Chapter 221: The Reed Dimensional Council
Immortus allowed himself one private moment of exhaustion before the others arrived.
The Reed Council. Of all the recurring headaches across his very long existence, they were the most persistent. It wasn't their power that troubled him — in a direct confrontation, the Council of Kangs could hold their own. What made them dangerous was the way their minds worked. Every Reed Richards in every universe was the smartest person in that universe. Put a roomful of them together and what you got was something that kept finding solutions you hadn't anticipated, from angles you hadn't considered, at moments when you'd thought the situation was settled.
Irritating didn't begin to cover it.
The one silver lining in the current situation: the Reed Council despised people who disrupted multiversal stability almost as much as the Kangs did. This Ethan Cross — fate-breaker, canonical event disruptor — would draw their attention whether Immortus wanted it to or not. That attention was a resource he could work with. Let the Reeds run down a lead that might or might not go anywhere. It kept them occupied.
He thought about the last time a man called Chen had occupied everyone's attention at once.
Immortus had tried recruitment first. That was always the first move with someone genuinely capable — bring them in, give them purpose, point the force somewhere useful. The man had refused. The refusal had led to a fight, and the fight had gone badly in ways Immortus still didn't entirely want to think about. He had survived, which was more than could be said for the outcome he'd expected.
The Reed Council had tried to handle it themselves after that. The results had been catastrophic — not for them alone, but for the fabric of the multiverse itself. Countless timelines compromised in the crossfire. They had eventually come to the Kangs out of necessity, and the joint operation had been the most expensive undertaking either organization had attempted before or since.
They had won. He kept returning to that. They had won.
But if the man had not been alone — if he had allies, or variants, or even a single person fighting alongside him — Immortus was not confident the outcome would have been the same.
He pushed the memory away. It was settled. The man was dead. The timelines confirmed it.
He stood and went to address the arriving Council members.
Somewhere in the void between universes, suspended in nothing and connected to everything, the Reed Dimensional Council maintained its headquarters.
The base was a structure of dimensional bridges — frameworks of bridged space that allowed travel to any universe, assembly of any resource, recruitment from any timeline. From here, the Reeds could go anywhere. From here, they had.
The Council's stated purpose was the preservation and protection of the multiverse. They believed this, which made them more dangerous than organizations that didn't. Every Reed Richards who sat at their table was the foremost scientific mind of his home universe, with the full research capacity that implied. Time machines were baseline technology here — the introductory-level capability you needed just to have a seat. Their weapons archive was something else entirely, and their Infinity Gauntlet collection numbered three.
Any one of those weapons could end a planet. Most days they collected dust.
The more unusual asset was the collar.
The device had been engineered to limit Doctor Doom's intellect — to reduce it, selectively and precisely, to something manageable. With it, the Council had assembled a Doom Corps: an army of controlled Dooms, each one still formidable, all of them pointed in the same direction. The multiverse's foremost weapons, aimed by the multiverse's foremost scientists.
It was an uncomfortable arrangement by almost any ethical standard. The Reeds didn't talk about it much.
Three Reeds sat at the round table. Three Infinity Gauntlets rested before them, one per founder, the ambient light catching the stones at angles that made them look like they were thinking.
Reed-98576 was in a suit that suggested someone who had come directly from a board meeting and expected to return to one shortly. He spoke first, cutting through the silence with the efficient irritation of a man who had seventeen other things scheduled.
"What's the situation? We don't convene without reason."
Reed-99107 had not opened his eyes. He appeared to be meditating. His shaved head and long beard gave him the look of someone who had either found enlightenment or was very specifically performing enlightenment — with Reed Richards it was sometimes difficult to tell. His presence in the room was nevertheless unmistakable, the way a large, quiet thing makes itself known through the air around it.
Reed-12498 spoke. His voice was the kind that made people listen before they'd decided to. "Intelligence report. An Eastern man — name Ethan Cross — is actively disrupting the Spider-Society's canonical framework. Breaking fixed events. Successfully, without corresponding universe collapse."
Reed-99107 opened his eyes.
The shift in the room was immediate. The meditative stillness became something else — alert, sharp, the quality of attention that had spent years being turned on the universe's hardest problems.
"It's been a long time since someone like this appeared," he said quietly. "Someone who changes fate." A pause. "We cannot allow it. The multiverse doesn't survive people who rewrite what's fixed."
The silence that followed had the texture of agreement that was running into obstacles.
Reed-98576 said what everyone at the table already knew: "We don't have the personnel."
He laid it out methodically. Defending existing multiverses. Monitoring the Kang Council. The ongoing threat from the Mad Celestial — that last category alone had taken more Reeds than he wanted to count, and the losses were still coming. There was no reserve capacity. There was barely enough capacity for what they were already doing.
"And we don't know which universe he's from," he continued. "The Spider-Society is nominally our ally. Moving against someone operating from within their organization, without knowing more — we'd be creating an enemy for the sake of a threat we haven't fully assessed. With Kang moving, that's a liability we can't afford."
Reed-99107 absorbed this without contesting it. He understood the logic. It didn't make him less troubled.
Reed-12498 offered the practical path forward: "We locate his home universe. Once we have that, we task that universe's Reed with the problem. Local jurisdiction — his world, his responsibility. We keep our focus on the Celestial and the Kangs."
The other two considered it.
It was the kind of solution that worked on paper and avoided most of the immediate complications. They would find out where Ethan Cross came from, identify the local Reed Richards, and let that instance of themselves handle the assessment. Clean. Contained. Minimal resource cost.
Both Reeds nodded.
In Ethan's home universe, the Reed Richards of that world was already heading toward a meeting.
He walked the corridor toward the Illuminati conference room at the pace of someone who had somewhere to be and knew it, his thoughts running three steps ahead of his feet as they usually did.
Beside him walked a young man carrying a magenta camera.
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