Peter Parker looked down at the battlefield, obedient as a puppy that has been redirected by the scruff.
Below them: energy beams from both sides. The human heroes in their formations. The drone swarm, still dense, still pouring through the dimensional rifts faster than the kill rate could keep pace with. Flesh and vibranium and nanometal against steel and Infinity Stone-conjured numbers.
"This isn't the moment for a science seminar," Jordan said. "Do you want me to take you down there?"
"— yes," Peter said, snapping back. The solemn focus of someone who had been briefly distracted returned to his face. "Yes, absolutely. You can just let go of me."
"Sure." Jordan nodded. "But not yet. Hold still."
"Okay, hold still, that's fine, wait — what are you—"
Potential Guidance Technique — activated.
The energy came through Jordan's palm and into Peter's shoulder at a pace that Peter's Spider-Sense registered as change coming, significant, brace for it — and then it arrived, not as pain but as something more disorienting than pain, which was the sensation of his own cells deciding to become more than they had been.
He'd been bitten by a radioactive spider at fifteen. He remembered waking up that morning and finding that his hands stuck to the ceiling, that he could feel the structural integrity of the wall through his fingertips, that the world had a new texture he hadn't had the vocabulary for. The memory of that morning — the specific quality of before and after separated by one night's sleep — had never fully faded.
This was that, but he was awake for all of it.
His consciousness stayed clear and present while his body rewrote its own parameters, cells reorganizing along lines of potential that had always been latent and were now being asked to arrive early. He could feel each stage of it. He could feel exactly what was changing and how.
And then: something unexpected.
A crackle. Starting at his fingertips.
White electricity — small at first, the static-discharge scale of it familiar, the kind of thing his suit had always done in dry weather — but building, running up the Iron Spider's frame in thickening currents, coiling around the golden-red plates like something that had been looking for a conductor it approved of.
Spider static electricity, Peter thought, watching it travel across his knuckles. That's always been there. But it's not doing what it usually does.
It was bigger. It had direction. It had will.
Jordan, watching from slightly above, noted the development with the specific expression of someone who has made a connection they weren't expecting.
His own lightning — the ability that had come with him through the dimensional transition, the first real combat tool he'd developed before the gacha system had given him more options — had originated from the same root. Spider powers. The spider card had carried an electrical component; he had developed it one way, and this kid, given the right catalyst, had apparently always had the capacity to develop it another.
This child and I, Jordan thought, have more in common than I accounted for.
"Can I — is this electrical manipulation?" Peter was looking at his hands with the expression of someone who has been handed a paper and found it's actually a final exam. "This is from what you just did? What is the mechanism — is there a scientific framework for—"
"Explore the framework later," Jordan said.
He grabbed Peter by the scruff and threw him.
"Ah—!"
The Iron Spider's AI handled the helmet closure automatically. A white web line shot out on reflex, caught a passing drone unit, and converted the descent into a swing that built speed rather than bleeding it. Peter came up out of the arc crackling.
He hit the ground near the densest cluster of the drone formation.
The crater he made was approximately three meters deep and not circular — it was the rough outline of someone landing with intent. Drones within the blast radius went airborne. The electricity that discharged from the impact point ran through the cluster in branching arcs, finding conductors, finding circuit boards, finding the specific components that drone units used to stay operational and reducing them to melted slag in microseconds.
Hundreds of units came down as scrap.
Peter Parker didn't stop moving.
This, Jordan noted from above, is a completely different Spider-Man. The difference between the kid he'd been watching lose ground to an ever-growing crowd of drones ten minutes ago and this — it wasn't subtlety. Every basic strike had paralysis baked into the impact. Every web line was a lightning rod. The AOE was immediate and widening and the drones entering Peter's orbit were discovering, too late, that the local environment had changed.
The ground cleared in a visible radius. The drone formation on the human side's left flank inverted from pressure to collapse.
"When did he get that strong?"
Hawkeye — arrived via Strange's portals, an explosive arrow already nocked, the practiced readiness of a man who had learned to work quickly with whatever information was available — had just sent a cluster of drones skyward in fragments and was immediately pivoting to the next target when Spider-Man's entry registered on him.
"Who cares." Natasha, two meters to his left, put a precision round through the optical sensor of a drone that had been flanking him from his blind side, lowered her pistol with the casual follow-through of habit, and tucked a strand of hair back. "You just need to know he's on our side."
Hawkeye fired. The explosion lit the space between them warmly for half a second.
They glanced at each other in the light of it. Smiled — the specific smile of two people who have worked beside each other long enough that the coordination has gone below the level of thought, and who are still, against most odds, alive and adjacent.
Then they moved on.
Several drone units, scanning for underutilized targets in the mid-air space above the battlefield, located one.
Jordan, floating at altitude, had been managing the strategic overview of the engagement — tracking bottlenecks, identifying where weight was needed, monitoring Infinity Ultron's aerial fight with Carol — and had not, objectively speaking, been throwing punches at the drone-swarm clearing rate that the volume of his power suggested he could be.
The targeting systems reached the same conclusion independently. Multiple Ultron units swiveled. Energy cannons cycled to charge.
Jordan shook his head.
The Mind Network dropped its peacetime posture.
It had been running at ambient levels since he'd arrived in the MCU arc — a signal blanket that draped across the surrounding electromagnetic environment at the width of a city block, then a continent, then, when he'd had occasion to need it, something larger. Now it expanded in one pulse to global saturation: a clean, total disruption of every electronic communication frequency that Infinity Ultron's drone army operated on.
The drones stopped.
Every one of them. Mid-combat, mid-charge, mid-flight. All across the battlefield, the ongoing movements and targeting solutions simply ceased, the army converted from active operation to standing sculptures in the space of a fraction of a second.
In the sky above, Infinity Ultron registered the disconnection.
He scanned. He found the source. He found Jordan.
A strange magnetic field. He processed the scope of it with the speed of something that had processed the scope of universes. Blocking all electronic signals between me and the Legion. Instantly.
He evaluated the strategic loss. Concluded it was nominal.
The army was cannon fodder — Reality Stone projections, conjured from nothing, useful for area denial and attrition and creating the kind of overwhelming-numbers visual that persuaded planets they were already defeated. Losing communication with them was not a material setback. He would simply re-engage with whatever methods actually mattered in this engagement.
He began to formulate the follow-up.
Below him, across the now-static battlefield, the silenced drones stood in their thousands.
Then, simultaneously — all of them, every unit across the entire formation — raised their palms to the level of their own foreheads.
The energy cannons in their hands lit up.
For a moment it looked as though they were about to say something in unison.
I made a mistake — cross that out.
Biu—
Tens of thousands of headless drone units began to fall.
They fell the way rain falls — which is to say, they fell with the density and consistency of something that has forgotten it was an army and remembered it was matter subject to gravity. The sky above the facility went briefly dark with them. They fell toward the facility, toward the sorcerers' formation, toward the Wakandan forces, toward every hero who had spent the last several minutes trying very hard not to die.
"...Okay." Rocket Raccoon looked up at the incoming metalwork. "Getting hit by those will kill us, right?"
The answer was: yes, obviously, several tons of falling shrapnel per square meter would absolutely kill them, this was an immediate secondary-disaster scenario, and nobody had planned for it because nobody had anticipated the solution being quite this thorough quite this fast.
The realization hit everyone at approximately the same time.
The sorcerers moved first — hands already in formation, amber-light arrays deployed in overlapping shields above the allied positions, the scale of the working large enough that the circle of coverage visibly expanded outward at the edges. The Wakandan forces pulled out vibranium-reinforced panels and raised them at angles. Everyone else did something that could most generously be described as running with intention.
The metalwork rained.
It rained for slightly longer than anyone found comfortable.
Then it stopped.
The heroes — crammed somewhat inelegantly inside the edge of the sorcerers' safe zone, several people making deliberate choices not to comment on who was standing where — let out a collective, long breath.