Vienna, seven hours ago: On a mission to shut down a sinister arms dealer, Winter Soldier runs into opposition from Kree warriors. Suddenly his mind is filled with a forgotten adventure from World War 2 involving the Norse Goddess of Death. Recovering, he captures a Kree and questions him; soon he is calling Captain America to tell him that Namor is a prisoner on the Kree homeworld and that Jim Hammond is in danger….
Now Cap and Bucky are in Blaketon, Illinois, to rescue a defeated Jim—the original Human Torch—from the powerful Tanalth the Pursuer. The fight is brutal and the Torch must summon all his strength to flame on again and attack their foe. She is not slowed down; then she receives word from her men that they have obtained the third piece of the God’s Whisper device so she departs. Torch looks around the ruined town and can only apologize to his friends….
Later in a Quinjet, Torch and Bucky explain the matter to Cap: as seen last issue in the wartime flashback, Cap was absent on a solo mission and Toro was hospitalized so Namor, Torch, and Bucky, with another hero called Major Liberty, were sent to capture a new weapon wielded by Baron Strucker of Hydra. It was a device called the God’s Whisper which could control deities; Strucker had used it to force the service of Hela Goddess of Death; in the fracas, Major Liberty was killed and the rest would have been goners had not the Torch snatched the weapon from Strucker’s hands and banished Hela back to her own realm…. The weapon was broken up into three pieces and each of the Invaders was tasked with hiding one; afterward, Aarkus, the original Vision, erased all memory of the adventure from their minds. They remembered nothing about this until the arrival of Tanalth who recovered the information from their brains. Cap now sees two problems: one, the Kree have the superweapon and two, Namor is a prisoner on their world. Solution: invade….