This isn't personal...
Watching from a distance, Daisy's mind went to something Crossbones had once said. Ordinary lives were so fragile. All she could do was make sure this ended here.
Both the Hulk and Blonsky were constantly pressing force into the ground—every punch, every landing, every launch. That force accumulated in the earth beneath them, and it was exactly what Daisy needed.
Virginia's geology was already vulnerable. The lithosphere here was thin—barely 20 miles (32 km) to the asthenosphere in places, and the ongoing battle had been eroding even that margin. She reached downward with her power, threading her vibration waves through the rock. Less than 2 miles (3 km) down, she found superheated magma.
Left alone, it would eventually breach on its own through the weakest points. She wasn't going to wait for that.
She pressed both hands flat to the ground, gathered the accumulated shockwaves from the battle, redirected them downward into the lithospheric fractures, and aimed the result at Blonsky.
Under approximately 30,000 atmospheres of pressure, the magma responded. It tore through the rock along the path she'd carved and erupted at the surface.
By the time it broke through, most of the 2,370°F (1,300°C) heat had dissipated through the stone. But what arrived at the surface still bent the light above it. And it brought everything with it—the metallic mineral compounds from the mantle, compressed to enormous density, releasing like a hammer directly into Blonsky's chest.
Two ribs of bone armor were already shattered from the Hulk's assault. This hit carried more than just Daisy's power—it carried the accumulated kinetic energy of both giants' entire fight, plus the pressure of the mantle itself.
Three forces converging at once. Blonsky had no answer for it. The magma column caught him from below and sent him straight up—a thousand meters (3,300 ft) into the air.
Natasha had been warned and was already clear. Fury and Coulson had retreated further back. They understood what she'd done—redirected and amplified, more than generated—but that didn't make the result any less staggering. Against the raw forces of the planet, even a green giant and a yellow one looked rather small.
The one person who hadn't gotten the memo was the Hulk himself.
He was still mid-roar when his opponent was launched into the sky.
The pressure surge was spent. What followed it was the secondary eruption—an enormous cascade of lava fragments and half-molten mineral debris raining down across the better part of the city, clattering and hissing against every surface.
None of it came at him directly. The Hulk wasn't particularly bothered by scattered falling debris. The heat where it stuck to his skin was unpleasant, but not a real threat.
What he hadn't anticipated was the scale of the follow-through.
A volcanic vent, once opened, doesn't simply close. The pressurized system below had found its outlet and had no intention of stopping. The magma found the first breach, then a second, then a third and fourth in rapid sequence—each one a new crack in the suddenly very cooperative lithosphere.
The earth shuddered hard. Gouts of flame and lava sprayed into the sky in succession. Chunks of superheated rock and molten mineral cascaded across the ruins of the town in every direction. What had been a battlefield was now, within seconds, a fire-lit hellscape.
From the air, it looked like the end of the world.
"Agent Johnson." Fury's voice came from the aircraft, dry as ever. "You're certain you didn't cause that."
Daisy was floating outside the plane, expression blank.
The simulation fights against Storm had been contained—finite exchanges, clean endings. She hadn't thought through what happened when you triggered a geological process in the real world.
It didn't stop.
"I just redirected things a little," she said. "The seismic activity in this region is probably just... naturally elevated."
She made a private note. That move is strictly for emergencies from now on.
They had a plane. The Hulk didn't. Faced with a city transforming into an active volcanic event, he did the only logical thing and ran south as fast as his legs could carry him.
He was midstride when he almost trampled something.
Seven small dogs, scrambling through the rubble in a desperate attempt at survival. Too small. A few of them had very short legs—legs that, under normal circumstances, struggled with curbs. Navigating a landscape of collapsed buildings and pooling lava with those legs was essentially impossible.
They were running in circles. Several had looped back to where they started, hit dead ends, and now sat in a cluster, crying in high, anxious voices that somehow cut through the noise of a volcanic eruption.
"ROAAAR."
The Hulk—whose core personality was, in the end, that of a child, full of rage and also full of things that weren't rage, none of which humanity had ever seen because humanity kept pointing weapons at him—stopped.
He'd already taken several large strides past them.
He went back.
A large rock fragment was falling directly toward the little tangled heap of dogs. The Hulk didn't think. He launched upward, caught the chunk mid-air, and knocked it clear with one fist.
Then, with enormous and slightly awkward gentleness: four on the broad shelf of his shoulders, one carefully tucked into his hair, two cradled in his arms. He checked that all seven were accounted for. He picked his direction—south, away from the fire—and moved. Carefully. Watching every step.
Somewhere in the rumble of his thoughts, an impression surfaced: Banner's woman. Something about the woman from before. The Hulk glanced down at the bundle in his arms, unimpressed. Dogs are better.
Inside the aircraft, Fury laughed—actually laughed, which was unusual enough to be notable.
Between the emotion modulator and this, S.H.I.E.L.D. now had two reliable options against the Hulk. The pressure that had been sitting on Fury's chest since the green giant appeared eased, very slightly.
"Well done, Daisy."
Daisy accepted the compliment with appropriate grace. What else could you do? Apparently the age they were living in operated on the principle that cute things justified everything.
The Hulk ran south through the ruined city, holding seven small dogs with extraordinary care. He passed by people buried in the rubble along the way. He didn't look at them.
A different era's priorities.
"Do we pursue, sir?" Coulson asked. He'd fitted every dog with a tracker before deployment. The Hulk's location was fully visible to them now.
Fury was quiet for a long moment—long enough that Daisy wondered if he'd gone to sleep.
"Keep eyes on," he finally said.
No order to capture. No order to release. Just watch.
Daisy suspected he'd already started building the Avengers Initiative in his head. Capturing the Hulk now would ruin that calculation. Everybody had their own agenda. Everybody was playing the long game.
The pieces moved. The survivors counted their losses. The ones who'd played it right were still standing.