In the blink of an eye, a month had passed. The last remnants of the supernatural storm, a ghost of its former fury, finally dissipated over the vast, uncaring expanse of the ocean. Only then, in the bruised silence that followed, could the world begin to count its dead.
The numbers that trickled in were not statistics; they were an indictment. The death toll that could be directly confirmed climbed past fifty million, a figure comparable to ten Hurricane Katrinas striking all at once. The number of missing was a phantom, a range so wide—from one hundred to three hundred million—that it was meaningless. In some areas, the grisly evidence of the storm's power remained scattered across the landscape, but more often than not, there was simply nothing left.
The economic losses were a number so large it felt like fiction: at least 8.7 trillion US dollars, more than ten percent of the entire planet's GDP. The global insurance industry had evaporated overnight, plunged into a crisis from which it would never recover. The environmental toll was just as staggering. An area of North American topsoil larger than the nation of France had been scoured from the continent, its dust now suspended in the atmosphere, promising to drop global temperatures by half a degree for at least five years. And this didn't even account for the devastation the earth elemental had wrought in Nairobi.
The New York Sanctum, once magically repaired by Strange, was again in ruins, its mystical shields shattered by the residual dark forces that had clung to the storm. This time, it would have to be rebuilt by hand. But its sacrifice had not been in vain; thanks to the sorcerers' stand, New York had suffered far less than any other major city in the storm's path.
The losses were unprecedented. It felt as if every household was in mourning. For the past month, the world's heroes had not rested. They became a blur of rescue operations, a constant presence pulling survivors from rubble, while the sorcerers opened portals to transport emergency supplies to the hardest-hit zones. In a rare display of unity, nations from across the globe offered their aid. This had not been one country's disaster; it was a scar upon the face of the world.
A report from the National Weather Service later confirmed how close they had come to utter annihilation. If not for the desperate, last-ditch efforts of Wanda and Thor, the storm would have swelled to a diameter of five thousand kilometers, its winds holding steady at 400 km/h. It would have been enough to extinguish all surface life in North America within seventy-two hours.
Tony watched a news anchor break down in tears while reading that very report, then silently switched off the screen.
The Spider-Men and their allies were gone. The sky screen had taken them twenty-four hours after the battle, whisking them away before anyone had a chance to say goodbye. The Avengers had been too busy, already deep in the grim work of sifting through the wreckage of a broken world.
Only the living were left to mourn on the devastated land.
A cold, determined fire now burned in Tony's heart. He had built suits to fight soldiers, aliens, and elf. He had never considered that one day his enemy would be nature itself, twisted into a weapon by a cosmic entity from another dimension. He despised Dormammu with every fiber of his being.
The Avengers now saw the Lord of the Dark Dimension as Earth's greatest enemy. Without his interference, the elementals would have been manageable; they had defeated the water and earth elementals with relative ease. But this hatred felt impotent. How did you fight a god? For the first time, Tony seriously considered learning magic, haunted by the memory of watching the storm approach, a feeling of utter powerlessness washing over him.
In a debriefing room at the Avengers Compound, the mood was somber.
"This isn't a disaster assessment report," Fury said, his voice flat as he tossed the file onto the table. "This is a terminal diagnosis for human civilization."
Tony took a deep, shaky breath. "We were lucky this time. Humanity scraped by. But what about next time? Will we always be this lucky?"
"What are you getting at, Tony?" Captain America asked, his brow furrowed. "We can't predict a threat like this."
"No, we can't!" Tony snapped, his voice sharp. "But I need a response plan. Who knows when that Dormammu freak will be back? What happened with the elementals cannot happen again. The planet won't survive it." He leaned forward, his eyes boring into Steve's. "Why are we always the Avengers? Why can't we, for once, be the Preventers?"
"Tony, are you okay?" Natasha asked gently, seeing the dark circles under his eyes, the slight tremor in his hands.
"No, Nat, I'm not okay!" he shot back, his voice cracking with emotion. "Every night when I close my eyes, I see it. I see the fire elemental blowing Yellowstone, or I see another storm ripping the world apart! That thing, that cosmic entity, he sent a fraction of his power and it brought us to our knees! Look at Wanda! She was unconscious for over a week! Look at Thor! Mjolnir, the unbreakable hammer, is cracked from dimensional corruption! The sorcerers are fighting a tireless war to keep these things out, but they're not enough! One rogue sorcerer was all it took for Kaecilius to tear their Sanctums apart. We need more. We need to be exponentially more powerful."
The room was silent.
Banner, who had been quietly observing, finally spoke. "Tony wants to upgrade the global strategic defense system."
"How?" Steve pressed.
Tony's gaze was distant, his voice low but filled with a terrifying resolve. "Thanos has the Aether. The Reality Stone. Carol confirmed it. God knows where he is, but he could be on our doorstep tomorrow. We've always been on the back foot, always reacting. Why can't we take the initiative? Why can't we build something that deters them from even thinking about attacking Earth?"
Thor had already returned to Asgard. The Bifrost's full-power activation had temporarily destabilized the energy balance of the Nine Realms, and Odin had been forced to use the Tesseract to fix it. They were on their own.
After a long, contemplative silence, Tony spoke the words that would change everything. "I want to use the Extremis virus. On myself."
"Are you serious?" Rhodes shot to his feet, his voice laced with alarm. "Tony, that stuff is insanely dangerous!"
"Maya's research is stable now," Tony said, waving off the concern. "Combined with Helen Cho's regeneration cradle technology, the risk is manageable. It's safe enough."
He looked around the room at his friends, his family. "Don't you see? Without the suit, I'm just a guy. A normal, squishy human being. Facing a monster like that elemental… I was nothing." His voice dropped to a whisper. "The armor is the peak of our technology, but it's not enough. Not against magic. Not against gods."
He locked eyes with Strange, a new, desperate light in them. He knew his path forward would require more than just engineering. Whether it was his new global defense initiative or the next generation of his own armor, he would need to integrate a force he had once dismissed as fantasy. The elemental war had fundamentally changed his perspective. The age of simply being heroes was over. To protect the planet from what was coming, they had to become something more. They had to become guardians.