Chapter Four: Suddenly, Squid.
With each pass of the helicopter, the swarm shifted and surged, its course bent sideways as it folded in on itself to consume the unfortunate dead. Tony leaned out of the open hatch, knocking his faceplate down, and mapped the swarm's dynamic again.
He had calculated that ten-foot paylines on the charges, just under the blast radius in water, would do the most damage to the 30-foot deep swarm. Any deeper and they wouldn't kill the top layer. The barrels of shark-bait he would dump in the middle of the circle of mines. It would be a kill-zone four hundred feet wide, but even then, he doubted they'd get them all and there was no guarantee that the luminous parasites would die anyway.
He growled off-air and pulled back into the hold to finish the bomb on the bait barrel itself.
"Where do you want us, Stark?" Hawkeye asked over the radio and Tony dropped his faceplate; they were half a minute out.
"There." He tagged a point on the far west of the swarm, "Kill as many as you can, no large ordinance until the first mines have gone off, and the whole thing will shift towards you."
"Copy; keep them away from the ship. Rogers, you got the machine gun, I'll take the wing mounts." He tuned out their chatter, leaning out again to watch them take position. The swarm heaved as their three guns started flashing.
"Alright, co-pilots! Round one; drop the mines. Any last orders, Doc?" he asked Bruce as the helicopters, freed up by the arrival of the quinjet, pulled up from strafing runs and circled. He heaved the barrel of shark-bait to the hatch and gave the co-pilot he was riding with a little wave before dropping out of the helicopter. He powered up and jetted west once he was clear, dropping the barrel and ripping its lid off as it fell. The three helicopters flew a circle around his position, the makeshift charges dropping every three seconds, give or take.
"Cease fire, Hawkeye! Pull up!" He barked as the sea below bled red and brown and wow that stuff stank. The quinjet and his air support pulled away from the killzone, their radio a tense silence as every one watched the swarm shift uncertainly. Three, four long seconds and then it surged, the water boiling with light.
"Hold it... hold..." Hawkeye murmured; Tony was trusting the man's eyes on this one, and his hand hovered over the remote detonator taped to his thigh armour, flipping off the cover. "Now!"
He pushed the button and the world went green.
The spray was thrown up hundreds of feet in a ring four hundred feet across and the concussion blast from the barrel at the centre met with the shockwave from the perimeter and god help anything in between. Water shot into the air, splattering across the suit and he had to fling an arm out to knock the carcass of a crustacean the size of his torso away. The circle below went dark and the straggling edges were stunned, the light dim and still.
Tony gave a small, breathless laugh, triumph bubbling in his chest, as the blasted water started falling like rain. A mile north east, the cruise liner rocked on the blast wave and there were cheers over the radio.
"Wohoo! Yeah, that wasn't so bad." Tony remarked, repositioning his limbs to power towards the quinjet. Bruce was standing at the back with his hand on the ramp controls as it lowered and tony slowed to come in gently. Natasha was a damn fine pilot and it was a steady target.
It was the light, the god-damn green glow, that warned him. Too late, too, too late, as it lit up the underside of the jet and a tentacle the size of a tree trunk and four times as long struck the side. Bruce hung in space for a moment, grip on the safety webbing jerked loose as the jet was suddenly not where it had been. Then, the shock on his face shifted into anger, anger into rage and by the time he struck the water fifty feet below he was very, very green. Tony had no time to change direction, no time to worry whether the Hulk could even swim, before he blasted into the tentacle with a smack like a wet towel hitting a tiled wall.
The impact flung it away from the jet, bending the appendage in half around the strike point and sending its long tip whipping wildly through the air, but the right-hand rotor was already stuttering, its broken fuel line and sparking control systems combining in a burst of smoke and flame.
"Pull up! EVERY ONE, GET AWAY FROM THE WATER!" He bellowed on an open channel. Tony's heart lurched sickeningly as he tore away from the monstrous suckers trying to curl around him; the sudden jolt of adrenalin made his chest ache.
"Shit, BANNER!? Iron Man? REPORT!" Steve was yelling, leaning out of the back of the jet, arm tangled in the webbing.
"Bigger company than shrimps, Bruce Hulked out before he hit the water, right engine is on fire," He barked, hauling ass up and away from the water. There was a round of swearing and the fire sputtered out as someone cut the fuel valves in the jet; it started to lurch to the side ominously. He was there before it could drop more than a few feet, bracing his shoulders against the underside of the propeller housing and locking his legs, trying to match the power output of the repulsors to that of the engine opposite.
"JARVIS, get into the navigation system. Widow; he'll match what the engine would have done, just... fly straight." He growled between clenched teeth, breathing hard. A snatch of Hulks voice from below went a long way towards reassuring him, but it was only a snatch before the sound of churning engines, white water and gunfire took over.
"Copy that. The liner got a heli-pad?" She asked and a readout appeared on the HUD of what the engine should be doing.
"Would a mini-golf course do?" He asked, snappy and watching for more tentacles to rise from the churning green sea.
"Close enough. Cap, get on the radio with the liner; clear the deck."
Tony narrowed his eyes as bits of the chaos beneath him begun to splinter off, bullets of luminescence headed for the civilian ship. "Problem; the shoal's lost cohesion; the boat's going to come under attack any minute." He reported succinctly, swearing under his breath.
"The crew are on it," Captain America's voice echoed through the Avenger's private line, "it looks like isolated inpiduals; we should be able to hold them off. We being Romanov and I. Stark, once we're down, get Hawkeye up in one of the helicopters, and go after the... thing. What is that?"
"You mean the giant tentacles playing tennis with Bruce? 'm gonna go with squid. Definitely squid." Tony said, training a camera over his shoulder and zooming in, in an attempt to get a bead on the Hulk's status.
"...Great. just... peachy."
They got the quinjet down with no casualties beyond the horrible quaint mini-golf windmill and they tumbled out to the deck. Tony heaved Clint back up with very little warning, while the Cap and Natasha ordered the unarmed crew below deck, against their feeble protests.
"Heavy-Hitter; open the hatch, I've got something for you." He radioed ahead to the lead helicopter and it pulled up out of its attack run, picking off as many stray creatures as they could. They weren't daring to shoot at the main event, not with a friendly in the mix. He adjusted his grip on Barton's harness and gained altitude to follow. The archer had his head ducked and eyes closed against the wind, his hands locked tight on the ridges of the armour.
"Copy," The helicopter had pulled to a standstill and the co-pilot had the side open wide. Hawkeye couldn't hold up to the sort of landing Tony had pulled earlier, which had rocked the entire helicopter, so he pulled up and hovered for a second.
"You do acrobatics, right?" He asked and Clint looked at him with an eyebrow raised. "Right, never mind. Ready?"
He nodded and Tony shifter closer and heaved the man over the remaining space; braking with repulsors that close to the co-pilot wouldn't have been a good idea, so once the archer was clear, he cut power and dropped gracelessly towards the ocean, his forwards momentum thumped his shoulder against the landing gear, but the angle was good and he barely felt it.
"Fuck, Stark. Just... fuck. We need to not do that. You alive?" Barton asked, huffing slightly over the radio.
"I'm good. Nice landing?" He snarked, zipping towards a bulge beneath the water that was glowing more brightly than anything he'd seen yet.
"We're good, scared the shit out of the crew, but we forgive you. I got these guys; go back the Hulk up."
"Right. Try not to shoot me down." The bulge turned out to be the squid's body and suddenly he was fucking glad they'd pulled the swarm away from the cruise liner; it was almost as big as the bloody ship. Its front end was a boiling, writhing mass of tentacles and water and thick, black ink. JARVIS managed to pick out the Hulk, a fist swinging into the side of a tentacle as big as he was, but Tony couldn't pick him out in the chaos.
"Deploy missiles, gaze-targeting," the plates on his shoulders shifted and opened up, the HUD changed and he tagged a line along the squid's flank before firing. The explosions made the squid roll, one massive eye turning up out of the water and an arm lashing towards him, but the flank was almost completely unharmed. He swore loudly and blasted away from the grasping limb, swinging around for a second pass, hoping to keep its attention; his manoeuvrability far outstripped Barton's ride.
"Alright, switch to armour-piercing," He muttered to JARVIS before switching back to comms, "Is it weird that my calamari preferences are influencing battle tactics? It feels weird, Barton, is that weird?"
"Christ, don't talk about eating in connection with that thing, do you want me to throw up?" Clint replied, disgustedly, as the helicopter he was using as a mobile snipers nest came around. The only evidence that he'd fired anything was a muffled explosion below, presumably from an arrow, followed by a much more messy one, which looked like a grenade. The exposed eye was gone, the mess of torn and burnt flesh completely unrecognisable. A hearty roar reassured them that the Hulk was above water, at least for now, and Tony traded off with the helicopter, coming in for a second pass.
The sharp-nosed missiles struck the squid's flank and sunk deep before detonating and Tony whooped as the squid turned its new, gaping wounds towards the water, exposing a massive eye.
"It's all yours, Hawkeye, blind the bloody thing." He growled, shooting forwards to scan for the Hulk. He couldn't get him out of the water, but he had his back, he would always have Bruce's back.
Tony got in close; with his ammunition running low, he needed to fall back on his lensed repulsors. He burnt holes in any tentacles that ventured above water and dipped to hover near the knot of pained writhing that he strongly suspected the Hulk was right in the middle of.
"Hey BIG GUY, you in there?!" He yelled, dialling his external speakers up to maximum. The combination of ink and bioluminescence made it almost impossible to see what was going on more than a few inches below the surface but the Big Guy hurled a torn of length of tentacle at the squids head and was visible for a few seconds; yeah, seven more to go, buddy.
"STARK, LOOK OUT!"
"What the fu-" an arm, twice, maybe three times as long as the rest of the squid shot out of the water, a massive, leaf shaped pad of suckers on the end. The impact was enough to rattle his brain in his skull, his vision sparked and he had no way to tell if it was the way his head snapped back or actual damage to the suit. He brought his right-hand repulsor to bear but the blast made the limb curl around him convulsively, crushingly tight. He hit the water in seconds and a count-down flashed up in urgent red; three minutes, before he'd lose air, and less than a minute after that he would start getting hypoxic.
"Arrow to the brain would be good right now, or possibly five minutes ago," He snarled, fighting to get his right arm back from the dinner-plate sized sucker that had folded around his forearm. His left arm was a lost cause and half his sensors were already covered. Instinct had kept his face clear, but with his arms held fast, the limb was inexorably winding over him and his camera feeds went blank.
"-ir, you must stop struggling, sir!" JARVIS' frantic voice finally made it through his panic and he froze.
"What.. what the fuck? I can't breathe, what's.." He started thrashing wildly, trying to push the amorphous muscle off his chest.
"Sir, STOP! If you continue, you will pass out in under fifteen seconds,"
He stopped and slumped inside the armour, feeling the clicks as JARVIS locked down the joints. Good luck to the squid moving any of his limbs now, he thinks in a manic, frightened way, trying to ignore the deep, wet wheeze every time he draws breath. He hadn't noticed until now, but the display JARVIS puts up shows the heaving of his chest, the wheezing, getting progressively worse over the course of the fight.
"Fuck. What now?" He growled,
"Now you wait; Barton is less than a minute away from firing an arrow loaded with the cores of six grenades into your opponent's brain and the Hulk is approximately ten meters away from this position." JARVIS said in an infuriatingly calm voice.
"I've got that long?" He asked in a tone that was not a frightened whine.
"You do. It may not feel like it, but you currently have enough air for three minutes and twenty seconds, at current consumption." There was a bone shaking thump and Tony tensed automatically, but there was no impact.
"Squid is down, I repeat, Squid is down." Tony had never been quite so pleased to hear Clint Barton's voice as he was right then.
"Thank- fuck I don't even know anymore, Thor. Maybe." He panted, feeling wrung out. The tentacle folded around him slackened and JARVIS unlocked the joints. He dragged his arm up slowly and popped a hole in each of the suckers clinging to the armour, freeing himself. His heart spiked in panic as something closed around his waist again and he thrashed, a gauntlet striking something harder than tentacle. It was fruitless; the grip did not relent and his arms were soon pinned too. His breath came in short, desperate pants, his lungs feeling like they were full of water. Had he drowned without noticing?
Not a moment too soon, his head broke the surface. Inky black water rolled away and he could see again and the dark, non-luminous green on the Hulk came into view. The faceplate snapped open and he went completely limp with relief; being cradled against the chest of your room-mates alter ego? Not the worst way to end a mission.
The Hulk clambered up, clear of the water and Tony's stomach swooped; they were on the move. Helicopter? He couldn't tell, his eyes had closed and he was concentrating too hard on pulling in salty air to open them again.
"Tony." There was a grunt and the Hulk shook him a little. "Awake, Tony. Now." He demanded, and that gruff voice was full of reproach.
"'m awake," He gasped, drawing a deeper breath afterwards and forcing his eyes open. "Thanks, Big Guy; we're making ... a habit of this," He put on his best grin, but it trembled around the edges. Hawkeye was quickly scrambling down the ladder from the helicopter above them, something bulky on his back, and before he knew it, all three of them were safely on the deck of the pleasure-boat. Tony staggered away from the Hulk, but his limbs went weak when he tried to support his own weight and he made it four steps before he was tumbling back towards the deck. He wasn't sure what Bruce had been doing while he moved, but he was sure as hell there to catch him, scooping him up and back against a broad, green chest.
Apparently, three weeks of companionship had made a dent in the guys Id.
"Sorry, Big Guy, I'll just stay here... shall I? Yeah, I'll... do that." He wheezed.