Chapter 5: Better the Devil you Know

"I thought it was quite clever, actually", chimed in Coulson.

His team was staring at him. That wasn't so unusual. When they'd first got together, they'd just assumed he was a little eccentric. Many of the high-level SHIELD agents got that way, after awhile. The stress of the job could really do a number on your head. His team, though, knew it probably wasn't stress. Coulson was well known for being a step ahead of most people. He'd proven it to them, time and again. Though they still grumbled occasionally, they'd learn to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even when he tended to stonewall them regarding matters they really wanted to be briefed on.

It took a few seconds, but eventually Ward broke the silence. "What was he trying to pull?", he asked quietly.

Coulson smiled. "Well, I honestly couldn't say. He hasn't told me. But, if I had to guess... he's trying to get himself known as the foolish Avenger. The one who rushes in and swings the hammer. If so, its actually a fairly smart play. His Asgardian body and great experience training as a warrior give him inherent resistance to a lot of magic. He's also taken to patrolling some of Earth's key magical junctions, essentially, areas where its easier to engage in the sort of teleportation magic that we're facing. Fury hasn't told me explicitly, but, if I had to guess... I think he's setting himself up as a trap. Big dumb hero, charging in with his hammer... if that's how he's seen, whoever tries to ambush him will be in for a nasty surprise when they find out about his resistance to magic."

Simmons frowned. "How, exactly, did he develop this magic resistance? I mean, very few humans have it. Even in Asgardians, having a very strong resistance to magic is unusual. How'd he get it? Is it something we could apply to SHIELD forces in general?", she asked, twirling a pen in her fingers.

Coulson smirked. "Well, consider. He DID have Loki as a brother. Imagine hundreds of years, growing up with Loki. Wouldn't you do anything you could to obtain resistance to magic, after that?"

His team nodded. It made sense. If Thor did not have decent resistance to magic after all these years, he'd probably have perished long ago in one of Loki's "pranks". The man was a menace. While theoretically reformed now, he seemed incapable of staying loyal for more than a short time, and mentally, half of SHIELD expected that, sooner or later, they'd get called in again to help stop him.

"In any case", continued Coulson, "that isn't why you're all here". He pointed to the large display screen, covering most of the wall of the small briefing room they were in. On it, the red patterns of presumed hostile portal activity still lit up the globe. "Fury may have assigned most SHIELD teams, including ours, to recon against this new threat. But, most teams have a heavy operations focus. They don't have the benefit of our strong R&D background, thanks to Fitz and Simmons here."

Fitz interrupted. "With all due respect, we don't have anything TO conduct R&D on. None of the field teams have reported contact thus far. We have yet to see any action ourselves. While some of the teams with magic users, loaned to us by the Sorcerer Supreme, have gone off-grid temporarily at times, that isn't proof of anything, and SHIELD has already dispatched backup to those locations. Right now, we have no scientific basis to go off of."

Coulson smiled. "That may be true", he said with a nod. "However, so far we haven't even been able to identify what came through. We're searching high and low, but so far, we've come up with nothing. I need ideas. Patterns. Filters. Something to narrow our search. We need, in essence, a hint about what to look for." His eyes rested firmly on Fitz for a moment, before flicking back to Jemma.

Fitz closed his eyes in thought. He had been wondering about that. The small portals all over the world were one thing. It would be fairly easy to send in infiltration teams using those, and hide them in the local areas of the portals. Abandoned buildings, for example. Or simply use the forest that most of the portals seemed to end up in. Good cover, forest. Especially at night. While SHIELD did have night-vision gear, even thermal cameras, that was only good as far as you could see. Moving around in a dark forest at night naturally slowed people down, and an observant enemy could hear you coming, and move out of the way. Or worse, ambush you. It made searching significantly more difficult.

It did not, however, excuse the big portal near Tokyo While it was possible that the portal was artificially large, and what came out of it was nowhere near that size, that just wasn't the obvious explanation. Whoever made that portal must have put a huge amount of energy into it to create a portal that size, and you don't waste energy on that scale unless you have something truly enormous to send through. So, that left the natural conclusion that something truly enormous DID come through, and it was now in hiding somewhere near Tokyo. And SHIELD still had not been able to detect it, using any means.

"Well, there are several possibilities, Sir", he began, speaking slowly as he was still finishing his thought. "The most obvious possibility is that whatever came through is some kind of stealth airship. That would enable it to get clear of the area before we could get there and check. The sky is vast, and if it cannot be seen at close range or detected on radar, it could be anywhere, go anywhere... it would explain how something so big could come through and then not be spotted. If the portal opened in the night, even visual identification would be difficult. Stealth aircraft are not known for their bright colors at the best of times, and at night, they're almost impossible to see. While the movement of something the size of a hellicarrier would normally be extremely obvious, we cannot say what sort of stealth tech this invader has, and appearing in a forest would both muffle sound and also minimize the potential for witnesses."

Jemma was fidgeting slightly, staring at him as if she knew what was coming, and if he did not pick up on it she'd have to call him out soon.

"But, if it were an aircraft, emerging near Tokyo makes no sense. Japan has one of the best air defense systems in the world. They obviously picked their exit points. Otherwise, they'd be random, or at the very least, SOME of them would be near crowds of people. But none are. Assuming they control their exit points, and they're sending an airship, why send it in next to Tokyo, in a forest? They'd have had MUCH better odds of staying concealed if they opened the portal in air... over the middle of the ocean. Preferably somewhere we have lax radar coverage, like the south pole."

Fitz paused for a moment. Jemma was nodding her head sadly. She'd come to the same conclusion. Whatever this was, it probably wasn't an airship. It certainly did not take her degree of expertise in biology to know that it wasn't likely to be an ocean-going ship either. You don't portal those in over land. The obvious conclusion was that whatever came through, it was land-bound. That left a few possibilities.

"So, we have to assume it isn't an aircraft. There isn't much water in a forest, so that rules out a naval ship. We're looking at something absolutely enormous, the size of a skyscraper, that is land-based. There is only one mundane thing we know like that. A building. I think we can rule that out because we'd have noticed a new building. Buildings of that size are incredibly difficult to hide. Not to mention, difficult to move. For a group that seems to prefer remaining hidden, creating a massive fortress right next to a nation's capital is about the least subtle thing imaginable. So, it doesn't seem plausible that it is a building. Whatever it is, it has to be stealthy enough that we haven't been able to detect it, despite combing the area. It has to be central enough to their plans that it can serve as the focal point or co-ordination hub of their invasion. And it has to be durable enough that they're not worried about dropping it in right next to Tokyo, even if this risks discovery. In short, what we're looking for has to have properties that no earthly thing has. It has to be absolutely enormous, skyscraper-sized, yet also easy to hide, it has to be capable of immense power output, but not show up on any of our sensors except the portal detection grid, and it has to be capable of coordinating the invasion using means that we have so far not been able to detect."

Coulson was drumming his fingers by this point. He knew he had to let his science team work through the problem, to try to come up with a solution, but he hated being led to believe they'd solved it, only for them to seemingly retract the solution due to discovering a problem with it. The brainstorming process was helpful, to be sure, but sometimes, it was infuriating.

It was at this point, Jemma came to his rescue. "What I think Fitz means", she started, "was that we have made a mistake. We're looking at this from our normal, semi-military point of view. When we think of something the size of a skyscraper, we naturally think bunker, or some sort of structure. If we're pushed to think of something that an invading force might use as a lynchpin, we think of a hellicarrier, or some other enormous, preferably flying, command center. We need to throw all of that out, right now. The invaders, and we assume they are invaders, are clearly using magic portals. That is the ONLY thing we know for certain about them right now. Well, that and the fact they appear to be EXCELLENT at evading detection. So, forget everything we know about what a military force looks like. We need to start thinking in magical terms. I can't believe I am saying this, but, what if we forget the laws of physics for a moment? What if... whatever this thing is, that came through, what if it can change size? So, it comes through huge, but then shrinks to a size where nobody will recognize it if they see it? What if it can use magic to prevent us seeing it? What if it can move such a great distance, so fast, via portals or otherwise, that it hasn't been near Tokyo since moments after its arrival, and the entire point of coming through there was a red herring in the first place?"

Fitz immediately started shaking his head. "No...", he started, "that doesn't make sense either. If the big portal was a diversion, why have so many smaller portals in Japan, too? That only makes sense if Japan is important. Or they were going the extra mile to highlight Japan as a red herring. But they don't need to do that, as we jumped to action based on that one big portal alone. No, it makes more sense that this isn't a diversion, and whatever the object is, it is still there. We can't really distinguish between it shrinking, and it making itself invisible to our perception. Not here, at least. But if it is using magic, we can try to counter that with technology. I have heard from our Sorcerer friends that some spells only work on the minds of the people they target. Cameras, for example, are not fooled. If we did flights over the Tokyo area, with one person looking out the window and one person looking at a picture on a camera, and they show different things... that would be evidence of a perception-altering magic. If we find any site around Tokyo that looks like there was something huge there, but its gone – that would be evidence of size shrinking – or possibly another portal."

Coulson coughed. "So, what you're saying is, when we head to Tokyo, we have to keep one person watching our cameras at all times, to counter potential perception-altering magic, and we have to keep an eye open for anything which looks like a large object was moved from the area recently?"

Fitz nodded. Jemma gave it a moment's thought, then spoke up again: "Yes, and if we are facing perception-altering magic, it would be a good idea to back off at the first sight of it. Some magic merely disguises things, but other perception-altering magic is really just a subschool of mind-altering magic, and mind-altered shield agents... sound like they would be a big, big problem."

Skye chose that moment to crash into the briefing room. She'd been sitting this one out, as she wasn't a trained scientist, nor die she have the operational experience of Coulson or even Ward. That suited her fine, though. She'd been trawling the net, and serving as their comms officer, keeping tabs on the communications between SHIELD agents and HQ, trying to keep their team in the loop about the developing situation around the world – and passing along any information that might help them in their recon mission. So far, that had been a very easy job, as there was approximately zero information to pass on. That, however, had just changed.

"Contact!" she barked. "One of our teams near Tokyo just went dark. They aren't answering radio. This has happened a few times. So far, we've had no proof that this was due to hostile action, because radio contact was always regained in a minute or so. This is different. Their lifesigns just vanished. No signal at all. Whatever we're up against may have just taken out a fully armed recon team before they could blink."

Coulson frowned again. Whoever this was, they were not playing by the rules at all. Staying in the shadows, striking at agents invisibly? It was too much like Hydra for his liking. Recon teams were supposed to be awake, alert, perceptive... not easy to pull this sort of thing on. He had to get to the bottom of this – before they lost any more teams. He thumbed his mic.

"May, change of plans. Set course for Tokyo."

Agent Holder was tense. He'd been taking point for over an hour, along this seemingly endless forest trail. Everyone was tense – they knew they were near Tokyo, and if they were going to see first contact, and likely, combat against this invader, they would see it here. Their team was on the front lines, front lines of a war that had not even been declared yet. SHIELD protocols were, first and foremost, to protect. Chiefly, to protect civilians, but also, to protect life in general. That meant that, assuming he was going to follow them, he would not get to fire first.

He hated SHIELD protocols. Things had been so much easier, back in Hydra, before he'd been tasked with infiltrating SHIELD, and had to start following all their ridiculous rules in order to maintain his cover.

At least his squadmates would back him up. He knew that almost all of them had been personally picked for this mission by Jasper Sitwell, perhaps the highest-ranked Hydra agent within SHIELD. One of them was even on loan from Garrett, another Hydra operative. Officially, their SHIELD mission was to locate the invaders, and perform recon. Unofficially, their mission for Hydra was: capture one of the invaders so that Hydra could find out what the new invaders were up to before SHIELD did.

Hydra had always had its ambitions, and yes, one of those was to establish a new world order. Still, that was a new world order with Hydra at the top. An outside invading force did NOT fit into their plans, and was an enemy to them just as much as SHIELD was. Perhaps even more so. SHIELD was ever so fond of taking the moral high ground. Capture, rather than kill. Interrogate, preferably not even using torture. Ensure criminals were jailed by a court of law, when possible.

Hydra had no such compunctions. And, they had to assume, neither did this new invader. It would be naive in the extreme to assume they were a soft foe, like SHIELD was. They could be as deadly and uncompromising as Loki's army that invaded New York. Or... worse.

So it was that they had ended up, all assigned together to a recon team, patrolling through a forest near Tokyo in the dead of night. With itchy trigger-fingers, they twitched at very snapped branch, whipped their heads around at every owl's cry. They were on edge. The jet lag, the caffeine, the possibly front-line combat mission in disguise. All of these grated at their nerves.

They were not alone.

One of the natural advantages of a kitsune is that it can look like a perfectly normal fox when it wants to. It is a relatively simple matter of hiding the extra tails. A simple illusion technique, a 'henge', can do this. Given the relatively minor alterations required, this sort of henge can be sustained indefinitely, even by a relatively young kitsune, like the one watching them from a tree at this very moment.

The forest being the natural domain of foxes in general, and kitsune in particular, was part of why they'd ensured their incoming portals would put them in less-populated, but still defensible, terrain. As specialists in illusion, it would require almost no effort for a kitsune to blend in, and hide, in a forest, should they need to. Especially when the humans of this world still had no idea exactly what sort of invasion they were facing – or what to look for.

Sadly, that was not to last.

Kyu sighed sadly as he glanced over the SHIELD operatives, his heart heavy. They weren't the first to pass through here. He'd seen over thirty agents tonight alone, prowling the forest and looking for any trace of the great disturbance that had ushered his kind back to Earth.

They were, however, unique, in that while most of the SHIELD teams had had merely one or two operatives who bore the tell-tale signs of dark chakra, this team was covered in it. Before they had set out for Earth in earnest, Kurama had told them of human sorcerers in this world they were going to. Humans who used magic for good – or ill. As perhaps the number one threat to their kind, he had not wanted his kitsune children to step blindly into a new world, and so, he had warned them. There were many kinds of magic, some worse than others. Mere portals, for example, were neutral. Anyone of sufficient power could use them. Yes, they had combat uses, and yes, they were dangerous. Yes, they could very much tire out the ninja (or biju) who created them. But they were not, by themselves, a dark ability.

The chakra bound to these SHIELD agents, was very dark indeed. Kitsune were, after all, partly or wholly chakra, depending on who you believed, and in human terms, that meant energy. Magic. So, they could see magic around them, both chakra-based abilities and other, more earthly magic.

The magic that covered these SHIELD agents was like a parasite. It fed on them constantly. Taking just a little bit, but taking it every second they lived. Kyu could see it drawing out what little chakra an untrained human had, and eating it, like an enormous, coiled worm that lived inside them.

In Kyu's experience, magic that involved leeching the life force of others, especially those who were not aware that they were even being drained, never ended well. You did not have to be a celestial kitsune, messenger of Inari, protector of rice, the harvests and the poor farmers of yore to be wise enough to recognize life-leech magic as evil.

Nor could it be easily undone. These men, these poor men (and, unusually for a SHIELD team, they were all men – not a woman amongst them) were saturated with it. It wasn't just clinging to their skin, it was suffused through them, as if it had been there for years. This did not bode well. Kurama would need to be informed. Someone else had been making their play for Earth, and whoever they were, they had a far greater moral flexibility than most kitsune.

First, though, it remained to him to gather intelligence. To find out what he could about these strange new agents, and report back. He considered his options.

Holder heard it first. It was a snapping, to be sure, of a seemingly insignificant twig. But it wasn't within the pattern of their footsteps. He whirled around – a split second before the rest of his team did the same.

Standing on his left, not ten feet from him, was a demon. Not the pathetic, waist-high imp variety. Not even the man-height, goat-footed old-school variety. This demon was a classic, looking like it could come out of the depths of hell to claim a man's soul. Easily twice as tall as they, with bright red skin, horns, and eyes that looked to be glowing with red fire. Emitting a furious bellow of rage, it wasted no time at all, and charged straight at them.

Hydra operatives, whatever might be said of their moral compass, knew exactly what to do in this situation. They'd trained for it even longer than their SHIELD contemporaries, and unlike them, they were fully prepared to deal with the darker forces of nature in service of their aims. Sometimes, that meant putting them down when they got uppity, and refused to acknowledge their masters.

The hail of fully automatic rifle fire ripped into the demon's flesh, biting and cutting and sizzling. It made it almost the entire distance to their firing line before it fell, its head disintegrating in a particularly gory blast from a semi-automatic shotgun carried by one of the operatives in the rear.

For all its fury, the merciless Hydra operatives were trained killers, and this was what they wanted above all, in this moment, to secure the kill and return home with something that could be dissected by Hydra scientists. They spent a good ten seconds after it fell, even headless, pumping yet more rounds into it as it lay there, just in case the rumors of demons being unkillable, or capable of regenerating to life, were true. Better safe than sorry when facing the forces of hell, after all.

By the time Sitwell stepped out of the shadows, their guns were almost empty.

"Report!" he barked, in a tone that brooked no argument.

"Sir?" questioned Holder, suppressing his instincts to train his barrel on the new arrival only because he recognized a higher-up in the Hydra ranks. "We we were not aware you were in the area!"

Sitwell sniffed distainfully, stepping over a loose tree branch, and dusting something off his suit.

"This is an emergency that may upend the world, agent." he said coldly. "We will spare no resources, no effort, to find and locate an enemy such as this. We MUST have it before SHIELD does."

Holder relaxed a little. He'd always known that his operatives had been blessed with some form of protective magic from the dark corners of Hydra, but the fact that his bosses had the ability to teleport to his location, if they were willing to expend the resources, was new to him. Clearly, Hydra was even more powerful than he knew, and his service would be rewarded. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Hydra was frantic for information on the invaders, and he'd just delivered the body of one. From what he had heard, the first ever to be seen, let alone killed. Yes, the more he thought about it, the more natural it was that the shadowy figure of Sitwell would find a way to immediately reach his location to secure a world-altering prize such as this.

"Enemy appeared right next to us." he reported, turning up his lip at the mutilated corpse of the demon. "We took it out promptly. I know, orders to capture, Sir, but it could not have been helped. It looked ready to kill us all. Whatever we are dealing with... it isn't friendly, Sir. Not to us. Not to SHIELD. Not, it looks like, to anyone. Goes down just fine to bullets, though."

"Very good, agent. A full extraction team will be here shortly to secure the body. You have done well. Have you anything further say for yourself?". Sitwell tapped his foot against the slain demon, seemingly fascinated by his new prize.

"HAIL HYDRA!" - the chant was immediate, and unanimous. Every member of the SHIELD team was united. This was not the time to slacken. This was not the time to hide. A supervisor was here, and they needed to look good. To look loyal. To perform as expected, and hope that, with time, they would rise in the ranks, perhaps be assigned duties more congenial to their health, like hunting traitors, or base security, rather than serving as infiltrators of a front-line SHIELD recon team. It had been a tense mission, but it would be a great feather in their cap – the first Hydra agents to win against the invaders.

"Quite right... quite right" spoke Sitwell softly. "Well, I do believe, if that's all there is to it, your services are no longer required here."

As he spoke, an independent observer would have noticed his eyes go wide. Round and wide, until they resembled small moons. The elite Hydra operatives, however, were not independent observers. They did not react at all. The shotgun-wielder did not even twitch as blood started to trickle from their nose.

That's the thing about illusions. Nobody ever considers their staggeringly powerful military applications. The ability to make illusions that seem solid, but aren't, is very useful. It lets you conjure foes out of thin air to distract your opponents. It lets you prevent them seeing you. It makes you more-or-less immune to conventional weapons, for what you cannot see, you cannot hit. And it easily allows you to trick your foes into shooting each other. Just that ability alone, a well-versed staple of the kitsune arsenal, is extremely dangerous.

Even that, however, is nothing compared to the power of true illusions possessed by kitsune of sufficient rank. True illusions aren't phantasms, insubstantial images that people are tricked into seeing. True illusions are more like reshaping reality itself, albeit temporarily. A false illusion of a foe might appear to take bullets, but it isn't really hit, because it isn't really there. It is just a mirage. A very convincing mirage, but a mirage.

A true illusion really is there. It has physical shape and form. It has weight. It is more like something out of a holodeck, than the result of magic. It is a physical thing, like a summon, but takes the form of whatever the caster wills it to be. That also makes it insanely lethal – limited mostly by the imagination of the caster. And kitsune have very good imaginations.

As the mirage that was Sitwell faded away into the night, the demon went with him. Gone was the blood, even the chunks of demon skull, that had littered the clearing. The bullet-casings, however, the holes in the trees, and the approaching sound of sirens and other SHIELD patrols, remained, stubbornly real.

As Kyu flicked a tail one last time, and started to head deeper into the forest, he spared a glance back at the clearing. The agents were on the ground, now, their eyes frozen open in blank stares. They couldn't see, even if they were still alive, the parasitic, magical miasma leave their bodies, deprived of their life force upon which to feed. They could have seen the large tree to their left, that tree which had once appeared to them as a demon, or a fellow Hydra agent.

Their radio started crackling, then barking demands, as a distant, but real, controller noticed the lifesign indicators of the team members go from green to red, then wink out entirely.

The whirring sound of approaching SHIELD choppers drowned out the rustle of the wind in the trees, as a small fox slipped away into the night.