"So you really came all the way out here just to make friends with a blond rage-case who thinks he's Thor from Norse mythology?" Tony looked at Clark like even saying it out loud felt ridiculous.
"Mr. Stark, reality has a way of proving things to you," Clark said. "Same way you once had no idea your weapons were being sold behind your back."
But Clark's thoughts weren't only on Thor.
He was thinking about everyone who could fight, and who had the heart to be a hero.
Because sooner or later, the purple freak was coming to Earth for the remaining Stones. Clark did not believe, not for one second, that he could face a Thanos wielding multiple Infinity Stones entirely on his own. He needed more friends.
And the more, the better.
Soloing a boss was fun, sure. But if you had a few powerful teammates who could tank, control, and support, the chances of clearing the fight cleanly went up a lot.
Inside his head, the little devil lounged back with a cigar, cackling.
"Exactly! That's called planning ahead! We rope in the richest man on Earth and an alien prince as premium-grade labor! When the raid starts, Stark funds the gear, Thor stands in front and eats the damage, and we stay in back looking amazing and cleaning up. Perfect!"
The little angel adjusted its glasses and objected on principle.
"It is not 'roping them in.' It is building deep bonds across worlds and social classes. We are forming a united front to protect Earth."
By then Thor had already been brought down with tranquilizers and stun rounds, then dragged into a temporary holding room like a felled animal.
"Come on," Clark said with a smile. "Let's go meet a god from another world."
He rose gently off the ground, slipping free of Earth's gravity and floating toward the S.H.I.E.L.D. base.
"Wait," Tony said, following after him. "You can fly now? Last time, based on the footage, you were still mostly jumping."
Clark just smiled and said nothing.
How exactly was he supposed to explain that? Tell Tony he was an alien too?
Outside the interrogation room inside the base, Coulson, as the highest-ranking official on site, looked profoundly tired.
The giant idiot they had just captured had no match anywhere in the global database. No fingerprint hit, no facial recognition match, nothing. It was as if he had appeared out of nowhere. And physically, he was far beyond normal human limits.
Coulson rubbed a hand over his thinning hair, which seemed to retreat farther every day. There was simply too much happening. Fury had just told him not to show hostility toward Superman, and now they had a new lunatic claiming to be a god.
"Send a team into town and see whether..."
Coulson never got to finish.
The door opened.
"Sorry to interrupt," said a voice. "But your security setup seems a little underwhelming. We skipped knocking."
Mark III armor and a uniformed Clark stood just inside the base as if appearing uninvited in a top-secret facility was a perfectly normal thing to do.
Agents had already raised their weapons. Infrared sights were painting vital points. Hawkeye had an arrow nocked and ready.
"Lower your guns! All of you, lower them right now!" Coulson snapped.
If they actually had weapons that could hurt Superman, maybe this would have looked different. As it stood, they were pointing glorified squirt guns at people who could swat missiles out of the sky.
"Mr. Stark... and... Superman," Coulson said, forcing out a smile that looked painfully close to a grimace. "This is a classified government facility. You have to understand, barging in like this puts me in a very difficult position."
He didn't want to handle it this way, but these two were, by every visible metric, people who protected civilians and had never shown hostility toward anyone except criminals. That meant they were potentially recruitable assets, and therefore under Fury's orders.
"Relax, Coulson. We're here to meet a new friend."
Clark ignored the agents and looked instead at the dejected Thor inside the room.
But in Clark's eyes, Thor wasn't alone.
In one corner stood a man in Asgardian robes with a golden horned helm.
Loki's magical projection.
He was feeding Thor the lies he had prepared, telling him that Odin was dead and that Asgard no longer needed him.
"So I can see magical projections too," Clark murmured, staring straight at Loki.
Back in Asgard, Loki suddenly felt the unmistakable sensation of being watched.
A chill ran through him.
He turned sharply and followed the line of that feeling straight to Clark, standing beyond the one-way glass.
"That mortal... he can see me?"
Loki was genuinely rattled. The sensation was so predatory, so immediate, that the God of Lies nearly lost hold of the illusion altogether. He didn't dare linger. He tossed out a few final lines of deception, then severed the projection and vanished back to Asgard.
"What?" Tony asked, following Clark's gaze. "What are you looking at?"
"Nothing," Clark said. "Thought I saw a horned reindeer, but it must've gotten shy and run off."
He turned back to Coulson.
"Let him go, Agent Coulson. Keeping him here serves no purpose. He can't lift the hammer. Right now, he's just a lost man."
Coulson hesitated. By S.H.I.E.L.D. rules, someone this dangerous absolutely should not be released.
The problem was, the person recommending his release was Superman.
"...Fine," Coulson said at last. "If you're saying that, I can process his release. But I'm assigning surveillance. We will keep eyes on him."
When one side of the situation was going smoothly, naturally something else was already getting worse.
In the frozen Arctic, Nick Fury hadn't stopped digging.
Aboard an icebreaker, wrapped in cold-weather gear, Fury stood above the operation and watched the work below.
"Director, encrypted message from Agent Coulson," one of the agents said, hurrying over with a tablet.
Fury took it and read.
"Stark and the target designated Superman entered the New Mexico research base by force, and... Superman requested that we release the blond giant who attacked the camp."
"Motherfu..."
Fury cut himself off only slightly.
He was standing in the middle of nowhere, in subzero hell, while all the disasters back south refused to let him breathe.
One was a former weapons dealer with an ego the size of a country who had just publicly declared himself Iron Man. Another was an alien powerhouse who tanked missiles with his body, made storms by taking off, and treated physics like a joke. And now they had a third problem, a giant blond man with no records, enough strength to treat trained agents like punching bags, and the temperament of a maniac.
"What the hell is wrong with this planet?" Fury growled. "Is Earth some kind of cosmic tourist destination? Why does every alien in the universe keep deciding to stop here?"
As the man with more classified secrets in his head than anyone else alive, Fury had long since lost patience. He had seen more aliens than most people could imagine, and now all of them seemed to want to settle down on Earth.
They still hadn't fully unraveled the Kryptonian technology or the energy signature from the Stone.
And meanwhile the situation had already moved well beyond S.H.I.E.L.D.'s control.
Conventional weapons were useless against these kinds of superhuman beings. If Superman woke up in a bad mood one morning and decided he felt like trying dictatorship for the day, what exactly was S.H.I.E.L.D. supposed to do? Throw agents at him until he got tired?
Had anyone in history ever seen ants bite an elephant to death?
And Superman wasn't even an elephant.
Did they really need to call Captain Marvel back now...?