The drone had Steve pinned — arms locked, mechanical grip tightening, the synthetic strength of something built for exactly this kind of restraint taking over from the leverage he needed to break it.
He was about to shift his weight and try the hard way when three short, flat cracks went off behind him in quick succession.
The shots went through the seam where the drone's head met its collar, three bullets in a triangle pattern, each one through a different cluster of components. The scarlet electronic eyes went dark. The grip relaxed into dead weight, and Steve stepped forward out of the mechanical arms as they fell.
He looked up.
Long hair. Considerable mass. A left arm that caught the ambient light with the muted gleam of vibranium, holding a rifle that was still leveled, muzzle trailing smoke.
They hadn't spoken to each other in years — longer, really, if you counted the years between what they'd both been. James Barnes watched Steve with an expression that held everything that needed to be said about survival and continuity and the particular relief of finding that someone you know is still standing on the same side of a battlefield.
Steve smiled at him.
Bucky smiled back.
No words. Then: the crack of Steve's shield and the burst of Bucky's rifle, and the Ultron units that had been closing on both of them were disassembled in seconds. They moved through the cluster with the zero-communication coordination of two people who had learned to fight together before either of them had learned to shave — each covering the other's exposure, each reading the other's angle without looking.
The last drone fell in pieces.
They kept moving.
Above the facility, the sky was doing several things at once.
Carol had hit Infinity Ultron with enough force to send him across kilometers of airspace inside of thirty seconds, and had been doing so repeatedly when his patience apparently ran out. The Mind Stone on his forehead pulsed once — one concentrated beam, direct, the light of a Stone at full output — and caught her before her sensors finished processing the charge-up.
Carol tumbled, recovered in mid-air, checked herself over with the brisk efficiency of someone assessing structural damage to a vehicle, and found everything intact.
Then she looked at the entity across from her.
"You have stopped me countless times," Infinity Ultron said, with the specific sincerity of something that has rehearsed this sentence in a hundred timelines. He moved his head, which had the look of something that has received significant structural criticism recently. "Yet every time, I remain the victor."
Carol stared at him.
...What.
She ran a rapid internal review of her last forty-eight hours: three weeks of hard transit through deep space, a brief landing at the facility, one party that lasted approximately four minutes before a robot broke the sky, and she had been in this aerial engagement for roughly the last eight minutes.
He said "countless times." I have met this robot for the first time eight minutes ago.
He is telling me that I have failed to stop him. On multiple occasions. Before we had ever met.
He said "every time" like we have history.
A robot. With apparently very strong feelings about our repeated encounters.
I don't know him.
Carol rubbed the bridge of her nose with two fingers, a gesture wasted on a face currently hidden inside a helmet, and re-raised her fists.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," she said. "But don't mistake my confusion for underestimating you."
What erupted from both of them at once was less a fight and more a mutual physics problem at extremely high energy levels — two force outputs compressing against each other in the same space, the surrounding air deciding very quickly that it had other places to be. The nearest cluster of Ultron drones, too close to the collision point to maneuver, was simply absorbed into the energy discharge and ceased to have a form that mattered.
Annihilated. Not destroyed. Not damaged. Resolved back into elementary particles by two infinite forces disagreeing in the same cubic meter.
Jordan was moving through the mid-level drone formations, clearing methodically, when a particular sound pattern reached him from the south end of the battlefield.
"Don't — don't chase me, I'll fight back—"
"My god, what are you made of, you're so—"
"OW! Who's hitting me in the — okay, that's it—"
He looked over.
A red-and-gold figure was doing something that could generously be called combat and more accurately be called a very fast game of being in a bad position. Peter Parker — MCU Spider-Man, seventeen years old, Iron Spider suit, recently snapped back from weeks of non-existence — was running from south to north while also running from north to south, maintaining approximately six different defensive engagements simultaneously, and not winning any of them.
The Iron Spider's mechanical legs had deployed from the suit's back — four articulated limbs that were genuinely impressive in isolation, piercing drone units at high frequency, heads getting punched through, components separating. The limbs were doing good work.
Peter Parker himself was doing the work of someone with very high raw attributes and very limited battle experience, which was the work of attracting every drone in his vicinity through energetic motion and wide movement patterns, and then being surprised there were so many.
Jordan watched for approximately fifteen seconds.
The Tobey version, he thought, would have gone feral on these units inside of thirty seconds. Black suit, no mercy, done. This one is...
The drone count surrounding Peter had crossed into the double digits.
...This one is getting hugged by a pile of robots.
He accelerated.
The sonic boom of his arrival scattered the outer ring of the formation into component parts. Jordan reached through the remaining cluster, found the back of a very surprised Iron Spider suit by the collar, and pulled.
"No no no get off me get away from—"
Peter Parker, airborne, eyes closed, threw a sequence of punches at the thing holding him with the committed energy of someone who had decided that the only correct response to being grabbed was to punch everything until it let go. His arms were somewhat shorter than the distance Jordan was maintaining. Every punch missed.
The Iron Spider's mechanical legs shot out and struck Jordan's forearm with a series of rapid metallic impacts.
Nothing happened to Jordan's forearm.
"Wait — wait — stand down! Deactivate one-hit-kill mode—"
Peter opened his eyes.
The recognition process took about two seconds — battlefield adrenaline clearing, threat-assessment cycling down, the face in front of him resolving from enemy to not enemy to I think I might know this person.
"Oh." He deactivated the suit's secondary systems. "Oh, I am — I'm so sorry, sir, I'm really—" The helmet retracted, revealing a face that had taken some impact, cheekbone red, clearly not from this encounter. "The armor's AI flagged you as hostile, which it was wrong about, we're definitely on the same side, I just—"
He was backpedaling through the apology at a rate that made it difficult to follow.
Jordan smiled, waiting.
Peter stopped. Took a breath. Tried again.
"Thank you for the rescue." He looked at Jordan with growing confusion. "But I feel like... we've met before? Somewhere? I can't quite—"
Hiss.
The hairs on Peter's arms and neck stood up simultaneously. A sharp alert shot through the base of his skull — the Tingle, uninvited and unmistakable, firing on the presence in front of him.
Jordan felt it too, at the same moment — his own Spider-Sense, the version from the Fantasy Card, considerably more dormant these days than it once had been, but not entirely silent. A resonance rather than a warning. Like two tuning forks responding to the same frequency from different rooms.
"Relax," Jordan said. "We have met. In a way."
"Where? I don't — I have this weird feeling that I know you but I can't find the memory—"
Spider-Sense quantum entanglement, Jordan noted internally. Multiverse resonance between the same ability in two different bodies, sharing the same root. Of course there's a signal.
The mechanics, as Jordan understood them: from the moment he had arrived in the MCU arc, the timeline had branched. This Peter Parker — right here, slightly bruised, apologizing with considerable speed — was not the same individual as the Peter Parker Jordan had interacted with in his first pass through the MCU. Parallel variants. Same person, different thread, shared fundamental gifts.
But the Tingle didn't care about timeline classifications. It knew what it knew.
"Think of it this way," Jordan said. "Maybe in some parallel universe."
Peter blinked. "That's — okay that's the parallel universe theory, which I actually studied, but it's still a scientific conjecture, there's no empirical—"
Jordan put one hand lightly on the top of Peter's head and redirected his field of vision toward the battlefield below them.
"Put the science on hold," he said. "Look down there."