[Third Person Pov]
Peter and the others forced themselves upward through the sucking, rain-churned mud, every muscle trembling against the invisible weight that crushed down from the armored figure standing before them. The pressure was not merely physical; it pressed against the mind, a cold, arrogant force that made lungs burn and joints grind. Water hung in the air in trembling droplets, frozen mid-fall by the sheer dominance radiating from the victor who now held the hammer.
Peter's eyes locked on the metal mask. His glare was pure defiance, a raw refusal to accept what he was seeing.
'How is he lifting it?' The thought scraped through his skull. 'And why can't I feel any life-force at all? No heartbeat. No pulse of living energy. Just… nothing. Someone like him shouldn't be able to touch that hammer, let alone raise it. I refuse to believe he's worthy.'
Spider-Sense screamed in overlapping waves, a chaotic static that made the edges of his vision pulse. He layered X-ray vision over the heightened awareness, peeling back the world in shades of density and structure. What he found made his breath catch.
There was no flesh beneath the green-and-silver armor. No bone, no muscle, no organic tissue of any kind. Only layered plating, servo-motors, dense cabling, and intricate machinery packed with ruthless efficiency. The face behind the mask was a sculpted alloy plate. The body was pure construct.
'He's a fucking clanker!'
The realization hit like a cold slap. Yet the malice remained—thick, intelligent, almost personal. The same presence that had sent every Spider-Sense into overdrive still poured from the metal shell as if a living mind occupied it. Peter shoved the unanswered questions aside, for he had many. They didn't matter right now.
'We need that hammer out of his hands.'
He straightened as much as the crushing force allowed, mud squelched from underneath his feet. "Bruce," he called, voice rough but clear, "time to go green. Don't you think?"
Bruce Banner still lay face-down in the muck, arms shaking as he tried and failed to push himself up. The pressure held him flatter than the rest. Beside him, half-visible in the rain-lashed air, the spectral outline of the Hulk crouched low, massive shoulders rolling, a slow, hungry grin spreading across the green face.
"Banner…" the phantom rumbled, voice like distant thunder. "Tag me in."
Banner's teeth clenched hard enough to creak. Then the grimace twisted into something fierce and almost eager. "You don't gotta tell me twice."
Green light flared behind his eyes, bright and radioactive. His body convulsed. Bones lengthened with wet, cracking sounds. Muscles ballooned outward in violent surges, shredding the outer layers of his clothes until only the stretch-resistant under-suit remained, straining across an expanding frame. Skin flushed from pale to deep emerald. Fingers thickened into blunt weapons. With a guttural roar that shook the rain itself, Banner completed the change and launched forward in a low, powerful leap, mud exploding behind him.
"HULK—!"
The massive green fist swung like a wrecking ball and smashed across Doom's helmeted face.
"SMASH!"
The impact cracked the air. The oppressive weight vanished in an instant. Suspended raindrops blasted outward in a glittering shockwave. Everyone gasped as the pressure lifted, lungs filling greedily for the first time in what felt like minutes.
They moved as one.
Rain resumed its heavy fall, cold and stinging. Hulk charged again, both fists rising high before slamming down like twin meteors. Doom caught the blow on a single armored hand. The kinetic force traveled through the suit and dissipated in a visible ripple of energy across the metal. Before Hulk could recover, an eldritch blast of crackling violet energy erupted from Doom's free palm and struck the green giant square in the chest, hurling him backward through the storm.
Lizzy dove from above, wings of flame already spreading from her arms. She unleashed a concentrated torrent of fire that swallowed Doom completely, the heat so intense the surrounding mud flashed to brittle, cracked stone. The armored figure rose through the inferno as though the flames were little more than an inconvenience. Felicia's hands glowed with gathered magic. She reached upward and seized the storm itself, dragging thick bolts of lightning down from the black clouds. Multiple strikes hammered into Doom in rapid succession, illuminating the battlefield in stark white flashes.
Doom answered with two interlocking magic circles that bloomed into existence with a low, resonant hum. One circle drank the lightning whole, the energy vanishing into geometric patterns of light. The second circle inverted, becoming a vortex that pulled the fire inward—and kept pulling. Lizzy cried out as the vortex latched onto the flames still burning along her body and began draining the power from her core.
"Ahhh—oh fuck!"
She plummeted, strength suddenly gone. Before she could hit the ground, a green-glowing figure intercepted her mid-fall. Nightwing slammed into her, arms locking tight, residual arcs of emerald electricity dancing across his suit as he twisted and landed on his feet with a slide across the wet earth and came to a stop several meters away.
Lizzy blinked up at him, rain plastering dark hair to her face, a dazed, dreamy smile already forming. "My hero~" she murmured, batting her lashes despite her earlier panic.
Harry grinned down at her, rainwater dripping from his chin. "For you, baby. Always."
Behind them the battle raged without pause. Flames still clung stubbornly to the edges of Doom's cloak, but the armor itself now pulsed with absorbed power—lightning and fire coiling together beneath the metal like living veins of light. The robot straightened to its full height, hammer still firmly in hand, and the air around it began to hum with gathering energy once more.
Peter and Aria launched into the storm-lashed air almost as one. Peter's repelled himself forward at blistering speed, the world blurring into streaks of rain and darkness. Aria's telekinetic grip locked around him a heartbeat later, amplifying his momentum until he became a blue-and-dark comet streaking straight at Doom.
They met the armored figure in a furious aerial clash. Father and daughter moved in perfect, unspoken sync—Peter the blue blur, Aria the purple streak of psychic force, and the green crackle of residual electricity still clinging to Doom. The three shapes spun and collided in a relentless dance of motion, weaving between the searing plasma rays Doom hurled in every direction. Each beam left glowing scars across the night sky and boiled rain into steam wherever it passed.
Aria's telekinesis flared. She shot a long string of web forwards and spun them tight around him, wrapping him in a cocoon of reinforced silk in the space of a breath. Energy built around Doom's gauntlets with a rising mechanical *whrrr*. A thick beam of superheated plasma tore free, bright enough to bleach the rain white.
Aria yanked the string roughly.
Peter became a living tornado—body spinning at impossible speed, blades extended, electricity forming a roaring vortex of steel and blue-white light. He punched straight through the plasma beam, the energy shearing apart around him in a spray of molten droplets. He closed the final distance in a single heartbeat, the edge of his blade stopping a bare inch from Doom's faceplate before the robot's automatic defenses flared and a shimmering energy shield snapped into existence.
Peter didn't slow. Magic circles bloomed beneath his feet in rapid succession—glowing platforms of pure arcane geometry. He kicked off one, then another, then a third, each launch carrying him around the shield in a blur of motion. In less than a second he was above Doom, driving a downward strike that slammed the robot into the muddy earth hard enough to crater the ground.
Doom rose almost immediately, metal plates grinding as he dusted debris from his shoulders with mechanical indifference.
Gwen and MJ arrived at a dead sprint, rain plastering their hair and clothes to their skin. Gwen skidded to a halt and flung both hands outward. Crystal-blue magic circles spun into existence on either side of her. The countless raindrops hanging in the air shuddered, then reversed course, racing toward her. They spiraled together in a rising column of water that grew taller and denser until it towered over her. A sharp twist of her wrist froze the entire construct solid—an enormous spear of glowing ice, dense as stone and sharp as a blade.
MJ's power answered at once. A massive construct of herself—formed of shimmering pink energy—materialized beside the spear and seized it in both hands. The construct charged, boots pounding the mud into spray, and brought the ice spear down on Doom with every ounce of force MJ could pour into the projection.
Doom simply raised Mjolnir above his head as a shield. The spear struck the hammer and exploded into a thousand glittering shards of ice that rained down across the battlefield.
From the periphery, Hawkeye saw his opening. The arrow left the string in a perfect arc, aimed at a seam in Doom's armor. The robot never even turned. One armored finger rose over its shoulder. A thin, precise beam of plasma met the arrow mid-flight, vaporizing the shaft, then continued on to slam into Hawkeye's shoulder. The impact spun him around. Blood erupted between his fingers as he collapsed, clutching the wound, face contorted in pain.
"Shit—"
Peter was already there, sliding to a stop beside the fallen archer in a spray of mud. "Hold on. Stay still." His hands glowed faintly as he pressed them over the wound, trying to stop the bleeding and heal him while his eyes remained locked on the fight ahead. Overhead, Hulk's massive form hurtled past to rejoin the fray.
Thor stood apart from the chaos, both hands stretched desperately toward the hammer still clutched in Doom's grip. Nothing answered. The god of thunder's face was a mask of raw frustration and shame.
"How can this be…?" he muttered, voice nearly lost beneath the storm and the battle. "How can I be this useless? These warriors fight with everything they have, and all I can do is stand here and watch."
Doom was already engaged with Hulk, Harry, and Felicia at once. Plasma beams and crackling bolts of dark magic forced the three of them into constant motion—dodging, blocking, never able to press a sustained attack. The robot's internal systems whirred at full capacity, the AI modeled after the original Victor von Doom calculating trajectories and probabilities in microseconds. Twenty moves ahead. Thirty. The conclusion was inevitable: it could not win this fight through force.
Winning had never been the objective.
Doom flipped backward over a wave of fire from Lizzy, rolled beneath a ground-shaking stomp from Hulk, then used Harry's own kinetic momentum against him—grabbing the younger fighter for a fraction of a second and hurling himself clear of the melee. The robot's armored hands clapped together with a resonant boom, then slammed into the mud. A vast magic circle erupted beneath its feet, runes blazing emerald green.
Thick, luminous mist boiled outward in every direction—the Mists of Munnopor. Illusions bloomed inside the fog. Senses dulled. Direction and distance twisted into meaningless noise.
Peter's Spider-Sense flared, but the warning was muted, distant, as though heard through water. Still, it was enough. He refused to let the illusions take hold.
He sprinted through the swirling green haze, senses stretched to their limit. "Hulk!" he shouted. "If you can hear me—Thunderclap!"
Hulk himself heard nothing through the sensory muffling. But the spectral form of Bruce Banner, still hovering near his other self, received the message clear as a bell. Banner's voice cut through the link.
Hulk planted his feet, spread his massive arms wide, and brought his hands together with catastrophic force.
The thunderclap detonated like a bomb. The mist was blasted apart in a single violent shockwave that ripped across the battlefield. Rain was shoved sideways. The ground itself seemed to flinch. Thor, Jane, Darcy, and Erik were caught in the outer edge of the blast and hurled backward, tumbling across the mud before landing in rough, breathless heaps.
When the last of the green fog shredded away, the space where Doom had stood was empty.
Felicia spun in a slow circle, claws extended, eyes wide. "What? Where did he go?"
Peter slid to a stop, mud spraying from his boots. He clicked his tongue in sharp frustration, staring at the empty crater and the fading residual glow of his teleportation technology.
"He teleported," Peter said, voice tight. "Right out from under our noses."
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