Smith looked at Steve for exactly the length of time it took to confirm the man was upright and functional, then said: "It would be embarrassing to show up personally and still have personnel gaps." He was gone before Steve could respond.
The HYDRA soldier Steve had taken down a minute earlier had not, it turned out, been fully down. He came back to consciousness, located the nearest assault rifle, and lined up a shot at Steve's back.
Steve's hand was already moving. The shield caught the burst, deflected it into the tree line, and returned on its arc with enough force to settle the situation permanently.
Forty meters out, a cannonball came from an angle that Jarvis hadn't flagged — one of the secondary artillery positions firing from cover — and connected with Tony's armor at full velocity. He went airborne in the wrong direction, clipped two trees, and came to rest in a shallow gully with snow scattered across his faceplate.
"—absolute son of a—"
"Language," Steve said reflexively, from the other side of the battlefield.
Tony pushed himself upright. "Jarvis."
Jarvis, through the satellite uplink: "Their troop complement is considerably larger than initial estimates. The outer perimeter alone has several hundred personnel, plus the enhanced individuals, plus what appears to be a contingent of HYDRA's elite death squads." A brief pause. "The Strucker installation is significantly more developed than anything in our previous database."
Thor came down from the communications tower he'd just demolished, snow and masonry dust still settling around him. He looked at the death squad soldiers reforming a defensive line forty meters ahead. "We've cleared a dozen of their positions and more keep appearing. Smith — how many of these warriors does Strucker have?"
"This is the last one," Smith said, overhead. "Burn it to the ground and it doesn't matter."
Natasha moved through the eastern perimeter at ground level, reading the battlefield through the combat capability detector strapped to her forearm. The display gave her clean differentiation and she kept her attention on the latter while her hands worked through the former. The detector had one critical limitation she'd internalized from her first day using it: never point it at Smith, Thor, or Banner when he was green. The readings would exceed the instrument's operational ceiling and the housing would fail.
She threw a shaped grenade under the chassis of an armored SUV that had been providing machine gun suppression from the tree line. The vehicle went sideways.
Barton had taken a bunker position behind a fallen tree and was working through the fortifications with explosive arrows, one per target, no wasted shots. A tank was sitting between him and the next defensive line.
He fired once. The tank stopped being a problem.
Tony came back online, repaired to combat readiness, and took three surface-to-air missile launchers off the northern perimeter simultaneously.
"No one wants to address the captain's language correction?" he said.
"It slipped," Steve said.
"For the record, I thought it was warranted."
HYDRA Command Room. Inside the base.
Strucker listened to the situation report with the focused attention of a military commander receiving information he already suspected but needed confirmed.
"The full Avengers roster," the duty officer said. "Including Director Smith. And the recently enhanced agents — Romanoff and Barton are both showing enhanced combat ability."
Strucker looked at the tactical display. "Concentrate armor on the western approach — that's the weakest point in their formation. Release all enhanced." He turned to Dr. List. "Everything we've built goes into the field now. Hold them long enough for us to get the critical assets out."
List nodded. He had calculated this possibility. "They'll see what we've accomplished."
"That's the point." Strucker looked back at the screen. "List — have the artillery position on the city. Surface-to-surface, mixed targets. Sokovia itself becomes the problem — they'll have to redirect resources to civilian protection."
List gave the order.
Sokovia. City center.
The first shells hit the main square. The sound carried for three kilometers. People who had been going about their afternoon in a city that had been a peripheral HYDRA concern for years were now running in every direction through streets that had abruptly become a targeting solution.
Jarvis: "Sir, Sokovia is taking artillery fire."
Tony altered his heading. "Iron Legion. Deploy everything."
The drones came in over the rooftops in formation — the Avengers sigil on each chest plate, the same pre-recorded message cycling from each unit in multiple languages as they spread through the residential districts.
This area is dangerous. Please evacuate. We are here to assist you. This area is dangerous.
A man outside a bar watched one of them come down his street and threw his bottle at it. The bottle broke across the drone's faceplate. The drone continued delivering its evacuation message. The crowd around him cheered.
On the walls and shuttered shopfronts along the main commercial street, the art that had accumulated over the past two years told a clear story: Iron Man rendered with gun barrels for arms. The Avengers seal defaced. Painted text in Sokovian that translated, with varying degrees of restraint, as go home.
Inside the base, List stood before his assembled troops.
"They sent their weapons to test us. We are sending them back." He looked at the faces in front of him. "This base does not fall. We do not yield."
Never surrender came back from the soldiers in unison. The sound of it filled the bunker.
The basement.
Strucker found Raina in the storage level. She was standing near the Obelisk's case with the particular stillness of someone who has already run through several versions of this conversation in her head.
"Take it and come with me," Strucker said. "We're leaving."
Raina looked at the Obelisk. Then at Strucker.
"I've seen what happens next," she said.
Strucker reached past her toward the case.
The Obelisk's response to his contact was immediate and complete. He had not been selected by the ancient Kree screening mechanism, and the Obelisk did not make exceptions. The transformation was rapid — his body going dark, then crumbling, the ash settling across the basement floor in a spreading pattern.
Raina looked at what remained of Baron Strucker and said nothing.
Eastern perimeter.
Lambert moved through the pine forest above the tree line, identifying targets below with the calm efficiency of someone for whom fire was no longer an external tool but an extension of his own body. He saw Barton repositioning from the cover of a fallen tree, gauged the angle, and threw.
The fireball went high and detonated above Barton's position instead of on it. Barton went sideways, rolling through the snow, the burns across his left shoulder and forearm already blistering through his jacket.
"Clint!" Natasha changed direction mid-sprint.
Lambert tracked the movement and threw twice more. Barton took one of them — partial contact, enough to put him behind the nearest boulder — and the other hit a tree that had nothing to complain about it.
From the north end of the battlefield, a ball of energy struck Steve's shield with a resonant crack and distributed itself across the vibranium without penetrating. Steve looked for the source and found it — another enhanced individual, this one generating controlled ball lightning, running along the base's upper defensive wall.
"New target, northeast wall. Ball lightning capability."
A second strike hit the ground at his feet and threw snow and frozen earth across his uniform.
Smith looked down from altitude, found Lambert, and fired.
The ki blast was one-handed and understated, the way a skilled practitioner handles a problem that doesn't require full commitment. Lambert's position on the hillside became a different kind of problem for the landscape.
Banner was no longer Banner. The Hulk took eleven running steps toward the nearest fortified bunker and hit it like it had personally offended him.
Natasha reached Barton's position, assessed the burns in under four seconds, cut away the damaged material, and began field dressing with the efficiency of someone who had been doing emergency medicine in combat conditions since before Barton could legally purchase alcohol. Smith passed overhead, registered Barton's status — injured, out of the fight for the moment, not dying — and turned back toward the base.
The ball lightning Inhuman had Steve pinned in a pattern he couldn't break cleanly — the discharge was quick enough to reset before Steve could close the distance, and the shield couldn't absorb indefinitely.
"Backup requested, northeast wall."
The lightning ball that was already in the air hit something that wasn't Steve.
Mjolnir had arrived ahead of Thor, which was the technical achievement that always preceded the man himself. Thor landed between Steve and the wall with the Hammer already returning to his hand.
"You have some ability with a little bit of thunder," Thor said, looking at the Inhuman on the wall. "Did you ask my permission?"
The Inhuman threw a ball of lightning directly at Mjolnir, which was the most straightforward way to find out what Mjolnir thought about ball lightning. The discharge hit the hammer, dissipated, and Mjolnir arrived at the Inhuman with the physics of a freight train. He left the wall very quickly.
Steve looked at Thor.
"Thank you."
"Of course," Thor said.
Inside the base.
Smith moved through the base's interior as if the defensive positions between him and his objective were a mild inconvenience rather than a military installation. Every HYDRA soldier who attempted to make that framing incorrect was rapidly proved wrong.
Tony came in through the same path, which was wide enough now to accommodate a truck.
"You could have left a few for me," Tony said.
"Dr. List is in the research wing."
Tony switched to thermal. "Found him. He's at a terminal."
List was deleting methodically — not panicking, not fleeing, working through the priority list of data with the discipline of someone who had prepared for this contingency. Inhuman genetic profiles. Obelisk experiment records. Awakening success rates. Subject screenings.
Smith raised one finger.
The laser that came from it was narrow and precise. List collapsed.
Smith looked at the terminal, then at Tony. "Copy everything he was deleting. Send the full dataset to headquarters."
Tony had already jacked his phone into the nearest port. "Jarvis — full extraction, everything on this network. CC Smith's office at SHIELD."
"Copying," Jarvis said.
Smith moved to the east wall, ran his hand along it, found the seam he was looking for, and hit it with a focused blast. The hidden door came apart and a descending passage opened beyond it.
Tony looked at the rubble. "There was approximately a one-second window there where I thought you were going to bury both of us."
"You were never in the window," Smith said, and went down.
They found Raina at the bottom.
She was standing in the middle of the storage room with her arms at her sides, the Obelisk in its case on the shelf behind her, and the remains of Strucker distributed across the floor in a radius around where he'd been standing.
She looked at the two of them with the composed attention of someone who had seen them arrive before they walked through the door.
"Mr. Smith. Mr. Stark." She inclined her head slightly. "I assume you're looking for Baron Strucker. He was the leader of this HYDRA cell." She gestured at the floor. "There he is."
Tony looked at what was left of Strucker, then at Raina, then at the Obelisk behind her.
Smith looked at the Obelisk. At the distributed ash. At Raina's position in the room, which was exactly close enough to the Obelisk to have reached it and used it on someone else, and exactly far enough from the remains to have stepped back afterward.
"You killed him with it," Smith said.