At the peak of his power, the cosmic tyrant drove his divine fury forward, an armored heel whistling toward Jordan's skull—
—and punched through afterimage.
For all his mass, Thanos moved like something half his size had any right to move. A lifetime at the apex of the universal food chain had taught him more combat instinct than ten thousand worlds could produce, and when the first strike bit empty space, the Tyrant's Blade was already in his hands, sweeping in a ferocious horizontal arc designed to catch whatever his enemy tried next.
He had, after all, been born at the top. The frame, the strength, the defenses—built to stare the strongest beings in creation in the eye and find them wanting. In any fair universe, a duel like this placed him in an unassailable position by default.
Unfortunately, the blond-haired young man floating across from him was not operating in a fair universe.
Jordan slipped the sword arc the way someone might step around a door swung too wide. One moment he was there; the next he was inside Thanos's guard, directly in front of that purple, ridged face, palm traveling in a wide and almost lazy curve.
Ordinary Series—
"Normal Slap."
One thousand kilograms of armored Eternal spun end-over-end through vacuum like a mishit softball.
"You never heard the saying?" Jordan asked mildly, shaking out his hand as Thanos's body corkscrewed away from him across the void. "Don't hit a guy in the face. Some nerve, slapping me with a jaw like that."
Thanos, still chewing on the ringing in his teeth, said nothing at all.
Because cosmic energy had already begun to blaze between his palms.
Right. Jordan watched the purple-gold lightning coil up the Mad Titan's arms and cupped his hands into a charging stance the way only the Celestial-seeded bloodline could. Eternals came with the full kit. The Eternal Titan (SSR) card sitting in his deck — trophy from the other Thanos — was proof enough: planet-cracking energy manipulation was baked in at the DNA level.
Canon-Thanos had just never bothered to use it against the Avengers. Not couldn't — couldn't be bothered. The script had him dragging his nails across Earth's defenders like a cat toying with mice, holding back everything Eternal about himself so Captain Marvel could saunter in from her cosmic vacation in time for the third act. If the Black Order hadn't been shaved down to nothing before the main event, Earth would have been slag inside an hour.
But this Thanos, pre-snap and in a branching timeline nobody was going to have to clean up afterward — this one wasn't on a director's leash.
The energy between his palms swelled to planet-killing scale. A purple-gold supernova primed between two armored gauntlets, arms-length lightning writing a farewell note for Jordan's atoms.
A slow, crooked smile touched Jordan's lips.
Oh. Colored lights first, huh?
Wait — no. Special effects first.
[Spider Time.]
[Fixed Time Control — 128x Acceleration.]
Both ignited together. Reality committed to a thick amber slowness, a pseudo-time-stop where he could trace each individual arc of lightning crawling across Thanos's fingers.
Inside that frozen space, Jordan's chakra core detonated.
Azure chakra flooded the meridians — not gently, not carefully, but in torrents — and seven interior nodes in his body groaned open in sequence under pure willed pressure. Slowly, from the outside. From his perspective, a single pulled breath.
"Open—"
"Gate of Life."
"—through to—"
"Gate of Wonder."
Every meteorite fragment within a hundred kilometers pulverized on the spot. Trillions of tons of sky-blue chakra erupted outward in a light-speed pulse, a supernova bloom painting the black void in blazing azure, and by whatever law governs the great truths of shōnen —
— the guy who powers up first wins.
Thanos's cosmic beam was mid-fire. It met the chakra pulse head-on and scattered across the vacuum like seafoam against a breakwater, dispersed before it could cover even a fraction of the distance between them.
And Jordan's hair — tall, blond, proudly shōnen-appropriate — took on a vivid sky-blue cast, as if something much older and considerably stranger had stepped into his body and decided to stick around a while.
Super Saiyan One at full power, plus seven of the Eight Gates open. What do you get?
Super Saiyan Blue, obviously.
...kidding.
The Blue Beast of Z-City Police Department.
The transformation stopped Thanos cold. He didn't understand what "Super Blue" was supposed to be. He did, however, understand what it meant: the young Eternal across from him had broken through some fundamental physical ceiling, and the pressure now rolling off him was the pressure of an ancient star-beast out of the deep cosmos — something even Titans had once prayed wouldn't look their way.
A blood-red kanji — 死, death — rose above the Mad Titan's head like a seal.
Thanos's expression changed. He hauled the Tyrant's Blade up to block—
An indestructible fist sheared through it.
A streak of sky-blue chakra collapsed the distance between them to zero. Thanos's guard shattered under a single punch, and before he could recover, Jordan exhaled — a slow white plume of absolute-zero breath from the Frost Giant's Constitution card, frost creeping across every inch of exposed skin, nearly locking the unprepared cosmic emperor solid on the spot.
"Yare yare," Jordan muttered, reaching up to adjust the brim of a baseball cap that wasn't actually there. The Araki lines passed down across every generation of the Jo family stood out along the sharp planes of his face like they'd been drawn on in ink. "Now it's..."
"...my turn."
Ordinary Series—
"Continuous Normal Punches — Eighty God-Tier Consecutive Strikes."
ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA—
Eighty punches a second. On paper, a manageable number. In execution, the dense blue shadow-field that engulfed the purple-skinned Titan wasn't eighty punches at all — it was a solid wall of impact, continuous and layered, a storm cloud of fists that swallowed the Mad Titan whole.
The golden imperial armor lasted less than a second before Celestial-grade metal sheared apart and drifted away as glittering scrap. Then the supposedly indestructible Titan Body began caving inward. Super Saiyan chakra at star-busting temperature drove into his flesh like the universe's angriest pile driver, crushing muscle, pulping bone, and scouring away the endless life-force woven into every individual cell — the cosmic engineering that had been designed to carry him to the death of the universe itself.
ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA—
"—and three pages of Ora have been respectfully omitted here for the reader's convenience—"
Jordan's body drew taut at the apex of the barrage, a fully-drawn bow of glowing blue muscle and intent, and released the final strike.
One punch.
A mashed-purple-potato of a projectile tore across hundreds of kilometers of vacuum before it collided with an asteroid the size of a small moon, pulverizing its surface mountains on impact and embedding the Mad Titan halfway into its mantle.
"...Khh."
A low cough rattled out from the center of the crater. Purple blood spilled slowly from Thanos's mouth, weightless globules drifting around his ruined face like clots of ink suspended in water.
Every bone broken. Every organ shredded. The cosmic tyrant who had looked the universe in the eye and demanded half of it now guttered in the void like a candle in a draft, courtesy of one obscenely handsome blue-haired blond.
And in the dim, swimming edges of his vision — he saw her.
Death.
The hood. The hand. The perfect, beautiful silhouette of the entity who had haunted his dreams since he was a child on Titan. His one great love, come at last to meet him on the far shore—
— and then she flickered.
Blurred.
Reshaped herself into the smirking face of a sky-blue-haired young man in a Z-City police jacket, hands tucked casually into his pockets.
In an MCU where the multiverse hasn't cracked open yet, that expression seemed to say, Lady Death isn't taking appointments. You'll have to make do with me.
The Mad Titan's facade, worn thin across a thousand conquests, cracked straight down the middle. No sacred consort waiting on the other side. Just this shameless, preening brat with a jawline designed in a studio.
"Terrifying. His injuries are actually starting to heal. He's basically a monster."
You — Thanos would have snarled, if he'd had the breath — you are the one who did this to me.
He had never, in a millions-year lifespan, met someone quite so shameless about it.
Super Healing was already surging back from the cellular level, closing the hairline fractures the barrage had written into Jordan's own bones.
And out of the void — as if the weave of space had remembered a shape it hadn't used in a long time — Vajra chains bloomed, diamond-bright and indestructible, and drove themselves through the gaping wounds in Thanos's ruined body. They coiled deep, sank their links into meat and bone, and clamped down on the cosmic life-force that was trying, with the stubborn Celestial engineering of a hundred billion years, to rise back up and carry him another round.
The injured emperor, pinned to a meteorite with his own blood floating around him like a dim red halo, threw his head back.
And, in what was left of his voice, began to roar.