The New Element Destruction Bomb was a tactical weapon built around the fusion properties of element SG5903.
Compared to conventional nuclear warheads, it had one terrifying advantage:
No radioactive fallout.
No long-term contamination.
And yet its explosive yield vastly surpassed that of traditional nuclear weapons.
Combined with its advanced missile delivery platform, the weapon system became something close to science fiction.
Maximum flight speed: Mach 30.
Operational range: 30,000 kilometers.
Impact accuracy: within one hundred meters.
Global strike capability.
No corner of the planet was truly out of reach.
The missile platform itself was named the Spear of Longinus.
It could be mounted on nuclear submarines, battleships, strategic fortresses, and other heavy military installations.
The five major world powers were deeply tempted by it.
More importantly, they understood exactly what the Spear of Longinus represented.
Existing anti-missile systems were likely obsolete now.
At Mach 30, many radar systems probably wouldn't even detect the missile before impact occurred.
"Damn Drex Valen!"
The new leader of Hydra's North American branch smashed his desk apart in fury.
The appearance of the Spear of Longinus had effectively destroyed Alexander Pierce's Insight Project.
Hydra had poured staggering amounts of money into the project. It was nearly ready for activation.
And now it was worthless.
If the helicarriers ever launched and openly threatened the world, they would probably be shot out of the sky immediately by Longinus missiles.
The only silver lining was cost.
The weapon system was outrageously expensive, even by superpower standards.
Drex Valen priced each full Spear of Longinus system at twenty billion dollars, including ten New Element warheads.
Different warhead variants carried different destruction radii:
Five kilometers.
Ten kilometers.
Twenty kilometers.
And the energy density was absurd.
Just one gram of the new element produced energy equivalent to ten million tons of TNT.
Drex had also applied advanced cluster compression engineering to the detonation mechanics.
Outside the designated blast radius, even being a single centimeter beyond the edge would spare you from the shockwave entirely.
Instead of wasting force outward, the explosion compressed its destructive energy inward to maximize annihilation inside the target zone.
So far, Umbrella Corporation had sold only ten complete Spear of Longinus systems worldwide.
That limitation was intentional.
Without nuclear fallout or environmental contamination acting as deterrents, Drex had no desire to watch the Spear of Longinus become the primary weapon of World War III.
Then came the issue of New York.
The war against the Chitauri and the Monster Association had only recently ended, and the city looked less like modern civilization and more like the aftermath of the apocalypse.
Ruins stretched endlessly in every direction.
Rebuilding it would cost an unimaginable amount of money.
And everyone already knew what came next:
Months of political fighting over who would actually pay for it.
A city like New York wasn't rebuilt with a few billion dollars.
Not even close.
Traditionally, defeated nations paid reparations after wars.
Unfortunately, nobody could exactly track Thanos down and hand him the invoice.
As for Garou...
Assuming authorities ever found him, they would either kill him or lock him inside a laboratory to study how a human transformed into a monster.
Either way, he definitely didn't look wealthy enough to fund reconstruction efforts.
Under those circumstances, governments could only do what governments always did:
Make speeches.
Offer condolences.
Encourage unity.
But when it came to actual reconstruction, they still needed capital.
And governments were notoriously bad at finding money quickly.
The United States government, in particular, had a global reputation for financial dysfunction. Congress nearly shut the government down every other year over budget disputes already.
Now they were somehow supposed to finance the reconstruction of a destroyed megacity?
The business world wasn't much more charitable.
Successful billionaires rarely became successful through generosity.
Within days, the White House was expected to start knocking on doors asking for donations, while corporations politely explained that they were suddenly "experiencing liquidity concerns."
Tony Stark understood exactly how ugly things were about to become.
Unlike most billionaires, however, he actually cared.
By the time the first emergency meetings ended, his mind was already racing through reconstruction concepts for New York.
Someone needed to take the lead.
And deep down, Tony already believed that person had to be him.
Events unfolded almost exactly as he predicted.
Postwar reconstruction rapidly became New York's single greatest crisis.
This wasn't a matter of replacing a few damaged buildings.
The Chitauri and Monster Association had hollowed out massive sections beneath the city before deliberately collapsing entire areas during the conflict.
At this point, large parts of New York were basically one enormous crater stretching hundreds of meters deep.
Thankfully, Drex Valen had established S.W.O.R.D. early and pushed large-scale civilian disaster evacuation drills long before the invasion occurred.
When the battle began, Sentinel robots evacuated enormous portions of the population at incredible speed.
Otherwise, the death toll would have been catastrophic.
Humanity had likely just experienced its first true God-Level Disaster.
Compared to what could have happened, limiting the casualties mostly to military losses was already considered miraculous.
Over the next month, every institution involved became united under one universal phrase:
"We're broke."
New York City begged the state government for help.
The state government begged the federal government.
The president begged the billionaires.
If this entire situation had been a competition, the insurance companies probably would have won first place in suffering.
Because technically speaking, if every contract were honored exactly as written, the insurance industry would owe compensation for nearly half the city.
Which was impossible.
If they actually attempted full payouts, executives across the country would probably begin planning escape routes before the quarter ended.
Everyone passed responsibility around endlessly.
No money.
No budget.
No solution.
The president spent weeks lobbying donors and corporations until he practically wore holes through his shoes, yet barely managed to raise enough funding to matter.
International aid arrived too, though mostly in symbolic amounts.
A few donations here.
A few carefully staged public gestures there.
Enough for every nation to claim they had "contributed."
Eventually, the White House changed tactics.
Massive reconstruction contracts were released to private citizens and independent crews willing to help clean the battlefield.
The contracts offered surprisingly generous terms and, intentionally or not, contained loopholes people could exploit for profit.
It worked.
Large numbers of contractors flooded into New York for cleanup operations.
Including one particular salvager who would later become infamous:
Adrian Toomes.
The Vulture.