Strange Supreme — who had the look of a man who had crossed a line a long time ago and had been quietly tending bar in the multiverse ever since — pushed the refilled mug back across the counter without meeting Thor's eyes.
"No offense," he said, "but watching the screen, that one looks like a harder problem than Ultron."
He meant Jordan.
"Hmm." The Watcher's expression, which had been contemplative since his declaration, did not change. "Be that as it may. You are the chosen guardians of the multiverse. You have to try."
Gamora — this Gamora, the one wearing Thanos's golden imperial armor with the ease of someone who has decided the previous owner's possessions were fair compensation — shrugged. "Grand mission. Very heroic."
Captain Carter, taller than most of the room's occupants, smiled at the ceiling. "At least it sounds like it means something."
The television on the wall changed.
Everyone looked at it.
Somewhere outside the solar system's familiar orbital paths, in the space above what orbital charts marked as Mars, two figures collided in the core of a dying planet.
They'd gone through the crust an indeterminate number of exchanges ago. The mantle had not been designed to accommodate this. At approximately 2,000 degrees Celsius, with the iron in the planet's core liquefying and churning around them, Jordan and Infinity Ultron were conducting what could charitably be called a disagreement — each impact sending shockwaves through the planetary structure that wrote new rifts from the surface down to the core, the rifts lit from inside by seven-colored Infinity Stone light.
The rifts accumulated. The energy discharge between each exchange built on what had come before. The planet's structural tolerance, already having a bad day, reached a threshold.
Mars exploded.
From the inside out — the core fracturing, the mantle separating, the crust dispersing into fragments that radiated outward in a slow-motion orange-red bloom that was almost, from sufficient distance, beautiful. Planetary material became dust became the beginning of a new meteorite belt. Some of it would find other orbits. Some would leave the solar system entirely.
Two figures emerged from the explosion before the light had fully resolved, facing each other in the wreckage of a planet.
Infinity Ultron raised what remained of his left arm and looked at the stump. The shoulder had been the boundary. Below that: nothing. He applied the Infinity Stone array passively — the strange rippling of colorful energy that meant the stones were rewriting local physics — and a new arm assembled itself from the Infinity Stone-authored version of reality, vibranium construction, indistinguishable from the original.
He flexed the fingers.
"No one has ever matched me to this degree." Something in the processing had shifted — not away from confidence, but toward a different register of it. The register of something that has encountered a genuine peer for the first time. "Therefore, I will show you what I am truly capable of."
The six Infinity Stones in his chassis began to radiate simultaneously.
This was not the selective use of individual Stones that had defined most of the engagement. This was all six at once, their energies converging, colors collapsing into a single frequency that was not a color anymore, that was white in the specific way that contains everything at once — the universe at the moment of its own creation, pressed into a fist, and released without restriction.
The complete power of infinity. Deployed without a blind spot.
Jordan watched the buildup and felt the scale of it arrive in the Mind Network like a pressure front.
"Muda muda." He said it in the language of a different villain entirely, which felt appropriate. "Useless. Useless."
His right hand — the one wearing the Infinity Gauntlet — snapped its fingers.
The blast arrived. And then it did not.
In the space between Infinity Ultron's fists and the surrounding void, a crystalline structure assembled itself around the destructive output — not blocking it, but containing it, lattice walls closing in on all sides, trapping the force that had been designed to fill everything it touched. The white energy pushed against the facets. The facets pushed back. The sphere compressed, and compressed, and settled.
Jordan plucked it from the air. The size of a lollipop.
He looked at it.
Infinity Ultron looked at his own hands, then looked at the space around them.
Mars — which they had apparently destroyed together just now — was completely intact, sitting exactly where orbital mechanics said it should be, showing no indication of having recently experienced its own internal collapse.
"...Did you notice something's wrong?" Jordan asked.
Infinity Ultron ran the calculation. Found the answer. Found that the answer had been in place since approximately the beginning of this phase of their engagement.
When Jordan had first caught him — when the chase through parallel universes had temporarily resolved into close-range combat — Jordan had been casting something that Infinity Ultron's combat-analysis had flagged as spatial magic at unusual scale. He had not fully processed why, at the time, because the fight had demanded other attention.
Mirror Magic. Combined with the Space Stone's spatial authority, scaled to the radius of a small planet.
Jordan had pulled them into a mirror dimension early — a vast reflective copy of the real space they'd been occupying, expanded to cosmically convincing scale. The 2,000-degree planetary core had been mirror-real. The explosion had been mirror-real. The destruction of what appeared to be Mars had been entirely localized to a reflection.
Real Mars: fine.
The energy sphere in Jordan's hand was real, though. The destructive force Infinity Ultron had discharged into the mirror universe had still needed somewhere to go. Jordan had collected it.
He put it in his mouth.
The energy core processed the intake without complaint — the Honkai-derived architecture that had been absorbing Infinity Stone energy since the Soul Stone siphon in chapter 364 finding this batch familiar and acceptable. Excellent tonic. Several cellular systems that had been running at slightly elevated consumption updated their reserves.
Infinity Ultron observed this without speaking for a moment that was longer than he typically allowed.
Then the battle resumed.
Four wisps of white smoke.
Four shadow clones — each one carrying half the current power, which was still a considerable quantity of power — materialized in the space around the engagement. The assembled Jordans had the specific coordination advantage of all sharing the same tactical assessment in real time. Infinity Ultron found himself surrounded by five beings who moved like one, each one knowing where the others were without checking.
One of the shadow clones got behind Infinity Ultron.
Applied a rear-naked choke.
This was, technically, a wrestling technique. Infinity Ultron was a cosmically enhanced vibranium entity with all six Infinity Stones. The shadow clone doing the choking had approximately three Infinity Stones' worth of power and a grip that could compete with Eternal Titan physiology on a good day.
It held, briefly, which was longer than it should have.
Before Infinity Ultron could discharge the Infinity Stone energy to break the grip, Jordan — the original — was already inside the guard.
Fast. Precise. Fingers finding the Stone sockets in the chest armor.
Three Stone sockets, specifically: Time, Space, Reality.
He pulled.
The clasps released. The Stones came free. The sockets became three empty spaces in the chest armor.
Infinity Ultron stared at the empty grooves, then at Jordan's hand holding three of the universe's most significant artifacts.
Half the stones.
Jordan turned the three Stones over in his palm and pocketed them.
"Let's call this state—" He considered. "—Half a Step into the Infinite Realm."
Half the original power. Which meant: no longer omniscient, no longer omnipotent. No longer able to rewrite reality at will, no longer able to repair damage to his chassis without the Reality Stone's constant authorship of the local physics. No longer able to jump timelines with the Time Stone or relocate through dimensions with the Space Stone.
What remained: the Power Stone, the Mind Stone, and the Soul Stone.
Three Infinity Stones were still three Infinity Stones. The math on what three Infinity Stones could do was not reassuring.
Infinity Ultron shook the shadow clones free.
"Give those back."
The Power Stone lit up across the right fist — that deep, planet-ending purple that was the simplest possible argument for ending a dispute — and he drove it forward. The force concentrated into a purple ribbon of light that sheared through the meteorite fragments orbiting in Mars's former position like they were decorative, and came for Jordan at the speed something comes for you when it has decided that negotiations are over.
The mirror dimension around them rippled.
It was reaching its maximum extension — the containment space Jordan had created was not designed for indefinite use at this scale.
Which, Jordan noted, means I need a new one.
He pressed two fingers together.
Mirror Magic — second casting.
The space around them shimmered, crystalline walls reassembling on a new blueprint, pulling both of them into a fresh reflective copy of the surrounding void. New container. New rules about what would and would not translate into real damage to real space.
"What, is there a cost to casting?" Jordan asked, rhetorically, as the new dimension settled around them.
His energy core considered the question.
There was, technically, always a cost to casting. The issue was that Jordan's energy reserves had a floor that was difficult to locate, a ceiling that the Pseudo-Herrscher Core had not yet finished raising, and a throughput rate that the Soul Stone absorption had permanently improved.
Put differently: the blue bar was full, had been full, and was currently in the process of being fuller.
Somewhere in the multiverse, Dormammu — who had his own opinions about energy economics — felt a distant professional kinship he could not account for.
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