Magical Marvel: The Rise of Arthur Hayes

Safehouse, Undisclosed Location

The harsh, blue-white glow of a stolen laptop lit Agent Clint Barton’s face. His eyes, usually sharp, assessing, and calculating, were a flat, icy, terrifying blue. His fingers moved across the keyboard with quick, mechanical efficiency.

Loki stood behind him in the damp shadows of the abandoned basement. He leaned casually against a cracked concrete pillar, idly turning the golden Scepter in his long hands. The blue gem at its core pulsed a slow, hypnotic rhythm in the dark.

"Director Fury is mobilizing," Barton reported. "He has officially activated his response team. The Avengers Initiative. They are pulling their assets together on the Helicarrier as we speak. They are preparing for a full-scale planetary defense."

Loki stopped turning the Scepter. A faint frown creased his forehead.

"Planetary defense? Against me?"

"Against the invasion," Barton stated, his blue eyes tracking lines of decrypted text. "SHIELD’s internal briefings state clearly that they know you are merely the vanguard. They know your objective is to bring an alien army to subjugate Earth. They are operating under the verified assumption that the fleet will arrive within days."

A muscle moved in Loki’s jaw. Just once.

He had told the mortals absolutely nothing about his army. Not a word about the armada. Not a single hint of the broader invasion. How could these primitive insects possibly know what was waiting in the dark?

"Who provided them with this intelligence?" Loki asked, his voice dropping to a dangerous, silken hiss.

Barton’s fingers tapped across the keys.

"Arthur Hayes."

Loki’s jaw tightened. Of course. The wizard.

"And what is the wizard doing now?" he asked, fully expecting to hear of grand preparations or an impending ambush.

Barton pulled up a highly classified personnel manifest.

"Arthur Hayes is currently classified as offline," Barton stated flatly. "His current location is unknown. The expected duration of his absence is unknown. SHIELD is actively preparing to fight this war without him."

The basement went completely silent.

Loki straightened slowly from the concrete pillar.

"What is the source of the wizard’s sudden absence?"

"Not specified. No reason is given in the files. No return date is listed. He is simply gone."

Loki said nothing. His mind immediately rejected what he had heard.

It was too convenient. Too perfectly timed. The mortal sorcerer who possessed impossible, infuriating knowledge of his invasion plans had vanished at the exact moment that invasion became imminent? The man who had somehow handed SHIELD detailed intelligence about a massive army hiding in the cold dark of space had disappeared right before that army arrived?

It was a trap. A blatant, insulting trap, designed to lure him out into the open under a false sense of security. Arthur Hayes was undoubtedly waiting somewhere, ready to strike the moment Loki revealed his hand.

But as Loki paced the cramped room, his long fingers tightened around the cool metal of the Scepter. The Mind Stone flared in response to his paranoia, sending a wash of cold confidence into his mind, drowning out his doubts.

Why should a god fear a trap set by a mortal?

Loki paused and looked down at the glowing weapon. The Scepter whispered promises of absolute dominance. It spoke of certainty. It spoke of the small, foolish creatures who believed they could lay snares for beings like him.

He smiled. A thin, cruel curving of the lips.

Let it be a trap. Let the arrogant wizard come.

Loki remembered the day he met Arthur Hayes for the first time vividly. He remembered the insult. The Wizard had cast him into a portal of endless falling and left him there to rot for thirty long minutes. Thirty minutes of humiliation Loki had carried with him across the cold dark of space, polishing it into something sharp and patient and waiting.

This time, he would not be the one falling.

This time, the wizard would learn what it meant to amuse a god.

The Scepter gave Loki the burning confidence to take on even the mortal who had killed his birth father, the King of the Frost Giants.

And in the highly unlikely event that Hayes proved too strong, Loki had already prepared a contingency far more elegant than anything the wizard could possibly anticipate. If pressed, he would simply lead the sorcerer straight to his own cruel captors. To The Other. To the Mad Titan himself. Let two immense cosmic forces collide blindly in the dark. Let them tear each other apart while Loki slipped quietly away in the noise.

Hayes would meet his match. Loki would meet his freedom.

That was only if it was a trap.

If the wizard was truly absent, the path forward became even simpler. Midgard held nothing else worth his caution. The mortals Barton had described, the man in the iron suit, the soldier from the ice, the beast wearing a man’s skin, were children playing at war. He was a god. He would take his throne. The Mad Titan would have his prize. The matter would be concluded by the end of the week.

Loki turned the Scepter once more in his palm, feeling its power hum against his skin.

Either outcome ended the exact same way. With him standing victorious. With the throne of this small, soft world finally bearing the weight it was meant to bear.

He needed to know which outcome it was.

A test, then. A loud, public, undeniable test. Something that would force the wizard’s hand if the wizard’s hand was still in play. Something that would let Loki measure the mettle of these so-called Avengers if it was not.

"I have always wondered what mortals look like when they finally understand they were never the masters of their own world." His smile was small and terrible. "Tonight, I think I shall find out."

—

Stuttgart, Germany

The night air was crisp. The plaza outside the Königstrasse Museum of Art was alive with the easy energy of a Thursday evening. Wealthy patrons in tailored suits and evening gowns hurried up the lit steps toward the gala, while tourists and locals milled around the glowing fountains below.

Loki materialized silently in the shadows of a quiet alleyway.

He stepped out onto the cobblestones in his full Asgardian regalia. The dark green leather, the overlapping plates of shimmering gold, the sweeping emerald cape.

He made absolutely no effort to hide. He used no illusions to blend in. He wanted them to look.

He walked slowly, deliberately through the crowd of mortals, the golden Scepter tapping a steady rhythm against the paving stones.

He watched the humans pass by with a mixture of superiority and disgust. He had walked this world centuries ago. They had traded mud huts for glass towers and horses for cars, but underneath it all, they were exactly the same. Scurrying, directionless ants, completely convinced of their own importance.

"Hey. Shakespeare!"

The loud, slurred voice came from the edge of the square. Loki did not turn at once. He let the disrespectful call hang in the air for a moment, faintly amused by the way a single loud voice in an evening crowd could pull every mortal head around by pure herd instinct. Then, gracefully, he turned.

Four young men had broken away from a noisy bar across the square. They were moving toward him with the loose, swaying walk of young men who had drunk just enough to confuse their own stupidity for courage. Tourists or students, by the look of them. The tallest one already had his smartphone raised, the recording light blinking.

"Nice outfit, bro." The tall one was grinning broadly as he approached. "Comic-Con was last weekend. You missed it."

The three behind him laughed.

Loki tilted his head. He did not reply. He simply watched them come.

The tall one took the silence for encouragement. He stopped a few paces away and held the phone higher, framing the shot. "Come on, man, give us something. Do a line. Do the voice. To be or not to be, something like that. My followers are gonna lose it."

"Bro, get closer," one of the others urged, nudging him. "Get his weird stick in frame."

"Do a pose, Shakespeare."

Loki looked at the group, and something cold flickered in his green eyes. Something amused. Something else.

"You remind me of someone."

The boy’s grin widened. "Yeah? Someone famous?"

"My brother."

"Oh shit, he’s playing along." The tall one glanced at his friends, then back at Loki. He was delighted. This was going to be a great video. "Who’s your brother? Is he here? Is he cool like you?"

"He is exactly like you," Loki said softly.

"Yeah?"

"Loud. Certain. Entirely convinced that his presence in a room is a gift the room should be grateful to receive. He has walked through the world for a very long time on the unexamined assumption that the world was arranged for his personal enjoyment, and the world has been polite enough not to correct him."

The tall one’s grin flickered. Not because he fully understood what had been said. Because the rhythm of it had changed, and even a drunk man could feel the shift from playfulness to danger.

"Uh. Okay. Weird burn, but okay." He forced the grin back onto his face. "So what, you hate your brother? Is this like a family-drama monologue thing? Should I be getting this on video?"

"I do not hate him." Loki’s voice was soft and almost fond. "I have, over the centuries, developed a certain grudging respect for him. Thor is many things I find tedious, but he is not stupid. He is not a coward. And when he chooses to speak, he does so with the confidence of a man who has earned the right to be heard. He is a fool, yes, but he is an articulate, powerful fool, and there is a certain dignity in that."

He paused. He looked at the tall one more closely.

"You, on the other hand."

The smaller friend behind the tall one stepped forward. He was shorter and meaner-looking. The kind of small, insecure man who liked to stand near tall ones for the reflected light and assumed safety. "Dude, you wanna move along? We’re just trying to get a funny video. Don’t be a weirdo about it."

"You see, that is my point precisely." Loki’s attention shifted to the smaller one for a moment, then returned to the tall one. "My brother, at his absolute worst, at his most insufferable, could at least construct a complete, coherent sentence."

He took a single, smooth step toward the tall one. The grin was entirely gone now. The phone in the boy’s hand had begun, almost without his noticing it, to lower.

"You, my friend, open your mouth and produce noises in the rough shape of language, and your companions make supportive sounds at the noises, and all of you have persuaded yourselves that this counts as conversation. You have spent your entire short life surrounded by people who laughed at everything you said because they were frightened of you, or hoping to befriend you, or simply drunk enough to find anything amusing. And you have concluded, on the basis of this evidence, that you are witty."

"Bro, what the fu—"

"You are not witty."

Loki’s smile returned. Small. Precise. Almost gentle.

"You are not even interestingly stupid. My brother, at his very worst, in the dullest hour of the dullest feast in Asgard’s longest winter, could have held this square’s attention for longer than you have managed to hold mine. And I find you tedious. Do you understand what that means, young man? It means I have walked this world for a thousand years, and I have seen armies burn and kingdoms fall and entire civilisations beg for mercy from gods they could not even see, and the fact that you have managed to bore me in under two minutes is almost an achievement. I should commend you for it."

The boy flushed an ugly, angry red. He tossed his lit cigarette to the ground and stepped aggressively forward into Loki’s personal space.

"Listen here, freak. You need to watch your damn mouth before I—"

He reached out to shove Loki’s armoured shoulder.

Loki caught the boy’s wrist before the hand ever reached him. He did not look down at the contact. He continued to hold the boy’s eyes with the same patient, almost regretful expression.

"You wanted a show," Loki said softly, his grip tightening like a steel vice until the boy gasped in pain. "I am going to give you one. And when it is over, you will understand that the universe does not, in fact, arrange itself for your personal enjoyment."

He released the wrist.

He raised one finger.