Chapter 320: Chapter 320: The Silence After

In New York, Steve Rogers drove his vibranium shield hard into a charging Chitauri soldier’s chest. But before the metal even connected, the alien went completely limp. It collapsed to the asphalt like a puppet with its strings suddenly severed.

Overhead, the remaining chariots lost power simultaneously. They rained down into the ruined streets in a screeching cascade of dead metal. The massive Leviathans simply stopped functioning, crashing heavily into the sides of skyscrapers or plummeting dead into the empty avenues.

Tony Stark hovered at three hundred feet, both gauntlets raised, targeting reticles dancing across his HUD. He watched the last chariot spiral into the East River. He waited five seconds. Ten.

Nothing moved.

"JARVIS. What just happened?"

"Unknown, sir. All Chitauri biosigns terminated simultaneously. I am detecting no residual activity from any hostile unit within sensor range."

Tony lowered his gauntlets slowly, the thrusters humming quietly. The sudden silence across the massive city was enormous.

—

At the exact same moment, three thousand miles east, Harry Potter was mid-cast when the speeding chariot he was targeting simply fell out of the sky on its own.

The alien pilot slumped over the controls. The vehicle tumbled past him and plunged into the Thames with a heavy splash.

Harry pulled his broom into a hover. Every single chariot in the sky was falling. Every soldier on the ground was down. The lethal spells the wizards were casting hit nothing but dead metal and empty air.

The battle was inexplicably over. The silence that followed was absolute and deeply unnerving.

Then someone cheered. A single voice from a rooftop near the Embankment. Then ten. Then fifty. Then the wizards, the Widows, and every agent and volunteer on the bridges roared. The sound rolled down the Thames like thunder.

Harry, Draco, and Neville found each other on the Embankment. They were dusty, singed, and grinning.

Sirius landed beside them a few minutes later. His Nimbus was scorched black along one side. His hair was a catastrophe. But he looked like the happiest man in London.

"What happened?" Neville asked, looking up at the empty sky. "They all dropped dead at the exact same time. How is that even possible?"

"Yes, it is like their strings got cut," Draco said, nudging a dead Chitauri soldier at his feet with clinical interest.

Harry looked west. "Someone on the other end did something. Destroyed the command ship, maybe."

Sirius had seen too many impossible things since Arthur Hayes entered his life. Alien invasions, Muggle technology that outperformed magic, and cosmic threats that made Voldemort look like a schoolyard bully. He had long since stopped looking for explanations.

He glanced happily around at the smoking wreckage littering the street and dusted some ash from his coat.

"We’ll find out what happened soon enough," Sirius said casually. "But before any of that nonsense, there’s one extremely important question that needs answering."

He looked expectantly between Harry, Draco, and Neville.

"Who won?"

Draco did not hesitate. "Eighty-seven confirmed kills. One assist on the big, ugly space monster." He looked arrogantly at Harry. "Potter?"

"I stopped counting after the second big monster."

"Then I win by default."

"You do not win by default, Malfoy. Two big monsters. Solo kills. Those count for considerably more than whatever you were doing."

"Without the ridiculous staff, you could not have touched them. It is exactly like school." Draco’s voice carried the precise, bitter edge of a man who had been outgunned and knew it. "You always had the better broom for Quidditch. Now you have the better weapon for war. There is always some unfair advantage I do not have."

Harry laughed. He was far too happy with the victory to let his old school rival ruin the moment.

Neville said nothing. He had been ahead of both of them the entire time and saw no reason to announce it.

Sirius looked at the three of them and shook his head. "Children. All of you."

"We are not children," Draco said stiffly.

"To me you are. I changed Harry’s nappies."

"You did not change my nappies."

"I absolutely did. Proof exists somewhere in a vault. Just need to dig it out." Sirius’s face lit up with the particular glow of a man who had just remembered a deeply embarrassing photograph. "James took the picture. You were screaming your head off. There was a lot of—"

"Stop right there," Harry said firmly, pointing his glowing staff.

—

In high orbit, Arthur floated in a graveyard.

The Chitauri fleet was in ruins. Support vessels drifted in pieces. Dead chariots tumbled among expanding clouds of debris. The mothership was gone. In its place, a spreading field of molten metal and cooling alloy, still glowing at the edges, still venting gas in thin white plumes that froze into glittering crystals against the black sky.

Carol Danvers floated at the centre of it all. Golden light poured off her skin. Her hair drifted in the zero gravity, haloed by residual photonic energy. She looked like a small, irritated star.

"You’re late," she announced as Arthur approached.

Arthur powered down the Arcane State. The glow faded from his skin. He held the Scepter loosely at his side, looked around at the field of wreckage stretching in every direction, and allowed himself a small nod.

"Impressive work," he said. "But it took a bit longer than I expected."

Carol scoffed, though the corner of her mouth twitched. "Impressive. That’s what I get? I just destroyed an entire invasion fleet by myself, and I get ’impressive work.’" She floated closer, arms crossed. "And you are in no position to grade me, Hayes. While I chased a ghost fleet across half the galaxy, you vanished. You did not answer a single call. I had to hear about your ’seclusion’ from Fury, of all people."

"It was sudden," Arthur said, holding up his hands. "You saw what happened with Karrok. That energy needed to be processed immediately. I could not wait."

"Uh-huh."

"And I knew you could handle this without me."

Carol narrowed her eyes. She floated right up to him, close enough that the residual golden light from her skin cast warm shadows across his face.

"Is that actually what happened? Or did you disappear on purpose to see how Earth would hold up against an alien invasion without the great Arthur Hayes? Let the board play out. And then conveniently show up at the very end, right when everything is wrapped up." She tilted her head. "The timing is very, very convenient, Arthur."

Arthur chuckled, shaking his head. "Hey, Carol. I fully expected these paranoid questions from Fury, but not from you."

"Where do you think I got the idea?" Carol’s expression was flat. "He thinks you wanted to stress-test his Avengers and force the wizards into the open. And honestly? I believe him."

Arthur was quiet for a moment."The seclusion was very real. But I will not pretend I did not want those things to happen."

Carol smiled knowingly. "Still, the timing is too convenient. Did you only really come out of seclusion just now? Not before the invasion began?"

"I did come back from my seclusion a few hours ago. Well before the invasion began."

Carol raised an eyebrow. "So what were you doing?"

"Handling the enemy commander." He raised the Scepter and held it up for Carol to see. The blue gem pulsed with its slow, patient glow, catching the distant sunlight. "See my new weapon."

Carol instantly recognized it from the recordings Fury had shared. "Is that the tool that has Fury so incredibly mad? The one that took control of his best agent and Hulk?"

"The very same." Arthur turned it over in his hands, admiring it. "Loki’s new weapon. Was. Now mine." 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

Carol eyed his pristine suit and unruffled hair. "You don’t look like someone who just fought a god, Arthur. From the messy footages Fury sent me of the Helicarrier, Loki was dangerous. He fought the entire team and Winky to a standstill."

"Not all battles need to be won with force, Carol." Arthur’s smile widened. "I defeated the God of Mischief with some trickery. I thought it was quite poetic, actually. Beating the trickster at his own game."

Carol sighed. "He must have been very angry."

"Oh, he was furious. Still is, I imagine."

"You and your tricks," Carol muttered, shaking her head. "So where is Loki now?"

"Experiencing consequences," Arthur said brightly. "Having the time of his life."

Carol looked at him. She knew what that particular smile meant. "I don’t want to know."

"Probably for the best." Arthur shifted gears smoothly. "So. Any grand plans for the evening? Tony is hosting a victory celebration. Interested?"

Carol tested the word. "A party." She said it the way someone says a word they have not used in a long time. "I have not done one of those in a while."

"You deserve a break," Arthur insisted. "Everyone is going to be there."

A slow, bright grin spread across her face. "Alright. But I am not showing up alone. I need to go fetch Maria. She would kill me if I went to a victory party without her."

"I will send coordinates once Tony picks a venue. In the meantime, I need to clean this up." Arthur looked around at the vast debris field. "I would prefer all of this alien scrap not destroy Earth’s fragile satellite network."

Arthur gripped the Scepter tightly in his right hand. He closed his eyes and mumbled a rapid incantation.

Suddenly, dozens of brilliant, golden beams of light erupted from Arthur’s palm. They shot out across the void of space like guided missiles, striking the drifting chunks of alien metal, dead Leviathans, and shattered chariots. Wherever the light touched, the wreckage simply dissolved, rapidly disintegrating out of physical existence until there was nothing left.

Carol watched him effortlessly clear a hundred miles of orbital debris in seconds. She crossed her arms again, letting out an exasperated sigh.

"How do you keep finding things that make you stronger every single time I see you?" she complained. "I only found out about the glowing silver transformation a couple of weeks ago, and now you have a cosmic scepter. It is deeply unfair."

Arthur smirked, not looking away from the disintegrating fleet. "People could say the same thing about you, Danvers."

"About me?"

"Millions of people die in accidents every year. Only you became one of the most powerful beings in the universe from one."

"Shut up and do the cleanup, Hayes."

She turned and launched herself violently toward Earth in a blinding streak of golden light.

Arthur stood alone in the quiet void. He looked down at the Scepter in his hand. The Mind Stone pulsed with its patient glow.

It did not boost his magical power directly. It did something different. He could feel the Stone extending his awareness, multiplying his ability to process information and manage simultaneous operations. With the Stone, his mind could hold a thousand threads at once without dropping a single one.

He wanted to test it properly.

He looked down at Earth, blue and bright and whole beneath him, and smiled.

Time to play god.