The Mirror Dimension had done its job perfectly.
Shielded by its geometry, not even Infinity Ultron's three remaining Stones had registered the trap closing around him. The universe itself had remained oblivious. Starlight streamed through the crystalline walls of the pocket dimension as if nothing unusual were happening at all — which, from the universe's perspective, was entirely true.
Jordan's operation had been completed in silence.
The invincible destroyer Ultron ends here.
Ultron's fist came down in a cascade of purple radiance, the Power Stone's force behind it enough to collapse a small moon. Jordan caught it with one hand.
He didn't catch it gently.
His fingers locked around Ultron's wrist, redirecting the momentum rather than absorbing it, and his boot came up in a sharp kick to the inside of Ultron's knee. The joint buckled. The god-machine went down — not all the way, not yet, but enough. Jordan stepped behind him in the same motion, wrenching the arm up and back in a hold that had no business working on a vibranium chassis.
And yet it worked.
Ultron was built in the image of man, down to every joint and stress point. That had always been his fatal elegance and his fatal flaw.
Purple light blazed across Ultron's frame as he struggled, shot through with the gold of the Mind Stone's neural fire and the deep amber of the Soul Stone. His intelligent core — the brilliant, terrible AI that had transcended programming to become something that genuinely lived — registered an unfamiliar sensation as Jordan held him pinned.
Shame.
The third human emotion Ultron had ever experienced, following pleasure and anger. He was not grateful for it.
He wrenched and pulled. The Soul Stone surged. The Power Stone detonated in concentric waves against the mirror dimension's walls, and the walls held. Jordan rode the pressure the same way he'd ridden Infinity Ultron's full discharge two chapters of this fight ago — absorbing what he could, redirecting the rest, never letting go.
Three Stones, Jordan thought, against someone in the same weight class who also has infinite energy reserves. That math doesn't improve for you, Ultron.
He summoned a shadow clone.
The duplicate materialized beside them in a flash of displaced air — Jordan's exact height, exact posture, blond hair, golden J emblem catching what little light existed in this pocket of folded space. It nodded at the original in silent acknowledgment. Then it stepped forward and, with calm efficiency, removed the remaining two Infinity Stones — Power and Soul — from Jordan's chest, one after the other.
The purple blaze across Ultron's body died.
The amber light guttered out.
Only the Mind Stone on his forehead still burned, a single point of gold in the dark, fighting to hold the tide.
The shadow clone stepped back. Jordan released Ultron's arm and let him straighten — not from mercy, but because there was no longer any reason to hold him.
The Reality Stone answered Jordan's thought before he'd finished forming it. Its red light swept across Ultron's frame in a wave of revised physics, and the vibranium armor — every sculpted, nigh-indestructible plate of it — simply ceased to exist. What remained was the chassis beneath: Vision's body, the synthetic flesh that Ultron had stolen and occupied. Deep crimson. Still. The Mind Stone's gold pulsing steadily in its forehead socket, the machine's last ember.
Something moved in Ultron's eyes. A deduction, completed in microseconds by the dying remnant of his intelligence.
He doesn't just want to end me. He wants the body.
"I happen to have a soul over there that needs a home," Jordan said pleasantly, and raised one finger toward the gleaming Mind Stone. "Think you could help him out?"
The Soul Gem's orange light blazed from the gauntlet.
Ultron's scream lasted approximately half a second before it stopped.
The divine light behind his eyes went out. The Mind Stone's gold faded from frenetic to a quiet, waiting pulse. The body remained — not gray like Vision's corpse, not cold, not inert. Still red. Still warm. The Mind Stone sustaining it the way a cradle sustains an empty room, patient, ready.
Waiting for a new owner.
The shadow clone dissolved in a clean burst of white smoke.
F-boy stepped out of Jordan's body.
He was impeccably dressed, as always — dark suit, clean tie, the studied composure of someone who had witnessed the destruction of several timelines and found it all professionally interesting. He crossed the space between them without hurrying, laid one hand across Ultron's vibranium crown, and the body — along with the quietly pulsing Mind Stone — collapsed inward into brilliant light.
An SSR card crystallized in the air between them. F-boy plucked it, examined it briefly with the expression of a collector verifying an acquisition, and added it to the deck.
It vanished.
Jordan dusted off his hands and began calculating the coordinates for a dimensional rift back to the MCU universe.
The Mirror Dimension shattered.
Not the way mirror dimensions normally shattered — the way glass breaks, into fragments and failure. This one came apart cleanly, deliberately, every crystalline panel fracturing in sequence until the geometry gave way and the real universe reasserted itself around them. The stars of deep space spread out in every direction. Mars gleamed red in the distance, untouched, unbothered.
And standing on nothing, surrounded by golden rings of protective enchantment, was a group of people Jordan recognized on principle if not by introduction.
He'd expected Uatu to send someone eventually.
"Hey, buddy." The one who stepped forward looked like Thor had been fed a steady diet of sunshine and diplomatic seminars. Broad shoulders, easy smile, golden hair — the Thor of a universe where the word responsibility had apparently never come up. He held out both hands in the universal gesture of please don't hit me. "I know you're strong. Clearly. Nobody here is disputing that. But I was thinking — maybe we could make a deal?"
He took two more careful steps forward, smile never wavering.
"Those gems you've got — they don't belong to this universe. They're dangerous. What if you just..." He tilted his head, charming, reasonable. "Handed them over to us for safekeeping?"
Jordan looked at the group. Golden protective magic. A woman with a shield. A man in Ravager gear with T'Challa's face. Someone in golden armor carrying a sword that had clearly belonged to a dead Titan. A man in black-and-purple. The diplomatic Thor.
Uatu's team.
He turned his hands over. Five Infinity Stones rose from his fingers in a slow orbit — Time's green, Space's blue, Reality's red, Power's purple, Soul's amber — casting a haze of color across the dark.
"The Watcher sent you," Jordan said. It wasn't a question. "I just resolved a threat that would have consumed countless universes, and based on your positioning, you're here to jump me." He watched the five Stones turn lazily in the air. "That about right?"
"No, no, no — there's been a complete misunderstanding—"
Jordan raised one hand in a pause gesture.
Behind him, a gravitational field snapped shut like a trap.
T'Challa Star-Lord — who had been closing the distance with exceptional quiet, Ravager boots designed for exactly this kind of silent approach, one hand already reaching — found himself locked in place as thoroughly as if he'd been set in concrete. He let out a short, involuntary sound of surprise.
Party Thor stopped talking. His smile developed cracks.
"A small misunderstanding," Jordan said, "is what you call it when you distract me so your teammate can come in from behind and lift a gem?" He glanced back at T'Challa Star-Lord, suspended in the gravitational field a meter off the notional ground. "That's a coordinated operation. Which tells me Uatu briefed you on exactly what I can do, and you still thought this was a reasonable plan."
"We genuinely meant no harm—"
Jordan swept his hand sideways and sent T'Challa Star-Lord sailing in a long arc toward the assembled group. Doctor Strange's sling ring was already moving; golden magic caught the Ravager mid-tumble before he could impact anyone. Strange set him down carefully, expression professionally neutral, and T'Challa immediately began testing the edges of the gravity field with his fingers. Finding no edges.
Jordan watched this.
Five Infinity Stones continued their slow orbit, casting colored light across everyone's faces.
"Given the ambush," Jordan said, "I've made a decision." He looked at the Stones. Then at the group. Then back at the Stones. "I'm not giving these to you."
"Okay, that's — that's fair, we can talk about—"
"I'm going to destroy them."
"—wait."
Jordan brought his fingers together.
Snap.
Infinite power detonated between his fingertips.
A white beam of absolute light erupted outward — not the killing half-light of Thanos's snap, but something else entirely, something expansive and scattering, a release rather than a reduction. It spread through the mirror dimension, through the walls, through every cubic light-year of the surrounding universe in a silent, blinding wave.
On the surface of Mars — visible through the clearing light, impossibly far and impossibly clear — the members of the Multiverse Guardians could do nothing. The distance was too great. The speed was too complete. The five Infinity Stones had already come apart, their crystalline structures dissolving into turbulent seven-colored energy that fanned across the cosmos in every direction, a spectrum aurora scattered to the infinite dark.
The light faded.
Silence.
Everyone stood very still.
No one had expected that. Not the diplomatic Thor with his frozen smile. Not Strange, who had presumably seen thousands of possible futures. Not T'Challa Star-Lord, still faintly testing a gravity field that showed no signs of releasing him. Not any of them.
Jordan dusted off his hands a second time.
Precious cosmic artifacts, he thought, and found he didn't regret it at all.