Chapter 555

"Hey, buddy. Got a light?"

The main control room wasn’t the highest point in the shipyard, but it offered a decent view. From there, Evenson could see most of the battlefield below.

He was sprawled against the railing, one hand holding his phone while he watched the chaos unfold.

Then he pulled a cigarette from his pocket.

He reached around for a lighter.

Nothing.

Of course.

Evenson had a bad habit of forgetting lighters. Being a Warlock meant he always had access to fire, after all. Why carry around a lighter when you could simply conjure flames?

Usually, he’d just light the cigarette himself.

This time, however, he reached down and grabbed an arm from the nearby Extremis soldier.

He tapped the cigarette against one of the man’s fingers.

A tiny orange ember appeared.

Evenson took a drag, exhaled a plume of smoke, then casually tossed the arm aside.

At his feet lay an Extremis soldier burned almost completely black.

He wasn’t technically a corpse.

Not yet.

Most of his body had been carbonized, green smoke curling from the ruined flesh. Only a few limbs remained relatively intact. The hand Evenson had just used as a lighter was one of them, glowing with the characteristic orange-red heat of Extremis.

The enhancements had given the man enough physical resilience to survive injuries that should have killed him instantly.

Unfortunately for him, they had also activated his regenerative abilities.

Which meant the fel magic still clinging to his body was slowly burning through the last scraps of his life.

It was going to be a long, painful death.

Evenson glanced down at him.

You could’ve just stayed downstairs and died with your friends.

Why’d you have to jump up here?

Evenson believed strongly in leaving yourself an escape route.

If you were going to sneak into an enemy stronghold, you needed a contingency plan in case the sneaking failed.

Especially when your particular brand of stealth was more "budget Rogue" than professional infiltration.

Before entering the shipyard, Evenson had spent half an hour preparing a spell.

He had summoned an Infernal.

But he hadn’t actually brought it into the world.

Instead, he had left the Infernal waiting at the edge of reality, ready to be called in if things went wrong.

It was an emergency measure.

If the infiltration succeeded, he could simply leave the Infernal where it was.

Maybe even get his mana’s worth out of the deal.

Then Tony Stark called.

Tony’s overwhelming survival instinct had forced Evenson to alter the plan.

And now his expensive contingency had been spent.

The first twenty Extremis soldiers to reach him had been directly underneath the descending Infernal.

Most of them died on impact.

Only one had survived.

Whether that made him lucky or unlucky was difficult to say.

At the very last moment before the Infernal struck, the man had instinctively thrown himself forward with every ounce of strength he possessed.

It saved him from being reduced to ash.

Unfortunately, his desperate leap had sent him straight toward Evenson.

Neither man had really understood what was happening until the Infernal’s fel flames washed over him.

And that was how he’d ended up here.

Evenson dropped the cigarette butt over the railing and looked down at the dying man.

"Clearly, you’ve never seen a horror movie."

The Extremis soldier barely twitched.

"When Death comes knocking, you don’t run. You accept your fate."

Evenson sighed.

"Otherwise, things just get worse."

Perhaps the man understood him.

Perhaps he simply didn’t have the strength left to resist.

Either way, the Extremis soldier finally stopped fighting and breathed his last.

Or maybe Evenson’s commentary had finished the job.

"All right."

Evenson pulled out his phone.

"Looks like you’re the ones."

He swiped across the screen.

There was something very important he needed to do.

And as it happened, he’d just noticed several particularly clever people down on the battlefield.

The Infernal’s arrival had been impossible to miss.

Its descent had made enough noise to attract everyone’s attention. Those who arrived afterward quickly spotted the monster climbing out of the impact crater, its entire body wreathed in green fel flames.

They immediately understood what the biggest threat on the battlefield was.

Unfortunately, an Infernal wasn’t exactly an easy opponent.

This was a Legion war machine capable of throwing wild punches, ripping into opponents with brutal strength, and even trading blows with Asgard’s ultimate weapon, the Destroyer.

If the Destroyer were operating at full capacity, the Infernal obviously wouldn’t stand a chance.

But in certain respects, the Infernal was actually more frightening.

The Destroyer’s armor could at least be approached.

Get close enough and, if you were suicidal enough, you could try punching it.

An Infernal was different.

Its entire body was wrapped in fel fire.

Punching it meant setting yourself on fire.

The Extremis soldiers weren’t suicidal insects, however.

They had no intention of throwing themselves directly into the flames.

Instead, they quickly grabbed whatever weapons they could find.

Steel rods.

Heavy metal plates.

Anything they could swing.

They attacked the Infernal from every direction.

The results were disappointing.

The instant those weapons touched the Infernal’s body, they vaporized.

Not damaged.

Not broken.

Vaporized.

The Infernal’s counterattacks were considerably more effective.

One stomp could crush a soldier.

A pair of hands could seize two more and tear them apart.

And every so often, the Infernal would curl itself back into its meteor form and roll straight through the battlefield.

That was when things became truly ugly.

If the Extremis soldiers hadn’t been quick enough to scatter, the Infernal would have flattened them into a pile of very unfortunate human pancakes.

Burned ones.

Evenson watched the fight with growing interest.

Something strange was happening.

The mass-produced Infernal he’d summoned was one of the Burning Legion’s war constructs. Its core source of power was fel energy.

Normally, once an Infernal was summoned from the Twisting Nether and began fighting, that energy would gradually run out.

Eventually, the Infernal would collapse into nothing more than a pile of stone.

Based on his previous experience, Evenson remembered that they could only remain active for roughly five minutes.

But this Infernal wasn’t behaving normally.

Every time it killed an Extremis soldier, whether by crushing them beneath its feet or tearing them apart with its hands, its dwindling fel energy was replenished.

Evenson’s eyes narrowed.

Was it converting the lives of its victims into fel energy?

If so, as long as it remained in the middle of a massacre, it could keep fighting indefinitely unless someone actually destroyed its body.

Evenson couldn’t help but admire the efficiency.

That’s the Burning Legion for you.

Turn killing into fuel.

By now, everyone on the battlefield had realized how badly the situation had shifted.

The Extremis soldiers were vastly stronger than ordinary humans.

They might even have possessed a certain pride in their own strength.

But none of them had expected to fight something like this.

A monster made of living stone.

A monster covered in fel fire.

A monster that became stronger the more people it killed.

An ordinary human would have run the moment they saw something like that.

The fact that these men had been brave enough to fight it at all was already impressive.

So when several of the smarter Extremis soldiers began slowly withdrawing from the battlefield, nobody could blame them.

They moved carefully.

They kept their distance.

They looked for an opening.

Then they ran.

They hadn’t made it very far.

Boom!

Their bodies suddenly overloaded.

Orange light erupted from within them.

Five explosions tore through the battlefield.

Evenson watched the blasts fade.

Then he counted.

"One. Two. Three. Four. Five..."

He nodded.

"Five. That should be enough."

He looked down at his phone.

His expression became solemn.

His eyes widened.

His finger hovered over the screen.

Then, with all the tension of a gambler revealing his final card, he tapped.

A moment later, Evenson’s face collapsed.

"You’re kidding me!"

He stared at the result in disbelief.

"Another one-star?!"

His voice echoed through the shipyard.

"I sacrificed five orange-glowing bastards to the heavens!"

He shook the phone furiously.

"Couldn’t you at least give me an SSR?!"

He stared at the screen one final time.

"Garbage game. I’ve wasted my youth on this thing!"

...