Hawk had no master, no ancient scrolls, no one to teach him the sacred ways of the Saints. The warriors from his memory were characters in a story, their growth dictated by the needs of a plot. This was reality, and as everyone knows, reality has no obligation to make sense. His training was not an elegant montage; it was a brutal, thousand-day-long grind of agonizing repetition.
There's an old saying: persist in drawing and sheathing a sword one hundred thousand times, and you can master the art of slaying gods.
Hawk had thrown and retracted his fist millions of times. Now, with his Cosmo finally awakened, that simple, repetitive action had undergone a profound, qualitative change. The technique that had been born from this crucible of effort had a name that resonated with his very soul.
Sonic Punch.
It was a principle, not a flourish. A law of physics that he now commanded. When his fist moves faster than the speed of sound, the impact arrives before the thunderous boom it creates. The victim feels the destructive result of the action, their body breaking and tearing, an instant before their brain can even process the sound of their own doom. That was Sonic Punch.
BOOM!
The deafening explosion of the Chitauri Captain's skiff was the overture. The Captain himself, having narrowly escaped the blast with a desperate leap, landed hard on the cracked asphalt, his enhanced alien physiology absorbing most of the impact. He rose to his feet amidst the flames, pulling a formidable weapon from his back. It was not a rifle, but a spear, its shaft forged from a dark, unknown metal and its tip glowing with the same sickly green energy as the soldiers' rifles.
He faced Hawk, who now stood shirtless in the center of the ruined street. The carpet bombing had been a failure, but it had succeeded in utterly destroying the cheap T-shirt Hawk had worn for years. It didn't matter. In fact, shedding the last tattered remnants of his old life felt strangely liberating. He stood there, his body a sculpture of lean, dense muscle, carved by ten million punches and now humming with the power of an inner universe. This wasn't an illusion of renewed strength. It was a well-known, if unspoken, truth of battle.
Exploding clothes increases one's combat power.
"Human!" the Chitauri Captain hissed, the sound distorted by its metallic faceplate. It held its energy spear in a ready stance, its large, insectoid eyes fixed on Hawk with a mixture of hatred and tactical appraisal. Miles away, behind the wormhole, Hawk's image was now being displayed on the main viewscreen of the Chitauri mothership.
Hawk met the alien's glare and smiled, a cold, confident expression that was utterly out of place in the war-torn street. He slowly extended his right hand, palm open, and beckoned with his fingers.
There was no need for words. The gesture was a universal language of contempt.
"Come."
"Die!" the Captain roared, its rage overriding its discipline.
With a concussive bang, its foot shattered the ground beneath it. It became a streaking shadow, closing the distance with incredible speed while the tip of its spear bloomed with light, unleashing a rapid-fire volley of searing energy beams.
Hawk met the charge with one of his own. As the ground beneath him cracked and sank, his entire body erupted in a sheath of brilliant, golden light. He wasn't running; he was a comet, a golden streak tearing through reality, weaving effortlessly through the incoming energy blasts as if they were standing still.
A Bronze Saint, once their Cosmo is awakened, becomes a transcendent being. Their speed reaches that of sound, their durability becomes astonishing, and their lifespan stretches far beyond that of a mortal. Hawk had no Saint Cloth, no holy armor to protect him, and had yet to formally claim a constellation. But the core of that power—the burning universe within—was his. He was no longer just a human.
"Pfft!"
The Chitauri Captain, still mid-charge, suddenly froze. Its expression, hidden behind its mask, contorted in agony and utter confusion. A violent spray of its own faint green blood erupted from its mouth with such force that it blew the metal faceplate clean off, revealing a grotesque, insect-like visage beneath.
Only then, an instant after his body had already been fatally wounded, did the sound finally arrive, exploding in his ears like the crack of doom.
"BOOM!"
Dazed and dying, the Captain slowly lowered its head. It stared in disbelief at the human arm that had somehow pierced its advanced, sturdy armor and was now embedded deep within its chest cavity. It let out a final, meaningless gurgle, attempting to raise its increasingly heavy head to look one last time at the impossible creature that had killed it.
It was out of time. As Hawk withdrew his arm, the light faded from the Captain's eyes, and the boundless darkness of death claimed it. Deprived of the arm supporting it, the corpse of the elite alien warrior toppled to the ground like a swatted bug.
Hawk casually hooked his finger, and the energy spear, released from the dead Captain's grip, flew into his hand. A faint green, liquid-like substance sloshed within its translucent core, the source of its power. He weighed it, a curious, pragmatic thought cutting through the lingering adrenaline.
Alien weapons... they should be very valuable, right?
He wondered how much this, and the other guns he'd collected, would fetch on the black market. He even glanced back at the ruins of his apartment, remembering where he'd stashed the first four rifles.
A sudden, brilliant flash of blue light from the direction of Manhattan pulled him from his thoughts. He snapped his head up.
The immense pillar of light that had been punching a hole in the sky from Stark Tower was gone. At the same time, the tear in reality, the Chitauri portal, was visibly closing, stitching the heavens back together.
"That's it?" he blinked. "It's over?"
He almost wanted to laugh. Was this it? The great Chitauri invasion that had terrified him into three years of obsessive training? If he had known it was this… weak… would he have pushed himself so hard?
The thought died before it could fully form. His gaze lowered from the closing portal and fell upon the street around him. The word "weak" turned to ash in his mouth. The street was a charnel house. Smoldering craters, burning vehicles, and among the debris, the unmistakable, gruesome sight of dismembered human limbs.
He swallowed hard. It wasn't that the Chitauri were weak.
It was that he had become strong.
"If I hadn't awakened my Cosmo," he thought, his gaze fixed on a severed hand lying in the gutter, "a piece of me would be lying there with the rest of them."
The thought was a cold, sobering wave that washed away any trace of arrogance. A new, harder resolve settled in its place. He had to become stronger. Stronger still. Not just to survive, but to seize control. To reach a point where he was no longer a pawn of fate, reacting to the invasions and calamities of this insane world. To become powerful enough to finally, truly declare:
My fate is mine to decide, not heaven's!
It was a grand, cosmic vow. But first, there was a more urgent, practical matter to attend to.
He needed to find a safe place to stash the five high-tech, alien-made weapons he had just acquired, and then figure out how to turn his spoils of war into cold, hard cash.