At the back of the formation, Killmonger's jaw was tight.
He was watching a man who had just snapped five Infinity Stones out of existence — just ended them, casually, the way someone discards a losing lottery ticket — and was now standing in open space with his hands clasped behind his back, wearing the expression of someone waiting for a bus.
Does he feel anything?
His gaze dropped to Jordan's right hand. The Infinity Gauntlet sat on it like a piece of jewelry. Diamonds catching starlight.
He's also got that.
Killmonger unclenched his fists. Clenched them again.
Okay. Fine.
"Let me guess," Jordan said, and smiled pleasantly at the assembled team. "The plan is to expel me — the unstable factor — from the web of fate entirely." He tilted his head. "Whenever you're ready."
"No way, buddy! That's — nobody's doing that!" Party Thor laughed, the kind of laugh that fills silences while the laugher frantically recalculates. He scratched the back of his neck. "What a stupid plan that would be. Ridiculous. Nobody here thought of that. ...Right? Tell me nobody thought of that. Hahahaha—"
"Plan A's done." Killmonger's voice cut through the laughter like a blade. He stepped forward, the Black Panther suit flowing across his body, and dropped into a fighting stance. "We're moving."
Thor's laugh died mid-syllable. He turned, mouth still open.
His teammates were already moving.
Captain Carter's shield left her arm in a silver blur, vibranium ringing against the cosmic silence. "His power comes from the Gauntlet!" she called out, tracking Jordan's position. "Get it off his hand and we've got a chance!"
Thor stared at her.
"Did you just—" He spread his hands. "Did you announce the battle plan out loud? While he's right there?"
"Incoming!"
In the sky, Jordan had already processed the information. He glanced at the Infinity Gauntlet on his right hand, then back at the approaching shield, and found himself genuinely considering it.
If that's really what you think the gauntlet is doing for me — giving it to you might actually be funny.
He filed the idea away for later.
The shield arrived.
He caught it one-handed, the vibranium ringing against his palm with a note like a struck bell, and threw it back along the same arc. It hit Captain Carter at the apex of her jump — she had time to cry out before the impact connected, and golden protective enchantments erupted across her body on reflex. She changed direction mid-air anyway, not by choice, and her landing carved a deep circular crater into the red ground of Saturn far below.
She pulled herself out of it, retrieved the shield from where it had settled beside her, and said something under her breath that the distance swallowed.
Above her, Doctor Strange had laid a staircase of golden conjuration across the sky — rings of light stepping upward through nothing. Killmonger and Gamora didn't hesitate. They hit each step at a sprint, building speed, and launched themselves into the open air toward Jordan.
Thor watched them go and made a decision.
"For the record — this is not personal."
He threw Mjolnir.
Lightning forked across the sky as the hammer spun, the air shrieking around it, and then Strange's hands moved behind it — a clean, precise gesture — and a golden portal opened directly in Mjolnir's path.
In the private frequency of their mental link:
F-boy: Got it. I'm calling this move Ninja Art: Mjolnir Shadow Clone Jutsu.
Jordan: That is genuinely the worst name I've heard since arriving in this universe.
F-boy: I'm workshopping it.
In the real world, Jordan's movements didn't slow by a fraction.
One Mjolnir became a hundred. Became a thousand. The conjured duplicates fanned out in every direction, filling the sky with hammer-shaped thunder, all of them screaming toward him on different vectors like a swarm of furious divine missiles.
The Reality Stone answered before Jordan consciously directed it.
Red light swept through the air in a quiet wave. Every copied Mjolnir dissolved — not shattered, not deflected, simply ceased — their conjured physics rewritten back to nothing. Strange, below, exhaled briefly through his nose.
The real Mjolnir arrived alone.
Jordan's fingers closed around the handle.
The thunder that had been screaming across its surface broke against his grip and disappeared. The runes of Odin's worthy-enchantment — carved into the hammer across eons, tested against gods and found absolute — registered his hand and offered no opinion on it whatsoever.
Jordan felt the hammer trying.
He felt it the same way he'd felt Ultron struggling — a real effort, genuine and considerable, just aimed at the wrong target. He held it at arm's length and studied it with something approaching Hela's private satisfaction at finding a divine artifact lighter than expected.
He didn't share Hela's destructive hobbies, though.
F-boy.
His Stand stepped halfway out of his body, suited hand extended. The Mjolnir collapsed inward into blazing light.
A card crystallized. It vanished into the deck.
Freely donated mid-combat counts as a donation.
"WAIT—"
Thor's hands were empty.
He turned in a full circle, as though Mjolnir might have gotten lost nearby and needed only to be located. He looked at the sky where it had been. He looked at Jordan, who had already turned his attention to the two figures closing from opposite angles. He looked at Doctor Strange, who had been his conjuration partner approximately twelve seconds ago.
Strange met his gaze, glanced at the still-imprisoned T'Challa Star-Lord, and made a small gesture that clearly communicated: I am occupied.
Thor looked back at his empty hands for a long moment.
The Leaf Whirlwind had already happened twice.
Gamora came in from the front, the Tyrant's Blade sweeping wide arcs — the sword that had killed a Thanos in her own timeline, double-edged and heavy with ceremony. Her reach was aggressive, her footwork precise. She'd spent her whole life learning to fight targets much larger and stranger than herself.
She swung.
Jordan caught the blade between two fingers.
The vibration of the impact traveled up the sword's length, through the crossguard, into Gamora's arms — felt more than heard, like catching a tuning fork. She pulled. The blade didn't move. It might as well have been set in concrete.
A flick of his wrist sent her in a long arc away from him.
At the same moment, his peripheral awareness registered Killmonger arriving from behind — exactly as intended, exactly as planned, the Black Panther suit's kinetic reserve coiling into ten finger-blades at his hands, reaching for the back of Jordan's head with the practiced economy of someone who had made this same ambush work a hundred times in his own universe.
Jordan pivoted.
The Leaf Whirlwind came from his heel, a single rotation — and Killmonger, for all his vibranium suit and kinetic dampening, had nowhere to put the energy of that kick. He left like a cannonball, red ground rising to meet him at speed.
The crater he made was significant.
Strange was already conjuring before either of them hit the bottom. Two dimensional gates opened at the landing sites, and Gamora and Killmonger reappeared beside him in the sky, intact, breathing hard, postures recalibrating for the second engagement.
Jordan hovered where he was and watched them sort themselves out.
Seasoned hunters, he thought. Just hunting the wrong thing.
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