The heavy plates of the Hulkbuster hissed and vented steam. Tony hit the manual release. The chest armor unlocked. He stepped out in his sleek Mark X, leaving the heavy lifter behind. It had done its job. It was out of power and too slow for an open sprint.
"Come on, Cap!" Tony yelled, firing his thrusters.
Steve was already running.
Tony matched him at a low hover, and the two of them crossed the ruined command center toward the jagged hole Hulk had punched through the outer wall.
They burst onto the open deck just in time to look up.
Hulk was fifty feet in the air. He had leaped off a destroyed gun battery and was coming down like a green meteor, aiming a devastating body slam directly at the smoking crater where Loki had landed.
Tony actually thought Loki was paste.
But Hulk never made contact.
A split second before the green giant hit the deck, the crater erupted. A dome of solid, violently bright green magic exploded outward. The shockwave caught Hulk completely mid-air. The massive beast was blasted backward, tumbling across the runway tarmac and crashing heavily into a parked fighter jet.
The green light faded and Loki rose from the crater.
He was not broken. His fine leather armor was scuffed. His dark hair was out of place. His cape was in tatters. But he was standing and mostly unharmed. His eyes, however, burned with absolute, terrifying fury.
Loki did not have the Scepter. It had been lost in the command center rubble during Hulk's brutal beating.
But looking at him now, it did not seem like he needed it.
Because the very air around his body had begun to violently ripple.
"You think," Loki hissed, his voice cutting through the wind, "a mindless beast can break a god?"
He moved.
The first strike came from behind.
Loki was suddenly not in front of them. A duplicate stood where he had been, pale and still, while the real Loki appeared at Steve's shoulder with a long, thin dagger already driving for the exposed gap beneath his jaw.
Steve's shield came up on pure instinct. The blade skidded off vibranium with a sound like breaking glass. Loki was already gone before Steve could counter, reappearing ten feet away with three more duplicates fanning out in a loose arc around him.
"I do hope," one of the Lokis said, though it was impossible to tell which one spoke as the voices echoed from all directions, "you are not going to continue to embarrass yourselves."
Tony immediately fired repulsor blasts at all four targets.
All four evaporated into green mist.
A fifth Loki, previously invisible, walked calmly out of empty air directly behind him and drove a boot into the small of the Mark X's back. The impact felt like being hit by a truck. Tony went skidding across the runway on his chestplate, the suit's stabilizers screaming, and came to a stop only by firing his thrusters straight into the deck.
"Okay," he muttered into the HUD. "He's been holding back."
"You think, Stark?" Steve shouted, already moving.
Hulk recovered first. He rolled to his feet at the far end of the runway, roared, and charged. The deck plating shook under every footfall.
Loki did not even move.
He simply raised one open palm.
A sheet of ice erupted from the steel in front of him, a translucent green-black wall two feet thick and twenty feet high, forming in less than a second. Hulk hit it at a dead sprint. The wall shattered, but it held for half a second, long enough to absorb the charge, and when Hulk exploded through it, Loki was no longer on the other side.
He was above Hulk.
A second dagger, longer than the first, plunged down into the exposed meat of Hulk's shoulder. Hulk roared in pain and swatted blindly. Loki flipped away, landed on the deck in a crouch, and came up with both hands wreathed in cold green fire.
"Cap, flank him!" Tony shouted.
They moved as a unit. Steve hurled the shield in a flat arc. Loki caught it. Caught it, one-handed, the muscle of his arm not even flexing, and threw it back so hard it cratered the deck between Steve's boots. Steve rolled clear. Tony came in firing, unibeam at full power, and Loki met the beam with a corona of dark magic that split the repulsor blast into a dozen harmless sprays of light.
Hulk came back in, dagger still protruding from his shoulder.
Loki ducked the first swing, stepped inside the second - impossibly close, impossibly fast - and drove the heel of his palm into Hulk's sternum with a pulse of force that sent the green giant sliding backward ten feet, boots carving trenches in the steel.
The three of them regrouped at the center of the runway, backs to each other, breathing hard.
Hulk ripped the magical dagger out of his shoulder with a snarl and threw it over the side of the Helicarrier.
"He is fighting completely differently now," Steve said, scanning the deck for new duplicates. "He wasn't doing any of this when we fought in Stuttgart."
"He was playing around then because he wanted to be caught," Tony deduced rapidly. "Now he is actually angry. This is the real him."
"How do we beat the real him?"
"You tell me, Captain."
Loki was walking toward them. Not rushing. Not teleporting. Walking, unhurried, across the ruined runway, green fire building along both arms and wrapping up to his shoulders. The air around his fingers was beginning to warp.
"Oh, that looks really bad," Tony observed.
"Spread out!" Steve shouted.
They broke formation immediately. Not a moment too soon.
Loki thrust both hands forward.
A wave of pure force rolled across the runway. It caught Steve mid-leap and threw him into a parked Quinjet, which folded around him like tinfoil. It caught Tony's thrusters and slammed him flat into the deck, flipping the suit end over end. Hulk took it in the chest and skidded backward forty feet, arms crossed in front of his face, digging furrows into the steel.
Loki did not stop.
He kept his hands raised. The ripple kept coming. A second pulse built behind the first, bigger, slower, and the air around Loki began to darken.
"He's charging something again," Steve shouted through the comm. "Tony, can you stop him?"
Tony fired from the ground. The repulsor blast hit the darkening magical halo around Loki and bent harmlessly, curving aside like water repelled by a magnetic field. The god did not even bother to look.
Hulk charged. Loki flicked two fingers without turning, and a column of black ice burst up from the deck, catching Hulk square in the jaw and stopping him mid-stride.
The darkness around Loki's hands condensed.
"Tony!" Steve shouted desperately.
"Working on it—!"
A beam of blinding, searing white light hit Loki squarely between the shoulder blades.
The magical construct exploded prematurely. The violent backlash staggered Loki forward, his concentration entirely shattered. The massive, half-built spell dissolved instantly into a shower of harmless green sparks.
Loki turned around in absolute fury.
Nick Fury stood tall on the upper command catwalk. He was holding a sleek, heavy rifle that glowed softly at the barrel. It was an unmistakable, piercing Tesseract blue.
"How is that for a deterrent?" Fury yelled down to the deck.
—
Loki recognized the energy signature instantly. It was Tesseract derived. Crude compared to the Scepter, but it had disrupted his spellcasting. And that was deeply irritating.
"You built toys from the fake cube," Loki said, straightening his posture.
"We built options," Fury replied coldly. "Consider it a free preview."
Loki raised a hand, gathering magic to obliterate the catwalk.
A second shot cracked. This one hit him in the palm, knocking his arm wide, staggering him sideways.
"Don't even think about it," Fury said, pumping the charge handle. "I will gladly do this all day."
Loki snarled and moved. Faster than before. More aggressive. The humiliation of Hulk's ragdolling and the disrupted spell had stripped away the last of his patience.
He closed the distance to Fury in a blur, ready to impale the director from close range.
Fury fired again, but Loki dodged, stepping inside the director's guard to deliver a brutal punch that sent Fury flying across the catwalk.
Before Loki could follow up and finish the spy, Hulk hit him like a freight train from behind. A massive green fist connected heavily with the god's ribs. Loki's feet left the catwalk entirely. He flew sideways through the air and crashed hard into the fuselage of another jet on the lower deck.
Steve sprinted forward to follow up the attack, but Loki recovered with terrifying speed. As Steve threw his shield, Loki reached out and caught it firmly by the rim. His fingers closed like a vice over the vibranium edge, and he yanked hard.
Steve, refusing to let go of the straps, came flying forward with the shield.
Loki's other hand shot out, wrapping tightly around Steve's throat. He lifted the super-soldier clean off the deck and slammed him down with enough brutal force to drive Steve halfway through the thick steel plating. Steve did not get up.
"Cap!" Tony dove from the sky.
Loki raised his free hand. A long, wicked dagger of solid emerald light formed instantly in his grip. He held it point down, aimed directly for the center of Steve's exposed chest.
Tony fired his thrusters to the absolute maximum, but he was not going to make it in time.