Gamora hit the ground rolling, scarlet cape snapping behind her. She bled off the momentum in a clean arc, vibranium boots gouging twin furrows in the rock before she came up in a combat stance, Tyrant's Blade already in hand.
Killmonger was not so lucky.
Jordan's Dimensional Gate had caught him mid-flight and redirected his trajectory from straight down to nearly horizontal. He drove his vibranium claws into the ground on instinct, sparks shrieking from both hands as he tried to bleed the speed — but he was going too fast for physics to cooperate. The leverage snapped. His balance went. And then he was simply skipping, like a stone thrown hard and flat across a lake, bouncing across the Martian terrain in a series of increasingly distant impacts until even the kinetic energy ran out of things to do.
The silence that followed was dignified in no one's favor.
A portal opened at the edge of his final resting place and a tendril of amber sling-ring magic hauled him back to the group.
Strange Supreme set him down without comment. The man looked, as he always did, like he had recently survived several weeks of terrible decisions — grey temples, creased forehead, the specific hollowness around the eyes of someone who understood the cost of power and paid it regularly. He'd once destroyed a universe trying to keep someone alive. Tending bar in the dimensional gap between realities was, arguably, a step up.
"I'm out." T'Challa Star-Lord broke into the air on twin thruster jets the moment the gravity field dissolved, looping two enthusiastic figure-eights above the group with the energy of someone who had been storing it for the last several minutes. He completed a third loop for good measure.
Strange pinched the bridge of his nose.
Killmonger pressed two fingers against his temple and rotated his jaw experimentally. "Okay. That's what we're dealing with." He straightened. "He's tough. We need to hit him together — all of us."
"That's a problem," said Party Thor.
Everyone looked at him.
He held up both empty hands, the expression of a man confronting a genuine tragedy. "My hammer is gone."
Killmonger stared at him for a long moment with the look of someone revising their opinion of gods generally downward.
Strange sighed — the exhale of a man who had, in his time, bargained with interdimensional darkness and found it less draining than this — and raised one hand. Amber light spiraled into geometric configurations. An object crystallized in the air between them: a warhammer in shape, forged from enchanted material, clearly not Mjolnir but occupying the same conceptual space.
He offered it without ceremony. "It won't last forever. But it'll hold."
Thor reached out and wrapped his hand around the haft. Lightning flooded in on reflex — the divine kind, the kind that remembered billions of years of accumulated storm.
The hammer groaned.
Every fitting strained. The enchantments flared amber, then white, then back to amber. The grip trembled. By some combination of Strange's craftsmanship and the sheer stubbornness of the material, it held.
Thor examined it. "Fine." He hefted it once, twice. The lightning settled into a low, continuous crackle. "I'll make do. Thanks, wizard."
Strange looked at the ceiling — which, in open space above Mars, was the universe — with the expression of a man reminding himself of his long-term purpose.
"Right," he said, and turned back to the problem. "Are we ready?"
Jordan was watching from above, hands loose at his sides, scarlet cape drifting on nothing. He tilted his head as the Multiverse Guardians finished assembling, weapons raised, magic primed.
"Ready when you are," he said pleasantly.
"Give me back Mjolnir!" Party Thor launched himself skyward like a golden artillery shell, hammer swinging, lightning cascading off every surface it touched.
Jordan spread both hands, placed his fingertips against his temples, and smiled.
"Try this first."
The ki he poured into something incandescent.
Solar Punch.
White light detonated from Jordan's entire body. Not the purple-and-orange of Infinity Stone power, not the crackling electric blue of his star core at capacity. This was something simpler and more absolute: concentrated radiance, the photonic equivalent of staring into a sun that had decided to make eye contact.
Thor, leading the charge at point-blank range, took the full discharge directly to the face. He stopped. His eyes had stopped working, and his nervous system, surprised by the sudden optical override, had sent halt signals to everything else pending further information.
Behind him, the rest of the Multiverse Guardians fared better — somewhat better. Gamora raised one arm across her eyes in time. T'Challa Star-Lord's visor polarized automatically. Killmonger turned his face away with the reflexes of a man who had survived worse.
Strange Supreme squinted hard, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and somehow — in the general misery of the moment — this seemed like the most natural thing in the world. These were eyes that had not slept properly in a very long time and that had developed strong feelings about sudden bright lights.
The white light faded.
Jordan hung in the sky above them, hands settled on his hips, scarlet cape spread on the stellar wind, a warm smile on his face. The energy ball materialized above his palm as they blinked the afterimages away — a sphere ten meters across, slowly rotating, emitting pressure waves that resonated in the chest cavity and said, clearly and without ambiguity, this could erase a planet.
"All together now," Jordan said cheerfully. "Let me see what you've got."
Strange felt it first — a faint flutter, dimensional, barely perceptible. A portal had opened somewhere nearby, at the edge of his detection range, in the fraction of a second while his eyes were adjusting. By the time he focused on it, it was already gone.
Something's off.
Then the energy ball swelled.
He didn't have time to investigate.
Three seconds earlier.
The Solar Punch's light had done its job. In the white silence behind the blaze, Jordan had summoned a shadow clone in the same instant — the copy appearing in his exact position, his exact pose, hands at temples, smile maintained. The clone had taken Jordan's place in the sky so seamlessly that the transition was invisible to anyone who still had functional eyes.
Jordan himself had used the Space Stone.
The Mirror Dimension had a seam, as all mirror dimensions did — a boundary between the constructed geometry and the real universe just outside it. He found it with the Space Stone's spatial authority and pushed.
He emerged into open vacuum above Mars. Real Mars. The red planet below, undamaged, unbothered, spinning along its orbit with the peaceful indifference of a world that had never heard of Infinity Ultron or the What If? multiverse or any of this.
Jordan balled his fist, felt the infinite power settle through his arm, and punched the world barrier.
It was not a subtle exit.
The boundary between universes — the metaphysical membrane separating the MCU's layer of reality from the void between all possible realities — shattered at the point of impact like safety glass. Jordan stepped through the gap, one hand already working to seal the tear behind him, Stone-assisted spatial needlework closing the breach he'd just made.
Can't leave those open. Dimensional rifts are a cascade-failure waiting to happen.
He moved forward through the between-spaces.
The cracks between universes were not what Jordan had expected.
He'd imagined something hostile — void, or static, or the particular grey nothing that showed up in dimensional-collapse scenarios. What he found instead was this:
Crystal walls.
They stretched in every direction, vast and irregular, each one a slightly different color depending on the angle of observation. Some were deep violet, some warm amber, some the precise blue of a sky that had never been touched by industrial pollution. They refracted the light that existed in this place — light with no obvious source, ambient and sourceless — into overlapping spectra that played across the floor and ceiling and Jordan's outstretched hand.
These were the edges of parallel universes. The literal boundaries between realities, crystallized into geometry by the pressure of infinite expansion. Each facet was a world. Each seam was the point where two worlds had agreed, over billions of years of expansion, not to occupy the same space.
Jordan walked forward with his hands clasped behind his back, tilting his head to watch the colors move.
Living here would be perfectly fine, he thought, with the pragmatic sincerity of someone who had been assessing real estate in unconventional locations his entire transmigrator career. The light was good. The structural integrity was, by definition, cosmological. No neighbors.
"I mean it genuinely," he said aloud, to no one who was currently visible. "This is a wonderful place."
He paused.
"Don't you think so — Uatu?"
Silence.
Then, from behind one of the larger crystal formations: a sharp intake of breath, quickly suppressed. The specific sound of someone who had been hoping they were better at hiding than they were.
Uatu, the Watcher, stepped into view.
His deep blue robes caught the prismatic light of the crystal walls and scattered it in a dozen directions. He was as Jordan had always understood him to be: vast in presence if not in form, the weight of observed history in every line of his face. His eyes, when they fixed on Jordan, held something that had no comfortable name — not fear, not anger. The genuine unsettled quality of a being who had observed every probability across a near-infinite sample size and found one that didn't fit the model.
He clenched his fists at his sides.
"So you made it after all, outsider." His voice carried the resonance of someone accustomed to being heard across dimensional barriers. "Before anything else — I am of the Observer Clan. My people—"
"Intervened," Jordan said.
Uatu stopped.
Jordan looked at him pleasantly, hands still folded at the small of his back, the light of a dozen parallel worlds playing across his scarlet cape.
The Watcher released a slow breath — the exhale of someone setting down an argument they'd already half-known they were going to lose.
"You weren't supposed to find your way here," he said. "Not like this." His eyes, ancient and troubled, held Jordan's. "Since you're here — let me be direct. You acquired the Infinity Stones through circumstance, not design. They are not your power. They belong to a universe you're passing through." He paused. "Return them. That is my final advice to you, outsider."
Jordan listened.
He did not immediately answer.
The crystals of the multiverse's edge refracted light around them in silence, universe after universe pressing softly against their boundaries, all of reality continuing its patient expansion in every direction at once.