Natasha Romanoff didn't leap from the skyscraper out of a desire for death; she leaped because the distance between her and the King of Jotunheim was closing, and the vertical drop was her only tactical advantage.
Mid-air, she unfurled her tactical gliders.
It was a contingency she had insisted upon during her years with the Red Room and later SHIELD. Survival for an agent of her caliber wasn't a matter of luck; it was a matter of redundant systems. But even the best equipment had its limits.
The Chitauri occupying the surrounding rooftops weren't blind. They saw the lone human gliding through the ash-choked sky and opened fire. A stray bolt of plasma caught her in the side.
Natasha screamed as the thermal energy seared through her tactical suit and into her abdomen. Her gliders shredded, and she began to tumble like a bird with a broken wing. Only a last-second deployment of her grappling wire saved her from becoming a smear on the pavement. She swung violently, smashing through a glass facade three stories down and skidding across an office floor.
She lay there for a moment, the world spinning. The air tasted like copper. The plasma bolt had cooked the edge of her lung; every breath was a jagged shard of glass in her chest.
"Dammit," she hissed, fumbling for a coagulant spray. She sealed the wound with a hiss of chemical foam, but the damage was done. A lung injury on a high-intensity battlefield was a slow-motion execution.
"This is Romanoff," she wheezed into her comms. "I have the Casket. Requesting immediate extraction. The aliens are closing in. Repeat: I have the artifact!"
A shadow flickered. Natasha rolled, drawing her widow-makers and firing three shots into the skull of a Chitauri scout creeping through the cubicles. She couldn't stay here. She clutched the Casket—heavy, cold, and humming with a malevolent vibration—and forced herself back into the stairwell.
Once, Natasha had viewed the concept of "saving humanity" as a hollow slogan used by politicians to justify their budgets. She was a ghost of the Cold War, a woman who lived in the gray spaces between regimes. But as she ran, her lungs burning with the sensation of boiling oil, she realized the truth of Emrys' words.
She wasn't running for a government. She wasn't running for Fury. She was running because she had seen Steve Rogers—a man who had every reason to live—choose to be torn apart just to give her ten seconds of lead time.
It has to be worth it, she thought, her legs feeling like leaden weights. If his death isn't the cornerstone of something, then none of us matter.
She broke through a line of Chitauri infantry using a combination of shock-batons and desperate, close-quarters combat. She was moving with a grace that defied her injuries, her will overriding the protests of her dying nervous system.
But as she reached the rooftop of an adjacent building to jump the gap, the air suddenly turned into a solid wall of ice.
Her feet froze to the concrete instantly.
A shadow fell over her. Laufey, his face twisted in a mask of genocidal rage, stepped out from the frost-mist. "Run then, little thief," he rasped, his voice like grinding glaciers. "Show me where else there is to hide in this dying city."
He didn't wait for an answer. He conjured a spear of jagged black ice and hurled it with the strength of a titan.
SPLAT.
The spear punched through Natasha's shoulder, the force of the blow carrying her backward until she was pinned to a structural pillar. She gasped, blood bubbling at her lips, her vision flickering at the edges.
"I'm sorry, Steve," she whispered, her hands still reflexively clutching the Casket. "I... I couldn't hold the line."
Laufey approached, his footsteps heavy and final. He saw the defiance in her bloodshot eyes and sneered. "You think your death buys them time? It buys them nothing but a cold grave. Even Odin cannot stop the winter I bring."
He raised his hand to reclaim the Casket, but before his fingers could touch the metal, he froze. Not from his own power, but from a sudden, overwhelming pressure in the air—the scent of ozone and the heavy, rhythmic thrum of powerful engines.
BOOM!
The reinforced concrete wall to the left of the pillar disintegrated as if struck by a demolition charge. A massive, charcoal-black figure burst through the dust at a speed that shouldn't have been possible for a being of that size.
Olsen, Brother-Captain of the Black Watch, didn't use a weapon. He hit Laufey with his shoulder, a tactical charge that sent the five-meter-tall King flying through two internal walls like a discarded toy.
Natasha slumped against the ice spear, a weak smile touching her lips. "About time..."
Olsen stood in the center of the roof, his power armor—the color of a moonless night—slicked with the gore of a dozen Chitauri he had killed on the way up. Behind him, four more silhouettes plummeted from the sky. They didn't use gliders or parachutes; they dropped from a hovering gunship a hundred meters up, hitting the rooftop with the force of meteors, their ceramic plates absorbing the shock of the landing.
Laufey scrambled out of the rubble, his crown of ice shattered, staring at the five giants who had surrounded him. For the first time in his immortal life, the King of the Frost Giants felt the temperature in the room drop—not from his magic, but from the cold, predatory intent of the First Legion.
"Target identified," Olsen's voice boomed through his helmet's vox-grille, mechanical and devoid of mercy. "Exterminate the heretic."
Laufey looked at the glowing red lenses of the Dark Angels and realized a terrifying truth: he was no longer the hunter. He was the prey.