"Eat that, you slimy, fang-faced son of a bitch!"
"Rocket! Not in front of Groot!" Peter Quill scolded, hovering a few feet higher to avoid the lunge of one of Thanos' creepy alien goons as it launched itself at him with a screech.
"I am Groot!"
"I don't care if you already know those words, he shouldn't be encouraging you!"
"I swear, if you two boys are going to spend another battle arguing instead of fighting-!" a feminine voice growled from behind him, and Peter opened his helmet to give Gamora a shocked, appalled look.
"He started it! You heard him start it!"
"Quill is lying! I didn't start anything!" Rocket shouted, stuffing a missile into some kind of launching device that he had propped up on the ground in front of him, aiming at the head of an approaching monster.
"I'm not the one lying, you stupid, furry-"
"I am Groot?"
"No!" Peter yelped in horror as Gamora's mouth opened in shock.
"Okay, which one of you taught him that word?" she demanded.
"Quill."
"Rocket."
All three of them turned to Groot in question.
"I am Groot," the Floral Colossus shrugged, glancing up from his handheld game.
"Drax!" Gamora shouted.
"Drax is busy right now," Mantis reported, fretting as she watched the man in question wrestling with a particularly large alien, his hands holding its gaping jaws open above him as it tried to bite him in half.
"I told you I didn't teach him that," Peter muttered to Gamora as she took a slow breath through gritted teeth.
"I will speak with the lot of you after we kill these assholes," the woman said, turning to line up her rifle's sights on some of the more distant aliens.
"Hey, watch your mouth!" Rocket grinned up at her. "Groot doesn't need to be hearing words like that."
Gamora turned a dry look on him.
"Once we kill Thanos, I'm turning you into a hat."
"Don't make promises you can't keep!" Rocket shouted after her, pausing for a second to reload before lighting up one of the enemy ships in a blaze of fire.
Peter shook his head in exasperation and began re-loading the cartridge on his blaster.
The group of them had been tasked with clearing out the remaining stragglers from Thanos' army after the titan had fallen back to his ship with most of his forces; making sure that the remaining aliens didn't spread to any of the populated areas near the cities.
The sorcerer's given reasoning for choosing them had been "because you have the most experience in fighting aliens," but it wasn't really any secret that they were chosen because they were the only sizable group left that was capable of somewhat functioning as a team.
Peter wasn't complaining, though. After the bullshit that had been their attempt at a last stand, he really felt like killing something. And he could tell that Drax, Gamora, and Rocket were of a similar mindset.
They'd gotten word that Thanos was on the move again a month or so ago, looking for another infinity stone, and they had been trying to track him down since.
After following him to the still-smoldering remains of a magic-based realm known as Asgard, they'd managed to catch up to Thanos as he was trying to capture the remaining people that were escaping from the city.
Apparently half of the city's population had already been wiped in some kind of civil dispute, so Thanos was not interested in taking out half of everyone that remained.
What he was interested in, however, was the Space stone that the sibling princes of Asgard possessed.
Peter's crew had arrived on scene just as Thanos was drawing the smaller Asgardians' ship in, and had managed to get a stun shot in to temporarily disable his ship's main power.
While Thanos' minions had scrambled around to restore their ship to full working order, Rocket had patched into the comms system of the Asgardian ship to offer a truce - to help them get the stone somewhere safe.
Thankfully the two princes had taken one glance at the looming threat of Thanos' ship and decided to take their chances with Quill's crew.
The two Argardians (as well as a large green monster and an armored woman) had used one of the few remaining ejector pods on the main ship to escape to the Benatar with the stone, and Peter's crew had barely had time to catch the little ship and close it in the loading dock before having to turn tail and run.
It had only taken Thanos a moment to realize that they had jumped ship with the space stone, of course, and he'd immediately been hot on their heels as they fled, the rest of the Asgardians forgotten.
Unfortunately, their ship was no match for the titan's.
Especially with the added help of the power stone to aid him.
They'd only managed to outpace him for a few minutes before the titan maneuvered them into an ambush, his army's ships pouring in from all sides.
Assured of his victory, the Titan hadn't bothered going in for the easy kill, and had instead captured their ship in a gravity beam and started pulling them in.
Gamora had given him a look as her hand dropped to her blaster - the knowing look that chilled him to the absolute core with the horror of what she'd made him promise - and he'd been reaching for his own gun with a trembling hand when the Asgardians had rushed onto the bridge.
The blond prince had revealed to them that he knew the location of another of the stones on a planet called Earth, and that he had a small and very powerful group of allies waiting for him there that may be able to offer the titan challenge should it come to a battle.
And that his brother - a sorcerer and realm-hopper by trade - could utilize a nearby rift to help them get there if they could just get free of the gravity beam.
Peter had been faced with two options, at that point.
The first, try their hand at fighting Thanos, his host of infinity stones, his top four assassins, and his army before being inevitably killed. (Or captured and tortured for information as to the soul stone's location in Gamora's case.)
Or the second, cut their losses, give Thanos what he wanted most, and run like hell while he was otherwise occupied.
Peter couldn't let Thanos get a hold of Gamora, and he couldn't let yet another planet of innocents get blindsided and slaughtered by Thanos.
And so, with time rapidly running out, he'd been forced to make a painful choice.
After all, there was no honor in knowingly running to their death when losing that battle might mean winning the war.
A significant distraction - in the form of ejecting the tesseract from their ship - was thankfully enough to distract Thanos for the few critical seconds it took them to break free of his ship's hold and allow the dark-haired sorcerer prince to realm-jump their ship to Earth without a trail.
All said and done, they'd just barely made it out in one piece.
Earth was a rather backwards, primitive, and unassuming little planet compared to most of the places he'd traveled, but the blond prince had assured him up down and sideways as they came in for a landing that there were people here who could actually go toe-to-toe with Thanos: from a girl that could get into people's thoughts like Mantis to manipulate them, to a man that was as strong as Thor and an excellent strategist, to assassins that were deadly with any weapon at any range and might be able to pose a threat to Thanos' own elite team.
Unfortunately their greeting party had been rather lackluster.
In fact, the "compound" that the blond prince had directed them to was only populated by a pair of humans in clunky power armor with blasters built into the palms and feet, and a short, skinny dude in a metallic red and blue onesie.
Nothing of the skilled, powerful allies that they'd been promised.
This seemed to have confused the prince and green monster (who had by that time returned to a human form himself) as well, and some questioning had quickly revealed that the group were apparently no longer allies.
Some internal disagreement or argument or something had left half of the group on the run somewhere on the planet, and apparently the remaining few "weren't on speaking terms" with the other half, like a bunch of preppy schoolgirls. Save for one member who wasn't present at the time cause he was hot for one of the girls on the other team and was apparently sneaking off to see her on the side.
Bunch of fucking high school drama.
Of course, the self-labeled "genius" of the group had been furious to learn that they'd given up one of the stones, even if it meant that they'd live to warn the rest of them. And he'd wanted to turn right around and attack Thanos with just the few of them present - not even call the others up. Some type of boy-band breakup nonsense where they couldn't be involved or he was out.
He'd whined about how finding them was just wasting time now that Thanos had another stone thanks to Quill, how they wouldn't gain anyone who was actually useful anyway, how they needed to attack now with no questions asked and following his five-second excuse for a plan, and finally Peter had lost his temper and told him that if he wanted to go toe to toe with Thanos and his army, in deep space with no air, or on a random planet that also might not have air, then the rest of them would watch and laugh. And then deal with Thanos for real when he got done wiping the tin scraps off his boots.
Thankfully the green-monster-gone-human had taken matters into his own hands and had contacted the remaining teammates, who were apparently not at all hard to find, and were actually on site in a matter of hours. And they had looked a lot more promising than the first half of the "group."
Two super soldiers, a red-haired assassin that actually reminded him a lot of Gamora, a couple of human fighters in combat gear, a small, mousy young woman that reminded him a bit of Mantis and seemed to catch the dark-haired prince's interest, and a robot with the mind stone literally embedded in his forehead.
And then the sorcerer had showed up.
Uninvited, of course, as he was apparently wont to do, but the man had felt some shift in the aura or something when they'd realm-hopped, and had come to investigate.
And he'd had another of the infinity stones with him.
It couldn't have been better timed if they'd actually planned it, and at the time, their odds had seemed pretty good.
Two stones to counter the three that Thanos had, familiar ground for them to fight on with traps waiting for the titan, and a number of highly skilled and highly powerful fighters to face his army down.
But looks were apparently deceiving.
The rifts between the blond prince's "allies" were apparently a bit deeper than he'd thought - what had come across as a petty "we're not talking" from one end was revealed to be a far more deep-seeded distrust and even wariness from the other.
They were working as two entirely separate teams.
It didn't help that the red dude with the stone in his damn forehead couldn't seem to decide if he wanted to go with his assigned team, or stick with his crazy-powerful girlfriend, and had spent the whole battle switching between whose side's orders he was listening to.
Usually at the worst time.
There was no plan, no cooperation, no united front - nothing. They'd been scrambling around like ants in a rainstorm, and Thanos had steamrolled them like they were some kind of joke.
All in all, it had been one giant, messy, frustrating clusterfuck from one end to the other, and more than that, they'd lost.
So when the Sorcerer had asked them to take one of the jets and go clear out the remainder of Thanos' army, they'd all been more than happy to oblige.
They'd all been about ready to kill something anyway.
To his surprise, Nebula had actually tagged along with them as well, although she had been completely silent the entire time.
Aside from a few exasperated looks she had mostly kept to herself, sniping the aliens alongside her sister and viciously stabbing anything that got too close.
However, she seemed almost distracted, somehow, like she was deep in thought about something.
Peter could only hope that it wasn't plotting their deaths once Thanos was taken care of.
A screech to his left warned him that another of the aliens was incoming, and he whirled to shoot it before it could leap at him, sending the creature tumbling across the ground with a blaster hole through its gut.
"Anyone have eyes on how many more are out there?" he called.
"I have eyes on at least two dozen," Gamora reported. "And there's a third ship over along the treeline that could have m-"
A large explosion interrupted her sentence, followed shortly by Rocket's whoop as the ship in question violently went up in flames.
"...about two dozen," Gamora corrected. "Then we report back to Dr. Weird that the area is clear, and see what needs to be done next."