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In Avengers: Tech-On Avengers #2, the Red Skull uses the power of the Infinity Stones to grant an already powerful MCU villain a substantial upgrade.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Avengers: Tech-On Avengers #2, on sale now from Marvel Comics.
In the comic book miniseries Avengers: Tech-On Avengers, many of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have been robbed of their might as the Red Skull gains the power of the Infinity Stones. Using his new cosmic powers, the Red Skull nullified the superpowers of the Avengers that opposed him while transforming the innocents around him into an army of monsters by distorting reality. As the Avengers rally together with an upgrade of their own to help even the odds, the Red Skull has cosmically augmented a longtime Avengers villain to help him maintain the edge over the assembled heroes by using the Infinity Stones to transform Loki.
As the Avengers coped with not having their respective powers, Iron Man unveiled a line of customized armors he designed for each of his teammates to put them back into action. The Avengers quickly acclimate to piloting the new armor, putting their new capabilities to the test as they take on a kaiju-sized Venom in an impromptu field test. After dispatching the supervillain, Tony Stark explains the power source and mechanics behind each of their custom armors. And in Avengers: Tech-On Avengers #2 (by Jim Zub, Jeffrey “Chamba” Cruz and VC’s Travis Lanham) an unimpressed Red Skull summons the cosmically upgraded Loki as reinforcement.
Recently, Loki had more or less undergone a change of heart, still maintaining a sense of mischief but shying away from the role of outright supervillain. This trend continued as Thor ascended to the throne of Asgard, with Loki playing a key role in combating mutual threats like a Donald Blake persona gone rogue. Fortunately, the classic Loki that now has been an ersatz ally to the heroes continues to move towards redemption with his atonement intact. Rather than taking the existing Loki and forcibly converting him into another one of his monsters, the Red Skull uses the Infinity Stones in his possession to create his own Frankenstein’s monster in the form of the Norse God of Mischief.
The Red Skull doesn’t possess the unflawed Infinity Stones that Thanos famously fitted into his Infinity Gauntlet but has instead recovered the shards after the Stones were previously shattered. Referring to them as the mirror shards, the Red Skull observes how, even their broken state, they have the potential to bend reality to his will. The towering Venom that the Avengers battled was a mirror shard construct by the Red Skull, and so is this new iteration of Loki. And the Red Skull isn’t the only one that has gathered mirror shards, with Stark revealing that the armors he and the Avengers are wearing are powered by mirror shards, designed to channel the shards’ energy to directly combat the Red Skull and undo the damage he has caused.
The Avengers have used their new armors to put down one mirror shard-generated enemy, but the vision of Loki created by the Red Skull is shaping up to be a much more formidable foe.
Stark’s use of the mirror shards as a fuel source capable of defeating the Red Skull gives Earth’s Mightiest Heroes a fighting chance once again, but the volatile nature of the substance and its unpredictable effects on reality may mean that the Avengers are quite literally playing with fire.
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