From a lawyer's perspective, Matt figured Thor was a textbook impulsive crime—charging in without a shred of preparation. That Daisy kept a lion was no secret; a little digging would turn it up. If he'd prepared at all, how could a person of normal intelligence end up in a fix like this?
Daisy had no idea Thor's "savior" plan had hit a small snag. As agents and troops from every direction joined the support effort, the disturbances on the various battlefields were all quelled.
War Machine, Colonel Rhodes, joined Stark's fight, and together the two of them brought down Blonsky. Both Blonsky and the hammer were seized by the military, while Stark quietly copied a set of the A.I.M. lab's data for himself.
On the other side, by sheer weight of numbers—the Fantastic Three plus the Asgardian quartet plus Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Crossbones, all pummeling away together—they finally knocked the Thing out cold. The hammer was taken by Mr. Reed for study.
The last front was a bit miserable. Loki was completely outmatched; the cunning fellow, propped up by his "God King" reputation, couldn't even run. Just as he threw caution to the wind and braced for a fight to the death, the Goddess of Fortune smiled on him: after the Hulk vented for a while, Hulk's own consciousness forcibly expelled the World Serpent's control, and he woke up on his own.
The thoroughly annoyed Hulk pounded the hammer a few times, stomped it twice, then flung it clean out of the atmosphere with a sweep of his arm and stalked off in a huff...
"I'll admit you Earthlings have some skill after all..." Seeing the God King again, Daisy noticed a bruise at the corner of his eye. There were no wounds on his body, but he walked with a slight limp.
She knew his personality well. For the sake of unity, she clamped down hard and managed not to laugh out loud.
But when she looked at the Destroyer, she frowned. "Can this robot of yours even be repaired? Isn't the battle damage a bit severe?"
The Destroyer was now a mass of dents and craters, its left arm simply gone, the breakage so irregular that it must have been wrenched off by brute force...
The Hulk had cost them a key piece of firepower against the World Serpent.
Loki was heartsick. In his eyes the Destroyer was his own, and to have it wrecked by some green Earthling was honestly a bit much—now Loki's cape was green, and his face was green too...
They grieved; and as Odin's brother and Thor and Loki's uncle, the World Serpent who ruled over fear was none too pleased either.
The eight hammers, whose seals he'd spent divine power to break, had not fulfilled his plan.
Set aside the hammers smashed by the three Sanctums—Juggernaut and Colossus had been forcefully suppressed the moment they transformed, providing next to no fear at all.
Blonsky and the Thing provided plenty of it. They were both in urban areas, and the citizens had been terrified at first.
But later, thanks to Iron Man and the Fantastic Three fighting so hard, the public's fear turned to excitement. The shift in mood left the World Serpent as queasy as if he'd swallowed something foul.
The last one, the Hulk, was truly extraordinary; Brazil's population was larger still, and one great battle had ordinary Brazilians bitterly wishing they had two more legs to run on.
His once-pale hair, nourished by the power of fear, had now turned grizzled.
His stooped frame straightened completely; the old man's features bore some resemblance to Odin. His beard, hanging to his chest, drifted in the wind, and his gaze was vicious and sharp. Earth's resistance had proven stronger than expected, and he felt he'd somewhat miscalculated.
But the arrow was already on the string—there was no holding it back now.
The old man took stock of his condition. He was still a long way from his peak quasi-Skyfather-level might, but on the fear supplied by several fronts, he'd already recovered a tenth of his strength.
Weighing the pros and cons, the thought of finding somewhere to hide and slowly recover was the first to be struck down. Possessed by the World Serpent though he was, he remained an Asgardian, and the spirit of "never back down, just fight" ran deep in him. He would not choose retreat.
Lightly stroking his staff, the weapon that had kept him company through countless ages of imprisonment seemed to sense his intent and transmit back to him a notion of slaughter and revenge.
The old man let out a few dry laughs like an old crow. Gripping the staff tightly, he chanted an ancient and arcane incantation. He was going to summon his realm, his army, onto the Earth.
The incantation was long and elaborate, devouring his last reserves of divine power like a bottomless pit. The old man didn't care; when the divine power bottomed out, he dipped into his core essence.
That essence spread across the globe in an unbelievable fashion, sparing no intelligent life.
A dread like the coming of doomsday coiled in the heart of every person on Earth. No one knew what they were afraid of, yet no one could rein in their own mind; the deepest nightmare buried in each heart surfaced one by one in this way. By this method, one that gnawed at his very foundation, the old man amassed a vast store of divine power of fear.
A dim, deathly-silent island floated in midair. That was the City of Fear, the very foundation of the World Serpent's power.
The island was about the size of Manhattan, holding a royal palace, a smithy, and—more numerous still—the soldiers the World Serpent had led in conquering the Nine Realms.
Countless soldiers ruled by fear rose again, among them humans, Asgardians, Frost Giants, and Dark Elves.
They were neither the living nor the dead—pitiable things wandering somewhere in between.
"Attack! Raze the realm of the Midgardians! Let fear descend upon the mortal world once more!"
The old man had overdrawn his core essence. Right or wrong, his army had at least made it onto the Earth, his divine power had recovered to a third, his hair had turned fully black, his robe had become battle armor, and in his hand he now gripped a giant axe of exaggerated design.
At his command, the floating island—with no power source whatsoever—sped toward Washington at tremendous speed.
He had two possible routes. One began at the Mariana Trench and ran from east to west, passing over Asia and Europe before making landfall on the U.S. East Coast.
The other ran from west to east: the U.S. West Coast, then the central region, then the East Coast, on to Washington, crossing the entire American mainland along the way.
Whether or not the old man bore some special hatred for Americans, he chose to travel from west to east.
Seated upon his throne, gazing at his countless dazed soldiers, he felt rather dissatisfied. His underlings simply failed to convey the bearing of a God of Fear; a master with nothing but cannon fodder for troops—that was hardly glorious.
After some thought, he decided to play a trump card.
The butt of the great axe struck the steps before the throne; mechanisms engaged in sequence, and a massive sarcophagus rose from the ground. Its surface was covered in carvings, and before the lid even opened, a bone-deep chill enveloped the hall.
"Come out. Your task isn't finished. Fight for me once more." The old man struck the sarcophagus again and again, and an unnamed power seeped into it. His voice was a little like Loki's—except his words of bewitchment were of a higher order, far more deceptive.
Silence answered from within the sarcophagus. At last the lid slowly opened, and a woman two meters (6.6 ft) tall stepped out.
Her features were exquisite, beautiful beyond compare, silver hair falling to her waist, clad in deep-blue battle armor—except that her eyes were dim and vacant, without consciousness, without a soul.
"Go, Skadi—scatter winter across this land that profanes the true god, and let the Realm of Ice and Snow know glory once more!"
The old man's words were faint and fine. Skadi, Goddess of Winter, had once been the World Serpent's enemy; sadly, her consciousness had been bewitched and sealed inside a hammer, then, after blow upon blow, finally scattered into dust.
What walked out now was only her body—taken by the ancient Asgardians and the Greeks to be a member of the race of Giants.
Had Daisy been on the scene, she would have loudly rebuked that claim. What race of Giants? She was clearly one of the Eternals!