(Not Marvel's) Infinity War

Xandar Prime

Vault

Tony now knew how Ray Stantz must have felt; that pessimistic thought was still echoing through his mind as a flash of blue light filled the cavern.

The light faded quickly, leaving a figure behind.  It was not a figure any of them had any interest in seeing at this juncture.  Ironically Thanos’s minions seemed even more disturbed by his arrival than his enemies; no doubt there would be consequences for not having readily crushed their opponents.

And, in his right hand glistened a small yellow stone.  Despite the dire turn the situation had taken Tony couldn’t help but worry about the friend he’d literally made so long ago.

An evil grin of anticipation spread across Thanos’s face as he surveyed the battlefield.  Tony’s heart fell as that look registered.  He didn’t know what the Mad Titan saw in that scene, but he was certain it would bode less than well for them.  It certainly wasn’t the course the battle had taken up till this point.  The Avengers and Friends had clearly begun the process of mopping up the field.  Yet he was clearly gloating.  It nagged at one part of Tony’s mind just as Parker’s comments about missing something pulled at another.  No doubt he’d have figured it out with enough time to ponder.  He wasn’t given it.

Thanos’s eyes came to rest on Tony as he held his gauntleted hand over his head.  Again, the Tesseract flashed.  But, instead of emitting bolts of lightning, or sending someone to visit a random neutron star, it emitted a pulse of energy so powerful it could be seen with the naked eye.

Tony knew exactly what that pulse was.  He winced in self-recrimination as he realized what they’d been missing.  There was even a parable about putting all of one’s eggs in the same basket.

The electro-magnetic pulse washed over the battlefield, affecting allies and enemies alike.  Most of Thanos’s minions suddenly found themselves without the use of their augments.  That loss effectively neutralized some of them.  It seemed to outright kill the ones with cerebral augments.  Others were only minorly inconvenienced.  Such was the pulse’s power that even those without augments were stunned momentarily.

But, if the effects of the pulse were detrimental to Thanos’s minions, they were devastating to their enemies; nearly all of them were wearing powered armor run by electronics.  Of course, Tony had installed countermeasures in all of his suits.  They were basically a reverse Faraday cage.  Instead of simply distributing any pulse around the object, his shielding was preceded by an array of conductive elements.  The pulse would hit the conductor, creating a localized charge.  The charge would hit the cage at the leading edge of any EMP, creating their own magnetic field.  The charge would then be fed into a capacitor for future use by conductors behind the cage.  In effect, the stronger the pulse, the stronger the counter magnetic field that was generated.  It was how his suit absorbed Thor’s lighting.

It wasn’t a perfect defense of course; his countermeasures were fully capable of protecting a suit from any EMP up to double that created by the most powerful nuclear bomb Earth had ever built at ground zero.  That was assuming the suit itself could survive such a blast, which they couldn’t . . .  yet.

But he’d never anticipated an EMP of this intensity.  Up until now it was believed impossible to create a pulse of such magnitude that it actually affected living beings.

And so, he’d gone and wrapped his nifty armor around nearly the entire team.  He silently cursed the pig-headed superiority complex that had driven that decision as he watched members of the team fall out of the sky.  The pulse knocked Wanda unconscious where she was hovering, and there was no one to catch her.  Falcon and Quill, suddenly without thrust, found themselves plowing into the ground. 

Falcon was able to hit his quick disconnect and push off from the wings he’d trusted for so long, but he still hit the ground hard.  If it hadn’t been for the kindly minion that broke his fall he’d most likely have been incapacitated.  The only thing that saved Quill was the reactive armor jacket he wore; apparently it needed no supervision or electricity to spread the force of impacts out.

Everyone on the ground had the good fortune to only find themselves trapped within several hundred pounds of personal prison.  While several of those occupants were probably strong enough to move while wearing the suits -albeit extremely awkwardly- there was no way they could overcome the servos that had most definitely locked up.  The only person that might have been capable of limited movement was Nebula, but he had no idea if the suit had protected her artificial arm sufficiently for such a task.  He wasn’t even sure if the suit had protected her implant from the destructive wave; mixed feelings there. 

Thor was the only one who seemed completely unaffected by the pulse; considering the charges he usually dealt with, that wasn’t entirely surprising.  Fortunately, he seemed to realize that, even with his hammer, he couldn’t defeat Thanos on his own.  Instead, he hung back, preparing to intercede if necessary, knowing that all he might accomplish was to delay whatever monstrousness he interrupted.

Tony attempted to cock his head, banging it into the inside of his immobilized helmet in the process, as a black figure made a controlled landing at the edge of his vision.  He should have realized that Rhodes would still be functional.  Still, with Thor that made a total of two combat capable units to fight off a Thanos.  Assuming Banner’s help, they’d had twice that number on the Statesman.  Clearly that had not gone over well because here Thanos was, holding the maroon construct’s borrowed bhindi in his massive fist.

And on top of all of that, a good portion of the lights in the room had been destroyed by the pulse, casting them all into a gloom that left the imagination with far too much freedom.

>> 

Peter was about half way back to that accursed elevator with his charges when that same pulse caught up with them.  It was all well and good for Mr. Stark to call him a reserve, but this was an escort mission.  Granted, his charges weren’t nearly as useless as those found in most video games, but still, it wasn’t action.  It was walking.  Sometimes it was carrying.  He could do that back home.  The idea that he would come all the way to an alien planet for relocation duties seemed somehow . . . anticlimactic.

Not to mention slow.  He managed to keep that thought to himself as he watched the two men limp their way across one of the smaller rooms he’d encountered.  At first, he’d tried to help them, but they’d waved him off.  So instead he’d picked positions as they went to keep watch as they made their slow way through.  By his estimate they’d barely passed the halfway point on this little trek. 

He couldn’t help but wonder what was happening behind them.  He was just toying with the idea of calling Mr. Stark on the suit comms when his spider sense started tingling.  A moment later his HUD flickered.  It was a brief, but surprisingly disconcerting glitch, particularly since Mr. Stark’s suit had never glitched before.

“Karen?” he asked, addressing the suit’s AI.

“I believe we were just intersected by a powerful electro-magnetic pulse,” The suit replied.

“Are you all right?” Peter asked.

“Yes,” the suit responded.  “The field was not powerful enough to damage any of my electronics.  The brief interruption you experienced was interference caused by the magnetic field.  However,” she added, as an afterthought “based on the field’s curvature I do not believe we were near its source.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Peter replied.  “Wait, did you say we weren’t near its source?” he asked as that afterthought caught up to him.

“Yes,” she affirmed.

“And it would have been stronger at the source,” Peter added, more as an extension of her statement than a question.  A bad feeling was starting to form in the pit of his everything.

“Yes,” Karen affirmed again.

“Is that all you can say?” Peter asked with a slight grin as the course of their conversation reminded him of another old movie.  Or perhaps, he reflected, he just didn’t want to ask the question he knew he should ask.

“No,” the AI replied, somehow managing to sound amused in that one syllable word.

“Is there a problem?” T’Challa asked, startling Peter.  While they’d been talking the two men had managed to work their way across the room.  Normally he’d have moved into the corridor ahead of them to make sure it was clear before now.

“Yes, I think so,” Peter responded.  “A big one,” he added.  “Karen, what direction did that pulse come from?” he asked.  “And how powerful would it have been at its source?” he added.

“I believe the pulse originated from the room Mr. Stark is in,” she answered.  “It would probably have been strong enough to disable even his suit,” she added, not quite answering the question he’d asked.  He passed that by.  It may not have been the answer to his question, and it certainly was not the answer he’d wanted to hear, but it did shortcut a couple of steps.

It also added some complications to his little escort mission.  The only thing he knew of in that room that could cause a pulse like that would by a fission reactor on critical overload.   A fission reactor like the ones powering Mr. Stark’s suits.  And if one of the suits had gone critical, he had to get back there.  Any suit not destroyed by the blast would have been paralyzed.

“Guys, can you make it on your own?” he asked.

“Wait, what’s going on?” Scott demanded, holding one hand out in a stop gesture.

“I think one of Mr. Stark’s suit’s fission generators went critical,” Peter said.

The two older men glanced at each other.  “What makes you suspect this?” T’Challa asked.

“Because of the electro-magnetic pulse that just passed us,” Peter said shortly.  If he was right there wasn’t much time.

“What, what pulse?”  Lang asked.  “What are you talking about kid?” he asked.

“The pulse that . . .” Peter started before cutting his high-pitched whine off.  He took a quick, less than calming breath, and tried to look at the situation from their perspective.  T’Challa had no electronics he was aware of, and Lang wasn’t wearing his helmet.  Neither of them would have any idea that anything might have just gone catastrophically wrong.  Most likely they thought he was just spinning webs in hopes of getting to go to the party.

Peter’s eyes fell to the buttons on Scott’s suit gloves.  They should have been glowing red.  Right now, they were dead.  “Try using your suit,” he ordered.

Scott’s brow furrowed in confusion.  “What?  Why?” he asked.

“Just do it,” Peter insisted.

Lang glanced again at T’Challa, gaining a noncommittal shrug for his trouble.  “Alright fine,” he said holding his hand in front of him.  “This is a complete waste of time,” he muttered before pressing the button.  Nothing happened.  He pressed it again, clearly operating on the common belief that if something didn’t work you just weren’t doing it hard enough. 

“No, no, no, no,” he said as he continued pressing the button rapidly.  After the seventh or eighth try he stopped and looked back at Peter.  “I can fix this,” he said.

“Now?  With no tools?” Peter asked pointedly.

“His suit could have been damaged in combat,” T’Challa pointed out, ignoring that last.

“That wouldn’t have caused my systems to flicker, and it wouldn’t have made my AI report an extremely powerful pulse originating from your combat area,” Peter said.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Lang replied waving both hands in front of him.  “Why would this hypothetical pulse knock my suit out and not yours?  And please, kid, don’t try to tell me it’s because you were further away.”

“Okay,” Peter said impatiently “maybe it’s because my suit wasn’t made in the nineteen fifties.”

Lang’s mouth opened automatically to protest, then closed.  “That hurts,” he said instead.  “You hurt my feelings.”

“And you think you can make a difference?” T’Challa asked.

“Hey, I’m the reserve,” Peter replied with a tight grin.

“No, wait, wait,” Lang cut in.  “I mean, come on.  He’s just a kid.  We can’t send him back there.”

T’Challa cast a quick glance at Lang and took a step closer to Peter.  He looked the younger man in the eyes as if searching for something.  Peter looked right back.  In reality he didn’t have to stay with them.  Neither of them could have stopped him from just swinging away.  But Mr. Stark had asked him to get them back to the elevators.  He couldn’t just abandon them without consent.   Mr. Stark wasn’t there to give it, but they could.

“Go,” T’Challa said, cutting into Peter’s thoughts.

Peter made to jump over them, but stopped himself.  “You know the way?” he asked T’Challa.

“I have a very good memory,” T’Challa responded.  Peter nodded and launched himself back the way they came.

“I can’t believe you let him go,” Lang said as Peter disappeared through the door they’d just exited.

“In truth we could not have stopped him,” T’Challa admitted as they began limping the way they’d come.

“Come on,” Lang argued “he’s just a kid.”

“A kid that could tear either of us in half with very little effort,” T’Challa replied.  “Be happy he is on our side.” 

For once Scott remained silent.

>> 

Tony was still silently, yet soundly, berating himself when Friday’s garbled voice came through the speaker in his helmet.  “Se--re suit dam---,” she said.  “Attem----- to ---oute ar--nd inta-- ---cuits.”  Tony’s eyes closed as a faint glimmer of hope returned to his being.  He’d designed his AI cores with integrated surge protection and defenses against EMP.  Which meant he might be able to get enough functionality back to be of some help to Thor.

Not that they could stop Thanos; he and Rhodey had the only suits with onboard AIs.  There was no way the dynamic trio of two semi-functional suits and one god of thunder could defeat Thanos.  But if Tony could get some of the others free of their suits, they could free the rest.  All they had to do was keep the Mad Titan busy while the others escaped.  They’d already lost this fight, but at least that way they’d be able to conserve their resources to try again.

His suit servos unlocked so suddenly that he nearly fell over.  “Partial suit functionality restored,” Friday reported in a voice laced with static.  But it was better than the garbled statements he’d had to parse earlier.

“Report,” he said quietly, hoping Thanos hadn’t noticed him catching himself.

“Boot thrusters at eighty-two percent,” she replied “but flight surfaces are only at forty-three percent.”  Tony nodded to himself.  The angle from the origin of the pulse to the boots was greater than to any other part of the armor.  Additionally, he’d been standing behind a pile of rubble and bodies going up to his hip when the pulse was released, providing some minor protection.

But he still couldn’t fly with only forty-three percent of his flight surfaces functional.  At best he could hover.  “So, flying’s out,” Tony muttered.  “What else?”

“All flight stabilizers are off line,” she informed him.  “All weapons are offline.  Servo control is at ninety-seven percent.  All capacitors fully charged.”  There was a slight pause, as if she found the next datum embarrassing.  “AI core at seventy-six percent,” she concluded.

He could understand why she might find that particular point hard to admit, but at least it explained the strange artifacts on his HUD.  Unfortunately, that was the least worrying part of the list.  With no weapons, minimal flight capability, and no repulsors, Tony had effectively been reduced to a tough Steve Rogers.  Except Cap was far better at hand to hand fighting than Tony.  Tough, yet slow and inept was not exactly a profitable trade.

The best he could hope for was to be able to free the others and slow Thanos down long enough for them to escape.  The down side of that rather suicidal plan was that the only way he could think of to achieve it was to detonate his suit.  He doubted it would kill Thanos, but it might just bury him under enough rock to buy them that time.  But it was the best he could come up with.

Tony nodded to himself without thinking, then froze as he realized what he’d done.  Fortunately, Thanos’s attention was elsewhere.

“My Lord,” Proxima Midnight begged respectfully “we can finish them.”

Thanos turned a frosty gaze on his subordinate.  “We will discuss your failure later,” he informed her in a voice that matched the look.  “For now, collect your husband and join Dwarf,” he commanded.  She bowed, seeming somewhat deflated by his rather blunt promise of punishment and moved to obey.  The rancorous glare she cast at Tony as she passed was nearly enough to melt his armor on the spot.  He had to fight the urge not to take a step backwards.

Considering the matter closed for the present, Thanos moved on to the next target of his ire.  He fixed his gaze on Nebula’s suit.  “Nebula,” he called out in a voice dripping with malice “you have disappointed me for the last time.”  She instinctively tried to take a step back, but the armor held her immobile.  She’d thought she’d been prepared to face Thanos.  She’d thought she was tough enough to handle that meeting.  But all she could think of was the pain he would inflict if he got hold of her, and getting away from it any way she could.

“I promise, there will come a time when you will beg me to kill her,” Thanos threatened cryptically.  Still Nebula remained silent.

“I promise you, you will never get that chance,” Gamora spoke up.  It was sheer bravado, plain and simple, driven solely by the need to defend the only sister she’d ever known.

Thanos turned that icy countenance on Gamora.  “You propose to deny me of an opportunity I already possess?” he asked, sounding for all the universe amused by the concept.

But where Nebula had felt only fear at his attention Gamora felt only a defiant anger, a need to protect Nebula that she barely understood.  “And if I kill myself first?” she insisted.  On the surface it seemed like a rather backwards threat.  The sort of ‘you can’t fire me, I quit’ childishness that never actually changes anything.  But it also represented a loss of control on Thanos’s part, and everything they’d learned suggested that that, in his mind, was a completely unacceptable condition.

They all braced themselves for an explosion of anger and threats.  But when Thanos spoke it was not in anger.  It was in a voice of a disappointed father, perhaps tinged with just a touch of threat.

“Gamora,” he replied almost sadly “I had expected that you would learn the lessons of Nebula’s misguided altruism.”  That statement, more than the tone, stopped every bystander in the place in confusion, even Gamora.  Many things could be said about the Luphoid, but altruistic certainly didn’t seem to be one of them.  But then, who knew what someone as deranged as the Mad Titan might consider altruistic in the first place?

“I will do it,” Gamora insisted.  But her voice had already lost some of that fire.  She couldn’t help it.  They’d all learned long ago that disappointment was the most dangerous of Thanos’s moods.

“I wonder how,” Thanos replied condescendingly, the next most dangerous of his emotions “when you have been so conveniently gift wrapped.”

By that point Proxima Midnight had returned meekly with her husband’s glaive.  She stepped silently next to the battered and bleeding body of Black Dwarf and waited.  Without a word Thanos raised his gauntleted hand, placing it on her head.  The Tesseract flashed again, this time sending the two disgraced generals back to Thanos’s ship in a beam of light.

“Now,” Thanos said, addressing the room as if excusing himself to make a constitutional “If you will excuse me, my gauntlet is prepared to fill another vacancy.”  He turned to the nearest of his minions.  “I will deal with these on my return,” he stated.  “You will make no move against them save to prevent their escape.”  Then he stepped quickly to the door they’d tried so hard to beat him too.

Tony was on the move before he’d fully stepped through the threshold.  Widow was the closest of the armored statues to his position.  He quickly stepped over to her and accessed a panel in the left thigh of her suit.  It slid open revealing a strange tool.  One end looked like an electric nut driver on a swivel head while the other appeared to be a mini Jaws-of-Life.

He twisted a band near the center that looked much like the selector on a torque wrench and the business end of the nut driver expanded and contracted to fit different sized heads.  He hit a button to test it and it whirred into life.  He wasn’t really surprised; it was a simple tool with no circuitry at all, just a small electric motor and battery.  His biggest fear had been that the suit’s defenses had not provided adequate protection to keep the battery from rupturing.  The tool could be operated by hand, but it would severely slow down the process.  He quickly stepped behind Widow, setting the selector to the number three position.

“Is everyone okay?” he called out as he began removing the fasteners securing that panel to the armor.  He let the nuts and bolts fall to the ground negligently as he freed them. 

“Yeah,” Falcon replied with a groan as he got to his feet.  “Some mutants broke my fall,” he added as the last of the fasteners came free.  Tony tried to lift the plate off, but the emp had effectively tack welded the pieces together. 

“I’m one hundred percent,” Rhodes said as Tony flipped the tool over and applied the flattened edges to the seam.  The heavy suit was currently flying a pattern around the cavern.  Rhodes wasn’t sure what to do about their remaining minion prison guards.  His impulse was to attack, but they seemed content to watch as Tony began freeing the others.  And he wasn’t sure what Thanos might do if the sound of renewed fighting reached him.  And, on further reflection, they might defend themselves no matter what Thanos’s instructions were.  Starting another fight while most of his allies were helpless did not seem to be a stellar move.

“I think, I broke . . . everything,” Wanda called from where she’d fallen.  Her voice was that of someone afraid to breathe too deeply.

“Falcon,” Steve ordered as the plate Tony was working on snicked off of the suit, revealing a small inset lever. 

“On it,” the former Pararescue stated, moving to check on the downed mage as Tony gripped the lever and pulled down.  There was a slight shrieking sound as most of the armor fell apart into a pile at the ex-assassin’s feet.

“Thanks,” she said as he helped her remove the remaining fused parts.

“Yeah,” Tony mumbled, not feeling at all like someone that deserved to be thanked.  “Let’s go,” he added, leading the way towards the next nearest immobilized suit.  “Getting to the release lever is pretty simple, but it might take a little force,” he explained.

“Why’s your suit still working?” Natasha asked as she followed.

“It’s not, but all my AIs have their own integrated defenses from EMP” Tony replied, displaying the tool to her. 

“And only two suits have AIs?” she asked.

“Right,” Tony admitted, before switching to shop teacher mode.  “Adjust the size here,” he instructed, twisting the band on his all-in-tool.  “This button activates the drill.  Forward is tighten, back is loosen.  You may need the other end to pry fused plates apart,” he added demonstrating their separating operation.  Then he turned back to the suit.  This one happened to house Gamora.  “All the levers are beneath a plate on their back,” he explained, demonstrating the removal of said backplate’s assorted fasteners.

“Why didn’t Thanos kill all of us?” Widow asked curiously, as she watched.

“Why didn’t Loki bring his alien army to Earth in some random field instead of New York?” Tony asked bitterly as he dropped the first bolt.

“He needs an audience?” she asked, surprised that anyone could operate like that.

Tony shrugged.  “It’s hard to gloat without anyone there to be humbled,” he said, dropping a nut on the ground.

“You should never give your enemy a chance,” Natasha stated, as if reciting a rule of some sort.

“Spoken like a dispassionate assassin,” Tony replied as the third bolt came free.  Romanov jerked a little at that, uncertain of whether that comment had been a criticism or a complement.  “But don’t worry,” he added as the third nut fell free “I’m sure he’ll correct that oversight as soon as he returns.”

“Why hasn’t he?  Returned I mean,” she clarified.  “I mean, how long does it take to break whatever’s holding the stone?”

“I would guess he’s still got a little time on the clock before he can add it to his bling gauntlet,” Tony replied as the last bolt came free.

He was on the last nut when Rhodes landed next to them.  His faceplate retracted to reveal the middle-aged man’s face.  “What can I do?” he asked eagerly.

“How’s your suit?” Tony asked, without looking at him.  Of all the people present, only Rhodes was likely to pick up on his rather self-destructive plan.

“The pulse caused an intermittent failure in power systems, but Charlotte says all systems are functional,” Rhodes reported crisply, eyeing Tony carefully.  There was something about the way the technologist had stiffened as he’d landed that bothered him.  That coupled with his unwillingness to make eye contact suggested that he was hiding something, something that Rhodes would object to.

“Good,” Tony replied, still focusing on his work.  “Then I want you in the air.  Things are about to go south quickly.  I’m hoping we can free everyone and skedaddle before Big and Ugly comes back, but I doubt it.  Either way, we’ll need air support.”

“Roger,” Rhodes replied before the faceplate slid back into place and he launched back into the air.

Widow watched him go.  “How come his suit still works?” she asked, puzzled.

Tony provided a grim grin.  “Because when the Airforce took over the suit, they couldn’t make heads or tails of my EMP countermeasures, so they added a Faraday cage to the armor.  Plus, it has heavier armor, which bleeds some of the charge off,” he added, just as he got the backplate free.  “After you,” he said, gesturing towards the lever and taking a step back.

Natasha gamely stepped forward and got a grip on the handle.  Her first pull barely moved it.  She stepped into a better stance and grabbed the stubborn control with both hands, yanking hard.  Even then, it took a jerk or two before the device came free.  The armor fell around Gamora’s body.  The green woman caught herself from falling into the pile as the lack of the suit’s support exposed her slightly off-balance posture.

Tony reached into the pile and came up with the left thigh plate.  He gripped it in both hands and yanked the panel off, revealing another all-in-tool, and handing it to Gamora.  “Each suit of armor has one of these in its left thigh,” he explained, handing the tool to Gamora.  “Romanov, you show her how to free them.  I’ll start at the other end.”  Then he instinctively tried to launch himself into the air.

In all fairness, the launching part was successful.  The flying part, not so much.  He crashed to the ground after only a few meters, cursing his forgetfulness.  He picked himself up and ran the distance to Steve’s suit, thanking his stars that his servos still worked.

Gamora and Widow watched the debacle, sharing a meaningful smirk before turning to Nebula’s suit.  Natasha quickly brought Gamora up to speed on the operation of the tool, and turned to the backplate, just as Tony had done for her.  Fortunately, this suit’s backplate had fewer fasteners on it, and it came free relatively easily.

As the armor fell free, they could see the depths of horror Nebula had been going through within her steel cage.  At first, she didn’t react to the sudden freedom.  Then she bolted for the door.

“Nebula!” Gamora shouted, sprinting behind her sister.  “Nebula, stop!” she called louder as she realized that she was not going to keep up with the Luphoid’s fear induced dash for freedom.  Widow briefly considered trying to help corral the panicked blue woman, but there simply wasn’t time.  She also wasn’t sure she could keep up with the chase anyways.  Instead, she shrugged and set about freeing Deadpool from his restraints.

Nebula made no indication that she’d even heard her sister, increased volume or not.  Several of Thanos’s minions moved to intercept her path.  She feinted left before striking the right one.  Then she threw herself over the other’s attack, clocked it in the face with her right heel, rolled to the ground, and was gone.  Gamora parkoured off of the momentarily stunned minions in her attempt to gain ground.

Tony, on seeing her mad dash, held his arm out to launch his custom manacles at her.  Nothing happened, a clear reminder of the lack of such a functioning system.  His eyes closed momentarily as he attempted to contain his frustration at again forgetting about the state of his suit, before turning back to finish extricating Steve.  There simply wasn’t enough time to chase her down and still free the remaining four people currently encased in their suits.  Deep down he was nearly certain there wasn’t enough time to free them at all.  But every person he freed before nuking the room was one more person that wouldn’t have to die with him.

Others had more time on their hands, though.  Rhodes landed directly in Nebula’s path.  He commanded his suit to lift his visor, in the hopes that an allied face might elicit some pause, and held his arms out in a ‘stop’ motion. 

“Slow down, we don’t want to startle anyone,” Rhodes started to say.  In reality he got as far as the ‘we’ in that statement before nebula’s right arm rocketed between his, punching him in the mouth.  Rhodes instinctively rolled backwards with the blow, unsheathing a stun club as he went.

In the end it was unnecessary; the delay imposed in her flight by the strike, and the subsequent need to divert around the rolling black suit, were enough to allow Gamora to catch up.  She hurled herself onto Nebula, grabbing her shoulders as she went.  Her momentum carried her across her sister’s path, dragging her off balance.  They both tumbled to the floor like expert gymnasts, ending up on their feet.

They ended their tumbles facing each other.  Gamora gave Nebula a look mingling disappointment and anger.  Nebula’s face wore an expression of rage that shifted quickly to betrayal as she realized it was Gamora who’d stopped her.  That her own sister might force her to remain within their father’s grasp, particularly after his threats, was almost more than she could bear, and the hurt was evident on her face.

It never reached her voice.  “You fool,” she hissed.  “This is our chance.”

“I’m not a fool Nebula,” Gamora said stiffly.  “I’m part of a team.  And, whether you like it or not, so are you.  No one gets left behind.”

Nebula glanced at the rest of their ‘team’ before returning her attention to her sister.  A part of her had to admit that she’d never have had her chance if the ambulatory among them had followed her chosen course of action.  If Stark had chosen to flee, she’d still be imprisoned, waiting, in terror. 

But she’d learned a long time ago the price of risk for another.  She would not go down that road again.  “You know how this will end,” she said quietly.

“I know we need you Nebula,” Gamora said, neatly sidestepping Nebula’s assertion.  Despite her words, even Gamora could see only one way for this to go.  But she wouldn’t leave the others, just as they hadn’t left the two of them.  “Just hang in there a little longer,” she pleaded.

Before Nebula could respond another voice rose from the other side of the room.  “I agree,” Thanos said from behind Gamora.  Involuntarily they turned to the door Thanos had disappeared into.   He was there, silhouetted by light from the previous room, a purple glow added to the other lights in his gauntlet.   And he was staring directly at the two of them.  “What’s your hurry?” he added, gloating at their feeble efforts to escape.

Nebula froze even more solidly than her suit had, a look of abject terror on her face.  Gamora wasn’t much better, displaying intense fear and increased respiration.

Seeing the appropriate response from those two, Thanos then made a slow, deliberate visual sweep of the room.  Natasha hesitated.  She’d managed to get the backplate off of Deadpool’s armor and get a good grip on the lever it’d concealed, but she wasn’t sure she should activate it with Thanos watching.  Then again, there was no way he could miss the fact that several of those who’d been encased in armored prisons when he’d stepped out for his cosmic constitutional were now free.  He’d been staring at two of them that he’d just happened to have words with beforehand.  So how much would it hurt if he saw how they escaped?

The war between her natural inclination to hoard information and the value of that hoarding was brief, but in the end could only end one way.  With a little shrug she yanked on the lever, releasing The Mouth.  It did not take long for him to use it.

“Well, Thanos,” he started congenially “may I call you Thanos?” he asked.  Thanos didn’t respond, unless you counted a somewhat quizzical glare.  It had been so long since he’d met someone that showed absolutely no fear of him that he’d forgotten how to react.  Wade let the silence carry for a moment.  “Thanos it is,” he declared.  “As I was saying, Thanos, we’re just eager to get to the final act.”

“This is your final act,” Thanos replied, putting the full weight of his centuries of experience into the threat.

For his part Wade sounded like someone trying to break bad news gently to someone.  “Well, not according to the script,” he stated, waggling a flat hand in the air.  “You see, this doesn’t end well for you.  In fact, if I were you, I’d surrender now in return for leniency.”

“Oh really?” Thanos asked, sounding semi-amused at the prospect of someone demanding his surrender.  “Tell me,” he added holding his hand out.  Deadpool found himself floating towards the purple slaver.  “This script of yours,” Thanos continued, drawing the Psycho Santa of quip right up to him.  “Does it go something like this?” he asked, slamming Wade into the ground with such force that it crushed through his chest.

A dozen different comebacks, most suggesting that Thanos hit like a girl, floated through Wade’s mind as he lay on the ground.  They were all left unsaid; it’s quite hard to speak when you’re suffering from a collapsed chest cavity.  Instead he made do by yelling them as loud as his mind could manage, in rapid succession.  The plus to this approach being that the mind couldn’t get out of breath.  There was no pause, no break.  It was an unending, unrelenting stream of insanity, invective, and insult.   The downside to that approach was that it required a telepath to work, and Deadpool had quite effectively eliminated that timeline.

Fortunately, Thanos was telepathic, and no telepath could ever truly block out Wade Wilson, try as they might.  It wasn’t the first time someone he’d condemned to a slow death’s last thoughts had consisted of such.  It usually didn’t last long, but he did savor it.  He loved the futility, the utter helplessness that it represented in his victims.

Usually he simply waited for them to finish.  But it didn’t finish.  It went on and on, long after most brains would have shut down from lack of blood.  Of course, such trifles were of no concern to one as insane as Deadpool.  Eventually, his complete lack of dying (or silencing) peaked Thanos’s interest.

He bent down, peering at the red suit.  “Interesting,” he said, as if noting a particularly odd form of fungus.  “Yes, I believe I can use you,” he continued to himself, as if running an interview.  “And it just so happens that I have an open slot in my command structure,” he added.

The threat of the sort of subservience he’d only narrowly escaped once before focused Wade’s mind like a high-powered scope.  His stream of verbal flak switched gears, from insanity to rage.  He forced himself to breath in.  One of his lungs filled, forcing his shattered chest cavity back into alignment on that side.  Wade used the pain of that act to intensify his rapid-fire remarks.  If not for the direness of the situation the multi-cracking sound that induced would have been quickly followed by the sound of a dozen people emptying whatever they happened to use as a stomach onto the floor.  Then the other lung filled.

Thanos watched the oddity with interest.  “I can see you will be an interesting challenge Wade Wilson,” he admitted grudgingly.  Wade had much to say on that issue.

Amidst that diversionary monologue Tony managed to finish removing the backplate to Bucky’s suit.  He surreptitiously handed the all-in-tool to Steve, who’d been watching the process, but held off on actually releasing him.  They were too much in Thanos’s line of sight.  He couldn’t tell what exactly about Deadpool’s, motionless body was keeping the Mad Titan’s interest but he was fairly certain that the sight of yet another freed enemy would probably abort it.

Steve edged his way over to the last suited figure.  On the plus side, Drax and Bucky had been fairly close together when everything had gone to hell.  On the minus side, Cap was about the most terrible covert operative Tony had ever seen.  It didn’t take long for anyone watching to realize that he’d never even considered cultivating stealth.  All of Thanos’s minions were watching him, but they were still constrained by their orders to only harm escapees.  None of them were going to disobey the boss in front of the boss. And none of them would have even dreamed of interrupting him.

In the end, the six-foot super soldier’s lack of clandestine aptitude was irrelevant.  He’d barely made it to Drax’s suit as Thanos commented on Deadpool’s inherent difficulty.  After said statement, the purple gorilla grabbed the still healing mercenary and hurled him upward with enough force to embed him in the ceiling.  Deadpool’s stream of invective continued.

“Stay,” he commanded Deadpool before looking back over the battlefield.  His gaze came to rest on Tony, still standing behind Bucky with his hand on the release lever.  For a split second there was a moment of understanding between them.  In some respects, they were kindred spirits.  After all, Thanos had begun his life as a tinker, interested only in what he could create, trying to help his fellow Titans.  It was a chilling realization for Tony, a doubt thrust among his many other doubts about his own actions.

But it was only a moment.  And apparently Thanos didn’t enjoy the reminder of his humble beginnings, because his lip curled in disgust.  Then he spoke.

 “Kill the others,” Thanos ordered.  His minions sprang into action, each attacking whomever they happened to be closest to.  No doubt any target was good enough, just as long as Thanos saw them attacking it. 

Such haphazard coordination probably would have served to overwhelm the group anyway if they hadn’t managed to whittle their numbers down so significantly before the Mad Titan’s intervention.  Of the hundred or so minions that had crowded the room on their entrance there were only thirty-five or forty left.  And, of that thirty-five or forty, roughly half were disabled to varying degrees by their master’s pulse.  Which did not preclude them from making nuisances of themselves.

“Rhodey, watch Steve’s back,” Tony called over the com as he yanked the lever on Barnes’s suit.

“Roger that,” the former air force pilot called, already arcing his flight path towards them.  His minigun spooled up quickly before sending a wall of lead right over Steve and Drax’s head as he closed.

Tony looked back from checking Rhodes’s flight to see Thanos charging him.  He grabbed Barnes by the back of his leather vest and hurled him to the left, out of the path of the rare and excitable purple backed gorilla.  But that still left Tony smack dab in the middle of the track.

He watched Thanos come, gauging the monster’s speed.  He could only hope that, from the outside, his manner was consistent with the proverbial deer in the headlights.  If Thanos even suspected what he was about to attempt he’d probably end up impacted in a wall somewhere.

But, whether due to anger at what Tony represented, anticipation given by the thought of what he was about to do, or an arrogance born of centuries of victory, Thanos never guessed that Tony would thrust over his head as his arms closed to crush him.  Despite that complete surprise he still almost snagged Tony’s boot.

Tony responded to the near miss by pointing his boot thrusters directly at Thanos’s giant purple head and kicking them on full.  The sudden thrust sent Thanos into a nearly uncontrolled tumble.  He actually crushed through two of his own minions before he could arrest his momentum.

But, as Isaac Newton had warned so long ago, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  In this instance, the action of sending Thanos smashing through the ranks of his own military came with the reaction of sending Tony rocketing in the opposite direction.

“Shiiiiiiiit!” Tony yelled as he tried to avoid a flight path that any onlooker would have described as ballistic.  No matter how frantically he tried, he could not gain more than a minor semblance of control.  Friday had reported that his flight surfaces were only at forty three percent.  But that number only described the number of surfaces that would respond reliably.  Some of the others would respond every now and then.  Nor could Friday simply shut power off to the unreliable flight surfaces due to her impromptu rerouting of command and control.

In the end Tony picked a soft looking (relatively) minion near Rhodes and steered towards him.  He cut his thrusters completely, arcing twenty feet downwards onto his target.  Even in this he was only moderately successful.  Instead of impacting the center of the minion he dealt it a mere glancing blow before crashing into the ground.

“Now that’s a textbook landing right there,” Rhodes commented as the green of Tony’s inter-suit healing device (patent pending) kicked in.  The tinker groaned and climbed slowly to his feet.

“Give me a break will ya,” he replied.  “It’s my first time in a bull fight.”

“I see you dressed the part,” Steve replied while wrestling with a rather recalcitrant bolt.  The back of Drax’s suit was mangled from the pounding he’d received from Black Dwarf prior to their liberation of Corvus’s glaive.  He was pretty sure the bolt he was working on had been tied in a knot.

“Well, you know what they say,” Rhodes added, blasting a minion with a repulsor “any bull fight you can walk away from is a good one.”  Tony grinned slightly at the rephrasing but otherwise remained silent.  Instead he focused on backing Rhodes up as best he could.  Again, he was moderately successful at best.

He’d just ended a wrestling match with a three-armed minion by hurling it away from Steve’s back when he caught a glimpse of Thanos.  The Titan had just righted himself and was glaring threats at Tony.  He raised a hand and Stark felt a brief tug at his suit, as if Thanos had lassoed him.  He clearly planned a repeat of his performance with Deadpool, save for the not dying part.  But before Tony could slide more than a couple of inches Thor intervened.

Thanos had been so focused on Tony that he never even saw the Asgardian’s hammer’s approach.  It sideswiped him in the jaw, sending him spinning back to the ground.  Thor recalled the hammer on a low arc, so that just as Thanos turned that glare his direction he was sideswiped again.

Thor knew better than to cast the hammer again.  He’d learned the hard way that Thanos’s indescribable power could overwhelm even its unstoppable nature.  Instead he charged.  Thanos gamely returned the gesture.

Falcon was just dodging past the last minion between him and their entrance/exit as that titanic clash ensued.  He ran past where Widow, Nebula, and Gamora had established a perimeter and gently laid Wanda up against the wall next to where Quill was frantically fussing with his guns.  She’d born the sudden jerks and shifts of their passage quite well, particularly considering the broken ribs his probing fingers found. 

“Hang in there,” he said before turning to fire his machine pistols at an approaching minion that had gotten past Gamora.  Wanda nodded, eyes sealed shut.  Sam lingered, worriedly over her.

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Quill offered without looking up from his work.

“You seem a bit busy,” Falcon observed.

“Yeah, I think I can get one working if I cannibalize parts from the other,” Quill said as he wrestled with the casing on the second gun, completely missing the point of Sam’s statement.  “Sort of a Frankenstein’s-ah,” he said as the casing finally released its death grip.  He turned towards them, revealing the opened guts of one of his guns, and glanced up.  His eyebrows furrowed in confusion as he noted Falcon’s absence of absence. 

“What?” he demanded, “I can multitask.”  Falcon flashed him a look suggesting he wasn’t so sure about that.  “Besides,” Quill said as he returned his focus to his gun “you should probably worry more about what’s behind you.”

Falcon’s eyes widened in surprise as he snatched his guns out of their holster and twisted around.  As advertised, one of Thanos’s minions had managed to work its way around Widow and head towards them.  Sam locked eyes with it and stepped away from Wanda in hopes of keeping her out of any collateral damage the upcoming action might precipitate.

He almost needn’t have bothered; the entire fight consisted of him ducking a wild swing, placing the muzzle of one of his machine pistols on a fleshy portion of the thing’s chest, and pulling the trigger.  It dropped where it was standing.

“Nice move,” Quill said, still not looking up from his work.  Falcon glanced back at Quill, noting that the rogue still seemed completely focused on his weapon, and nodded to himself.  He gave Wanda one last worried look and stepped up to join the three-woman perimeter.

As it turned out it was more like two women.  Nebula might as well have been a statue for all the help she was.  She was still in the same position she’d rolled to before Thanos had reared his ugly head.  Her breath came in short quick strokes.  Her eyes were following Thanos wherever he went.  Her face was a mask of pure fear.

                One glance showed that Gamora wasn’t doing much better in the fear department, but at least she was fighting back.  She and Widow had taken up flanking positions centered on Nebula and were doing their best to protect her.  That stopped Sam for a moment.  He could not figure out why they would work so hard to protect Nebula; as far as he was concerned, she’d written herself off the roster of allies with her actions.  But he was also aware that this was hardly the time to have that conversation.  He quickly took a position on Widow’s right, and hoped his bullets would hold out.

“Dammit Tony,” Steve grunted, catching Stark’s attention.  “This plate won’t come off.”

Tony glanced at the object of Cap’s displeasure.  Steve had given up on the all-in-tool and was attempting to bend the backplate back with his bare hands.  He’d made a small amount of progress too.

“Alright switch,” Tony ordered.  They both twisted in unison, back to back, ending in each other’s spot.  The maneuver was carried out as if they were dancers working an intricately choreographed and rehearsed step, instead of fighters making it up as they went in the midst of explosions.

Tony snagged the tool from the ground and held it up to the plate as if planning to use it.  He stopped short, realizing that it would be completely useless; Steve’s mechanical improvisations had mangled the plate beyond use.  And that was if it would have worked in the first place.  Instead he tossed it over his shoulder.  “I’m sure you can find something to do with this,” he said over his shoulder.

“Yep,” Steve called as he caught the tool and slammed it into a minion’s head, all in one smooth motion.  Tony forwent a reply in favor of a more powered version of Steve’s approach.  While the super soldier hadn’t accomplished much, he had managed to bend the plate enough for the suit’s gauntleted fingers to fit under the gap.

Meanwhile the one on one fight between Thor and Thanos was not going well.  As Tony worked a gauntlet under the gap Cap had made, Thanos managed to snatch Thor out of the air and backhand cast him in a not so random direction.

Tony had just gotten a grip on the offending plate before Rhodes yelled a warning.  Tony glanced up to see Thor on a ballistic track that ended with the two suits.  And past Thor’s flailing form he could see Thanos in hot pursuit.  He was currently charging through two of his own minions like they weren’t there.  There was barely enough time to process that image before the Asgardian slammed through them.

Drax and Tony were knocked away from each other like bowling pins.  Of the two, Drax was far more pin like in that he couldn’t move in any way.  That was great for imitating an inanimate object, not so much for trying to cushion one’s rough landing.  He bounced away from the combat like an escaping top before coming to rest propped partly up by the door to the vault.

In what amounted to pure luck Tony was knocked directly into Rhodes, adding a nice third dimension to his tumble.  Which was still better than Rhodes faired; the impact launched him straight into the center of the rather large group of minions he’d been holding off. 

That left Bucky of the one arm and Steve to fend for themselves.  But what they lacked in strength they made up for in team work.  None of the few minions that targeted them could attack either of them individually.

Thor flipped over after the impact to make a controlled landing on the opposite wall.  He’d planned to leap back off of the wall at Thanos, but before he could Thanos was right there.  The Mad Titan led with his left hand, smashing Thor back against the rock he’d so adroitly alighted on, pinning him to it.  Apparently, he was very much against anyone upstaging him acrobatically.

 “Regretting killing your sister, Thor Odinson?” Thanos gloated, face filling Thor’s view.  “Wondering if she might have been of help here?” he added.  Thor couldn’t deny that he had a point.  Hela’s power would have been an asset in this fight.  But that would have been trading one supervillain for another.

“She was just like you,” Thor returned, glaring defiantly at that massive face.  He struggled to free himself, but Thanos had all the leverage.  He’d even managed to pin Thor’s hammer to his chest, rendering it useless.

“And I thank you for removing the competition,” Thanos replied.  “With the power of Asgard she was a threat to me, like your father before he lost his nerve.  But you, you’re just an annoyance,” he added, pausing to allow his sadistic grin to work its magic. 

Then he leaned still closer.  “You’re not worthy of the name Odinson,” he added, giving voice to the very insecurity that had plagued Thor all of his life.  It was why he’d worked so hard to be a warrior, and ironically, it was why he’d once lost his father’s favor.  He’d thought he’d buried that fear when he’d regained Mjolnir.  But if he was to be honest with himself, he’d opposed Hela more because his father had than from any internal conviction.  She might have been the wrong person to wield Asgard’s power, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was wrong.  And, here and now, he could not convince himself he’d been right.

Thanos listened to Thor’s mind as it reached the conclusion he’d waited for.  Once it arrived, he cocked his massive right fist back as far as it could go.  “I’ll send your regards to your brother,” he sneered as he prepared to crush the meddlesome Asgardian once and for all.  Just a last little dig into Thor’s failures.  The blow never landed.

While Thanos worked at destroying Thor’s confidence Tony was busily picking himself out of the crevasse his pinballing had landed him in.  The first thing he saw was Rhodes’s black suit in the middle of a shiver of minions.  Rhodes had managed to right himself, and was swinging those big powered arms like he was dancing The Twist in attempt to give himself some room.

“Rhodey!” Tony yelled before thrusting towards the group.  His course was about as accurate as an out of date solid fueled rocket, but with a mass that size it hardly mattered.  He bounced off of the ground once before plowing into the left side of the group at hip height.  The first few were knocked aside much like he’d been moments before, but their impacts effectively killed his momentum.

He stomped the rest of the way through the mass of metal and organic limb, arms swinging in much the same manner as Rhodes.  Most of the minions never even noticed him, such was there need to be seen attacking something.  Whether or not they were the third or thirtieth in line didn’t matter.

But the further into the mass Tony pushed the greater the number of that alien mosh pit that noticed him.  As they became aware of his presence, they threw themselves at him just as they had against Rhodes.  Tony found himself facing the very press he’d been trying to save his friend from, and with far less suit to do it.  Less training as well.

But every minion targeting him was one less targeting Rhodes.  As Tony began to wonder about the wisdom of this tactic Rhodes managed to unlimber his stun clubs.  With those in hand he was able to work his way towards Tony.  Anyone even appearing to think of interfering with his progress was administered an electric clubbing for their troubles.  Cumulative to the damage they’d already taken from their own master’s pulse, it wasn’t hard to understand how even Thanos’s minions might withdraw.

As the black suit closed, their enemies gave enough ground to create a small open area containing the two suited figures.  “Hold this,” Rhodes ordered thrusting one of his stun clubs into Tony’s gauntleted hand.

Tony glanced at the unfamiliar weapon.  “What am I-” he started as Rhodes used the recently unladen hand to grip Tony’s armor just below the upper back.  Then he launched himself into the air, dragging Tony’s suit with him.  Tony’s question died stillborn as he found himself jammed against the front of his suit.

Fortunately for Tony it was a short flight; Rhodes set them down at a spot midway between the mob they’d just escaped and where Thanos had Thor pinned.

“I think I prefer driving,” Tony gasped as Thanos started cocking that massive arm of doom back.

“I’ve seen your driving Tony,” Rhodes replied as he angled his body parallel to the line between the two groups, one arm held out towards each like a crossing guard.  Then he fired both concussion pulses.

The concussion pulse was his suit’s ultimate crowd pleaser.  He’d have loved to have used it in the mosh pit, but he’d been having a hard time maintaining control of his arms until Tony crashed the party.  After that he’d held off, not wanting to concuss his ally.

He played one pulse across the approaching wave front of minions.  Wherever it touched they became disorganized and uncoordinated, often falling and tripping up others behind them.  It wasn’t going to stop them; nothing short of death was going to stop that approaching collection of broken pawns.  But it did slow their advance.

There were a few leakers of course, members of the crowd that managed to avoid the pulses.  Tony stepped forward, careful to avoid interceding in Rhodes’s field of fire, and held the stun club he’d somehow managed to hold onto in a two-handed grip like a bat.  He was far from adept with the weapon, but he was able to keep them off of the black suit. 

It helped that they really didn’t care who they attacked or why.  They were perfectly happy throwing themselves into Tony’s electrified home run swings even if the rest of their brethren were being inhibited by someone else.  Clearly Thanos’s lessons had focused far less on tactics than on mindless obedience.

The other pulse Rhodes targeted on Thanos; it had far less effect.  Partly that was due to Rhodes’s own discomfort with hitting allies with the pulse.  In order to avoid hitting Thor with the beam he was forced to target only the edge of the Titan, where the effect began tapering off, on his captor.

That’s not to say it had no effect on the lumbering purple colossus.  As it hit Thanos bellowed in rage at yet again having been interfered with, and twisted his glare to the source.  That motion loosened his grip on Thor’s chest enough that he was able to shove that massive hand to the side. 

While Thanos was busily staring threats at Rhodes Thor happily dropped his hammer on the Mad Titan’s foot.  This led to another bellow, this one more in pain than in rage.  Thanos reached down to grasp the hammer, but before he could Thor called it back to his hand.  It intersected with his jaw on the way, causing its owner to fall flat on his back.

Now that Thor and Thanos were separated Rhodes was free to direct his beam of discombobulation more directly at Thanos.  He inched towards the prone Titan.  As the distance to the target shrank so did the attenuation of the beam.  Instead of walking directly towards Thanos, Rhodes took a path that moved closer towards the wall, so as to keep Thor out of his line of effect.

Despite his efforts Thor still felt the effects of the beam a few times, usually as he tried to dart a blow in on his massive opponent.  After a few attempts he settled for simply casting the hammer repeatedly at Thanos in an attempt to keep their adversary from regaining his feet.

Fortunately, the hammer was completely unaffected by the pulse.  The same could not be said of its target.  At first Thanos simply tried to catch the hammer, as he’d done before at Tivan’s offices.  But the effects of the stun pulse made it difficult for him to bring the force of mind necessary to the task to bear.  He tried to roll out of the beam, but Rhodes’s aim was more than equal to that task.  He even grabbed a chunk of dirt from the ground with the hand not holding the mind stone and chucked it at Rhodes in an attempt to attenuate the beam.  It was simply pushed aside

But what they hadn’t considered was that with every failure Thanos became more and more enraged.  Finally, he yelled ‘Enough’ and released a telekinetic explosion in all directions.

The blast knocked everyone in the area down, Rhodes, Tony, Thor, even the minions further away.  Before anyone could react Thanos was back on his feet.  He grabbed Thor in one fist and launched the both of them across the room, well away from Rhodes’s pesky stun pulses.

The others got up and regrouped as the various minions around them forced themselves back to their feet.  Tony glanced between the helpless Drax and the nearly helpless Thor, unsure of what to do.  He toyed briefly with the idea of sending Rhodes to help Thor, but there was no way they could fight their way to Drax without him. 

“Well?” Bucky asked, also unsure of what to do.  Whereas Tony was fighting his prejudice to help his friend, Barnes really didn’t care who he helped.  He barely knew either of them.  One was completely helpless, but easier to free.  The other was less helpless, but would be tougher to help.

“It’s your call Tony,” Steve said eyeing the two suits; they were by far the most effective members of the team at the moment.  There was a time when that wouldn’t have mattered, when Steve would have made the call without thinking.  But the pilots of those suits were part of Tony’s Avengers, not his.  He had no right to order them around.

Steve stopped to glance at Tony when the inventor didn’t respond immediately.  “You’re not sure what to do,” he said in surprise.  Tony always knew, or thought he knew, what to do.  For some reason Steve found that indecision more unnerving than the entire rest of the fight had been.

Fortunately, Thor took the decision out of Tony’s hands.  The statement was barely out of Steve’s mouth when the Asgardian called his hammer.  Thanos was currently slamming him piston like against the wall he’d thrown them at with one hand, clearly enjoying himself.  He never saw the hammer.  He felt it as it slammed the elbow he was using as a piston aside.  He roared in pain and wrung the hand in the air as if fighting off a serious attack of pins and needles.  But Thor wasn’t done.  As the blow freed him, he caught the hammer and swung upwards under Thanos’s exposed armpit.

There was another bellow, but this time Thanos’s other hand came into play as he punched Thor in a line parallel to the curved wall.  It wasn’t long before Thor found himself tumbling against the upright surface.

As he came to rest, he glanced up to see the halted foursome.  “Go,” he commanded them.  Then, without checking to see if they were following orders, he pulled himself back to his feet and launched himself back at Thanos.

Tony hesitated for another moment, still unwilling to just abandon his friend, even if only for a short time.  Steve’s probing eyes crossed from Tony to Rhodes.  The black man shrugged in his armor noncommittally, but it was clear that Tony’s behavior bothered him as well.

“You heard him,” Steve said to the group, finally taking that step.  It worked.  Tony glanced at him, then over to Drax, nodded once to himself, then started working his way towards their target.  The others followed.

Fortunately, most of the minions in the cavern were behind them.  There were only a few between Drax and his extraction crew, and those that were present quickly stopped trying to peel him out of his armor as they approached.

                As it turned out, Drax was not the only helpless combatant in danger: some of Thanos’s minions on the opposite end of the dome had recently taken an interest Brunnhilde.  It was hard to say why they’d ignored her so long.  Perhaps they’d simply assumed she was dead.

Sam noted the change immediately.  He’d spotted her body where it had been embedded in the rock on the other side of the entrance to this godforsaken cavern shortly after stepping in to cover Widow’s right flank.  He’d wanted to retrieve her then, but he’d been unable to find a moment when their stretched line could afford to lose him.  They were three fighters trying to protect three noncombatants.  Granted, one of those should have been a combatant but for her lost nerve, but that didn’t change the situation.

Besides, there was no guarantee he’d be able to get to her.  And he’d been fairly certain that they’d key on her the moment he started any rescue attempt.  So, he’d decided that the best course of action was to just leave it alone. 

Unfortunately, that was no longer an option.  He chucked one of his two remaining grenades behind the minions advancing on her, hoping they’d shield her from the shrapnel.  It worked, but the explosive only managed to incapacitate two of the three goons.

Sam watched as the third continued on with a complete lack of interest in what that grenade had done to its buddies, or who might have thrown it.  Of its three legs the two back ones were cybernetic, which probably explained why the grenade hadn’t stopped it.  It was dragging itself forward on the one leg, using the back two as a makeshift crutch.  One of them seemed to still have partial functionality.

He knew he had to do something, but he only had one grenade left, and there were more behind it.  His machine pistols were simply too inaccurate to project the damage necessary to do anything but annoy them, and he risked hitting Brunnhilde if he tried.  But he’d been Pararescue for three years.  You never really quit a job like that; it becomes a part of you.

He turned to warn Widow he had to leave her flank, but the view when he did so was less lethal redhead and more giant raging cyborg.  While he’d been worrying about Brunnhilde one of Thanos’s children had managed to slip inside his guard.

He caught sight of it as it was in the middle of a backswing that would surely have pummeled at least half of his body into goo.  For a split second that surprise froze him in place.  All he could do was watch as it finished its backswing.  While the rest of him remained frozen one corner of his brain began a running analysis of the beast.  It was over eight feet tall, with bright red skin.  It was dotted with augments, and appeared to be missing an eye.  And it also appeared that what he’d first identified as a club was actually the leg off of one of its compatriots.  So, an improvised club.

By the time he’d gotten past that momentary startlement it had started its improvised club on its forward arc.  Sam instinctively pointed both machine pistols at its massive body, knowing full well that nothing he could do to it would stop what it was about to do to him.

Before he could fire a blue bolt of energy arced from the wall by Wanda, sending the thing and its buddy club flying away from him.  Sam backtracked the bolt to its source, the barrel of Quill’s readied gun.

“Nice shot,” he called out before turning back to check on Brunnhilde.  The last of the first group had reached her.  Somehow, she’d managed to deflect its first attack with her left arm.  Then she kicked at the joint of the front leg, breaking it at the knee.  She moaned in pain as the action grated against her injured right side.  It fell to the ground silently.

“I told you I’d get it working,” Quill said coming up behind him.  Sam turned, a question in his eyes.  “Go,” Peter said with a glance at the target of his concern.  “I’ll do what I can to cover you from here.”  Sam was gone before he’d finished, dodging past as many minions as he could avoid.

Quill tried to cover Sam’s advance while holding down his sector at the same time, but the press quickly became too much.  There were simply too many targets, and he was down one gun.  He was forced to give a few steps of ground, which left Widow open on her right.

Their opponents quickly capitalized on that; before she knew what was going on Widow found herself completely on the defensive verses three of Thanos’s deranged children.  She gave ground stubbornly just as Quill tried to take his own back, but it was no use.  He knew he was taking dangerous risks.  Even if he hadn’t the blows to his body would have been a clue.  Thankfully his armor didn’t require any processing power; it was, in fact, the only piece of gear he had that still functioned at one hundred percent.

Widow was barely holding on.  She managed to deflect a bladed appendage of some sort (she hardly had time to examine it) to her left.  Not only did it narrowly miss her, but it also came within two hairs widths of Nebula.  The blue woman flinched as the sudden, and much closer, movement drew her attention away from Thanos.

Her eyes snapped to focus on the bearer of said bladed appendage.  As they did, and as she realized what had almost happened, all of the fear that had paralyzed her so turned to rage.  It was as if someone had flipped a switch.

Then she moved.  It was like watching liquid lightning.  Before Natasha knew what had happened, she found herself facing but one of her three opponents.  In less than two seconds Nebula had broken or removed every limb on the offender and was working on the second aggressor.  Widow made a mental note to go over her memory of what had just happened when she had a spare moment.

But at the moment they had other concerns.   “Quill, go,” Natasha ordered as she fell into his position.  One look at Nebula’s handiwork was enough evidence for the space rogue.  He vaulted one minion, firing at it as he passed over its head, and did his best to recreate Sam’s feats of acrobatics.

He slipped through the crowd to find Sam standing in front of Brunnhilde, guns blazing.  As it turned out, reaching her had been the easy part.   Finding enough time to remove her broken body from the wall was entirely another.  He was standing in a pile of clips for his gun that honestly seemed like more than he could have carried.  He’d been contemplating using his last grenade when Quill showed up.

Quill fell in on his left and opened up on the target rich environment without a word.  As if by some unspoken consent Falcon holstered his smoking weapons and turned to check on his charge.  It was pretty much as Friday had reported to Tony.  He was fairly certain that kick hadn’t done much good, other than keeping her alive of course.

“Retrieving,” he called over his shoulder.  He gently pulled her out of the wall amidst her groans of pain, and tried to figure out exactly how he was going to get her back to the line.  He couldn’t exactly dodge past all the flailing limbs with such fragile cargo, but they also couldn’t just set up another perimeter.

As he was working out the particulars, he saw Widow say something to Nebula.  There was a quick back and forth between them, ending only when Gamora shouted Nebula’s name.  A moment later the blue woman had carved a path to them.  At one point she’d picked up one of her siblings and hurled it at another like a sack of potatoes.  She also acquired a couple of short clubs in the form of slightly used limbs.  Apparently ‘Using your enemy’s limbs for fun and profit’ was a required course in the twisted aberration Thanos called a family.

Gamora and Widow collapsed their defensive line around Wanda just as the rescue party started back.  Surprisingly Nebula wasn’t nearly as good at defending someone as she was at carving up her former allies.  Sam found himself having to dodge attacks several times, much to Brunnhilde’s pain.  Clearly ‘Escort Missions for Aggravation and Annoyance’ had been left off the syllabus.  Still, in the end they managed to make it across the threshold of the room to the three women.

Odd allies were being formed on the other side of the dome as well.  The four men had made it through the last of the minions between them and Drax when Tony thrust the stun club Rhodes had given him into Bucky’s hand.

“I suspect you’ll be needing this more than I,” he said simply before accelerating ahead of the group.  Bucky stopped in shock, staring at the club.  He’d been doing his best to stay out of Tony’s way ever since their dramatic team up, and to be fair Tony had made the effort to be at least cordial to him.  But he’d have never guessed that Stark would give him anything.  Well, anything other than a bullet traveling at very high speed.  But this?  It was such a little thing, and yet not little at all.

He looked back up to where Tony was flipping Drax’s rigid suit around to access the backplate.  He felt a need to say . . . something, to acknowledge that oddly ironical olive branch.  But nothing seemed appropriate.  ‘Thanks’ somehow managed to seemed to be both an underwhelming and overwhelming response at the same time.  ‘Sorry’ would only have brought up old disagreements.

So instead he simply shrugged, thumbed the switch at the top of the club’s handle, and turned to face the oncoming horde.

“You might as well take my other stun paddle, Cap” Rhodes said as he reached behind himself to remove it.  Steve took the proffered weapon, equally unsure of how to respond.  He’d never forgiven himself for what had happened to Rhodes.  While technically he wasn’t responsible, he’d led the group that had caused it.  He’d okayed grabbing Wanda from the Avengers facility.  If he hadn’t been so stubborn none of it would ever happen.  Even after he’d discovered that Rhodes had been healed, he’d still felt a pang of regret every time he talked to him.  And here the guy he’d paralyzed was giving him his last melee weapon.  In the end he settled for a little eye contact and a nod of acknowledgement.

Rhodes grinned a sly grin.  “Don’t get all mushy on me Steve,” he said in mock warning, before following Barnes’s example.  He knew how Steve felt; he imagined he’d have felt pretty much the same if the roles were swapped.  But he’d never held what happened against Steve.  He hadn’t blamed Vision or Sam either.  It was just tough luck, bad timing, the x factor.  And yeah, it had sucked.  But he’d never been one to hold a grudge.  He’d never have been able to put up with pre-Iron Man Tony if he had, let alone post Iron Man Tony.

“I’ll take center,” Rhodes added as they watched the wave approach.  “You guys catch any leakers.”  With that the helmet closed over his face and he took a long step forward.  “Hey,” he said twisting his head back to them “you guys ever see a train derail?”  Without waiting for an answer, he activated both stun pulses and trained them over the front of the wave.  It dropped, tripping up the next line back.

Meanwhile Tony was busily wrestling with the back of Drax’s armor.  Somehow, in what had to be a thousand to one chance, one of the impacts the suit had suffered as it careened around from the Thor-ball strike had reclosed the opening Steve had made in the panel.  He couldn’t get his gauntleted fingers under the plate anymore.

After a few scratching attempts he slapped his left thigh, opening the compartment his all-in-tool was stored in.  He snatched it deftly from its holster and held it up to the nearly welded metal, looking for a gap in the seam that it could fit into.

“You know, any time now Tony,” Steve called as he backhand swung his high-tech club at the jaw of a closing minion.

“Why, you in a hurry Steve?” Tony asked sarcastically as he tried to force the wedge in.  The largest gap in the seam he could find could easily accommodate one side of his mini jaws of life, but it couldn’t quite fit both.  He was currently twisting the edge in the seam to try and create a little more room, but he’d never designed the tool to be used as such.  There was no real leverage to grasp, and his gauntlets kept slipping on the shaft of the tool.

“Of course not,” Steve replied in kind.

“Who’d want to leave paradise?” Bucky added.

“Good,” Tony replied as he finally widened the crack enough.  He jammed the tool into the seam a little harder than necessary and activated it.  “Because even after we free the blue berserker we still can’t leave.”

“What?” Rhodes asked, sounding shocked.  ‘Never leave a man behind’ he understood, even if he also understood that that wasn’t always an option.  But once they’d rescued their comrades what else was there to do; keep getting their asses kicked?

“Ah,” Tony said as the tool finished creating an opening big enough, completely missing Rhodes’s question.

“He means we can’t let Thanos keep the Mind Stone,” Steve answered.

“Right,” Rhodes replied, feeling as if he should have seen that.

“Wait, why?” Barnes asked.

“Because, then all he needs is the Time Stone to destroy half of the life in the galaxy,” Rhodes replied.

“He doesn’t have it yet,” Barnes argued.

“We have to assume he knows where it is,” Tony countered as he continued arguing with Drax’s suit.  He’d managed to peel back most of the backplate, but its upper part had been virtually fused to the collar assembly.  When he’d pulled the panel up it had bent along that axis instead of freeing the top seem.  “He was perfectly fine letting others hold the stones until the Soul Stone was found, which suggests he was waiting until all their whereabouts had been revealed before he moved.”

“And we don’t know where the Time Stone is,” Bucky replied as a light dawned.

“Yeah,” Tony agreed as if Barnes’s statement had been blindingly obvious.  “Which is why we have to stall,” he added as he finally managed to yank the recalcitrant lever down, freeing Drax.  The Blue Rager burst from the armor.  He appeared mostly whole, despite the shape his armor had been bent into, but he was holding his left side. 

“Got any ideas on that?” Bucky replied, ignoring Tony’s tone.  They all turned to their destination on the other end of the dome.

“Better figure it out quick,” Rhodes replied in a warning tone.  They followed his gaze to where Thor was fighting Thanos.  Again, the fight had not gone well for him.  His left eye was swollen nearly shut.  He had myriad cuts and bruises distributed evenly along the exposed sections of his skin, a split lip, and a very broken nose.

As they watched Thanos once again slammed him into a wall of the dome.  This time, as if their conversation had reminded him of it, he opened his right hand, revealing the golden glow from the Mind Stone buried in it.  Thor stared at it and felt fear.  Thanos grinned sadistically at Thor’s expression, giving the Asgardian just enough time to work out the implications before touching it ever so gently to the Asgardian’s chest.

For the second time that day Thor felt as if he was losing himself.  It felt nearly identical to the last thing he’d remembered feeling when Supergiant had imposed her own will on him, and yet distinctly different.  It wasn’t as controlled as Supergiant had been; it was as if Thanos was using a new tool he’d neglected to read the manual for.  But what it lacked in focus it more than made up in sheer power.

Thor fought against it with everything that he was, but he could feel the immense power of the stone find the cracks in his defenses.  He opened his eyes as if searching for something, some anchor that would help maintain his self.  At some point in his internal struggle his head had turned away from Thanos.  He found himself watching Sam and Peter as they tried to extract Brunnhilde’s broken body from the wall he’d slammed her into.  He saw them checking the wounds that had been created by his hands, and he knew that if he failed again it would only be worse.

A new sensation rose through him, fighting the old.  Apparently today was a day of firsts because it was another new feeling.  It was akin to anger or fury, but not the same.  He’d felt those in his past.  But this, this was wrath.

And it didn’t come alone.  It brought its friends Determination, and Purpose.  Thor found himself digging deep into reserves of energy within himself; reserves he’d never known were there because he’d never needed them.  There had always been plenty of energy for the taking all around him.

But now he knew.   He gathered that energy, pulling it up into his chest.  He couldn’t tell if it was the reluctance of his own body, or the Mind Stone fighting him, but it took more willpower than he’d ever guessed to get his body to relinquish its reserves.  Fortunately, he had that to spare; anything, anything was better than allowing himself to be used against his friends again.

Once he’d gathered all the energy his body could spare, he opened his eye to glared at Thanos.  He had just enough time to take some small satisfaction from the puzzled expression on the Titan’s face before a light blue lightning bolt discharged itself from Thor’s chest.  With it came Thor’s roar of defiance.

The bolt’s impact launched Thanos on a short trip half way across the room.  Such was its intensity that the impact actually caused the Mad Titan to drop the Mind Stone.  Unfortunately it managed to drift directly into a large concentration of minions.  There was a short scrabble by four or five of them to retrieve it for their master.

The Titan himself crashed to the ground, flat on his back, a mere four meters ahead of the retreating group, sliding across their path seemingly oblivious to their presence.

Thor fell forward from the wall where he’d been pinned, barely managing to get his arms up before the swiftly approaching floor could slap him in the face.  Even then, all they managed was to blunt the impact.  His arms crumpled under the strain of his weight like the unibody on a car in an eighty-kilometer head on impact.

He tried to push himself off of the floor, instead collapsing where he lay.  It wasn’t anything wrong with his battered body.  The engine ran, there just wasn’t any gas in the tank.

Thanos fared much better overall.  The surprised look he’d worn as the Mind Stone wrought a somewhat opposite effect from normal had vanished before he even hit the ground, replaced with one of . . . anticipation.

Rhodes pointed one of his stun emitters at him with almost instinctive speed and fired.  It may have affected his intended target for that long before one of his minions jumped in the way.  Then another threw itself at him.  He was able to throw it off, but there was another, and another. 

Their efforts left them completely vulnerable to reprisals swiftly meted out, but they didn’t seem to care.  However much they hadn’t given a damn when he’d used those weapons on them, they clearly understood that The Boss would look unfavorably upon them allowing them to be used on him.

While his children spent themselves for his protection Thanos sat up slowly, eyes locked onto the prone Asgardian.  The look on his face sent a chill of memory down Cap’s spine.  He’d had more experience with that look in his early life than he’d ever wanted to think about.  It was the look of malicious triumph every bully gave when their victim was helpless.  When they’d won.

But there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.  He could only watch in fear for his friend as Thanos continued the motion of his hands-free sit up, rolling further forward until he could get one of those massive go-karts he called feet under him.  Then he stood, slowly, savoring the moment of his triumph over this truly annoying group of ants.

“Let’s try this again,” he said, holding his right hand out towards the minion that had managed to collect The Mind Stone for him.  It held the stone up, centered in the upward turned palm of its hand.  The stone began its slow drift from one palm to another with the inevitability of a train wreck.  There was nothing they could do about it.  Thanos’s body was between them and the stone, effectively eliminating the chance of intercepting it with a missile, improvised or not.  Recent events had pretty much conclusively proven that any such weapon targeted on the Mad Titan himself would only serve to annoy.  In fact, the one weapon that might have worked were the stun pulses integrated into the sleeves of Rhodes’s armor, but Thanos’s children seemed to have grasped that as well. 

They threw themselves at Rhodes with a fanaticism that could not simply be brushed aside.  Individually they were no threat.  And, even in a group they couldn’t harm him; such was their mindless focus that they left themselves open to counterattacks from Rhodes’s allies.  But each time they were batted away they would pick themselves up and charge again. 

The casualty collection point at the other end of the dome was in an equally poor position to effect any change on current events.  They had far less combat power to deal with nearly the same amount of the sisters’ kindred, and the only weapon they possessed that had a chance of hitting the stone at that range was Quill’s rather temperamental blaster.  He tried to shoot the glowing amber stone a few times, not even sure what effect that would have. 

None of his shots connected; in fairness that had less to do with any failing marksmanship on his part and more to do with the hasty repair job he’d performed.  It had been a miracle that he’d managed to cobble the two crippled weapons into one functioning blaster; expecting to get one fully functional blaster out of the improvised transplant operation would have been pushing the bounds of credibility, and probably would have annoyed Lady Luck at the same time.  Even Quill knew better than to get on her bad side.

The stone reached Thanos’s hand unhindered.  He grasped it between thumb and forefinger and strode briskly back to the origination point of his unexpected flight.  Clearly, he felt he’d gotten as much effect out of the calm, slow routine as possible.  Either that or the casualties among his own ranks that performance was causing were becoming problematic.

His empty hand snaked out, grasping Thor’s torso less than gently and yanked the Asgardian back up to eye level.  Thor tried to fight back but, in a bitter form of irony, the effort of powering a lightning bolt from nothing but his own reserves of energy had staggered him far longer than it had delayed his enemy.  Thanos responded to his flailing efforts by lifting Thor away from the wall and slamming him back into it, no doubt adding a concussion to his list of injuries.  Thor’s flailing subsided.

“Now,” Thanos said as if to himself.  He held the stone up and placed it against Thor’s forehead once more.  Thor immediately began to feel himself falling deep into himself again.  The effect was much faster this time; he simply did not have the energy, to put up a good fight.

And then, suddenly, nothing; Thor opened his eyes in confusion, to see the same condition reflected in Thanos’s face.  Between the thumb and forefinger that had held the means of Thor’s enslavement was only empty air.  Thor followed Thanos’s gaze as he turned to look at the red and blue suited figure lounging effortlessly above the room’s entrance.  He was tossing the mind stone up and down as if it were nothing more than a shiny marble.

A giddy feeling flowed through Thor as he realized he’d been reprieved.  He started chuckling, whether due to the direness of their straits or the close call with his worst nightmare, he wasn’t sure.  What he was certain of was that as that chuckle turned into a full laugh.  That act did more than just make him feel good; it also returned some small measure of his strength.

And that brought with it an idea.

“I’m confiscating this until the end of the semester,” Spiderman called out.  “Or you can get your parents to collect it at the end of the day.”  Thanos squinted at the scrawny figure taunting him.  It seemed like such a nonthreatening creature, yet he could feel a shift in the emotional undercurrent of the room.  Before it had appeared, his adversaries were doomed.  What’s more, they’d known they were doomed.  He’d almost been able to taste their despair.  They’d still fought, of course, but it was more from stubbornness than any sense that they might win.  Now, somehow, this singular presence had given them hope.  And he had no idea how it had taken the mind stone from him.

He reached into its mind, attempting to ascertain this new threat and was nearly repelled instantly; not from any force of will on his target’s part, but from the strange way its mind worked.  Thanos had studied many psyches in his life.  He’d even ran into the insane variety, like that possessed by his new recruit/temporary chandelier.  But he’d never encountered a mind like this.

Most minds were a single stream that occasionally branched into new ideas.  This one, however, was more like a lake with boulders slamming into it.  Each new boulder created a ripple that interacted with all the ripples made from previous boulders creating an endless web of possibilities.  That mind was currently analyzing dozens of different possible moves and countermoves, and the moves and countermoves resulting from those moves.  It bounced from possibility to possibility faster than even he could keep up.  He’d never encountered a mind like it.

But more than that, it intrigued him.  “Who are you?” he demanded.

“What; they didn’t cover ‘The Reserve’ in supervillain school?” Peter replied innocently.  “By the way, what happened to your face?” he asked curiously.  “It looks like you got a skin transplant from your scrotum.”

Any response to that snappy remark was put on hold as Thor regained the Titan’s attention.  With Thanos otherwise occupied the Asgardian had managed to grasp the blue stone set in the gauntleted hand that was currently pinning him to the wall. 

At full strength Thor would have probably been able to snatch the stone out of its setting easily, but at his current strength he was barely able to grasp it.  At first there was no noticeable effect, but as he began to separate the stone from its new home it began sparking.  That sparking quickly turned into an arc between the stone and the gauntlet, as if either the gauntlet or the stone (or both) were trying to maintain their connection.  Sometimes that arc would strike Thor’s hand instead of the stone.  Almost any other being would have immediately abandoned such tactics in return for not having that ever happen to them again. 

For Thor that arcing served the same function jumper cables served a failing battery.  He could feel his strength returning with each discharge.  He adjusted his grasp on the stone by rolling it along his forefinger, creating a more stable grip, in preparation to relieve Thanos of it forever.  And who knew, with the nearly unlimited supply of power the Tesseract possessed he might just be able to rid the cosmos of this menace once and for all.

Unfortunately, electrical discharges also came with side effects: a flashing blue light and very distinct crackling hum that were hard to miss.  Thor barely had time to form a startled look as Thanos’s other hand hammered him into the wall.  Thor’s head was still bouncing from its savage impact against the wall when his captor took one step and hurled him like he was a javelin, right at Spiderman.  Of course, he was barely conscious at the time, so it took a second or two for him to grasp that fact.

Parker was considerably more on the uptake.  He leapt in a path that would cross just above the Asgardian javelin, and started slight spin.  As the spin brought him around to face his push off point, he webbed the Mind Stone to the wall.  He then continued around, finishing the spin just as he passed over Thor.  He webbed the Avenger’s back, then webbed the ground.  Gripping Thor’s line, he pulled hard on the ground line, while rotating Thor over his head.

The result was that, instead of flying face first into the wall Peter had so recently vacated, Thor found himself swinging in a long arc.  Peter watched his progress with one eye, while keeping another on Tony’s crew, and a third on Thanos’s attempt to retrieve his wayward stone telekinetically.  Tony’s team was making the most of his distraction, it only took Thanos about a second to pull the stone through the webbing, and it was time to cut Thor loose.

Thor sailed towards the impromptu casualty collection point at an even greater velocity than Thanos had thrown him, a parting gift from the arc he’d traveled in.  He raised his arms to try and cushion the blow, even as he realized that his bones would probably snap like breadsticks at this velocity.  The others at his destination glanced at him in concern as he streaked over to them, aware that there was nothing they could do to arrest his fate.

Peter had that covered too.  He no-look-webbed the Mind Stone back to the wall with one hand, while webbing the ceiling with the other.  He pulled himself to where his feet could hold the strand to the ceiling, then re-webbed the errant thunder god’s back.  He used his left hand to apply braking power while his right continued to spool out more web until Thor’s forward velocity reached zero.  Peter released the cable, allowing Thor to fall the last few feet to the floor.  The entire incident, from Peter pushing off of the wall to Thor’s landing, had taken all of three seconds.

“About time you showed up,” Tony called out as Peter dodged an errant projectile from Thanos, landing on yet another wall.

 “I was going for fashionably late,” Peter replied with a nonchalant shrug.  Then he jumped off the wall just as the Mind Stone, once again freed of its vertical imprisonment, zipped past him.  With his left hand he fired a glob of web at Thanos’s face.  His right webbed the stone and pulled.  That first attempt had the effect of pulling Spiderman along with the stone.  But then the glob hit Thanos in the face.  In that moment of distraction Peter yanked again.

This time the stone obeyed.  He spun on his long axis and hurled the stone at Tony at a speed that was impossible to intercept.  It was so fast that Tony barely had time to get his right hand between it and his face.  The stone imbedded itself into the already defunct repulsor of that gauntlet.  Tony glanced at the damage in horror, as the thought of what might have been stared up at him.

Before he could voice his displeasure one of Thanos’s minions attacked him from the right.  He dodged the blow, glanced from the attacker to his newly acquired stone, and then jammed the palm of his right hand onto the thing’s forehead.  It immediately froze.

“Get us out of here,” he ordered it.

“I hear and obey,” the monstrosity replied before falling in with the group.  It gained a few startled looks from the others, but they seemed to take the change of heart in stride.  Tony was just picking out new friend number two when Steve’s voice brought him up short.

“Tony,” he barked, indicating Thanos’s direction with a quick head jerk.  Tony looked past him to where Thanos had managed to get a grip on Peter.

Not that Peter hadn’t tried to avoid him.  Unfortunately, that first yank on the Mind Stone had sent him sailing directly into the Titan’s path.  Once he’d offloaded the Mind Stone, he’d tried to web himself to a wall and out of the monster’s path, but there simply hadn’t been enough time to pull off such a maneuver.  And now he’d succeeded only in taking Thor’s place.

“What about you brings them hope?” Thanos demanded, holding Parker up to his face as if to examine an interesting bug.

“Hope?” Peter couldn’t stop himself from asking.  “Do you see a stylized S on my suit that suggest an advanced alien race would cling to hieroglyphics?”

Tony’s eyes locked with Rhodes’s for a fraction of a second, one warrior pleading with another.  “Go,” Tony agreed.  Rhodes was gone before Tony had finished that rather short word.  He blasted into the air directly for Thanos

Thanos glanced at Peter’s suit.  “All I see is a bug,” he replied before attempting to slam the young man into the wall.  Peter grasped one of those mammoth fingers holding him and used it as leverage to twist himself around in Thanos’s grip, neatly placing his legs between him and the approaching hard surface.  To Thanos’s shock Peter absorbed the power of his attack in his legs, and even managed to push himself back from the wall. 

“What?” Thanos demanded incredulously.  He’d encountered very few beings that matched his strength.  And never had any of them appeared so frail. 

That one syllable question was all he got out before Rhodes came into concussion pulse range.  Such was Rhodes’s haste to save the kid that his speed by the time he entered that range made it impossible to stop prior to reaching his target while maintaining one of his disruptors on it. The Titan capitalized on that mistake by backhanding Rhodes with such force that the black suit went cartwheeling across the room.

But, before he could turn back to squashing Spiderman like a bug, a much more difficult endeavor than he’d originally expected materialized; Thor delivered a rather indignant right cross with his hammer.  Peter used the shift in weight from the blow to work out from the Titan’s grasp and escape.

“Kid!” Tony called over his com.  He’d been busily recruiting new allies with the mind stone, forming a solid wedge of enemy linebackers for their group to follow.  At the pace they were going he figured they’d be out of the room in thirty seconds. 

“Yeah?” Peter asked as he simultaneously dodged a massive purple fist and webbed said fist to the owner’s opposite boot.

“Bad Santa got stuck in the chimney,” Stark said, trusting the kid to parse.  Peter looked up, spotting Deadpool’s form amidst the upper part of the dome.  Deadpool rotated his left hand back and forth around its wrist, the closest his broken body could come to waving at the sudden attention.

“On it,” Peter called just as he performed a no look backflip over another of Thanos’s attacks.  In response he webbed the Titan’s eyebrows, yanking hard on the strands to double kick him in the face, and then used said face as a springboard to launch himself into the air.

Thanos bellowed and made a snatch for the Peter; the lithe red and blue suit turned out to be just out of reach.  He attempted to correct that failure with a telekinetic grab, but by that point Rhodes had returned.  He and Thor were able to keep the Titan too busy to worry about Peter or Deadpool.

Despite the similar circumstances, there position was much more precarious than it had been the last time they’d teamed up against the Mad Titan.  Thor was reeling like a drunk from the exertions and injuries of the prolonged fight, the minor charge he’d gotten from the Tesseract notwithstanding, and Rhodes’s armor was starting to show serious signs of wear despite its heavier design.  One of the concussion pulse emitters had been crushed, and several dents were interfering with full range of motion.  Not to mention the fact that it was nearly out of expendable munitions.

Just keeping Thanos from interfering with the rescue operation was a Herculean task, which meant they were completely out of position when Thanos switched focus to Tony.  Before they could react, he snatched the inventor telekinetically and slammed him back against the wall they’d rescued Drax from. 

Steve reacted instinctively, trying to reach Tony to do . . .  something.  Had he had a moment to think it through he’d have realized there was nothing he could do.  As it was, he was just lucky he’d been too slow to actually grab his friend.

That maneuver left Thanos open to retaliation from the other two, yet no matter how hard they tried they could do little more than interrupt him.  If it hadn’t been for the minor damage they’d caused to his face and armor they’d have assumed he was completely impervious to their attacks.

If he wasn’t, he was close enough to it to ensure his victory if they let the battle fall to attrition.  Tony could see that clearer than anyone from where he was pinned to the wall.  He knew they needed to end this now.  He knew they were all only a couple of lucky hits from dead.

He looked over at his left palm, to the yellow gem embedded therein, the germ of an idea forming.  It wasn’t what one would call a good idea.  It was, at best, the least bad idea he could come up with.

He reached over and wrestled the gem from his gauntlet.  Then he watched the ongoing fight, and Peter’s progress simultaneously.  As Peter got Deadpool to the safety of their collection point he activated his com.

“Peter,” he said, trying to figure out how to short circuit the argument he knew was coming.  “listen carefully.”

Peter straightened from setting Deadpool down and looked across the room to Tony.  “Yes Mr. Stark?” he asked, in a voice that suggested he already knew what he was going to hear.

“I need you to start moving the wounded into the next room,” Tony started.  “As soon as that’s done you blind Thanos.  Be ready to receive the Mind Stone, and get the hell out of here.”

“Mr. Stark, what about you?” Peter asked.

“I’ll buy you time to get to the surface and scatter,” Tony said, praying the kid wouldn’t argue.  They didn’t have time for a lively debate on the best possible strategies to keep Thanos from his goal.

For once Tony got his wish.  The kid didn’t argue.  “Like hell you will Tony,” Rhodes said cutting in.  Tony winced at that; he’d forgotten that Rhodes also had a working communicator.

“Rhodey, it’s the only way,” Tony pleaded, as he watched the holding group start to move the injured to the next room.

“You are not blowing yourself up, Tony.  That’s final,” Rhodes said, his voice tougher than the steel his suit was made from.

“Do you have a better idea?” Tony asked.

“Any idea is better than that!” Rhodes shouted as he dodged yet another blow.

“We don’t have any other ideas Rhodey,” Tony reminded him.  “We have this one.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Rhodes snapped.

“No!” Tony yelled automatically.

“Tony, it’s safe to say we’re going to lose this one,” Rhodes said patiently.  He was hovering a safe distance from Thanos while playing his remaining concussion pulse over Thanos’s body.  “You’re one of this pickup group’s leaders, not to mention the fact that you’re also our best bet to figure out how to stop this bastard.  And, lastly, my suit makes a bigger bang than yours.”

“I’m also the one pinned to the wall furthest from our exit in a barely functioning suit,” Tony argued.  Sadly, he had a point, and they all knew it.  Try as he might Rhodes could not come up with a good counterpoint.

“I can fix that,” Peter announced, swinging towards Thanos.  The hulking purple gorilla saw him coming and grinned in anticipation.  As Peter came into range one of his massive hands snapped out to grab the annoying teenager.  But Peter had anticipated, indeed had counted on, that reaction, though he hadn’t quite expected the speed with which it was conducted.  At the last moment Peter pulled on his strand just enough to clear that groping paw.  Realizing that wouldn’t be enough he tucked his legs up to his chest and released his line.  He passed over Thanos’s arm in mid back flip, coming around just in time to fire webbing into the monster’s eyes.  Then he did the splits to clear the Titan’s head, landed, and webbed both sides of his target’s pauldrons.   Holding himself to the ground with his feet, he pulled with every ounce of strength he had.

Thanos found himself flying in a tight arc that ended quite abruptly on the ground in front of Peter.  Before he knew what was happening Peter had him hog tied with two-ton tensile strength webbing.  “Clear!” Peter yelled, standing with one foot placed on Thanos’s prone body, Captain Morgan style.  He wasn’t actually sure if that was what you were supposed to say when you finished hog tying something; he’d never been interested in such events in the past.  It just seemed like he should say something.

Thanos did not react well.  For one priceless moment everything gave way to his fury.  He forgot about keeping Tony pinned to the wall.  The concussion pulse being played over him had more the effect of an old memory. He didn’t even notice Thor’s mad dash to try once again to wrest the Tesseract from his gauntlet.  There was only fury, and the need to avenge this humiliation on the teenager.  Thanos growled in anger as he flexed every muscle in his body, straining with all his might against his captor’s cords.

Tony flicked the Mind Stone over to the group by the door just as Thanos’s attention was dragged away from him, dropping him rudely to the ground.  More to the point, he had Friday flick the Mind Stone.  Despite her normal perfection in such things he found himself watching the tiny gem’s path to make sure it was on course.  But whatever damage she’d suffered during the fight hadn’t affected her ability to compute trajectories; the amber stone flashed across the cavern looking as if it would hit Drax dead in the face.  Fortunately, that targeted noted the approaching projectile and prepared to catch it.

It never arrived.  Despite wearing a webbing blindfold, despite being hogtied, despite being blind with rage, Thanos somehow knew exactly where the stone was.  As it approached Drax’s hand the stone veered and accelerated towards the purple monster.

Based on the briefing they’d received detailing Thanos’s capabilities Peter was under no illusions as to the limited time his cattle rustling would be effective.  Thor, despite his attempts to warn him off, wasn’t.   So, while Peter jumped to the safety of the wall Thanos had so recently used to pin Thor, the Asgardian took the full force of Thanos’s descending fist and found himself tumbling uncontrollably across the ground.  Thanos leapt to his feet, catching the amber stone as if the entire event had been choreographed and rehearsed repeatedly.

Peter and Tony both stared at the figure for half a second as their minds reeled with the implications of that act.  In retrospect it should have been obvious that, while Thanos clearly needed line of sight for his telekinetic powers, he did not in fact need to see what he was manipulating; he’d proven that as he fought Rhodes and Thor.

But the worse part of that was that he had known where the Mind Stone was, meaning that there was simply no way they were going to deprive him of it.  Tony’s original plan had been to bury the bastard under a few tons of ceiling.  By the time he dug himself out, the group could have hidden somewhere on the planet.  But who knew how far this sense went?  If he had the time, he could have probably discerned a way to hide it from whatever means Thanos was using to detect it, but there just wasn’t any.  Those means clearly weren’t intergalactic in range, but what if they were the same means he’d used to pinpoint The Statesman?  What if he could find them anywhere on the planet?  They couldn’t possibly leave with his ship in orbit, and they couldn’t remain.  Keeping the stone had just become akin to playing a shell game with an active beeper in place of the nut.

“Colonel Rhodes, would you please retrieve Mr. Stark?” Peter asked politely, but somewhat preoccupied.  He barely noted Thor tumbling away as that train of thought ran its course.

Rhodes glanced from Peter to Thanos as the latter worked to remove the webbing from his eyes with those hammer sized fingers of his.  With a shrug he took off, wondering if it was fair to Thanos to leave them alone.

Meanwhile Peter was splitting his time between concocting a new plan to delay Thanos, worrying about how long it was taking Thor to get back on his feet, and dodging a half blind haymaker from Thanos.  He’d managed to telekinetically remove the webbing from one eyelid, but based on how he was rubbing it Peter figured some of that eyelid had gone with it.

And Thor still wasn’t completely back on his feet.  Peter watched the Asgardian out of the corner of his eye, wondering what he could do to help him.  He felt like there was something he could do.  This niggling voice in the back of his head told him he could, while simultaneously refusing to explain how.  He hated it when it did that.

Still pondering that puzzle, he leapt over another of Thanos’s swings, only to find himself caught in midair.  He tried to web the ground to pull himself free, but he simply wouldn’t budge.  Thanos grinned as he calmly reached out with his gauntleted hand to pluck the helpless teenager from the air.  He grasped him around the body, pinning Peter’s arms to his sides and slammed him into the wall.

Peter did the best he could to mitigate that hit, but truthfully there wasn’t much he could do the way he was pinned.  For a moment he swore he could see stars.  He wasn’t sure how Thor could have possibly taken so many hits like that and be breathing, let alone still staggering around. 

When his vision cleared, Peter found himself staring at the gauntlet that held him.  His eyes focused, almost of their own accord, on the tesseract as his mind replayed the events just after he’d snagged the Mind Stone.  Thor had made a grab for the Tesseract.  As it was removed the stone started emitting little arcs of electricity . . . arcs that seemed to increase Thor’s strength.  Apparently, the little guy in the back of his mind had decided to be more helpful than usual.

Perhaps that was due to the large fist rocketing towards him.

“Karen,” Peter whispered hurriedly “switch to shock webbing.”  He barely got that one command out before that fist smashed his head into the rock.  The fist reared back momentarily, halting like a piston at top dead center; then it returned, again, and again.  Clearly Thanos was intending to make a point about the consequences of humiliating him. 

The only thing that saved Peter’s life was, ironically, the size of Thanos’s fist.  The rock the first hit had jammed his head into took most of the force of those repeating impacts.

That and the fact that Thor cast his hammer at the back of Thanos’s head with such force that the Titan found his own face buried in the rock.  He peeled himself off of the wall and turned to see the Asgardian struggling to get back up.  He’d been so set on getting as much power into his throw as possible that it had also overbalanced him.

“A pathetic effort,” Thanos sneered at the Asgardian.

“Shock webbing activated,” Karen replied, also in a whisper.  Peter tried to focus, but between his entire face hurting and the land mine sized concussion those blows had caused, his entire world seemed to be swimming.  He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to do.  He was supposed to do something, he was certain.  But ‘take a nap’ was all that came to mind.

“Administering stimulant,” Karen said even more quietly, concern apparent in her synthesized voice.  The ‘stimulant’ in question was a collaboration in progress between Peter and Tony.  Despite the name, it was far more than a simple stimulant.  It was designed to turn Peter’s ability to regenerate up by a factor of ten while giving his body the energy it needed to use it.  They’d run several promising computer simulations with it, but the truth was that this drug was designed to be used as an emergency measure.  That necessitated Peter having taken severe amounts of damage, a condition they’d been rather hesitant to test in the lab.  In truth they didn’t know what would happen.

It was, however, clear what would happen if it wasn’t used.

Peter’s eyes snapped open as his heart began pounding in his chest.  He could feel his blood pressure rising to that of a dismembered person in a Quinten Tarantino movie.  His entire face felt itchy as his healing factor worked to repair the damage.  But, most importantly, his vision cleared; it was as if a brisk wind had blown a cloud of fog out of his brain.

Peter focused on Thor, trying his best to judge his aim.  It wasn’t exactly an easy task, what with his pounding pulse, and suddenly quivering muscles, or the fact that his arms were still pinned to his sides just above the elbow.  Karen tried to help by superimposing a reticle representing his aim point, but it bounced over his body like a moth on Ritalin.

Peter took a deep breath and held it in an attempt to steady his pulse, but the bouncing reticle was completely undaunted.  He knew that he had to get the first shot right; even a blind fool would have no trouble figuring out what he was up to, and he had no doubt what would happen then.  He couldn’t even use the other arm due to Thanos’s bulk blocking the way.

Realizing that he didn’t stand a chance of steadying his aim, Peter focused on looking for a pattern in the madness, a point when he could fire just as the reticle was about to cross his target.

“Screw it,” he muttered in irritation before firing, more on impulse than conscious plan.  But, however he’d done it, the electrified web flew true, hitting Thor in the arm.

As the care package impacted him Thor jerked spasmodically, just as anyone else would have reacted.  For a moment Peter was certain he’d miscalculated, that his assumptions had only made things worse.  But only for a moment.

“ANOTHER!” Thor yelled as he regained himself.

By that point Thanos had turned back to Peter, a look of surprise and disgust mingling drunkenly on his face.  Panic at the sudden forecast of another pummeling froze Peter’s veins.  But if panic froze his veins, it proved to be quite motivational for his trigger finger.  Peter loosed a barrage of electrified globs of web at the Asgardian.  Many missed.  More than enough hit.

Thanos glared short swords at Peter.  The fact that the precocious teen was able to function at all after the pummeling he’d just administered was a bit of a shock; the fact that he’d been clear headed enough to make an intelligent decision was downright disturbing.

In an ideal world he’d have continued pounding the little shit into a fine layer of amorphous goo, but he now had a somewhat capable Asgardian king at his back, not to mention a rapidly closing window before Rhodes returned.  Instead he javelin threw the kid into the wall across the room, where he’d keep until Thanos finished dealing with the rest of his friends.

At least that was his intention.  In actuality things went a bit different.  Peter was barely out of his grasp before he webbed Rhodes, who happened to be on his return trip from dropping Tony off at the exit.  Fortunately, his lack of mass meant Rhodes only had to make a few minor course corrections as Peter swung in a wide arc around him.

As he came around, he saw Thor in the process of an overhand swing aimed at Thanos’s head.  Sadly, Thanos also saw it; he caught the hammer at the apex of its swing, arresting its motion entirely.  He lifted the hammer, and a reluctant to release Thor, further off the ground.  As the hammer reached a point that left Thor standing on the tips of his toes, Thanos jabbed his closed fist at him.

Thor saw that coming as well.  He pulled himself to the side, wrapping his legs around the striking limb.  By that point Peter arrived.  He’d been concerned about lobbing any webbing at the two from further out, but just before he landed he took another shot at Thanos’s face.  Somehow the Titan managed to move that massive target out of the way of that one shot, but the maneuver put him slightly off balance.

Before he could regain it, Peter grabbed the closed fist Thor was keeping immobile and pulled it away from its owner’s body.  His other hand formed a knife edge and jabbed at the underside of the wrist, hoping Titans also possessed the nerve plexus that ran there.  Evolutionarily speaking, form followed function, making the inner wrist a well-protected spot to place a nerve conduit.  Then again, evolution was responsible for the platypus.

The hand jerked open, informing him even before Thanos’s stunned roar that (this time) evolution was on his side.  Peter’s hand darted into that gaping maw of a hand, pulling the Mind Stone out before it could close again.

Thanos immediately forgot about hammers and Asgardians.  He dropped the hammer, swung the other arm in a wide arc that threw Thor out of position, and slammed his gauntleted hand down at Peter like an avenging sledgehammer.  Peter jumped outside the blow and slammed the Mind Stone into one of the empty slots on the gauntlet as it passed him.

Everyone stopped for a half second as they processed what he’d just done.  Their expressions ran the gamut from confused to outraged that he’d take such a unilateral decision for the group.  Only Tony seemed to grasp Peter’s reasoning.

“NO!” Thanos yelled, making a mad swipe for him.  Peter webbed the ground and pulled.  He folded his knees underneath himself and lay as flat as possible on the ground as he passed under the blow.  He came up from the slide in front of the Titan and fired two globs from each web slinger into Thanos’s face, ensuring complete coverage of his eyes.

“Now you know how your girlfriend feels!” Peter called out whilst considering his next move.  He could have webbed the monster’s chest and sent him into the walls behind him, but Peter wanted him as far from the exit as possible, which meant getting around him.  There were several options: the high road (an oldy but a goody), the low road, or either side road.  Each held a risk.

This time Peter opted for the low road, neatly avoiding Thanos’s defense of the more anticipated high road.  So, while Thanos blindly swiped at the air above him in a vain effort to ward him off, Peter webbed the ground between his feet.  Again he went sliding, this time right between those tree stumps Thanos laughingly called legs.

Then came the now familiar no look backwards webbing of Thanos’s Pauldrons.  But this time was a little different.  This time Peter pulled with every ounce of strength he could possibly muster.  And, instead of slamming Thanos into the ground (no matter how cathartic such an activity might have been) Peter released the errant Titan just past the apex of the swing.

Thanos shot into the opposite wall a few feet above the ground as if fired from a cannon; a really, really big cannon.  By blind luck Thanos hit between seams in the wall’s hardened metal paneling and slammed right past them into the rock behind.

Rhodes and Thor were quick on the jump, both flying up to the hole.  Rhodes trained his concussion pulse into the hole Thanos’s passage had created and cranked the intensity up to a hundred and twenty percent.  Thor began casting his hammer repeatedly at the walls around it, trying to cave in the hole.  The metal panels caused something of an issue with that though.  They’d also caved in at Thanos’s passage, creating severely bent semi walls that were holding the improvised tunnel up.  He tried to dislodge them with his hammer, but they just bent further.

By that point Peter had caught up to them.  He webbed one panel with two strands and handed the other ends to Thor.  He then webbed another.  Between the two of them they had the makeshift supports cleared in a couple of seconds.

Peter jumped up to the edge of the hole and fired a stream of webbing at Thanos’s thrashing form, making sure to keep just out of the effect of Rhodes’s ray.  He knew the strands wouldn’t hold for long, but every second gained was priceless.  Meanwhile Thor continued his deconstructive efforts.  After a few more hammer throws the entire tunnel started collapsing.

“Time to go!” Rhodes yelled as falling debris blocked his pulse.  He grabbed Peter and Thor by the scruff of the neck and blasted towards their exit with such reckless speed that his braking maneuvers carried them inside the tunnel itself.

The others immediately fell back from the line they’d been holding against the remainder of Thanos’s minions.  All except Tony at the other side of the cavern.  He braced his feet in preparation to blast off.  He knew he couldn’t fly well, but then, all that really mattered was that he not be in line with the group’s entrance before he detonated.

But as the boot jets fired a strand of webbing attached itself to his back.  A quick jerk on the line altered his course from ‘somewhere that-a-way’ to down the exit tunnel.  He quickly shut off the jets and prepared for an uncontrolled landing.  He came sliding to a halt on his back half way down the five-meter tunnel between the two rooms.

“Peter, what the hell are you doing?!” he demanded without bothering to get up.

“Adjusting your plan,” Peter replied quickly, stalking back to the entrance.  Rhodes followed, concussion pulse pointed over Peter’s shoulder.  He fired a single rocket at those of Thanos’s children that had managed to make it into the tunnel as Peter webbed the paneling at the edge of the tunnel.

“I’ve only got three more missiles,” Rhodes called warningly as Peter grunted against the stubborn plating.  Being that this particular area hadn’t taken any of the abuse the previous room had, it took some effort to dislodge the first one. 

Ironically, it came free at nearly the same instant that Thanos emerged from his temporary tomb with a shotgun blast of loose gravel.  The Titan took one look at what they were attempting and launched himself in a massive bound at their exit.  They all knew they were looking at death.  In that confined space Thanos would kill them all with very little effort.

Peter quickly ripped another panel down.  This one was much easier, either due to the lack of structural support from its predecessor or the sudden fear seeing that monster flying towards him elicited, he wasn’t sure.  Probably a little of column A and a little of column B if he was going to be honest.

Thor cast his hammer at the naked sections of roofing, but all he accomplished was the raining down of a small amount of dust from the opening.  The plating around the entrance inside the dome had been largely left intact and there wasn’t enough exposed rock inside the tunnel yet.  And Thanos was coming like a missile.  Thor was only able to cast the hammer twice in his flight.

Just before he did Rhodes released another of his precious stockpile of missiles.  There simply wasn’t enough time for Thanos to react; it hit him in the side, doing little damage.  But the explosion did alter his course.  Not much, but enough for it to end with him slamming into the wall next to the exit, as opposed to down the tunnel.

Peter ripped another two panels down simultaneously, as Thor redoubled his efforts.  By the time Thanos had peeled himself from his latest crater large chunks of ceiling were collapsing, burying the tunnel.  Peter and Thor walked backwards in unison, pulling panels down, and expanding the collapsing ceiling with the hammer, respectively.

As they backed into the next room they broke into a run towards the next tunnel, to repeat the process.  They worked frantically to collapse that one as well.  There last sight of their first cave-in was of some of the rock trembling, as if something very large and angry were right on the other side.