The roar carried something hotter than anger in it.
Something raw.
Something ancient.
The massive creature loomed over Barnes like a nightmare dragged out of some half-forgotten myth, and the instant it saw him, it lashed out with the burning whip in its hand.
The air cracked.
The whip shrieked through the sky with a sound that made every person nearby flinch instinctively, their skin crawling as if the noise itself had teeth.
BOOM!
It struck a nearby skyscraper and carved a long, brutal trench straight through the building's outer shell.
Barnes didn't even have time to brace before the blow hit him.
The impact drove him deep into the pavement, smashing most of the skeletal armor across his upper body into fragments.
That one strike made the threat crystal clear.
This was not just a weapon.
This thing could level a city block with a single swing.
Everyone watching felt the same chill run down their spine.
A whip?
No.
That was a missile with a personality.
Below, every heavy weapon on the field snapped into aim.
Coulson's voice cut through the restored comms system, sharp and urgent.
"Open fire! Don't conserve ammo! Hit the thing with everything you've got!"
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
WHOOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!
The battlefield answered him with thunder.
Tank-mounted weapons roared.
Missiles screamed out from the ground, from rooftops, from the air itself, converging on the fire creature from every direction.
The moment its whip began retracting, before it could bring the weapon around for a second swing, the first wave of armor-piercing shells and high-explosive rounds reached it.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A heartbeat later came the missiles.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The explosions were even worse than before.
Windows that had somehow survived the earlier blast finally gave out, shattering all at once across the surrounding buildings.
And from the heart of the smoke, a sound like a scream rose through the firestorm, as if the monster itself were announcing that it had been hit.
A middle-aged Army officer near Coulson sounded tense enough to crack.
"No one survives that kind of firepower."
Coulson never looked away from the target.
"Yeah," he said flatly. "No one does. But that thing isn't a person."
As if to answer him, the smoke had barely begun to clear before the creature roared again.
The sound slammed into the soldiers below like a physical force. Several of them clamped their hands over their ears and staggered.
Then the whip came again.
It tore through the sound barrier with a vicious shriek and slammed toward the ground.
People who later described the moment swore the weapon had stretched hundreds of meters in an instant, far longer than it had any right to be.
Vehicles were thrown into the air.
Some exploded before they even landed.
The troops manning a rotating machine gun on top of an armored vehicle never had a chance to react. One instant they were firing; the next, the whip appeared out of nowhere.
"Jump!"
"Get out!"
Too late.
CRACK!
The armored vehicle folded like aluminum foil.
A soldier screamed as the blast of superheated air hit him like a flash fire. His entire body ignited.
Around him, soldiers and police officers were suffering the same fate in waves. Dozens were caught in the whip's wake, burning as if the air itself had turned to gasoline.
"Put it out! Put it out now!"
"Extinguishers! Move, move, move!"
Dry ice foam and cold water sprayed over the burning men.
For some, the flames vanished.
And yet they still screamed.
They rolled on the ground, clawing at themselves, bodies convulsing in agony while the people trying to help stood helplessly over them, confused and horrified.
One soldier had three extinguishers emptied onto him at once.
The visible fire was gone.
He was still burning.
Not with flames.
With something worse.
His body jerked and twisted on the pavement while he howled in pain, and anyone who tried to hold him down ended up with their hands burned raw the instant they touched him. Ice, water, foam, none of it mattered.
In the end, all they could do was watch him die from a fire no one could see.
"Transparent fire?"
No one understood why the flames still killed after being extinguished.
Barnes did.
He could see it.
It was soul-fire.
Something no human eye or machine could detect.
Unless human science had somehow learned how to measure a soul, the flames were effectively invisible.
The smoke thinned further.
The fire creature was not unharmed.
There were wounds across its body now. Chunks missing. Dark red, magma-like fluid dripping from openings in its flesh, burning as it fell.
But compared to the thing's massive body, the damage was not enough to matter.
And worse, it was healing.
Fast.
Far faster than anything medical science would recognize.
The heat around it kept rising.
Within a hundred meters of the creature, the air had turned a deep glowing red, like the atmosphere itself was catching fire.
The attack didn't stop.
More shells and missiles kept coming.
This time, though, the larger explosive rounds were detonating in midair before they ever reached the target.
Only the smaller, purely kinetic ammunition was making direct contact.
The resulting fireballs and heat streams rolled together into a horrifying wave that surged across the monster's body.
Then the aircraft joined in.
Dozens of Black Hawks and Apaches opened fire from above, their 12.7Γ108mm machine guns hammering the target with vicious, anti-air firepower.
Ordinarily those guns were meant for aircraft and light armored targets.
Against this thing, they actually worked.
The rounds punched through.
The monster roared in pain and retaliated.
Now everyone could clearly see it.
The whip in its hand could stretch.
It moved with terrifying precision.
Fast enough to track a Black Hawk.
Fast enough to catch an Apache trying to split away.
Two Black Hawks were simply erased from the sky.
The explosion was deafening.
Soldiers without noise-canceling gear dropped to their knees and clutched their heads, groaning in agony. The shockwave from the blast shattered their eardrums at close range.
Barnes was already on his feet again.
He had hoisted an 88-millimeter cannon out of the weapon cache.
The kind of gun that made everything else look polite.
One shot from that thing.
That was all it took.
The shell slammed into the massive fire demon and sent it flying.
The smaller artillery and bullets had only made it twitch.
This time, the beast was launched clean off its feet.
"Looks like you might need a hand?"
A streak of fire cut across the sky.
A gold-and-red armored suit descended from above, glowing in the sunlight like a flying billboard.
"Tony Stark."
Coulson sagged in relief.
For half a second, it looked like Stark was going to land with all the style he loved so much, music blaring and ego intact.
Then the fire demon lashed out from where it had been thrown.
The whip snapped through the air like a gunshot.
Tony Stark had no time to dodge.
The strike hit his armor head-on.
The high-strength titanium alloy designed for satellites and impact resistance split open like butter under a hot knife.
Stark was thrown backward hard, smashing through the outer wall of a building and disappearing into the wreckage without a sound.
Coulson stared at the impact site, stunned.
"Get Stark out of there!"
He was genuinely baffled.
Tony Stark had arrived with a dramatic entrance, taken one hit, and vanished in under a minute.
That was the legendary Iron Man?
And now S.H.I.E.L.D. had to spare people to rescue him, because if something happened to Stark, it would ripple straight back into their own interests. S.H.I.E.L.D. held stock in Stark Industries. A lot of their budget leaned on that relationship.
Barnes shot a glance toward the crater where Stark had gone down, then turned back to the demon.
The enemy was strong.
Extremely strong.
It had survived an 88-millimeter shell and was still standing.
But the wound in its stomach told the truth.
The blast had torn open a massive gash, and molten red fluid was pouring out of it in thick, burning streams.
That only made the creature angrier.
No.
Angrier wasn't enough.
It was reaching real fury now.
...
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