The wounds inside him had just compounded themselves again. A fresh mouthful of purple blood drifted out of Thanos's ruined mouth in slow, weightless clots, and the Mad Titan who had demanded half the universe came — for the second time in as many minutes — to the ragged edge of his own life.
His one intact eye fixed on Jordan. A thin, bitter smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
"You've won, young Eternal. Whatever you want from me, go ahead. Do it."
Jordan snorted.
"Save the magnanimity. The loser doesn't get to narrate the terms. Everything you have is mine now — by right."
He flicked two fingers. The Vajra chains hoisted Thanos off the surface of the meteorite as easily as a fisherman might lift a salmon. Another finger-snap, and a dazzling golden line drew itself across the void — reality unzipping along the seam — before a circular Dimensional Gate bloomed open in front of them, sparks of law-energy crackling along its rim.
Thanos lifted his ruined head to look through it.
And felt, for the first time in several hundred years, something close to fear.
Through the gate, blotting out the far starfield, hung the one colossus in the cosmos that had carried him across his every campaign: the flagship of the Black Order, the mobile throne of his life's conquest.
Sanctuary II.
Home. Throne. Fleet. And—
"What..." Thanos's voice, slurred by broken bone, barely made it past his teeth. "What are you going to do?"
Jordan's smile sharpened into something that didn't quite belong on a human face.
"You love your daughter very much. Don't you?"
The sentence hit the Mad Titan like a second supernova. Pure, unfiltered parental rage flooded through a body that should not have had the energy left to blink — and the Vajra chains piercing his flesh groaned audibly along their lengths, cracking light across their links.
"You are not allowed to touch my daughter!!"
"That's not really up to you."
Jordan took one step forward, Thanos hoisted beside him like a side of meat. The gate collapsed behind them — and, crossing stars in the span of a blink, the two of them arrived in open vacuum directly under the shadow of Sanctuary II.
Klaxons. Alert lights. Hundreds of gun batteries pivoted as one, giant barrels flooding with charge, targeting lasers painting flickering crosshairs across two new silhouettes where a moment ago there had been nothing.
On the command deck, however, something caught before a single trigger was pulled.
"Wait — that's—"
Ebony Maw, Thanos's most trusted herald, stared through the bridge viewport at the purple-skinned figure dangling from diamond-bright chains like a dog hauled home dead, and came, with obvious reluctance, to a realization his mind refused to accept.
"...Lord Thanos?!"
A thirty-second silence fell across the bridge of the flagship. The most unflappable of the Black Order found his jaw working with nothing coming out — struck, like the entire cruiser around him, by a magnitude-fifteen internal earthquake.
"Don't hurt my daughter! Gamora, ru—urgh—!!"
Thanos, still bellowing over Jordan's shoulder, got half a sentence out before another golden chain shot up out of the void, wound itself across his mouth, and cinched tight.
Jordan ignored the gun batteries entirely. He reached out lightly with Mind Network — felt Sanctuary II's interior layout unfold like a pressed-flat blueprint under his fingers — located the signature he was looking for three decks down — and stepped through the flagship's layered defenses the way a man might step around a curtain.
They teleported directly into a private stateroom.
Someone moved in the half-dark the instant his weight landed.
Gamora had a Godslayer dagger out from beneath her pillow before she finished turning — the twin blades unfolding from the hilt with a clang as her grip locked in — and dropped into a killing stance trained by the most lethal assassin school in the galaxy.
Green skin. Dark crimson hair. Every line of her coiled and ready.
"Who the hell are you—"
Her eyes caught on the figure hanging beside him.
"—Father?!"
Her jaw fell open before she could stop it. The sight refused to resolve: the tyrant she had loved and hated all her life, hanging from a stranger's hand as a trussed, bleeding wreck.
Memories surfaced before she could suppress them.
She had been old enough, when he adopted her, to remember. Her family. Her people. Her homeworld — the world this purple-skinned giant had ordered halved. The order had only called for half; the consequences that followed — famine, collapse, civil war — had turned the rest of it to ash.
And yet.
This man, whom by every right she should have hated to the end of her life, had reached down into the corpse-strewn ruins and pulled her out. Had fed her. Trained her. Called her his daughter every day since, and meant it.
Hatred and filial love, tangled at the root. Every reunion with him did this to her.
Before she could say a word, Jordan snapped his fingers.
Her trained, assassin-honed body locked up. Golden chains unspooled out of empty air, twined across her limbs, and cinched themselves into a crosshatch of bonds across her arms and torso. The Godslayer clattered, still active, onto the floor at her feet.
Across the stateroom, in his own chains, tears cut slow tracks down Thanos's ruined face.
Whatever else he had done across a million years of conquest, his love for his adopted daughter was the one thing he had ever felt that was unambiguously real.
Gamora, still mid-processing, tried to wrench one hand loose out of pure trained reflex. The chains answered by tightening, coiling of their own accord like something half-alive, and she let out a low, involuntary sound of pain before going still.
Jordan nodded, satisfied, and turned to leave.
The stateroom door slammed open behind him.
"Damn intruder. Release the Master — or else—"
Ebony Maw's voice cut off mid-threat.
Behind him, the elite vanguard of the Black Order snapped their eyes to combat-red in unison — and then froze, red glow paused like taped-over film.
Because the dark figure standing in the middle of the room, in the scarlet officer's jacket, had golden light in his eyes.
Not glow. Not reflection.
Sunfire. The furnace-core brightness of a working star, radiating out of two human sockets — and behind it, the distinct, awful sense that the man was merely choosing, at that moment, not to let it out yet.
Every hair on Ebony Maw's scalp lifted as one.
He threw up both hands. Hundreds of psychic shields folded themselves into existence in front of him — layered like petals of a flower, the full defensive suite of the Black Order's most skilled spellcaster.
A single, terrifyingly bright ray swept across deep space.
It went through the hull of Sanctuary II like the hull was paper. It went through Ebony Maw's hundred-shield defense like the shields were the hull.
The upper half of his body was there for one instant, and not the next — reduced, at sun-core temperature, to vapor that didn't even have time to become smoke. Psychic architecture perfected across centuries, annulled at a molecular level.
Jordan watched the lower half topple, calmly, and raised his other hand.
"You know," he said, drawing his palms together in front of his chest, "I was actually going to let you off."
Golden lightning crackled in the hollow between his hands, compressing past the point where any sane quantity of energy should have collapsed into something else entirely.
"But — nah. Let's destroy you."
He drew the charge back to his hip, both fists glowing, one knee bending into the stance.
"FINAL—"
Both arms thrust forward.
"—FLASH!!"
The Prince of All Saiyans' ultimate technique detonated from the second stateroom of Sanctuary II.
A shockwave on the order of planet striking planet blew outward across the void — a ring of brilliant cosmic light painted across the dark, every photon of it burning ten times brighter than the surrounding stars.
The three of them were already out.
Jordan stood in open vacuum a safe distance off, the afterglow of the Final Flash stance still clinging to his sleeves, Thanos and Gamora both secured in their golden binds at his sides. All three watched in silence as the flagship of the Black Order came apart along the axis of the blast. As its bridge crumpled. As its engines bloomed outward. As an entire fleet formation around it caught, flared, and was scoured into stellar dust in less than a full second.
The most unprecedented fireworks display in the cosmic calendar.
F-boy, internal commentary: Now this feels like New Year's.
As soul-particles began to drift outward from the wreckage by the tens of thousands — incomplete souls, efficient targets, ripe for collection — F-boy made a command call.
He burned an SR Chitauri card and activated its unique skill:
Fantasy Moment.
Tenfold stat boost. Ten full minutes.
Not, in this case, deployed for combat — the combat had already concluded — but for a much more pressing strategic application.
Fate Draw counters spiked.
The counter multiplied, multiplied again, multiplied past anything resembling reasonable, and finally came to rest at —
[Fate Draws Acquired: +10086]
Which solved one problem very thoroughly.
It had, however, created a fresh one.
The corresponding side effect had just piled more than one hundred thousand Vanguard N-rank fodder cards into F-boy's deck inventory, cascading into the card-space like a snowfall with no off switch.
F-boy stared at the accumulating pile inside his own stand, middle finger half-raised in professional reflex.
...How long is this going to take to feed through?