Natasha watched three Brotherhood elders gain altitude above the Manhattan roofline, moving through airspace on their own power, and said, quietly, "When did ki training include flight?"
It had — apparently for some time — she'd simply never been in the right briefings. Her S.H.I.E.L.D. clearance didn't extend to the Brotherhood's internal training curriculum, and the quarterly liaison meetings she'd been missing hadn't covered aerial combat doctrine.
Alexei Shostakov, who had been in those meetings but had also not yet mastered flight himself, was below and to her left and conspicuously not addressing the topic.
Xu Wenwu arrived from the west with Ying Li beside him.
He didn't announce himself. The Ten Rings separated in motion — five forming a rotating barrier around his body, the other five moving outward into the formation of Kree craft that had been pressing from that direction. Each ring hit its target with the precision of someone who had been calculating force application for over a thousand years.
Ying Li moved differently. The Dragon power in her was quieter than Shang-Chi's, more settled — a long familiarity with something that had been part of her for decades rather than years. The laser beams that came for her met Tai Chi redirections that sent them back along modified vectors, and she moved through the engagement with a composure that made it look like something she'd done before.
She had, technically. Just not at this scale.
The pressure on the western approach eased considerably.
Tony saw the Dark Aster before his instruments registered it — the sheer visual mass of it occluding the sky above Midtown at an altitude that made the clouds below it look like ground fog.
He said, "Big one's here," which was accurate as far as it went.
Steve Rogers looked up from the street level where he'd been working through Kree ground troops and said, "Tony. That thing."
"I see it."
"Can we—"
"I don't know. Let's find out."
Three Quinjets came in from the north on an intercept vector, launched their full missile load in sequence — six missiles, maximum yield, hitting the Dark Aster's forward section in a tight spread.
Six detonations. The fire cleared. The Dark Aster was unchanged in any perceptible way.
The Dark Aster's point-defense systems responded. All three Quinjets were gone before the smoke from the missiles had finished rising.
Barton, from his current vantage point, said, "The enemy is more than we planned for."
He fired left without looking. A Kree soldier who had been flanking his position went down.
The projection system on the Dark Aster activated.
A figure appeared above Midtown — three hundred feet tall, rendered in the visual frequencies that worked best at scale, the image of Ronan the Accuser looking down at the city with the expression of someone who had already concluded the negotiation before it began.
"I am Ronan. Commander of the Accuser Legion, Kree Empire." The voice came from the projection with the kind of amplification that made windows flex. "My purpose on this planet is singular."
"The Dragon Balls."
"Surrender them, and this ends. Continue resisting, and it ends differently."
Below the projection, New Yorkers who hadn't made it to shelter looked up at the image and at each other.
"What are Dragon Balls?"
At the Triskelion, Fury looked at the Dark Aster on every display feed simultaneously.
The Kree Empire. One of the three major cosmic powers. The species from the Tahiti laboratory. The ones who had been here before, at some point in the past, and left a body behind.
He'd been hoping the timeline on Earth's cosmic attention was longer than this. He'd been wrong.
"Smith Doyle?" he said.
Hill said, "Not on Earth. The Fraternity's people are deployed but he's not among them."
Fury stood at the window for a moment.
"Activate the Helicarrier," he said.
The pool deck on the Triskelion's upper level opened. The carrier's engines, which had been running on standby for exactly this category of situation, brought it up through the surface and into the sky.
Hill caught the Security Council alert on her display. "Sir. Emergency session."
"I'll take it." Fury moved toward the conference room without changing his pace. Whatever the Council wanted to say, they were going to say it to someone who had already committed to a course of action.
Tony looked at Ronan's projection and made one decision.
"JARVIS. All available suits. Projection array. Now."
The sixteen Mark-series suits in his immediate airspace angled their chest repulsors at the Dark Aster's projection emitter. The targeting took approximately one second.
The combined discharge hit the emitter simultaneously.
Ronan's three-hundred-foot image flickered and went out.
The suits reformed around Tony's position.
On the ground and in the air, everyone who hadn't been waiting for instructions continued what they'd been doing. The Kree ground troops were the more immediate problem for most of them, and Ronan's demand for Dragon Balls was relevant to approximately zero people who were currently handling the immediate problem of Kree laser fire.
Nobody had the Dragon Balls except Smith Doyle, and Smith Doyle wasn't here.
On the Dark Aster.
Korath said, "They've destroyed the projection array and they're not responding to the demand."
Ronan had expected this. He'd made the announcement because it was the protocol, and the protocol's purpose was documentation rather than genuine expectation of compliance. Civilizations didn't hand over objects of cosmic significance because someone asked politely from a large spaceship.
"Deploy the fleet," he said.
The hangar bays opened at a different sequence than they had before. The craft that emerged were the same individual fighter design but with one modification — the navigational systems had been locked to impact trajectories, the weapons cycling in reverse for the terminal approach, every vessel converted into a kinetic projectile.
From the street level, the sky above New York changed character.
The individual craft that had been firing, maneuvering, adjusting — those had been a problem you could engage on their terms. This was different. Hundreds of craft, all of them descending, none of them trying to fight. Just falling.
Vanko had been running the numbers since the Dark Aster appeared on sensors. He gave the order to his war machine units before the kamikaze fleet had fully cleared the hangar bays. The war machines landed, their leg systems locked into the pavement, and every weapons system they carried elevated and began acquiring targets.
Tony's fleet was already moving. "JARVIS — all units, intercept pattern, prioritize the densest approach corridor."
The combined fire from Vanko's ground units, Tony's suits, and the Brotherhood operatives who had mastered aerial ki blasts was substantial. It destroyed a significant portion of what was falling.
Not all of it.
The first impacts hit the outer blocks. Buildings that had been standing for decades went to rubble in seconds. The concussion from the terminal detonations propagated through the surrounding structures, and buildings that hadn't been hit directly began showing stress fractures in their upper floors.
Barton stood where his building used to have a roof, looked at where the building he'd been using three minutes ago had been, and processed the math.
He said the word for it.
Xu Wenwu brought all ten rings to bear, the full set working through the incoming craft in expanding circles, each ring capable of independent target acquisition and carrying enough force to shatter a Kree fighter on contact. He was covering a sector. He was covering it well. The sector was one of twenty.
Ikaris, above the city, turned his eye beams on the densest approach vectors and worked through them at the speed of light.
It was not enough to stop all of it.
New York absorbed what got through.