"Every fucking time someone's talking, some shit has to happen. Doesn't it ever get old?"
Chen Xiao frowned in his swivel chair, his face etched with irritation at the interruption.
He didn't move an inch. His left hand, resting on the armrest, merely pressed down through the air in a seemingly casual gesture.
Crack!
At that instant, terrifying pressure forcibly sucked the air from the space above the hall.
A searing torrent of lightning, blazing with dazzling radiance, punched straight through the entire base's ceiling defenses and plunged downward without the slightest sign of a charge-up.
The Ancient Parasites were still frantically regenerating and splitting, their bodies leaping through midair, when an immense, invisible force crushed them from above. Bones, rotten flesh, and even the extraordinarily corrosive Black Sandworms had their entire physical structures violently torn apart at the atomic level the instant they entered the ionization field, heated to tens of thousands of degrees.
There were no screams, not even the sound of bones breaking. Five blinding flashes of white light flickered in the air and vanished.
Sizzle...
Tiny, dancing arcs swept across the scorched floor. Only five molten craters with smooth, glassy edges remained in the middle of the hall. Not a single visible speck of dust was left behind, and the pungent smell of ozone instantly overwhelmed every trace of decay.
Steve's shield-bearing arm froze for half a second. The miniature Hive Missile pods that had just opened in Tony's shoulder armor quietly retracted, and a sharp intake of breath came from behind his faceplate.
Coulson clutched his chest and stepped back, lowering his gaze to the crystallized craters in the floor. The noise of his miniature cardiac pump was clearly audible in the deathly silent hall.
"Those weren't the base's experimental subjects." Nick Fury stared at