The shadow clone's barrage hadn't broken their concentration.
Their concentration had broken itself.
"Does this thing have any intervals?!" Thor's hammer came down on a Chidori Shuriken — the spinning disc wrapped in cone-shaped lightning — and the impact sent a full body's worth of chakra-laced electricity straight up the haft and into his arms.
His skeleton flickered.
This was not metaphorical. The lightning chakra was dense enough to illuminate bone through skin, every vertebra and rib briefly visible in silhouette before the light died and Thor's muscles resumed their argument about which direction to face.
He managed to drop the follow-up shuriken he'd been conjuring with his divine lightning before it discharged into his own hands. His arms twitched intermittently. His teeth chattered.
"Hehehehehe—" He shook himself back to function with the resilience of something that had survived several thousand years of poor decisions. "What kind of lightning does that?!"
Gamora didn't look up from the Adamantine Chain she was severing with a single stroke of the Tyrant's Blade. The vibranium edge met the golden links and the chain came apart with a sound like a cracked bell. She flicked it off her wrist.
"Would it be less absurd if a slab of rock fell out of the sky?"
Before anyone could answer, T'Challa Star-Lord swept past at low altitude, wrapped in three competing water dragons who had decided he was more interesting than the ground. His thrusters fired in three different directions trying to negotiate his way out. He was not successful.
The assembled heroes watched him go.
"..."
Strange Supreme, meanwhile, had stopped trying to fight the Rasengans directly. He'd opened a dimensional portal instead — not a transit gate but a drain, a swirling aperture of devouring force — and was feeding the stream of Super Giant Rasengans into it one after another. Hundreds of them. Each one carrying enough rotational chakra energy to crater a city block, and Strange was eating them the way a furnace eats wood.
The absorbed energy crystallized in the portal's throat.
Strange reached in with two fingers, pinched the crystal out, and ate it with the expression of a man taking medicine he didn't enjoy but understood was necessary.
The energy rippled through him. The dimensional debt came due immediately. He directed it upward, tracing three geometric sigils in rapid succession, and the price was paid to the beings of another dimension in a language older than the universe had words for.
The ground cracked.
Three heads rose through it.
The dragon that emerged was enormous — each head taller than a city building, scaled in deep red, radiating heat that warped the air above the mirror-Martian surface. A sulfurous smell preceded it. The three heads turned independently, surveying the sky with the composed interest of entities that had been summoned for a specific purpose and were looking forward to executing it.
They fixed on the shadow clone floating above them.
The expressions that crossed three inhuman faces were something close to satisfaction. Mouths opened.
Three pillars of fire converged on a single point.
The shadow clone's figure disappeared into the blaze — a rolling mass of white and orange that expanded outward and upward, bright enough to be visible from outside the atmosphere. The ninjutsu barrage from above cut off. The sudden silence after the sustained bombardment felt almost physical.
Killmonger landed in a smooth drift, vibranium claws trailing four parallel lines in the rock as he bled his momentum, and came to a stop with the easy composure of someone stepping out of a vehicle. He looked up at the column of fire.
"If he had that," he said, "why didn't he use it earlier?"
The fire raged. The three dragon heads turned toward each other with the faintly pleased demeanor of craftsmen reviewing completed work.
"Ninja Art — Sealing Technique: Fire Sealing Method!"
The voice came from inside the flames. Calm, unhurried, conversational.
The next moment, the fire column inverted.
Every observer — including the three dragon heads — watched as the rolling inferno stopped rolling and started contracting. The blaze bent inward at the edges, spiraling, forming a vast orange-red vortex that tightened and concentrated and flowed — up, toward the black-clad figure who had stepped back into visibility above it, one hand extended, palm open.
The fire poured into his hand and disappeared.
The three dragon heads stared at the sky where several tons of accumulated combustion had been a moment ago.
Where did the fire go.
"Okay, hold on." Thor pointed at Strange with his borrowed hammer, his electric-shock tremors mostly resolved into occasional finger twitches. "You're telling me he and you aren't running the same trick? Because you just ate all those spinning ball things — " he waved vaguely at the sky where the Rasengans had been — "and he just drank an entire dragon fire. That is obviously the same trick."
Strange looked at him with the patience of someone who had, over the course of this operation, developed very strong feelings about being compared to the shadow clone.
"They're completely different disciplines," he said. "Mine draws on dimensional debt. His is..." He paused. "I genuinely cannot tell what his is. It doesn't match any magical taxonomy I know."
Thor absorbed this. "So you're saying you don't know what he's doing."
"That's what I said, yes."
Thor nodded as if this answered something.
In the cracks of the multiverse, time had ceased to function as a concept.
The battle between Jordan and Uatu existed outside of before and after, duration measured only by the accumulation of impacts, redirects, spatial compressions, and the slow geology of damage building in the crystal walls around them. It felt like a moment and like several ages simultaneously, the way significant things tend to feel when they happen between significant people.
In the end, the outcome was straightforward.
Jordan, who had been in the Infinite realm longer and had fought its rules more thoroughly, had an edge in the specific geometry of their exchange. He fought with the economy of someone who had learned, over hundreds of chapters of continuous combat, that the most dangerous punch was the one that didn't announce itself. No special effect, no technique name, no charging period.
Just the accumulated weight of everything he was, delivered cleanly.
Uatu, ancient and powerful and genuinely formidable, found himself pressed against the world barrier with Jordan's forearm across his chest and the crystal edge of a parallel universe hard against his back.
He breathed carefully.
"You win, outsider." His voice was even. It cost him something to say it, but not as much as continued resistance would have cost. "Kill me or torture me, then. Get it over with."
Jordan looked at him.
"Who said anything about killing you?"
He stepped back and let the Watcher find his footing, crossing his arms with the easy manner of someone who had never seriously considered the alternative.
"I ended Infinity Ultron's multiverse massacre. I'm the hero of this story." A beat. "You could've guessed that."
Uatu stood up straight. The ancient light in his eyes reassembled itself into something resembling dignity. He looked at Jordan for a long moment with the expression of a being recalibrating a very long-held assumption.
You have the larger fist, he thought, and in the final analysis that means you have the argument.
There were worse foundations for an agreement.
Pragmatism was something Uatu understood. He had watched civilizations built on ideology collapse and civilizations built on adaptability endure. Jordan had demonstrated, twice over, that he was both more powerful than the interventionist hypothesis assumed and more aligned with the Watcher's actual goals than the original threat assessment had allowed.
Infinity Ultron's massacre had been stopped. The multiverse's structural damage was being repaired as they stood here. The Infinity Stones had been scattered, not weaponized.
The terms of peace wrote themselves.
"I will fulfill my function as an observer," Uatu said, with the formal weight of someone making a genuine commitment, "and refrain from further arbitrary intervention."
Jordan nodded once.
Marvel's locals, he thought, with something close to admiration. Reasoning doesn't work, so you demonstrate physics. Either way, as long as the logic holds up, they're reasonable.
The atmosphere in the cracks of the multiverse shifted — the specific quality of air in a place where a fight has just ended and everyone involved has decided it's over.
It didn't take long to find the right universe. Jordan put his palm against the world barrier, and the barrier offered exactly as much resistance as paper does to a finger. They stepped through together into the Mirror Dimension above mirror-Mars.
Inside, the situation had developed.
The shadow clone had maintained the barrage long enough for the Multiverse Guardians to reach the specific state of being technically operational but functionally exhausted — the sustained ninjutsu having done its work on focus and coordination if not on structural integrity. Strange Supreme remained the exception, his reserves apparently drawing on the same bottomless well of personal cost that had always defined him.
The clone looked up at the moment Jordan stepped through the dimensional rift.
"Oh, finally."
He snapped his fingers.
White smoke. A brief displacement of air. Nothing where the shadow clone had been.
The Multiverse Guardians, already braced for the next wave, processed the sudden absence. Weapons stayed raised. No one relaxed.
Then the dimensional rift appeared in the Martian sky.
Two figures stepped through: Jordan, scarlet cape settling around him as the portal closed, and Uatu the Watcher, deep blue robes catching the light of the Mirror Dimension's false sun — and Uatu's head, smooth and luminous and operating at full reflective capacity, concentrated that light and distributed it generously to everyone present.
Several people squinted.
Strange Supreme stared.
The three question marks that appeared above his expression were not literal but were nonetheless legible. His sling ring was still active. His mind was running rapid cross-references between the scenario he'd prepared for and the scenario currently in front of him.
Why, his expression said clearly, are you walking out with him?
The other heroes were arriving at similar conclusions through similar routes. Uatu had assembled them. Uatu had declared the outsider a destabilizing force requiring correction. Uatu was now standing next to said destabilizing force with the composed demeanor of someone who had just made an executive decision and was prepared to defend it.
"What," said Thor, with the directness of someone who had given up on subtext, "is happening."
Uatu cleared his throat.
What followed was several sentences of the kind of language that ancient cosmic entities deploy when they need to communicate a simple fact but are constitutionally incapable of stating it plainly — references to the turning of fate's mechanisms, the natural convergence of causal streams, the provisional nature of outcome assessments in a multiverse of infinite states.
It could be summarized as: we stopped fighting and made peace.
Eventually everyone arrived at that summary.
The weapons came down, one at a time.
Strange Supreme let out a breath that had apparently been waiting for some time. "Our goal was never to beat him," he said. "It was to end the threat to the multiverse. That's done." He looked at Jordan, then at Uatu, then back at the group. "This is the outcome we were working toward."
"The wizard is right," said Captain Carter, who had been waiting to say something reasonable since the fight started.
"So," said Party Thor, processing, "we just... don't fight?"
Several people nodded.
Thor nodded too, after a moment, with the look of a man who was genuinely relieved but wouldn't say so.
Killmonger did not nod.
He stood slightly apart from the group, arms crossed, eyes moving between Jordan and the Infinity Gauntlet and back to Jordan with the focused calculation of someone running numbers and not liking where they landed. He had watched the Gauntlet in operation. He had watched what Infinity Ultron had done with six Stones, and he had watched Jordan do considerably more with the same hardware. He had been built, in his own timeline, by a singular hunger for power that had taken him all the way to a throne — and the gap between what he currently held and what Jordan represented was a distance he found extremely interesting.
He was almost certainly the person in this space who had the least interest in the conversation ending here.
"Hold on." His voice cut through the general atmosphere of resolution. His eyes were still moving, calculating. "He damaged universes in that fight out there." A pause. "We're just letting that go?"