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“Where are the useless healers?” Barnes muttered as he threw his bionic hook at the Psylocke who thought she was invisible, pulled her close, and shot her right through the head.
“Speaking of useless,” Stark said as he tried to shoot one slippery raccoon currently climbing up the tall building with an impossible strafing, “Where’d Strange go?”
“All of you are useless,” Venom growled, squeezing tentacles tight around the poor Groot, “We will ask Galacta to give us a better team next time. One with Spider-Man and Peni. We are doing all the work here while you waste time running around and chit chatting. Especially the healers on the back.”
Meanwhile, on the backline...
“TREMBLE BEFORE BAST!”
“No, I don’t think I will,” Stephen sighed, taking the brunt of the damage on himself right on time.
T’Challa lurched forward, and Stephen held the grouchy kitten by the neck to keep him from dashing past himself. T’Challa reached a hand past Stephen’s shoulder to swipe a claw. Stephen sharply turned his head and watched Loki lurch back just in time to avoid the sharp claw. He looked up at Loki’s health bar.
22 hp.
Yup, that could’ve dug his grave right then and there.
Jeff was here now, thankfully, and showered the Asgardian with water.
“Okay, you need a timeout,” Stephen muttered, opened a portal, and just as T’Challa was about to throw a spear at Loki, tossed him through the portal. The great King of Wakanda died gracelessly by falling off a cliff.
With that problem solved, Stephen turned back to his fellow Strategist, and found that Loki had gone invisible, seeable only to the eyes of the ones he deemed as allies. “No, thanks, healer,” he told Jeff ever-so-elegantly, as though he wasn’t still covered in claw marks and bleeding cuts all over. Jeff listened, though, and decided that Stephen needed a shower now.
He dismissed the very wet but oddly refreshing feeling of Jeff’s healing and stepped closer to the Asgardian, watching as he ran ghostly fingers over his own injuries, emerald mist healing them slowly.
He never quite understood why couldn’t Loki just accept help from his allies instead of trying to do everything by himself.
“Are you alright?”
Loki looked up at his inquiry, then hurriedly fixed his stance, hands crossed over chest and head held high. “Of course. A mere feline’s scratches cannot hurt me. It was barely a tickle.”
Oh, it was most definitely more than a ‘tickle’, if Loki’s health bar a few seconds ago was any indication. Or his generally disheveled look.
Stephen hummed. “Well, you did good, holding out by yourself.”
Loki stared at him with an unreadable expression, then blinked and quickly turned his head away. “I have no need of your compliments, second-rate sorcerer.”
Maybe Stephen simply imagined it, but he thought he saw a bit of pink in the green of Loki’s invisible mirage of his face. Stephen’s lips curled up just a hint.