"Mortals, kneel before a god." A smile played at the corner of Loki's mouth, as though he were speaking of some trivial little thing—but the crushing pressure of him, the sheer gulf between his order of existence and theirs, set the soldiers trembling head to toe. They didn't know what was wrong with their own bodies; they only felt weak and boneless, their footing unsteady, while a voice roared inside their skulls: Kneel!
"Loki!" Thor, who had traded a few blows with the Chitauri and spent the rest of his time watching the battlefield, spotted his brother at once. He hammered his current opponent flying and hurtled toward Loki, riding the force of the thunder.
"Still as foolish as ever." Loki's eyebrow arched. Gauging the distance between them, at the very moment Thor was about to enter his striking range, he drew a glowing blue rectangular box out of the empty air before him.
"The Casket of Ancient Winters?" Thor's inability to fly—his reliance on the hammer to sling himself back and forth—was laid utterly bare. Suspended in midair with nothing to push off from, he frantically swung the hammer to try to clear the strike zone, but he was a step too slow.
A wall of ice blotted out the sky and swallowed everything within a radius of a kilometer (about half a mile). The bone-deep cold sealed the two nearby buildings, a convenience store, and more than a dozen soldiers, agents, and brave civilians in solid ice. Confusion and terror were still frozen on their faces, their minds still stuck on the question of whether or not to kneel—and then a white light flashed, and they knew nothing at all.
Thor was trapped inside the ice, his lips clearly shaping a shout of Loki, but no sound could get out. Robust as his constitution was, it only bought him a little resistance to the cold; in under three seconds Thor felt a wave of dizziness—the extreme low temperature going to work on his brain.
The Frost Giants and the Asgardians had warred for countless years, and as their people's divine weapon, the Casket had been designed from the very start to target Asgardians. If the Casket of Ancient Winters did one unit of harm to an ordinary person, it did one and a half to an Asgardian. Thor's heart brimmed with fury, but his will was draining away fast, his eyelids growing heavier and heavier.
"Fool!" Loki gave a soft snort. Yet his gloating lasted less than three seconds, because Daisy teleported his old friend the Hulk right over.
"Don't come near me!" Even mind-controlled, his thoughts twisted, Loki still remembered the Hulk.
Momentarily flustered into saying the wrong thing, he hastily brought the Casket to bear, hoping to freeze the big oaf too.
But the Hulk didn't coddle him the way Thor did. A fist several times the size of an earthenware pot slammed into the ice, and even the Frost Giants' divine weapon couldn't hold back the Hulk's monstrous strength—two punches shattered the ice pillar, and shattered Loki's nerve along with it.
If even the mightiest divine weapon couldn't do anything to the Hulk, what else did Loki have left?
Loki turned tail and ran, throwing up ice now and then to slow the Hulk down—freeze him just once, and wouldn't the win be his?
At first the Hulk really was chasing his old acquaintance, but then he discovered that the ice Loki conjured was wonderfully resistant to smashing, and the Hulk slowly found the fun in it. Unlike buildings and concrete, which were gone in a single blow, Loki's Casket could churn out ice endlessly—sturdy, and in unlimited supply. The Hulk decided he'd found himself a great new toy, and set off on those big flat feet to chase Loki down, wailing on him the whole way.
Loki was a sly one. Running and watching, he saw the Hulk had no way to fly, so—friend or not—he yanked a Chitauri off its flyer, commandeered the machine, and bolted. The Hulk, of course, wasn't about to let him get away; with great leaps and a hard sprint, he tore after him.
Elsewhere, Daisy manipulated gravity to haul the ice-locked Thor back to Stark Tower.
She could have melted the ice easily enough with Phoenix fire, but with the battle right on top of her there was no sense wasting her own reserves. She left it to her agents to thaw him out slowly with flamethrowers, keeping her eyes sweeping the city for any sign of Supergiant.
On the strength of sheer numbers, the Chitauri broke through Earth's wall of firepower—first a few, then dozens and hundreds, then thousands and tens of thousands.
The Chitauri army had no formation to speak of. They were a horde of interstellar bandits, and the first thing they did on breaking through the firepower was scatter in every direction, sowing chaos, attacking the humans' anti-aircraft guns, breaking up the human lines.
With a crisp shing, Daisy casually cut down a foot soldier that had gotten close, her long sword slashing left and right to kill two more Chitauri. These things had somewhat tough necks, something between flesh and steel—no trouble for her to cut through with her strength, though an ordinary person would have had a harder time of it.
Flicking the foul blood off her blade, she got on the line with the forces outside New York. "Bring the follow-on units in. The enemy's target is New York, plain and simple."
The military, National Guard, police, and agents currently positioned in New York came to just over fifty thousand.
For one thing, they feared the enemy might jam their side's communications. Humans were superstitious about alien technology, convinced the aliens could do anything, and if too many troops were brought in and their comms got knocked out, command would fall apart. That very worry was why Daisy kept the White Queen at her side—if it came to it, she could relay orders through psychic power.
Beyond the communications issue, there was another reason everyone understood without saying: the brave were too few. Most people, once they heard they'd be fighting aliens, would rather be deserters facing a court-martial than go to New York. With no other choice, they'd handpicked veterans willing to fight and kill, and sent them to New York for the street war.
Now, with the battle footage streaming to the rear, a lot of people saw that these aliens weren't the unstoppable monsters they'd imagined. Apart from being a bit terrifying to look at, they didn't exceed current understanding by all that much in any other respect. They could be killed!
As the soldiers' courage returned, the follow-on units could move to surround New York from all sides.
Better New York get flattened than let the aliens go ravage some other city—that was the shared cry of everyone on Earth. And, of course, of every American who didn't happen to live in New York.
The major powers began setting up defenses around New York's perimeter, building defensive points layer by layer from the outside in, squeezing the enemy's room to move a little at a time.
Thud—with a dull, heavy sound, Kingpin, in his black suit, pinned a Chitauri's head against a wall, then rained down punch after punch, beating the wretched thing to death, before finally seizing its head in both hands and wrenching it clean off.
"Look at this! These pieces of garbage are nothing special! This is New York—this is our turf!" As the strongest human alive without a shred of enhancement, Kingpin rallied his men his own way: by killing an alien with his bare hands.
There was no denying how much it moved them. Gangsters who lived by the blade, who searched for meaning in the dark corners of the world, were beside themselves with excitement. Lousy shots though they were, they started spraying the Chitauri with their submachine guns like men possessed.
Kingpin's black suit was soaked with gore, but he didn't care in the least. Instead he stood ramrod straight, like a wall, watching his men trade blows with the Chitauri.