With astonishing defense and boundless strength, Colossus still stewed over his poor showing last time during Fear Itself, and this time he'd insisted on joining the battle.
Wolverine was noncommittal and Storm objected, but Cyclops, as deputy headmaster, thought it over briefly and agreed. With defense as strong as Colossus's, short of some special means almost no one could kill him. It would be a waste not to have him fight.
As for Pyro, he joined purely out of his defiant streak, unwilling to pass up the chance to show off his powers. Needled by him, Iceman hesitantly joined in too.
The three didn't rack up much at first, but after fighting a while they found the Chitauri were pathetically weak, with no special abilities whatsoever, and gradually cut loose.
Colossus grabbed enemies and used their bodies like bowling balls, sending Chitauri soldiers flying dozens, sometimes over a hundred, meters (roughly 65 to 330-plus feet) into the air.
Pyro couldn't create fire from nothing; he wore a flame-throwing device on his wrist and then used his power to raise the flames' temperature and volume, launching fireball after fireball at the enemy.
Iceman's performance was comparatively unremarkable. He disliked fighting, favoring defense over offense, but the occasional attacks he did make were highly valuable assists, a good deal cleverer than Pyro, who only knew how to spray fireballs like a madman.
The teachers were still the mainstay of the fight. Wolverine cared nothing for defense; no enemy lasted a single exchange against his Adamantium claws. Time and again an energy gun would punch clean through his body, and then, under the Chitauri's savage glare, he'd run the enemy through, and as it died, it could only watch his wounds knit themselves shut.
Bloody and brutal. Wolverine's tactic was, as ever, to trade wound for wound.
Facing an enemy that blotted out the sky, Storm didn't take to the air but stayed on the ground, calling down thunder and hurricanes to sweep them away. She was the most efficient of all. A single hurricane would sweep up seventeen or eighteen enemies, and a great bolt of lightning right after would wipe out nearly all of them.
The occasional straggler was picked off by deputy headmaster Cyclops.
Three young mutants plus three teachers held Xavier's School firmly; the enemy simply couldn't break through.
Daisy's teleport got her there a step ahead of the enemy. She joined the fight with the others in tow and organized a simple defensive line. The Chitauri host finally merged into a river of steel; seemingly having received Supergiant's command, they no longer used their mobility to fight hit-and-run, instead hurling themselves at Xavier's School like moths to a flame.
"Scott, it's on you." For their handful to fight thousands, tens of thousands of Chitauri, they could just about manage if they had room to maneuver, but defending the school without yielding an inch was another matter.
All they could do was inflict maximum casualties, and the one among them with the greatest killing power and the lowest cost was Cyclops, who was linked to another dimension. The enemy was numerous, but to that dimension, the energy spent killing these Chitauri didn't amount to a drop in the bucket.
His attack power was tremendous. His eyes were just a valve, the energy all supplied by that other dimension, the cost astonishingly low. His only weakness was that Cyclops's own defense was far too poor; if he simply stood still, two enemy shots would kill him.
Daisy's solution was to have the others soak up the damage for him.
Her own technological energy shield, Wolverine as a shield of flesh, and Colossus as a shield of steel: the three of them kept Cyclops in the middle, so all he had to do was pour everything into killing the enemy in the air, while the occasional straggler could be cleared out by Spider-Woman and Storm.
The red beam tore between heaven and earth, cutting countless Chitauri in half, severed limbs raining down across the sky.
A hawk among the moderates, Cyclops cared only about mutants; he didn't set much store even by humans, and for the sinister Chitauri he had not an ounce of pity. He killed without the slightest hesitation. There was even something almost cathartic in it.
Daisy wasn't just standing there dumbly on defense either; she wanted to build a modern fortification at Xavier's School. Unfortunately, one look around showed nothing but lawn and saplings. Forget bricks and stone, there wasn't even a car!
With no other choice, she used gravity to haul over the corpses of the fallen Chitauri, their chariots, and the like. These creatures' flesh contained iron anyway, so she wrung them out like a wet towel, squeezing out a rust-colored pulp of flesh, then flattened and packed down the leftover unknown metal, building a rough semicircular fortification around the four of them.
Such savage methods were a bit hard for Colossus to stomach; in his view, the enemy's dead deserved respect. But Wolverine couldn't care less; he even pitched in to haul the chunks of corpse himself, just to make the defenses a little stronger.
The enemy's energy guns hammered ceaselessly at the fortification and the fighters behind it; leaning on their numbers, the Chitauri kept firing, and Cyclops kept firing back. At last, deciding that single shots were too inefficient, he simply flipped the switch on his ruby-quartz visor, and two red beams began sweeping without pause.
Nothing could withstand those beams. The Chitauri were blown to bloody shreds, a sight too gruesome to watch.
The Chitauri, too, turned desperate, throwing themselves forward wave after wave just to land a single shot, some breaking out of Cyclops's field of fire. They used more than energy guns; some also hurled squarish explosives that looked like Walkmans.
Just then Daisy noticed another shortcoming of Xavier's School: they didn't even have handguns. She had to shoot down those explosives herself, one careful shot at a time.
Her bullets were soon spent, and she had to resort to firing flame bolts to deal with the bombs.
Iceman and Pyro helped shoot down the bombs too. The group held out for several minutes until Hill finally arrived at the head of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents: over a thousand of them, plus more than two hundred robot soldiers, more than enough to defend a single school.
Daisy slipped back into commander mode and went around with a pistol, plugging gaps in the line.
Watching the young mutant students peeking timidly out, Daisy suddenly remembered something and waved to Kitty, Shadowcat, not far off.
"Kitty, come here, come here."
"Daisy..."
"I'm giving you an important mission, one tied to the survival and continuation of humanity." Seeing that Kitty didn't look well, since it was chaos and carnage outside and the girl was a little scared, she caught herself: she'd misjudged this. A child her age wasn't going to be swayed by lofty principles, so she hurriedly switched from noble cause to bribery.
"The newest PlayStation console! A limited edition! Plus an autograph from the game's producer."
Shadowcat's eyes lit right up. Her lips moved as she stammered, her breathing quickened noticeably, and then, a little embarrassed, she gave an eager, ingratiating smile.
Daisy went over the Tesseract's buried location with Kitty and, at the end, drove the warnings home again and again.
"This thing is very dangerous, you can't touch it with your hands. These are S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue tongs and a containment case; the moment you get the cube, put it inside. And one more thing, burn this into your memory: this is a secret mission. No matter who asks, you can't say a word. Just hand it straight to me when the time comes!"