"Leave this to me."
A dark mist gradually spread from Shin's body. Fortunately, it was already nighttime when they arrived, so it couldn't be seen clearly from the ground. It only gave the illusion of ominous storm clouds gathering in the sky.
The black mist spread faster and faster, soon covering the entire sky. Wanda and Pietro, standing beside Shin, felt an unnatural chill as if they'd been transported to some alien realm of shadows.
At the military base below, Clint Barton, Hawkeye, was the first to feel uneasy, thanks to his heightened senses. He stuck his head out from his perch and looked toward the sky.
"What is that? A storm cloud? No, it's like a cloud of darkness..." Barton's sharp vision caught the scene above, but it was too late. The entire sky seemed to turn upside down with darkness.
Inside the base, Tony Stark had been running various tests on Thor's hammer when a blaring alarm suddenly interrupted him.
"What now?" Stark muttered, quickly pressing a button and heading into the adjoining room. His unmanned Iron Man suit launched from its dock and flew to merge with him.
"JARVIS, report the current situation... JARVIS?" Tony called out, only to hear silence. After a brief pause, a mechanical voice responded
"Primary signal not detected. Booting fallback protocol... Hello. JARVIS Unit 23 is now online."
"Signal lost? The communication range between the armor and JARVIS spans the whole earth! What, are we in the Earth's inner core? Wrapped in lead? Or did we just get shifted to another plane of existence?" Tony muttered, unsettled.
Stark had been brought in by S.H.I.E.L.D. for this project. After the Kingpin had revealed clues about a new element, Stark quickly located the designs in his father's files with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s help and created the new reactor.
While S.H.I.E.L.D.'s support this time wasn't as critical as in the films, where Nick Fury practically saved Stark's life, the collaboration had established a working relationship between them.
After days of fruitless study of the hammer, S.H.I.E.L.D. turned to Tony for his expertise. On one hand, he owed them. On the other, his curiosity about the hammer pulled him in.
They'd also considered reaching out to Mr. Fantastic, but he was too preoccupied with preparing for his wedding to the Invisible Woman. Despite his own curiosity about the hammer, Reed Richards ultimately backed down under Susan Storm's death glare.
To be honest, Reed might've had better luck deciphering the hammer. He'd successfully used science to analyze magic on several occasions.
Tony, with his focus on machines and traditional physics, was slower to make headway. After nearly a month, he still hadn't cracked it.
At that moment, power throughout the base dropped. The lights flickered and dimmed, swallowed by an unseen force.
Dark mist seeped in through the cracks in the door, quickly filling the entire lab. Even though the arc reactor on his chest still glowed, Tony found himself nearly blind unable to see more than a few feet.
"Power levels dropping! Ninety-nine percent! Ninety-eight... ninety-seven..."
The JARVIS subroutine inside the suit began issuing urgent warnings.
Tony's expression changed instantly. The arc reactor wasn't just powering the suit it was also keeping him alive by preventing shrapnel from reaching his heart.
If it failed, he wouldn't just lose the fight, he'd be finished for good.
But he couldn't even determine where the enemy was, let alone engage them. It was one of the worst tactical scenarios he'd ever faced.
He pushed open the lab door and fired off a batch of lasers, but the darkness swallowed the light. Just as he tried to think of his next move, a wave of dizziness hit him.
The black mist vanished.
His arc reactor stopped sounding alarms, though the power had dropped to 50%.
"Well, good thing I upgraded to the new element reactor," Tony said, still a bit shaken. "If I was still using palladium, I'd be dead already."
The new reactor wasn't just cleaner it packed several times more energy. It was likely the only reason he survived the energy drain from the dark dimension.
Dying without even seeing his attacker? Stark refused to accept that kind of end.
As the mist faded completely, Tony's systems reconnected to JARVIS.
"JARVIS, scan the base. What the hell just happened? And why was I cut off?"
"Mr. Stark, satellite imaging shows your location was engulfed by black mist. It appears to have disrupted electromagnetic waves."
"Additionally, no personnel in the base were harmed. The only thing missing is the unusual hammer."
"Oh, perfect. So, the mighty Thor's hammer vanished into thin air. What now? Did the real Thor finally show up?" Tony said sarcastically.
Even without fully deciphering the hammer, Tony had identified the inscriptions, translated from ancient languages, as Mjolnir. The legendary hammer of Thor.
He still wasn't convinced it had any divine origin. To Stark, "gods" were just highly evolved aliens.
With that, he remotely activated a tracker he had installed to detect the hammer's unique magnetic field.
Weeks of testing hadn't cracked the hammer's secrets, but it had been easy to engineer a scanner that could locate it again.
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