A sleek stealth Quinjet slowly descended from the night sky, its VTOL thrusters humming softly as it touched down within the secure perimeter of the outpost. The cabin doors hissed open, and the four Avengers quickly stepped out onto the tarmac.
"Where are they?" Tony Stark demanded, taking the lead.
Before his boots had even cleared the final step of the ramp, his sharp command had already reached the ears of the waiting S.H.I.E.L.D. agents below.
When old "friends" meet, sparks tend to fly.
The moment Tony breached the doorway of the outpost's private lounge, the sophisticated watch on his left wrist rapidly expanded, clicking and locking into place around his forearm to form a sleek, high-tech armor gauntlet.
"John Constantine!" Tony roared. "I've missed you so much!"
He raised his hand and fired a brilliant blue repulsor blast as a localized greeting.
BOOM!
The heavy wooden table sitting directly between John Constantine and Wade Wilson instantly shattered into a million flying splinters.
"I knew it!" Wade screamed, throwing his legs over his head as he rolled backward over his chair. "This is walking right into a blatant, textbook trap! Constantine, you absolute piece of shit!"
Amidst the flying debris of shattered wood and upholstery, Deadpool started cursing loudly at the top of his lungs. The entire living room descended into absolute, chaotic violence. Tony Stark did not stop his assault for a single second, his glowing gauntlet continuously tracking and aiming at the British occultist.
And John? He had already seamlessly dove to the floor, using Wade's thrashing, red-suited body as a human shield.
"I think we can humanly talk this out, mate!" Constantine yelled over the whining charge of the repulsor. "Tony, believe me!"
"I believe you're a piece of shit!" Tony fired again, blasting a hole through the drywall.
Simple verbal abuse, ultimate emotional enjoyment.
Outside the lounge door, Hawkeye calmly reached out and slammed the heavy metal door shut, effectively blocking the curious, wide eyes of the lower-level S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in the corridor. Tony Stark was now the official, public leader of the Avengers. Exposing an image of him acts like a petulant child brawling with a scruffy magician in a S.H.I.E.L.D. safehouse was definitely not good for public relations.
Inside the closed room, the sounds of expensive government furniture breaking continued unabated, heavily accompanied by Deadpool's high-pitched screams.
After a thoroughly exhausting ten minutes, the heavy metal door was finally pulled open from the inside.
The three men—John and Wade covered in thick drywall dust and looking utterly disheveled, and Tony adjusting his collar—walked out into the main corridor.
They relocated to a clean, secure conference room. Tony Stark, looking impeccably groomed despite the scuffle, sat calmly at the head of the steel table. Opposite him sat Wade and John, still covered in white powder.
"This is discrimination, blatant, systematic discrimination!" Wade shouted, flailing his arms to attract attention. "Why does the billionaire get to clean up his suit, but the working-class anti-heroes have to look like powdered donuts? I object! Hey! Are any of you pristine super-people even listening to me?!"
Wade dragged his dust-covered suit over to Hawkeye's side of the table. Just as he was about to reach out a gloved hand to aggressively wipe a thick layer of drywall dust onto Clint's spotless tactical vest, his wrist was violently, flawlessly twisted behind his back.
Natasha didn't even look up from her tablet as she calmly recited his file.
"Wade Wilson. Hell's Kitchen mercenary. Gained a flawed immortal body after undergoing an illegal, weaponized mutation experiment. And currently has a fiercely loyal, civilian girlfriend named Vanessa living in New York."
"Alright, alright! Jesus, I get it," Wade whimpered, instantly raising his free hand in absolute surrender. "I yield! You call the shots, scary spider-lady."
He made a dramatic zipping motion over his mask's mouth, obediently sliding back into the chair next to Constantine. Deadpool crossed his arms and tilted his head away, putting on a cartoonishly angry pout, but absolutely no one else in the room paid him any further attention.
"Joke time is officially over," Tony Stark said, his expression turning cold and serious. The playful, frustrated energy from his petty scuffle with the duo instantly vanished. "John, let's talk business. What actual intelligence do you have right now?"
BZZZ.
At that exact microsecond, John Constantine's and Wade's phones lit up simultaneously on the steel table.
> [Transaction Alert: You have received a $10,000,000 wire transfer from Stark Industries.]
John casually flipped his phone face down, completely unfazed by the wealth, while Wade nearly jumped out of his boots, his white eye-patches widening in pure, unadulterated ecstasy. Tony Stark simply raised a single finger, making a sharp shushing gesture, and Deadpool instantly closed his mouth and sat down like a perfectly obedient schoolboy.
There is truly no one on Earth who cannot be bought; it's usually just a matter of not offering enough zeros.
"The little deal with the Crossroads Demon," Constantine began, leaning back and propping his boots on the edge of the steel table. "You must have all watched the S.H.I.E.L.D. feed by now. Otherwise, you wouldn't have flown across the country."
Tony Stark's jaw stiffened, his knuckles whitening as he remembered exactly how this trench-coated bastard had casually traded away his eternal soul.
As if sensing the billionaire's rising blood pressure, Constantine offered a calm, cynical justification.
"Don't lose sleep over it, mate. With the sheer amount of blood money and weapons your company manufactured over the last two decades, your soul was already legally bound for Hell anyway. 'I just happened to find you a much better Hell Lord.' Meghan's boss, Lucifer, values elegant contracts over mindless torture. He's much better than the other sadists down there. And in ten years, you're not necessarily doomed."
John blew a stray bit of drywall dust off his sleeve. "When the ten years are up, just kill the Hellhound that comes to collect the debt. Problem solved."
Tony's blank expression indicated he was not comforted in the slightest by this occult legal loophole.
'Am I really destined for the Pit?' Tony thought, a cold weight settling deep in his chest.
Thinking of the catastrophic loss of innocent life caused by the Stark Stark weapons that had flooded the black market for years, he found himself entirely unable to verbally refute the magician's claim. His expression merely grew extremely heavy.
"Alright, let's move on to the actual meat of the intel Wade and I fished out," Constantine said, his tone turning sharp. "The lesser devils currently flooding into the tri-state area under Mephisto's banner aren't just looking to cause random chaos. They are actively hunting for an ancient, missing contract."
"What contract?" Natasha asked, leaning forward.
"The Covenant of San Venganza."
After dropping the name, Constantine closed his mouth, picking at his fingernails. The remaining Avengers present in the room exchanged blank, confused glances.
"That's it?" Clint asked. "Just a name?"
"It's more than enough," Tony Stark said.
While the others were still hesitating and observing, Tony had already taken direct action. He swiped his fingers across his smart-glasses, projecting a dense array of encrypted files directly onto the center of the conference table.
Displayed across the holographic screens were classified files extracted directly from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s deep-storage intelligence database, all cross-referenced with the keyword: San Venganza.
Natasha and Clint both let out a synchronized, helpless sigh.
Hacking into the most secure servers of S.H.I.E.L.D. had officially become second nature to Tony Stark. Since things had already come to this, there was no point in reprimanding him. They all leaned forward to examine the heavily redacted historical materials.
"Ghost Rider?" Dr. Banner asked, squinting at an old, grainy photograph of a scorched motorcycle trail. "Really? This intelligence seems to be from decades ago. I... I had always thought that supernatural incidents only started erupting globally in recent years."
According to the old files, decades prior, there had been a terrifying, myth-like vigilante operating in the American Southwest known as the Ghost Rider. The S.H.I.E.L.D. logs clearly stated that every single victim left in the Rider's wake was a heavily guilty criminal.
"The files say his methods were purely psychological," Bruce noted, reading a coroner's report. "The criminals all seemed to have been literally scared to death. Heart failure from extreme terror."
"They weren't scared to death, Doc," Constantine interjected, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. "It was the soul. Every single human that monster laid his eyes on... their souls were completely, permanently vaporized into ash. That's the Penance Stare."
Having dealt with the denizens of the Pit for his entire adult life, John recognized the distinct, hollow state of the victims' remains at a single glance.
"So the Covenant of San Venganza is directly related to the Ghost Rider?" Natasha asked, trying to steer the chaotic pieces of the puzzle into a coherent tactical picture.
S.H.I.E.L.D.'s ancient database did not possess detailed text regarding the actual contents of the San Venganza contract, only a single, vague note stating that the historical Ghost Rider had been the last entity to have direct contact with the artifact before vanishing from the grid.
"The only living soul who knows where that contract is buried is the Rider himself," Tony Stark stated firmly, closing the holographic projections with a sharp twist of his wrist. "Our objective is clear. We have to find him before Mephisto's vanguard does."
There weren't many clues left to follow; continuing to debate the semantics in a sterile conference room was entirely futile. As long as they could track down this legendary, former Ghost Rider, the mystery of the Covenant would solve itself.
"But Tony, we have a massive logistical problem," Hawkeye quickly spoke up, interrupting Tony's movement as the billionaire stood up to head back to the jet. "There have been dozens of localized supernatural incidents breaking out across Los Angeles over the last forty-eight hours. The local police are completely overwhelmed."
The current tactical situation on the West Coast was not optimistic. Ever since the spatial cracks had formed from the aftershocks of the Washington battle, lesser demons had been consistently slipping through the breach. This was an active emergency that the Avengers, under congressional mandate, were legally obligated to handle.
"But unfortunately," Clint added, looking highly uncomfortable, "our team has absolutely zero training or tactical experience when it comes to fighting literal demons from Hell."
At that exact statement, every single gaze in the secure room slowly, smoothly turned to look at the dust-covered man in the dirty trench coat.
John Constantine slowly looked up, a cigarette dangling loosely from his lips.
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