Steve sat inside the Quinjet's cabin, head lowered as he ran his fingers over his shield.
A few short decades couldn't leave any marks on it. It was still exactly the same as it had been back then.
But the world had already changed.
Steve let out a quiet sigh. Even though S.H.I.E.L.D. had pulled him out of the Arctic, facing this rapidly shifting era still left him feeling out of his depth.
Nick Fury told him he just needed time to adapt, that he needed to get his body moving again after being frozen for decades. Steve could only hope that was true.
Because even today, even in an age where HYDRA had already been wiped out, enemies who wanted to destroy the world still appeared one after another. The danger had clearly escalated.
Yet he was still the same.
Compared to that, what confused Captain America even more was this: why, even now, had the "better life" he thought he fought for still not arrived?
Since being thawed out, aside from hiding underground and boxing, he had also been trying to understand this world. HYDRA was gone, the war was over, but peace still didn't exist.
He used to think that fighting for his country meant fighting for the world, for peace, for humanity. But after learning the history of the past several decades, he realized he was wrong.
A nation that called itself a beacon had launched several wars in these years. It left him deeply conflicted.
At that moment, the jet's speed slowed.
A soldier walked up to him. "Captain, we're here."
Steve snapped out of his thoughts and looked up at the soldier with a white mustache. The nameplate read "Brock Rumlow." Clearly, that was his name.
"Thanks," Steve said.
He exhaled and slung the shield onto his back.
"You don't have to be so tense," Brock said with a smile that looked a little like mockery. "The agency always gets a bit jumpy about things that fall from the sky."
"Are they worried Superman's going to fall out of the sky? If that happens, it should be Kansas," he added, shrugging.
Steve didn't get the Superman reference, but he still relaxed a little.
This mission wasn't difficult so much as it was strange.
A hammer falling from the sky, and nobody could lift it, sounded like a fairy tale.
When the jet landed, Steve stepped out.
Coulson spotted him and immediately put on a warm, welcoming expression as he hurried over.
"Captain!" Coulson called out, smiling broadly.
Steve remembered him clearly.
Coulson then walked Steve through what had happened. "That hammer has been in New Mexico for a while now. It made a small crater when it landed, but our satellites didn't detect anything abnormal."
"I heard it can't be lifted?" Steve asked.
Coulson nodded. "Before we arrived, the locals already tried. Nobody could move it. An old man tried towing it with his truck and ended up ripping his truck apart."
After S.H.I.E.L.D. arrived, they naturally tried all kinds of equipment too, but the hammer didn't budge.
"Then my mission is?" Steve asked.
He figured that if so many modern machines couldn't move it, Fury wasn't going to ask him to somehow haul it away personally.
"No. Fury's worried someone will come and try to take it," Coulson said.
No matter what, since the hammer had landed on their soil, Fury had already treated it as ownerless. And if it had no owner, then it should belong to S.H.I.E.L.D.
As he spoke, Coulson smiled again. "Of course, Captain, you can give it a try too. Maybe you really can lift it."
"That sounds like the legend of King Arthur's sword in the stone," Steve said, finally catching a reference.
Then he set off with Coulson.
Brock glanced at them, then started directing the other soldiers to quickly set up a temporary base. Since they couldn't take the hammer away, the only option was to lock down the area and study it on-site.
On the other side.
Across the vast desert wilderness, a blue blur flashed past at high speed.
Bant, transformed into Fasttrack, sprinted forward, the afterimage he left behind cutting straight ahead like a laser line.
"New Mexico really is desolate," he muttered.
He slammed into a hard stop, and a thick cloud of dust shot up into the air.
Bant had asked Eunice to book him a ticket to New Mexico, but the flight he actually booked was to Texas.
That famous sunny coastline was more like a vacation destination.
After arriving in Texas, Bant transformed into Fasttrack and ran all the way over.
New Mexico looked like it was stuck in the last century, exactly the kind of environment you'd see in every Western with cowboys and small towns.
Seeing these sights made it impossible not to picture the classic movie scenes in your head. People rode past in cowboy outfits, sat by the river panning for gold, then took their money to the town saloon to drink until they dropped.
And of course, when it came to that, cowboy quick-draw duels were always unavoidable.
"Eunice, mark the landing site of Thor's hammer," Bant said.
"Yes, sir," Eunice replied, sending him the location.
Not long ago, the hammer had caused a huge stir around here. Bant had already gathered the intel back then. Now, all that old news had been wiped clean from the internet.
He knew S.H.I.E.L.D. was involved.
But Bant's goal didn't conflict with theirs. He wasn't interested in the hammer anyway. It wasn't like he could lift it. And even if he actually could, so what?
Odin, the All-Father, wasn't dead yet.
From the beginning to the end, Bant's target was the DNA of the Asgardians, and Loki's DNA in particular.
"Getting Thor's DNA should be easy," he thought.
Thor had lost his divine power. He was only a bit stronger than an ordinary person now, and he was a brainless idiot too. Getting his genetic sample would be effortless.
But Loki was different.
Loki hardly ever appeared in the mortal world, and once the Little Broken Watch entered capture mode, Bant couldn't transform.
"Good thing even without transforming, I still have Spider-Man's strength!" Bant clenched his fist confidently.
Still, even though Loki looked weak in the movie, his strength level was rated Level 5. In reality, he was stronger than Bant without a transformation.
From that alone, it was obvious that getting Loki's DNA wouldn't be easy.
"Then again, I can think about it from another angle," Bant mused.
"I'll beat him until he's crawling with Heatblast first, and then I'll take his DNA."
Loki: ???
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