Chapter 82 : When the City Becomes the Battlefield – Holding the Line Isn't Enough
New York, Manhattan – 3rd's POV
The city has stopped behaving like a city.
Streets are locked under ice, traffic frozen in place at odd angles, vehicles abandoned mid-turn like toys dropped by a careless hand. Storefronts have become hazards—glass weakened by cold, awnings sagging under accumulated frost. Buildings creak and complain as temperature and pressure wage a slow, grinding war against steel and stone.
And everywhere, people.
Running. Slipping. Shouting names that disappear into the wind.
Natasha Romanoff moves through it all like a blade through fabric.
"Eyes up. Watch your footing. Don't run unless I tell you to run."
Her voice cuts cleanly through the noise—firm, controlled, carrying just enough authority to anchor people's attention. She doesn't shout. She doesn't plead. She gives instructions like facts, and people follow facts when panic is looking for something to grab.
She gestures sharply with one gloved hand, redirecting a cluster of civilians away from a street where a bus lies half-buried in ice, its metal frame groaning under stress.
"Not that way," she says. "Building integrity is compromised. We go left. Slow. Together."
They listen.
Not because they know who she is—but because she sounds like someone who knows what comes next.
Above and behind her, Clint Barton shifts position on the edge of a frozen fire escape. His breath fogs instantly, freezing on the fabric of his scarf. Fingers already numb, he flexes them once before nocking another arrow.
"Left corridor's clear for now," he says calmly into comms. "I've got ice shear on the north facade—looks ready to drop. I'll pin it."
Natasha doesn't look back.
"Do it."
The arrow whistles, strikes high. A grappling line deploys mid-flight, anchoring into reinforced concrete. Clint yanks hard, redirecting the slab of frozen debris as it tears free. It crashes harmlessly into the street instead of onto the evacuation path.
No applause. No pause.
They move.
Natasha steps into a collapsed intersection where the cold has turned spilled water into uneven, glassy terrain. A man has fallen, clutching his ankle, shock dulling his reaction. His daughter is crying, trying to pull him up with hands too small to help.
Natasha crouches instantly.
"You," she says to the man, already assessing. "Can you stand?"
He shakes his head.
"Okay," Natasha replies, without judgment. She turns to the girl. "What's your name?"
"—Maya."
"Maya," Natasha says, meeting her eyes. "I need you to be very brave for ten seconds."
She doesn't wait for agreement.
A sharp whistle. Two SHIELD agents appear, sliding in from cover.
"Carry him," Natasha orders. "Stretcher improvisation. Jackets under the back. Now."
The agents obey.
Natasha helps Maya to her feet, places herself between the child and the wider chaos.
"Stay on my left," she says. "If you fall, I stop. If you can't see me, you shout."
Maya nods, terrified—and focused.
Above them, Clint shifts again.
"Nat," he says. "Movement east. Not fragments. Secondary collapse. You've got maybe forty seconds before that building sheds another layer."
"Copy."
Natasha pivots.
"Move," she says to the group. Not louder—stronger. "Now."
They go.
The cold is relentless.
It doesn't just slow people—it steals strength. Every step costs more than it should. Breath burns. Muscles stiffen. Fingers stop responding when needed most.
Natasha feels it too. She ignores it.
She makes decisions in motion.
This group goes first—children, injured, elderly.
That group waits—able-bodied adults who can move on their own.
That building is too unstable—mark it, leave it, don't look back.
Each choice is a subtraction.
Clint watches her do it without comment.
He knows the weight of it.
A woman breaks from the line, screaming a name—her son, separated in the confusion. She grabs Natasha's sleeve, eyes wild.
"Please—I just need a minute—"
Natasha catches her wrist. Not rough. Unyielding.
"You don't have a minute," she says quietly. "You have a direction. Follow it."
"But my—"
"If he's mobile, he'll be moved toward shelter," Natasha says, meeting her gaze. "If he's not, teams are already searching. You stop now, you add another body to the problem."
The woman hesitates.
Natasha lowers her voice just enough to cut through.
"Go. For him."
The woman goes.
Clint exhales slowly.
"Clear shot," he says. "Path's holding."
They guide the convoy through a narrow passage between two frozen trucks. Clint fires twice—not at enemies, but at hazards: an arrow to shatter an icicle the size of a lamppost, another to anchor a dangling streetlight before it can swing loose.
He doesn't miss.
He doesn't rush.
He adjusts constantly, repositioning for sightlines, accounting for ricochets on ice-slick surfaces, choosing arrows based on utility rather than force.
Smoke arrow. Cable line. Impact dampener.
No theatrics.
Just control.
The soundscape shifts as they move closer to the safe zone.
The wind lessens.
The cold—still present—loses its teeth.
People notice it before they understand it.
"I can feel my hands again," someone whispers.
Natasha clocks the reaction immediately.
"Keep moving," she says. "Don't stop here."
The alley comes into view.
A circle of wrongness in the right way.
No frost. No pressure. No sound distortion. Just… space.
Jack's zone.
Clint lands beside her, boots skidding slightly before he stabilizes.
"That's… unsettling," he mutters.
"Yes," Natasha agrees. "It works."
They usher civilians across the boundary.
The effect is immediate.
Shivering slows. Breathing steadies. Panic recedes—not gone, but muted.
People sag with relief they didn't realize they were holding back.
Natasha doesn't let herself feel it.
She counts.
Numbers in. Numbers out.
She watches how long people linger, how quickly they recover, who collapses once the danger passes.
She flags medics.
She assigns SHIELD agents to hold the perimeter—not to defend it, but to organize flow.
No crowding. No bottlenecks.
Clint watches the approach routes.
"Nat," he says quietly. "We can hold this intake for maybe five minutes before the next pressure shift reaches us."
"Then we take five," she replies.
They get three.
A distant rumble rolls through the streets—not close, but heavy enough to register through the ground.
People flinch.
Natasha raises her voice just enough.
"Stay inside the boundary. You are safe here."
She believes it.
She doesn't let herself think about how temporary that safety might be.
Clint taps his comm.
"We're cycling," he says. "Second sweep, same sector. Priority residential blocks."
"Copy," Natasha answers.
She takes one last look at the civilians—at Maya, now wrapped in a thermal blanket, eyes tracking Natasha with fierce attention.
Natasha nods to her once.
Then she turns away.
They move back into the cold.
Immediately, the city reasserts itself.
The wind claws. Ice bites. The pressure returns like a weight on the chest.
Clint takes point this time, scanning for overhead threats as Natasha leads from the front, recalculating routes based on what's already failed.
They pass a building that wasn't dangerous ten minutes ago and now very much is.
They mark it.
They pass a man waving from a window three floors up.
Natasha clocks the angle, the structural stress, the time it would take.
She shakes her head once.
"Later," she says into comms, and hates the word.
Clint hears it anyway.
Neither of them comment.
They keep moving.
Because somewhere behind them, people are alive who weren't before.
And somewhere ahead, more are waiting—cold, scared, and running out of time.
The city does not pause.
Neither do they.
New York, Manhattan – 3rd's POV
They were not supposed to be here.
Not this close to collapsing structures.
Not this far from the main fragment-hunting formation.
But the scream cut through comms—and Spider-Woman was already moving before anyone finished saying civilian.
"Wasp, breaking off," she snapped, firing a web-line into the frozen superstructure of a half-collapsed apartment block. "Three heat signatures, upper floors. Structure's failing."
"On you," Wasp replied instantly.
The fragment they had been tracking—jagged, luminous, radiating waves of killing cold—was left behind, temporarily boxed in by Storm's pressure currents and Jean's distant psychic grip. Not destroyed. Not yet.
But people were closer.
That decided everything.
Spider-Woman slammed feet-first into a vertical wall, boots skidding on ice-slick concrete as she redirected momentum upward. Her movements were sharp, economical—every swing calculated to minimize contact with surfaces that burned with cold through insulation and suit alike.
The building groaned.
Metal screamed somewhere deep inside its frozen skeleton.
"Clock's running," Wasp said, already shrinking mid-flight, slipping through a fractured window in a blur of gold and black. "Ice load on the beams is bad. Worse than it looks."
Spider-Woman didn't answer. She was already inside.
The interior was a nightmare of white and blue—walls coated in rime, stairwells warped by uneven expansion, air so cold it felt thick in the lungs. A family huddled near a stairwell landing, wrapped in coats that were no longer enough.
Two adults. One child.
All shaking.
"I've got you," Spider-Woman said, voice firm, steady, cutting clean through panic. "You're coming with me. Now."
Behind her, the cold surged.
The fragment was closer than she liked.
Wasp re-expanded just enough to be visible, landing lightly on a broken railing. "Fragment's adapting," she said. "It's not chasing—but it's spreading. We don't have long."
"Then we don't waste time."
Spider-Woman fired a web net across the ceiling, reinforcing cracked supports, then spun another line around the child, securing them to her chest harness with practiced efficiency.
"Eyes on me," she told the kid. "Don't look down. Don't let go."
The building shuddered again.
Outside, the fragment released a pulse.
Ice raced up the exterior walls like a living thing.
Wasp darted toward the source—not to fight it, not really. She shrank, accelerated, and struck a protruding node of condensed energy at speed, her gauntlets releasing a precision burst designed to disrupt—not destroy.
The fragment recoiled.
Not injured.
Distracted.
"Bought you seconds," Wasp said, already veering away as frost detonated where she'd been a heartbeat earlier. "Use them."
Spider-Woman didn't hesitate.
She jumped.
Web-lines snapped outward, anchoring to three separate structures as she swung the family out through a collapsing window just as the floor behind them gave way entirely. Concrete shattered. Ice exploded into powder.
They landed hard—but alive—on a lower rooftop already webbed into a temporary safe platform.
SHIELD agents rushed in moments later, pulling the civilians toward evacuation corridors.
"Go," Spider-Woman ordered. "Don't stop."
She was already turning back.
"Wasp," she said, breath tight. "We're rejoining."
"Copy. Fragment team's two blocks east. They're holding, but it's ugly."
Spider-Woman fired a line and launched herself back into the frozen chaos without another word.
They re-entered the fragment zone at speed.
Storm's winds screamed overhead, tearing at the unnatural cold. Jean's psychic presence pressed like invisible gravity, forcing two fragments into partial stasis. Wolverine was already on one of them, claws carving through ice at the cost of skin and blood.
Spider-Woman didn't slow.
She webbed a fragment's legs together mid-lunge, anchoring it to a shattered fire escape and yanking hard—redirecting its momentum just enough for Logan to finish the job in a violent implosion of frost and energy.
"One down," Jean sent, strained. "Two more nearby."
Wasp zipped past Spider-Woman's shoulder. "You good?"
"Still moving."
That was enough.
They worked like that for minutes that felt like hours.
Destroy. Disrupt. Extract.
Fragments fell—but not fast enough.
The city never stopped screaming.
Another call came in—this time closer. Too close.
A school bus, frozen mid-turn, half-buried in ice. Children inside. No fragment directly engaged—but one moving in their direction, bleeding cold into the street with every step.
Spider-Woman cursed softly.
"Breaking off again," she said.
"Already ahead of you," Wasp replied.
They split without slowing.
Spider-Woman swung low, skidding across frozen asphalt as she fired webbing to pry open the bus's rear emergency exit. Inside, children cried, breath fogging thick in the air.
"Listen to me," Spider-Woman said, climbing inside despite the cold burning through her gloves. "Single file. Follow my voice."
Outside, Wasp went big.
Not full size—never full size this close to a fragment—but enough to be seen.
Enough to be a target.
"Hey!" she shouted, blasting the street beside the fragment with a concussive burst. "Snowman! Over here!"
The fragment turned.
Ice formed weapons where its arms should be.
Wasp didn't wait.
She shrank, darted between strikes, grew again just long enough to kick debris into its path, forcing it to divert, stumble, recalibrate.
Every second mattered.
Spider-Woman pulled children free one by one, web-lines cushioning drops, anchoring them to lamp posts and safe zones where responders grabbed them immediately.
The cold was worse now.
The fragment was close enough that ice crept across the bus windows in fractal patterns.
"Hurry," Wasp said, voice tight. "It's pushing through my interference."
"Last one," Spider-Woman replied.
The fragment roared—sound like cracking glaciers.
Wasp took a hit.
Not direct—but close enough.
She spun through the air, armor frosting over, wing screaming in protest as she barely recovered altitude.
Spider-Woman burst out of the bus, grabbed the last child, and swung.
The fragment lunged.
And missed.
Barely.
They cleared the street as Storm's wind slammed down like a wall, forcing the fragment back long enough for Wolverine and Jean to re-engage from another angle.
The bus collapsed behind them.
Spider-Woman landed hard, rolling to absorb impact, then came up on one knee, breath ragged.
Wasp hovered nearby, shaking ice from her wings. "That was too close."
Spider-Woman nodded once. "Yeah."
No time to dwell.
They were already moving again.
Back to the fragments.
Back to the real fight.
By the time they rejoined the main team, two more fragments lay shattered across the streets, reduced to inert crystal and lingering cold. Everyone looked worse. Slower. Tired.
But alive.
For now.
Jean's mental voice pulsed through them all—steady but strained. Nearest cluster is thinning. But the pressure's increasing elsewhere.
Spider-Woman wiped frost from her lenses and looked east.
Toward the heart of the storm.
Toward the Avatar.
"This isn't slowing him," she said quietly.
"No," Wasp agreed. "But it's keeping people alive."
That was the point.
Another scream echoed from somewhere deeper in the city.
They didn't wait for orders.
Spider-Woman fired a web-line.
Wasp shrank and accelerated.
They launched back into the frozen maze—two fast-moving constants in a city that was falling apart by degrees.
They destroyed fragments when they could.
They saved civilians when they had to.
And they knew—with absolute clarity—that every successful rescue was bought on borrowed time.
Because somewhere else, the storm was getting worse.
And sooner or later, running would no longer be enough.