"There are three steps," Jordan said, holding up the Orb and doing a slow, demonstrative toss-and-catch.
Everyone looked at him.
"Step one: open the refrigerator." He caught it. "Step two: take out the elephant." Another toss. "Step three: close the refrigerator."
Rhodes stared at him for a long moment.
I feel like my intelligence has just been issued a formal complaint. He set his jaw. What do refrigerators and elephants have to do with any of this?
"Hey—" Scott's attention, characteristically, had already gone somewhere else. He was looking at Jordan's suit with an expression that bordered on reverent. "What's your suit made of? Can I order one?"
"Made it myself," Jordan said. "If I ever open a tailor shop, I'll make you one first."
Ant-Man appeared to briefly consider crying. "I'll patronize your store even if it bankrupts me. You have my word."
They moved through the ruins toward the valley where the Benatar was docked — the Orb secured, spirits reasonably high, Nebula still shaken but upright.
As they rounded a wide bend in the stone corridor, Natasha went quiet and turned her head.
"Do you hear—?" She paused. "Is that someone singing?"
"Yes," Rhodes said, without inflection. "'Come and Get Your Love.' He's doing it terribly."
Scott tilted his head. "I don't know, I thought it was kind of—"
Through a stretch of weathered rock wall ahead, a figure in a leather jacket gradually materialized out of the grey light — approaching at a complete saunter, gesturing with both hands in the precise manner of a man who had invented his own concert and was performing it for an audience of rocks. He was wearing the kind of headphones that came with Walkmans, and the cable trailed up from his jacket pocket to his ears in a way that suggested someone was playing this music for him specifically. Every few paces, he reached down and grabbed one of Morag's territorial rat-creatures — they kept approaching to hiss at him — and held it up in front of his mouth like a microphone for the big notes.
He was, unambiguously, in his own world.
Rhodes watched this for approximately three seconds.
The armor's thrusters activated.
He came in at a flat arc, low and fast, and the punch caught Star-Lord squarely in the face while he was mid-breath for a high note.
The man went horizontal, landed in a puddle, and was asleep before he stopped sliding.
Rhodes looked down at the scattered alien-rat microphone, then up at Nebula.
"That's the idiot your sister's in love with?"
Nebula looked at the man lying in the puddle for a long, expressionless moment.
"...Unfortunately."
The fear that had been clinging to her since the neural hack had, very slightly, been dislodged by the sheer absurdity of the last fifteen seconds.
They stepped around Star-Lord and continued toward the valley.
Even with Jordan's biomagnetic field keeping the worst of the neural intrusion at bay, Nebula walked with the careful posture of someone who was listening for something they hoped not to hear. When she stopped and looked up, everyone stopped with her.
"He's here."
It arrived before the sentence had finished.
A spatial fold opened above the valley — the enormous silhouette of a warship descending through a gravity-jump like something falling from a much more dangerous universe. The Sanctuary II. 2014 model. Thanos's flagship from the campaign that had taken him across this decade.
A thick beam of concentrated gravity lanced down from the hull, washing over the group and the Benatar with a sense of pressure that Scott, specifically, had never felt before in his life — the weight of a cosmic weapon calibrated to drag entire ships out of the sky.
"Hey—" Scott's voice came out smaller than he intended. He swallowed. "Our Superman. I think this is the moment. Whenever you're ready."
Jordan raised his head.
His eyes lit up gold.
Two beams — thick and blazing, the heat-register that sat two settings below the one labeled lethal — drove upward and met the gravity beam head-on. The collision happened in the middle-air above the valley, and for a moment it looked like a standoff: two energies pushing against each other, forming an unstable luminous sphere between them that was already expanding.
In the control room of Sanctuary II, Ebony Maw's expression broke open.
Someone is counteracting the gravitational beam bare-handed from the ground. His mind — the fastest-working mind in the Black Order — went through every scenario he'd prepared for in the last three centuries and found nothing that covered this. On pure reflex, he drove the ship's energy output to maximum.
Five seconds of stalemate.
The sphere between them was now throwing off arcing chains of discharge, each one capable of leveling a city block. Jordan was tracking it carefully. He recognized this configuration — two energies building toward a critical mass where a single destabilizing input would turn the whole sphere into a bomb large enough to sterilize Morag's surface.
He'd been watching the ship's output readout in his peripheral vision the whole time.
There it was: the needles at max. The ship had given everything it had.
Jordan had not.
Beneath eyes burning crimson-gold, something settled in his expression — calm and crooked and just slightly anticipatory, the smile of a man who has been waiting for his turn to go.
You're at your limit. I'm not.
He pressed two fingers — sword-hand, index and middle extended — against his right temple. A limiter released somewhere deep in his energy architecture. The Heat Ray jumped its scale — bypassing the standard Destruction Mode entirely, skipping straight to—
On the command throne of Sanctuary II, Thanos — who had been watching the readout feeds from a distance, perfectly calm, expecting the gravity beam to resolve matters within seconds — felt something shift in the numbers.
He was off the throne before Ebony Maw had time to process what was wrong.
"Move," he said, and there was no room in his voice for a second interpretation.
Gamora, stationed at his side, didn't need to hear an explanation. Her combat instincts were already translating the energy signatures coming through the ship's sensors into a run. She was one step behind Thanos heading for the exit.
The beam came through the hull a half-second later.
It entered through the floor. It passed through the throne. The steel — Uru-reinforced, engineered for battles that had destroyed moons — went from solid to ionized state in an interval too small to measure. The pulse continued upward through the ceiling without deviation, out through the hull, and into open space, taking nothing with it except light and heat and the fading signature of everything the metal had been.
The unstable energy sphere Jordan had been holding in place outside — the bomb waiting to happen — went into the open channel in the ship's belly.
Sanctuary II came apart from the inside.
The explosion was something the team in the valley would not have a word for immediately afterward. It occupied the sky above Morag in total. The shockwave arrived as a physical pressure against their chests. Fragments that had been warship components were now pieces of light that traced arcing trails through the overcast and burned out against the atmosphere.
F-boy appeared at Jordan's shoulder, staring upward.
F-boy: I'm full. A pause. Wait — no. I'm about to overflow.
The soul-particle bloom from the hundreds of thousands of Vanguard troops aboard was cascading across the sky in a spread that looked, from the ground, like the afterimage of something enormous having thought a thought.
(Side note: when Jordan had stopped by 1970s New York to pick up the Pym Particles earlier, Fantasy Moment's ten-minute clock had already run out. Which meant F-boy had since reactivated it — ten-times-stat-buff running across the current resource bloom — and was now harvesting on an industrial scale. The Fate Draw counter was somewhere above +10086 and still climbing. The deck problem, Jordan acknowledged internally, was going to be immense.)
On the ground, Rhodes had gone very quiet. He was still looking up.
"So," he said, finally, to no one in particular. "Everything he said was true."
Scott wiped a considerable amount of nervous sweat from his forehead.
"Yeah," he said. "So there really are superheroes in the world."
Jordan wasn't looking at the fireworks.
His eyes had already found the two figures who had cleared the ship before it went up.
Thanos — this version, the third one he'd dealt with since arriving in the MCU arc, the 2014 model who still had his army and had never held the Gauntlet — had punched through the hull with his bare hands in the seconds Jordan's beam had given him and used brute force to carve a survival path out of the explosion. He was in open air now, a purple silhouette against the burning sky.
Gamora was behind him. She'd made it out too.
And somewhere below — not in Jordan's eyeline, but in his awareness — 2014 Nebula was accounting for the other side of that coin.
She had not yet betrayed her father. She never would — she had not lived long enough to face that choice. In the wake of what Ebony Maw had pulled from the neural link, Thanos had replaced her with the version from nine years forward. When 2023 Nebula and 2014 Nebula had finally come face to face in the chaos following the ship's destruction, only one of them had walked away.
For the last time, the younger Nebula had lost to her sister.
It had cost her everything she had left to lose.