Anansi Storytelling

The Avengers came down like a raid.

New York sky. Smoke, sirens, people running. Scipio stood barefoot on cracked asphalt in the middle of an intersection that had already seen one bad day. Cars were flipped. Windows blown out. A deli sign burned slow.

Gaia breathed under the concrete and pipe and trash. Slow and patient.

Got you.

The coin at the back of his neck warmed. CRAS-9 flowed out of it in a fast black wave, sliding over his shoulders and chest and arms, snapping into place as a matte combat hoodie and pants. It looked soft. It was not. Every thread was armor. It hit his nerves like a second spine and started whispering micro-warnings in the back of his skull.

Feet stayed bare. Always.

Neswt dropped in on his right, riding a platform of invisible telekinesis like a slow elevator. Braids back, eyes sharp. Her CRAS-9 came out in a different style, red and black jacket over form-fit armor, Egyptian lines on the edges if you knew what to look for. Woven into the suit there was a strand of Aset’s hair. The whole thing hummed with old power.

Her feet were bare too. She liked the ground almost as much as he did. Almost.

“Avengers,” she said quietly.

He followed her gaze.

Iron Man cut across the sky first, thrusters screaming. Thor came in slower with the storm, lightning already licking his fingers. Captain America dropped on a line from a quinjet, shield on his arm. Black Widow and Hawkeye landed behind cars like this was just another op. Hulk hit the far end of the street and cracked it deeper.

Civilians were already gone. Evac teams had been fast.

“Okay,” Scipio said. “You take the archer and the spider girl if she shows. I will handle the gods.”

Neswt smiled without humor.

“You just want to steal the hard ones,” she said.

“I am trying to keep the lightning away from our suits,” he said. “You know the rule.”

CRAS-9 pinged in his head at the word, a quiet reminder. Weakness: high level electricity. Enough juice and the suit did not just hurt, it seized. Neural link included. Best case, lockup. Worst case, brain fry.

They both knew it.

Neswt rolled her shoulders, letting her own suit sync tighter.

“Keep Thor busy,” she said. “I will keep you alive.”

The quinjet’s speaker blared.

“This is Captain America. You are ordered to stand down and surrender,” the voice said. “You are not cleared to operate on U.S. soil.”

Scipio sighed.

“I hate this part,” he said.

Thor strode forward, cape snapping, hammer in hand. His eyes were already bright with the storm riding him.

“In the name of Midgard’s safety, you will yield,” Thor called. “If you mean peace, lay down your arms. If not, we will make you.”

Scipio flicked vector sense out across the street. Every moving piece drew a line. Iron Man’s flight path. The tremor in Hulk’s shoulders. The way Cap’s fingers tapped the rim of his shield. Thor’s storm currents above their heads.

He ran surface telepathy like a scan. Not deep. Just enough to taste.

Cap was all mission and concern. Thor believed every word he just said. Natasha and Clint were already calculating lines of fire. Tony was half thinking about them, half thinking about his HUD. Hulk was hot static and a deep, ugly, simple promise: smash the threat.

Scipio did not taste anything like compromise.

“We tried,” he told Neswt.

“We did,” she said.

He took one step forward, spear still at his side.

“Scipio Okoro,” he called. “King of Amanirena. This is not your jurisdiction. Walk away and we never have to fight.”

Cap’s jaw tightened.

“You do not get to make that call,” he said. “We have dead agents. Evidence of your powers at the scene. Drop the weapon.”

Scipio thought of the S.H.I.E.L.D. black site they had just cracked open. EPBs in cages. Kids. Shock collars. Files tagged “acceptable collateral.”

He let the anger sit in his chest. He did not raise his voice.

“Your people were running a prison,” he said. “You did not know that. Now you do. You can either deal with it or back the ones who did it. Pick.”

Iron Man hovered higher, repulsors hot.

“Look, man,” Tony said over external speakers. “You do not get to blow up our shit and then give us a lecture. We do oversight. You are not on any books.”

Thor tightened his grip on Mjolnir.

“Last chance,” Cap said. “Stand down.”

Neswt brushed Scipio’s mind.

You are not talking him out of it.

“I know,” he sent back. “Gotta try.”

“Alright then,” Scipio said out loud. “We decline.”

CRAS-9 pinged hard sudden in his head. Suit prediction. Thor’s shoulder twitch. Iron Man’s repulsors shifting. Hulk leaning.

Here we go.

Thor threw the first bolt.

Lightning cracked out of the sky, thick and white, straight for the intersection. The thunder hit half a heartbeat later, deep and hard in their bones.

Scipio grabbed the vector before it landed.

He did not touch the electricity directly. That was the kill switch. He grabbed the path. Direction and angle.

The bolt bent at the last second. Instead of slamming into him and Neswt, it curved hard and hit the street ten meters behind them, blowing up a car and turning a patch of asphalt into glass.

CRAS-9 still screamed in his nerves. The proximity warning was ugly. Too close.

“Watch it,” Neswt snapped in his head.

“On it,” he answered.

Iron Man fired.

Twin repulsor beams lit up and shot down the street toward Scipio’s chest. Predictive pings from the suit lined them in red.

He slid into time dilation. Myelin thickened. The beams slowed to bright crawling lines. He bent them with a twist of his fingers, sending them whispering past his sides and up into the buildings instead. Concrete blew out in fountains of sparks and dust.

Hulk came in like a freight train.

He took long, tearing strides up the street, sweeping abandoned cars out of his way, roaring. Every step hit like a bomb.

Scipio did not stand there waiting to get hit. He Blinked.

One heartbeat he was on the asphalt. The next he was on the hood of a car halfway down the block, Chaos Iklwa in his left hand, bare feet denting metal.

“Hulk,” he called. “Wrong target, big man.”

Hulk roared louder and leaped.

Neswt went the other way.

She slid to the side as Cap’s shield came in, grabbed it with telekinesis, and flipped it off its line so it went whipping past her head instead of into it. It snapped back toward Cap on its normal arc. She hooked it and dragged it a foot low.

It hit his shin instead of his hand. Cap stumbled.

Black Widow came in low from the side, guns already out, bullets sizzling. Hawkeye had a perch on a delivery truck, bow drawn, tips glowing with those special arrows that did too much.

CRAS-9 handled both.

Bullets hit Neswt in the chest and arms and just stopped. No penetration. No bruising. The suit drank the kinetic energy and streamed the vector map back to her nerves as data. She felt the impacts more as notifications than pain.

She flicked a hand and caught Natasha in a telekinetic trip, flipping her over a low wall and dumping her into a patch of broken landscaping.

Clint loosed an arrow laced with crackling blue.

Electric.

Neswt’s suit screamed in her head. She blinked sideways off her TK platform, letting the arrow pass through the space where she had been. It hit a stop sign instead and blew it into glowing fragments.

“Electric,” she sent at Scipio.

“Saw it,” he answered.

Hulk came down on him.

The green fist the size of a motorcycle blotted his view. CRAS-9 pinged bright red.

He stepped into superposition for a breath. In one branch he took the hit and bounced three blocks, body turned to pulp inside the suit, regen scrambling to keep up. In another, he dodged and let Hulk walk right through buildings and more collateral damage.

No.

In the third he used Hulk on the others.

Yes.

He collapsed into that.

He bent his own vector just enough that Hulk’s punch missed his head and caught only his shoulder. CRAS-9 took the impact. His bones inside still felt like somebody hit him with a truck. The street under his feet fractured.

He grabbed Hulk’s momentum with vector manipulation and threw it.

Instead of stopping, Hulk kept going, his path turned in a hard arc. He hit the ground, tore a trench, and plowed straight into the car Cap had been using as cover. Metal and glass went everywhere.

“Sorry, Cap,” Scipio muttered.

Thor threw Mjolnir.

The hammer came in spinning, wrapped in lightning. CRAS-9 screamed at the voltage. That thing hit the suit wrong and it was lights out.

Scipio did not try to block it. He twisted its line with a clean telekinetic tap, just enough to shift the spin. The hammer missed his head by an inch, ripped the door off a car behind him, then snapped back toward Thor’s hand on its recall path.

Scipio grabbed that path too.

He flipped the return vector just enough that Mjolnir came back low and hard instead of neat and vertical.

It hit Thor in the chest.

The god of thunder grunted and stumbled, lightning flickering around him uncontrolled.

“Focus,” Scipio told himself quietly.

Iron Man dove on him.

Tony came in fast, shoulder rockets firing, micro missiles streaking. CRAS-9 pinged each threat as a red bead that he could almost taste on his tongue.

Scipio waved a hand.

Missiles reversed mid-air and screamed off toward empty sky. One of them did a sharp turn and detonated near Thor instead, throwing him through a storefront. Not enough to kill. Enough to piss him off.

“I am starting to not like you,” Tony said over the PA.

“You started that way,” Scipio said.

He blinked up onto a nearby fire escape, getting vertical. The city turned into 3D lines in his head. Buildings, alleys, air currents. A playground.

Down on the street, Neswt was dancing.

Cap had recovered and come in close. Widow joined him, baton crackling with electricity, going for joint shots. Hawkeye kept dropping arrows in with all the nasty toys.

Neswt’s CRAS-9 caught the hits like they were finger taps. Electric baton or not, it took sustained voltage to get past Aset’s hair and the suit’s shielding. Widow did not have that kind of amperage.

Neswt did not try to trade hits. She moved like the ground obeyed her more than gravity did. Telekinesis and hyperkinesis wrapped her body. She let Widow overextend on a strike, caught her wrist with TK, and flipped her into Cap’s path. Cap turned to catch his teammate. Neswt ripped the shield out of his hand with a twist and sent it whistling down the street toward an oncoming Hulk.

The shield hit Hulk in the head. He barely noticed. He did get madder.

Arrows came in. A rope line. A taser head. An explosive.

Neswt sliced the vectors apart with TK, sending the taser head into a parked car, the rope into empty air, and the explosive straight up to go off like cheap fireworks.

Above, Iron Man rattled Scipio with a shoulder tackle. The suit took it. Scipio grabbed Tony’s arm with tactile telekinesis and yanked his flight vector downward.

They crashed onto a rooftop. Tony rolled, thrusters flaring.

“Okay, Wakanda knockoff,” Tony said, popping up and firing a chest beam. “Let’s test your paint.”

The beam hit Scipio dead center.

CRAS-9 held. No burn. No hole. The impact rocked him back a half step. Inside the suit, his heart skipped and his ribs complained, then regen settled them.

“You are not the first man in tin I have fought,” Scipio said.

He redirected the beam’s remaining vector up, sending the tail end of it slicing into the sky.

“Yeah, but I am the best dressed,” Tony said.

Thor came back out of the smashed storefront, eyes lit white, beard singed.

He brought the storm with him.

Clouds thickened over the block, black and ugly. Static crawled over every surface. The hair on Scipio’s arms lifted. CRAS-9 threw up a full field warning in his head.

Electrical load incoming. Fatal threshold.

Neswt’s voice hit his mind hard.

He is charging for the big one.

“I see it,” Scipio said.

We cannot take that in suit.

“I know.”

Thor raised Mjolnir.

“Enough,” the god roared. “You will fall.”

Lightning started to gather, not little bolts this time but a column, a god level strike that would turn the intersection into a crater.

Scipio slid fully into quantum state awareness.

He saw the ways this went. Thor fired. CRAS-9 took the hit. He and Neswt convulsed, locked up, maybe cooked. Or he deflected it wrong and it hit Hulk, Iron Man, civilians, everything.

He pulled Gaia up under his feet and reached for Neswt along their link.

Drop the armor, he sent.

That is a shit idea, she shot back.

Only way to avoid a short if he tags us.

She swore in a language that had not been spoken out loud in centuries.

Fine.

They moved together.

“Compact,” Scipio said.

CRAS-9 obeyed. The armor collapsed in on itself, sliding back across his body, shrinking to a hot coin against the back of his neck. Suddenly he felt naked. Bare chest, bare arms, only his own skin between him and the world.

Neswt did the same. Her suit folded back, leaving her in a simple black sports top and pants, Aset’s strand hidden now in the coin.

Thor brought the hammer down.

The sky dumped a pillar of lightning as thick as a house.

Scipio did not try to catch it. He grabbed the path.

He bent everything.

Gravity, air, the angle of the street, the shape of the column. The bolt swerved.

It hit Hulk.

The big green bastard took the full hit and screamed. He also did not die. Electricity raced over his skin, lit every crack, then sank in.

“What are you doing,” Tony shouted, horrified.

Hulk got bigger.

“Fuck me,” Scipio said under his breath.

He did not have time to celebrate surviving that play. CRAS-9 was still off. That meant no predictive feed, no ballistic mapping, no passive shield.

Just him, Neswt, Gaia and their powers like it was the old days.

He grinned despite himself.

“Back to basics,” he told her.

“Just like Ghana,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice.

Iron Man came in hot, trying to capitalize on the drop in tech. Thor tried to call lightning again. Cap rallied. Widow got back on her feet. Hawkeye found another arrow that was probably a war crime.

Neswt and Scipio went to work.

Barefoot, skin to stone, they split the battlefield without talking. He took the sky and the god. She took the ground and the ghosts.

Scipio blinked up, met Tony mid air, and used vector manipulation on the man’s own flight systems, dragging his trajectory sideways into Thor. Both of them spun in a messy fireball of power and godly cursing.

Neswt used TK to snatch Cap’s shield out of the air again and then slammed him into a car hood, pinning him there with invisible force. Widow charged. Neswt redirected her baton into a hydrant, blowing it and sending a geyser of water up. Hawkeye tried to get cute with a grappling arrow. She grabbed the line and yanked him off his perch straight into Hulk’s legs.

Hulk was glowing with leftover lightning and rage. He turned and roared at Clint, who decided lying still for a second was the best career choice.

The fight got messy. Loud. Ugly.

They did not kill anyone.

Scipio had chances. He got Mjolnir’s handle in his hand once when Thor overcommitted and almost broke his wrist on the feedback. He put the tip of Chaos Iklwa against Tony’s chest plate at one point, just an inch from the reactor. He saw Widow’s neck open for a quick kill, Cap’s exposed ribs, Hawkeye unconscious and vulnerable, Hulk wide open mid roar.

He did not take those shots.

Instead he stacked pain and inconvenience.

They broke weapons, not bones, when they could. They threw people into cars instead of off roofs. They redirected hits so Avengers hit each other or the ground.

Eventually, the team did what good teams do.

They realized they were losing and backed off.

Cap called a retreat over coms. Hulk had to be dragged away by a combined Tony and Thor effort. Widow grabbed Clint. The quinjet swooped lower.

Scipio and Neswt stood in the middle of the ruined street, bare feet on broken asphalt, coins at their necks cooling.

Tony hovered at a safe distance, armor scorched, voice tinny on external speakers.

“This is not over,” he called.

“It can be,” Scipio said, breathing hard. “You leave us alone, we leave you alone. You clean your own house.”

Cap met his eyes from the regroup line. There was a lot going on behind his.

“We will be in touch,” Cap said.

Thor looked like he wanted another round. Hulk definitely did. Widow and Hawkeye looked like they had had enough for one night.

The quinjet opened its rear. One by one, the Avengers peeled away, leaping or flying or getting dragged inside.

In another breath, they were gone.

Silence dropped over the street. Sirens wailed farther away again, but the immediate space was theirs.

Scipio let out a slow breath and finally let the tension bleed off his shoulders.

“Suit,” he said.

CRAS-9 unfolded from coin to clothes again, wrapping him in a simple black hoodie and pants. Neswt’s came back as an armored coat, soft at the hem, hard everywhere else.

“You good,” he asked her.

She flexed her fingers.

“Suit is fine,” she said. “I am annoyed. They always think they are the only good guys.”

“We just punched their gods,” he said. “It will take them a minute.”

She smiled, tired.

“You okay,” she said.

He thought about Thor’s storm, about that one second where if he had misjudged the vector everyone here would be a skeleton.

“Yeah,” he said. “Still breathing.”

He looked up at the sky where the quinjet had gone, then down at his dirty bare feet.

“One world at a time,” he said.

Neswt stepped up beside him, shoulder to shoulder, looking at the same broken street.

“One fight at a time,” she said.

They walked away together, armor wrapped tight, toes on concrete, leaving the Avengers to figure out what kind of story they were going to tell themselves about tonight.