years of field training kicked in, and his body reacted before his mind caught up — a single roll, and he vanished from where he'd been standing in an instant.
He came up steady, glanced back — and found a massive crater where he'd been standing a heartbeat earlier, smoke billowing up around it.
His pupils contracted. Cold sweat ran down his forehead. He knew, without a doubt: if that hit had landed, he'd simply cease to exist.
But the danger wasn't done with him yet. He'd barely regained his footing when a bone-deep chill swept across his back.
He knew what that meant — another attack, already coming. He spun to dodge, but Corvus Glaive's scythe found him anyway, tearing a deep gash across his back.
Pain screamed through him, but there was no time to process it. He knew he had to give everything he had, or he wasn't walking away from this.
He spun and loosed an arrow at Corvus Glaive — no ordinary arrow, this one rigged with an explosive charge.
The arrow arced gracefully through the air and landed a clean hit.
A thunderous blast followed, smoke billowing outward.
Hawkeye used the brief cover to fire off another arrow — a grappling shot — and swung himself into a nearby building.
He weaved through the buildings, using the terrain to keep evading pursuit. He didn't dare let his guard down for a second — he knew full well these aliens were far beyond anything he'd imagined possible.
Finally, roughly a hundred meters from where he'd started, he stopped. He leaned against a wall, chest heaving, forcing air back into his lungs. That whole exchange had drained nearly everything he had left.
He turned, ready to resume tracking the three aliens' movements — only to find a slight, thin figure standing directly in front of him.
Cold eyes. A face frozen somewhere between a smile and a smirk.
Ebony Maw.
☆☆☆
-> 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