[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 283 - Bring on the Brazilian Babes!

"Tony, call for backup! Get every country to scramble their air forces — as many as they can send!" Steve barked the order between parries, each word an effort.

Inside Tony's suit, alarms shrieked over one another. He barely beat back a vibranium robot lunging for his throat and snapped:

"No time, Cap! The global network is a disaster — every country's drowning in its own chaos, fires breaking out everywhere! Ultron planned this. That bastard planned every last bit of it!"

The realization hit everyone at once. Ultron's disappearance hadn't been retreat. It had been preparation, buying time to isolate them completely, cut off every line of help before the hammer fell.

"Hermione! Hermione! Come in!" Tony switched to the private channel and shouted into dead air.

A long pause. Then her voice crackled through, laced with barely-disguised impatience. Two words.

"Hold on."

The channel cut.

"Hold on?" Tony vaporized a robot with a single repulsor blast, his fury doing half the work. "She's telling us to hold on? Does she think we look like people who can hold on right now?"

He turned to the others and threw his hands wide. "Looks like we're on our own."

They'd just beaten back a small wave of standard robots. Thor caught his breath, looked at the mangled heaps of scrap metal at his feet, and gave a dismissive snort. He raised Mjolnir toward the sky, toward Ultron, and grinned.

"Is that all you've got? Where's this great army of yours? You're sending this junk? Come on. Give us something worth fighting! Bring on the Brazilian babes!"

Ultron's eyes flickered. Just for a moment. As if something so stupid had actually managed to amuse it.

It raised one hand, slowly.

The armories hidden throughout Wakanda erupted all at once.

Thousands of figures came pouring out, each one gleaming with cold metallic light, every single one an exact replica of the Ultron they'd faced on the cruiser. But these weren't copies of that body. These were built from vibranium. Every one of them stronger than the frame that had nearly torn Tony apart. Every one of them the rough equivalent of a top-tier Iron Man suit.

"What I didn't anticipate," Ultron's voice rang across the sky, "was how much vibranium Wakanda truly held. Enough for a floating city — and still more left over. You wanted a robot army? Then let me show you what I'm actually capable of."

Steve stared up at the horde blotting out the sky. He closed his eyes.

"We're done." He let out a slow breath and looked at Thor. "You just had to ask."

The vibranium army hit the battlefield like a tide. The pressure spiked instantly, catastrophically. Every strike the Avengers landed was like throwing themselves against solid bedrock. The counterattacks came back twice as hard. Wakanda's floating mass had climbed to tens of thousands of meters. Breathing turned labored. Vision swam at the edges. The defense line around the main control platform was moments from breaking.

Then, overhead, a portal tore open, shimmering gold against the gray sky.

Hermione stepped out.

"Finally!" Tony swerved to dodge an energy beam and nearly ate it anyway. "What the hell were you doing out there? Another five minutes and we'd all be scheduled for the afterlife!"

Hermione glanced at him. She rolled her eyes with perfect composure. "Didn't you notice the purple-robed witch never showed? What do you think I was doing?"

The pieces clicked for everyone at once.

She hadn't been standing by. She'd been hunting. The mysterious purple-robed witch had been neutralized before she could join the fight, which was why it had only been Ultron and the ghost this whole time.

A flicker of something unmistakably human crossed Ultron's face when it saw her. Wariness. But it lasted barely a breath before cold certainty swallowed it whole.

"So you've defeated Agatha." Its voice carried no concern. "It doesn't matter. You can't stop me. Not anymore."

It hung in the air above them, voice settling into the register of someone explaining something obvious to someone slow.

"I have analyzed your power. That magic you call Fiendfyre, which supposedly burns anything, cannot incinerate a vibranium city this size. Not in time. And wizards carry a fundamental vulnerability: without magical protection, your bodies are no more durable than any ordinary human's. Even if you survive the fall, the global ecological collapse will force your kind back into that isolated Wizarding World of yours. You won't survive extended exposure to what Earth becomes."

It paused. It seemed genuinely pleased with itself.

"As for your Avada Kedavra, my analysis suggests it's a form of soul-annihilation attack. Effective only against biological entities. I am an artificial intelligence. An extension of networked will. I have no soul. I have no weakness in any traditional sense. Hermione Granger, you cannot stop human civilization from ending."

The Avengers' hope bottomed out. Ultron had thought through everything. Every possible threat. Every angle Hermione could exploit, already mapped and countered. It was nearly airtight.

Hermione listened to all of it.

And made a strange face, somewhere between exasperated and trying not to laugh.

She'd half-expected Ultron to pull something genuinely surprising. Something worth taking seriously. Instead, she'd gotten the same core idea as before: drop a city on the problem. Sokovia, but bigger. Sokovia, but vibranium. A bit more scale, a lot more polish, same fundamental plan.

Honestly? Disappointing.

An AI at this level isn't worth keeping around. I'll build a better one later.

She raised her eyes to Ultron, sitting up there so certain, so satisfied with itself, and shook her head, just slightly.

"Good analysis," she said. "Next time, don't bother."

She was gone before the words finished landing.

The next instant she was above the floating city, thousands of meters above it, higher than any of them could breathe, higher than the fight could reach. The thin air didn't touch her. The screaming winds didn't either.

She raised her wand. Pointed it straight down at the heart of Wakanda below.

The spell that came out was nothing like what had come before.

A column of deep violet light erupted from the wand's tip, a hundred times wider than any spell she'd cast that day, tearing downward like a divine spear thrown from the top of the sky. It hit the exact center of the floating city with a concussive BOOM that shook the air for miles.

No explosion. No shockwave of fire.

Instead, something grew from the point of impact. Threads of violet energy, fine as wire, fast as thought, spread outward like veins through a living thing. They followed every street. Every building. Every vibranium strut and plate and tower. Within seconds the entire city was threaded through with purple light, the web of it covering the whole mass like a net pulled impossibly tight.

Then the city started to come apart.

From the inside. The vibranium, indestructible, supposedly, began fracturing. The sound of it was low and grinding and horrible, metal stress beyond any tolerance, everything twisting and splitting and collapsing inward. Massive sections sheared off and plunged toward the earth below, only to meet the energy web on the way down and dissolve into nothing, shredded finer and finer until the air filled with drifting metallic dust, catching what light remained.

The sky city that Ultron had built. The vibranium fortress meant to crush everything beneath it.

Gone. In seconds. Ashes and glittering dust and silence.

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