S.H.I.E.L.D.'s pride and joy—its conventional forces, Tactical Teams, Quinjets... before something of that caliber, they were as fragile as paper toys.
For the first time, Fury felt with perfect clarity that when faced with certain descending "natural disasters," the trump cards he had always been proud of were painfully inadequate.
Yet the people truly capable of fighting those "natural disasters" had built a higher, more mysterious, and more inaccessible circle beyond the Avengers network he had so carefully woven.
"Stark... Chang Wei..."
Fury's single eye locked onto the image of the dim-blue Giant Cocoon on the screen, along with the constantly flickering watermark filled with Stark-style mockery. "And that 'Ark'... what exactly are you doing? What else are you hiding?"
An overwhelming sense of losing control and a deep sense of crisis coiled around Fury's heart like an icy venomous snake.
He realized that the rules of the world's game had already been quietly changed by certain people.
And he, Nick Fury, the Director who called himself Earth's night watch, was discovering for the first time that he might not have even reached the edge of the card table.
He turned and walked toward the communications console, his voice hard as iron. "Agent Romanoff, Agent Barton, drop all current assignments and return to headquarters immediately. We have a new... 'learning target.'"
He paused, then added, "Top secret. Codename: 'Deep.'"
The Pacific Ocean's waves seemed to have calmed, but beneath the surface, an undercurrent of fear swept across the globe with even greater ferocity.
The catastrophe that had nearly turned the Northwest Pacific Ocean into a land of eternal silence had been too vast in scale and too devastating in destruction to be concealed by Stark Industries' flickering holographic watermark.
Tony had just finished an unpleasant call with Pepper.
The consequences