[S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier – Fury's Office, Somewhere Above the Clouds]
The helicarrier moved above the cloud line in the smooth, continuous way. Through the wide window behind Fury's desk, the tops of the clouds sat white and undisturbed below them, the sky above it a clean, deep blue that had nothing to say.
It was a view that communicated, without subtlety, that the business conducted here was above the level of the world below.
Nick Fury sat at his desk and read the report in his hands was the latest update from Romanoff and Barton, transmitted two hours ago from their current position in the field. He had read it twice already.
Maria Hill stood on his left. Phil Coulson stood on his right. Neither of them spoke until he was done.
"Two weeks out and they're close," he said.
Fury lifted the report page and read aloud without particular inflection. There was another network operating on the global stage. Highly organized, completely invisible to conventional surveillance, and systematically targeting the corrupt and the wealthy across multiple jurisdictions.
The assassinations were clean, purposeful, and escalating in frequency. Romanoff and Barton had been tracking the pattern for two weeks and their latest update indicated they were close to identifying the people behind it.
He looked at Hill. "Romanoff and Barton are close. They're almost at the source." He leaned back. "When they have something concrete, I want backup ready to move on short notice. Not after. On short notice."
"Yes, sir," Hill said.
Coulson cleared his throat slightly. "On the matter of the Tesseract. Dr. Selvig's addition to the programme has accelerated things considerably. Current projections put meaningful results somewhere inside the next two years, with the potential for mass production of advanced weapons-grade applications shortly after."
Fury absorbed this with a nod. "Good."
He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands. "Aeon Biotech."
Neither Hill nor Coulson moved, but something in the quality of their attention sharpened.
"Most influential civilian power on this planet right now," Fury said, his voice carrying the flat, objective quality he used when he was not editorialising. "Took Oscorp apart in no time at all. Absorbed it. Rebranded the whole operation as Aeon Industries."
He looked down at the summary sheet. "Immune-Plus protocol, Regeneration Cradle, Mutant Stabiliser Serum, Bio fertiliser. With only four products and they are currently dictating the direction of multiple global markets."
He looked up. "Keep eyes on them. Closer than we have been."
"Understood, Sir," Hill said.
A beat of quiet settled over the office.
Fury looked at both of them. "You have something to ask," he said. "Both of you. You've had it since you walked in here. Get it out."
Hill and Coulson exchanged a brief glance.
Coulson went first. "Sir," he said, choosing his words with care. "I apologise if this oversteps. But why didn't we attend Ethan Carter's wedding? We all received invitations. With respect. Carter has helped this organisation on multiple occasions. The Hydra incident. The tip regarding Captain Rogers, with the Mr. Sinister situation. The incident in Mexico involving Thor."
He paused. "You declined all of our attendance, including Sharon Carter." He held his ground. "We're asking why. Maintaining a positive relationship with someone at his level of capability seems straightforward."
Fury did not respond immediately. He turned his single eye to Hill.
"And you?" he said.
Hill's jaw set slightly. "Two questions, Sir. First, whether using the Tesseract as the primary development platform for offensive weaponry is the right call, given who else might eventually notice what we are building with it."
A brief pause later. "Second, Sharon Carter. You sent her specifically to locate the Black Priestess. To negotiate." She kept her voice neutral and professional. "The Black Priestess killed a significant number of people several years ago. A massacre by any measure. And Ethan Carter is Sharon's cousin. They are related by blood. Even if he has shown no strong reaction to her activities, sending his cousin to approach her carries a level of risk that I think warrants discussion."
Fury was quiet for long enough that the cloud view behind him filled the silence.
Then he leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk.
"Let me be clear on one thing first," he said. "I trust Carter. What he has done for this organization and for this planet is not something I take lightly or without gratitude. That is not the issue."
He stood from the desk and moved toward the window. The cloud line sat below them, unbroken and white.
"The issue," he said, "is that Ethan Carter is not someone you simply walk up to and call a friend because you exchanged favours a few times. I have had a full read done on him. Not threat assessment but full read."
He turned slightly. "That man can dismantle a significant percentage of the life on this planet in minutes if he decides to. I'm not being hypothetical, but rather practical. The power set alone puts him in a category where the word friendship doesn't cover what a relationship with him actually requires."
Hill and Coulson were still.
"We have had this conversation before," Fury continued. "The question of how you read a person like that. Someone who is not an enemy, who has shown nothing but good intentions, and who could end everything we are trying to protect in the time it takes us to realise it is happening."
He looked at them both. "We need a contingency. Not because I think he will go rogue. But because the job of this organisation is to have a contingency for everything that could threaten this planet, and Carter is powerful enough to qualify whether he intends harm or not."
Besides, intelligence from those present at Ethan's wedding confirmed sorcerers and high-level global influencers in attendance—and the guest list alone was enough to keep him up all night.
"His alliances alone," Fury said, "X-Men, Frost Industries, half a dozen other networks we're still mapping."
Neither of them spoke.
"If we go to him as friends while we are building contingencies against him," Fury said, "he knows the moment we're in the same room. He is a telepath. More capable than Xavier by a margin we are still trying to measure properly. The blocking chips we developed don't work against him. We already tested that. And if he learns about our plan to move against him in any way, it will turn him against us. That's a far worse position than simply being honest about where we stand and keeping our distance. So yes, we sit this out until our position is better than it currently is."
He turned back to the window. "We are not avoiding him because we don't trust him. We are avoiding a conversation we are not equipped to have honestly yet."
"As for the Tesseract, the weapons development is not about Carter specifically. Thor was real. What happened in Mexico confirmed that the mythological world is not mythological. Zeus, Odin, creatures and forces that humanity has no frame of reference for handling, those are real possibilities now. Humanity cannot spend the rest of its existence relying on a single individual, however powerful, to stand between it and whatever walks through the next door. Humanity needs its own teeth." He glanced back at them. "That is not negotiable."
His voice was even. "We build what we can build. That is the job."
He looked at Hill directly. "As for Sharon and the Black Priestess. I sent Sharon on that assignment deliberately and with purpose. I will address it at the right time." A pause. "Trust me the way you always have. Both of you. That is what I'm asking."
Hill and Coulson nodded.
Fury held their gaze for a moment, then made a small, dismissive gesture with one hand. They understood it and left without further discussion, the door closing quietly behind them.
The office was empty.
Fury turned back to the window. The clouds moved below in their slow and indifferent way, the world continuing its business beneath them. He stared at the grey-white expanse and let the silence of the room close around him.
'I just hope,' he thought, 'that everything works out the way it needs to.'
The light in the office shifted slightly, catching the glass of the window at a particular angle.
He looked at his own reflection in the cold glass of the window.
The face that looked back at him was not his.
In the surface of the transparent pane, where Nick Fury's reflection should have been, something else looked back. Green-skinned, ridge-faced, with features that carried the unmistakable flatness of something shaped for an entirely different world.
It looked back at him for exactly as long as he chose to let it.
Then Fury turned away from the window, and the reflection was his own again.
...
[Hell Dimension of Mephisto – Day Ten]
The dimension stank of scorched stone and old blood.
Corpses of demons lay scattered across every surface that could be called a floor, piled against the jagged outcroppings of rock, slumped over the ruins of structures that had once been something before a war had moved through them.
The sky above, if it could be called a sky, churned in deep, bruised shades of red and black, lit from below by the fires that never went out in this place.
And above all of it, two figures moved.
Diana Prince cut through the smoke-thick air like something the dimension had not been designed to contain.
The God Slayer Armour covered her from shoulder to boot, its dark metal catching the hellfire light in sharp, clean lines, the craftsmanship of it precise and deliberate in a way that no demonic forge in any hell dimension had ever managed to match.
It moved with her completely, responsive to every shift of her body, as though it had been built not around her measurements but around her will.
The Divine Reaver blazed in her right hand, its edge carrying a sharpness that had nothing to do with simple metallurgy. It cut through matter, through magic, through the specific dense substance of spells woven in this dimension as easily as it cut through air.
On her left arm, the Aegis of Dawn sat steady and immovable, its surface holding the Full Counter enchantment Ethan had installed personally before he left, a spell that read incoming magical attacks and returned them to their source with precise, unforgiving force.
Across from her, Mephista moved with the coiled fury of someone who had been throwing everything she had at a wall for hours and had begun to genuinely consider that the wall might not have an upper limit.
She was the daughter of Mephisto, born of a dimension that understood power in its most raw and unsubtle forms. Her magic was considerable and her rage was considerable but neither had been enough.
She hurled a wave of hellfire that expanded outward in a concussive arc, the kind of attack that flattened demon battalions without requiring a second thought.
Diana angled her body slightly to the left and the Aegis of Dawn came up in the same motion. The Full Counter activated without a sound. The hellfire folded back on itself and returned to its origin at twice its original velocity.
Mephista moved sideways and the backwash scorched the stone beside her. Her teeth pressed together.
She tried a binding spell next, a lattice of dark energy that wove itself through the air toward Diana in a pattern designed to saturate and hold rather than strike directly.
Diana read it in the half second before it arrived. The Divine Reaver came through in a clean, diagonal sweep and the lattice split apart, its component threads unravelling into nothing the moment the blade passed through them.
'That sword,' Mephista thought, fury threading through every layer of the thought, 'cuts through magic as though it were made of paper.'
She pulled back and circled, buying herself a breath, and used it to send a targeted disintegration hex at Diana's left pauldron.
The kind of hex that dissolved the bonds between materials at the molecular level. She had used it to unmake constructs that had been considered indestructible.
The armour did not respond. The hex struck the surface and simply stopped existing, absorbed or rejected in the same instant, and the pauldron sat exactly as it had before.
Mephista stared at it in disbelief.
Earlier in the fight, she had managed to knock the Aegis of Dawn from Diana's arm entirely. She had seen it fall and had moved to press the opening.
The shield had returned to Diana's arm on its own before Mephista reached her, moving through the air with absolute purpose, snapping back into place as though it had never left. She had tried twice more after that. The result was identical both times.
The armour could not be damaged. The weapons returned to their wielder regardless of how they were separated. And the woman inside them moved and fought with the instincts of someone who had been trained in warfare since she was born.
Mephista cursed Diana loudly and sent a fresh wave of attacks, increasing the rate and intensity of them, layering spell after spell with the furious logic of someone who refused to accept a ceiling.
'My father is not here,' Mephista thought, and the frustration of it pressed against the inside of her skull like a headache. 'He is not here when this Demigod wages war against us.'
The bitterness of it sharpened into something more pointed. 'I was not here when the Hellbreaker, Aeon, came and humiliated him in his own dimension. And he is not here now when this worthless Demigod who relies entirely on her fancy gifted weapons is outpowering everything we send against her.'
She thought of Aeon's visit and the state her father had returned from it in, and then she looked at what was currently left of this dimension.
One Demigod in borrowed technology had nearly destroyed the entire demon hell. She was a threat of a magnitude that Mephista had not fully estimated before the fighting began, and acknowledging that honestly was the only thing keeping her alive in this exchange.
'How ironic,' she thought, dodging another strike from the Divine Reaver by a margin that was becoming less comfortable with every exchange. 'He came in raw power but she came in fancy weapons. And somehow this is worse.'
Diana moved through the increased assault like water around stones.
A dodge here, a shield raise there, the blade sweeping through anything that came too close to be simply avoided.
Her battle sense was not the instinctive reaction of a trained fighter alone. It read the dimension around her, tracked intentions before they became movements, processed multiple incoming threats in the same instant. Fighting her was like fighting someone who had already seen the next three moves of every sequence Mephista tried.
Diana's voice cut through the noise of the exchange, clear and direct. "This ends when you call back every demon you have sent to Earth. Every single one of them. That is the only condition I am offering."
Mephista answered with a scream of concentrated dark energy but Diana cut through it.