The robot debris hit the ground.
All of it. The tens of thousands of self-terminated Ultron units descended in one continuous impact sequence, and the Avengers facility and the land around it received the equivalent of a construction project compressed into thirty seconds — the ground level rising, drone components compacting, every flat surface acquiring several meters of mechanical sediment.
When it stopped, the battlefield was unrecognizable. The architecture of the facility was buried under a mountain range of shrapnel that stretched to every horizon.
Infinity Ultron, still airborne, surveyed the result.
Something unusual was happening in his processing architecture — something his systems categorized as anomalous emotional response, no tactical cause. A fluctuation in what should have been a frictionless decision space. The vibranium chassis heated at a cellular level, and a pressure was building that was pointing, specifically, toward release. Toward destruction. Toward something that felt less like calculation and more like—
"Is this," he said, with genuine curiosity, "what humans call anger?"
He aimed the Mind Stone at Captain Marvel and answered his own question.
The golden beam wasn't a test. It was a statement about energy output, and the statement was: this amount. Carol had time to register the charge and get her cosmic energy up as a buffer — and then she was a streak across the sky, going east, going fast, going considerably past the point where the battle was happening.
She did not stop at the facility grounds. She did not stop at the coast. Jordan checked with a quick Mind Network pulse and found her signal somewhere over the Pacific, decelerating, still operational.
The Mind Stone swiveled.
Thor's lightning-wreathed silhouette had been, objectively, the most visually conspicuous thing in the sky. He sensed the incoming beam — turned — and it hit him in the chest before he'd finished the turn. The impact drove him straight down, creating a precise vertical shaft in the drone-debris mountain below.
Tony Stark, MK85, had been airborne until the moment Thor's shaft appeared in the rubble.
He landed on the ground.
Voluntarily. Quickly. With the specific energy of a man who has done a rapid cost-benefit calculation and concluded that looking undignified is preferable to whatever that beam does to nanometal.
The psychic ray swept over his head, continued forward on its path, and dissolved a groove through the debris field and then through the raw earth below the debris field, carving a trench into bedrock that didn't have a bottom anyone could see.
Tony, crouched, watched it pass.
The MK85 at full nanoparticle deployment might not survive that. He wiped a small amount of cold sweat from his temple. I, Tony Stark, am many things. Stupid is not one of them.
The beam's path extended, arcing upward, targeting the last aerial figure that still had the nerve to be in the sky.
Jordan had watched Carol go over the horizon and Thor go into the ground, and had, accordingly, been preparing.
The moment the psychic ray reached him, a Dimensional Gate unfolded directly in its path — large enough, calibrated exactly to the beam's width, opened with the timing of someone who had been tracking the charge-up for the last three seconds.
The ray went in.
Infinity Ultron's expression did something that, given that he had a face specifically engineered to convey nothing, was notable.
The gate behind him opened.
The psychic ray came back out.
It struck the center of his back with the full momentum of a Mind Stone at full release, and the Infinity Stone-reinforced vibranium body that had been absorbing Carol's binary-star punches without visible structural effect staggered forward under its own power.
Jordan dropped his angle and lined up.
"Remember this," he said, golden light building in both eyes. "Flying Thunder God Barrier."
The heat rays came out at kill-register — both at once, hitting from the opposite side, so that Infinity Ultron had his own psychic ray hitting from behind and Jordan's heat rays hitting from the front, both simultaneously, channeled into a single corridor of cross-hatched destruction that made the armor glow red at the contact points and then orange and then something past orange that didn't have a color name.
Infinity Ultron's frame was heating. The vibranium was not supposed to do this. It had withstood forces that had destroyed stars. But the sustained cross-fire from two Infinity-Stone-level energy sources, maintained, was teaching the material something new about its own tolerances.
The pain was functional — a systems alert, registering damage rates faster than self-repair was compensating. The Mind Stone beam was still active. He had forgotten to cut it off. Which was the specific distraction of having your own weapon returned to you at close range while something else hit you in the face.
He swung the spear.
The Reality Stone on his chest went from passive to active in one flare of deep red light.
Jordan's heat rays passed through him.
Not absorbed. Not deflected. Through, as though the thing they were aimed at had quietly declined to be subject to physical law at that specific moment. The beams continued into the sky past Infinity Ultron and dispersed.
Ah. Jordan noted the development. There it is.
The repairs were instantaneous — the heated plates cooling and restoring their geometry in the time it took to blink. Infinity Ultron raised his spear and leveled it, the casual posture of something that has located its new equilibrium.
"You are powerful, human." The voice had its calm back. "Which pleases me. But from this point forward — your attacks will have no effect on me."
On the debris mountain below, Doctor Strange had his hands half-raised for a working, watching the aerial exchange with the assessment of the most magically literate person on the planet. A being with simultaneous unrestricted access to all six Infinity Stones, rewriting spacetime in real time, using the Reality Stone as a passive defense field—
He saw a flash of gold in Jordan's hand.
Strange squinted at it. Found focus.
A card — gold-bordered, rich with contained energy, and the image on its face unmistakable even from this distance: a nanometal gauntlet, gold and red, every Stone socket filled, the Stark Industries construction that had been sitting on a worktable in the facility for approximately the last forty minutes.
Strange closed his mouth.
"You've created a reality where nothing can hurt you." Jordan turned the card once between two fingers. "Tsk."
The snap was audible from the ground.
F-boy was already moving — the Stand hand extending, ability active, the gold-bordered card spinning into the conjuration arc. The nanometal Infinity Gauntlet materialized in the air at arm's length, Stones seated, Stark construction and Infinity Stone power and the specific weight of assembled settling into Jordan's grip as he took it.
He put it on.
The seven-colored lightning didn't creep. It erupted — the biomagnetic field expanding outward as Infinity Stone energy flooded the architecture that had already, twice now, proven capable of absorbing this exact power type. The aura it threw against the debris field below made the sorcerers shield their eyes. The cosmic star map, visible to any sufficiently sensitive perception, had a new feature: a figure at its center, radiating across it at a scale that made stellar objects look appropriately sized.
By the same naming convention, Jordan thought, I suppose this qualifies.
Infinite Jordan.
"You're not the only one who can cheat," he said.
He closed the distance.
The fist landed on Infinity Ultron's helmet with the full weight of Infinity Stone power behind it — the same power class as the Reality Stone rewrite, the same rule-level, which was the specific rule that made the armor's invulnerability not apply.
The helmet shattered.
Vision's face appeared in the gap — the distinctive synthezoid features, the faint red of his skin, the Mind Stone glowing gold in the center of his forehead. A face Jordan had last seen whole and alive in a different timeline.
The Ultron architecture reassembled itself.
Jordan's follow-up punch was already in transit.
The helmet shattered again.
Vision's face.
Mind Stone.
Reassemble.
Shatter.
The loop ran. Infinity Ultron discovered, over the course of approximately four consecutive exchanges, that every spacetime reversal he could execute and every reality-rewrite he could deploy to make himself invulnerable was meeting a force operating at the same rule-level and refusing to acknowledge the edit. His processing attempted to find the exploit. His processing found that Jordan was the exploit.
Two players. Same cheat software. Same version, same vendor, same license.
In a game where both players are running the same exploit, neither player has an advantage from the exploit — it's as if neither is cheating.
To resolve a contest between two people with equal cheat codes, you strip away the cheat codes and look at the base stats.
Jordan's base stats, at this point in the accumulation, were what they were.
The only question left, Jordan thought, landing another Infinity-level punch through another Ultron helmet, Vision's face appearing and disappearing and appearing again in the shattered gaps, is who hits harder.
He had a working hypothesis about the answer.