Inside Avengers Tower, Tony landed on the upper platform and immediately looked toward the black sphere hanging above the structure.
It had grown larger than before. Streams of electricity constantly flowed around it while the air itself seemed distorted by the sheer amount of energy being produced.
"Sir," Jarvis said, "the individual impersonating you is currently on the lowest level of the tower. However, I strongly advise against attempting to reach that location."
Several warning screens appeared across Tony's helmet.
"The arc reactor is completely out of control. The energy output has ionized the entire surrounding area — if you enter the reactor chamber, your armor and body will be vaporized within seconds."
"Then shut the reactor down remotely."
After Loki's attack, Tony had built numerous emergency safeguards into the tower specifically for situations like this. Someone seizing control of the reactor should have triggered an automatic shutdown.
"Not possible, sir. All failsafe systems have been disabled and every automatic shutdown procedure has failed."
"The only remaining option is a manual shutdown from inside the reactor chamber, which I would not recommend."
Tony looked back at the sphere. "Yeah, that area is completely out of hope."
Walking into a region capable of turning him into plasma wasn't high on his list of good ideas.
Before he could think of another solution, a new holographic window appeared.
"Sir, I think I found something."
The screen expanded to reveal several containment pods hidden somewhere inside the tower. Inside them were four familiar faces. Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Wanda Maximoff, Steve Rogers.
The variants from the other universe.
"Wait, these guys are still here?" A week ago the variant Tony had specifically told him the portal back to their world was ready. Everything should have been finished.
So what the hell were they still doing inside containment pods?
"Perhaps they never got the opportunity to leave, sir."
Tony's expression darkened. If the portal was completed and the variants were still trapped, then whoever had been impersonating him never intended to send them home.
"Track their exact position. And tell me everything you know about what's happening on the bottom level."
"Immediately, sir."
As information spread across his HUD, Tony had a feeling this was considerably worse than simple Skrull infiltration.
Then someone appeared behind him. Tony smiled inside his helmet.
"Starting to wonder what was taking you so long," he said, turning toward Luke.
"I was handling another massive problem today." Luke glanced upward at the sphere. "This universe is really unlucky."
The sphere had already begun pulling everything toward it — streetlights torn from foundations, cars sliding across roads, civilians flooding the streets below in a panic.
It wasn't a true black hole yet. A genuine singularity would have already erased the city.
This behaved closer to a naked singularity, a point of infinite density without an event horizon, its gravitational effects bleeding outward unpredictably rather than collapsing inward.
Luke snapped his fingers.
The sphere vanished. Roads straightened, structures repaired, and the fleeing civilians found themselves standing in perfectly ordinary streets.
"What exactly did you do?" Tony asked.
"Adjusted the past so the event never occurred. No singularity means no spacetime curvature, no distortion, no casualties. Causality corrected itself."
The frustrating part was that it was completely logical.
General relativity described gravity as the curvature of spacetime produced by mass and energy — remove the source and the curvature flattens to baseline, every downstream effect unraveling with it.
Rewrite a cause along a worldline and the effects restructure accordingly. The science wasn't wrong. What was deeply wrong was that Luke had executed it by snapping his fingers.
"So you can just alter the past now?"
At this point, Tony could honestly consider Luke a god. The people who called themselves gods mostly flew around throwing lightning, but someone who could alter the past was a genuine god in his eyes.
"Yeah, though compared to everything else I can do, it's nothing major," Luke said, cracking his knuckles. "What do you say we go beat the hell out of this Skrull?"
Tony grinned. "Been waiting for someone to say that."
***
On the lowest level of the tower, the Skrull wearing Tony's face stared at the reactor controls in confusion.
Seconds ago the arc reactor had been accelerating toward catastrophic failure — output climbing exponentially, containment fields collapsing under thermal and electromagnetic load, the feedback loop building toward a chain reaction that would have converted several city blocks into superheated plasma.
Now every reading was stable, warnings gone, the data itself claiming the crisis had never occurred.
Which, technically, it hadn't.
He was still processing that when a voice came from behind him.
"It's time you stopped wearing my face."
The Skrull turned around.
Tony stood near the entrance with Luke beside him, expression flat and unreadable — no anger, no excitement, nothing.
"Yeah," Luke said calmly. "You pissed off the wrong guys."
*****
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