The arena reformed itself, reality knitting back together like cosmic fabric repairing a tear. Stars that had been displaced drifted back to their original positions. The void cleaned itself, sweeping away debris from destroyed predators like a cosmic janitor on overtime.
Tony floated in the center, his armor's nanobots working overtime to repair minor damage. His HUD displayed a dizzying array of data—energy readings, dimensional coordinates, probability matrices, and what appeared to be a recipe for cosmic brownies (he'd have to debug that later).
"JARVIS, damage assessment?"
"Seventeen percent power drain, minor structural integrity loss in the left gauntlet, and your coffee supply is getting low."
"That last one is the real emergency."
The God's presence intensified, its impossible form coalescing into something almost solid—still wrong on every conceivable level, but at least consistently wrong.
"You have performed adequately," it said.
Thor perked up. "Adequately? We destroyed an army of cosmic monsters!"
"Yes. Adequately. Now comes the real test."
The temperature in the arena—or what passed for temperature in a place where thermodynamics was more of a suggestion—dropped suddenly. Not cold like winter, but cold like the absence of energy, like the heat death of the universe compressed into a single moment.
Loki felt it first, his magical senses screaming warnings. "Something's coming. Something... big."
"How big?" Tony asked, already running scans.
"I don't have words for this kind of big. Ask your scanners."
Tony's HUD lit up with alerts, warnings, and several error messages that just said "NOPE" in all caps.
"JARVIS?"
"Sir, my sensors have detected something approaching that's registering as... and I quote... 'OH GOD OH GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE' on the threat assessment scale."
"That's not a real scale."
"I made it up three seconds ago specifically for this situation."
From the edges of the arena—all the edges simultaneously—darkness gathered. Not the darkness of space, which is merely the absence of light. This was darkness as an active force, a predatory presence that consumed everything it touched.
The darkness coalesced, pooling together like oil on water, and from it emerged...
The Singular Threat.
It was massive beyond comprehension—not just large, but dimensionally massive, existing across multiple planes of reality at once. Its form kept shifting: one moment a writhing mass of tentacles made of collapsing universes, the next a crystalline structure that contained entire galaxies within its facets, then something that looked like a mathematical equation given malevolent life.
Each of its forms radiated power that made the cosmic predators look like particularly aggressive housecats.
"Well," Tony said, his voice remarkably calm despite his heart rate spiking, "that's new."
The entity moved—if "moved" was even the right word for something that seemed to exist everywhere at once—and the entire arena flexed, spacetime bending like rubber under impossible strain.
It spoke, and its voice was the sound of stars dying, black holes forming, entropy itself:
"CONSUME. EXPAND. ETERNAL."
"It's a singularity," Loki breathed. "A living singularity. It wants to collapse the entire arena—maybe the entire universe—into itself."
Black Adam's lightning crackled, but even his divine power seemed insignificant compared to this thing. "Then we stop it."
"With what?" Thor demanded. "My hammer can open dimensional rifts, but that thing is multiple dimensions!"
Tony's mind was already racing, calculations spinning faster than quantum computers, his enhanced perception analyzing every aspect of the threat. He could see the singularity's structure—not just its physical form, but its fundamental nature. It was collapsing probability waves, devouring potential futures, erasing possibilities.
And then it clicked.
"Guys," Tony said slowly, "I have a completely insane idea."
"Those are usually your best ones," Loki replied.
"Or worst," Thor muttered.
"Shut up and listen. This thing is collapsing possibilities, right? It's making the universe smaller, reducing infinity to zero. But what if we do the opposite?"
"Expand infinity?" Black Adam asked, his tactical mind already following Tony's logic.
"Not just expand—explode it. We hit this thing with so much possibility, so much potential energy, so much impossibility that it can't collapse it all. We overwhelm its ability to consume."
"And how exactly do we do that?" Loki asked.
Tony's grin was manic. "We improvise... outside the laws of everything."
The singularity lunged—or rather, reality around them suddenly found itself being pulled toward it, space itself being eaten like spaghetti into a cosmic drain.
"NOW!" Tony shouted.
Thor and Black Adam moved as one.
Thor swung Mjolnir, pouring every ounce of his divine strength into it, while simultaneously opening a dimensional rift. Black Adam unleashed his sentient lightning, not in a single bolt but in a storm, thousands of strikes at once.
When hammer energy met lightning in the dimensional rift, something beautiful and terrifying happened.
They created a plasma storm of raw creation—not just energy, but potential energy, the kind of power that existed at the moment of the Big Bang. It was matter that hadn't decided what to be yet, energy that could become anything, probability waves that refused to collapse.
The storm roared toward the singularity, and for the first time, the entity hesitated.
Loki and Alien X acted in perfect synchronization.
Loki spread his hands, manipulating probability on a scale he'd never attempted before. He didn't just make unlikely things happen—he made impossible things become probable. He found gaps in the singularity's defenses that shouldn't exist and forced them to exist anyway.
Alien X, with its three arguing personalities suddenly in rare agreement, warped reality around those gaps. Where Loki created cracks in the armor, Alien X turned them into chasms. The singularity's perfect, impenetrable form suddenly had weaknesses blooming across its surface like flowers made of entropy.
"IT'S WORKING!" Loki shouted, sweat beading on his forehead from the effort.
Doremano barked.
And the universe listened.
The god-dog's gravity manipulation kicked into overdrive. His tail wagged, and each wag sent out gravitational pulses that repositioned everything. Enemies that had been surrounding them suddenly found themselves scattered across millions of miles of space. The singularity's own gravitational field—which had been pulling everything toward it—suddenly turned against itself, creating feedback loops that made it stumble.
The Galectors coordinated their fire, targeting the weak points that Loki and Alien X had created. Their neutron-star weapons struck with surgical precision, each shot calculated to cause maximum disruption.
And Tony... Tony conducted it all like a symphony.
His enhanced perception let him see the entire battle playing out in real-time and future-time simultaneously. He calculated trajectories a thousand moves ahead, coordinated attacks with microsecond precision, manipulated energy fields to redirect the singularity's power back at itself.
"Loki, probability spike at coordinate theta-nine, NOW!"
"Thor, dimensional rift in three, two, one—SWING!"
"Black Adam, lightning cascade pattern delta-seven!"
"Doremano, gravity well, center mass!"
"Alien X, time stop in five seconds—mark!"
But the singularity was adapting. It was learning, analyzing their attacks, evolving defenses in real-time. For every weak point they created, it sealed two more. For every attack they landed, it absorbed the energy and grew stronger.
"It's not enough!" Black Adam shouted, his lightning being absorbed almost as fast as he could generate it.
Tony's mind raced. They were hitting it with everything—raw creation energy, probability manipulation, dimensional tears, gravitational anomalies, reality warping—and it wasn't enough. The singularity was too big, too powerful, too fundamental.
Unless...
"We're not thinking big enough," Tony said suddenly.
"What?" Thor gasped, dodging a tendril of pure entropy.
"We're treating it like an enemy to destroy. But you can't destroy a singularity—they're the ultimate expression of gravity, of matter, of spacetime itself. You can't fight fundamental forces."
"Then what do we do?" Loki demanded.
"We don't fight it. We redirect it."
Tony's fingers flew across his holographic interface, calculating something so complex that even his enhanced mind struggled with it. He was trying to solve equations that didn't have solutions, manipulate forces that shouldn't be manipulatable.
"JARVIS, I need you to coordinate with everyone's systems simultaneously. Link Thor's dimensional manipulation, Black Adam's lightning, Loki's probability control, Alien X's reality warping, and Doremano's gravity fields into a single synchronized pulse."
"Sir, that's theoretically impossible."
"Good thing we're beyond theory."
"Fair point, sir. Coordinating now."
Tony raised his hands, and his armor began to glow with every color that existed and several that didn't. He could see the connections forming—not physical links, but probability connections, energy bridges, dimensional threads tying all their powers together into a single unified field.
"Everyone, on my mark, give me everything. Don't hold back, don't conserve energy. This is all or nothing."
"What exactly are we doing?" Black Adam asked.
"Creating a feedback loop across dimensions. We're going to turn the singularity's own momentum against itself, use its power to tear open a rift to somewhere else—anywhere else—and shove it through."
"That's insane," Loki said.
"Completely," Tony agreed. "Ready?"
The singularity sensed something was different. It pulled back, defensive for the first time, as if it could feel the trap being laid.
"Three..."
Thor gripped Mjolnir, lightning dancing down its length.
"Two..."
Black Adam's eyes glowed with divine fire.
"One..."
Loki's hands wove patterns in probability.
"MARK!"
Everything happened at once.
Thor swung Mjolnir, creating not one dimensional rift but hundreds, a cascade of tears in reality that surrounded the singularity.
Black Adam's lightning became a web, connecting all the rifts, turning them into a network of dimensional pathways.
Loki manipulated probability so that the singularity's own gravitational pull, instead of drawing things in, pushed outward.
Alien X blinked, and time rewound—but only for the singularity, forcing it to experience its own attack in reverse.
Doremano barked, and gravitational waves stronger than any black hole's tidal forces seized the singularity, not pulling or pushing but spinning it, creating angular momentum on a cosmic scale.
And Tony... Tony created the feedback loop.
He manipulated the energy fields so that every ounce of power the singularity generated fed into the dimensional rifts. The more it struggled, the stronger the trap became. Its own strength became its prison.
The arena screamed.
Not metaphorically—reality itself screamed, a sound that existed below hearing but that everyone felt in their bones, their atoms, their very existence. Stars blinked out and reignited. Time moved backwards, forwards, and sideways simultaneously. Gravity stopped being a suggestion and became a demand.
The singularity writhed, fought, tried to collapse everything into itself, but it couldn't. The feedback loop was perfect—for every action it took, an equal and opposite reaction pushed back. It was caught in cosmic stalemate, unable to advance or retreat.
And then Tony threw the switch.
All the dimensional rifts connected, forming a single massive portal. The gravitational spin that Doremano had created gave the singularity momentum it couldn't resist. Thor's hammer energy provided the push. Black Adam's lightning guided the path.
With a sound like the universe taking a sharp breath, the singularity was shoved through the portal and into...
"Where did we send it?" Thor asked breathlessly.
"A pocket dimension I created," Alien X said, its three voices speaking in unison for once. "Infinite space, no matter to consume. It will expand forever into nothing."
"So we imprisoned it in the concept of loneliness," Loki said. "Poetic."
The portal sealed. Reality knitted itself back together, slower this time, like the universe needed a moment to remember what "normal" was supposed to feel like.
The arena fell silent.
The heroes floated in place, exhausted, their powers drained, armor smoking, divine energy flickering.
And then the God appeared, floating above them all, and for the first time since they'd met this incomprehensible being, it was smiling.
"You have surpassed expectation," it said, and its voice carried genuine warmth. "Not by brute force... but by intelligence, creativity, and unity. You did not simply fight—you understood. You saw the nature of your enemy and adapted your strategy accordingly."
The God gestured, and instantly their energy was restored, their wounds healed, their powers replenished.
"Each of you played a role. Thor's might opened the path. Black Adam's precision guided the way. Loki's cunning found the weakness. Doremano's joy brought chaos to order. Alien X's wisdom shaped reality. And you, Tony Stark..."
The God focused on Iron Man, its impossible eyes meeting his visor.
"You saw the pattern. You connected the pieces. You conducted a symphony of cosmic power with nothing but your mind and your will. You proved that genius—true genius—can bend even the fundamental forces of reality."
Tony tapped his helmet, trying to play it cool despite his hands shaking slightly from adrenaline. "Genius does everything. Even survival against living singularities apparently."
"Indeed."
The God's form began to fade, becoming translucent, see-through, like fog in morning sun.
"Rest now. You have earned it. But remember—this was merely a test. The real challenges await beyond this arena. And when you face them, remember this lesson:"
The God's voice echoed as it disappeared:
"Knowledge is power. Curiosity is weapon. Genius bends even gods. And together... you are unstoppable."
And it was gone.