Thanos drove his full divine power through the Sanctuary II's armored bulkhead like it was drywall.
The cabin walls came apart in concentric rings around him. The enormous purple-skinned figure shot out through the new opening like a fired shell — indestructible Eternal Titan physique absorbing, more or less, what the ship's detonating hull threw at him. With gravity's assistance, his considerable mass carved through several mountain faces on the way down, and the Tyrant's Blade was stripped somewhere in the debris and lost. He hit the ground on Morag's surface in approximately the condition one would expect from that sequence of events.
Gamora, following through the same breach seconds later, had made better use of the descent. She'd seen the treeline coming and positioned herself for it — deliberately crashed through the canopy, using the branches to bleed off speed in stages, and ultimately rolled into the darkness of a deep ravine.
Where she was now: unknown.
Thanos stood up from his landing crater. Panting. Eyes fixed on the dark figure dropping from the sky above.
He took a breath to speak.
"I'm not an Eternal," Jordan said.
Thanos closed his mouth.
"I could see you building up to it." Jordan touched down on the ground twenty meters away. "So I saved us both the time."
"That's—" Thanos's expression tightened. "That's impossible." He could feel it plainly — the energy signature radiating off this young man was unmistakably Eternal in character. The physique, the power output, the genetic structure. Everything his senses told him said Eternal. "The power within you—"
"Is mine," Jordan said pleasantly. "Not theirs."
The Mad Titan's eyes went to the sky, where Sanctuary II was still in the process of finishing its destruction across the upper atmosphere of Morag.
He considered the energy readings he'd just witnessed.
Right. The joke window had closed.
Thanos made the only reasonable call available to someone who had been fighting at the apex of the cosmic food chain for a million years — he took stock of the engagement range, concluded that trading planet-busting energy at long distance was a losing proposition, and threw a punch without preamble.
Jordan was, genuinely, impressed by that. No monologue. No escalating speech. Just: this range is bad, close range is better, throw the punch. He activated Super Blue in acknowledgement.
And returned a normal punch.
Thanos — third playthrough — died.
The ground where he landed was blasted into a crater five meters deep by the subsequent heat ray. Jordan walked to the edge of it, looked down for a moment, then raised one foot. Earth-attribute chakra sank into the ground beneath him. The stone and soil responded — surging upward in slow waves, rock flowing like water, folding over the crater and the figure inside it until the surface had sealed itself flat again.
Let the outdated monarch rest on an abandoned planet. Jordan dusted off his jacket. Whether that constitutes peace is between him and whoever he wronged.
He went to find Gamora.
She was in the ravine — unconscious, scraped up, but breathing. Vitals, when he checked: stable. A few hours and she'd wake up on her own.
He left her there and walked back toward the Benatar.
"It's done," he told the group waiting by the ship. "We can go home."
Nebula, still pressing two fingers against her temple where the neural hack had left residual pain, looked up at him.
"Thank you," she said, and then after a small, complicated pause: "For killing my past self."
Everyone went quiet for a beat.
...This is a sentence that should never, under any circumstances, have needed to exist, Rhodes thought.
The things that happen to families, Scott thought.
They boarded the Benatar.
Twenty meters behind them, in the ravine, Gamora's eyelids moved.
The cold, wet sensation of Morag's perpetually damp ground against her cheek brought her up slowly, in stages.
"Ow — that hurts." She pushed herself upright, blinking. "Where—"
A groan from somewhere nearby.
"Ugh. My face feels like I got punched by a silverback gorilla with an agenda—"
Two unfocused sets of eyes turned toward each other across the ravine.
Star-Lord's eyes cleared. Then gradually brightened. Then his face did something that, given the state it had been in two minutes ago, was either impressive healing or complete psychological compartmentalization.
He smiled.
Gamora: Who is this absolute fool.
Star-Lord: Nature provides.
Main timeline. New Avengers Facility.
The quantum portal sat silent for exactly one minute.
Then it bloomed open, and ten figures flew out at ant-scale before expanding back to human size on the landing pad.
Ten went in. Ten came back — which, by the standards of this particular operation, was about as clean a result as anyone had dared to hope for.
Thor had not, at this stage in his post-snap grief, fully committed to the diet that would eventually result in what Rhodey had privately been calling "the cheese-and-beer situation." He and Rocket had navigated 2013 Asgard intact, extracted the Aether before Jane Foster's body could claim it, and — if Thor's expression on return was anything to go by — also found time to visit someone he'd needed to see.
He didn't explain. Nobody pressed.
The six Infinity Stones were on the table.
The Tesseract and Loki's Scepter. The Aether from Asgard. The Orb from Morag. The Time Stone from the Ancient One. The Soul Stone from Vormir.
The light in the room had changed — seven colors crossing and overlapping as six different kinds of ancient power radiated quietly from six different containers on one folding table.
For a long moment, everyone looked at them.
All six. Somewhere in the room, that thought moved through every person present in a slightly different way.
Iron Man and Banner got to work.
They used Thanos's original Gauntlet as a template, and spent three hours building a replica out of Tony's high-precision nanomaterial stockpile. Earth's version. It lacked the Uru metalwork and would not take the channeling load as gracefully, but it would hold the Stones.
Steve and Clint dismantled the Mind Stone from the Scepter housing — careful work, the kind that required patient hands and no sudden movements.
Thor wrapped his fingers around the Orb and applied direct pressure with the studied expression of someone who knew that "fine motor control" and "Asgardian strength" were, professionally speaking, difficult to combine. The housing cracked. The Power Stone came free — purple, humming, and deeply reluctant to be held by anyone whose hands weren't made of nanomaterial.
When it was the Tesseract's turn, Jordan picked it up.
He turned it over once in his hands — this blue cube that had been a MacGuffin for three separate wars — and then closed his fingers around it and applied the kind of pressure that didn't come from muscle.
The outer crystal shattered.
The Space Stone sat in his palm, cool and luminous, a vivid blue that was nothing like the Tesseract's glow. Smaller than the housing had implied. Precise.
The moment Jordan's skin made contact with it, something deep in his chest moved.
The Pseudo-Herrscher Core — the compressed fragment of void-attribute power that had been sitting dormant in his energy architecture since he'd first acquired it — registered the Space Stone with an immediacy that was almost a sound. Not a warning. A want. An ancient architectural hunger that said, quite clearly: absorb this and rebuild the throne. Or better. Go further.
Jordan let it speak.
Then set it down with the others, calmly.
You, he told the craving, without speaking, are not on the schedule for today.
It wasn't that the Infinity Stones weren't worth taking. They were, obviously, among the most significant power sources he'd come across. He fully intended to address that question before he left the MCU arc.
But the timeline for that was not now, and the Core could wait.
He turned to the Aether.
This one required a different approach — the Reality Stone had spent years as a free-floating liquid, dispersing through a host body's biology, and getting it back into gem form wasn't a matter of breaking a container. Jordan created a miniature gravity field between his palms, adjusted it to about the width of a fist, and let the Aether's particles — freed now from their containment vessel — respond to the compression.
They did. Reluctantly, then quickly, then all at once.
A gem with the deep red of arterial blood sat in the field when the particles had finished deciding they were a solid object again. The Reality Stone, properly speaking — the liquid form had always been a phase state, not the truth of what it was.
Jordan set it with the others.
Six stones. One gauntlet.
Tony's hands were steady as he installed them one by one. Each one clicking into its socket changed the light in the room. Power Stone — purple-violet. Space Stone — cold blue. Reality Stone — red. Soul Stone — orange. Time Stone — green. Mind Stone — yellow.
With the last one seated, the room was quiet.
The gauntlet sat on the table and threw its rainbow light across six people who had lost half of everything they knew.
It looked like something that should not have been made by human hands. The energy reading coming off it was something the room's instruments weren't rated to measure. One ordinary person wearing it could, in theory, address the largest question that had been hanging over this planet for weeks.
The price for an ordinary person would be death. Even for Thanos — the most durable demigod produced by Eternal genetics in the history of the species — using it had cost him everything he hadn't been able to hide behind the Gauntlet's housing.
The seven-colored light shifted and breathed.
Nobody reached for it immediately.
"I should do it."
Banner's voice was measured. Certain. He looked around the table, and when no one cut him off, he continued.
"The Stones give off mostly gamma radiation. The Hulk runs on gamma. Same source." He met the eyes he could find. "I think I can handle it."