AN: Laverock mentioned in a review that Scott Lang fights mean in the last chapter. I actually had some trouble figuring out how Ant-Man would fight against regular-sized enemies. You may remember I said early on that I didn't read the comics; all of my information about the characters is coming from the movies and from Wikipedia. When Wikipedia talks about any of the characters who bore the name Ant-Man, it seems to skimp on such details as how they would fight. It mentions who they fought, and many of the enemies were insect-based or insect-sized. The most I could see that would suggest how Lang would fight against the Chitauri is a picture on Wikipedia of Dr. Pym commanding a colony of ants to attack a thug holding a gun. So, I kind of took that and multiplied it exponentially into Lang's method of fighting against larger opponents. His methods may or may not come back to haunt him in a future chapter since this is his first all-out battle.
Anyways, back to the story.
The nuclear missile streaked toward Stark Tower, Iron Man hanging on for dear life below.
JARVIS was feeding all the information from the Iron Man suit to War Machine, so Rhodey knew the exact moment when Tony would need to activate his thrusters in order to turn the nuke. As the moment came closer, he began reducing the distance between himself and the Tower just in case he needed to intervene. His eyes were glued to the countdown in the bottom left corner of his view screen. The moment was coming up just… about… now. He shot forward.
His assistance was unnecessary, however. Tony's thrusters activated, pushing with all the suit's remaining power against the underside of the missile. James Rhodes stopped moving as soon as he saw the thrusters engage. He watched from a block away as his best friend pushed with everything he had left to turn the nuclear missile upward toward the portal.
He could see Tony's face on his heads-up display as his friend rocketed toward the portal, making slight corrections every few seconds to keep the missile pointed directly toward the alien ship barely visible in the distance on the other side of the black hole. He heard JARVIS ask, "Shall I call Ms. Potts?"
"Might as well," was Tony's resigned response. Rhodey checked to make sure that JARVIS was recording the feed, just in case Pepper wanted to see it if…
Rhodey shook his head, trying to get away from that line of thought. The battle still raging beneath and around him faded out of his focus as he was momentarily lost in watching Tony. An alien energy beam sailed within inches of his head. Almost without a conscious command, War Machine's mini-gun returned fire, silencing the Chitauri warrior in the building next to him.
He watched as Iron Man shot through the portal and disappeared on the other side. JARVIS' connection to the Iron Man suit was suddenly lost as the distance between them abruptly climbed into the light-years, despite the line-of-sight view. At the same time, however, Rhodes could look up through the portal and see Iron Man let go of the nuclear missile, which continued traveling on a collision course with the alien mother ship. JARVIS adjusted the view in Rhodes' helmet so that he could watch the nuke enter the ship and detonate. The alien mother ship took up the entire view, so the detonation momentarily blinded Rhodes before JARVIS was able to dim the screen to protect his eyes.
Rhodey glanced around the view through the portal at where he knew that Tony had just been, and he saw him being pushed backwards slowly by the force of the blast. Even in the vacuum of space, there was just enough matter around him for the tiny particles of debris to transfer some momentum to the suit. However, he didn't seem to be moving fast enough.
War Machine shot upwards toward the portal, hoping to bring Tony back through himself. However, as soon as he had made up his mind to do so, JARVIS cut in, "Sir your suit does not have upgraded exosystems to withstand space travel, either. If you go through the portal, there is a 96.4% probability that you will have the same problem as Mr. Stark: Your life support systems will fail and you will be trapped in space also. Instead of rescuing Mr. Stark, you will only be killing yourself as well."
"But I have to—I can't—I've got to—Argh!" Rhodey said in frustration, banging his head and hands against the confines of the suit. Nevertheless, he remained hovering 500 feet in the air a block north of Stark Tower.
Ten blocks north of his location, the rest of Team B had not been paying attention to the drama unfolding in the sky overhead south of them. Mockingbird, Power Man, and Iron Fist were fighting off a squad of Chitauri at that moment, while Ms. Marvel was drawing the last leviathan in the city away from the others to deal with it herself. Ant-Man was observing his teammates below him from the back of his wasp and preparing another wave of insects to intervene where needed.
He watched as Mockingbird spun her bō-staff above her head and brought it down with a sharp whip-like crack on top of a Chitauri's head. The alien fell backwards to the ground and went limp. At that same moment, all the Chitauri around them went limp and fell down simultaneously. Ant-Man felt the presence that had been gnawing at the back of his mind all afternoon suddenly vanish. With a jolt, he realized exactly what the entity he had felt had been: the Chitauri's hive mind, which had just been destroyed. He catalogued that information away for later.
Out of their team, Ms. Marvel had perhaps the best view of what had happened. The leviathan chasing her was in the middle of roaring at her when it unexpectedly cut off short. She turned around to see what had happened, and watched the beast's eyes glaze over as it abruptly took a nosedive toward the pavement. She turned away as it crashed, flattening a street full of destroyed cars under its prone body, and looked around at the rest of the city. Everywhere she looked, she could see the sunlight glinting off the golden helmets and armor of Chitauri warriors, in sharp contrast to the pale gray bodies of the aliens they hid. But she looked more closely and realized that none of them were moving. She dove to hover a mere ten feet from the ground and flew down Park Avenue toward where the portal had been. The Chitauri below her were all unmoving and lifeless.
Luke Cage, Danny Rand, and Bobbi Morse all glanced around them at the alien corpses littering the ground at their feet before looking back at each other. Scott Lang jumped from his mount and reverted to normal size beside them. The four of them slowly and silently began walking the ten blocks separating them from the worst devastation, that surrounding Stark Tower. Carol Danvers dropped down and fell into step beside Scott, stretching out her tense neck muscles as the blue-and-yellow energy still crackling in her hands dissipated.
Moon Knight had an excellent seat to watch the battle end in the pilot's seat of his quinjet. After leading the Wakandan Air Guard fighters over the battle zone in line and dealing with the leviathans, things had quieted down for his team. A detachment of Chitauri speeders had made an attempt to attack their quinjet directly a few minutes earlier, but they had been silenced by the Wakandans as soon as they reached their hard floor. When the Chitauri had realized that the Wakandan fighters gave the Avengers air superiority, but that none of the planes were venturing below 1000 feet, they had chosen to remain below that altitude to avoid the fighter jets above them.
As a result, Moon Knight and the Wakandans had taken station at 5000 feet and begun flying in concentric circles above the city, watching the action below them and alert for danger.
Spector's eye was drawn instinctively to the flash of grey streaking through the sky below them from over the water to the east. Light glinted off a tiny red-and-gold object as it caught up with the missile and grabbed onto its underbelly. He signaled Akátá Lead to inform him of the missile's location relative to their position and turned the quinjet to shadow the missile from above.
The missile shot toward Stark Tower at top speed, with Iron Man certainly holding on for dear life below it. Less than 50 feet from the tower, Spector and everyone in his quinjet watched the missile's trajectory slowly adjust upward until it was no longer pointed directly at the tower. Four pairs of eyes followed the missile straight up until it disappeared into the black hole ahead of them and 10000 feet above their plane. From their perspective it looked like the missile vanished into thin air.
Dr. Foster let out a cheer and threw his fist in the air from the seat next to him as Marc clapped his hands together and grinned. He looked over his shoulder and saw Wanda smiling, while the Doctor sat in the same position with the same nonresponsive expression he'd worn since destroying the leviathan. Spector turned back to resume piloting the quinjet.
A minute later, his automatic sweep of the sky around his jet landed on three dozen Chitauri speeders flying down Park Avenue. At that moment, however, the aliens on them hunched forward simultaneously, like marionettes whose strings had been cut. Without anyone to steer them, the speeders dipped forward and crashed to the ground in a fiery explosion.
A glance at the targeting screen told the same story. A large number of speeders that had gathered near the Empire State Building had just been in the process of flying up to attack Akátá Two, using the building to give them the element of surprise. However, the riders on all of those speeders had suddenly gone limp and fallen backward off their speeders, leaving the pilotless speeders rocketing upward alongside the Empire State Building.
Moon Knight spoke into the jet's radio, "Akátá Two, this is Avenger Three. There is a large cluster of unguided speeders ascending on the north side of the Empire State Building. Could you take care of them before they do any more damage to this city?"
The response came back immediately. "Affirmative," the pilot in question said, as Akátá Two and Three broke formation and activated their weapons guidance systems. The two fighters' automated systems eliminated all of the speeders in less than a minute, though a couple still managed to crash into the observation deck of the Empire State Building before they could be destroyed.
A minute later, Director Fury's voice came through the quinjet's radio system saying, "Moon Knight, return to Governor's Island to pick up passengers. Your team has one more duty to perform today."
"Close it," Captain America's voice said over the communicator in Rhodes' suit a long moment after the nuclear explosion on the other side of space. He heard Black Widow plunge Loki's spear into the portal device and watched the beam of light flicker as the portal collapsed on itself.
War Machine looked back into the portal to find Iron Man. As he turned back, his view screen located the Iron Man suit moving backward toward the portal. Rhodey's heart leapt when the suit fell through the shrinking portal into the Earth's atmosphere just before the portal closed.
His heart sunk into his metal boots when his eyes confirmed what JARVIS was telling him: The Iron Man suit had completely run out of power.