Chapter 78 : The Avatar of Hrimthul Descends – When Heroes Converge (Part 2)
New York, Manhattan – 3rd's POV
They arrived like a single, moving line of intent.
A ripple of displaced snow swept across the street as the X-Men emerged from the far end of the frozen avenue—shadows at first, then silhouettes, then a formation tight enough to read as military. Cyclops walked at the front, shoulders squared, visor glowing faintly through the frost-laden air. Behind him, Jean's steps faltered only once—barely noticeable—when the Avatar's mental presence brushed her mind like a glacier scraping bedrock. Storm lifted her chin, pupils thin with focus, the unnatural weather slamming against her senses like a pressure front gone rabid. Colossus shifted mid-stride, steel rippling across his skin in a clean, liquid sweep of metal. Wolverine was already ahead of them by two paces, claws out, gait low, animal instincts zeroing in on the oldest, coldest danger in sight.
The battlefield already writhed in destruction, but the X-Men's disciplined advance cut through the madness like a blade.
The scene hit them instantly—Thor half-buried in shattered frost, Hulk circling the Avatar in a wide, angry arc, buildings cleaved open, the street fractured into frozen slabs. The cold was so intense it bit through uniforms not meant to freeze. Cyclops didn't gasp, didn't comment; he only adjusted his stance as if this level of catastrophe was a language he'd spoken since childhood.
Hulk turned toward the newcomers with a low, warning rumble—recognition on a level far beneath names. Not allies. Not enemies. Just others entering the territory of his rage. His muscles flexed once, a territorial shiver, before he dismissed them and refocused on the towering ice-entity.
Loki's illusion—slumped, drained, the picture of wounded irrelevance—snapped its head up just enough to look startled by the sudden arrival. The breath hitched. The shoulders tensed, but only briefly. Perfectly sellable weakness. Perfectly forgettable. The real Loki, hidden deeper in the drifting fog, smirked behind his veil of magic.
The Avatar didn't show emotion—but its attention fractured, just slightly. A tilt of the faceless head. A subtle shift in stance. New variables. New threats. Fresh calculations rippling through a body made of ancient cold and jagged geometry.
Cyclops took it all in.
"Positions," he ordered, voice steady despite the frost stinging his lungs.
Colossus moved first, stepping between Thor and the Avatar, bracing his steel body like a living bulwark. Storm closed her eyes for half a second, feeling the distorted weather patterns, mapping the pressure lines, ready to thread her power through the chaos without feeding the creature. Jean pressed two fingers to her temple, reaching—not for domination, but for cracks. Weaknesses in the mind of something that didn't think the way mortals did. Something that might not think at all.
Wolverine crouched, claws angled forward, breath fogging around bared teeth.
"Alright," he muttered, voice gravel over ice. "Let's see what you're made of."
The X-Men didn't rush in recklessly.
They aligned.
They prepared.
And the battlefield shifted again, the arrival of a coordinated strike force adding a new, dangerous rhythm to the chaos already tearing the street apart.
The battle fractured into chaos the instant the X-Men joined it—
not because they were uncoordinated, but because everyone else was.
Hulk charged first, bellowing as he swung a broken chunk of pavement the size of a truck. Cyclops angled his visor upward, shouting "DON'T CROSS HIS LINE OF FIRE!" just as Hulk's shadow passed over him. The optic blast lanced under Hulk's arc, striking the Avatar square in the torso and blasting a trench of glowing red heat through the frost-coated street.
The Avatar staggered—barely—then shifted its weight with that unnatural stuttering movement, letting the optic beam carve uselessly into the ice behind it. Wolverine darted in through the steam, claws catching pale blue light as he slashed across the Avatar's knee. Sparks of ice and energy burst out—then reformed instantly, sealing around his claws and throwing him back with a violent flash.
Storm swept overhead, wind spiraling around her like a living shield. The cold coming off the Avatar bent her storms out of shape, warping the currents, forcing her to wrestle the atmosphere itself into cooperation. Lightning cracked from the clouds she summoned—only to dim on contact with the creature's aura.
Thor leapt in beside her blast, Mjolnir arcing with desperate fury.
They didn't coordinate. They collided.
His swing passed so close under Storm's path she felt the burn of displaced air. The Avatar turned with impossible speed and slammed a backhand into Thor's chest, sending him ricocheting off Colossus—who had stepped forward to protect him, arms up, steel form ringing like a struck bell from the impact.
Jean's voice cut through the storm of noise:
"IT HAS A MIND—BUT IT'S NOT HUMAN! I CAN'T HOLD IT—JUST DISTRACT IT!"
Cyclops redirected instantly. "Wolverine! Pressure left side! Colossus, anchor center!"
They moved without hesitation—Wolverine bounding off Colossus's shoulder to reach the Avatar's flank, Colossus locking his feet into the frost-glazed pavement, bracing his whole body like a living wall.
Hulk crashed in from the right with a roar that shook the block. He grabbed the Avatar by the arm and pulled, ripping a jagged chunk of ice off its shoulder. For a heartbeat—only one—the heroes saw damage stick.
Then the Avatar's chest runes brightened.
Ice flowed back.
Mended.
Whole.
Hulk snarled in confusion.
Storm dropped another lightning bolt. Cyclops fired. Wolverine slashed. Thor hurled Mjolnir in a spiraling arc that cracked the air.
None of it mattered.
The Avatar moved through the barrage like a glacier given speed—slow in intent, fast in motion. It grabbed Wolverine mid-lunge and hurled him at Hulk. The two collided, tumbling in a mess of rage and metal. Colossus caught Thor's fall as the god was knocked spinning by an elbow strike that felt like a winter storm given shape.
Steam, frost, lightning, fire from Cyclops's beam—they mixed into a roaring fog that swallowed the street.
Through it all, the Avatar stood untouched in the center of the storm, ancient cold radiating outward.
No coordination between Hulk, Thor, or the scattered mutants could break its rhythm.
And minute after minute, just as fatigue and frustration began to whisper among them, a new figure appeared at the edge of the battlefield, altering the equation instantly
Hank Pym snapped into full size at the edge of the battlefield, boots hitting the frozen pavement with calculated precision. The chaos unfolded before him—Hulk tearing into the icy titan, Thor striking in desperate arcs, the X-Men weaving coordinated assaults—and his gaze sliced through it all with clinical exactness. He didn't admire. He evaluated. Variables, trajectories, weak points, angles of collapse.
The X-Men noticed him instantly. A newcomer dropping into the kill zone wasn't something you ignored. Cyclops shifted a fraction, visor tilting. Storm narrowed her eyes, winds curling reflexively around her. Jean's psychic aura flickered as she took a mental snapshot of him. Wolverine growled under his breath, metal claws already bared. Colossus stepped subtly forward—not aggressive, but protective.
Hank didn't slow. Didn't introduce himself. Didn't ask who they were.
He barked orders the moment he opened his mouth.
"You—move twenty degrees left! Redhead—probe the east side, not the center! Weather-controller—reverse the airflow! Metal one—hold that quadrant! Animal—test the perimeter at thirty meters!"
Harsh. Exact. Delivered like commands to instruments rather than living beings.
The X-Men didn't obey.
Not a single one.
But they reacted.
Instinctively. Reflexively.
And that was enough.
Cyclops hesitated for a half-second, recalculating whether the stranger had tactical authority. That microscopic delay offset Jean's psychic pulse, which collided awkwardly with Storm tightening her wind currents. Wolverine paused mid-lunge, thrown off by the sudden environmental shift. Colossus moved to cover an area Hank had pointed to—then realized too late it wasn't actually necessary, leaving Storm briefly exposed.
A perfectly trained unit didn't need to follow orders to be disrupted by them.
All Hank had to do was speak.
And he kept speaking.
Rapid. Unrelenting. Pure calculation.
"Adjust! Shift your angle! Avoid that sector, it's unstable! Don't waste energy there, its composition is denser! Keep pressure on the right side, not the left!"
His voice cut through the frost-laden air like a scalpel, disregarding their own coordination, their own rhythm, their knowledge of each other's movement patterns. The battlefield stuttered—tiny misalignments, mismatched timing, attacks narrowly brushing past allies instead of enemies.
Storm shot him a sharp look, irritation flashing beneath her focus.
Cyclops clenched his jaw.
Wolverine muttered something guttural and unfriendly.
Jean's mental aura tightened as if resisting the intrusions.
Hank didn't care.
He wasn't analyzing their teamwork; he was analyzing the Avatar.
Every chaotic ripple they produced was just more data.
The icy titan shifted, aware of the growing dissonance among its attackers, its faceless gaze sweeping briefly toward Pym as if recognizing the new variable in the equation.
Hank lifted a device, eyes narrowing as it hummed to life.
Perfect.
The disruption had given him a read he needed.
The X-Men rebalanced, already compensating for the interference—but the damage was done. Their flawless coordination now carried a tremor of caution, a fraction of a beat lost between thought and action.
Before the X-Men could fully recover from Pym's abrupt commands, another presence entered from above, shifting the battlefield once more.
Iron Man streaked into view like a red-and-gold comet, repulsors howling against the frozen air and bouncing sharp echoes off the iced façades of nearby buildings. The moment he cleared the rooftop line and saw the battlefield—Hulk smashing through slabs of ancient ice, Thor struggling to stay on his feet, the X-Men scattered in tense disarray, and Hank Pym barking data into the void—Tony didn't hesitate.
"Okay," he muttered inside the helmet, HUD flooding with alerts, "either I took a wrong turn or Christmas came early and nobody told me."
His tone was light.
His pulse was not.
One glance at the Avatar's energy signature—cold so old it registered as negative entropy, runic cores thrumming with god-tier power, temperature curves plunging past the thresholds his sensors were designed for—and Tony's spine tightened beneath the armor.
"Yeah. That's… not good. That's actually the opposite of good."
He dove lower, repulsors flaring as he angled for better coverage.
Hulk was the first to react.
He looked up mid-swing, nostrils flaring, and gave a rumbling grunt—not hostile, not confused. Almost… acknowledging. A simple recognition that another big player had arrived in the arena.
The X-Men, battered by the last few minutes of disjointed coordination and Hank's abrasive interference, shifted as well. Cyclops straightened, adjusting his stance; Storm's winds steadied with a flicker of renewed control; Jean's psychic field momentarily brightened. Even Wolverine flicked a glance skyward, a low growl of approval rumbling when he recognized the armored newcomer.
Pym looked up too, jaw tightening, expression unreadable behind the goggles. But Tony didn't need facial cues—Hank's entire posture said it:
Finally. Someone who speaks science.
Tony slowed his descent just enough to hover above the melee, the thrumming of his stabilizers weaving a pulsing harmony with the distant sirens and cracking ice.
"Alright everyone," he said, voice amplifying across open channels as he brute-forced a synchronized com-link between every suit, visor, and communicator in range—X-Men included. "Let's play nice and share the sandbox. Connecting you all now."
A brief distortion.
A synchronized chime.
A unified channel hissed open.
"Good," Tony continued, "now that we're all officially on the same awkward family call—let's see what Frosty the Runic Murder-Snowman is made of."
His scanners swept the Avatar, slicing through layers of ice and eldritch energy. Runes. Pulses. Structural refreeze nodes. Something that might've been a core—or a heart—or a star about to die.
"Okay, got it. Weak spots: unidentified. Strong spots: all of them. Fantastic."
He angled one arm forward, palm charging with a precise, narrow repulsor beam—tuned not for brute force, but to test the Avatar's reactivity, its defenses, its adaptive threshold.
"Alright, team," Tony said, settling into position above the battlefield, "let's poke the frost giant that isn't a frost giant and see what happens."
High above, two more figures threaded through the frozen air, landing amid the shattered avenue, adding nimble eyes and agility to the chaos below.
Peter touched down first—boots skidding across a sheet of frost that hadn't existed five seconds earlier. Gwen landed a heartbeat after him, posture low, controlled, the cold hitting her lungs like a punch. Both of them turned at the same time, and their momentum faltered.
Because the battlefield wasn't a battlefield.
It was a nightmare carved into Midtown.
The Avatar of Hrimthul towered at the center of the devastation—jagged ice plates shifting like tectonic armor, blue fire leaking through the seams. Around it, the temperature rippled in visible waves, bending the air, killing color, thinning breath. The ground was split and frozen in jagged patterns that branched outward like a glacier forced through asphalt.
Thor staggered near the creature's flank, chest heaving, arm trembling around the haft of Mjolnir. The god's breath came out in thick bursts of steam, every inhale scraping his lungs.
Hulk loomed farther ahead—massive, pacing, shoulders rising and falling with barely restrained fury. He kept edging sideways, trying to find an opening to charge, but even he wasn't reckless enough to launch himself blindly at something radiating that kind of cold.
Iron Man hovered above them, boots glowing against the frost-heavy air, his faceplate angled down in tight concentration. HUD-light flickered across the ice below as he ran constant scans. "Okay," Tony muttered over the comms, "that thing needs a user manual."
The X-Men were the only ones still coordinated—Cyclops directing angles, Storm watching the sky like it was a wounded animal she had to soothe, Jean keeping her mind a tight shield against the psychic static radiating off the Avatar, Colossus and Wolverine bracing for another clash of impossible forces.
Peter's mask tilted upward as he took everything in.
"…Okay," he whispered, voice tight but aiming for levity. "So. Worst. Boss fight. Ever."
Gwen didn't answer. Her eyes swept the scene—pattern recognition kicking hard.
Thor: injured.
Hulk: holding but unstable.
Iron Man: analyzing, not attacking.
X-Men: stressed formation, minor disruption.
The Avatar: untouched, undeterred, unhurried.
Her throat tightened. "We're late," she muttered, voice low.
"And underleveled," Peter added, softer this time. He wasn't joking anymore.
The existing groups reacted to their arrival almost at once.
Hulk grunted—a deep, guttural sound that wasn't hostile but wasn't exactly welcoming either. More: ally-shaped. Close enough.
Cyclops shot them a short, sharp glance and immediately recalculated spacing; Storm nodded with clipped acknowledgment; Wolverine sniffed once, dismissive but accepting; Jean's focus didn't break, but she felt them—recognized the familiar mental signatures.
The battlefield expanded to include them.
Peter swallowed hard, then stepped forward. "Okay. We go wide. Flanks. Mobility first, saves second. We don't crowd the heavy hitters."
Gwen nodded sharply. "We keep civilians out of the blast zone. We look for openings, not hero moments."
They split instantly, lines practiced and fluid—one left, one right—finding perches, walls, vantage points that gave them escape routes and angles on the monster.
They weren't here to win the fight.
They were here to keep people alive long enough for someone else to do it.