Lucius came back through the portal with better information and plans that made his future targets unlucky.
He stayed invisible at first and drifted high above Manhattan while the battle below turned whole blocks into broken geometry. Chitauri chariots cut between buildings in hard silver sweeps. Leviathans pushed through the avenues like armoured nightmares that had learnt how to fly. Energy fire chewed through glass, concrete, traffic lights, buses, and people's certainty about what the world was supposed to contain.
He watched the patterns.
The Chitauri were still pouring in through the wound above Stark Tower, and every one of them looked a little cheaper now that he had seen the nursery and the cybernetic corners their designers had cut. Ugly little function-creatures, useful and efficient in the narrow sense, but once the mystery was stripped off them, they stopped being apocalyptic and started being inventory.
Lucius almost felt disappointed in the universe, though not enough to spoil the moment.
Then he remembered that the whole world was watching, and that this meant he could improve his image while wrecking an army and denying salvage to every parasite with a badge, a laboratory, or a dream of pointing alien weapons at his back later.
He floated to ground level and dropped the invisibility.
The shift was dramatic enough to matter. One second, the sky above the avenue held only Iron Man, smoke, blue portal light, and falling debris. Next, a very tall man floating in plain view with his coat moving in the wind, pale eyes cold with amusement, and enough visible calm to make the whole invasion look briefly like a stage built for him.
A rooftop camera caught him first. Then three phones from different rooftops. Then two news helicopters banking too close for good judgment. After that, the city itself did the rest.
Lucius gave them a clean profile for half a second; a proper pose was necessary for good public relations, shape and timing, not just violence, and then he went to work.
The first chariot died without fanfare when he caught it in telekinesis mid-dive as it came screaming towards an intersection jammed with abandoned taxis and fleeing pedestrians. The whole vehicle jerked sideways so hard the driver's neck snapped before the craft fully understood it had stopped obeying. Lucius folded the nose into the cockpit, crushed the rear stabilisers flat, and sent the resulting metal corpse spinning back upwards. It clipped a second chariot, smashed both of them together into a burning knot of alien alloy and screaming parts. Then he flung the whole wreck straight back through the portal before a single recognisable component could fall into the street.
That got Tony Stark's attention three blocks away, and he adjusted course at once.
Below, civilians stopped in doorways, under buses, behind concrete barriers, and stared upward as Lucius spread one hand and tore six Chitauri infantry off a half-collapsed office façade. They kicked and fired wildly while an invisible force yanked them together hard enough to shatter armour, ribs, and the ugly little cybernetic riggings. Lucius twisted the ruined cluster into something the size of a suitcase and casually batted it upward into the portal like rubbish being returned to sender.
The next thing to come after him was a Leviathan bursting between two towers in a storm of grit and broken masonry, mouth open and armour flaring where weapons nests sat under layered plating. The thing's sheer size still did good work on the nerves of ordinary people. Even knowing what it was now, Lucius had to admit it made for excellent theatre.
He raised both hands.
The clouds above Manhattan, already bruised by smoke and portal light, thickened fast under his command. The wind changed direction. Loose paper, ash, and powdered concrete began to spiral. Then the lightning came.
Not Thor's blunt, righteous style, but Lucius's own version of it, meaner, cleaner, and more selective.
Three white-blue bolts stabbed down in sequence and hit the Leviathan along the exposed seams he had already learned from the mothership systems. The first overloaded a forward control web. The second cooked half of the creature's secondary nerve-routing. The third dropped into the armour gap above the thoracic chamber and turned an entire line of support implants into slag. The beast convulsed mid-flight, rolled, and smashed into a tower face so hard that windows vanished in glittering waves for all the floors above and below the impact point.
People screamed, but Lucius did not let the carcass fall.
He stopped it half a heartbeat before the thing could bury itself into the avenue, peeled chunks of concrete and twisted signposts off its armour, then seized the whole stunned bulk in telekinesis and hurled it bodily back into the portal. It went through nose first like an accusation.
Now the crowd below started to understand what they were seeing.
This was not simply a powerful mutant or just another combatant, but somebody who could decide which part of the invasion got to remain on Earth as evidence and which part got thrown back into the sky like spoiled meat.
He used the next few minutes to make that point impossible to miss.
A police cruiser had been crushed half under a fallen delivery lorry near Forty-Second, two officers pinned behind the twisted frame, while Chitauri fire walked the street around them. Lucius dropped to street level so fast the air snapped around him. A telekinetic shield flared between the officers and the incoming bolts. With the same motion, he lifted the lorry off them, set it aside, and dragged one officer clear by the vest just as the man's left leg gave way under him.
The officer had an open fracture, severe blood loss, and all the bright, stupid signs of shock.
Lucius crouched, put a finger to the man's thigh, and let biokinesis do what it now could. Bleeding closed first. Bone drew back into line. Ruined vessels sealed. Torn muscle knitted. The officer gasped once in raw disbelief and clutched at the pavement as pain changed shape under the healing.
Lucius stood before gratitude could fully form.
"Try not to get hurt again," he said, then kicked the cruiser door off its hinges, ripped it free, and used it as a spinning metal blade to cut a Chitauri gunner out of the air across the street.
Brownie points, he thought. Lovely little things.
A bus went over at the next junction when a chariot clipped its upper half. Civilians inside screamed under shattering glass. Lucius turned, caught the bus before it could crush the people under it, lowered it flat, and froze the ruptured fuel spill under its chassis into a white sheet before sparks from a downed cable could reach it. Then he tore the cable loose with magnetokinesis, wrapped it around a descending Chitauri soldier, and sent enough current through the line to leave only smoke, a smell of burned flesh, and a falling weapon that he caught before it hit the street.
He crushed that gun into a dense block without even looking at it and sent it back through the portal as well.
Not one intact toy for the scavengers. Never let dogs near butcher's scraps if they might later grow teeth from them.
He rose again, storm still turning overhead under his influence, and went broad with the destruction.
Chariots dropped from the sky in chunks. Infantry disappeared under telekinetic compression or lightning strikes that walked across their formation lines like divine irritation. Two more Leviathans came in low over Midtown and met different answers. One got stopped cold, peeled open along its ventral armour seams, and flung back in strips and convulsing pieces. The other took a chain of magnetically accelerated wreckage through the jaw, rolled broadside, and got driven bodily through the portal by a telekinetic shove strong enough to buckle every nearby traffic sign toward him.
By then, the weather had turned properly theatrical.
Rain had not started, but pressure had. Dark clouds gathered in thick layers above the breach, wind pushing smoke sideways, lightning flickering in the belly of the sky often enough that half the city began looking upward between explosions just to see where he would point next.
He enjoyed that, as Lucius was not naive or noble enough to save people for its own sake, but he was absolutely vain enough to enjoy the image of himself doing it while the world watched. Every ambulance he cleared a path for, every police officer he healed, every child he pulled free from concrete or glass, every elderly civilian he lifted out of the line of fire with invisible force and set down somewhere safer, all of it paid into a different account than the battle itself.
He could feel public opinion being written in real time, which made the whole exercise far more useful.
A woman trapped beneath a slab of concrete stared at him while blood ran into one eye and dust whitened her hair. Lucius lifted the slab, hauled her clear in telekinesis, and reset the dislocated shoulder she had not even realised was out before setting her down behind an overturned truck, where she could do nothing but stare.
He gave her a brief smile polished just enough to read as heroic on camera and then ripped twelve Chitauri rifles from the hands of an advancing infantry knot, bundled the lot into a compact metal sphere, and fired it upward through the portal with enough force to leave a vapour trail in the smoke.
He was getting alarmingly good at this.
Tony joined him at last, coming in hot, taking out a chariot on approach, then hovering off Lucius's right shoulder just long enough to watch him yank a Leviathan sideways by the internal reinforcement of its armour plates and crush its head with a clench of a hand until its face disappeared.
Tony looked at the street below, the rising storm, the bodies and wreckage vanishing back through the portal, the healed civilians, the flattened infantry, and then back at Lucius.
"If you could do all this," he said over the suit speakers, "why did we even bother?"
Lucius threw three more dead Chitauri through the breach without looking and tilted his head.
"My dear friend Tony, you are doing wonderfully for decorative support."
Tony stared for one full second.
Then he banked away to destroy another chariot before the answer tempted murder. Lucius was a good friend, yes, but his ego was as unbearable as Tony's own. Still, since the day they met, not once did the fruit ninja reject any help request from Tony. And that was not something to scoff at.
-
Far from decorative support, Fury watched the feeds and felt anger settle and rise as Noctis systematically denied SHIELD every piece of salvage worth wanting.
The bastard was doing it on purpose, and that much was unmistakable.
On one screen, he ripped over two dozen chariots apart in mid-air, stopped the larger fragments from falling into the avenue, and sent every recognisable component straight back through the portal. On another, he crushed a cluster of dropped energy weapons into a neat spinning mass and threw them upward before recovery teams could even dream of reaching the street. A third feed caught him, tearing the intact control web out of a shattered chariot and hurling it skyward with the rest of the carcass.
Fury leaned closer.
He watched Noctis bring down a dozen chariots in under a minute and deny every single sample to Earth-side hands. Weapons, hull fragments, neural relay pieces, power couplings, targeting assemblies, everything that might have gone into a lab and come back wearing a SHIELD insignia, vanished back through the portal in one glittering stream of telekinetically redirected contempt.
The son of a bitch knew exactly what he was doing.
He was not merely fighting the invasion. He was curating the aftermath.
Fury almost admired it, which only made the irritation worse.
Then a different feed caught his eye. Noctis dropped to street level again, healed two wounded officers, lifted a child out of a crushed taxi, and sent another burst of alien wreckage upward before rising back into the storm like some vindictive angel with no patience for procurement outside his own pockets.
Around Fury, analysts and operators were reacting in real time.
"Sir, he just took another Leviathan."
"Sir, that one's gone as well."
"Feed twelve shows civilians being moved out of the kill zone."
"Feed seven lost visuals. Feed seven regained. Jesus Christ."
Fury ignored the last comment because it was not technically the worst identification error anyone had made today.
He folded his arms and watched Lucius erase evidence with the same care other men reserved for protecting family heirlooms.
Yes, Fury thought, you bastard. You know exactly what we would do with it.
And he hated that Noctis was right.
-
The X-Men reached Manhattan fast, too fast for comfort and still not fast enough to matter at the centre of the rupture before the city had already started bleeding.
Cyclops landed with the field team in the middle of smoke, broken masonry, and civilians running whichever way fear pushed hardest. Jean, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Kitty, and a scattering of others spread through the streets almost immediately, each of them going where their powers would do the most good in the least time.
Storm pulled lightning out of the same sky Lucius had already begun brutalising, though with finer restraint, less raw control and less open delight in the damage. Jean held up half a collapsed fire escape long enough for six people to get out from under it. Kitty phased through a buried service entrance and dragged two maintenance workers out before the smoke could finish them. Piotr went to brute work, lifting slabs, buses, and steel beams with the steady silence of a man too used to being used as infrastructure. Logan made sure alien organs learned what claws were for.
Then they saw Lucius properly, not as an inconvenient name in a file, not as a problem attached to SHIELD drama, and not as the man from the St. Regis, but above the avenue in full view while the storm bent around him, Chitauri ships folded out of the sky, police and civilians got hauled to safety under telekinetic force, and wounded bodies on the pavement healed under hands that should not, by any record they possessed, have been able to do any such thing.
Scott's visor tracked upward.
Through the team link, his voice came clipped and incredulous.
"Since when does he have healing?"
A chariot exploded above them in a crack of warped metal.
Storm followed it with her eyes, then looked back to where Lucius had already torn the next one out of formation.
"And weather manipulation," she said, her tone tighter than she liked. "Since when does he have these powers?"
Jean did not answer immediately because she was watching the scale instead, the control, the force, and the decisions underneath the display. He was not simply attacking, but selecting, rescuing, shaping, and staging the whole performance at once.
Logan wiped blue blood off one claw and glanced up. Scott did not look away.
"No. This is something else."
Jean felt the same thing.
Whatever Noctis had been when they first crossed paths, he was no longer operating inside any sensible category they had. The healing alone was enough to raise new questions. The storm manipulation made it worse. The fact that he was using them all together while carefully not showing everything made it worse still.
Through the link, Kitty's voice came in from two streets over, breathless with movement.
"He just healed a cop."
Logan snorted.
"Public relations."
Storm said nothing; she knew he was right.