I pressed myself against the wall of one of the buildings, now having made it through the tunnel to a proper structure.
The arrow had caught me across the shoulder blade, not deep enough to be serious, but enough to hinder my movement.
I needed to think.
There was no way for me to go directly at Hawkeye when he was perched up high on that platform.
On top of that, it was unlikely my Haki would be able to shake him. A full blast would probably be able to reach him, but Hawkeye was a bona fide superhero and a trained agent with serious mental fortitude, not someone who could be so easily broken.
I did have one avenue of mental attack, but there was no way for me to converse with him whilst the storm raged outside.
'Ah, that's right!'
Right now, Hawkeye would be taking commands through an earpiece from Phil Coulson.
In other words, my best bet to talk to Hawkeye was to make it to Coulson.
...
In the chaos of Thor's rampage, the agents were stretched thin across the compound, most of them converging on wherever Thor happened to be at any given moment.
Which meant Coulson, sitting in his command position, was comparatively isolated.
I moved through the building I had entered, stepping over two more agents that Thor had apparently already dealt with on his way through.
I found a door at the far end that opened out into a narrow gap between structures. The main operations tent was visible directly ahead, identifiable by the cluster of communication equipment visible through its open flap and the two agents posted outside it.
I took a breath.
Full blast.
Thud. Thud.
'Easier than I thought.'
I had expected it would be more troublesome, but with the soldiers being distracted on top of the rather small size of the field base, finding Coulson wasn't all that hard.
---
"What have we got?" Coulson asked his agents as he ran into the communications room.
"There's a massive electromagnetic surge coming off that thing; systems are barely coping." An agent informed him of the rapidly worsening scenario.
"Barton, talk to me." He didn't bother asking the communications agents any more questions. Instead, he decided to ask the ever-reliable Hawkeye.
"You want me to slow the big guy down, sir?" Barton's voice came through the radio, confirming that he had an eye on at least one of the intruders.
"Or are you sending in more guys for him to beat up?"
Coulson frowned, but he couldn't exactly deny Barton's words; he had, after all, sent plenty of agents only for them to all get beaten up.
Before he could respond to the quip, he heard the flaps of the command room open, an unconcerning thing considering plenty of agents were panicking around right now, but the cause for concern was what came after.
Hearing the thuds of several agents surrounding him, he immediately turned around to scan the room.
Agents all around him seemed to be pressed against the floor, with some faring better than others.
"Hm, none of you passed out? Guess the higher-ranking agents aren't half bad."
A man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask spoke nonchalantly with an assault rifle in his hands.
The man's eyes.
The mask covering his face made his eyes only that much more striking. A deep burning red.
But before he could pull out his gun and apprehend the man, an inconceivable turn of events occurred.
To put it simply, everything happened very fast.
The assault rifle came up and moved with surgical precision.
No, it was beyond that; it was borderline inhuman.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Every agent in the room who had begun to raise their weapons dropped down simultaneously, clutching their hands with sharp cries of pain. Every single round the man had shot, easily over a dozen, had found a hand, a wrist, a forearm, totally disabling any hope of self-defence for the agents in the room.
The whole thing took under three seconds.
Coulson stood with his gun pointed towards the man, though he knew he had no chance of apprehending him.
'Super soldier?'
He had no idea what he was dealing with. Whoever this was, they weren't someone S.H.I.E.L.D. knew of.
His hands shook as fear crept up his back.
"Oh, hey, pretty good." The red-eyed man spoke with a strangely jovial tone, considering the situation.
Bang!
Before Coulson could ask him anything, his gun flew out of his hand.
"Sorry, had to get rid of that before anything else."
He paused briefly, moving further towards Coulson.
Coulson kept his hands visible. He knew that the man's reflexes far outpaced his own, so a hidden attack would be worthless. Instead, he aimed to gain as much information as possible through observation.
"Smart." The man said approvingly.
He crossed the tent in three steps, reached out, and plucked the earpiece directly from Coulson's ear.
Coulson didn't move.
The man pressed it into his own ear and was quiet for a moment, listening.
Then he spoke.
"Barton."
---
Barton had been tracking two targets for five minutes when the crane stopped moving.
The agent controlling the crane had been moving him to the most optimal positions since he had got on the platform. If the crane stopped moving, that meant one of two things.
'Either he's slacking off, or someone's entered the main building.'
Then through Coulson's earpiece came the sound of gunshots.
Then silence.
Then a voice that wasn't Coulson's.
For the first time since this altercation began, he felt tension.
"Barton."
His jaw tightened.
"Where's Coulson."
"Right here, he's fine." A brief pause, then Coulson's voice came through, clipped and controlled. "Stand down Barton, he has the room."
That was Coulson's way of telling him the situation without giving anything useful away. It meant that Coulson was alive, but currently not in a position to act, most likely being held hostage.
"What do you want." Barton asked plainly.
"Just wanted to talk a little." The voice was unhurried, almost casual.
"Laura and your little archers, how are they doing?"