Maria Hill watched Fury's rigid back disappear into the conference room and let out a frustrated sigh, sneering at the suicidal arrogance of the politicians. With the director occupied, command fell to her.
"Alright, people, we need to find a way to slow that thing down," she announced to the command deck, her voice crisp and authoritative.
An analyst from the R&D division quickly stood up. "Ma'am! The experimental energy weapons derived from the Mind Scepter! They were designed for unconventional threats. They might have an effect."
"Then do it," Hill ordered without hesitation. "You're in charge. Buy us as much time as you can."
"Yes, ma'am!" the analyst replied, a bitter look on his face. He hadn't expected his suggestion to come with a battlefield promotion to "the guy in charge of stopping the apocalypse." As he hurried off to coordinate the deployment, Hill pulled out her phone and dialed the number Strange had given her.
In the quiet solitude of the restored London Sanctum, Strange's phone began to ring. He found it lying behind a stone gate, miraculously reassembled by the temporal reversal just like the temple around it. He glanced at the unknown number, rolled his eyes, and answered.
"You've reached the Sorcerer Supreme. Who is this?"
"It's Maria Hill with S.W.O.R.D.," the voice on the other end replied, cutting straight to the point. "Where are you?"
"London. What's wrong?"
"Have you seen the news?"
"I'm standing in a mystical temple that's several centuries old. There's no cable."
"Right. Then listen closely," Hill said, and quickly briefed him on the entire situation: the wind elemental's defeat, Wanda and Thor's struggle to dissipate the remaining storm, and the fire elemental's relentless march on Washington D.C. She spared no detail of the military's catastrophic failure, a feast of steel that had only made the creature stronger.
Strange listened, a deep sigh escaping his lips. He hadn't expected Dormammu's dark power to make the elemental so devastatingly powerful. But as he processed the information, his hand instinctively went to the Eye of Agamotto. The Time Stone, still humming with residual energy, seemed to respond. A wave of cold, cosmic understanding washed over him, not a vision, but a sudden, intuitive download of horrifying truth.
He finally understood. This wasn't just a monster. It was a failsafe. A planetary immune response. Dormammu's power hadn't created this threat; it had only accelerated it. The elementals were a natural function of the Earth itself, a brutal reset button designed to wipe the slate clean to protect the Celestial embryo growing within the planet's core. Their mission, given to them by the planetary consciousness, was to scour all life from the surface. The arrival of the mysterious screen had simply triggered this world's consciousness to act, birthing its own elemental protectors.
The thought was staggering. They weren't just fighting monsters; they were fighting the planet's own will to survive.
Shaking off the cosmic revelation, Strange focused on the immediate crisis. He called Banner. After a brief exchange, a photo and a set of GPS coordinates appeared on his phone. A few seconds later, a shimmering golden portal tore open the air in an African clearing where the Quinjet had landed. Strange stepped through.
"Alright, I've got them," he said into his phone. "Where do you need us, Hill?"
"Coordinates coming through now."
Strange glanced at the location data, and with a series of precise, practiced gestures, opened a second, much larger portal. "Let's go," he announced to the assembled heroes. "Washington needs us."
The two Spider-Men, two Harry Osborn, and the rest of the team exchanged looks and then walked through the gateway. They stepped from a humid jungle into a cool, temperate valley. In the distance, the sky was on fire.
"It's heading right for us," Strange said, pointing toward the capital behind them. "A few dozen kilometers past this valley is Washington."
"Oh, man," the second Spider-Man breathed, his voice filled with awe and terror. "Okay, now I get why they called it a catastrophe. That thing is huge."
Harry stared at the sea of flames on the horizon, a deep frown on his face. "How do we even fight that? We'll be incinerated before we get within a mile of it."
Just then, the roar of jet engines screamed overhead. Several F-22 Raptors, flying in a tight formation, banked hard toward the fire elemental. These jets weren't armed with conventional missiles; they carried specialized cryogenic warheads, their deployment delayed by the time it took to retrofit them.
The planes released their payloads in a single, coordinated drop before pulling up sharply and streaking away from the battlefield. A dozen sleek, silver missiles whistled through the air and slammed into the fire elemental's molten body.
The explosions that followed were not fiery, but silent and cold. An impossibly vast cloud of silver-white vapor erupted outward, a blizzard of liquid nitrogen that instantly enveloped the giant. The moment the extreme cold hit the superheated lava, the battlefield was filled with a deafening, violent hissing sound—the sound of two fundamental forces of nature tearing each other apart.
The boiling lava on the elemental's surface flash-froze, shattering into a thick crust of black, volcanic glass. The armor of ice and rock spread rapidly, while a ghostly fog of cryogenic vapor shrouded the titan from view.
"Whoa," the second Spider-Man exclaimed, his voice filled with a new, unfamiliar emotion. "I think… I think that's actually working!"
Everyone stared at the cloud-wreathed giant, a glimmer of hope igniting in their hearts.
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