"Banner — you can't access the Hulk right now. That's the problem."
Tony turned from the Gauntlet on the table and shook his head. "I built the gloves. Theoretically, I can layer nanostructure between the Stone energy and skin contact — use the metal as a buffer."
"No." Thor's answer was immediate, and his expression had the weight of someone quoting a library. "Asgardian records on the Infinity Gauntlet are clear. The power distribution affects the user at a level that no mortal metal can mediate. The Stones and the body conducting them are two fundamentally different categories of thing. The gap cannot be bridged by engineering."
Tony frowned. Thor stood his ground. Banner looked at his own hands.
"Alright, everyone stop."
Jordan raised one hand. The room went quiet.
"As the current strongest Avenger—"
Thor's expression changed. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked somewhere else.
Jordan glanced at him sideways.
You have something to say?
Thor examined a point on the wall with studied casualness.
My mouth's just a little dry. It's nothing.
Jordan didn't push it.
He was already leaning against the outer wall, a lit Stark Industries–branded cigar — Exclusive Reserve embossed in gold along the band — tucked between two fingers. His gaze drifted through the floor-to-ceiling window at the blue sky outside, expression carrying the exact quality of a man who is about to do something dangerous and has decided to treat it aesthetically.
"I just hope," he murmured, "I can hold on."
Everyone in the room experienced, briefly, the same double-vision.
On one level: the silhouette of a transmigrated superhero, 1.95 meters of Eternal-Kryptonian heritage and accumulated cosmic power, backlit by the afternoon sky, about to attempt the most consequential act in the history of the universe. Genuinely impressive.
On another level: the distinct spiritual imprint of an immortal who has absolutely been known to eat the entire refrigerator and then describe himself as having made a noble sacrifice.
The two images coexisted. No one could fully explain it.
With Steve's nod of support, the Gauntlet was passed to Jordan.
Immediately, Tony picked up his newly developed energy shield and moved to the front of the group, facing Jordan, arm raised.
If you hadn't seen how things had gotten to this point, you would have assumed the Avengers had assembled to take on Jordan as the final boss.
Jordan looked at the formation around him — eight people in full combat readiness, aimed at him, for his protection — and picked up the Gauntlet without comment.
Tony's nanotech registered Jordan's hand shape on contact, automatically extending and contouring until the fit was exact. The Gauntlet settled against his fingers like it had been made for him specifically.
The energy came immediately.
Seven-colored current — violent, massive, with the particular character of power that has been present since before the universe had a name for itself — poured up his arm in a cascading flood, particle effects trailing from his knuckles to his shoulder, aiming for skin, aiming for in.
The force-field suit rippled. The biomagnetic field responded.
Both engaged before the energy had covered half the distance to his skin.
The Honkai-derived architecture in Jordan's body registered the Infinity Stone energy and performed something that was not quite recognition and not quite greeting. I know what this is. Deep in his energy core, the Pseudo-Herrscher's framework — which had been waiting quietly since the Space Stone incident — simply opened, the way a channel opens for water it was built to carry.
Oh, the Core seemed to say, essentially. This one.
Jordan frowned slightly as the surge hit full force.
Honestly?
He gave it a genuine assessment. The power of six Infinity Stones, running through him simultaneously, the kind of energy that had turned the most durable Eternal in creation into scrap metal.
It's... manageable.
He let the passive defenses down and invited the energy in properly — not blocking it, not bracing against it, but actively guiding it the way you'd redirect a river rather than dam it. The infinite power became a current. The current found the channels waiting for it.
Light detonated from every surface in the conference room.
The heroes flinched. Some of them covered their eyes.
Jordan stood in the center of it, and what happened inside him in the next three seconds would have required a different kind of vocabulary to fully describe. His four-dimensional attributes — the numbers he'd long since stopped treating as a meaningful upper limit — hit their maximum scales, passed them, and the readout resolved into the only symbol that made sense for the destination.
∞.
For three seconds, the operating rules of the universe were laid out in front of him like a map someone had finally thought to unfold.
He saw the origin and the structure. He saw the river of time as something with visible banks. He saw the multiverse the way you see a city from a high enough altitude — all of it present, all of it distinct, all of it reachable in principle.
"This is," he murmured, mostly to himself, "genuinely remarkable."
Then he pulled his will back through the layers of his own expanded consciousness and brought the focus home.
Right. The task.
He had been about to snap his fingers the usual way. Then something occurred to him.
He thought about how Thanos had done it — on the bridge of Sanctuary I, gauntlet burning, expression closed. He thought about how Tony had done it — on a battlefield, one hand dragging across stone, everything he had left going into a single motion.
A flash of something, quick and certain.
No. Not like that.
There's a better way to do this.
Jordan looked up. His eyes had come back to their normal color. The light in the room had settled.
"Is everyone ready?"
The heroes exchanged looks. Steve gave the smallest nod. They all did.
"Jordan," Steve said, in a voice that settled the room, "you can begin."
Jordan looked at him. Something moved in his expression — a recognition, a warmth, something very slightly ridiculous and very slightly genuine at once.
He took a breath. A golden aura rose from his frame — not Infinity Stone energy, but his own, the Super Saiyan light that had been with him since before all of this — bright enough that Tony's shield dimmed slightly in comparison.
"Yes..."
Every hero in the room felt it.
"I...am..."
The light built.
"JOJO!!"
The snap.
A burst of radiance erupted from the point of contact between his fingers — not an explosion, not a shockwave, but a light that had no specific source and no defined edge, that expanded as if it intended to fill everything that had a concept of space and simply hadn't gotten around to it yet. It moved through walls. It moved through the building. It moved through the planet.
On the far edge of the solar system, a figure in red and blue arrowed toward Earth at a velocity that hadn't had a name attached to it yet — a golden energy trail behind her, the particular cosmic aura of someone who had been flying hard for three weeks and was ten minutes from home.
She stopped.
Looked up.
The sensation that washed past her was familiar in the way that power is familiar when you've spent enough time near its upper limits — infinite in quality, certain in execution. For a moment, through the lenses of her cosmic senses, it had the faint aesthetic impression of some enormously powerful entity dressed in a superhero's cape.
What in the universe just—
Then the white light caught her on its trailing edge, and Carol Danvers turned the last ten minutes of her trip into three.
The backlash arrived the way all consequential power does: afterward, once the thing it was attached to had already been used.
The Infinity energy in Jordan's system reversed course — not a clean withdrawal but a gnawing, the kind of cellular damage that had unmade Thanos's arm and killed Tony in the same moment. It pushed inward, looking for something to take, trying to recoup the cost it was owed.
It found the Energy Star Core.
The Core assessed the situation with the practical clarity of a system that had been built to absorb and process ambient cosmic energy, looked at this vast and disorganized river of infinite power suddenly flowing into it, and made a decision.
Energy Star Core, internally: Hey. You.
Infinite Power: ...
Energy Star Core: Welcome.
The backlash, essentially, became lunch.
Jordan opened his right hand. Closed it. Opened it again. The Gauntlet moved with him, still reading his hand shape, Stones still seated.
He rotated his wrist, checking the mechanics.
"I'm fine," he said, to the room full of people waiting for him to collapse. "Nothing's wrong."
"That's—" Tony's energy shield dropped. He stared at the Gauntlet, at Jordan's arm, at Jordan's face. "You're actually fine. How are you actually fine?" He caught himself. "I mean — that's great. So we did it? We—"
Steve's phone rang.
The room stopped. He pulled it out of his uniform in one motion, and the heroes closed around him. The name on the screen:
T'Challa — Black Panther.
Steve pressed answer. Turned the speaker volume up.
"Captain." T'Challa's voice came through — steady, measured, with the faint quality of someone who has just returned from an experience they don't yet have language for. "Something happened. I don't know what. One moment I was in Wakanda — the next, everything went dark and I fell." A pause. "When I woke up, I felt — I felt like I had only blinked, but everyone was gone." A shorter pause. "Captain? Are you there?"
Steve Rogers looked at the phone.
Around him, no one said anything.
Nobody needed to.
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