The black portal irised open and Jordan stepped through into sunlight.
New York City. Times Square, or close enough—the broad streets, the overwhelming density of signage, the particular quality of crowd that forms at the intersection of commerce and tourism. A Western city in full daylight. The kind of place that never quite looked like anywhere else on Earth.
The Dimensional Walk cooldown had cleared, and Jordan had been planning this excursion for a while.
The training program had kept him occupied longer than expected. The cohort, the facility, the instructor roster, Tatsumaki's Dean of Students arrangement, the Atomic Samurai addendum—all of it had absorbed the time he'd originally allocated to this trip. But now the class was running, the shadow clones had the day-to-day covered, and he'd slipped away during the opening ceremony preparations with a clear itinerary.
The last thing he'd done before leaving was apply Element Pickup to the A-rank hero Green during their brief pre-class consultation—the plant manipulation ability stored cleanly, the Wood Release pathway one step closer. Then he'd stepped off the timeline.
The destination had been selected from the items in his inventory: a Fate Draw acquisition that had come through during the hundred-and-seventy-draw session.
[Fantasy Card: Vibranium Shield] Type: Item • Rarity: SR (Purple) The shield carried by Captain America in the MCU. An alloy created when vibranium was accidentally combined with various experimental compounds, producing the hardest known metal on Earth. Properties: virtually indestructible; absorbs kinetic energy; resistant to extreme pressure, heat, radiation, and electromagnetic spectrum attacks. Can be thrown and recalled with stable trajectory. Note: Equipped users generate a taunt effect—opponents will prioritize attacking the shield.
The shield itself was undecorated—factory alloy, light gold metallic sheen, none of the patriotic paint work. Jordan had tested it. A sustained heat ray at non-lethal output hadn't compromised the surface. He'd handed it to Dr. Kuseno for materials analysis, with the note that once the vibranium composition was mapped, acquiring raw material from the relevant source in this world would be straightforward. Wakanda was close, by any meaningful definition of close.
Vibranium armor wasn't the same tier as Genos's cyborg body—not for someone operating at Jordan's current level. But for the population of people who couldn't survive a Demon-level incident on physical capability alone, a nano-assembly vibranium suit powered by a permanent energy reactor was a different proposition entirely. The OPM world had a whole organizational infrastructure being planned around exactly this problem—something that, in the original timeline, would emerge as the Neo Heroes concept, armor-based combat for people who couldn't generate the power themselves.
Dr. Kuseno would have thoughts.
Jordan was already having thoughts.
He was in the middle of mapping the Mid-Manhattan grid through the Mind Network when the smell hit him.
Not gunpowder, exactly. Closer to ozone, and beneath it something with the particular quality of large-scale energy discharge that left a signature in the air for hours. He expanded his perception outward.
And found the traces.
Broken trees. Collapsed building sections. Ground compression patterns. Barricaded perimeter. The architectural signature of a large-scale battle that had concluded—not ongoing, but recent. Hours ago at most.
Something happened here.
He moved.
The cordon was NYPD, standard equipment, two officers on the eastern side. Jordan materialized inside the perimeter before either of them registered the displacement.
"43rd Street, Trespass!" One of the officers had his weapon up with professional speed, the other calling in on radio. "Don't move! Hands where I can—"
Jordan turned.
The officer's Glock 17 hit the pavement.
The hand that had been holding it was gone. Half the man's body was gone—dissolving even as Jordan watched, the physical matter converting to something lighter than dust and dispersing upward on a current that had nothing to do with wind. The man's expression had gone blank before the dissolution completed, whatever he'd been about to say simply stopping.
Jordan looked at his own hand.
He had, by pure reflex, snapped his fingers.
He stood very still for approximately two seconds.
"...I didn't do that," he said, to the air.
F-boy, who had been uncharacteristically quiet since their arrival, did not respond.
"F-boy."
Silence.
"I am looking at you."
[The Mind Network will confirm,] F-boy said, at length, [that the disintegration events began before our arrival and are distributed across all observable coordinates simultaneously.]
Jordan exhaled.
Something snapped. The scale of it was registering now—not one person, not two. The Mind Network, expanding outward through the city, found the same pattern everywhere. People mid-stride. Mid-conversation. At desks, in cars, on rooftops. The dissolution happening in parallel across every point his perception reached.
Half of everything. At random.
He knew what this was.
He found Nick Fury two blocks over, following the signal—a distinctive energy signature from old Kree technology, functioning in a city that had just lost half its population.
The man was on a street already half-gone, standing beside a vehicle whose driver's seat had recently become unoccupied. His expression was the face of someone watching something they had feared for years actually happen and finding that the preparation didn't help.
Jordan saw the deputy—Hill, he identified from context—go first. A handful of dust where a person had been.
Fury reached into his bag.
He knew what was coming. That was the worst part of it, Jordan thought—the man knew, had time to register it, and still used his last moment to do something useful.
The pager came out of the bag. An old-fashioned device by any standard, modified with components that had no business existing in the 1980s when it had presumably been manufactured. Fury's hands worked the controls.
Then Fury started to say something.
The word didn't finish.
His body went the same way as his deputy's—dust, dispersal, nothing—except that the pager was falling.
Jordan caught it.
The screen was lit. An octagonal star pattern on a red-and-blue background. Below it, a progress indicator that resolved to complete as he watched: signal transmitted.
He looked at the screen for a moment.
He could see why. The signal had been going somewhere specific—somewhere a long way away, to someone with a very particular set of capabilities. The kind of call you kept unspoken for thirty years because you only had one use of it and you were waiting for the right moment.
This had been the right moment.
Jordan closed his hand around the pager.
"F-boy," he said, pleasantly.
The purple-suited figure materialized from his shadow with the expression of someone who has been hoping this particular topic would pass.
"The original plan," Jordan said, "was to arrive during the battle. During Infinity War. Plenty of chaos, various powerful artifacts changing hands, multiple opportunities for targeted acquisition. Yes?"
[Technically,] F-boy said, [we arrived at the conclusion of Infinity War. The battle did occur. We simply—]
"We arrived after."
[...At the very end.]
"After the snap."
[The timeline spans approximately forty-eight hours. The margin of error is—]
"The Infinity Stones," Jordan said, "are currently in space having just been used to eliminate half of all life in the universe, Thanos has gone home to watch the sunset."
F-boy adjusted his tie.
[The good news,] he offered, [is that we have five years before the relevant events resume.]
"Five years." Jordan turned this over. The pager was still in his hand. Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm was going off with nobody to silence it. "Five years, during which Tony Stark retires to a lake house and raises a daughter"
He stopped.
"Wait a minute."
Something had occurred to him.
F-boy, who had been preparing a preemptive defense, paused.
Jordan was looking at the pager. Then at the empty street. Then at some intermediate point that was neither the pager nor the street but whatever calculation was currently running behind his eyes.
"Five years," he said again, slower. "Five years of open calendar, one semi-retired genius with a lake house, and I know how the whole thing ends."
He looked at F-boy.
"This might actually work out better."