That single sentence from Thor killed every sound in the cabin.
Rocket dropped the jokes. He grabbed the control stick with both hands, pushed it forward, and the Benatar's engines answered with a roar that vibrated through the hull plating. The ship dove for the planet's atmosphere on Jordan's trajectory, friction converting the leading edge into orange-red fire—the energy shields holding, barely, because they'd had the foresight to repair them three days ago.
Inside the hull, the Avengers held on and said nothing.
Jordan was already through the upper atmosphere.
Super Saiyan energy ignited around him in a column of gold as he dropped, cutting through cloud cover with the casual violence of a comet that has decided where it's going. He didn't need the speed—he had time—but old habits from the Dragon Ball world had a way of expressing themselves when the situation called for commitment.
He spread the Mind Network outward as he fell, the electromagnetic field of it expanding through the planet's biosphere in a fraction of a second, encompassing every living thing on the surface simultaneously.
Biomagnetic fields resolved in the feedback: small creatures, herd animals, the specific rustling signature of plant life responding to vibration. And then—one that didn't match any of them.
Strong. Distinctly non-standard. Weakening at a visible rate, but still carrying the residual output of something that had recently been operating at cosmic scale.
Titan-class physique. Specific cranial structure. That unmistakable chin.
Thanos.
Jordan almost moved toward it immediately—then stopped.
Because in the opposite direction, something else had just left the planet.
A presence, moving fast—far exceeding planetary escape velocity, already at the edge of the Mind Network's range and accelerating. Not Thanos. Not anything Jordan recognized from his inventory of MCU entities. Mysterious, powerful, and gone before he could capture a full reading.
He filed it away. Noted the direction. Said nothing to the others.
His working theory was already at ninety percent confidence: Thanos had used the Infinity Stones a second time since the snap. Used them to destroyed them, burning through whatever remained of his body's tolerance in the process. The Eternals were durable—nuclear-blast durable—but the Infinity Stones operated at a different tier of force, and nobody got to use that kind of power twice without consequences.
Which meant the Thanos currently tending his garden was a significantly diminished version of the Thanos who had stood on Titan.
The same old maxim applies. Even without Jordan's involvement, Thor with his grief-and-fury multiplier was probably sufficient to handle a Thanos whose enhancements had been burned away by his own weapon.
But.
In some respects, Thanos in the MCU reminded Jordan of Dio Brando cornered in Egypt—a being who had committed genuinely inexcusable acts on a cosmic scale, who had been equally outrageous to gods and mortals alike, and who was now in a position where consequences were imminent. Jordan had a personal policy about not missing those moments.
He spotted the farmland below.
There it is.
The Benatar was still a few seconds behind him, burning through re-entry. Through the cockpit viewports, he could see Thor and Tony already at the hatch, ready to deploy the moment the ship was close enough.
Jordan registered the incoming kill-steal attempt and accelerated.
The farmland below was meticulously maintained.
Fields of vegetables and fruit in careful rows. A thatched cottage with smoke curling from the chimney—something warm cooking. And standing in the middle of the nearest field, serving as a scarecrow: the battle-damaged Infinity Gauntlet armor, one arm raised permanently skyward, festooned with birds.
The universe's most accomplished retirement village project.
What an absolute ghost.
Five seconds earlier.
The purple Titan stood at the hearth.
His body was diminished—half-withered, the burns of massive energy expenditure still visible across his left arm and torso, moving with the careful deliberateness of something large that has been badly hurt and is learning to manage around it. His right hand, the intact one, held a wooden ladle. The soup pot before him—vegetables, fruit, something that smelled of the planet's soil—bubbled steadily.
A distant sound reached him.
Growing louder by the fraction of a second.
Thanos turned. His eyes, still sharp even through the exhaustion that had settled into every line of his face, found the incoming streak of black and gold with the unhurried recognition of a being who has seen threats coming and chosen, for the first time in his life, not to prepare for them.
He looked old.
He looked tired.
He looked—
The fist arrived.
Jordan gave it three-tenths of his strength. A conservative opening number, appropriate for an unknown defensive value against an injured target with a recent energy output reduction—tactical, calibrated, responsible.
The shockwave that erupted between knuckles and cheekbone sounded like two planets exchanging opinions.
Thanos's face deformed on one side. The pain of it—unexpected, extraordinary, the specific shock of a body discovering it is no longer as indestructible as it believed—lit up behind his eyes in the moment before his head snapped sideways and he stopped being conscious.
The cottage disintegrated.
The shockwave leveled the surrounding farmland in a ring pattern. Two figures—one black-gold, one purple—punched through the far wall of smoke and tumbled into the rock face of the nearest mountain, carving a trench forty meters long.
Jordan landed in a crouch at the end of the trench, examined his fist, and noted with genuine appreciation that the impact hadn't fully cracked through. The Eternal's baseline physique, even in its current degraded state, was remarkable.
Finally. A punching bag with some structural integrity.
Thanos was already trying to reorient—the biological reflexes of a being who had spent centuries as the most dangerous entity in any room, fighting the temporary shutdown of a concussion.
Jordan didn't give him the window.
He rose, set his feet, arched his back, and swung.
"Ora ora ora ora ora ora—!"
The rapid-fire barrage came down with Stand-enhanced force, each impact driving Thanos deeper into the rock face, cracks spreading through the mountain at each point of contact. The sound of it was rhythmic, consistent, the specific tempo of a sequence that isn't stopping until something structural gives.
Thanos's face became intimate with the ground four times in quick succession.
Jordan stepped back, shook out his hands, and produced a Crimson Band of Cyttorak from thin air, sending the golden chakra chains drilling through the rock face and snapping closed around Thanos's wrists, ankles, and torso with the mechanical certainty of a mechanism that was designed to hold things that didn't want to be held.
The chains went taut. Thanos was airborne, suspended by his own extracted weight, roughly half a ton of unconscious cosmic overlord dangling in golden restraints over a demolished mountain.
Thor came down like weather.
Stormbreaker moved with the same clean economy as Wakanda—same angle, same commitment—except this time there was no gauntlet to intercept it.
The screaming started a moment after the impact.
The severed limb hit the ground. The surface of the cut was black and crackling, cauterized by lightning, still smoking. The Infinity Gauntlet rolled to a stop in the crater with a metallic sound.
What had been the universe's most feared being let out a sound that had nothing of cosmic ambition in it—just pain, raw and animal, the cry of something that had never before encountered its limit.
Less than three weeks ago, that entity had been a cosmic overlord who commanded armies across multiple star systems. The universe's most dedicated proponent of involuntary population management. The self-appointed family planning director of the entire known universe.
How things change.
"...They're fast," Tony Stark observed, touching down in the crater with his boot jets, the cannon on his right arm dimming back to standby as he registered the situation already resolved.
He scanned Jordan—chains still active, smoking knuckles, expression of mild satisfaction—and Thor, who was standing over the severed limb with the specific stillness of someone who has done the thing they've been building toward and doesn't quite know what comes next.
Tony crossed the crater.
He didn't go for Thanos. He went for the Gauntlet.
It lay on its side in the rubble—grotesquely large, twisted, the metal deformed from forces it was never designed to contain from the inside. The six stone settings were visible.
Tony knelt, turned it over with one hand, and looked at what the stones had become.
His heart sank before he'd finished registering what he was seeing.