Chapter 163: Astartes: We Will Set the Sky on Fire and Grind These Aliens Into Nothing.
New York and the surrounding cities had become something that couldn't be described as a city anymore.
Dozens of Leviathans moved through the streets. They didn't need to make an effort to destroy things. A glancing pass against a building facade was enough to bring the exterior wall down.
The shadow of them blocked out the sky.
Through the portal, the Chitauri infantry came in the way insects swarm: dense, continuous, filling every available space.
Fear took hold in the city and spread the way things spread when there's nothing stopping them.
One moment the city had been alive and functional. The next, without any warning, the end of the world had arrived.
A cab driver stepped out of his vehicle, looked up at the things moving through the air above him, and his sunglasses came off in his hand without him deciding to remove them.
"God... what are we... what are we even looking at?!"
Screaming. Weapons fire. The shriek of alien craft cutting through the air. All of it at once and constant.
The air itself felt like despair made physical.
The butterfly effect had accelerated the timeline. The portal over New York opened before the Avengers had finished clearing the Helicarrier. There had been no warning and no gap to prepare.
Inside the Vought building.
Homelander stood at the window, watching the city burn below him.
The conference room display came on. Ikorela's face appeared on the screen.
Before she could say anything, Homelander spoke. "You're going to tell me this is an opportunity to build our reputation."
"Isn't it?"
"Obviously it is. A once-in-a-lifetime chance, which is why I already deployed the Seven before your directive came through."
"Then why are you still here?" Ikorela looked at him through the screen.
Homelander tilted his head slightly, straightened the glove at his wrist, and let the smile he was known for appear. "The lead doesn't come on until the finale. Isn't that how it works?"
He looked down at the war spreading through the streets below, then punched through the glass exterior wall and was gone.
In an instant he broke the sound barrier.
He swept his laser vision through the Chitauri swarming in the air above the streets. A red arc across the sky.
The Chitauri soldiers dropped by the dozens, hitting the streets below like a chain of falling objects.
The people watching from below felt something change.
"It's Homelander! We're going to make it!"
"Homelander! Homelander!!"
"Homelander, please, my child is trapped under the rubble!"
"Kill them all!"
The calls rising from the wreckage fed something in him. He let himself stand in the middle of the burning sky with his arms out, drinking it in.
This. This was what it was supposed to be.
The world calling his name. Him as the answer.
He drove through a Chitauri skimmer, stood above the ruined frame with the city spread out beneath him, and held that position.
It lasted about thirty seconds before the sky around him filled with craft.
Hundreds of them had come through the portal. They surrounded him, targeting systems locking on, and opened fire.
Homelander's individual combat capability was genuine. There was no question about that.
But this was not a performance space. It was a battlefield.
His opponents were not ordinary people with standard firearms. They were alien soldiers with enhanced physical capability and energy weapons, every one of them with individual air mobility, and they had numbers.
He got careless.
The energy fire from that many simultaneous sources hit him from every direction at once. It didn't put him down, but it drove him backward through the air, armor scorching, and for a moment he was simply somewhere he could not control.
The people watching from the street saw it happen.
"It's over..."
"Even Homelander can't handle them. Who else is there?"
"We're going to die. We're all going to die."
"Is this really how the world ends?"
And then, cutting through the artillery noise across every street in the city at once, the public broadcast system in the Umbrella building came to life.
The sound stopped the chaos for a moment. Just a moment.
[Citizens of New York: there is no need to panic. Locate the nearest shelter and move to it calmly. If you are in danger, Umbrella Corporation is here.]
[Umbrella Corporation will be the last dome over humanity. The shield that does not fall. We will protect every single person.]
[Faced with this provocation from those who have come from the stars to threaten human life, we have one answer. We fight back. We fight back. We fight back.]
[To teach these invaders what pain means, we are deploying humanity's blade of judgment. The Astartes Legion.]
[We will set the cosmos alight. We will burn the sky. In the name of humanity: we will grind these arrogant aliens into nothing.]
The broadcast rolled through every corner of the city like a wave of sound.
People looked up at the Umbrella building.
Thirty thousand feet above the cloud layer, dozens of military transport aircraft broke through the upper atmosphere.
The heavy cargo doors of the transports opened against the howling wind.
Below, the storm clouds had swallowed the city completely.
Up here, the sky was clear.
Sunlight came through the gap in each opening door and fell across the Astartes assembled inside.
The gold light hit the thick faceplates of their helmets and produced no warmth. It made those expressionless faces look colder and more remote than before, with something that might almost have been called sacred.
"Attention. First Strike Group has reached designated drop coordinates."
"Initiating deployment."
The mechanical voice cut through the wind inside the cabin.
The cold white lighting in the cabin went out the moment the words ended. In its place: a deep, almost viscous dark red that filled the space like something solid.
Every Astartes stood up.
No hesitation. No fear.
Through their helmet lenses, they looked at each other.
Two of them at the rear of the transport took two steps and jumped.
The rest followed, moving toward the door without slowing.
The instant the first one cleared the aircraft, the red beacon on his shoulder detonated silently, and he became a burning streak tearing through the storm clouds below.
Behind him, dozens of the same streaks ignited simultaneously.
For a moment they were meteorites.
The red trails were alive in the way fire is alive, consuming every layer of cloud they passed through.
In an instant.
Those trails set the entire sky on fire. The world had one color: burning, boiling, the red that belongs to war.
And in that burning sky, the streaks tore through the clouds, broke apart the rolling lightning, and fell in silence toward the ground below.
They had one target.
To crush the aliens who had come here thinking they owned everything they could reach.
"Attention. Astartes Unit Zero, landing imminent."
"Attention. Astartes Unit One, landing imminent."
"Attention. Astartes Unit Three, landing imminent."
The automated announcements came one after another across the city's airspace.
Inside the buildings where civilians had taken shelter, people heard the announcements and looked up toward the sky with the last of what they had left.
Through the rolling storm clouds, hundreds of red streaks were falling.
People pulled out their phones, zooming in, trying to understand what they were seeing.
"Those are... people?!"
"They have to be Umbrella's forces."
"Those are the Astartes?! We might actually survive this!"
Hundreds of Astartes came down at landing points across the city.
The moment they hit the ground, targets were locked.
At the same moment, the Chitauri army saw what had just landed among them.
One Chitauri soldier pulled off its face covering and screamed at the nearest Astartes.
A bolt round left the barrel in the same instant.
The soldier that had been screaming became a spray of purple across the street. The heat from the bolt vaporized most of it before it reached the ground.
The Chitauri infantry around it stopped for a fraction of a second.
The mist was still spreading when the Astartes stepped into it.
Through the visor.
The targeting system marked each remaining Chitauri soldier individually in the display. These were not independent lives. They were coordinates that needed to be cleared. Signals that needed to be extinguished by hand.
The Chitauri ground formation closed.
They were fast. Two seconds to complete the encirclement, establishing overlapping fields of fire covering both ground level and the air above.
This formation had broken resistance on dozens of worlds. Against every opponent they had ever faced, it had worked.
"Fire!"
Hundreds of blue energy beams discharged simultaneously.
Not dozens. Hundreds.
The Chitauri's calculation was straightforward: one coordinated volley to remove the high-threat target, then continue with the rest of the population.
They had miscalculated how capable the target was, and how well the target worked with others.
The energy barrage covered the position completely.
While the Chitauri held the trigger, a second Astartes burst from a building on their flank.
He jumped.
The thruster module under his feet carried him up the equivalent of a fifteen-story building in a single movement, and he hit the Chitauri air formation from below, scattering it.
Before he came down, both hands had closed around two Chitauri skimmers. He brought them down like thrown shells onto the ground formation below.
The Astartes under the barrage meanwhile was not standing still.
He looked up at the energy beams coming in.
Inside his armor, a mechanical voice activated.
[Military-grade Stanavistin: engaged.]
The road under his feet cracked.
He was gone.
The Chitauri soldiers tracking him saw an iron-grey blur disappear from the center of their fire pattern, leaving a crater of powdered concrete and a fading afterimage.
The afterimage moved through the web of energy beams in a trajectory that ignored everything inertia required. No deceleration. No pause.
Inside the containment, then outside it, moving into the Chitauri formation before any of them had processed the transition.
A knee strike under powered armor.
The Chitauri soldier's chest collapsed. The armor it was wearing shattered with it. The upper body absorbed the kinetic output and ceased to function as an upper body. Purple blood and organ matter distributed across the immediate area.
Before any of it reached the soldiers beside him, the Astartes had turned and drawn the chainsword from the side of the power pack.
Under Stanavistin, he was moving faster than the chainsword's ignition sequence. The weapon connected before the teeth had finished spinning up. The nearest soldier's neck bent under the impact in a direction necks don't go. The head went somewhere it wasn't supposed to go.
Then the teeth engaged.
A horizontal sweep at shoulder height.
No technique. No complexity. Pure mass and velocity in a single stroke.
Three Chitauri soldiers were cut across the same horizontal plane simultaneously. Their upper halves stayed in the air for a moment through momentum. Their lower halves sat down.
Before those halves had finished falling, the chainsword came down vertically on another soldier: entry at the crown of the helmet, through the helmet, through what was under it, sparks from the metal, a spray of purple, and the saw teeth divided the body from the top down with the thoroughness of something built specifically for this.
The two halves separated left and right, knocked over the soldiers behind it who had been lining up shots.
Above the street, the Astartes who had entered the air formation had started working through it in earnest. The two skimmers he'd brought down exploded in the center of the ground formation, dismantling what the first pass had left intact.
The remaining air units moved to respond.
They were slower than they thought.
The bolt gun came out.
Four shots. Each one found a craft.
The sky had fewer things in it than it had a moment before.
Elsewhere in the city. An office building full of civilians.
The building was surrounded. Chitauri skimmers circling above, infantry below, herding everyone toward the upper floors.
Their logic: dispersed groups were slow to process. Collected groups were easier.
From the far end of the stairwell, a Chitauri soldier made a sound at the evacuating civilians. A dozen people ran faster.
The person at the front of the group reached for the fire door ahead and found it was already open.
Not opened. Torn off.
A Astartes was coming down the stairs from above. Behind him, through the gap, the scattered components of Chitauri soldiers were visible on the floor.
He looked down at the man in front of him, who was shaking in a way that made standing difficult. Without speaking, he picked up a security shotgun from the floor and put it in the man's hands.
"The second exit route has been cleared."
"Take the stairs on the other side. There are personnel at the ground-level exit waiting for you."
The voice came through the helmet's filter. Low, rough, metallic, like a machine.
That machine voice was the first thing in an hour that let the people in that corridor believe they were going to survive.
They helped each other past him.
The smell of blood was everywhere.
A boy, somewhere around seven or eight years old, stopped when he reached the Astartes.
He didn't follow his mother.
He looked up.
He was not tall enough to reach the knee armor.
But he stretched his neck back as far as it would go, looking up along the grey-iron powered armor all the way to the face.
Their eyes met.
There was no fear in the boy's face. What was there was something purer than that: the specific kind of awe that comes before understanding has complicated it.
In the framework a child that age carries, the enormous armored thing in front of him was not a weapon and not a monster. It was an angel. One that God had sent.
Different from the ones in books and films. Taller. Stronger.
The boy's lips moved.
"Are you an angel? Did God send you to save us?"
His voice was quiet but clear.
His mother reached for him, terrified of what the armored figure dripping with blood might do with the question.
The Astartes's helmet moved down slightly.
The cold light in the visor stayed on the small face for a moment.
"There has never been a God in this world."
"But we are angels. A fighting angel that belongs to humanity."
He raised the hand that still had purple blood on the fingers and used one fingertip to push the boy gently toward his mother.
Very gently. Impossibly gently for what that hand had just been doing.
The footsteps on the stairs faded and were gone.
The Astartes looked down the corridor at a Chitauri soldier still trying to call for reinforcements. He drew the chainsword slowly.
The Chitauri saw the weapon come out and ended the call.
Its arm swung.
An energy grenade traced an arc through the corridor air directly toward the Astartes's chest. The blue-white sphere got brighter as it came, the light intensifying, the detonation building inside it.
The Astartes did not step aside.
His chainsword hand didn't come up.
His other hand came up instead.
The armored palm opened, fingers slightly bent.
No hesitation.
The grenade dropped into it.
Then it went off.
Light through every gap between his fingers. Blue-white fire working at the material of the hand armor, beginning to melt through it. The force that should have leveled everything within thirty feet was contained in the space of one closed fist, compressed into a fraction of the volume it was designed to fill.
Five seconds.
The light went out.
His hand opened.
The fragments of the grenade fell from his palm. A thread of smoke rose from the center.
He looked at the Chitauri soldier, who had resumed calling for backup.
The chainsword probably wasn't necessary.
He kicked off the floor. A piece of concrete the size of a human head broke free under his boot, and he sent it at the Chitauri soldier the way you might kick a ball.
What was left of the soldier did not require follow-up.
He swept a look down the corridor.
He was about to leave the building when the sound of craft outside cut past the wall.
Then the wall came in.
Chitauri infantry through the breach, weapons up, targeting him in an instant.
"Fire!"
"Kill it!"
The energy beams came in a solid wall.
The Astartes didn't dodge. He didn't look for cover. He didn't activate Stanavistin.
He walked straight into it.
The beams turned the outer layer of the power armor red-hot in places, threatening to begin melting it.
He didn't slow down.
The energy fire that would have reduced a human being to nothing felt approximately like light rain.
He walked through the rain, through the fire line, into the middle of the Chitauri formation.
The chainsword swept horizontal.
The leading Chitauri soldier was separated from itself at high speed. Purple across both walls. The sound it might have made didn't get started.
The one behind it tried to step back.
A hand found its head before it could. He used the wall the way you use a hard surface against a walnut.
The sound was brief.
The others understood the situation and tried to reach their craft.
He pulled the bolt gun.
The craft and the soldiers who reached them went down together.
In under five seconds, the engagement was over.
He stowed the chainsword and the bolt gun.
The locking mechanism engaged.
That sound, clean and specific in the now-silent corridor.
The air settled.
Distant weapons fire from the street outside. The fluorescent lights overhead flickering from inconsistent current.
He stood still in the intermittent light.
Then, without any signal:
His right fist drove into the blood-soaked wall beside him.
The wall came apart.
Behind it: a Chitauri soldier that had been positioned for an ambush. Its skull was compressed through the wall.
Outside, the battlefield had become something that wasn't a battlefield in any traditional sense.
No tactical positioning. No fire superiority calculation. Just one-sided, absolute slaughter.
Some of the Astartes units in the streets had stopped using weapons entirely.
The powered armor and their own bodies were enough. They became mobile processing facilities.
Iron grip on a Chitauri soldier's skull and shoulder simultaneously.
Both arms pulled outward.
The sound that followed was fabric tearing.
The body divided into two.
Purple blood covered the Astartes who had done it, turning the grey-iron of the armor into purple-black.
He discarded both halves. Two pieces of old cloth.
Chitauri aerial superiority, the thing they had relied on across dozens of invaded worlds, had stopped meaning anything.
The current generation of Astartes powered armor included thruster modules that gave jump height of up to a hundred meters. Beyond that, Matthew had equipped every Astartes with a custom Goblin Glider that could be called to their position remotely on demand.
The Astartes Legion had collectively decided the Goblin Gliders were too undignified to deploy.
Even when the Chitauri had an altitude advantage over them.
They jumped instead.
A real engagement, the way real soldiers fight it: close range, bodies, no distance, no compromise.