On the secret space station, Nick Fury relates to the assembled heroes the following tale: in 1958 while with Army Intelligence, he and a team of soldiers battled alien invades emerging from a portal in Kansas. Most of the troops were killed in the first attack but suddenly an armored Earthman in a jet pack, swooped out of the sky and engaged the enemy. He killed the aliens and destroyed the portal but not before being fatally wounded. Howard Stark then arrived on the scene to find Woodrow McCord, Earth’s Protector, dead. Stark flew Fury to a secret base in the Rocky Mountains where he explained that McCord was single-handedly guarding the Earth from alien menaces; Stark then asked Fury to replace him. Over the next decades, Nick Fury fought the planet’s enemies while maintaining a normal existence in the CIA and SHIELD. He fought aliens, subterranean monsters, and creatures from the netherworld, aided by LMD doubles. We learn that one possible menace he let go free was Spider-Man. After that he destroyed a living planet, thinking that all of his adventures went unseen. But there was the Watcher….
Fury finishes his account (and the readers now know that he was responsible for all of the bizarre killings revealed in the previous several issues) but the others have questions—the Orb starts to mention something but he passes out and is put into the interrogation room. Fury declines to explain the death of the Watcher….