The six stones were empty.
Tony stared at them. Then he stood, the helmet dissolving away from his face, and looked at Thanos with the specific expression of a man whose last remaining option has just been removed.
"Tell me." His voice had gone very quiet, which was worse than shouting. "Where did you put them."
Thanos, suspended in the golden chakra chains with his remaining arm pinned, his face bearing the evidence of the previous few minutes in considerable detail, shook his head.
"There's nothing to find." He didn't sound defeated. That was the part that landed wrong. Despite the chains, despite the severed arm, despite the four separate craters his face had contributed to the local geography, he carried himself with the settled composure of a man who has completed something. "Not a single stone remains."
"That's impossible—"
"Is it?" Thanos looked at Tony with something almost like patience. "I used the power of the stones to destroy them. Utterly." A pause. "Why do you think you found me so easily? Why do you think I fell so quickly?"
He tilted his head, displaying the deep burn channels across the left side of his face and down his arm—not battle damage. Something far more comprehensive than battle damage.
"There are no more Infinity Stones in this universe."
The silence that followed was the kind that fills a space completely.
The Avengers had come down from the Benatar in time to hear it. Rocket Raccoon, last off the ship, went very still on the ramp. His ears flattened. "No. No, no, no—this is—"
Nebula said nothing. The color had gone from her face.
Rhodes broke first. "He's lying. He hid them somewhere on the planet." He was already scanning the ruined farmland, the demolished cottage, the churned earth of the surrounding mountains. "We find them. We take this place apart stone by stone if we have to."
Several people looked at that possibility. Started to believe it.
Thanos almost smiled.
Nebula's voice cut across the room before he could speak. "My father," she said, and the word carried the weight of everything it had cost her to say it, "is capable of many things." She set her pistol down, slowly, deliberately. "Lying is not one of them."
The last light went out of the room.
"You know me best of all, daughter." Thanos's voice was soft. The chains held him in a spread position, arms and legs wide, but he looked—in this moment, inexplicably—like someone at ease. Like someone who has done the thing they meant to do and is content to let the rest play out. "Whatever you do now, the reality is fixed. The work is finished."
He raised the corners of his mouth.
"Because I am inevitable."
Thunder cracked.
The axe moved with the same clean arc as Wakanda—same decisive geometry, no hesitation—except this time there was no arm to intercept it, no gauntlet, no stones. Just Stormbreaker and a target.
Thanos's head hit the ground. His eyes stayed open.
Jordan released the chakra chains. The golden light dispersed.
Everyone stared at Thor.
Thor looked at the axe in his hand, then at the ground. He breathed in. He breathed out.
Jordan shrugged. "He said he'd aim for the head this time."
There is a specific emotional state that results from building toward a goal through grief and fury and twelve days of crisis management, crossing four thousand light-years to reach it, and arriving to find the goal already gone. It does not have a clean English word. The Avengers experienced it collectively, standing in a demolished farm on a planet that smelled of vegetables and ozone and recent violence.
They had come here full of something. They stood here with nothing to spend it on.
Jordan, meanwhile, had quietly received a notification.
[Fantasy Card: Eternal Titan] Type: Ability Card • Rarity: SSR Source: Thanos, genetically mutated Eternal — Marvel Universe
Eternal Divine Power: Strength, stamina, regenerative capacity, and agility transcending ordinary Eternals. Effectively unmatched at baseline among physical beings in the universe.Titan's Constitution: Body resistant to cold, heat, electricity, radiation, toxins, disease, and aging. Can directly handle a single Infinity Stone with bare hands—an act that would kill an ordinary person.Cosmic Energy: Absorbs cosmic radiation, transforms and stores it internally; capable of releasing plasma and cosmic energy shockwaves from eyes and hands.Heart of the Titan: Near-invincible psychic defense. Immune to most mental attacks. Capable of psychic projection, telepathy, and mental domination.Eternal Knowledge: Innate extraordinary intelligence encompassing all Eternal divine philosophy; intuitive mastery of ancient cosmic artifacts.
Jordan absorbed it immediately.
The card dissolved into his energy core—and the Eternal Power within it surged outward immediately, the kind of energy that wanted to rewrite things at the cellular level, transform the recipient into a new Eternal Titan from the genetic architecture upward.
It met Jordan's existing energy core.
And was consumed.
The transformation failed in the sense that nothing visibly changed. It succeeded in the sense that the energy was real and went somewhere—folded into the blue, processed and integrated, the Eternal Power stripped of its agenda and added to the reservoir. His physique, already several tiers beyond baseline human, climbed another step. His psychic defenses, already considerable, became something meaningfully harder to find edges on. The influx of Eternal Knowledge hit his cognitive architecture and spread outward like a root system finding water—not new intelligence, exactly, but a deeper and cleaner integration of what was already there.
Super-brain configuration, Jordan noted internally, with some satisfaction. Optional but essential.
He filed the development away, turned his attention back to the assembled heroes, and clapped his hands once.
The sound carried.
"Everyone." He waited until faces turned. "Things haven't gotten worse yet. Have they?"
Thor, who had been moving quietly toward the ship—the specific movement of a person seeking to be alone with something they can't share yet—stopped walking. He turned around. His eyes found Jordan's.
The anger in them was barely contained. But it was still contained.
"Is this not already the worst it can get?"
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