12. Avengers 1

"Being the lone human amongst gods is both a mark of pride and badge of weakness" Clint had always said.

It meant you knew that simply through skill, practice, a strict diet and buckets of effort you were able to stand shoulder to shoulder with outright super-humans. But you also knew that if you ever failed, if you ever gave less than your absolute best then people would wake up and wonder why a vanilla human with a bow and arrow was part of the Avengers.

So you couldn't fail. You could never allow yourself to miss a shot. You had to train until you were ragged and then train some more. If you made a mistake you passed it off as intentional and then trained until you never made it again. That was Clint's motto and given his long and successful career as a superhero Kate supposed that he must have been onto something.

That need to be the best of the best had made Clint Barton a hero, it had made him Hawkeye. And Kate Bishop, now Hawkeye, now an Avenger, was a bit surprised that she didn't feel the same kind of perpetual pressure Clint had when he stood among the Avengers.

Oh, Thor made her feel small sometimes. When the Goddess of freaking Thunder was on your team it was hard not to feel outclassed. And yeah she couldn't shrink or grow like Scott, make sound into a weapon like Songbird or give hardened criminals nightmares like Robbie. But she was... comfortable in the Avengers.

She didn't have the same need to succeed that Clint had. Perhaps it was due to her growing up in a world where Hawkeye could remain in the Avengers or a result of her being a long standing member of the Young Avengers before joining the regular team.

Whatever the reason the new Hawkeye was confident in her abilities. Which was why she was picking off crazed cyborg killers with a steady hand and faint smile.

From her rooftop perch Hawkeye could see the battlefield. A relatively small town had become a warzone with fires burning and the sound of explosions echoing in the distance. The primary threats were a bunch of scared people who had tried to use leftover Ultron tech and paid the price. There was also a supervillain running around causing chaos as he tried to evade advanced gunfire.

With the news that Canada had been taken over in the span of a single day there had been widespread chaos and confusion across America. In particular those towns on or near the border who were either declaring for the new regime or screaming for the US to provide assurances they weren't about to be conquered. Some people rightfully concerned that border and area near it was about to become a warzone had fled one way or the other while a percentage had hunkered down and fortified their homes.

The current mess was a result of the second category. Some snake oil black market weapons dealer had come up with the idea of selling partially reactivated Ultron tech based weapons to the scared people. When a supervillain, some eco-nut called Brother Nature, had passed through the town making for the Canadian border the locals had activated their new weapons and promptly been forcibly converted into homicidal cyborgs.

Songbird was trying to deal with Brother Nature, having beaten the idiot back in her Thunderbolt days, while Ghost Rider helped, as his powers were a touch too destructive for use against mind controlled civilians.

Which left Hawkeye as the token not enhanced human alongside Ant-Man and Thor. Scott Lang and the new female Thor were both proving one hell of a show. Ant-Man had grown to giant size and was swatting at a number of flying cyborgs who harried him, creating a scene straight out of King Kong. Thor meanwhile was at the center of a swarm of gleaming chrome bodies and having the time of her life, laughing as she beat back the horde with fists and divine hammer.

Meanwhile Kate alternated between supporting her teammates with well placed arrows and defending her own position. Idly she noted that one of the Ultronized (Scott's name's for them and dear god had Cassie's dad always been this much of a dork?) was trying to scale the building to get at her. Rather than waste an arrow she threw a stun grenade to its face and then got back to work.

"Lasers! They've got lasers!" Ant-Man boomed.

The Ultronized had indeed developed laser weapons as part of their continuing evolution/adaptation which they were happily using to blast at the hard to miss target that was Ant-Man. Scott's size and the speed of the shots meant he couldn't dodge the stream of attacks and Kate was treated to several curse words booming from massive lungs. Seeing the danger Thor lept into the air and used her hammer and body to shield her teammate from the barrage of attacks.

Of course this meant that the mass of Ultronized she had been fighting were free to turn their shiny new laser cannons on Kate's rooftop. Kate barely had enough time to fire a grappling line and jump before the building she had been standing on collapsed under the weight of fire being directed at it.

She landed hard, rolled and came up swinging as some of the chrome and flesh monsters charged her. "This would be so much easier if we didn't have to worry about hurting the converted", Kate mused even as she axe kicked an oncoming cyborg into the dirt. One big Lighting strike from Thor would have made the situation much more manageable. But these were innocent people who might still be saved so that kind of destructive force was to be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

There came a sound like a roar and the flaming impossibility of Robbie's "Hell Charger" hurtled into the town. Songbird was flying overhead and she quickly joined the fun battering the Ultronized with constructs of distilled sound.

The hellfire powered car screamed to a stop and the unnatural sight of the Ghost Rider stepped out a woman, who Kate recognized from pictures as the arms-dealer who had started this mess, being forcibly yanked along with.

"Now." hissed the charcoal and burning gravel voice of the Ghost Rider.

"R-right" the petrified arms-dealer stammered as the cyborgs turned glowing optics towards them. "All unit's shut down and disengage: Authorization Code: Mechanical-Calvin-Calvary-Aphrodite!"

As one the cyborgs froze and dropped, the shiny metal attachments falling from them like dead skin. And while it took a bit of quick maneuvering on the part of Ant-Man, Songbird and Thor to catch the fliers before they crashed into the ground they thankfully managed to. While pale, bruised and largely unconscious the townspeople appeared to be alive.

"Brother Nature's tied up and out cold. We found her outside the town limits." Songbird explained. "It seems the person who provided her with the weapons knew what would happen when they were activated and wanted first hand reports on how things developed."

"Does she know who was behind this?" Scott asked having shrunk down to human scale. "I'd believe just about anything of that creep Doom but this seems a little out of character for him and what little we've heard out of Canada points to magic being this new crazy dictator's focus."

"She doesn't know, any contact was through proxies and dead drops and trust me Ghost Rider was persuasive so we can be sure of that." Songbird said. "Whoever it was had the know-how to tinker with Ultron tech, money to throw around liberally and a complete lack of sanity to activate the stuff like this."

"So any of half a hundred suspects then." Kate dryly commented.

Never a dull day in the Avengers. Still she wouldn't trade it for the world.