Marvel: The Awakened One

In the end, Hawk suppressed the burning urge inside him and chose not to join the chaos on the main front in Manhattan.

The Leviathan, a biomechanical war machine belonging to the Chitauri, was an impossibly massive creature, its entire body plated in thick, alloyed armor as it roared out of the portal.

Leaving aside the question of whether he could even hurt the thing, the sheer size difference was like comparing an ant to a mountain.

Besides.

If he had his Saint Armor, maybe he would have considered crashing the party.

But for now, it was better to pass.

Queens had more than enough Chitauri swarming around. There was no need to rush off to Manhattan.

That was the original Avengers’ battlefield, not his.

He was stronger now.

But that was all. He was just stronger.

Awakening his Cosmo was just the beginning, the starting point.

It wasn’t the destination, nor the end of his journey.

So...

Hawk went nowhere. He didn’t even go on the offensive. Instead, he found a spot right in front of his ruined home, hunkering down to wait for the inevitable. He was an angler waiting for the fish to bite, knowing the Chitauri in the area would get the message about their fallen comrades and come looking for payback.

This was a hell of a lot easier than chasing them down himself.

After all, the Chitauri could fly. He couldn’t.

Most importantly.

His apartment building was in a poor neighborhood.

What does that mean, exactly?

Let’s just say, it took an ambulance at least half an hour to get there after a 911 call. In a wealthy Manhattan neighborhood, the response time was three minutes, tops.

The same went for surveillance.

In the rich parts of town, there was probably a dedicated camera pointed at every single trash can in every alley. Here, there weren’t even cameras on the main streets.

And even if there were, they wouldn’t last a day before some local kids figured out how to strip them for parts.

Soon.

Hiding in the shadows, Hawk saw them. Two Chitauri soldiers on flyers, drawn by the death signals of their allies, streaked through the sky nearby.

Hawk’s eyes lit up.

....

Two minutes later.

Thump.

Thump.

On the ruins of the apartment building, two more ugly corpses joined the two Hawk had already arranged neatly, almost as if for display.

Sensing the deaths of their pilots, the two now-empty flyers automatically turned and flew off in a single direction.

Hawk watched them go, then silently retreated back into the shadows.

A minute later.

Detecting a sharp spike in Chitauri casualties in Queens, a signal was broadcast down from the command ship lurking within the wormhole above Manhattan.

The next moment.

A nearby squad of Chitauri soldiers—who had been unleashing hell, screeching with glee as they destroyed buildings, cars, and people—all stopped.

They received the new signal and immediately changed course, converging on the source of the silent alarms now ringing out across Jackson Heights.

They had been ordered to engage.

The Chitauri squad shrieked as they formed up behind their leader. He was taller and more heavily built than the others; even his flyer looked more menacing. He led them over the neighborhood and into the sky above the destroyed street.

Instantly.

They saw them: the broken bodies of their four comrades, laid out in a neat row on the rubble of the apartment building.

”Skeee-keee-keee!”

”Hsssss-sss.”

The Chitauri captain and his six soldiers seemed to freeze in mid-air at the sight of their dead.

A second later.

As if they’d received new orders, they came back online. The engines of their flyers roared back to life.

In seconds, the captain and his soldiers spread out, forming a circle in the sky above the street. Then, with cold, emotionless eyes like reptiles, they squeezed the triggers on their flyers’ energy cannons without hesitation.

In an instant—

A storm of energy blasts rained down, a net of pure destruction covering the entire street block in a carpet bombing run.

BOOOOOM!

BOOOOOM!

BOOOOOM!

....

The buildings on the street exploded. The asphalt buckled and cracked. The cars still on the road detonated in secondary fireballs.

Hovering in their circle, the Chitauri fired relentlessly, their expressions blank, their claws locked on the triggers like machines. They didn’t stop until the entire block was choked with smoke and fire, until their flyers’ energy cells were completely depleted, and until their captain finally ceased his assault. Only then, like a perfectly synchronized machine, did they all release their triggers at once.

The entire block was now nothing but a smoldering ruin.

Crumbling skeletons of old apartment buildings.

Burning cars that occasionally popped and exploded.

The place now looked more war-torn than any battlefield.

The Chitauri captain, still seated on his flyer, scanned the silent, lifeless ruins with his slightly larger, green-bead eyes. Satisfied, he turned away, having received his next orders to withdraw.

Under such a powerful and overwhelming barrage, no life form could have possibly survived.

And so...

The Chitauri mothership, monitoring through the soldiers’ eyes, issued the new directive to the captain.

As the captain turned, his six soldiers began to follow, banking their flyers to leave.

But just as they turned their backs, one of the soldiers on its flyer suddenly arched backward violently, its body bending like a cooked shrimp. With a sickening squelch, its armored chest exploded from the inside out.

The next second.

One, two, three, four, five.

Before the remaining soldiers could even react, they all suffered the exact same fate.

The moment they turned their backs to the street, their chests detonated, leaving a fist-sized hole clean through their torsos.

The wounds were ripped from back to front, as if they had each been punched straight through the spine.

Almost in perfect sync with the six soldiers’ chests exploding, six thunderous sonic booms finally caught up, tearing through the air.

BOOM!

BOOM!

The Chitauri captain, who had been turning just as his six squad mates were obliterated, heard the sonic booms rip past his ears. His head snapped up mechanically. Without a shred of hesitation, he threw himself sideways, leaping from his flyer.

The next instant.

His custom, menacing-looking flyer, now empty, was struck by something unseen and vaporized in a massive explosion.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!