"Why haven't you eliminated the intruder? He's alone!"
The Chitauri general's voice carried the particular register of a commander whose confidence in his forces is declining in real time. The response came back in pieces from across the command channel, each update worse than the last.
"General, the target has split into five individuals using unknown methods—"
"Their physical capability matches the lord's own—our weapons have no measurable effect—"
"General, we need to consider retreating—"
"Retreat?"
The general's sidearm moved once.
The head of the advisor who had suggested retreating experienced a rapid and terminal decompression. The rest of the bridge staff absorbed this development and elected to say nothing further about tactical withdrawal.
"If we retreat," the general said, scanning the faces of his remaining command crew with the controlled intensity of a being who has just made his position clear, "how do I explain this to His Majesty?"
"A fair question."
The voice was wrong. Accent wrong. Origin wrong. Present on the bridge extremely wrong.
Every head turned.
Jordan stood on the command deck in his black-and-gold suit and scarlet cloak, hands clasped behind his back, with the mild expression of someone who has arrived at a meeting they called themselves.
"I agree," he continued. "I don't think an honest accounting would go well for anyone."
The heat vision moved.
A single, surgical sweep—crimson-gold geometry crossing the bridge at collar height.
Heads. Several of them. The general's alone remained attached to its owner, a courtesy Jordan had extended on purpose.
F-boy stepped out from Jordan's body, invisible to the surviving Chitauri, and gathered the scattered soul particles with the focused efficiency of someone who had strong feelings about card yield. The results materialized as cards—ugly, low-grade, the visual equivalent of junk mail—and stacked themselves into the deck without ceremony.
Jordan looked at the total.
Fate Draw count: +18.
(F-boy, with feeling: In terms of drop rate, I consider myself the most impoverished Stand in this or any dimension.)
The general, surrounded by his headless command staff, processed the situation. He straightened. He bared his teeth.
"Die, for the glory of—"
Jordan's fist arrived before the sentence finished.
The general's view of the bridge was briefly occupied entirely by a large incoming object, and then occupied by nothing at all.
The body hit the deck.
SR fodder card. Fate Draw count increases.
Jordan shook the gauntlets once—the force field vibrating the surface clean—and surveyed the bridge.
"Tch." He turned. "It's not as if I needed directions."
He'd already located Thanos once, on the Garden. That specific biomagnetic signature—unmatched in scale anywhere in the observable universe, the particular weight of an Eternal who had subjected himself to cosmic-level modification over centuries—was not something Jordan was going to lose track of simply because the timeline had changed. Same signature. Different moment.
F-boy finished processing the general's soul particles, and Jordan teleported.
He emerged into open space above the portal, gathered Super Saiyan energy in one hand, and was mid-throw at the Chitauri mothership when he saw it.
A familiar gold-and-red figure, MK7 armor running on fumes, pushing a nuclear warhead roughly his own height toward the portal opening.
They actually launched the nuclear missile, Jordan thought, with the resigned recognition of someone watching a timeline-mandated event proceed on schedule.
He tossed the ki blast at the mothership—it was going up anyway, might as well help with the timing—and flashed across the vacuum to intercept.
The 2012 Tony Stark, by the time Jordan reached him, was in the specific physical state of a human being in a vacuum with failing suit insulation and near-zero power reserves: core temperature dropping, oxygen running out, still conscious but not for much longer. The MK7 hadn't been designed for deep space; it was doing its best and losing.
The nuclear warhead, now drifting untended, Jordan caught with one hand and redirected with the other. It continued toward the mothership on a slightly adjusted vector.
He caught Tony with his free arm and held him there while the mothership caught up with the ki blast, then with the nuclear warhead, in that order.
The explosion was large.
The chain detonation that followed was larger.
Tony, half-frozen, half-conscious, turned his dimming faceplate toward the light. Jordan, reading the flicker of thought in the dying suit's biomonitor through the Mind Network, caught the precise shape of what was going through his head.
The nuclear bomb actually worked on the mothership.
What a primitive civilization. They couldn't even handle one of our weapons.
Jordan's mouth curved.
I blew up that ship. You were already unconscious. You did not blow up that ship.
But sure. Iron Man saved the world. Pass it on.
He shook his head, holding the cold armor, and banked toward the closing portal below.
"Same in every timeline," he said, to no one in particular. "Tony Stark is always a complication."
In the lobby of Stark Tower, nine stories down from the rooftop, future Tony Stark sneezed.
The sneeze was inconvenient given that he was currently wearing his iron man armor and a SHIELD field agent's lanyard and attempting to pass as someone who belonged at this particular Hydra meeting. The tactical goggles covered most of his face. The mustache was familiar to anyone paying close enough attention, but nobody was, because the cover was solid and Hydra agents had been extensively briefed on not questioning their colleagues.
The agent beside him glanced over. "You alright, buddy?"
"Fine. Just—caught some dust." Tony touched his nose, gave the man a generous smile. "Thanks."
The agent, who had apparently been having a difficult week and was working through it with the help of friendly conversation, leaned marginally closer. "The air quality in here is genuinely terrible. Going to need a few showers when we get back." A brief pause. "Want to come along?"
Tony held the smile in place through what appeared to be some effort.
"...We'll revisit that."
Outside, through the breach in the sky, the Avengers watched the mothership come apart.
The portal was already closing. Black Widow had put the Mind Scepter against the energy shield of the Tesseract machine on Steve's order, and the Cosmic Cube's output had dropped away, the aperture contracting toward nothing.
The Avengers had been waiting for a specific figure.
It didn't come.
Steve exhaled. "Yes." He clicked his headset. "Close the portal."
From somewhere above them—through the floor, through the ceiling, from the upper levels of the tower—a sound floated down. Something between a groan and an announcement, gaining volume as its source apparently found its feet.
Loki had regained consciousness.
The Frost Giant lineage, as advertised, was extremely resilient.
"This machine cannot be shut down!" His voice descended through the tower like a formal grievance being filed with the universe. "This is the beginning of my claim on the Nine Realms—why do you foolish mortals always insist on defying their gods—"