The just-released Avengers: Infinity War trailer offers fans their first look at the Outriders, the newest race of beings to enter the shared Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The four-armed creatures can be seen doing battle with Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and the Wakanda army in hand-to-hand (to-hand, to-hand) combat before the assembled forces of Earth's mightiest heroes — including Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), sporting his massive Hulkbuster armor — charge towards an army in the Wakandan plains.

A fairly new addition to the Marvel Comics mythology, the Outriders were introduced in the Free Comic Book Day issue of Infinity in 2013. A mix between a worker bee and the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, the creatures were utilized in the comics by Thanos as scouts and foot soldiers meant to seek new planets with weak inhabitants so that the world could be razed should it fail to produce a a tribute worthy of the power-hungry Mad Titan.

In the comics, Corvus Glaive — a member of the Black Order, who in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are Thanos' guards and children — described the Outriders as disposable killers who exist only to serve their maker:

Outriders are not born, they are made. A genetically engineered parasite-assassin solely devoted to the whims of its maker. These creatures have no names, just a binary existence defined by whether they complete the task given to them, or whether they fail.

While it's currently unknown what the Outriders are capable of on screen, their comic book counterparts possessed the powers of telepathy, invisibility, intangibility and flight — making them more of a threat than the Chitauri, who were mowed down during their invasion of Earth by the relatively small assemblage of heroes in 2012's The Avengers.

Per the newly released Avengers: Infinity War synopsis, all the heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man and more — will face off with Thanos (Josh Brolin) and his army of minions in "the deadliest showdown of all time."

Avengers: Infinity War opens May 4.

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