Hulk roared.
Then his body began to change.
The green mass expanded outward in every direction, bones cracking and reshaping beneath the skin, spikes tearing through along his spine one by one, a tail ripping free from the base and whipping outward.
The missing section of his side still gone but the rest of him growing past it, compensating with sheer scale until what was standing across from Luke was no longer something that resembled a man in any capacity.
One hundred meters. Easy. A green Godzilla wearing Hulk's hunger and nothing else, the gamma energy bleeding off him in visible waves that lit the surrounding void an angry sickly green.
Luke looked up at him.
"Hulk really is a monster," he said quietly.
Then Hulk opened his mouth and gamma radiation began gathering at the back of his throat, condensing, building, the glow intensifying with every second as the energy collected into something that was going to be very unpleasant for anything in front of it.
Hulk released it.
The gamma beam came out as a column wide enough to swallow a city block, green and absolute, burning through space with the accumulated rage of everything Hulk had become.
Luke's hand came up.
'Plasma Lance.'
Lightning condensed into his palm and tightened into a single concentrated point before he drove it forward to meet the column head on.
The two forces met in the middle and held for exactly one second, the boundary between them trembling, neither giving ground.
Then it gave.
The resulting sphere of unstable energy expanded outward in every direction, gamma and plasma folding into each other and destabilizing completely, the debris field disintegrating instantly, the shockwave consuming everything it touched until the sphere was large enough to swallow a small moon.
The event horizon in the distance lurched.
Luke's hair danced wildly from the residual air displacement, whipping across his face as the sphere dissipated around them.
He had to admit. Hulk was the strongest opponent he had fought in a straight exchange. Not the most annoying — that title belonged to Shadow King, who was a different kind of problem entirely — but in terms of raw opposition, this one earned it.
Hulk looked across at him and saw Luke still standing.
Something shifted in the infected eyes. Not respect exactly. But recognition.
"I really want to stay here and test every skill I have on you," Luke said, rolling his neck once. "But there are people waiting for me. So it's time to end this."
'Neutrino Lightning.'
A single thread of black lightning appeared at his fingertip, thin and quiet. Luke dragged it slowly through the air in front of him like he was drawing a line.
The atmosphere around them began to change.
Reality itself started coming apart at the seams, fractures spreading outward from Luke as the central point, the fabric of the space they occupied breaking down at the subatomic level, atoms ceasing to be atoms, the fundamental architecture of matter simply stopping.
Hulk roared and swung into the wave with everything he had.
His fist turned to dust on contact.
Then his arm.
Then the rest of him followed, the green fading as Hulk came apart piece by piece and became nothing.
***
On the outside Daniel sat on the platform looking at his opponent.
The platform was surrounded by a black barrier eating every attack that came at it.
But this one was different.
Sentry hung in the air outside the barrier, a strange mechanism rotating slowly around his head, intelligent hunger sitting behind his eyes, power radiating off him that didn't announce itself because it didn't need to.
"Where is the white haired guy?" Sentry asked, and punched the barrier. The clouds in every direction simply ceased to exist from the shockwave.
Daniel watched the clouds disappear.
"My uncle is currently dealing with another problem. You're welcome to come back in an hour."
"Do I look like a fool?" Sentry hit the barrier again, harder. "Tell me where he is or I kill every single one of you."
Daniel's barrier shifted, and Sentry's next punch passed through it entirely, unable to make contact with anything, his fist swinging through empty air where solid barrier had been a moment ago.
"Do you think it's that easy to deal with me?" Daniel extended his middle finger toward Sentry without breaking eye contact.
Steve turned to Tony.
"Is his uncle also like that?"
"Yes," Tony said. "Except that one is more annoying than this one somehow."
"Hey I can hear you," Daniel said without turning around.
"And you," Daniel said, looking at Sentry through the barrier, "what are you going to do? Your physical strength means nothing here. We exist outside of time and space right now. Nothing can touch us unless you know how to manipulate time itself."
Sentry stared at him.
Steve looked around at the platform beneath his feet, at the clouds, at everything that looked completely normal and present, then back at Daniel with genuine confusion on his face.
Tony's variant stepped beside him.
"What he means is we're currently sitting in a void between time and space. A gap between dimensions. Which means technically we don't exist within this dimension right now, and you cannot harm something that isn't present in your own dimensional plane."
"But we're standing here," Steve said, looking down at his feet. "I can feel the platform."
"It doesn't work like that," Tony's variant said. "We appear to exist here. We can interact with this dimension selectively. But we aren't in it, not fully, which means anything originating from within this dimension passes through us rather than connecting with us."
Steve looked at his hand, then at the barrier, then at Sentry still hanging outside it looking increasingly irritated.
"So we're here but we're not here."
"Exactly," Tony's variant said.
Steve nodded slowly like a man accepting something he would never fully understand.
*****
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