Peter pressed his encrypted burner phone to his ear, his white lenses narrowing as he listened to the frantic voice on the other end of the line.
Around him on the Arecibo tarmac, the tension was thick enough to cut with a blade. Thor stood with his arms crossed, lightning arcing lazily across the head of his hammer. The Guardians of the Galaxy were locked in a hushed, aggressive argument over whether they should simply abandon Earth to its impending doom.
"Yeah. Yeah, stay exactly where you are, Gwen," Peter said, keeping his voice low. "Do not let him out of your sight. We're on our way."
Peter killed the call. He slid the phone back into one of the concealed waist pockets of his suit. He turned to face the heavily armed assembly of alien mercenaries, U.S. military personnel, and the God of Thunder.
"So," Peter began, clapping his hands together once. "Good news. We don't have to scour the entire planet for our walking doomsday device. A friend of mine just found Michael Korvac."
Star-Lord stopped arguing with the raccoon. He blinked. "Your friend just... found a cosmic entity capable of vaporizing a solar system?"
"Yep. He's currently sitting on a curb in Old San Juan," Peter nodded, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. "And the really weird part? He's looking for us. He wants the Avengers to help him."
Thor's brow furrowed. "He seeks our aid?"
Peter nodded slowly, his own mind struggling to process the sheer absurdity of Gwen's report. Korvac had called himself a living "Cosmic Cube." That was impossible.
In his meta knowledge the only time Cosmic Cube taken humanoid form, it becomes ither Kobik the little girl or Kubik, it was never Korvac.
Honestly Peter thought that the Cosmic Cube was the Tesseract and It was currently sitting under heavy guard in Odin's vault on Asgard.
And if what Korvac said is true than the Tessaract is not the Cosmic Cube.
Furthermore, Korvac claimed to be from the thirty-first century. If a god-like being from a thousand years in the future was suddenly stranded in 2012, it absolutely screamed temporal interference. And where there was time travel, there was usually only one man pulling the strings.
Kang.
Ten minutes later, the Milano hovered silently over an abandoned industrial lot on the outskirts of San Juan. The ship's repulsor engines kicked up a massive cloud of dust and dead grass as it slowly descended.
Peter stood on the edge of the lowering cargo ramp, the humid wind whipping past his mask. Below them, Gwen stood near the rusted shell of an old shipping container. Sitting in the dirt a few feet away from her was Michael Korvac.
He looked terrible. His heavy gray hoodie was soaked with sweat. He was rocking back and forth on his heels, a thin trail of saliva gathering at the corner of his mouth. But as the ship touched down, Korvac's head snapped up. His bloodshot eyes locked dead onto the spider emblem on Peter's chest.
A massive, childish grin broke across Korvac's haggard face. He scrambled to his feet.
"Spider-Man! It's me!" Korvac yelled, waving both arms frantically. "It's Korvac! You're here!"
Peter stepped off the ramp, keeping his center of gravity low. The rest of the Guardians filed out behind him, their weapons drawn and leveled at the shivering man.
"Sorry to break it to you, man," Peter said, his voice entirely devoid of its usual quippy warmth. "I don't know you. At least, not yet." Peter tilted his head, calculating the variables aloud. "If I had to guess, you took a wrong turn in the timestream. You know us, but we haven't met you yet."
"Oh," Korvac blinked, his arms dropping to his sides. "Yes. Yes, I'm early." He looked around nervously, his eyes darting to the heavy plasma cannons pointed at his chest. "But... but the Avengers said they could take me home."
A hundred yards away, floating just outside the visible spectrum of reality, Kang the Conqueror watched the exchange from his chronal observation chair.
Kang's fingers flew across a holographic interface. He was not looking at Korvac's physical form. He was measuring the raw, bleeding energy signature radiating from the man's cellular structure.
The chronal computer chimed. A perfect, one-hundred-percent match.
Kang's breath caught behind his blue, translucent faceplate. There it is. The exact quantum frequency he had been hunting across the centuries. This was the specific energy signature responsible for triggering the catastrophic multiverse collision crisis. The Incursions. This shivering, broken man was the spark that would eventually burn down reality.
Kang did not hesitate. He tapped a command sequence into his wrist gauntlet.
The world simply stopped.
It wasn't a gradual slowing. Time halted instantly. The dust kicked up by the Milano froze in mid-air. A seagull hung suspended in the sky above the lot, its wings locked in a downward beat. Peter Parker stood completely motionless, his foot hovering an inch above the dirt mid-step.
Kang stepped out of the chronal void, his boots hitting the gravel with a heavy crunch. He wore his signature purple-and-green battle armor, the metallic alloys gleaming in the frozen sunlight. He drew a sleek, futuristic pistol from his hip holster.
It wasn't a lethal weapon. It was a localized stasis emitter. It would lock Korvac's molecules in a state of absolute temporal zero, allowing Kang to drag the anomaly back to the thirty-first century for dissection. Ripping a living Cosmic Cube out of the timeline would undoubtedly cause massive historical fracturing, but Kang did not care. He was the Conqueror. Rewriting history was his birthright.
Kang raised the barrel. He aimed directly at Korvac's chest.
Korvac's eyes snapped toward the armored warlord.
He moved.
"Kang is here!!!" Korvac screamed.
A blinding, cataclysmic wave of raw cosmic energy erupted from Korvac's body. The shockwave hit the frozen spacetime like a sledgehammer striking a pane of glass.
The time-stop completely shattered.
Sound rushed back into the world with a deafening, concussive boom. Peter staggered backward as gravity reasserted itself. He whipped his head around. A man in highly advanced purple armor was suddenly standing ten feet away, holding a glowing pistol.
Peter's Spider-Sense didn't just buzz; it screamed like a siren in his skull.
Star-Lord reacted with lethal speed. He slapped the activator on his jawline, his metallic faceplate snapping over his head. He leveled both of his quad-blasters directly at Kang's head.
"Who the hell are you?" Quill demanded. "And where did you just come from?"
Kang ignored the blasters. He stared at Korvac, completely shaken. The man possessed no chronal shielding. He wore no time-travel equipment. Yet, he had shattered a quantum stasis field through sheer, brute-force willpower.
"I am Kang the Conqueror," the armored man declared, his electronically modulated voice carrying an air of absolute superiority. "I am a traveler from the thirty-first century. I have no intention of interfering with your primitive era, but I am taking this man with me."
"Yeah, that's not how this works," Quill snapped, thumbing the safety off his blasters. "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't melt your helmet to your skull."
Kang shifted his gaze to the assembled heroes. "Because in the near future, a temporal crisis will fracture the very structure of reality. The multiverse is actively heading toward total, inevitable destruction. And this man is the singular culprit."
The industrial lot went dead silent.
A multiverse collapse. Total destruction.
Thor slowly lowered the head of Mjolnir by an inch. Adam Warlock's serene expression tightened into a frown of deep calculation. Even Peter hesitated, his mind racing. If Kang was telling the truth, protecting Korvac meant ensuring the end of everything.
Korvac felt the shift. He watched the weapons lower. He saw the doubt clouding Peter's white lenses.
The broken man's breath hitched. His chest heaved violently. Pure panic seized his fractured mind. They were abandoning him. They were going to hand him over to the butcher.
"I won't let you catch me again!" Korvac shrieked, his voice tearing his vocal cords. "Never again!"
"Wait! Don't—!" Peter yelled.
A blinding, apocalyptic light tore out of Korvac's chest. The air temperature spiked instantly, the heat enough to flash-fry the surrounding grass.
Peter didn't think. He dove backward. He tackled Gwen to the dirt, wrapping his arms around her and using his symbiote-enhanced body to completely shield her from the incoming blast wave.
Thor moved instantly. The God of Thunder spun on his heel, channeling a massive surge of lightning into Uru metal. He swung Mjolnir with terrifying force.
CRACK. The hammer slammed directly into Korvac's glowing chest. The sheer kinetic impact launched the living bomb backward. Korvac skipped across the dirt like a stone over water, crashing straight through the rusted shipping container in a shower of tearing metal.
"Leave him to me, Spider-Man!" Thor roared, his red cape snapping in the wind. "He is beyond your durability!"
Thor launched himself into the sky, gripping his hammer. Adam Warlock immediately followed, a trail of golden cosmic energy burning in his wake.
Peter rolled off Gwen, pulling her firmly to her feet. He scanned the lot, his eyes darting frantically for the purple armor.
"Wait," Peter snapped. "Where is Kang?"
The space where the Conqueror had been standing was completely empty. The gravel wasn't even disturbed.
"Typical," Rocket Raccoon spat, lowering his heavy cannon. "You mean 'Runaway Kang'. The second the fight starts, the coward jumps back into his little time-hole." Rocket turned around, marching straight back toward the Milano's ramp. "Alright, pack it up! We're leaving! Quill, this planet is cooked. There's no stopping that freak now."
Quill didn't move. He just stood there, his blasters lowered, staring up at the darkening sky of his homeworld.
Peter left Gwen by the ship and walked slowly toward the small group of U.S. military personnel who had accompanied them on the flight. His eyes locked onto Dr. Michael Rossi. The Chief Scientist was completely rigid, his face pale, staring at the crater Korvac had left behind.
Rossi hadn't said a single word since Adam Warlock first mentioned the Cosmic Cube.
"Dr. Rossi," Peter said, his voice cold and flat. "Are you hiding something from us?"
Rossi blinked, pulling his eyes away from the wreckage. "What? I don't understand what you mean, Spider-Man."
Peter closed the distance between them. "Every time I stand near you, my sense hums. It registers you as a latent threat. You aren't just an ordinary scientist." Peter crossed his arms, staring straight into the man's eyes. "And when the Guardians mentioned the Kree Empire back at the base, your heart rate spiked."
Peter turned his head slightly, looking back at the alien mercenaries.
"We have a ship full of intergalactic travelers right here," Peter said, turning his gaze back to Rossi. "I'm betting one of them has a scanner that can tell me exactly what you really are."