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CHAPTER NINE THE HULK
*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧
"I don't know whether to be disgusted or horrified," Riley whispered, staring at the scene with wide eyes. He couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. Human-sized aliens, he could deal with just fine. It took a little adjusting, but the adjustment period was quick. He had seen worse, all things considering, and the human-sized aliens were easy to deal with since he had seen plenty of alien movies. This was something else entirely. He didn't even know how they could possibly take something that large down with just hand-held weapons. He was pretty sure they couldn't, and that only made him feel worse about the entire situation.
"Both," Clint muttered beside him. "You can be both."
"Both," Natasha agreed, huffing out a small breath. "Definitely."
"Stark, are you seeing this?" Steve demanded, breaking everyone in their group out of their disbelief. There was more static through the comms, but Tony's voice was clear when he spoke.
"Seeing," he confirmed. "Still working on believing."
"That makes two of us," Riley muttered.
"Save the bonding for later, Spy Kid," Tony ordered, making Riley roll his eyes and sigh. "Where's Banner? Has he shown up yet?"
"Banner?" Steve asked. None of them had even realized Tony had asked for Bruce to begin with. If they had known, they would have been checking in with Maria every minute just to see if they had found him yet.
"Just keep me posted," Tony ordered. Steve heaved a sigh and looked around them. By that point, the screams of the civilians were hard to ignore. It was impossible to ignore them, actually, and that was precisely why none of them started working towards Stark Tower like before. Something inside all of them simply couldn't walk past screaming and crying civilians, no matter what their orders or their plans were. Maybe that was what Fury had been looking for when he'd chosen the members of this team.
"Thor is dealing with Loki, and Tony is dealing with the Chitauri in the sky," Riley said eventually, but only after they all realized they were standing in the open and promptly crouched behind an abandoned taxi car. He was fiddling with his crossbow, counting the arrows he had left. "We have no way of getting to the Tesseract fast, and we can't help Tony with the Quinjet down. I say we help down here." As if to prove his point, a Chitauri appeared in the middle of the road, crashing down from one of the chariots flying past them. Riley was the only one fully facing it, so he didn't hesitate to bring his crossbow up and fire. It landed in the Chitauri's neck, sending an electrical current through its body. It collapsed a moment later, nothing but dead weight. It was only then, while looking around for more Chitauri on the ground, that Riley even noticed that they weren't on a main road. They were on a bridge. The main road was below them, and looked even worse.
