Jordan stared at the pager for another two seconds, running the calculation.
Five years. Tony Stark, retired. Lake house. Daughter growing up.
Then: "Actually, why wait five years?"
F-boy appeared beside him with the expression of someone who has been waiting for exactly this conclusion.
[That was my point,] he said. [The New York situation is—]
"You can't even keep accurate time," Jordan said. "Stop looking smug."
F-boy offered a middle finger with great professional dignity and dissolved back into the ambient space.
Jordan pocketed the pager, checked the Mind Network's scan of the city, and picked a direction.
The situation in Wakanda was still active.
He followed the strongest concentration of the right kind of energy—the specific signature of large-scale combat, of vibranium technology and superhumanly-generated force, of a battle that had been decided in principle but not yet resolved in practice. The portal opened and he stepped through.
Wakanda. The battlefield outside the energy barrier. Evening light through smoke.
The grief was still fresh. Jordan could read it in the posture of everyone still standing—the particular way people held themselves when they'd just lost something and hadn't yet arrived at the stage of the loss where the body accepts what happened. Patches of char and ash on the ground where heroes had been. Equipment without users. A raccoon perched on a broken tree stump, energy weapon in both hands, scanning the sky with the specific wariness of a small predator surrounded by things that could eat it.
The source of Thor's grief-rage was visible in the axe on the ground—Stormbreaker, the weapon forged at significant cost from a star's dying heat, with a handle made from Groot's own arm. Thor sat near it with the posture of a man who had fought across a thousand-year lifespan's worth of catastrophe in about forty-eight hours and was running low on things left to lose.
Thor had come into something that looked like actual grief rather than the theatrical grief he'd carried earlier in his story. Freya gone. Odin gone. Hela. Asgard. The refugee fleet. Loki. The loss piling on the loss with an efficiency that suggested the universe had decided to accelerate his character development forcibly.
The axe had clipped Thanos in the chest. Thor knew what he'd had at that moment—knew it and had chosen something that felt like satisfaction over something that would have been a finish.
He'd live with that.
The broader battle, however, had not concluded.
Thanos was gone. His generals, reduced to various states of non-functionality by the assembled heroes—were done. But the Outrider army remained: those strange, four-limbed creatures that moved like water finding the lowest point, individually manageable and collectively a problem. Perfect warriors assembled from the best genetic stock across conquered worlds. Thanos's practical tools for the parts of empire-building that required numbers rather than finesse.
Rocket Raccoon called them space dogs, which was inaccurate in terms of taxonomy and accurate in terms of energy.
Most of their troop transports had been destroyed. Most of their number had been reduced by the combined effort of Wakanda's vibranium defense technology and the assembled hero response. But the Outriders that remained were still functioning, and the Wakanda garrison—already losing ground before the snap, now operating at half its starting numbers—was being pushed back.
Captain America had found his footing first.
Of course he had, Jordan thought, watching from distance as the man gripped his shield and turned to address the remaining heroes with the specific quality of someone who has decided to be the spine of the situation. His best friend was ash. His plan had failed. He was doing it anyway.
"There's no time for grief," Rogers said. "The battlefield needs us."
It landed. Not enough—not enough to close the gap between what remained and what the situation required—but enough to get people moving again.
Rhodes spotted something in the sky first.
He had the eyes of a man who had spent decades tracking things moving through air at high speed, and he used them.
"Guys." His voice had the tone of someone who is looking at something and hasn't decided what to do with what they're seeing. He pointed up. "What is that?"
Rocket pivoted on his stump, squinted.
"No idea," the raccoon said. "But whoever it is, the letter on their chest is definitely wrong."
Jordan had, without consciously planning it, followed the protocol.
Entering a superhero world required a superhero presentation. Not because disguise mattered at the power level he was operating at, but because context mattered—arriving as a clearly recognizable hero-type made the subsequent conversation vastly easier than arriving as an unknown entity in street clothes.
The Hero suit had been waiting in his inventory. He'd worn it last in the Boys arc, during the confrontation with Homelander.
Jordan cape caught the Wakandan evening air as he stabilized his position in the sky.
Lightning-pattern detailing along the suit's seams. The build underneath it that had been accumulating since the beginning of all of this. The particular presence that came with standing above a battlefield at altitude and having absolutely nothing in the sky that could threaten you.
Jordan looked down at the assembled survivors and made a quick assessment.
A lot of ash. A lot of grief. Outriders still operating. Heroes at significantly reduced capacity. The situation needs maybe fifteen minutes of work.
He started calculating entry angles.
Below him, in the tree line at the edge of the cleared field, Thor had looked up.
The Stormbreaker rose from the ground to his hand without him consciously reaching for it—the weapon responding to the instinct before the thought completed. His hand found the handle Groot had made, the familiar weight of it, and some of his agitation settled.
The aura from the figure in the sky was not something Thor was accustomed to encountering.
It was the aura of something old and large—not old in years, necessarily, but old in the way that power becomes old when it has been tested and refined and has stopped being something a person carries and started being something a person is. He had felt auras in this register before. Hela, when Asgard's own power had flowed into her and she had become something the realm fed rather than a person within it. His father, in his prime, carrying Gungnir across eight-legged horse with the absolute certainty of a king who had never seriously contemplated defeat.
This was that register.
Thor turned the axe handle in his hand once, the Groot-wood warm and familiar.
The figure in the sky looked down.
Thor looked back.
Who, he thought, are you?