Having achieved his goal of using Uru Metal to entice Tony into making things for him in the future, and after force-feeding Tony a hefty dose of emotional encouragement, Lin Hai returned home with Gwen.
After the Portal's golden sparks faded from the living room, Lin Hai leaned back against the sofa and began studying his next plan. Gwen sat down beside him, casually picked up the fashion magazine on the coffee table that she had read halfway through, and flipped to the dog-eared page to continue reading.
There really should not be anything going on for the next month or so.
Lin Hai calculated it in his mind. Tony had just had his head smashed senseless by Uru Metal, so he would probably be holed up in his lab wrestling with that black ingot for a while. Peter and Harry, meanwhile, had recently become obsessed with exploring every function of their new suits.
As for S.H.I.E.L.D., Nick Fury had not contacted him since bringing Steve over for a free meal last time.
So he planned to take Gwen around Manhattan properly, because the Manhattan they knew was about to temporarily disappear.
Once the Chitauri invasion began a month later, even with Steve Rogers's command and the Avengers' efforts, the battlefield would only be reduced and contained within Midtown Manhattan.
Yet with Stark Tower at its center, four blocks in central Manhattan would be almost completely destroyed, while ten more blocks on the outskirts would suffer varying degrees of damage. The destruction caused by Chitauri energy weapons and the buildings demolished by Leviathans would all take a considerable amount of time to rebuild after the war.
Under those circumstances, it would take quite some time for Manhattan's most prosperous areas to recover to their present state. So while everything was