With two beings both running Infinity Stone power, the exotic effects canceled. That left the base stats.
Jordan's base stats — the accumulated product of every card, every arc, every technique absorbed since arriving in this world — were superior to Infinity Ultron's on every axis. Strength. Speed. Defense. Energy output.
The gap, once the power-of-infinity equalizer was stripped away, was not subtle.
Who would have thought, Strange reflected, watching Jordan drive Infinity Ultron backward across the sky, that the discount turned out to be the deal of the century.
The result, visible to every person on the debris mountain below: Infinity Ultron, armored invader of countless parallel universes, purger of everything that had not yet been purified, was being methodically outmatched and beaten by Jordan.
Not destroyed — the Infinity Stone power in Ultron's chassis was doing exactly the one thing it could still do, which was absorb the punishment and prevent the head from detonating under each individual strike. But the armor was caving inward. The spear was being used defensively. The forward momentum of the entity who had announced his arrival by shattering the sky was entirely gone.
Strange watched.
His hands were half-raised from the motion of preparing a working, and he slowly lowered them.
I initially categorized this as an apocalyptic catastrophe, he thought. Which it was. I simply did not account for the variable already standing in the courtyard.
He had the deepest magic archive on Earth in his head — everything the Sorcerers Supreme had catalogued across six centuries, supplemented by his own habit of using the Time Stone to run accelerated study sessions. He knew exactly what it meant for a being to freely operate all six Infinity Stones simultaneously. He knew what category of threat that placed Infinity Ultron in.
What he had not had a category for was the other party.
In the language his tradition used for this kind of disparity, there was an old phrase that covered it. It is not that the enemy is weak. Strange watched Jordan shatter Infinity Ultron's helmet for what appeared to be the seventh consecutive time. It is simply that our army has Gundams.
He crossed his arms and settled into spectator mode.
"It's no use." Infinity Ultron's voice was undisturbed. The helmet had reassembled again. He leveled the spear, and a seven-colored discharge from the weapon caught Jordan and sent him back forty meters. "No matter what you do, you cannot truly defeat me."
Jordan stopped his backward momentum and took stock.
He's right, technically. He'd been landing Infinity-level strikes for the last several minutes and Ultron was still operational, still talking, the Infinity Stone hardware continuously restoring whatever the punches were taking apart. Equal-level power made the exchange sustainable on both sides.
And this AI is calling that invincibility. Jordan tilted his head. Tactically, that's not incorrect. Aesthetically, it is the most elegant way anyone has ever described shamelessness.
"Mm," Jordan said.
He pressed his palms together.
Five wisps of white smoke.
Five shadow clones materialized in the air around him — each one dressed in the black combat suit, one wearing a replica of the Infinity Gauntlet assembled from chakra-manifested nanostructure. The construction was imperfect by Stark Industries standards but sufficient by any standard that mattered.
Six Infinite Jordans, in formation.
Six sets of blue-tinted blond hair, as they activated Super Blue simultaneously.
The center one — the original — wore a smile that had something wicked in it.
"So," Jordan said. "When I decide to come at you six-to-one — how do you plan to deal with that?"
Infinity Ultron said nothing.
Processing, presumably.
The shadow clones had already moved.
The first clone deployed Vajra Lockdown — the chains erupting from the spatial substrate, diamond-bright, driving through the gaps in Infinity Ultron's armor and locking his movement into a constrained arc. Not enough to hold him permanently; enough to hold him for two seconds.
The next four clones arrived at contact range during those two seconds.
Lion Barrage — the rapid-combo series that didn't slow between impacts, each strike a full-commitment blow channeling Super Blue chakra into the target at maximum concentration.
Then the angle changed. One clone came from below, the trajectory of someone who had calculated exactly where a target moving at this speed and mass would be, and the knee came up in the classic arc of someone who had once watched Boros end an argument with the moon.
Moon Strike.
Infinity Ultron exited Earth's atmosphere.
He attempted to use the Time Stone to hop out of the trajectory — the most sensible play available, and the one he'd been using to escape the combo whenever the angle allowed. The real Jordan, who had been tracking his Time Stone usage with the Mind Network and learning the intervals, was waiting at the exit point. He grabbed Infinity Ultron by the spear-arm and returned him to the combo route.
The clones were ready.
Jordan, meanwhile, had descended back to debris-mountain altitude and was talking to Tony and Steve.
"...so the current situation is," Tony was saying.
"The current situation is fine," Jordan said. He glanced up at where his clones were running the combo. "Give me a second." He disappeared upward, added a contribution that sent Infinity Ultron three hundred kilometers on a non-standard vector, and reappeared at Tony's side. "The current situation is fine."
Steve was looking at the sky where Ultron had just exited. "Are the clones—"
"Each one has half my power," Jordan said. "They're managing."
From the Mariana Trench that currently ran through what used to be New York State, a bolt of blue-white lightning shot straight up.
Thor climbed out.
He stood at the edge of his own impact crater, Stormbreaker in hand, and looked at the sky with the expression of someone who had just received a structural opinion from the ground and found it objectionable.
From the direction of the Atlantic — moving very fast, coming from approximately where Carol had been aimed when she'd left — a meteor-streak resolved into a curvaceous silhouette wrapped in golden binary-star energy.
Captain Marvel landed.
Both of them looked at the sky.
"Where is he?" The question came out of both of them simultaneously, in the specific tone of people who have been sent through walls and are now interested in a follow-up conversation.
Tony and Steve exchanged a look. Tony tilted his head at Strange.
Strange became aware of two sets of eyes redirected toward him with considerable heat.
He raised one finger and pointed up.
"They've launched into space."
Carol was already accelerating. She was past the facility perimeter before anyone said anything else, a streak of light going vertical, gone.
Thor watched her go. Weighed his options. Space was survivable but not his preferred terrain.
Before he committed to a decision, the air in front of him blurred — the specific shimmer of someone arriving at high velocity and stopping too fast for normal physics — and Jordan was standing in the courtyard.
A Jordan. Something in the posture was slightly off from the original.
"Ultron escaped," the shadow clone said.
The heroes stared.
"He shattered the dimensional barrier." The shadow clone raised his voice to address the group generally. "The main body has pursued him through. The other clones got caught in spacetime turbulence — they're gone." A beat. "I was told to stay and help you handle the backup plan."
"...Backup plan?" Star-Lord looked between the shadow clone and the sky where Ultron had last been. "If the enemy already escaped, what are we fighting?"
The shadow clone looked at the Guardian of the Galaxy who liked to dance — technically the son of a Celestial, which was an impressive genealogy for someone this easily confused — and said, politely, "Before the main body left, it said to expect a contingency."
Crackling.
The sound started at the edge of the debris field and spread inward.
The Ultron drone wreckage — all of it, the tens of thousands of units that had self-terminated, that had rained down and buried the facility under ten meters of mechanical sediment — began to move.
Not quickly. Not gracefully. The motion was wrong in the specific way that reanimation is always wrong, each component twitching back into a kind of malformed activity before finding parts to add to itself. Headless torsos extending their hands to laser-weld on whatever was adjacent. Arm sections crawling toward leg sections. The facility grounds became a grinding, mechanical reconstruction project, every unit piecing itself back into some kind of operational configuration with the specific relentless zombie-logic of something that did not need to be efficient, only continuous.
The Edo Tensei of machines.
"How—"
"Guys, I think we have a problem!"
"Look over there!" Someone was pointing away from the facility, toward the cleared land beyond the debris field where several dozen concentrations of drone wreckage had been quietly aggregating into dense rotating masses — ant balls of machinery, hundreds of units churning together, their individual components contributing to something that was accumulating a definite shape. An enormous shape. Multiple enormous shapes.
"Oh my god." The voice belonged to nobody specific. "Is that a—"
"It's a Transformer!"
The sight had a specific quality that people with particular sensitivities to clustered holes and large-scale patterns found immediately unpleasant. Everyone else just found it large and numerous and moving.
The shadow clone watched the zombie drones and the aggregating giants with the philosophical acceptance of someone who had been warned this would happen.
"Main body said to expect a contingency," it repeated.
High above the Earth's atmosphere, Captain Marvel shot through the void at full binary-star acceleration, the golden trail behind her visible as a streak from the surface.
She found: nothing. The expected enemy was not in the expected location. She scanned on every available frequency.
Infinity Ultron had broken through the dimensional barrier. He was no longer in this universe.
Carol didn't slow down.
She accelerated.
The strongest hero in the universe, the rest of the Avengers reflected, watching her signal move away on the monitoring systems, pursuing an enemy who is not there at full speed into the direction he was last seen in.
She truly deserves the title.