"Don't use anything too over-the-top, just hold the villa." Wanda watched the enemies streaking back and forth across the sky, muttering Daisy's instructions under her breath as she flipped through the book, hunting for that "not-too-over-the-top spell."
Unfortunately, of those who had ever read the Darkhold, a small few were on Dormammu's level, and the rest were hardly weaker than the Ancient One. How could a book like that possibly contain a spell that wasn't over-the-top?
Wanda's delicate brows knotted as she compared one against another, and at last she settled on a spell that looked, at least, not too extreme.
She murmured softly, her eyes welling with a heavy black mist, and then hurled a wave of Chaos Magic that covered an area several kilometers (a few miles) across, up into the sky. Every Chitauri within it dropped like a game connection cutting out, clattering to the ground one after another. Their wills had been wiped away by the magic; they were already dead the moment they left their chariots.
The enemy blotted out the sky, seemingly without end. The advance on the city's outskirts was slow; they had to push forward without letting any of the enemy slip away, so there was no picking up the pace.
The former research center where the Tesseract lay buried was the hottest contested ground of all. Stark and War Machine were there, holding the line to the death alongside the military and S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.
Grant Ward, along with the terminally chicken-hearted Jasper Sitwell, had both been stationed here on defense by Daisy.
They weren't only defending; they also had to carry out the excavation. As far as humanity's leadership was concerned, whether the cube was used to sue for peace, to surrender, or for their own research, it had to be dug out.
Daisy backed this too. Burying it deep underground and playing ostrich solved nothing; you had to look at the problem scientifically and rationally, and digging it up to take for herself was the most reasonable solution of all.
With the assault stalled, the concealed Supergiant issued another command. A rumbling roar split the air, and the Chitauri Leviathans, vast troop-carriers like great dragon-fish, finally broke through the atmosphere. Five of the enormous alien beasts blotted out the sky at once, weaving and lurching as they surged toward the Tesseract's location.
"Fire missiles!" Daisy ordered at once.
Fifteen cruise missiles rose as one from the ground silos, followed by a second volley: thirty missiles in all slamming into the Leviathans that had just entered the atmosphere.
Fire lit up the sky, and the roar of the blasts set the earth trembling faintly, yet Daisy's brow furrowed. Apart from the first Leviathan, which had taken ten missiles and shown some minor damage, the other four were almost untouched.
The things were frighteningly well-armored.
As battlefield commander, she had no choice but to step in herself.
The Atomic Cut lanced out like lightning, and the nearest Leviathan in her line of sight was sheared clean in two from the side, dropping to the ground amid a small explosion and the wails of the Chitauri.
"What kind of light was that?" Sharp-eyed as ever, Stark had spotted the anomaly of the Atomic Cut immediately.
"A kind of laser," Daisy lied without missing a beat.
Stark flew over and tested it with the laser on his wrist. The Leviathan was barely scratched. J.A.R.V.I.S. informed him that the ship's armor was extremely thick, that even draining every ounce of power in the Iron Man armor might not cut through it, so he gave up on the spot.
"Is lying just an instinct with you agents?"
"It really is a high-energy laser, I'm not lying to you..." Clad in her armor, hair streaming loose, she flew to the top of one Leviathan, meaning to tear it apart with her vibration powers.
But two pulses in, she realized the Leviathan was built of some unknown metal, abnormally thick. By rights it should be inferior to vibranium and Adamantium, yet the sheer mass of its armor drained her vibration power before it could sink even a third of the way in.
So she had to slip in through a breach the missiles had blown open earlier and wreck it from the inside.
Inside, the Leviathan was packed with Chitauri, crowded as thick as a famous tourist spot on a long holiday weekend, enemies jostling shoulder to shoulder. She hacked left and right, forcing her way through, but still took two hits.
"So you're going to be a superhero too? Thought of a name yet?" Stark, tangled up with another Leviathan, kept up the banter as he fought. "Let me help you out. Flame Guy? Fire Girl?"
"What garbage names are those! Remember this." Daisy carved a bloody path through and smashed a fist into what looked like the Leviathan's control console.
"You can call me Wonder Woman!" Then she burst out through the breach, a Chitauri Leviathan blazing behind her like one enormous torch.
Two of the five ships down. This turtle-shell approach was a real headache, she had to admit; humanity's tech weapons were basically useless against it, leaving only raw personal strength to put them down.
On her orders the military kept launching missiles; even if they couldn't kill the ships, they could slow them a little and buy time.
Stark copied her method, charging into a Leviathan's gaping maw, wrecking it from within, and bursting out the back, taking down a ship of his own, though his armor came out badly damaged.
"Why'd you stop using that light? Can you only do it once?" he asked, genuinely curious, watching Daisy cut her way into yet another Leviathan.
"Obviously," Daisy shot back, irritated.
The Chitauri in this Leviathan seemed to have learned their lesson. They fought cautiously, entrenching at every step, refusing to go toe-to-toe with Daisy. Turtling on the outside, turtling on the inside too. She had to fall back on the Phoenix Force and the Iron Fist to smash it apart.
Four of the five Leviathans down; the last one she simply couldn't get to in time.
"Clear out!" Grant Ward at least managed to give an order, sending everyone scattering. Jasper Sitwell had already bolted for his life at the first sign of trouble, and the remaining agents, powerless to stop a collision on that scale, all dove for cover.
The massive ship plowed head-first into the ground facilities excavating the Tesseract. Dust flew, and countless shards of rock and metal scattered across a vast area more than a kilometer (over half a mile) wide. The ship gouged out a crater over thirty meters (about a hundred feet) across and more than ten meters (thirty-odd feet) deep, and with the impact came an even wider collapse of the ground.
Before the dust had even settled, swarms of Chitauri soldiers were already crawling out of the ship. They did exactly what S.H.I.E.L.D. had done: first establishing a defensive perimeter, then digging furiously with something that looked like a drill bit.
Daisy dropped to the ground, her long blade flashing, scattering all who stood in her way, then struck the ground with tremendous force, demolishing another half of what remained of the old research site. But that was as far as she could take it.
There were still plenty of humans on-site, and tearing up the landscape on a massive scale, destroying friend and foe alike, wasn't what she'd intended. On top of that, the Chitauri were reinforcing again; two more ships soon touched down at the dig site.
A huge ground force plus the chariots filling the sky: hundreds of Chitauri, heedless of their own losses, concentrated their fire on Daisy. The eerie blue energy weapons had her dodging left and right, and when she couldn't dodge, she took the hits head-on with the energy shield Medusa had given her.
When the gap in power between two sides wasn't a yawning chasm, numbers couldn't be ignored. Even the Hulk, caught in concentrated fire, would be pinned down and left helpless, let alone her.