Steve Rogers/Captain America

“A knight of the round table?” Steve asked as tea was passed over to him. He took a sip. Absolutely perfect.

“Well, a lesser one, of course,” Sir Benedict said embarrassed. “I’m ashamed to admit that I only became a knight right before the last war of the Kingdom. After Mordred, Lancelot, Arthur… Well. I am, at the least, a knight. But after that, I had little to no real kingdom to represent after I entered the Otherworld.”

“Our resident magical expert, Agatha Harkness, has mentioned the place once or twice,” Steve said.

“The witch of ages?” Benedict frowned thoughtfully. “Interesting… Well, in my meditations there with the other denizens, we were struck by calamity.”

Pete Wisdom sighed. “Yeah, mates. Everyone knows about Rio. But it wasn’t until Benedict here showed up that we found out our dimensional neighbors got hit by the same thing.”

Steve felt a shot of anger. Thus far, the Rio incident was the bane of the Avengers’ existence. It simply kept showing up, over and over. Bruce was becoming worriedly obsessed with it, working with Jane Foster to find out how it happened and how to keep it from happening again. In the meantime, they kept finding new consequences of that single event.

“What happened?” Steve asked Benedict.

“Monsters,” Benedict shook his head. “Much like Rio, the Otherworld was plagued by a series of beasts following a hurricane the likes of which we’d never seen. Beasts of the Hyborian Age were reborn and striding through our lands. I had to kill a Shoggoth for the first time in centuries.”

Steve stared at him, uncomprehending. He had read some Lovecraft as a teen. While the man’s racism was on a level that was just absurd, his works were incredible. The Colour Out Of Space being one that had amazed and horrified Steve as a child.

“Shoggoths are real?” Steve asked.

“Lovecraft may not have known it,” Pete said with a dark tone to the British man’s voice. “But our boys downstairs figure he was one of a few artist-types over the decades that’ve been… ‘plugged in’, so to speak, to the monsters from the other side.”

Benedict continued. “We stemmed the tide of those horrors, but we needed a response. So I volunteered. That is my quest in the world of mortals. To discover the source of, as you have called it, the Rio incident, and prevent such an assault on this world and the rest for the rest of time.”

Bucky leaned forward in his chair, his lavender tea steaming across his face. “We’ve been trying to track the guys behind it as well. But right now, our focus has been on building up our team.”

“A team of worthy warriors, spies, and pagan gods,” Benedict said with a nod. “I wish to join you. To aid you in your quest to protect this world, and battle evil as a knight must,” he held a fist to his chest. “I know you do not know me. But I have ever been a knight. I believe in that cause. In the truth of strength in service of good, and not for oneself. I-”

“Wait,” Pete stopped them, holding a hand to his ear. He stilled for a moment, listening. Then he spun to his feet, alarm in his eyes and pointed at the wall on the far side, next to a tree that was growing from the grassy floor. “Captain, block us!”

Steve didn’t hesitate. He leaped to his feet, rolled on the floor, and rose in a crouch, his shield up while the others crouched behind him. The wall exploded apart, sending chunks of concrete, metal, and tree bark flying towards them as a beam of red light hit the famed shield of Captain America. The blast pushed with all it’s might against the red, white, and blue, and left not a scratch.

“We have armed combatants on the roof over there!” Pete shouted over the sound of lasers bouncing off vibranium. “I’ve got reports of more inside that someone has infiltrated inside!”

“How!?” Bucky asked, befuddled. “This place has more security than Fort Knox!”

“They simply appeared out of thin air! We need to split up!”

“Understood,” Steve narrowed his eyes. “Bucky. You go with Pete. He knows this building, so he can guide you to your targets. Benedict. We’ll head to those rooftops.”

“Understood,” Benedict said in a reflection of Steve’s tone.

“Got it. Lead the way, Captain Britain,” Bucky raised a hand and watched his armor shift to surround him as he spoke to Pete.

“That’s a different bloke mate,” Pete snarked. “All right then. Let’s go fight for Queen and Country, eh?”

Bucky rolled his eyes, lifted his gun high, and the pair rushed out of the room.

“That’s our cue,” Steve said. “Can you reach those roofs?”

“I am a dragon, Mr. Rogers,” Benedict said grandly. Fire burst around him, spinning. As it faded, his elegant and antique looking outfit had burnt to ashes. In replacement, he wore armor. It was a dark grey color, scarred with cuts and dents from battle, a few looking animal claws. Despite that, it looked strong and solid, and gleamed with the shine of fresh polish. “If there is one thing a dragon can do, it is fly.”

Steve grinned at Benedict. The dragon-man lifted a sword as long as a door and wide as a dinner plate.

Together, the pair ran for the opening in the wall, Steve still blocking the beam of red light. He rolled at the last minute, allowing the beam to pass over his shoulder.

“Have at thee!” Benedict roared. Steve let out a wordless roar. Together, their right boots pressed against the edge of the hole. Then they jumped.

It made for quite a sight. A red scaled dragon man in the armor of a knight, sword held high as he roared. A blue blur carrying a familiar shield that flashed in the light. Between them, a large laser blast was entering the most secure building in London, the two heroes flying over the street below them.

On the building the laser was coming from, a group of men stood. Twelve men total surrounding a large cannon that was firing the laser, six of whom were wearing some sort of advanced suit, one of whom was ripping his shirt off.

Steve landed on the roof and tossed his shield. The disc smashed into the laser, ripping through the supports and finally shutting it off. Steve grabbed the shield as it came spinning back to him and blocked a blast of energy from one of the armored men.

Benedict smashed into one man on his landing, kicking him off the rooftop. Benedict ignored the bullets that peppered his skin and armor to slice one of the soldiers across the chest. He was less able to ignore the man who had been taking his shirt off beginning to grow.

“What-” a green fist snapped out and hit Benedict in the chin, sending him back a step. Benedict snarled, snapping his head around to glare at the man.

His skin was finishing it’s change over to emerald colors, his muscles growing to a grotesque size. Anyone who had never met him would have compared the man standing there now to the Hulk. But Steve, who spun out of the way of another blast, knew better.

He looked sickly, misshapen. The man’s right arm was larger than his left, his skin was a series of light and dark patches of green skin, his eyes were engorged with blood, and his upper body was so much bigger than his lower that he looked like he was staggering. His head was pulsing, like there was a living creature inside, and his breathing sounded like muted screams of pain.

Still, he was big, muscular, and green. A gamma mutate.

Almost without meaning too, the warriors separated. Benedict focused on the gamma mutate, who was glaring back at him.

“You’re big,” Benedict smirked. “Fought bigger.”

“SCRAAAGH!” the gamma mutate rushed Benedict, a misshapen fist aiming for his head.

Benedict raised his forearms and took the blow on his crossed arms, the roof under him cracking. The dragon knight had a massive smile. “A fine blow!” he uppercut the gamma mutate, then took a punch to his cheek that made a sound like wood cracking. The two superhumans began to box, Benedict tossing his sword aside to enjoy the brutal conflict fully.

Steve ignored them to focus on his own fight. Nine men left after Benedict had taken out two and was fighting one. Six of those men had something that looked like cleaner and more sophisticated versions of the Chitauri armor Hydra were using. Okay.

Steve rushed forward. The other soldiers shot at him, the ammunition bouncing off his shield, before the super-soldier reached them, forcing them to choose their shots.

“Hail, Hy-Oof!” Steve’s fist landed in the stomach of the one shouting, then ducked a punch, blocking a kick next. They were fast, strong. Steve snapped an elbow against one soldiers cheek, then spun out of the way of another laser blast, tossing his shield at the furthest Chitauri soldier.

The men he was punching weren’t going down as quickly as he would have liked. It only took a moment for him to realize why. They were healing. He grabbed one soldiers arms, wrapped his fists around the man’s sleeves, and kicked him in the chest with all his strength. The man went flying back, his sleeves ripping away from his shirt. Steve scowled at the metal device attached to the man’s arm, filled with a glowing liquid.

“Centipede,” Steve mumbled.

“That’s right,” one of the Hydra agents laughed. “The next level of super-soldier.”

“You're dead, Rogers!” another one said. He ran at Steve, laughing.

Steve caught his shield. Then, just before the overconfident soldier got to him, he placed his shield on his back.

There was a moment of fighting. Steve blocked, parried, and diverted the blows of the soldier for bare seconds. Then, in a single blow, he punched the soldier in the face once, came back with another punch, then spin kicked him in the stomach, sending him flying back ten feet.

“Next level,” Steve slowly lowered his leg back to the ground, raising an eyebrow. “Right.”

The other Hydra agents began to look very nervous.

------

Mahmoud Schahed/Dial

A giant plant man and a psychopathic ninja fell through a skylight, crashing into the center of a dinner table. People started screaming. We ignored them to roll to our feet. I broke Deadpool’s arm. He was more focused on something else.

“Oh man, Steve’s gonna kick their asses,” Deadpool said randomly as he stabbed me in the heart. He was looking upward.

I punched him back and sighed. “Dude, I can’t break the fourth wall, can you stick to the things I have some concept of?”

“Don’t tell me how to break the fourth wall!” he slashed at me with his sword, sending chips of wood flying about as he severed my right arm. I grabbed my own arm by the hand and smacked him in the face with it, the lunatic talking the entire time. “Yeesh, the Mary Sue dates She-Hulk and he gets all uppity!”

“In my defense, I’m dating She-Hulk,” I said, pressing my arm back into place so it would reattach, then grabbed Deadpool’s arm as he came in with a slice, breaking it with a squeeze of superstrength.

That was when he dropped the grenade he’d been hiding. A grenade with a blue glowing bit on it.

The explosion tore shrapnel through my body and lit my wooden form partially on fire as it sent us flying in two directions.

“Fuck!” I staggered back, grabbing a piece of metal out of my eye. “The hell kind of grenade was that!?”

“Mhe explomy mind!” I looked up to see Deadpool.

“...”

“Mwha?” he looked at me, his mask moving with a lot more animation than it should have been capable of when his lower jaw had been cut in half by a piece of shrapnel, then down at himself. A hole was lying in his stomach. He blinked at it. Then, he took his broken arm, which was making loud crack noises as it healed, and poked it through the hole, before looking over his shoulder, presumably to see his own fingers wiggling behind him.

“Cooooool,” he whispered, the words tinged with blood. “Oh, let me check something else!”

He looked up at something over his head he couldn’t see. After a moment, he grinned. “Nice! Still think in the yellow boxes!”

I stared at him for a long moment. Wow. I mean, I knew he wasn’t wrong. That the Marvel universe, all of them, were likely connected to the rest in a way only he could perceive. But seeing it from the outside, I could understand why people just chalked it up to his insanity. Because he really was insane. It’s possible to be right and crazy as balls.

“Well that is just mean!” he snapped up a pair of submachine guns from nowhere and started shooting at me. “I’m as sane as the next homicidal merc!”

“Wade, that isn’t saying much!” I lobbed a ball of fire at him, the merc ducking under it before shooting more bullets. “Don’t suppose you’ll stop for a lifetime supply of chimichangas?”

“Eh. I don’t really care about them,” he said in a voice like Demi Moore gargling gravel. “I just like the name. Chimichanga, chimichanga, chimichangachangachangachanga!” he said in time with the bullets hitting me across the body.

Yeah, suppose that would have been too easy.

“Wade, why are you even working with Hydra!?” I ignored the bullets to create a ball of mud in my palm, tossing it at him like a football, then following with a fireball that met the mud just before it would hit him, the highly-flammable liquids within exploding just in front of Deadpool.

He flipped back with the explosion and pulled a rocket launcher from somewhere, expertly firing it the second he landed on the roof of a Cinnabon. “Money!”

I was blown back into a shoe store, smashing through a glass window filled with Air Jordans. I pulled myself up to glare at him as my chest slowly healed, plant matter growing in the hole his launcher had made. “They’re literal evil scientists who have maimed, murdered, and tortured people for the sake of power.”

“We all do dark things,” he said grimly, dropping into the empty cinnabon and grabbing one of the buns out of the display. “Ever since Disney bought Fox, I have no idea if I’m going to be able to show up ever again! I’m grabbing all the screen time I can!”

Oh right. It was literally impossible to reason with the Merc with the Mouth. He followed his own logic.

Fine.

I got to my feet and glared at him.

“Oh man, he’s getting serious folks!” Wade said, a bit of frosting on his mask now. “Does this mean we’re going to fight, or are you going to end things on a cliffhanger again?”

I responded by raising my hands. We were inside a mall. A mall where people had placed plants around the food court.

“Ah, shit,” Deadpool put his rocket launcher away and pulled out two katanas. “All righty Bea and Arthur, let’s dance!”

A tree next to him exploded upwards, vines lashing out at him.

“Oh god no!” he sliced through one vine, back flipping away as more reached for him. “Now I know how a Japanese schoolgirl feels!”

“Not until I impale you,” I said, turning a cute rose bush near Deadpool into something with thorns like knives.

“I need an adult!”

“You need a therapist.”

“Aren’t those the same thing?”

Deadpool dived around another vine, balanced on one of the thorns that had tried to stab him, sliced through a wall of thin vines I tried to wrap around him, then flipped and cartwheeled through the air like a damn ballerina.

I was trying to capture him, but I still had time to be impressed.

He landed just in front of me and I grabbed a table leg that had been discarded in our fight in my left hand.

His left katana met my left table leg, and for a moment our blades danced. Back and forth, we danced across the mall’s food court. I hopped over a swipe, he ducked under a stab, his sword and my table leg made a ‘clack-clack-clack’ song as we dueled with a single weapon each.

Finally, Deadpool chuckled. “Man, you are good! But I have bad news!”

He brought his right katana forward and sliced my left arm off at the elbow, leaving the green limb bouncing across the floor. “I am not left-handed!”

I stared at Deadpool, then at my missing arm. “I’m not left-handed either. You cut it off!”

He laughed, swiping both blades forward. I rolled out of the way, grabbed my left arm off the floor, then came back to my feet and leaned back out of the way of another slice when I came back to my feet. I stumbled, stopped my fall with my right foot, and reached out my hand to grab his right wrist.

“Uh oh.”

“RAAAAGH!” I lifted him off the ground, then smashed him into a pillar, dust falling from the ceiling as bones cracked. Then I swung him up, then down into the floor, the mall’s ceramic floor shattering under him. I let him go and got ready to punch him in the face, only to cross my eyes when I found a flamethrower pointed at my face.

“Gotta say, it’s ice to meet you!” he said with a chuckle.

My head ignited. I stumbled back, grumbling as the front my plant body burned under the hail of flames.

“Damn, that’s the wrong pun,” he hummed, watching with a healing broken back from the floor as I wiped away the flames that had ignited across me. “Can I try again?”

“No. But then, life is unfire that way,” I raised my hand and blew up the flamethrower with a blast of flame, the explosion sending him flying.

“Ow!” he bounced off the ground, then landed inside a Mediterranean grill restaurant on the other side of the food court. “Owwwww. Everything smells like burnt meat. Is that me? Or does this place have terrible standards?”

A bunch of vines wrapped around him.

“Yeep!?” Deadpool was soon covered in layer after layer of thick plants, pulled to hang upside down. I walked forward until we were face to face.

“...You have beautiful eyes,” he said at last.

“They’re more Swampfire’s eyes than they are mine,” I sighed. “Wade Wilson. Why are you doing this man? You can break the fourth wall. You know that if you want money, Tony will pay you. You know if you want screen time, you literally just need to show up!”

“But where is the fun in that!” he laughed, swinging back and forth in his bonds. “Where’s the action, the adventure, the chance of getting tentacled! By the way, my safe word is ‘cupcakeviolater’.”

“And mine is ‘rune’. Seriously. In the movies you had a whole revenge plot thing. What is going on here?”

“Oh, I still have revenge on my mind,” Wade’s mask narrowed it’s eyes. “But it isn’t going to happen without the right toys! So, when a bald-headed asshole showed up and said ‘give an honest shot at killing the protag and I’ll give you a cool teleport belt’ of course I said yes!”

“Teleport belt!?”

“Surprise!” Deadpool shuddered in the grasp of my vines. I reached out for his waist, ready to rip him in half if I had to. “Mut()*)([email protected]!”

I reeled back, my head exploding in pain. I screamed, dropping to my knees. The pain grew as I stared at Wade. He glowed in the grasp of my vines.

“Wait, I just realized this might hurt. Is this gonna, FUCK ME, THAT COCKSUCKER IS A BITCH, OWOWOWOWOWOWWWWWW-!!!”

He flickered like tv static. I was fairly certain I saw his body go inside out, then inverted, then something that made my head even worse, before he disappeared in a flash of blue light.

“...That still counts as me winning,” I grumbled, still gripping my head.

“I cannot find the individual you called Wade Wilson anywhere in your immediate area,” Jarvis said, worried. “It seems Strucker gave him an experimental version of some refined form of the Phase Harmonic Teleportation Device.”

“The Fishhook?” I growled. “Damnit. Okay. That’s horrible. Jarvis, how are Luke and Jessica?”

“Victorious. As is Mr. Stark.”

“Tony?” my headache was gone, but worry was now filling me instead. “What is going on!?”

“Hydra has initiated worldwide attacks,” Jarvis said. “BRIDGE is currently collecting as much data as they can.”

“Did they find out about the mission? Is Nat okay?” she was the coordinator for the mission, the Avengers and BRIDGE lead on everything.

“Black Widow is currently headed to the infirmary to help Ruby Hale.”

“The fuck happened to Ruby!?”

“It may be best if you return to the tower while I inform you of the current issues facing us.”

I tapped the Omnitrix, shifting from Swampfire to Fasttrack. In a blur of motion, I got moving, scowling.

Fucking Hydra. This bullshit needed to stop.