The many citizens who had hidden all day now crawled out of their hiding places. The aliens they'd found so hideous and terrifying before didn't look like much after all.
Harpoon guns, crossbow bolts, shotguns—everything came out at once. Seeing the Chitauri trying to flee into the sky, some people flung fishing nets down from the upper floors. By sheer luck, they managed to snag a few here and there.
The military's remaining weapons opened fire again too, every barrel trained on the sky—right now, every extra one they brought down counted.
The mercenaries who'd been holed up in the little tavern, fighting the Chitauri street by street, all fired into the sky as well, as if celebrating a holiday.
"Cover me for a sec..." Lorna said to her companions. Then flecks of green light glimmered between her fingers, and an invisible, immaterial magnetic net settled into place around the tavern.
Many Chitauri flying past overhead plummeted headlong before they even grasped what was happening, and later became fodder for the mercenaries' bragging.
At the two points where heavy forces had gathered, the resistance was fiercer still—but that was among the ordinary people. The heroes, who'd carried the fighting, were basically spent after a full day. The few mutants from Xavier's School went back to tend to the old bald man, and only Wolverine, Daisy, and the others pressed the pursuit all the way, finally linking up with Captain America.
"Captain, you've done well." However much they might disagree, Daisy still deeply respected Steve Rogers. One look at him drenched in blood told her just how brutal the fighting had been.
Chitauri blood was iron-gray, so the blood on Captain America was basically all his own. When Daisy found the old soldier, he was resting, seated atop an enemy corpse.
"Was she blown to pieces?" Captain America asked, pointing at the deep crater not far off.
There was no body in the crater—only some scraps of Supergiant's hood and cape, patches of blue blood scattered about, and several completely charred psionic-energy extraction devices.
"Dead?" Daisy wasn't entirely sure herself. She picked up a fragment that looked like part of a psionic-energy extraction device, turned it over, then crushed it in her hand and searched the vicinity for similar targets on the device's particular frequency. Nothing.
She had the White Queen sweep the area with her psychic power too, and still there was no sign of anyone.
Whether Supergiant had been blown apart or teleported away, there was no telling.
In Daisy's view, the two outcomes were about equally likely. Thanos might look like a big, brawny brute, but he was in fact a very famous scientist. He'd finished learning the entire body of the Eternals' technological knowledge as a boy in his teens, then roamed the cosmos for countless years afterward. That he'd built an emergency teleportation device for a loyal subordinate wouldn't be strange at all.
She silently cursed how hard the enemy was to deal with.
As she picked up Cap's shield to return it to him, Daisy discovered something unexpected: the shield had actually taken on a good deal of the Mind Stone's power. In other words, in the great explosion of Supergiant's psychic power, by sheer chance the shield had acquired a touch of the properties of a divine artifact.
The shield's psychic power enhanced its wielder in proportion to their strength of conviction. The shield had always been well disposed toward Captain America, and now it was nearly becoming a weapon uniquely his own.
Daisy was taken aback. Could it have been like this in the original timeline too?
If Captain America carried this shield, then a great many of his incredible feats could be explained. The power of the mind was boundless, and Steve Rogers was a man of unshakable conviction—put the two together and he'd be all but invincible...
She handed the shield to Captain America. From now on, as long as he held it, he'd be immune to all mind-type powers weaker than the Mind Stone—a formidable effect indeed.
"Hand the scepter to me. This falls under S.H.I.E.L.D.'s jurisdiction." A major tried to take the Mind Scepter, but the quick-eyed, quick-handed Daisy snatched it away first.
He held out for two seconds under her stare before finally choosing to back down.
Smart of you! Daisy couldn't care less whose orders had sent him to grab the scepter. This was S.H.I.E.L.D.'s property! And, of course, hers too...
What had she clawed her way up to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s upper ranks for, if not for things exactly like this?
Peggy Carter had put it well: give ground when you can, and when you can't, don't yield so much as half a step. That was the S.H.I.E.L.D. creed, passed down through the generations!
Still, too many people on the scene had seen the Mind Scepter, so she couldn't just claim it outright as her private property. For the time being she'd have to hold the Mind Scepter—and the Mind Stone within it—under the S.H.I.E.L.D. banner.
The Infinity Gauntlet, as the device for mastering the six Infinity Stones, had its own extremely precise order for setting the stones, and not a single step could be wrong: from Power, Space, Reality, Soul, and Time to Mind—a progression from the material to the immaterial.
Thanos had held the Mind Stone for countless years and could only use it fashioned into a scepter. The fact that he wasn't the least bit anxious about losing it said it all—this stone was the very last step, so having it ahead of time was of little real use.
But there was no way Daisy would simply hand it over. Whatever the case, tucking it away first was never a mistake.
The fighting lasted until the sun went down. In the end, the Chitauri invasion of Earth concluded in failure.
How many aliens had been killed was hard to tally so soon, but Daisy estimated that of the nearly thirty thousand Chitauri who'd come to Earth, at least a fifth—maybe even a third—were now dead, with many of the rest wounded. Their main force of arowana-shaped troop ships had been all but wiped out. Even "crippling losses" would be an understatement.
"Commander..." some field officer began, about to report to her.
Daisy waved a hand, signaling that she'd already handed back command. Don't come to me! Trying to saddle me with the death-benefit payouts too? Dream on! Go find your own superior.
Earth's side had suffered heavily. Of the four thousand S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who'd taken part, a rough count already put the dead at over five hundred, with more than three hundred wounded to varying degrees.
If that many nimble, skilled agents had died, the army's fatality rate was higher still—the dead and wounded certainly numbered over ten thousand. In the brutal street fighting, many squads had been wiped out entirely and lost all contact. Add in the mop-up units on the outskirts, and once the true figures came in, twenty or even thirty thousand dead would be nothing surprising.
The death benefits would be an astronomical figure, and the postwar reconstruction costs even more so—a number that could frighten a great many people to death.
With the fighting clearly over, Obama—who'd been hiding in who knew which hole until now—popped back out to grandstand with a televised address. The gist of it was "God bless America" and the like, followed by the usual procedures of lowering flags to half-mast and observing a moment of silence, before he finally got to the point and called on everyone to pitch in with the disaster relief.
Daisy phoned a few friends and loved ones. Lorna was safe and sound, and Wanda had even kept the villa completely intact. Delighted, Daisy showered Wanda with praise for a good while.
Hammer Industries' headquarters and production plant were both out in the suburbs, defended by a fair number of robot soldiers and with the maid helping out, so on the whole the damage was minor. The slight losses she could still split among a few shareholders, so she wouldn't have to pay much out of pocket.