The industrial sector was dying by the time Steve and Thor reached it, streetlights going out in a slow wave down the block, an evacuation sign looping the same dead instruction toward a route that didn't exist anymore.
Steve took point through the gap between two loading docks, shield low, and something about the quiet snagged at him before he could name it. Too even. Too complete. A street this size didn't go this still on its own.
"Something's off," he said.
"Off how?"
"I don't know yet. Just watch the rooftops."
He caught the first drone by silhouette against a dead sign, and then a second, and by the time he'd counted four more he understood the shape of what they were about to walk into.
"This isn't a response," he said. "It's a welcome."
Thor's grip flexed on the hammer's haft, shoulders squaring toward the rooftops like he was daring them to make the first move. "Then let's not keep our host waiting."
The drones came off the roofs in a formation too clean to be improvised, and Steve threw the shield the second the first one cleared cover, catching it off a fire escape rail and following the ricochet into the gap it opened. His fists did the rest. One went down under a straight punch to what passed for its center mass. A second clipped his shoulder hard enough to spin him half a step, and he used the spin, came back around with the shield leading, and put a third through the side of a parked van.
Thor didn't bother with the gaps Steve was working. He walked into the middle of the formation and swung, and the street cracked open where the hammer landed, concrete lifting in a spray that took two more drones down with it.
For a few seconds it looked exactly like it was supposed to look. Steve clearing the edges, Thor clearing the center, the two of them doing what they'd done in worse places than this one more times than either of them could count.
Then the second wave dropped in from above instead of the street, and Steve's stomach turned before the first one even landed, because a formation this patient hadn't spent everything on the opening move.
"Thor, up!"
Thor got the hammer up half a second too late. The drone that caught him didn't look like much on its own, a fast dive against his forearm, but the angle was wrong in a way Steve felt before he understood it, and the sound that followed cut straight through everything else on the street.
Thor didn't go down. He roared instead, the kind of sound that used to end fights on its own, and swung one-armed into the thing that had done it, crushing it flat against the pavement. It didn't slow anything else down. Three more closed in while his broken arm hung useless at his side.
Steve didn't weigh the odds before he moved. He threw himself into the gap between Thor and the nearest strike, shield raised, and felt the current hit before he registered the drone that had fired it. Every muscle in his body locked at once, jaw included, and he stayed on his feet three full seconds out of nothing but stubbornness before his knees finally stopped listening to him.
The last thing he saw clearly, going down, was Thor still standing over him, one arm ruined, surrounded on every side, refusing to be the one who fell first.
Wanda felt Vision's frustration through the bond before he said a word about it, that particular tension he carried when a problem wasn't yielding the way he expected it to.
Something wrong?
The network. It's already occupied. A pause, careful, the way he got when he was still working out how bad something actually was. Not a firewall. Something that anticipated me specifically.
She stood at the base of the relay tower with both hands raised, the antenna array humming faint under her palms, close enough to feel him pushing against whatever was on the other side.
"I can come in from outside," she said. "Give you room."
Be careful. Whatever this is, it's fast.
She reached for her own power and let it curl up her arms and thread into the antenna, red light bleeding off her fingers in slow ribbons. Chaos didn't ask permission the way other magic did. It found the shape of a system and bent it, small and quiet, until the system stopped being sure of its own rules.
For one full second it seemed to be working. A seam opened somewhere inside the network's logic, chaos finding a gap nothing rigid should have had.
Then the seam closed around her power instead, calm and precise, reading the shape of what she'd sent before it finished forming and folding shut on it the way a hand closes over something already caught. She staggered back a step, the red light snapping into her palms too fast, burning going in, and she bit down hard enough on the pain that she didn't make a sound.
Wanda. Vision's voice again, closer now, sharper, an urgency she almost never heard from him. Get clear. It already decided how this ends.
"Not without you."
I'm not asking.
She turned toward the building instead of away from it, because whatever he wanted her to do, leaving him in there wasn't a version of tonight she could live inside. She'd made it maybe ten steps when it happened.
No warning. No fading. Just gone, like a door slamming shut on the other side of a room she was still standing in.
She screamed before she understood why she was screaming, and two blocks over a window cracked clean down the middle from the force of it. She reached for him with everything that was left in her, the bond, the place where he'd always been since the day they'd found each other, and there was nothing there to reach for anymore. Not silence. Absence. A shape where a person used to be.
She was still reaching when the drones closed in around her from three directions at once, and she didn't turn to fight them, because turning would have meant giving up the last direction she still believed he might be in.
They took her while her hands were still raised toward a building that had already stopped meaning anything.
The rooftop gave T'Challa a clean line across three Brooklyn precincts, exactly as the network was built to provide, which was precisely why it took him longer than it should have to notice something in the feed had begun lying to him.
A threat marker blinked live two blocks south. He redirected a response team without a second thought, the same call he'd made a hundred times before with a system that had never once been wrong about something this basic.
The team reported back an empty street.
He pulled the raw feed instead of the processed one, stripping away every layer of interpretation the network offered him by default, and found the corruption sitting at the source, patient and deliberate, threaded through data he had trusted with his own life and the lives of his people more times than he could count.
"My network is compromised," he said into the open channel, already moving for the fire escape. "Do not trust positional data from me until further notice."
Silence answered him. He checked the channel again and understood, with the same cold clarity, that it had gone dead sometime in the last ninety seconds without his noticing.
Whoever holds this network now has held it for a while, he thought, taking the stairs two at a time.
The street below read wrong before he could say exactly why. Storefronts dark that should have carried emergency power. An alley mouth too quiet against a night that was loud everywhere else. He kept moving toward the last confirmed position of his escort, three blocks that felt longer with every step, because he was making them without the one advantage his entire fighting style had been built around.
They were waiting for him at a subway entrance, rising out of the dark in a formation that told him exactly how long they'd known he was coming.
He fought the way he had trained his whole life to fight, precise, economical, each strike placed exactly where it needed to go, no wasted motion, no strike thrown without purpose. A drone came in low and he redirected it into the one behind it. Two more closed from the sides and he put both down in the same breath, claws finding the seams in their plating like he'd studied the design himself.
It wasn't enough. A king who had built his reign on knowing more than anyone in the room was still, tonight, a man fighting half blind, and half blind against something that had already mapped this exact stretch of tunnel had only ever had one outcome.
They took him at the base of the stairwell, still transmitting on a channel with no one left on the other end of it, reaching for backup that had never existed in the first place.
***
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