Stormbreaker answered its king.
The axe shuddered against the wall, lifted free of the floor, and launched itself across the conference room like a thunderbolt given form—a streak of crackling blue-white heading straight for Thor's outstretched right hand at a velocity that turned the air into a pressure wave.
The heroes squinted against the sudden gust.
A hand intercepted it.
Jordan caught the axe handle mid-flight, one palm, no visible effort—the weapon that had punched through the complete Infinity Gauntlet now sitting quietly in his grip like he'd plucked it from a shelf. He held it there for a moment, turning it once, slowly, as if checking for scratches.
The feel isn't quite right.
—But it seems alright.
—What's that green light?
Stormbreaker, from somewhere in the metaphysical space between weapon and wielder, registered a low sense of uncertainty.
Something was off. It couldn't say what, exactly. But there was something around this one's hand—a faint luminescence, biological, organic, not quite anything it had encountered before. Not threatening. Just... notable.
Jordan turned the axe around and offered it back handle-first.
"Excuse me," he said, his expression perfectly pleasant. "Did you drop a golden axe? A silver one? Or—" his eyes moved briefly to the weapon in his hand "—this one? The Uru metal axe?"
Thor stared at him.
The joke was so specific, so completely unexpected, that it took him a full second to process it. Then, with the controlled expression of a man who has decided he will not be made to react, he reached out and took Stormbreaker from Jordan's grip.
He turned it over once. Checked the head. Nodded once, slowly, with the gravity of a formal inspection.
"...I like this one."
Stormbreaker: I like him too.
The silence broke.
"Okay, yes—" Rocket Raccoon was already on his feet, one fist raised, the tension of the past hour finally finding somewhere to go. "So we've got at least two people in this room who could take Thanos apart! I feel great about this! Anyone else feel great about this?"
Nobody said yes. But several people smiled—quietly, briefly, the kind that slip past before you can stop them—and for a room full of people who had spent the last two days staring into the wreckage of everything, that was enough.
After that, the meeting found its footing.
Goals are clarifying. The moment the Avengers had a direction, the grief and the paralysis had somewhere to put themselves, and the group shifted—not back to what they'd been before Wakanda, nothing so easy as that—but forward. Into motion.
"We need to find Tony." Steve Rogers had the holographic display up, running projections. "We can't confirm his status yet, but he chose to engage directly—he's likely carrying intelligence we need."
"Iron Man boarded Thanos's ship before the snap." Banner pushed his glasses up, already scrolling through data. "I can work out the signal frequency from their drives. We'd need satellite access to track the trajectory."
Rhodes and the Captain exchanged a look. "Military authorization. I'll contact the general and the secretary of state—I'll get it cleared."
"Technical side's covered." Rocket raised a paw without looking up from whatever he was already disassembling from his pocket. "Just point me at the hardware."
"Good." Steve moved on. "Banner also confirmed a sorcerer from New York boarded that ship with Tony. I need someone to track down his organization—there may be information there, maybe even a way to locate them."
Thor recognized who they were talking about immediately. The Midgardian wizard who had helped him trace his father—the one with the golden circular weapons and the dramatic entrance. He started to speak.
"I'll handle it," Jordan said first, with the mild confidence of someone accepting an entirely reasonable assignment. He glanced at Thor. "After all, Hammer God did say I had the look of a mage. Seems like the natural fit."
Thor's jaw set.
"...I find that I am suddenly very interested in understanding my teammates' abilities before we engage in combat."
"Reasonable." Jordan nodded earnestly. "I also think we should confirm whether any members of the team might become a liability under pressure."
"Alright." Steve stepped between them with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been managing volatile personalities since before most people in the room were born. He pointed at Jordan. "Wizards. You." He pointed at Thor. "Energy conservation." He swept the group. "Everyone else has an assignment. We move."
He paused.
"We've already lost once. We cannot afford to lose again."
"Respectfully, Captain," Rhodes said, his mouth pulling sideways, "I'm not particularly familiar with that concept."
Steve looked at him for a moment. "I think I'm not either."
He almost smiled.
"Thor—when we find Thanos, you're our primary strike force. I need you at full strength." He added this last part carefully, aware that he was currently managing the most volatile person in the room in the absence of both Tony Stark and Bruce Banner's larger alter ego.
The God of Thunder nodded once. There was no performance in it. No bluster. Just the quiet, fixed quality of a man who had made a specific decision and intended to keep it.
"I will not miss this time."
The conference room emptied in less than five minutes.
Steve and Natasha were last, walking in silence down the corridor that opened onto Wakanda's skyline. He let the quiet sit for a moment, then said it:
"Do you believe him? Jordan?"
Natasha didn't answer right away. Her heels were quiet on the floor, and she was looking somewhere ahead of herself.
"I don't know," she said finally. "But I don't think it matters."
He waited.
"We don't have any other options right now." She glanced at him sideways. "And it couldn't get worse than where we are."
Steve turned that over. "You're right." A beat. "Which means we do everything we can."
"We will."
New York City.
The greatest city in the world was experiencing something unprecedented, and it was not handling it gracefully.
Half its population had ceased to exist in a single moment, and the infrastructure that assumes everyone always comes home had not adapted to this news. Cars sat in the middle of intersections, doors open, engines running. A woman was crying on a stoop in Hell's Kitchen with a phone she kept redialing. Two blocks north, three teenagers were carrying flat-screen televisions out of an electronics store with a studied casualness that suggested they were aware this was theft but had concluded the present circumstances created a gray area.
Manhattan, which had never once resembled Gotham City, was doing a reasonable impression of it now.
Jordan descended over Midtown, assessed the tableau below with the detached curiosity of someone who had seen civilizations buckle before, and landed on a sidewalk.
"—Damn it, hand it over—all of it—damn it—"
The man was white, large, and had a firearm and a cloth bag that clinked with the weight of other people's valuables. He'd apparently decided that Jordan's landing represented an opportunity rather than a warning. This was the kind of optimism that deserved some acknowledgment.
"Here," Jordan said pleasantly, and shook his hand.
The magnetic field did the rest. Metal flows toward metal; fingers and pistol grip became, briefly and uncomfortably, a single unified system.
The man's expression went through several stages in quick succession—threat, confusion, realization, and then a high-pitched noise that carried surprisingly well over the ambient chaos of a city in crisis.
The cloth bag dropped from his other hand.
Jordan caught it with a flick of his wrist before it hit the ground, glanced inside—quite a haul, actually—and tucked it under his arm.
"Thank you," he said, stepping over the man, who was kneeling on the sidewalk shouting something that Jordan was generous enough to interpret as a greeting to a maternal figure. "Have a good day."
The burger joint two blocks over was still open, staffed by a family who had apparently all survived the snap and were now operating in the particular stunned mode of people who don't know whether to feel grateful or guilty about it.
"Thirty beef burger combos," Jordan said at the counter. "Twenty pizzas."
The owner—round-faced, middle-aged, wearing the expression of a man whose context for normal had been recently and significantly revised—stared at him. "Sir. Even a large family would struggle to—"
"It's for the office," Jordan said. "Don't worry about it."
The owner held his gaze for another moment, reached some internal conclusion, and turned toward the kitchen.
Ten minutes later, Jordan was on the roof of a reasonably clean building three stories up, working through the first burger and looking out over a city that was only just beginning to understand what had happened to it.
The immediate chaos was visible from here—the stopped cars, the small fires, the clusters of people who didn't know where to go. But the real damage, Jordan knew, was going to take longer to surface. The kind that accumulated quietly, in apartments where someone had been waiting for a person who wasn't coming home. In jobs that no longer existed. In relationships that had simply stopped mid-sentence.
Five years from now, if Thanos's snap held—and Jordan had no intention of letting it hold—some of those people would return. Step out of nowhere, whole and unaged, into a world that had finished grieving them and moved on. First loves married with two kids. Friends who'd settled into new lives without them. The infrastructure of daily existence rebuilt around their absence, and suddenly they'd be standing in it.
This is how social order becomes chaotic.
He took another bite and watched the city below work through the first hour of its new shape.