Thor's ears beheld his comrade's screams and, his eyes, the man of iron laying from him motionless, crimson several shades darker than his suit's leaking and pooling from twisted arms while Captain America, without his shield, recklessly struck at Alex Mercer with all the power and fury of a solder defending his friends.
For a moment the god of thunder was wrought with indecision: whether he should help the wounded Tony Stark or the valiant Steve Rogers who would surely discover soon how Mercer had been able to match Thor's blows under the fog. Currently however the Captain seemed to have been gifted with the fortune of catching Mercer off guard: every violent blow lead into another and each of them were firm and true enough that the uninterruption was keeping Mercer from transforming.
So Thor crossed the distance between him and his metal-clad team-mate in a single, flighty bound and knelt.
"Friend Tony, awaken, I will not allow you to abandon us!" he made no attempt to keep the fear from his voice.
The faceplate of the Iron Man snapped away to reveal a strange face: pale, tightened in pain and slowly relaxing as morphine was pumped into his system.
"D-don't sound t-too concerned… I… might start… thinking that you actually care" he managed to wheeze and hiss out through his teeth.
He still had his colourful sense of humour intact then, which was good.
Thor was about to answer in kind when his communicator rung, to his chagrin, and he reluctantly rose to stand. Placing a pair of fingers to his ear he heard Cross' voice growl through the static "Thor, listen to me, remember what we went over in the briefing: Mercer is vulnerable to high voltage, do you understand me? Shock him!"
The god of thunder wasted no time "Be safe and calm, friend Tony, help is imminent" he rose above the rooftops on an almighty breath of wind, ignored the raspy apologies the iron man made to his son and lifted mjolnir over his head. The sky itself rumbled like a hel-beast at his call and the blanket of acid clouds coiled into a spiral; the wind whipped at his cape and hair and painted him heroically against the backdrop of the corpse-like city.
The Captain lost his advantage when Mercer demonstrated the discipline of a veteran and managed to redirect one of his slower attacks; the monster made sure the clutch around his opponent's wrist was as painful as possible before locking an arm several sizes larger around his head.
Rogers then found himself soundly and repeatedly punched into the ground with impacts that made his super solder bones rattle.
Mercer, lifted the captain's limp body until it hung in front of him, like some butcher's cut and slowly but surely tightened his grip on his prey's skull.
Thor could've sworn he'd heard something crack before the infant storm above him reached his order and cast a brilliantly white arc of lightning that lit up the world and which the Asguardian wasted no time with once it made contact with his hammer.
With an indulgent gesture he sent the power and fury of the god of thunder barrelling into Alex Mercer who violently lost his grip on Rogers and cried out as he was sent away to fall into the distance as a smouldering speck.
Following Alex Mercer was a larger, greener figure who, upon the arc of his leap, caught him while he fell and, from what Thor could gather, made certain the demon's landing was uncomfortable.
Thor heard the indignant, distant bellow of the hulk and the rumble of what he suspected was now a very one-sided battle.
Granted small reprieve to pant with the arrival of his vitriolic comrade he looked down to his hand and cursed at the remains of his vial, Rogers had been tossed into a building and was now labouring across the ruins of the street over to his husband, who had posthumously lost consciousness.
Thor could hear the monotonous whirr of helicopters as Blackwatch's contingent forces moved in on the captain's call to render aid to the out of commission avengers.
The warrior moved to kneel beside his comrades and confirmed with the more coherent friend that Captain America had indeed lost his vial in his fight, and the majority of his professional disposition, there were rivulets of blood leaking from his nose and his ears.
"I should've been more careful, bastard caught me off guard when I botched one of my swings"
"You were acting in defence of one you loved, even a warriors control is uncertain when clouded by rage" Thor's friend made no more complaints but doubt remained on him as clear as his concern.
Iron Man's suit would've had some special pocket, the least likely to be damaged to keep his vial.
"C'mon Tony, give us a break here" cried Steve, "we don't know what to-"
He was cut off by Jarvis' voice "Voice recognition: Steve Rogers = confirmed. Iron man's incapacitation = confirmed. Deploying requested protocols."
With that announcement the suit split open, the mauled metal was forcefully dragged away from Stark's arms revealing damage that, while frightfully severe, was devoid of infection or irreparable damage.
Neither Avenger heard themselves sigh behind their fearful but careful efforts to find the vial and bandages to stem the bleeding.
Steve worked like a paramedic, keeping his expression a recurring neutral as he wound the fabric around his husband's wounds.
"Huzzah!" whispered Thor, equal parts relief and battle-fervour gripping his voice as he lifted a tube of some black-red liquid between his thumb and forefinger.
The cries of the hulk, up till that point, a constant reminder that Mercer hadn't gotten away yet, had begun to rise in pitch and frequency.
They exchanged a wordless nod: Banner's 'other guy' could usually handle most anything they faced but there would have been no hope for any items that they might have tried to put on his person whenever he'd have transformed.
Steve placed a hand over Tony's and looked up to the fully masked solders, sprinting methodically over to them with a stretcher and several pieces of equipment Thor recognised but could not name.
There was an exchange of concern then at the roughly dressed, elderly man jogging disjointedly alongside the military. They made no move to stop him.
He reached them and after catching his breath in a painful tirade of wheezing and sputtering coughs that kept anything understandable coming through Thor quieted the man and placed his huge paw on his bony back, inwardly wincing at how very malnourished he was.
"Th-thank you, your majesty Thor sir!" he hacked, wiping the bloody phlegm in his palm onto his ragged trousers. He restarted and Thor noted how frantic and concerned his abused, spiky voice sounded; his words were disorganised and all tumbled out of his mouth in a flurry. "Listen, I need to set things straight about Al… he's not a bad guy, sir he's been looking after us since this whole thing started! You-you can't kill him! Please! Don't kill him your majesty Thor sir! He's all we got keeping us safe!"
"What's your name?" asked the captain
"Tony, sir" the man replied, only raising eyebrows for a second
"Alex Mercer?" asked Captain America again, keeping most of his incredulity out of his voice
"You say the demon… protects you? Why?" Thor wasn't so tactful.
"I know it sounds crazy and I know you've got no reason to believe me but it's the truth sir!"
The pair of them looked at each other and the understanding was there that there was a lot about the situation they hadn't been told, not that they suddenly believed this tramp on his lonely word of course but they knew there was some greater game being played, perhaps it had been going on long before redlight, both of them knew that someone important was keeping S.H.I.E.L.D. from investigating that one.
"Take him somewhere safe." The man protested desperately as he was dragged away.
A few moments later Cross was standing over their heads as statuesque as ever and presiding atop the open head of the iron man suit.
He spoke clipped and professional; betraying no hint of animosity "my superiors have asked me to defer to your orders captain" he saluted to a suspicious blond brow.
Ultimately there was no question pending Fury's rectification and so there was no outward contention, Cross was patient during the deliberation even as an outrageous bellow rolled across their ears from the horizon.
"Thor will take you to where the Hulk and the target are currently engaged, I'd join you but my vision and sense of balance appear to be beyond the point where I can remain useful" Cross nodded, evidently unimpressed and the captain ignored him in favor of stoically radioing in reinforcements from S.H.I.E.L.D. to recover the Iron Man suit.
Concern growing malignantly in him just as the frequency and urgency of the sounds of distant battle, Thor wordlessly moved to hoist the man under his arms and so they were lifted silently towards a horizon, which was bathed in smoke, fire and bright noise; ruined streets wheeled beneath them, damaged by numerous sources, the most recent being the hulk, Thor could see the circular indent where Banner had probably stomped on the demon's chest.
When he looked up he was expecting… he was not sure, he didn't know what the two seemingly unstoppable entities would do when faced with each other but whatever he thought it could have been it was not what he saw then.
There, in the middle of what used to be a street, writhing and beating into itself, was a gigantic mass of black and green flesh intermeshed with itself: limbs adorned with jagged bones and screaming maws jutted out from a spastic, black growth on the hulk's side; Mercer's shuddering outline could be made out just barely: the drills of his tendril mass were veined with green and the hulk was screaming at the top of his lungs as they were eaten in to, as he tore pieces of the virus away only to have them grow back as quickly as he to was healing from Mercer's intrusion.
Cross was unreactive as he released himself from Thor's slack hold and landed with a crunch against the ground; he charged around the combatants to crouch behind a spike of debris and placed a hand to his earpiece.
"Get Zeus' attention Thor, he has to remember what you can do!"
"What is happening to them?!" Thor demanded.
Cross shouted quickly, impatiently "Mercer's trying to consume the hulk, it's how he regenerates and evolves but it looks like their respective healing factors are cancelling the other's out, they're wearing each other down"
"Can we not try to break them apart?!" the agonised bellows of his comrade were disquieting even to a seasoned warrior like him it seemed.
"The consumption process breaks down tissue at an exponential rate, despite his power the hulk is weak enough now that you might very well kill him if you try force, tell me you have your vial!" Thor pulled Iron Man's from his cloak like a child pulls out a copied paper from his bag to hold up "It's designed to break down viral tissue, if you can introduce it to the target it might tip the balance in the Hulk's favour and give us a chance to separate them!"
Thor wasted no time and charged headlong into the fray with a powerful whoosh. He plunged the bloodtox into the blackest part of the screaming, heaving mess which posthumously smacked him away as quivering bits of filth began to peel and fall from the fountain of blood and gore that was pouring off and out of the hulk, whose face's olive pallor was now clearing to be replaced with a healthy look of incomprehensible green rage before the last of his fight suddenly left him and his eyes closed.
Soon enough Mercer was squirming and coiling in his own ruined flesh, the Hulk had turned, in a set of fatigued whimpers, back into Bruce Banner who promptly collapsed into his friend's arms while Cross called in a containment team for the mulch that was once 'the target'. Thor could've sworn he saw fear in a melting eye at the sight of Cross darkly smirking over his quarry.
The sound of reinforcements from both S.H.I.E.L.D. and Blackwatch soon filled the air; Fury and a general they didn't recognise stepped out from carriers landed at either side of the lane and were both followed by their respective soldiers and scientists.
The air suddenly got tense for an entirely different reason.