Tony Stark had permanently relocated his primary operations to the upper floors of Stark Tower while the smoking crater in Malibu underwent a massive, heavily fortified rebuild. It was a highly workable arrangement—the bleeding-edge lab space was significantly better than he'd ever admit to anyone out loud, the sweeping aerial views of Manhattan were useful for clearing his head, and his parents were currently living exactly two floors down.
That last part remained the strangest, most profoundly welcome fact of his entire chaotic existence.
Tony stood at the massive glass window, staring down at the bustling city streets. "JARVIS. Give me an update on Smith Doyle. Anything?"
"Ms. Fox's office firmly maintains that the Inspector General is in deep seclusion, sir," the AI's crisp voice echoed through the lab. "They have provided no estimated return window. I am currently running a continuous global scan. His cell phone shows absolutely no signal anywhere on Earth."
Tony slowly turned that terrifying detail over in his mind. No signal anywhere on Earth meant one of two things: either the indestructible phone was simply powered off—which was entirely possible—or the phone was definitively not on Earth. That was arguably less possible, but Smith Doyle operated at a god-tier scale where "less possible" was rapidly becoming an active, daily category of physics.
He thought back to the horrific, reality-warping illusion Wanda Maximoff had forced him through during the tournament. The apocalyptic version of the future where Smith had simply left the planet, packing up his cosmic margin of safety, and something monstrous had eagerly filled the vacuum he'd left behind in the stars.
He had originally been building the automated Iron Legion partly as a localized, tactical answer to that exact doomsday scenario. Now, it wasn't just an answer. It was a mandate. He was going to keep building until the sky was silver.
"The Bucky Barnes search," Tony said, his voice dropping into a cold, clinical register. "Anything?"
"No useful records found through standard open channels or current intelligence databases, sir," JARVIS replied. "My facial recognition sweep is currently running a deep scrub across all classified and unclassified archived global footage, spanning from the 1970s onward. It will take time to process the sheer volume of data."
"Keep it running," Tony ordered, not turning from the window. "I don't care how long it takes. Find him."
In the S.H.I.E.L.D. Trident Building, Maria Hill delivered the exact same "seclusion" update to Nick Fury. She got a drastically different response.
"We're absolutely not waiting around for him to come back from wherever the hell he is," Fury said, his single eye fixed on the sprawling intelligence map on his desk. He was already aggressively moving to the next crisis item. "Get the White House on the secure line right now and start the Manhattan land allocation conversation. We desperately need a designated, sovereign premises in New York for this Asgardian consulate. Run it entirely through the usual, shadow national security channels. Keep the State Department out of it."
Hill jotted the order down. "And on our end?"
"Ask the President whether there is any viable diplomatic path to a reciprocal S.H.I.E.L.D. presence up there. An office in Asgard. A permanent liaison position. Something." Fury paused, a grim, self-aware smirk touching his lips. "We don't actually know exactly where Asgard is, we have absolutely no idea how to get there, and we have zero infrastructure to actively maintain communication once someone is actually standing in their halls. So the answer from Odin is almost certainly going to be a hard no. But I want it in the permanent geopolitical record that we formally asked."
Hill noted it with a crisp nod. She shifted to the next file. "The Sky Curtain coverage. The public is rapidly starting to connect the massive, global eclipse to the localized New York resurrections."
"The previous two sky-darkening events didn't produce mass resurrections, so the direct, causal link doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny. Use that," Fury instructed ruthlessly. "Get some of our asset academics out there on the morning shows with alternative, weather-based hypotheses—it doesn't matter how wildly speculative the science is. Spread the uncertainty. Dilute the narrative. And that New Easter framing spreading on Twitter is incredibly good for public morale. Lean heavily into it."
Hill closed her folder and left the office.
Fury stood up and walked to the reinforced window, looking out at the city skyline.
The underground energy monitoring room had completely lost three multimillion-dollar instruments the exact day Smith Doyle's power had violently spiked. The staggering readings had simply exceeded the equipment's absolute, theoretical ceiling and kept climbing until the internal circuits physically melted. Whatever the hell had happened at the Fraternity compound that afternoon—whatever Smith had recklessly done, integrated, or become—it had briefly registered on every single hyper-sensitive instrument in the building before those instruments simply stopped being able to register anything at all.
Seclusion, Fox had said.
Nick Fury believed in a lot of crazy, impossible things in this new era. He wasn't entirely sure he believed that.
The Bus sat in the massive, cavernous S.H.I.E.L.D. hangar looking exactly like what it was: a heavily retrofitted, lumbering tactical aircraft that had been through several brutal decades of continuous use and hadn't been retired strictly because Phil Coulson stubbornly refused to allow it. The newer, sleek, hover-capable Quinjets got the premium hangar space nearest the rapid-deployment exit. The Bus got the drafty back corner.
Grant Ward was meticulously reviewing his tactical gear manifest when Leo Fitz suddenly appeared beside him, casually took the bulky communication receiver right out of his hand without asking, and ruthlessly destroyed it with a ball-peen hammer on the metal workbench.
Ward just stood there and watched this happen, his jaw tight.
"That was new," Ward said.
Jemma Simmons materialized on his other side, holding a medical kit. "He's resetting the comm chip, Agent Ward. The external receiver is completely obsolete now—the new in-ear unit is fully standalone and heavily encrypted."
Fitz proudly extracted the tiny, uncrushed microchip from the plastic wreckage with a pair of delicate tweezers and held it up to the light for inspection.
Ward cautiously pulled out his current earpiece. "Then how exactly does it—"
Simmons instantly produced a sterile cotton swab and a clear test tube. Ward's trained combat instinct was to violently move away; he forced himself to override it. The swab went swiftly into his mouth, came back out with a fresh saliva sample, and went straight into the waiting tube.
"Embedded sensory-nerve silicone," Simmons explained brightly. "It's fully DNA-matched to your specific biological signature. It will feel like absolutely nothing is there within an hour."
"You too, Donnie."
Donnie Gill, standing nearby in a standard tactical uniform, simply opened his mouth with the exhausted resignation of someone who had already calculated that resisting the two brilliant scientists was highly inefficient.
The two field agents stood there in silence for a moment after the swabs were taken.
"Finally on a real, sanctioned field mission," Donnie muttered, adjusting his jacket.
Fitz didn't reply; he had already eagerly moved on to the complex micro-calibration of the chips.
A low, throaty engine roar echoed through the hangar bay door. Phil Coulson's pristine 1962 Corvette—cherry-red, beautifully restored, highly impractical in virtually every operational sense, and clearly not going anywhere near a combat zone—rolled smoothly onto the concrete. A young ground crew member moved reflexively toward the driver's side door to assist.
"Don't touch Lola," Coulson warned calmly, without even breaking his stride as he stepped out of the vehicle.
Fitz leaned in, just barely audible to Ward: "He actually named it."
Donnie, equally quiet: "Noted."
Coulson gathered the three of them with a sharp wave of his hand and walked them up the heavy cargo ramp of the Bus. "Lola isn't a museum collectible. She is a fully functional, highly modified mobile command asset. She ran at absolute peak operational capacity through most of the nineties." He paused, a faint smile touching his lips. "Have you kids heard the one about the veteran agent who was terrified of flying?"
Ward crossed his arms. "I've done HALO night jumps into heavily contested, active-fire landing zones, Coulson."
Donnie casually leaned against the bulkhead. "I can instantly build structural ice bridges in midair. Getting from place to place without a heavy aircraft is rapidly becoming less of a physical constraint for me."
Coulson chuckled. "I'm kidding. Relax."
Melinda May stepped silently out of the cockpit doorway. She looked at Ward and Donnie with an icy, flat expression that efficiently conveyed, without a single word, that there was absolutely no margin in her five-minute departure window for personal banter or effects that weren't already safely stowed.
They immediately moved to stow their gear.
She handed Coulson a thin manila folder without stopping her pre-flight checks. "Possible Rising Tide waypoint. Los Angeles."
He opened it, read the brief in thirty seconds flat, and snapped it closed. "Good. We desperately need to stay current on their network."
May turned and went back to the cockpit. The massive hydraulic ramp hissed and closed, sealing them in. The Bus rolled heavily out of the secure hangar into the gray morning light, gathered its roaring speed down the long runway, and lifted smoothly into the sky.