"Who are you?" Watching the agents drop out of nowhere, Dr. Bruce Banner hadn't even grasped what was happening before they hurled three grenades at him.
Grenades? Not even a dark-matter bomb could kill Bruce Banner — but it could blow the Hulk out of him.
The Hulk, back in his oversized shorts, drove a single fist down and pounded one agent's head clean into his neck, then snatched up a nearby lab table and smashed it against the wall.
"Hulk smash! Hulk smash!!" Whatever he got his hands on, his answer was to smash it.
Tear a door off its hinges and smash the wall with it, grab a table and smash people with it — whatever he laid eyes on, he smashed.
These days the Hulk had had a good deal of his ferocity worn away by the goofy sweetness of the puppies. He was no longer that raw newborn personality of old; he'd formed a rough view of the world and of humanity.
Maybe Bruce Banner had rubbed off on him, or maybe the puppies had shown him the joys of life. Either way, apart from the Hydra man who'd thrown the grenades and gotten beaten to death for it, the rest of the small fry were driven back by a single glare from the Hulk. With no bystanders left to bother him, he settled into some smashing purely for his own amusement.
In destruction he searched for validation, and in the fear in human eyes he searched for proof that he was a person — living, breathing proof that he was human.
The Hulk was the Hulk. He was not Bruce Banner, and still less some appendage of Bruce Banner. That guy was too much of a coward, whereas the Hulk was his own being.
Smashing around a city might not do all that much damage, but venting his rage this freely inside a Helicarrier, the ship truly wouldn't hold up for long.
Though he had no wish to kill, egged on by the scheming Hydra men, the Hulk's rampage was slowly creeping toward the power room.
Once the power room was wrecked, the carrier would drop from the sky in an instant, and the cell holding Supergiant would lose power, setting that extraordinarily strong mind controller free. That was exactly Crossbones's plan.
"Big guy, I really don't want to fight you!" Halfway there, the Hulk ran into Black Widow and Jessica Drew, who'd come to head off the enemy — two spider-named women joining forces to block his path.
Of course, Black Widow was mostly just along for the ride; neither her pistols, nor her electrostatic pads, nor her retractable lines could do the Hulk any harm.
Black Widow could only serve to tie him up a little. The real firepower was Jessica Drew, the one who had this big softie trembling.
Fused with spider genes and raised alongside them, Jessica Drew was, from a purely biological standpoint, essentially a giant spider — and a Wundagore spider at that, a breed renowned for potent venom and great size.
As the last trace Chthon had left in the material plane, the creatures of Mount Wundagore were a cut above animals anywhere else, and its spiders were the finest of all arthropods.
She was certainly no match for the Hulk in strength, but with her unrivaled agility, reflexes, predatory instincts, and Spider-Sense, it took only a little training for Jessica Drew to unveil an extraordinary gift for combat.
She couldn't shoot webbing, but Jessica Drew could convert her own bioelectricity into a Venom Blast, a mid-range energy shockwave, and on top of that, her metabolism produced pheromones that drew men toward her.
The Hulk was still young… he didn't really understand the things between men and women, but he was affected all the same. A muddled, dazed feeling crept in and naturally offset his surging rage, so that his attack power slid into a faint downward trend.
Like so many spider-heroes, Jessica Drew leapt and darted circles around him, snatching up a firefighting hose from the side as she went. The thing was quite tough, and she wound it around the Hulk again and again — when one length snapped, she wrapped on a fresh one — until the once vividly green Hulk was trussed up like a patient on his deathbed.
Black Widow wasn't entirely useless either. From who knew where, she dug up an old tape recorder and played the Hulk a lullaby, wearing down his fury.
Amid the ceaseless roar and the fires everywhere, the Iliad inevitably began to sink, and up on the deck an even harsher battle was breaking out.
Loki stood on the deck, head high and chest out, watching Thor come flying in from the horizon.
"Loki, that woman has bewitched you. I will bring you home!" Thor, ever the doting brother, had circled the whole planet only to discover his brother hadn't gone far at all, and had rushed straight back.
Loki, without a word, threw himself into fighting him.
Bolts of thunder crashed down onto the deck, only hastening the carrier's plunge.
With no time to put on his combat suit, Captain America grabbed only his shield and ran out alongside Coulson to help the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents hold off Crossbones's men, while Stark hurriedly suited up in his armor to patch the carrier — at the very least they couldn't let it crash-land.
Daisy's fight with Supergiant was also drawing to a close. Having conserved her strength and let her enemy tire, she'd weathered the psychic assault; with a high-tech containment pod between them, Supergiant couldn't bring even a tenth of her full power to bear.
Supergiant coughed up several mouthfuls of blood in a row, her face deathly pale — clearly on the verge of giving out.
Just as Daisy's fingers came within half a meter of the pod's self-destruct, an unexpected figure appeared.
"Miss Johnson, you look like you're having a hard time of it. Did you ever imagine this day would come?" The wrinkle-faced Pierce stepped up to the doorway, pistol leveled straight at her, his face alight with manic glee and his voice carrying a distinct edge of excitement.
That old face wore an expression that all but spelled out what goes around comes around, and payback is only a matter of time.
He had no psychic powers, but he was a wily old fox. Seeing Daisy clutching her forehead while the Supergiant inside looked utterly ashen, how could he fail to tell that their contest had reached its critical moment?
"When you set yourself against me, did you ever picture this day?" the old man snarled.
To keep things from dragging on and going wrong, he kept firing even as he spoke, seven or eight rounds tearing toward Daisy.
She could shrug off ordinary pistol rounds easily enough, and her agent's uniform offered decent protection as well — but the old man was cunning, aiming nearly every shot at Daisy's eyes.
Whose eyes are bulletproof?! Once her Eternals genes awakened, maybe — but right now, absolutely not.
There was no way she'd trade her own eyes just to kill Supergiant.
Left with no choice, she jerked her head aside to dodge the bullets, and her psychic grip loosened by a fraction. Supergiant seized the moment and struck at once, leaving Daisy dazed and reeling, while Pierce fired shot after shot and used the opening to throw open the door of the containment pod.
Supergiant staggered out on unsteady legs.
"You've got a death wish, you old bastard!" Daisy clenched her teeth and threw a Fire Fist straight at the pair of them — but she'd burned through too much of her psychic strength, and the punch carried barely half a meter before her faltering control let it dissolve in midair.
Pierce jumped in fright. Wasting no more time, he signaled his men to sling Supergiant onto their backs and run for it.
The old man was on the verge of making it off the carrier when a gunshot cracked out behind him — Nick Fury, lurking in the shadows, had put a round through his old comrade's left foot. Hitting the ground, the old man howled at his men to go on without him.
"Earthling, we'll cross paths again!" Supergiant's voice was as gentle as ever, though a flame that seemed like it would never die coiled in her eyes.
Heedless of her own injuries, Supergiant, like a woman gone mad, unleashed once more a psionic storm that swallowed the entire carrier.