Leaving the villa and returning to S.H.I.E.L.D., Daisy found the place just as tense.
Against enemies numbering in the tens of thousands, the handful of Avengers had little room to show off. Black Widow and Hawkeye were folded back into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s ranks, and Captain America took over Crossbones's old post, leading the special-operations team as the main force in the fighting.
Thor, none of them really knew—and hearing this guy call himself some kind of crown prince, well, that touched on matters of state. Nobody dared give him orders.
Stark was a piece of work all his own. He loved directing other people, but being directed? Sorry—he'd flip on you in a heartbeat.
As for Dr. Banner—heh, best not even bring him up. When he transformed, he did more damage than the aliens did. Turn him loose to fight without a care, and postwar New York could probably just be handed back to the Native Americans.
Spotting Daisy walking past, Stark reached out to grab her arm—and nearly got yanked off his feet.
"You're strong…" Stark waved a hand, signaling the agents who'd witnessed the moment to get back to work.
"We can't just let the aliens make landfall on Earth. The damage from that kind of fight would be catastrophic." Stark's face was more serious than it had ever been.
Daisy glanced around and lowered her voice to match. "So what's your plan? Fight them in space? Your armor can supply an hour of oxygen—maybe you've added some new function by now? But I can't. You're not going to send me out to fight in a spacesuit, and in a vacuum I can manage half an hour of combat at most."
Stark, never one to leave a jaw un-dropped: "J.A.R.V.I.S. tracked down an alien ship in Nick Fury's hands. Maybe we could—"
Daisy figured Fury had deliberately let the alien ship's existence leak, precisely to bait the heroes into running point. By now she'd already made her connection with the Inhumans; she didn't particularly need Fury's obsolete alien ships anymore.
She waved Stark off mid-sentence. "The enemy is a whole species. Every one of them has a mind of its own—they're not robots. Even if you break your back knocking out a few ships, what does that have to do with the actual fight? This is a war between species, life and death. It's not the chess game between one country and another. That whole approach of a few people charging in to take out the enemy's leadership—all it does is make a little chaos. It won't accomplish much."
Heroism—that was the biggest gap between her and this crowd of superheroes. With enemies swarming in across every hill and field, having a small team pick off a few commanders truly changed nothing. Even if the Chitauri were driven back this time, what happened when they came back better prepared, carrying more weapons, bringing more of their kind to Earth? You couldn't exactly relocate the whole planet.
Win the whole thing in a single stroke. Seize the moment while the enemy was overconfident, and in one blow beat them so hard their nation fell and their species was wiped out—a warning to every covetous eye in the cosmos. That was the right road.
Rather than pour a mountain of effort into killing a few leaders, Daisy chose to slaughter the rank-and-file soldiers.
By her recollection, the Chitauri didn't actually number all that many. Kill one and there was one less. Why not use overwhelming force and cut them down?
At 12:20 in the afternoon, Daisy made a special trip to see Professor Xavier.
She got straight to the point. "Supergiant has a scepter that can control the mind. Last time she got careless, so the scepter ended up in Loki's hands—but who knows now. She already has enormous psychic power of her own. Add the scepter on top of that, and I'm afraid no one on Earth could stand against her. Professor, we need your strength."
Just how strong was Supergiant plus the Mind Stone? Going by how Ronan, once he had the Power Stone, could destroy an entire planet—if Supergiant got hold of Loki's Scepter, she could probably seize control of everyone on Earth in a single instant.
Daisy didn't know why she kept holding off on doing exactly that, but Earth had to be prepared regardless.
Professor Xavier and his Cerebro were the only means of putting up even a little resistance.
"All right. I'm willing to do this." The old man agreed without much hesitation.
Right now the Professor's importance eclipsed everyone else's. If the two forces squared off, Daisy figured he'd be the soft underbelly on her side. The moment Supergiant met resistance, she'd strike at Xavier's School first thing.
Professor Xavier could run, but Cerebro—that piece of advanced tech—couldn't be moved. And without it, the old man was of little use.
The X-Men all stayed behind to protect the Professor, and Mockingbird stayed too, bringing a large contingent of agents to help.
At 1:25 that afternoon, the sky over the Western Hemisphere went dark. Dense black shapes appeared beyond the atmosphere, seemingly without end—they blotted out more than half the sunlight. Judging by their flight path, the landing point was New York itself.
A huge crowd of civilians was still jammed on the Brooklyn Bridge. At last they grasped the reality of it: war had come.
Even the police, who'd been patrolling the streets to keep order, were rattled. At least a third of them threw down their badges—they didn't believe their pistols could do a thing against aliens.
The soldiers rushed in on emergency muster were scattered across the streets, shivering as they stared at the sky. The officers who'd been barking orders moments before fell speechless too at the sight of that black, oppressive sky. They didn't know whether they could hold off the aliens, whether they'd live to see tomorrow's sun.
"I'm done! I'm going home!" A private threw down his weapon and bolted from the ranks—only to be shot dead on the spot by a military policeman. The officers were terrified too, but plenty of them knew: band together and you might live; scatter and run and you were as good as dead.
Hell's Kitchen, chaos incarnate, finally knew a moment of quiet that day. Kingpin stepped out of his office and looked up at the sky.
Bullseye stood a little behind him. The two of them hadn't gone down into the tunnels to hide. Even if he wasn't the boss of the underworld yet, Kingpin didn't believe any so-called aliens could force him to flee. His fists were full of power—come one, kill one.
His men were another story—but after James Wesley rushed a large shipment of weapons over to them, morale ticked back up. Full American military kit: body armor, assault rifles, grenades.
A pack of gangsters with mouths full of yellow teeth and bodies full of knife scars watched their buddies get dressed up in proper American uniforms, one and all, and traded snickers and jabs. It took the edge off the dread before the big fight.
They were New Yorkers. If they were going to die, they'd die on this soil.
Soldiers, agents, gangsters, and countless nameless civilians ready to resist to the end—every one of them watched the sky, waiting on the doom about to descend.
There were ordinary citizens prepared to fight to the death for their families, and naturally there were also clueless idiots.
A gaggle of young men and women in heavy makeup and outlandish outfits held up signs at street corners and down every alley, pushing their cause: welcome the aliens to save the Earth, they proclaimed, and called on the military to lay down its arms. Some even hurled rocks at police—simply because the officers were keeping order and moving people out.
God knew what was going through their heads. They actually believed alien rule would be more enlightened than humanity's own. They thought an alien invasion of Earth was thrilling, cool, something to brag about among their friends.