Scorpio

THIRTY NINE - No Soul in Soldier On

It was like a horror movie - faces popping out of nowhere at each turn, grisly mouths stretched into hideous smiles, fingers like claws grasping for his face. Shooting past in his astral-projected form, Dr. Strange veered around a corner, closely tailed by twin blurs of fuzzy brown-white: a buff elf named Corvus Glaive and the dreaded Maw.

His body lay in another room - unconscious, unreachable. Thanos had somehow managed to knock his soul from its home vessel and put it under lock and key. With the help of the Soul Stone, any sorcerer would have succumbed to their very likely defeat right then and there - but defeat was not a word in Dr. Steven Strange's vocabulary. Besides, he held one glaring upper hand on the Mad Titan.

Thanos was a novice in handling the Soul Stone. He had only books and legends to entertain his claim of power on infinity stones - several thousand millennia, but still. It was like helping with the appendectomy demonstration back in medical school, and still topping twenty-hour star-studier Morgana Blessing's test scores. Thanos only had the Soul Stone for mere minutes. Dr. Strange was the Master of the Mystic Arts. The Mad Titan could not shut him out of his body forever.

A white face flew towards him, squealing like a low-pitched leaky balloon, and Dr. Strange grabbed a nearby column, letting his momentum carry him around in an abrupt u-turn. Thanos had unknowingly expunged his henchmen of their greatest assets - again, novice.

Telekinesis did not carry over to astral projection. Nor did spear cleavers. Really, all it boiled down to was their knowledge of fighting in hand-to-hand combat.

It was a good thing Dr. Strange had brushed up on his martial arts skills.

*******

Sam flew to the roof as soon as he got the call - the canons were virtually destroyed, with most of the robo-soldiers taking the hits on the battlefield down below. Strange was the only man unaccounted for, but his signal was still live, albeit unmoving.

"Coming in now," Sam warned through his radio. He levelled his arms at the top of the ship, his goggles sifting through a catalogue of his available grenades. "Mind the ceiling." The cat-shaped missile sank its teeth into unsuspecting metal, bursting like a paintball seconds afterwards and melting away the blockade in swirls of uniform grey, crusty orange and a hint of wisteria violet.

Maybe he should be a poet, after the war was all over.

Steve and Barnes were nowhere to be seen, though considering the distant crashing some ways away from their rendezvous point, Sam guessed they couldn't be far behind. A glance through Scout's monitor confirmed his suspicions - the pair of supersoldiers seemed to have attracted the vast majority of the henchmen Thanos had on his ship: milky white, mottled green and sleek blue aliens, with varying ratios of limbs to heads, probably all armed. Sam tapped at his wrist, already writing up Riley to go give them a hand - or at least a few grenades.

Sam landed at the edge of the roof, staring down at the twenty-foot drop. His fingers tapped idly at the gauntlet on his wrist. The controls were rugged but familiar, a little too loud for his headset but with the same air his old drilling commander gave him - one from home.

Riley emerged with a chirp, the headlights on the mini hovercraft blinking in greeting. Shuri insisted Sam give it a name, because it responded better with voice activation - along with all sorts of other bells and whistles, being the children of the future and all. Also, it would be frankly devastating if someone made Riley blow a buddy up with an RPG - just like his namesake, an old wingman and friend Sam had in the army.

Damned wars. Anytime someone tries to play hero, someone else gets hurt.

Sam stared up at the waiting miniature hovercraft. "Rogers and Barnes need a hand. There are sixteen grenades in your cartridge. Your job is to blow out anything with more than four limbs. Riley."