The plaza was empty.
The crowd was gone. The police were gone. Even the defiant old man had been pulled away into the dark side streets by the last of the fleeing civilians. The only sound left in the grand square was the low, aggressive hum of the Quinjet's engines hanging high overhead, and the soft, ragged breathing of the soldier lying broken on the cobblestones beneath the shadow of a god.
Steve spat a mouthful of blood onto the stones.
He scrambled to his feet. Pain lit up his jaw and his ribs and the muscles along his spine, and he ignored all of it. He limped over to the wreckage of the lamppost, recovered the shield, and raised it in front of him.
"I've read your file," Steve said. His chest was heaving, but his bright blue eyes were dead steady. "You're not a god. You're just an alien with a magic stick and a massive chip on your shoulder."
Loki's smile sharpened into something incredibly cruel.
"Let me correct that perception for you."
Steve charged again.
The exchange that followed was brutally fast. Shield against scepter. Fist against gauntlet. Steve's tactical instincts hammered into a wall of centuries of ruthless combat experience. Every move Steve had ever learned, every technique from every war he had fought, every instinct the serum had sharpened in his body, all of it crashing against a being who had been fighting on fields of cosmic slaughter while Steve's grandparents had not yet been born.
Steve feinted left and struck right. Loki was already moving. Steve threw an elbow into Loki's jaw. Loki rolled with it. Steve swept a kick at Loki's knee. Loki shifted his weight a fraction of an inch and let the kick slide off his leg like rain off glass.
But Steve did not stop.
Every time Loki knocked him back, Steve came forward again. Every time the scepter blazed, the shield was there to meet it. Every time the god opened his guard, even for half a heartbeat, the Captain was already attacking.
A glancing shield edge caught Loki's forearm and drew a thin line of dark blood.
A desperate elbow cracked against the side of Loki's jaw and made his horned head snap sideways.
A perfectly timed kick to the knee actually, for the very first time all night, forced the Asgardian to adjust his stance.
None of it did any real, lasting damage. But all of it landed. And Loki noticed.
"You really don't stop," Loki said. He sounded genuinely puzzled now. Almost offended by the mortal's persistence. "Why do you not stop?"
"Not really my style."
A scepter thrust caught Steve in the shoulder and drove him back three metres. He bit down on the pain and kept the shield up.
In his ear, Natasha's voice crackled with frustration.
"Captain, his magical shields are scrambling my targeting systems. I cannot get a clean lock on him from the air."
"Then give me a dirty one," Steve grunted.
"Hold your position. Draw him out into the open center. I will do the rest."
Steve rolled under another scepter swing and came up inside Loki's guard. He drove the edge of the shield straight up into the underside of Loki's chin.
The blow rocked the god backward. It was the hardest hit Steve had landed all night.
Loki touched the corner of his mouth with a pale finger. He looked at the smear of blood. He looked at Steve. And something dark and terrible behind his green eyes went absolutely cold.
"Now," Loki said softly, "you have my attention."
The scepter blazed to life in his hand.
Then the Quinjet's forward cannon opened up.
A deafening stream of high-velocity rounds hammered down from the dark sky, chewing a violent line of sparks and shattered stone chips across the cobblestones, slamming directly into Loki's back and shoulders. The heavy rounds were not designed to kill a god. They were designed to ruin his concentration, and they did exactly that. The armor-piercing bullets flattened uselessly against his shimmering magical shields and tumbled away, but the sheer, sustained kinetic impact staggered him. His aim shifted wildly. The Scepter's building cosmic charge guttered and died.
Loki whirled toward the hovering jet, snarling in raw fury.
He fired back immediately, two massive bolts of blue cosmic energy ripping upward through the night air.
The Quinjet was already moving.
Natasha banked hard to the left and dropped thirty metres in a single controlled fall, letting gravity do the work of dodging for her. Both bolts passed through the space the jet had been occupying a fraction of a second earlier. The cannon kept firing the entire time, a relentless stream of tracer rounds lashing down at Loki from three different angles as the aircraft spun through the sky in a pattern that no targeting system in the universe would have been able to predict.
Steve took his opening.
He threw the shield underhand, low along the ground, skipping it off the cobblestones in a flat ricochet that Loki did not see coming because his attention was still fixed on the jet. The shield clipped the back of Loki's knee and the Asgardian dropped to one knee with a grunt of surprise.
Steve was already sprinting in to follow up.
Loki snarled. A pulse of green force erupted outward from his body, a shockwave of pure rejection that caught Steve in mid-stride and threw him ten metres backward through the air. He hit a parked motorcycle, flipped over it, and landed hard on his side.
Loki rose slowly to his full height. His eyes were no longer amused.
"Enough games."
The Scepter came up. The blue gem blazed brighter than it had all night, humming with lethal intent. The magical shields around him shimmered into full, glowing visibility, layered in thick, triple concentric rings.
High above the plaza, Natasha's voice was very quiet in Steve's ear.
"Captain. This cannot continue. We are completely outmatched. Heavy backup will be arriving any moment now. Stay down."
Steve was already painfully pushing himself up out of the motorcycle wreckage. Blood ran freely from a deep cut above his eye, blinding him on one side. His left shoulder did not want to hold his arm at the correct angle anymore.
"I'll hold him."
"Thank you, Captain," she said softly.
—
And then, from somewhere high above the dark rooftops, music started playing.
It was loud. It was aggressive classic rock. It was utterly unmistakable.
The music poured heavily from external suit speakers that had absolutely no tactical business existing, filling the historic German plaza with a very particular brand of aggressive, billionaire showmanship.
Steve looked up.
Loki looked up.
Tony Stark did not make a flashy, hovering entrance. He came in swinging.
A blinding repulsor beam dropped from the dark clouds like a localized lightning strike. It struck Loki squarely in the center of his chest before the god even had time to raise the Scepter. The massive kinetic impact lifted Loki entirely off his feet and threw him violently backward.
Before Loki could hit the ground, two tiny, silent smart-munitions shot out from the descending red and gold blur. They slammed directly into Loki's right wrist. The kinetic force was massive and hyper-focused. Loki's grip failed instantly. The golden scepter was ripped from his hand.
A second repulsor blast fired from the sky, catching the tumbling weapon mid-air. The blast sent the scepter skidding fifty yards across the plaza, completely out of Loki's reach.
Only then did Iron Man land.
He came down right next to the scepter. The Mark X armour hit the cobblestones with a thud that shook the stones underfoot. The suit was sleek and angular and practically humming with power, and the triangular arc reactor set into the chest plate glowed a cold, blinding blue-white.
Tony did not pause for banter.
He scooped up the scepter in one smooth motion and pointed it directly at Loki's face. He had absolutely no idea how to fire the thing. But Loki did not need to know that, and the threat of his own weapon pointed at his own head was doing exactly the work Tony needed it to do.
At the same time, every hidden weapons pod on the Mark X snapped open.
Shoulder-mounted micro-missiles deployed with a sharp mechanical whine. Forearm lasers ignited, casting thin red tracking lines across Loki's chest. Anti-tank munitions slid smoothly from the thigh housings. The chest reactor shifted into offensive mode with a rising electrical whine, and the unibeam tracked down onto Loki's heart.
In less than a second, Tony Stark had turned himself into a one-man firing squad, with every single weapon system on the suit locked dead onto the disarmed Asgardian.
Steve limped across the plaza and took up position on Loki's other side. His shield was raised. His jaw was bleeding. His breathing was ragged. But his eyes were absolutely steady.
Above them, the Quinjet descended until it hovered twenty metres above the cobblestones. Its cannons swung into position and glowed hot.
Three-point lockdown. A cornered god staring down enough firepower to flatten the block.
"Make your move, Reindeer Games," Tony's modulated voice projected through the suit's external speakers.
Loki pulled himself up slowly from the cobblestones.
He looked at Tony holding his own scepter against his face. He looked at Steve, bloodied and still standing. He glanced up at the heavily armed aircraft hovering overhead.
He could have done a dozen things. A simple spell would have turned him invisible. A flick of the wrist would have violently summoned his heavy armor back into place. A single thought would have brought the Scepter flying back to his hand, and he could have used it to effortlessly escape this primitive trap.
But defeating the mortals here did not suit his grand objectives.
Steve and Tony both braced themselves, muscles tight. They were fully expecting a fight. A long one. Maybe a losing one.
But Loki did not cast a spell. He did not raise a hand in anger. He did not move at all, except to smile.
The shimmering green and gold armour dissolved into the night air. The heavy horned helmet vanished. He stood in the centre of the ruined plaza in a simple black leather coat, his hands slightly raised in a gesture of mock surrender, the thin trail of blood from Steve's shield strike still running from the corner of his mouth.
The smile on his face was slow. Chilling. Deeply, completely satisfied.
"Well fought," he said softly. "I yield."
Tony did not lower any of his weapons.
"Say that again for the cheap seats."
"I yield, man of iron. I surrender."
Tony looked at Steve.
Steve looked back at Tony.
Neither of them said a single word. They didn't need to. The heavy look that passed between them held everything.
The surrender was too clean. Too fast. Too incredibly easy. And they both knew it in the exact same second. A thousand-year-old god who had just proudly declared his intent to rule the entire world did not simply give up because someone had taken his favorite glowing stick and pointed a few primitive guns at him.
But you could not refuse a total, unconditional surrender.
They took him.