Jordan raised his right hand.
Six Infinity Stones blazed on the Gauntlet's knuckles — Time's green, Space's blue, Reality's red, Power's purple, Soul's amber, Mind's gold — each one a compressed history of cosmic consequence. He turned his hand slightly so the prismatic light of the multiverse cracks caught them all at once.
"Here's the thing," he said. "Even if you hadn't assembled a team to come after me — I was already planning to do exactly what you're asking."
Uatu went very still.
"What?"
Jordan's posture didn't change — back straight, hands easy, the particular unhurried quality of someone who had assessed every variable in the room and found the math comfortable. He looked at the Watcher with something close to patience.
"If your bald friend hadn't accidentally let Infinity Ultron see through the dimensional walls," Jordan continued, his tone pleasantly conversational, "I would have already returned every one of these Stones to their proper timelines and put the fractured sequences back on track." A beat. "You made my job significantly harder by watching so loudly."
The accusation landed cleanly.
Uatu's luminous eyes held no expression — which was itself an expression, if you knew what to look for. The faintly rigid set of his jaw. The half-second before he found his composure and retrieved it.
Because Jordan hadn't fabricated anything.
It was Uatu's observation that had given Infinity Ultron his window — the precise moment when the Watcher's attention pierced the dimensional barrier and Ultron's six Stones felt the gap and understood what lay beyond it. The multiverse massacre had begun there. In that instant of cosmic voyeurism.
This is awkward, thought the Watcher, who had been observing civilizations rise and fall for longer than most species had existed, and who had therefore developed a very specific armor against awkwardness.
He was old. Genuinely old, the kind of old that makes geological time look like a long weekend. He had watched stars born and die and born again. He had catalogued extinctions, renaissances, the quiet ends of species that had never known they were being watched. Those years hadn't made him wise in the comfortable sense — but they had made him durable, and they had given him a Dao Heart that didn't wobble for a few pointed sentences from a transmigrator in a scarlet cape, no matter how accurate those sentences happened to be.
The orange light gathered in his palm.
"Whatever the circumstances," Uatu said, his voice settling back into its proper register — vast, measured, the tone of a being who had converted his last concession to confidence a very long time ago — "I have to ask you to leave. That will not change."
The air in the multiverse cracks dropped several degrees.
Jordan raised one finger.
"One problem."
Uatu paused mid-windup. "...Yes?"
"How do you know," Jordan said, "that my arrival in this universe isn't simply a natural event within the range of infinite possibility?"
As he spoke, the Infinity Stones on the Gauntlet blazed. Seven-colored lightning crawled across his shoulders and arms, static discharge from the infinite power bleeding into the surrounding environment. The crystal walls of the multiverse's edge — each one the boundary of a parallel universe — shivered as the energy rippled outward. The world barriers trembled.
Uatu did not answer immediately.
This was not because the question had no answer. It was because the honest answer was complicated, and Uatu was old enough to recognize when an argument was being made with better foundations than his own.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe had never been a closed system. Dimensional entities pressed through its walls on a near-regular basis. Lords of hell left their fingerprints on its physics. The Phoenix Force blazed through it periodically without filing paperwork. Time travelers arrived, departed, accidentally created branching timelines, and then complained about the mess. DC crossovers happened often enough that the Avengers had standing protocols for them. The world's barriers had, over the span of the MCU's existence, functioned less like walls and more like a screen door on a submarine.
Existence is reasonable, Uatu thought. That is his point. The principle that justifies my own interference also justifies his presence.
He looked at Jordan.
Jordan looked back.
Two beings who had arrived at the same conclusion by different routes: there was nothing left to resolve through words.
They raised their fists at the same moment.
Jordan moved first.
A torrent of seven-colored energy erupted from the Gauntlet — not a beam, not a blast, but a cascade, the full spectrum of infinite power released in a single continuous wave. It crossed the space between them in a fraction of a second.
Uatu deployed a hemispherical shield with both hands, orange-white energy crystallizing into a dome that bent and scattered the impact. The crystal walls around them cracked. The floor of the between-space shook. The shield held — barely, straining at its edges, but held.
Before he could retaliate, a fist filled his vision.
Jordan had crossed the gap while the energy barrage kept the shield occupied. No technique announced, no special effect — just the speed of an Infinite-realm combatant who had stopped telegraphing his attacks several fights ago.
Uatu didn't panic. He compressed the orange-yellow energy in front of him in the same instant, condensing it from a broad field into a single needle-point: a bolt of destructive force capable of piercing the world barrier itself. His arm, apparently frail, moved with the precision of something that had been calculating optimal responses since before Earth's sun was born.
His fist met Jordan's.
The collision didn't produce sound, exactly. It produced a change in the local conditions — the gap between universes widening by several factors as the shockwave propagated outward, the crystal walls heating to scorching red along the nearest faces, the world barriers glowing at the edges as the divine power of two Infinite-realm combatants invaded the metaphysical structure of the space between spaces.
A hairline crack appeared in one of the nearer universe-boundaries.
Jordan noted it. Filed it. Put it on the list of things to repair when this was over.
The exchange of blows continued for three more seconds — which was, at their respective speeds, a substantial engagement. Then the space in front of Jordan became a wall.
Not a physical wall. An invisible constraint, two meters on a side, a cube of compressed dimensional authority that locked his limbs, his movement, his spatial options. Uatu had built it from divine power in the gap between one heartbeat and the next.
The Watcher exhaled — a controlled, purposeful breath — and pushed.
The force of banishment was not subtle. Jordan felt the fabric of local space grab him and accelerate, the dimensional equivalent of being thrown very hard in a direction that didn't have a name. The multiverse cracks blurred. The crystal walls streaked past. The distance between his current position and the position Uatu occupied expanded at a rate that could generously be described as significant.
The ends of the universe arrived.
Jordan stepped out of a blue spatial portal, golden flames climbing from his shoulders as the Space Stone dissipated the residual banishment energy. He rolled his neck. The sound it produced propagated through the world barriers like a minor seismic event.
"Good warm-up," he said.
Uatu turned.
Jordan was standing directly behind him.
"Ready for the actual fight?"
The Watcher looked at the man in front of him — at the golden flames, the Gauntlet, the calm eyes that were somehow more unsettling than aggression would have been — and experienced, for the first time in several thousand years, a specific variety of regret.
Why, thought the oldest observer in the multiverse, did I provoke him?
In the infinite multiverse beyond the cracks, the consequences of their battle were visible to anyone looking at the sky.
Crystal formations erupted through the air without warning — in cities, in open fields, in oceans that had never known frost. Translucent, geometric, prismatic. People approached them with curiosity and mild alarm, reaching out to touch surfaces that resonated faintly against their palms.
Somewhere in the depths of that resonance, distorted by distance and dimensional interference, drifting across the boundaries of space and time like something half-remembered:
"Ora ora ora ora ora."
Then the crystals folded inward and vanished, leaving only ripples in the air where they'd stood.
Inside the Mirror Dimension, Strange Supreme noticed.
The world had shivered — a subtle wrongness in the dimensional geometry, the kind of thing only someone who had spent decades reshaping reality could feel. He started to track it, following the thread with the practiced focus of a man whose entire power set was built around reading the architecture of reality.
Then the shadow clone launched its next wave.
"Ninja Art — Secret Technique: Prince's Battle Barrage, Super Spiral Variant!"
A storm of rotating energy spheres, each one carrying Vegeta's royal signature modified through the clone's chakra into something jagged and corrosive, rained down from three angles simultaneously.
"Divine Sky Strike!"
A straight descending punch wrapped in condensed force — no element, no technique, just the weight of infinite power poured into a single point of impact.
"Ninja Art — Lightning Release: Chidori Shuriken Shadow Clone Technique!"
A dozen simultaneous Chidori-edged shuriken, each one piloted by its own micro-clone, tracked targets with independent intelligence.
"Water Release: Multiple Water Dragon Bullets!"
"Earth Release: Heavenly Brick Drop!"
"Wind Release: Vacuum Cleansing Barrage!"
"Sealing Technique: Vajra Chain Formation!"
The shadow clone moved through hand seals with the fluid speed of someone who had catalogued every jutsu in its inventory and chosen to use all of them at once. Golden chains erupted from the geometry of the Mirror Dimension itself, snapping toward the Multiverse Guardians from every angle. Energy rays, water dragons, compressed wind vacuums, and spinning earth masses plowed across the Martian terrain in overlapping waves, detonating against each other as much as against their targets.
The surface of mirror-Mars, already scarred from the previous engagement, was being systematically reprocessed.
The clone's operational calculus was simple: sustained high-density fire across all vectors, preventing coordination, preventing concentrated retaliation, eroding the group's ability to think clearly under pressure.
Then — when an opening appeared — seize the Infinity Gauntlet.
Strange Supreme, squinting through the barrage with the weathered composure of someone for whom terrible situation had become a weather condition rather than an emergency, reached out his sling ring through a gap in the chain formation and thought: the world shifted just a moment ago. Something changed out there.
But the chains snapped shut before he could complete the thought.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~