Mysterio’s mists were dissipating and flowing out the open doors of the skyroom. Octavius had opted not to run, although the way his mechanical limbs were flexing, extruding, and sheathing their spikes was clearly meant to look intimidating.

I walked in, crushing the Crowbar to dust in my hands. The pieces hit the floor and fractured into mounds of iron filings, scattered in the passing of my feet above the ground, electricity spurting as it crossed them.

“I’ll have you know I’ve made some upgrades to the systems on my arms!” he exclaimed in proper nerd fashion, his arms snapping into formation, and electricity sparking on the splayed pincers.

The invisible force bolt of hard air in the Invisible Woman’s style took him right in the face. He flopped over heavily, glasses shattering, and was instantly unconscious. His tentacles spasmed and went limp abruptly as the neural link was interrupted by dint of brain malfunction.

I walked over to his nose-flattened self, well on the way to a massive pair of black eyes, and turned him over.

With a lightning-edged Versatile UA edge of my hand, I first stabbed into his pack and destroyed the power relays to his tentacles, then overfed the backups to the nuclear micro-batteries inside them and blew those out as the steel appendages twitched around him.

Then I cut off the power pack from his backside, torched the neural relays, and without the slightest hesitation, cut him open and removed the interface circuits and cyberlink systems going up his spine and into his neck completely. With very pinpoint precision, holding him down as his nerves spasmed, I sealed his neural pathways so if he tried anything like this again, he’d fry his brainstem and die instantly.

Then I tore off his back, waist, and leg braces, which were the only reasons he could walk around with the damn things in the first place, alchemically sealed up the incisions I’d made in him, and headed out to find Falcon, Jarvis, and the Wasp, who were all unaccounted for and believed to be somewhere in the penthouse area here.

These fuckers had set an extraordinarily successful and very bad precedent for the whole villain/hero rivalry, all because Otto fucking Octavius’ fucking megalomania hit on a system to use the satellite tracking systems to infiltrate NATO’s nuclear arsenal and potentially hold half the world for ransom with it.

What High Guard? Certainly Primus wouldn’t do anything about it, the plan was too cool, right?

Using the Avengers uplink systems was one way to do it, courtesy of how advanced Tony’s systems were, but Otto had not been stupid enough to try this on the Baxter Building.

Also, they’d seen that Thor almost never came in during working hours, mostly on weekends, so they’d timed this for when he wasn’t around. The full-time Avengers had been assaulted when they’d gone out in civvies or to other public engagements.

A combination of illusions of incoming vehicles and aerial attack had put Tony Stark’s fancy car into a crazy accident outside of his armor. Nets, poison, illusions, and being beaten to an inch of his life had taken out Steve Rogers, while the Wrecking Crew had created distractions around the city tying up SHIELD and Peggy from helping him. Pym had been ambushed on his way to a class he was teaching at Empire State, Wanda had been taken out while clothes shopping by Kraven with a single blow, and Quicksilver got caught up in Mysterio’s illusions and literally ran himself into a wall as the gasses got to him. Arrow had been taken by surprise and without a bow, he was just a normal man going up against the Wrecking Crew, and hadn’t lasted long at all.

I could only hope the last three weren’t in that bad of shape...

-------

A few days pass...

The rest of the cellblock was absolutely empty.

The four members of the Wrecking Crew were each in their own cells. They were all in bad shape, reduced to mere humans, and all of them were broken or crippled in places.

They knew what was coming, too. They’d manhandled enough cops over the years, and the cops knew they couldn’t do anything about it. Any retribution by them would just mean more cops getting broken when the Crew got their powers back.

That was probably going to be a little different now, what with the Crowbar atomized, and the magic literally sucked out of them.

They were a bit surprised when Mr. Hill walked in, set down a stool, and glowered at them.

He had rep going on many levels. They were shocked to see The Mountain here. He was actually one of their inspirations.

“Why are you here, Hill?” Wrecker finally spoke up. All his limbs were broken. He’d chosen to fight, he’d paid the price. He still wasn’t in a hospital cell, and if his lawyers wanted to complain, nobody really cared.

“You idiots set a very dangerous precedent here in Murica,” Hill growled at them, looking at each of their faces as they hung on the cell doors in whatever manner they could. Piledriver’s hands and arms were totally wrapped and encased, with pins sticking out of them, and he couldn’t grab onto anything.

“Watcha talking about, Hill?” Bulldozer spoke up thickly, his breathing slow and painful, his chest in a virtual cage after his breastbone had been shattered. “We beat the Avengers! We done trounced ‘em good!”

Hill pulled out a cigar, struck a match against his face, and lit it, taking a long, slow puff. “You did,” he agreed after a long, slow moment, and the Wrecking Crew grinned despite themselves. Even if they lost their powers, their rep was made... and there were other ways to be strong. Power armor, magic pills, other things... it was all out there, and guys willing to bust heads and who knew how to fight at that level always had value. “The problem is that you did it the wrong way.”

His head snapped up, and his gray eyes were so flat and cold the Crew all pushed back from their bars at the rage lurking inside them.

“How many times have I had the stuffing beat out of me?” he asked them, and went on before they could guess, “More than I can count! Did I turn around and attack them in their civvies? Ambush them among civilians? Use teams to take them out one by one while doing it?”

He clasped his hands together, and clamped his eyes shut, huge chest rising and falling. “You stupid boys...” he murmured, thick smoke billowing out his nose...

“You had the fucking greatest job in the world. You went around, and got to flex, got to trash stuff, got to show off how strong you were, and got to show people that you didn’t have to take the stuff from The Man. It’s a fucking awesome feeling, inn’t it.” His deep, rough voice was coarser then grinding gravel. “And then you went and got fucking clever. Instead of keeping it above the table, you got sick of being beat, didn’t ya?” His eyes slowly opened, the gray almost shining in the dim light. “Because them heroes, they take their jobs seriously. They train, and train, and train, and they save people. And you guys, just like me, we want to kick back and celebrate, not do all that boring training shit. So, we lose... but that’s fine, because they can’t keep us down, and we just come back.

“We are the fucking underdogs of this super-powered conflict, even if we occasionally messed up a civilian. Despite everything, we had people rooting for us, because we always came back.

“And you guys might just have fucking ruined all that.”

His knuckles popped, although they weren’t grabbing anything. The Crew flinched despite themselves.

“How long we been beating on the Champions and stuff out on the Coast there? Twenty years, you numbnuts. You think we ain’t got all this crap figured out?

“We are fucking entertainment, you idiots. As long as we are entertaining, and there’s no body count, guess what? We get to come back again, and do it again. We get to have big super brawls, we get to throw one another around, we get to bounce bullets and destroy cars and wreck buildings, and nobody cares, cause it all looks good on the news, and exciting to read in the papers.

“You think you stumbled on a nasty secret, taking out heroes in downtime? You think I couldn’t think up a hunnert ways of bringing down the Aerie? Of wrecking Champion HQ? Of picking them off one by one, here and there, trying to leave no traces so they wouldn’t realize what was happening until it was too late?

“You think I’m not patient enough over the years to do that? You think I’m that dumb?”

His eyes were chips of crystal now. There was no sympathy left in them.

“I saw the game, I played it, and, boys, I enjoy it. I especially like coming here to Murica and playing the middle of the street as a merc, and not having to worry about some hero-type attacking me for some rep, thinking that because Hercules can handle me, so can they.

“But, ya know what? I still go back home if someone pays me, and I still get whaled on by Hercules. He’s got his work cut out for him now, we both know it, and we both enjoy it.

“You boys took the job way too seriously. You thought winning the fight was the game. No. The game is getting to fight, again and again. Winning, that’s just the laugh. You just want to keep playing the game.

“Now, now you numbnuts are gonna be an example to those who think that getting ‘more serious’ about this is the key. That ‘winning’ is the thing. And of course, the only way to truly win... is to get rid of your opponents.”

His voice was so flat and cold their legs went soft. They all fell on their butts.

“You all got lucky. None of the Avengers died, although you put them all in Intensive Care. Most of ‘em will come out of it fine, what with the magic healers and the like. And you didn’t rape the women.”

Piledriver promptly pissed himself. He’d said some words about that, fancying Wanda and wanting to take some real revenge on the Wasp...

“But someone’s gonna think killing is the logical next step, that you didn’t go far enough, and you showed that if you just use some brains an’ teamwork an’ surprise, it ain’t that hard to kill a hero.

“They’re right. It ain’t that hard to kill a hero. You wanna know something else?” All of the Wrecking Crew swallowed. “It’s even easier to kill one of us.

“I’ve killed Powered over the years,” Mr. Hill went on grimly. “One thought he was a hero, hunting down supervillains with low powers he could handle, making them vanish, putting them in the ground.

“He wasn’t as good as he thought he was, and he went after a friend of mine. He got ‘im, too. And then I got him, and it took him three days to die as I pulled the little toad apart.”

His eyes were grim and flat and cold, and he was looking at the Crew with them.

“I done killed villains, too. They thought they could cross the line, that they could play with Powered and people, and as long as they were strong enough, they could do what they wanted, kill and maim and torture and kill as they pleased.

“They had names and reps and followers and stooges, money and gear and secret bases and escape plans and ruthlessness.

“It didn’t matter. I got serious, and I killed ‘em.

“I ain’t even going to talk about some of the Powered shit I’ve run into doing merc work across the world. People abuse power, and Powered ain’t no damn different from those with guns doin’ shit to those without ‘em.”

He finally reached up and took out his cigar for a moment, leaning back and blowing glittering blue smoke rings in thick, lazy circles towards the ceiling.

“If you boys had killed any of them Avengers, you would be dead right now,” The Mountain stated grimly. “You would not have left the hospital alive. Villains are easy to kill.” His gray eyes dropped to them, cold and clear as granite, and about as sympathetic.

“If this move of yours starts Powered killing Powered here in Murica, I’m putting the blame square on you and the bunch of fucking smart guys you were working with, and you’re all dead. I will fucking kill you all, and nobody will know how or why, you’ll just be dead because you fucking ruined the best life us mooks could have.”