Fire and Ice

•28•

The room devolves into chaos as everyone scatters, shielding themselves. Kate hits the deck and rolls behind a couch, taking a moment to get her bearings. She would rather not use fire in here, but these things are in the air, and that's the only way she'll be able to get to them. She blasts fire at the ones above her, managing to hit some clear back into the walls. Others are just knocked off track and scorched, but it helps.

Glass breaks behind her, Thor's hammer flies past her vision, and things are breaking left and right — at least including some of the Iron Legion. And then a blue one flies in from the lab and starts blasting. Kate and others blast back until Steve jumps on its back and it slams him into the wall, throwing him to the ground. Nat and Bruce go running up the stairs, and Kate covers them, distracting the Legion that's firing down on them.

Tony finally jumps on it and seems to have it under control, so she turns to blasting others, running at the ones closer to the ground to punch, kick, and swing a nearby lamp at them before the metal warps and bends in her hands. As she punches and dodges attacks from one, it begins to repeat the phrase it was programmed to.

"We are here to help. We are here to help."

"Well, you're not!" Kate shouts back, kicking it back to the railing and watching it flip over the side. When it comes back up, she blasts it, sending it crashing to the ground.

She turns and blasts the last one as Clint tosses Steve the shield. Steve throws the shield at the scorched bot, breaking it into useless pieces.

Ultron still stands. "That was dramatic."

"Yeah, and who's fault was that?" Kate asks, breathing hard.

He ignores her. "I'm sorry, I know you mean well. You just didn't think it through. You want to protect the world, but you don't want it to change. How is humanity saved if it's not allowed to... evolve?" He looks down, picking up a broken bot by the head. "With these? These puppets?" He squeezes, popping off the mask and tossing the bot aside. "There's only one path to peace: The Avengers' extinction."

Thor throws his hammer, sending Ultron into the wall. Pieces fall to ground, the eyes and mouth of the head lighting up to his last phrase before it dies. "I had strings, but now I'm free."

~_~_~_~_~

They cleaned up some of the mess before heading into the lab, and then noticed the scepter was gone. Thor left immediately to track a bot that escaped. In all the chaos, Kate never even noticed it. As the mistake eats away at her, she focuses on trying to figure out what went wrong — except there's no data to refer back to.

"All our work is gone," she laments, trying desperately with Bruce to find something. Guilt, regret, and loss all build up in her chest. There might've been something in the data to help fix whatever happened.

"Ultron cleared out, used the internet as an escape hatch," Bruce says. Where is he? And what's his game plan?

Nat speaks up from the other side of the room. "He's been in everything. Files, surveillance. Probably knows more about us than we know about each other."

"He's in your files, he's in the internet," Rhodey says. "What if he decides to access something a little more exciting?"

Hill looks up from picking glass out of her feet. "Nuclear codes."

"Nuclear codes," Rhodey repeats as Kate's heart drops. "Look, we need to make some calls, assuming we still can."

Nat shakes her head. "Nukes? He said he wanted us dead."

"He didn't say dead. He said extinct," Steve corrects.

"He also said he killed somebody," Clint adds.