After watching the video in full, Tony directly called Fury.
"Nick," Tony said without preamble, his voice carrying unusual hesitation. "Are you sure about releasing this? Do you understand what will happen once it goes public? There will be chaos. Unpredictable chaos. The kind that burns cities down."
"Tony." Fury's voice was flat, exhausted. "The Earth will be destroyed in one week. What exactly do you think is going to happen anyway?"
A pause.
"If we don't give people some kind of hope," Fury continued, "then forget about saving humanity—we might not have anything resembling a functioning civilization left before that week is even up. People need something to hold onto or everything collapses right now."
Tony considered this for approximately three seconds.
While every single person on the planet was completely certain they were going to die in seven days, what law would hold? What social contract would survive? Why would anyone go to work, follow rules, respect other people's property or lives?
Society was held together by the collective belief in tomorrow. Remove that tomorrow with a week's notice and you removed the glue.
"Yeah," Tony said quietly. "Okay."
He didn't hesitate further. He directly authorized the broadcast, sending Natasha's stolen footage to every distribution channel JARVIS could access simultaneously.
The Global Internet - Minutes Later
While the whole world was already in various states of chaos—some people praying, some looting, some simply sitting in stunned silence staring at walls—the video suddenly spread throughout every device on the planet with the speed of wildfire.
Comments exploded across every platform within minutes:
[What the FUCK is this?]
[Is this real? Or is the government just trying to manipulate us again?]
[It's absolutely real. I verified it independently. There's no signs of digital manipulation, and the footage of the Asgardian queen's matches perfectly with amateur recordings from dozens of different angles of the final battle field video.]
[Okay but what does this even mean? We already lost. One guy talking to their queen doesn't change anything.]
[Are you stupid? Did you not clearly see that the Asgardian queen didn't dare to attack them? She came to NEGOTIATE. She offered terms. She gave them TIME TO DECIDE. She doesn't do that with anyone else.]
[Although I don't understand why Sokovia didn't intervene during the actual battle, at least this proves we have SOME kind of fighting chance.]
[Okay but think about it—if this Elric guy didn't intervene when it mattered, why would he fight for Earth now? Asgard has already completely compromised with him specifically. He has everything he needs to survive this. Why risk all of that for us?]
[Also—you guys might not know this, but Sokovia has been in a brutal civil war for years. Countless people died. And a lot of that was caused directly or indirectly by the major world powers. So why would he risk everything for the people who destroyed his home?]
[So we're screwed then.]
[I mean... honestly? The fact that he didn't destroy Earth himself after gaining that kind of power is probably already the greatest mercy he's shown us.]
[So what do we DO? He's literally our last option here.]
[How should anyone know what to do? Personally I'm driving to Sokovia right now. Maybe if I just show up they'll let me stay with them. One more person, they probably won't mind, right?]
[That's the dumbest plan I've ever heard. I'm also doing it.]
[Same. Convoy forming in Budapest, anyone nearby come join.]
SHIELD Conference Room - One Hour Later
"Here you go," Coulson said, placing a document folder on the table with the careful movements. "This is everything we could find. Compiled primarily from testimonies gathered from people who escaped Sokovia during the civil war."
"There really wasn't much to work with," he admitted, sitting down. "And we obviously couldn't send anyone directly to Sokovia to investigate."
"Fortunately, among the refugee testimonies, we found two people who actually knew this Elric personally."
"One of them, a man named Rick, used to live close to him until relatively recently," Coulson continued. "The other, Ivan, was apparently a childhood friend. We got what we could from both of them."
Fury opened the folder and began reading while Coulson summarized aloud.
"His real name is Victor Werner von Doom," Coulson said. "His family were minor nobility—one of the old Sokovian ducal houses. After the civil war launched into full violence, his entire family was directly killed."
"After that, he took the name Elric," Coulson continued. "Apparently completely abandoned his birth identity. For years he was living what passed for a normal life in a war zone, surviving, keeping his head down, until approximately three years ago when he simply vanished from the city entirely."
"Rick left Sokovia shortly after that due to the intensifying violence, so our information stops there."
"From Ivan, who knew him before age eight, we have limited personality information," Coulson added. "Mild temperament, exceptionally high intelligence—apparently capable of independently working out advanced concepts without formal education. A genuine genius, Ivan described him."
Comparable to Tony Stark in raw intellectual capacity, possibly higher.
Tony, who was sitting across the table, looked up briefly at this assessment.
"Anyway," Coulson finished, "everything else is uncertain. Oh—and the Hulk incident? Our analysis suggests it's likely connected to him. Dr. Bruce Banner was probably taken by Elric."
Fury closed the folder and sat in silence for a moment.
As he'd guessed, Fury thought privately. There was absolutely a reason why Elric, with all that power, had chosen to negotiate a way OUT of Earth rather than fighting to defend it.
He'd had every opportunity to intervene during the battle. Had watched everything unfold from what was presumably a position of complete safety.
And had chosen not to move.
The comments spreading online were right. After everything Sokovia had suffered—after the civil war, the proxy conflicts fought on their soil by powerful nations who didn't care about the casualties—it was actually remarkable that Elric hadn't simply let Earth burn. Or accelerated the process.
How do you convince someone who has every reason to hate you, who has no material need for anything you could offer, and who already has a safe exit negotiated, to risk everything to save the people who destroyed his home?
Fury looked around the table at the assembled faces—Tony, Steve, T'Challa, various intelligence officials—and none of them looked like they had the answer either.
"Money is useless," Tony said, apparently following the same logic chain. "Power is useless. Resources are useless. He has everything already."
"Tony," Fury said. "What do we do? And if you can't figure something out, we need smarter people in this room."
"I'm the smartest person in any room I enter," Tony muttered reflexively, rubbing his face with his one remaining arm—the other was still being rebuilt by nanobots. "But genuinely? I don't know."
"We can't force him," Tony continued. "We can't offer him anything he wants or needs. We can only ask nicely and hope for the best."
He leaned back in his chair. "But if he didn't do it the first time when the stakes were obvious, I don't see why he'd agree just because I politely asked."
"The most desperate moment isn't when you're close to death."
"It's when you can see a way to survive, but you can't reach it. That's when desperation actually peaks."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Then Namor spoke from his position at the end of the table, his expression suggesting he'd been waiting patiently for his turn to contribute.
"Why don't we just attack Sokovia?" he said. "Threaten this Elric directly take action against Asgard or we destroy Sokovia ourselves. Force his hand."
The silence that followed was a different quality entirely.
Every head in the room turned toward Namor with the unified expression of people witnessing something uniquely catastrophic.
"Did living underwater turn your brain into a fish brain?" Tony asked, his voice carrying genuine bewilderment rather than cruelty. "Like literally, I want to understand the thought process that led to that suggestion."
"We have one week before Earth gets destroyed," Steve added flatly. "You want to cut that timeline down to what, twenty minutes?"
"A man who can make the Queen of Asgard back down and compromise," T'Challa said carefully, as if explaining gravity to someone who'd never heard of it, "is not someone you threaten. If you threaten him today, there will be no Earth tomorrow. That's not hyperbole. That's a realistic assessment."
"And more importantly," Fury added, "Asgard has already guaranteed his safety. So threatening Sokovia doesn't give us leverage over him—it just removes the last reason he might have to feel any sympathy toward us."
The room sank back into heavy, desperate silence.
How do you ask for help from someone who has no reason to give it? Fury thought. How do you appeal to someone who's already decided they owe you nothing, and who's right?
He didn't have an answer.
Nobody in the room had an answer.
The door opened.
Natasha stepped in, and the expression on her face was something none of them had seen from her in the entire crisis.
She looked like she'd just found water in the desert.
"Boss," she said, and her voice carried something that felt almost physically warm after the cold despair of the last hour. "Good news. Absolute good news."
Every head in the room snapped toward her.
"Sokovia has agreed to attend tomorrow's world conference," Natasha said.
The silence that followed this announcement was completely different from all the silences that had come before it.
This one felt like the first breath after nearly drowning.