After hearing the full story, Luke had to admit — Daniel got lucky. When he first arrived in Marvel he had nothing. No system, no guidance, no idea what was happening. Just him figuring it out as he went.
Daniel at least had a head start.
But that wasn't the thing sitting heaviest on his mind right now.
There was another Avatar operating somewhere in the background. Avatar of Virtuoso. He didn't know what that title meant yet, but the fact that this person had reached into his system and blocked dimensional travel without him even sensing it said enough. That wasn't a small ability.
And according to Daniel, this Avatar was also the reason Daniel was standing here right now.
Which meant this wasn't coincidence. This was already written somewhere — and maybe, Luke thought, this exact chain of events was what pushed his future self to build the Recovery System and pull Daniel into all of this in the first place.
He filed that away.
'At least now I have someone to work with when it comes to taking this one down,' he thought. The last Avatar had nearly cost him his mind. He wasn't interested in a repeat.
He looked at Daniel.
"So, my dear nephew — how strong are you exactly?"
It wasn't small talk. He needed an actual read on what the system he apparently built had produced.
Daniel didn't answer with words.
A clockwork pattern surfaced in his eyes, gears and geometry spreading across the iris like something waking up, and he simply told Luke to hit him.
"You do understand my physical strength isn't something to test casually," Luke said.
"Try," Daniel said.
Luke threw an undercut, straight and clean, aimed directly for the chin.
It passed through him completely.
Like hitting air. Like Daniel wasn't there at all.
"That," Daniel said, "is one of the powers you designed. Mark of Nexus — it controls time and space." The clockwork faded slowly from his eyes. "I tweaked it enough that in this mode my body exists outside of time entirely. And since I'm not in time, nothing in time can touch me."
Luke looked at his hand.
Then back at Daniel.
His future self had built that.
And Daniel had taken it apart and made it better. Honestly, not bad.
"That ability has a weak point though," Luke said. "Anything that operates outside of time and space won't care about that mode. A black hole for example — time and space mean nothing inside one."
Daniel nodded. "I know. But it's not like we run into people who can casually control black holes every day."
"Most who can don't bother intervening in mortal affairs," Luke agreed.
"Exactly so —"
"You encountered one just now," Luke said flatly.
A singularity appeared in his palm without ceremony, small and absolute, pulling at everything around it — light bending slightly at the edges, the air itself leaning inward. One of the skills of Void Sovereignty. A black hole, condensed and held like it was nothing.
Daniel stared at it.
"Stop showing off," he said. "Give me time. I'll catch up. It's been long enough for me to grow."
Luke closed his hand and the singularity disappeared.
"I know," he said. Then quieter, "When did I ever look down on you. You're the only one in that family I actually care about."
He pulled Daniel in without making a production of it.
Daniel smiled, and for a moment neither of them said anything.
Then Daniel pulled back with a completely different expression.
"So," he said, "how many sisters-in-law do I have now?"
Luke's arm dropped.
The warmth on his face evaporated instantly.
"That, my dear nephew, is a conversation for some future date," he said, already walking.
Daniel laughed.
Behind them, the five who had been watching the entire exchange stood in varying degrees of silence.
Natasha was the first to speak.
"Well, that looks like a family reunion."
"Maybe," Steve said. "But doesn't it seem strange to anyone else? Our dimensional jump malfunctioned the moment he arrived and now someone from his family just shows up out of nowhere."
Nobody answered that.
Tony's variant crossed his arms. "Yeah. That's strange."
Then an arrow cut through the air, electricity crackling along the shaft, heading straight for Steve. Wanda caught it just before impact and crushed the charge with her magic.
They all looked up.
Hawkeye landed first, dropping from air. Falcon came down beside him, wings folding slowly, feet hitting the cracked ground without a sound.
They didn't look right.
The skin was off. The eyes were worse. Whatever was sitting behind those eyes wasn't recognition or caution or anything close to human calculation. It was simpler than that. Hungrier than that.
"Been a long time since we saw humans," Clint said, gaze moving across the five of them like he was taking inventory. "Don't you think, Sam?"
"Yeah," Sam said, and the smile that followed it was wrong in a way that was hard to pin down but impossible to miss. "Fresh meat."
Natasha studied Clint without moving a muscle.
The face was his. The stance was his. The bow was held exactly the way she had watched him hold it a hundred times across a hundred different situations.
But the Clint she knew had never looked at her like she was something to eat.
"Ummm are they the intelligent zombie he talked about?" Wanda asked, her eyes not leaving the two figures in front of them.
"Yeah," Tony said, his mask sliding down and locking into place. "And judging by the way they're looking at us, we're nothing more than a meal to them right now."
Steve brought his shield up slowly.
Sam tilted his head slightly, like he found their defensive posture amusing.
"They're getting ready," Sam said to Clint, almost conversational. "Cute."
"Doesn't matter," Clint replied, already reaching for another arrow. "Just means the food fights back. More fun that way."
*****
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