Doctor Strange had been preparing the groundwork for this working since the moment he'd seen the drone wreckage start to twitch.
He spread his arms.
The protective circle expanded in a single pulse — outward from his position to the full edge of the Earth Alliance formation, golden threads of law weaving themselves across every person in the perimeter in the time it took to breathe in. The armor they found themselves wearing was not heavy and not warm and not quite visible, but when the first wave of zombie drones crashed into them and the mechanical fists and laser bursts landed, the golden framework held. Everyone inside it: unharmed.
"The protection won't hold indefinitely!" Strange's voice cut through the noise. "Destroy them!"
The first wave spent itself against the shield perimeter without a single casualty.
Then the second wave hit, and the numbers problem became immediate.
The zombie drones didn't care about taking losses. They were wreckage that had been told to continue, and they were continuing — each unit rebuilding itself from whatever components were within reach, headless torsos acquiring spare limbs, damaged chassis acquiring spare torsos, the whole formation in a constant state of self-repair that made attrition meaningless. For every unit dismantled, the adjacent pieces were already being incorporated into something else.
The Earth Alliance was, in terms of raw volume, completely overwhelmed.
Which was when the people who could do something about volume started doing it.
Wanda raised her hand. The chaos magic came out in a directed wave — not scattered, but aimed, a sweeping curtain of crimson that traveled through the zombie formation in one direction and left that sector clear. Not damaged. Clear.
Thor was already airborne, Stormbreaker trailing lightning through three consecutive thunderstrikes that each covered their own radius. The ground teams working those sectors got a brief view of open sky.
Then the lightning-threaded silhouette of Spider-Man carved through another cluster at speed too high to fully track — the electrical discharge from each impact radiating outward in branching arcs, circuits frying, the specific death of things that ran on electricity encountering a hostile electrical field in significant quantity.
The sorcerers, distributed through the formation, were each running their own working — containment fields, crushing constructs, the amber-spark geometry of various Kamar-Taj techniques layering over each other wherever the density was highest.
It was enough to create windows. Not enough to create breathing room.
In one corner of the defensive formation, Steve Rogers — vibranium-tech energy weapon from the Wakandan armory, Bucky at his back, Sam running cover in the air — was doing the work of clearing minions. Precision, efficiency, the long-developed rhythm of two soldiers who have been each other's flanking cover since 1945. Above them, the resurrected Falcon's high-maneuverability flight path was threading the stragglers that the ground teams couldn't reach.
They were performing well, by every reasonable metric.
The shadow clone, watching from a position of slightly better altitude, clicked his tongue.
Steve Rogers, by any objective measure, was the most capable version of Steve Rogers that had ever existed on this earth. He was also, relative to the current engagement, roughly several power-tier updates behind the version of the game they were playing. He was clearing grunts with the methodical excellence of a professional who had accepted his bracket. Bucky and Sam were doing the same.
This is fixable, the shadow clone decided.
He teleported.
He reappeared behind Thor at the apex of a thunderstrike — close range, well within the arc of Stormbreaker's residual lightning, which was uncomfortable but survivable — and extended the chakra Gauntlet's hand.
A compact sphere of pure divine lightning pulled free from Thor's discharge, redirected into the Gauntlet before it grounded anywhere useful.
Thor completed his strike, landed, and immediately noticed that something in his body's energy reserves had changed in a way he had not authorized.
"What— where— who took my thunder?!"
The shadow clone was already working with the chakra Gauntlet's Reality Stone replica. The sphere of divine lightning rotated in the air between his palms. He compacted it, shaped it — the replica Reality Stone rewriting local physics in a small radius, persuading the energy into a new form: dense, balanced, capable of being wielded.
A hammer.
Roughly Mjolnir-shaped, crackling with the full force of Thor's stolen lightning, spinning lazily in the air.
He aimed it at the ground formation.
"Hey, Captain—"
A sound of wind. Steve Rogers — who had been mid-reload, who had not turned around, who was operating on battlefield instinct — leaped. A full lateral flip, one hand catching the incoming projectile by the handle in mid-rotation, landing in a two-point stance with the hammer in his grip.
Mjolnir, some part of him said, before the rest of him caught up. Not the real one, but—
The thunder poured in through the handle and ran through his whole body from the contact point outward.
Oh, that part said. There it is.
He had felt this before. The first time: Tony's party, years ago, when he'd shifted the hammer a fraction of an inch and seen something in Thor's expression and quietly decided not to push it further. The second time: on a ruined battlefield, with Thor already beaten half to death, needing his presence.
This was both those things at once, and more, because this time the hammer had been given to him.
"CAPTAIN—?!"
The voice belonged to Thor.
Thor, whose expression was doing something that required careful description: it had the specific devastated quality of a man who has given something up, and made his peace with giving it up, and had built an identity around the loss of it, and is now watching that thing come back to life and immediately go to someone else. Like a spouse he'd thought was gone forever, materializing at the kitchen table only to introduce their new partner.
He felt this. Deeply.
"Heartfelt apologies," the shadow clone said pleasantly, from a safe distance.
Thor did not respond, being occupied with the process of processing.
Steve was not occupied. Steve raised the hammer, felt the combination of his shield and the thunder working together for the first time — the geometry of it, the weight and the arc and the way the two implements complemented each other — and felt, very briefly, the same uncomplicated excitement he'd had in 1943 before he'd learned to be careful with how much of it he showed.
He charged into the zombie formation.
The sound of it — electricity, impact, the specific bass register of divine lightning making its opinion known about mechanical zombie architecture — rolled outward from the point of entry in waves.
Bucky, watching, didn't say anything. His expression did something that had no name for it in English and didn't need one.
"Captain, the Jo family—" the shadow clone called out, then caught himself. "The Jo family is just that helpful."
Steve looked up at the clone with a grin, mid-swing.
The shadow clone watched the combat readouts across the formation and did a resource check.
The chakra Gauntlet — the replica assembled from pure chakra nanostructure — had taken a significant power hit from the Reality Stone work. He ran a quick projection: a few more high-end uses and the Infinity Stone replicas would hit the floor of what they could actually do. After that, the hardware would be a well-constructed piece of decorative metalwork and nothing else.
Right. New approach.
He reached out with the Mind Network.
He found the zombie drones' communication channels and sent the same pulse he'd used earlier in the battle — the global blackout, total electromagnetic disruption.
Nothing happened.
The zombie drones continued their advance without any observable change.
The shadow clone stood with the Mind Network pulse running and watched the drones continue unaffected and thought about what this meant.
He fixed it. Infinity Ultron — before breaking the dimensional barrier and departing — had apparently taken a moment to patch his drone army's vulnerability. The electromagnetic disruption exploit, which had worked cleanly during the earlier phase of the battle, had been acknowledged as a weakness and closed.
The actual Infinity Gauntlet could have overridden that. The power of a genuine Infinity Stone was rewriting reality at the source — no patch could survive a direct Reality Stone override, because the Reality Stone didn't ask what the current rules were, it wrote new ones.
The chakra replica, however, was not the genuine article. It was a very good imitation operating at a meaningful fraction of the real power, and when the shadow clone tested whether the fake Reality Stone could reset the original rules installed by Infinity Ultron's genuine Reality Stone—
It could not.
The authority gap was too large. The replica did not have the standing to modify the original author's code.
In that case, the shadow clone thought.
He pressed both palms together.
"Ninja Art: Wood Release — Dance of Early Withering Vines!"
The ground moved.
Not an earthquake — something more specific, more deliberate. The tremor ran through the soil in radiating lines outward from the shadow clone's position, and at each point along those lines, something pushed through from below. Vines. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of them, each one thin and fast-growing and under active direction, reaching upward and laterally with the kind of purposeful mass that suggested they knew what they were looking for.
This was a ninjutsu Jordan had developed in the quieter periods between major engagements — a synthesis of two ability cards sourced from plant-affiliated hero characters, elevated through chakra application past the threshold that separated natural growth from the extraordinary. By strict classification standards it qualified as Wood Release, which was a significant upgrade from just controlling plants. By practical standards in this specific context, it was: there were a lot of vines now, they were under control, and control at scale was what the situation required.
If the quality can't bridge the gap, the shadow clone thought, watching the vines multiply outward across the drone formation, add quantity.
The mechanical zombies, built for combat with humanoids, did not have specific contingency programming for several thousand directed vines wrapping their limbs and joints and finding the gaps in their structural architecture with the patient persistence of something designed to grow around obstacles.
The vines, on their own, would not stop a drone. But they would slow it. Entangle it. Create temporary structural commitments that other heroes could close on.
The effect was visible: the advance slowed. Not stopped. Slowed. The formation lost its clean momentum, individual units getting pulled sideways or caught at the ankle, the relentless lockstep becoming something messier.
Tony Stark, who had been running the combat at MK85 capacity and processing battlefield data through FRIDAY, registered the sudden proliferation of vines in his sensor suite as unknown biological mass, origin unclear, quantity: significant — and raised both palm cannons.
"Hey —" The shadow clone's voice arrived. "Those are ours!"
Tony held the charge.
"...Those are yours?"
"Obviously."
Tony looked at the vine carpet extending across the battlefield, re-evaluated the threat classification, and lowered his hands.
"I knew that," he said, to no one in particular.
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