TGS - #62

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Sokovia [November 2014]

–Jack Sullivan–

After a quick commute straight to the castle that served as Stucker's base of operations, they found themselves in front of what could only be called a veritable fortress. He could spy Chitauri derived weaponry on all the patrolling soldiers.

Just like the ones he remembered, the soldiers had enhanced guns that would send out energy bullets and some even had jetpacks that might help them fly with ease.

Welp, it was not as if something like that was going to help them at all. Still, he didn't know if the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were born into this reality or not, though he had a feeling that the birth of Scarlet Witch could not really be stopped, owing to her multiversal nature.

"Guys, be careful. I am sensing some enhanced presence in the Castle as well as increased energy weaponry presence in the castle," He didn't really feel anything because he did not have any spell under his belt that could give him the necessary information but they didn't know it and it was the best way to warn them about the possibility of enhanced being on the field without tipping off his foreknowledge of the entire event.

He couldn't believe he had forgotten about the whole sceptre being stolen by HYDRA and being used to birth the Scarlet Witch of this reality.

"Great. Like we didn't have enough problems as is," Tony snarked through his suit, his repulsors whine becoming more and more audible as he probably prepared to take off and lay siege to the building.

"Wait! We need to make sure that the enhanced don't hightail it out of here, with Baron Strukcer, without even putting up a fight," He said to the team.

"You need to remain hidden until the mastermind behind the operation reveals himself. If they see you coming, they might just run away or hide because they knew they wouldn't be able to defeat you," Captain's analytical mind came in clutch this time as he nodded in realistion.

"Oh boo hoo, so they think you are the hot shot and I am not?" Tony's voice reverbed in the barrier as he nodded at Captain, the floor of the barrier unfurling itself to reveal multiple barriers.

His impeccable control over his powers meant that the Avengers probably felt like they were passing through multiple soft fluffy layers as they were dropped straight on top of one of the watchtowers.

Clint was grabbed by Tony who simply deposited him on top of the tallest building he could find. Hawkeye was the most dangerous from a distance, and especially now since he was now armed with functionally unlimited explosive arrows. 

He was already taking a risk revealing this much, so he didn't add any more functionality in the quiver he had handed over to Barton.

The Captain simply absorbed the shock by using his Shield, a slightly dented shield, but a Vibranium shield nonetheless, and then simply began hammering every single soldier he could see in sight.

Romanoff, even before landing on top of the tower, was making generous use of her now explosive stingers and was taking out as many soldiers as she could. Her eyes widened as one of the bullets passed through two tanks before exploding, creating a much bigger explosion to take out both the tanks at the same time.

He still remained hidden, waiting for Pietro to arrive on the battlefield. Once he captures him, Wanda would come to him on her own, assuming that they still existed here, that is. He didn't know if Wanda could already access her magic and he blamed himself for not learning more sensing spells because if it was any other half decent Master here, they could have easily told him if they had detected traces of foreign magics being used.

That was part of the training as it helped every Master to detect magics other than dimensional magic being used, like Demonic Magic, Hell Magic, Dark Magic, and…Chaos Magic.

No sooner did the word enter his mind, his vision snapped to the topmost tower of the Castle, the one that Tony just bounced off of, cursing "Shit!" as the suit had to deal with the violent impact, no doubt jostling the pilot inside.

"Language!" 

He suppressed the laughter that threatened to bubble out of him as Captain somehow managed to chide Tony Stark, Billionaire extraordinaire for cursing in the middle of a battlefield.

Truly, things stayed the same even as he tried to divert them from their intended path.

Even as his thoughts continued to wander, his gaze never strayed from that one point in the balcony on the topmost point of the castle, even as his shots continued to be fired from both sides, the explosions lighting up part of his vision.

Slowly, his vision sharpened as part of the shadow of that area melded, to reveal two glowing red eyes. His eyes widened as Wanda Maximoff appeared in front of him, but not the Wanda he expected her to be.

No, this looked as if she was a fully realised Wanda staring at him. Wanda somehow smirked at him before disappearing from his view with a red shimmer. At the same time, his eyes widened, a chill running down his spine as he realised something. 

The Silence.

It was completely silent, all around him, even as he watched multiple explosions light up the area around the castle and the soldiers defending it, he couldn't hear a single thing.

"Surprised?" A ghostly voice entered his ears, causing him to just manifest a barrier around him and expand it greatly.

He whirled around to see only a rapidly disappearing thin red mist. The mist being the only sign of Wanda doing something, he promptly summoned hundreds of barriers and rained them on the mist and all the area around it.

Alas, the barriers passed through the mist, revealing nothing. His vision spun all around him, as he secured the sling ring with one of his barriers. Frustrated with his failure in locating her, he roared and simply slammed his hands down on the ground, creating an omnidirectional wave of barriers that spread apart, covering a huge area around him.

'There', he thought to himself as he felt some disturbance using his barriers. He covered himself in another layer of barriers before pouncing on the location, cratering the ground in the mirror dimension but all he could see on the ground was a single rock.

No, not a rock, he realised as he bent and gingerly picked it up, or rather picked the entire ground on top of which the pendant was on, using his barriers and bringing it closer. Carefully, he extended his barriers and flung the pendant open, taking a physical step back just in case.

He could never be more careful with something associated with the Scarlet Witch. She was prophesied to either destroy the Universe or something.

He looked around, a sword made up of his barriers appearing in his hand as the sound of laughter entered his ears. He looked around, trying to spot the Witch but he could not find anything.

If he was right, and he most probably was, this Wanda was not the Wanda native to his universe. She was someone else, someone much more dangerous. He could not afford to tangle with a semi realised Scarlet Witch.

He looked around, even as the laughter subsided. He didn't drop his guard down for even a moment as the area around him continued to stay the same. When Wanda didn't appear for a moment longer, he simply kept his barriers up and opened a portal back to the real world.

The scene that greeted him was one of complete chaos. The Castle, the one that looked intact, like the one in the movies was gone, no, not gone but it was as if it never existed in the first place.

In the place of that castle, nothing remained but a burning building. Fire that looked red.

He dropped down to the ground, right in front of the assembled Avengers. He spied through the corner of his eyes and aside from singe marks on Tony's suit, there were no significant injuries on any of the Avengers.

"What the…" He muttered as the very ground around them began to wither, the green giving way to dried yellow and then straight to blood red. He acted instantly, scooping up all the Avengers, and then watched as the ground around the Castle erupted with red lights, cracking the very land the castle was built upon.

Then, as if the very Earth had turned into a huge maw, the ground opened up and completely swallowed up whatever was left of the castle, leaving no traces of the once massive HYDRA base.

"Stark?" He asked the one person who could give him more information than he could find on his own.

"What? Don't look at me. The sensors still show me that the ground in front of me is completely normal, and you know, not straight from hell, the castle swallowing kind," Tony said, trying to act nonchalant but the tremors in his voice were unmistakable.

Then, the comms crackled back to life as Bruce's voice filtered through.

"zzz….Gu…Guys…GUYS, what is happening there?" Bruce's anxious voice came through the earpiece as he created a portal straight to the Avengers Tower.

"I'll bring the Quinjet, you guys go on ahead. I have some work to do," he said before setting down on the land, his barriers covering him completely. He half expected the ground to begin attacking him but nothing of the sort happened.

He closed the portal when he felt all the Avengers going through to the other side. 

He had to make sure that the locals were not pulled into this mess. Something terrible has happened and he had to make sure that this did not end up pulling their entire universe into the grinder.

From what he remembered, Wanda doing these Multiversal jumps was the reason why the Universes had begun collapsing, from the strain of maintaining a link between two universes. If he didn't want his universe to become another casualty in Wanda's quest to find her children, he had to stop her.

Now, how would he go about doing that? He wondered to himself as a series of huge barriers manifested around the entire clearing of the red land, embedding themselves deep into the land, connecting from all ends, before he pulled.

The entire land mass, the size of the Castle and its surroundings, shuddered for a moment before miles of land were simply lifted into the air. The strain was nothing compared to a Helicarrier and he was even stronger than when he had to do that the first time.

As he had expected, the land beneath the red land was not corrupted, at least not completely, that is. He could not sense the sceptre at all, so that was another disaster in the making, nor could he sense any living being.

She really wiped off the entire place from the map. Opening the biggest portal he could, he simply dumped all that land into the Mirror dimension, waiting to take advice from the Ancient one on how to properly dispose of Chaos Energy tainted objects.

He then created another portal, his eyebrow raising in disbelief when the portal simply fizzled out instead of creating a doorway straight to Kamar Taj. he was one of the few that could create portals straight into Kamar Taj without authorisation. That just meant that a huge alarm would not be raised if an errant portal was opened in the middle of Kamar Taj.

He tried to make a portal to the city, only for that to fizzle out as well.

Okay, this was bad, he rose into the air, his form covered in a cone shape as he simply rocketed towards the direction of Kamar Taj. In the meantime, he tried to open one around the country, in the mountains nearby, and more.

And yet, every single time, his portals fizzled out. He looked closer at the sling ring, and was astonished to find a single small line on one of the characters of the ring.

"When did she?" he asked himself as he rocketed towards Kamar Taj, breaking all his past records, his barriers partially burning up due to the sheer speed.

Somehow, despite all the barriers and caution that he maintained against her, Wanda managed to render his sling ring useless.

But why did it not interfere when he sent the Avengers to Stark Tower?

"HOLY SHIT!" He shouted as he turned around, heading straight up, before heading straight down to the landmass he recognised, New York coming into view.

"SHIT SHIT SHIT!" he muttered as he came down like a comet into the city of New York, his heart hammering in his chest as he hopped what he feared did not come to pass. That he did not just send the weakest mystical members of the Avengers into a portal that was not created by him.

His burning form came to an abrupt halt as he found himself standing in front of the Avengers but….

His heart sank as he took in all the blank looks on their faces. Wanda had gotten to them, he realised with a heavy heart.

Without hesitation, Tony aimed his suit at him and fired a volley of repulsor blasts, coming straight from his suit, as Captain threw his shield at him which he simply caught and threw it into the building.

The arrows and the bullets did little damage to his barrier, as he simply created a series of barriers around each one of them and then knocked them out.

"Jarvis?" he asked out loud, fearing the worst.

"...Jarvis? Jarvis? Someone?"

"...bzz….zzz…Mr.Sulliv-Sullivan?" The weak voice of Jarvis came through one of the broken speakers embedded into the ceiling.

"Yes! Jarvis, what the fuck happened here?" He snapped as he collected all the Avengers and laid them down in front of him, determined to not let them out of his sight even for a second.

How could Wanda have reached this place so soon and then taken everyone down?

What about Bruce?

His eyes widened as he simply flooded the tower with his barriers, his barriers not finding any trace of another living being in the Tower, well, aside from Jarvis.

"...All I remember was red…bzz….zzz," The line went dead as Jarvis' weak voice fizzled out.

"Shit…" He muttered as he looked at the defeated Avengers and the missing Hulk.

God, things had turned from bad to so much worse than he expected them to be.

He levitated the Avengers and just began floating towards the Sanctum, when in the distance, a huge explosion rang out, an explosion that gave out red flames…..

Word Count - 2516

A/N - Shit just got real. What was Wanda doing here?

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