When Thor and Hulk rushed to the top of Stark Tower, Loki was standing on the edge of a broken floor-to-ceiling window, his scepter held horizontally in front of him, his dark green cloak billowing in the night wind blowing in from above.
He saw Thor, but before his ever-present smile could even fully form, a massive green figure slammed into him from the side. The Hulk didn't slow down at all, grabbing Loki's leg and slamming him repeatedly against the cracked Dali floor like a rag doll, leaving behind a series of deep and shallow human-shaped dents. Thor stood beside him, opening his mouth, but seeing the Hulk's expression, he closed it again; that punch from the Hulk had really hurt.
While Hulk was still using Loki to test the hardness of the Dali, Natasha climbed up the side fire escape to the top floor, rolled to avoid Loki being knocked away by Hulk, and found the scepter that had fallen to the ground among the broken glass shards. The gem at the top of the scepter was still faintly glowing. She picked it up and went to the base of the Tesseract's Cube device, aiming it at the core of the energy barrier.
"I've got the scepter, I can close the wormhole now!" Her voice was breathless, but her tone was unusually calm.
"Don't turn it off!" Tony's voice came through the communication channel almost immediately. His HUD showed that the thrusters' output power had reached its limit, and the golden-red light trails were rushing towards the wormhole at full speed.
"The only person who can reliably close the wormhole has gone out of control. I must send a nuclear bomb into the wormhole! If you close the wormhole now, where will you drop the nuclear bomb?"
There was a moment of silence on the communication channel. Rogers ' voice broke the silence, the muffled thud of shields hitting the Chitauri soldiers' visors in the background indicating he was still covering the last street of civilian evacuation. " Tony's right. Most of the Chitauri soldiers are being held back by Lynn from the sky, so we're not under much pressure. But Lynn like this... is he really alright?"
Lynn could no longer hear anything on the communication channel while he was in mid-air. The magic circle was still erasing his short-term memory every second, and the analytical ability amplified by the Mind Stone made him completely unable to pay attention to communication. Only a rooted obsession remained in his mind, constantly being cleared away and then reappearing.
Clean up!
Silver particle wings unfurled to their maximum wingspan behind him, each flap sending up a cloud of particle debris. He hovered in Midtown Manhattan, escorted by dozens of small fighter jets that followed closely behind the three-headed Leviathan. His fingers trembled uncontrollably, and dark golden magic circle patterns spread from his collarbone to his shoulder blades, then climbed up his upper arms, intertwining with the silver particle stream around him to form dense, regular patterns.
As Lynn saw more and more Chitauri soldiers, his morbid smile grew wider. More of these massive behemoths, more time to dismantle, and then there were even more to come. He abandoned his precise, layer-by-layer dismantling technique, transforming into a three-colored streak of light and crashing directly into the Leviathan's head armor seams. Silver particle threads shot out from both hands simultaneously, frantically penetrating the armor seams and dismantling the behemoth's energy circuits, power core, and cockpit shell all at once.
Leviathan's jaws were still opening and closing, but the blue light inside had already extinguished. Its massive body lost power and plummeted vertically to the ground from a height of tens of meters. Before the behemoth had even fully crashed, he had already turned and lunged at the next incoming aircraft. A Leviathan charged from the side, but he didn't dodge. Silver particles condensed into an arc-shaped barrier in front of him, directly blocking the energy impact from Leviathan's jaws. The barrier shattered upon impact, sending fragments of light flying everywhere. But in the instant the barrier shattered, he circled around to the top of Leviathan's head, grabbed the seams of the behemoth's armor with both hands, and tore off an entire section of armor plate from the inside, throwing the Chitauri pilot inside, along with the control panel, out of the cockpit.
More spacecraft poured out of the wormhole. He somersaulted in mid-air, dodging a barrage of plasma projectiles, and released particle threads that pierced the engine cores of three spacecraft. The light wings nearly grazed the glass curtain wall of a residential building. At the last moment, he withdrew his power, and the particle stream merely grazed the wall, leaving the entire window intact. His brain, continuously overclocked, had lost almost all its capacity for thought, leaving only two obsessions—to cleanse the Chitauri without touching the buildings. Cleanse, but don't touch the buildings. These two thoughts were repeatedly deleted and refreshed by the magic circle, intertwining into his sole code of conduct at this moment.
On the ground, Rogers, shield in hand, escorted the last group of civilians to the subway station entrance. He glanced up at the figure in mid-air, its body shimmering with silver patterns, its wings fluttering, simultaneously battling a dozen aircraft and a Leviathan. Each strike of the particle threads disintegrated an aircraft, each flap of the wings precisely avoided buildings, but his movements grew faster, more frantic, and more erratic. The calm dismantling was gone, replaced by frantic tearing. Occasionally, a silver particle thread grazed the edge of a building, shearing a billboard's support in two, but before it fell, he caught it with another particle thread and casually tossed it onto a nearby rooftop.
Rogers stared silently at the billboard that Lynn had caught in mid-air and placed steadily on the concrete ground of the rooftop...
" Lynn isn't responding to the team's in-game voice chat anymore."
Rogers spoke over the comms, his voice tinged with complex emotion, "But in that state, he still remembered not to damage the building... I watched him accidentally slice off a piece of the billboard, then gently catch it and place it on the roof..."
"That proves he still has a bottom line; we can wait and see."
Tony's voice came through the comms, the roar of the thrusters drowning out all the background artillery fire. "If we shut down the wormhole first and restore him to normal, things will be fine. But if he doesn't, or if he does restore but doesn't have the capability to deal with a nuclear bomb in a controlled manner, then the problem is much bigger. We'll be there in a few dozen seconds. Didn't you just say that most of the army was being held back and the pressure wasn't too great? Since things are like this, let him hold them back a little longer. A minute or two won't make a difference." The comms channel was silent for a few seconds; no one objected.
Just as Lynn finished dismantling a spacecraft attempting to flank him in mid-air, silver particle threads shot out from his fingertips, precisely ripping the spacecraft's engine core out of its armored shell. Propelled by inertia, the spacecraft crashed into the exterior wall of a nearby commercial building, exploding into a fireball. He used a particle barrier to envelop the area before the explosion spread, preventing damage to the building's exterior.
An aircraft swooped down from his blind spot, its plasma trajectory grazing the edge of his light wings. His fingertips trembled more and more violently, and his eyes completely lost their luster; the continuous energy overclocking had long since eroded most of his thinking ability.
As everyone waited, a tiny point of light appeared in the distant night sky. The point of light zoomed in extremely quickly, growing from the size of a pinhead to a clear golden-red streak within seconds. Tony Stark held a nuclear missile longer than himself in his hands, the MK7's thruster output power already pushed to the edge of overload.
His flight path drew an arc over Manhattan, passing Lynn was simultaneously engaging a dozen Chitauri spacecraft in mid-air, and brushing past the top floor of Stark Tower covered by golden magic array patterns. His visor was aimed at the center of the wormhole, and his thrusters accelerated again. The golden-red light trail and the silver body of the nuclear missile merged into a straight tail flame, rushing towards the huge void above his head that was still churning with eerie blue energy.