Both Jordan and Uatu turned to look at him at the same time.
Killmonger didn't move. His expression stayed exactly where he'd placed it — composed, controlled, the face of a man who had spent years operating in environments where showing the wrong thing at the wrong moment got you killed. He had stood in throne rooms and boardrooms and dark corners of palaces where every other person in the room was trying to read him, and none of them had managed it.
But the feeling that crawled up his spine in this moment was unlike anything those rooms had produced.
This was what it felt like to be standing at the river's edge when both the crocodile in the water and the cheetah in the grass decided to look up at the same time.
They're not the same order of being I am, he thought, with the flat clarity of a man doing triage. They're not even close.
He knew it the way a skilled hunter knows it upon encountering an apex predator — not fear exactly, but a precise, useful awareness of relative capability. In his universe, he had learned this skill from Tony Stark, who had taught him everything worth knowing about operating in spaces where everyone around you was more powerful than they appeared. He had repaid Tony for those lessons by being the one thing Tony hadn't seen coming, right up until the end.
Manipulated a genius on his deathbed, Killmonger thought. These two are powerful, but power isn't the same as perception.
He steadied himself on that foundation.
I won't lose this one either.
Jordan and Uatu exchanged a glance — brief, wordless, the shorthand of two beings who had just finished trying to kill each other and arrived at a mutual understanding. For people who could read intention from across a dimensional gap, Killmonger's ambition was radiating off him like a heat signature. The undisguised greed of it was, from their vantage point, almost charming.
"You or me?" Jordan said.
Uatu gestured graciously. He had, he noted, a standing policy against arbitrary intervention in the affairs of others.
Jordan nodded, uncrossed his arms, and walked forward with his hands settled behind his back and an expression of mild, warm interest on his face. The scarlet cape moved around his boots with each step.
Killmonger's heartbeat, which had been performing admirably under the circumstances, skipped once.
Jordan stopped in front of him. One-ninety-five of relaxed posture, looking down the way tall people do when they've stopped thinking about it.
"I have to ask," Jordan said pleasantly. "Are you genuinely concerned about the lives lost across the multiverse? Is that what's happening here?"
Killmonger met his eyes. "Everything we've done here has been for those innocent lives. That's the only thing that matters."
"Right." Jordan tilted his head. "And what's the real thought underneath that?"
Something happened.
Killmonger didn't experience it as an intrusion — there was no sensation of entry, no foreign presence rearranging his defenses. One moment he was preparing his next measured answer, and the next, the words were already leaving his mouth, bypassing every filter he'd spent a lifetime constructing.
"The Gauntlet. Obviously. Once I have it, I'll use that power to climb to the absolute top — expose every hypocrite who's ever hidden behind authority, make the oppressors answer for what they've done, and force this rigged world to acknowledge what it owes." His jaw was still moving. "That's what I actually want."
Jordan clapped twice, slowly.
"There it is."
The rest of the Multiverse Guardians absorbed this.
Killmonger became aware, in the silence that followed, that his fist had been clenched tight and was now slowly releasing. He looked at the people around him. He looked at his own hands.
What did I just say.
"That was fairly direct," Captain Carter said carefully, her shield rising on instinct. "Are you aware of what you just—"
"Your thoughts are genuinely dangerous," Strange Supreme said, not unkindly, in the tone of someone filing a formal observation.
"Look, I can tell something's off here, and I usually can't tell." Thor raised his hand. "That's basically my entire assessment. Also — and I realize this isn't the moment — but you remind me strongly of my brother. Half-brother. Loki. Frost giant, technically, though he'd hate me for saying it, he went through a whole thing—"
"Thor." Gamora didn't look away from Killmonger. Her hand had found the Tyrant's Blade. "We're not on the same side as him."
Killmonger's pupils contracted.
The architecture of what had just happened assembled itself in his mind with unpleasant clarity. His thoughts had been extracted and spoken without his permission, his defenses circumvented without him feeling the circumvention. He had walked into the most sophisticated information-extraction operation he'd ever encountered and hadn't recognized it as an operation until it was finished.
"My mind was controlled." He kept his voice level. "Those weren't my actual—"
"Uatu." Jordan had already turned away, addressing the Watcher with the easy manner of someone tabling a side conversation. "What's the protocol for this?"
This was, Killmonger understood in a flash of absolute clarity, his opening.
Jordan's back was to him. The Infinity Gauntlet was on his right hand. The distance was two steps and a lunge, and Killmonger had spent his entire life turning two steps and a lunge into outcomes.
His claws deployed.
He moved.
Jordan's right arm came off at the elbow.
The Gauntlet was in Killmonger's hands before the arm hit the ground. He drove his fingers into the nanometal housing and felt it contract — the intelligent metal recognizing a wearer, reshaping itself to fit, sealing against his fingers and palm with mechanical precision. The power came up through the contact points like a current finding ground.
Oh.
Seven-colored light detonated behind his eyes. This was nothing like what he'd imagined power to feel like. This was larger than imagination. This was larger than him — the sensation of holding a lever connected to the physical constants of the universe, every law of reality suddenly negotiable, every limit suddenly a suggestion. He could feel galaxies. He could feel time as a texture.
His arms went up. He couldn't help it.
"Intoxicating—"
The concussive force of both of Jordan's palms arriving simultaneously at his ears was, in terms of pressure differentials, not something his skull had been designed for.
The sound it produced was not something that had a good description.
Killmonger's awareness of the universe, recently so vast, contracted to a very small bright point and then went sideways. The ground arrived. He registered, distantly, warmth spreading from both ears, the specific metallic taste at the back of his throat that indicated something had gone badly wrong with several blood vessels.
The Gauntlet on his hand flared red.
Then it was gone.
The heroes stood in the silence that followed, looking at the figure crumpled on the mirror-Martian surface and the entirely intact Jordan standing over him — both hands present, both arms functional, the Infinity Gauntlet secure on his right hand and the Reality Stone glowing faintly in its socket.
Nothing that had happened since Killmonger grabbed the arm had been real.
The Reality Stone had authored every moment of it: the arm tearing free, the Gauntlet transferring, the seven-colored power surge, the speech. A pocket performance staged in the space between Killmonger's decision and the consequence of that decision. In the actual universe, the Gauntlet had never left Jordan's hand, and the infinite power backlash of an unprepared wearer contacting six live Stones would have dissolved Killmonger's life force before he'd finished the first word of his monologue.
Jordan had given him the experience of the alternative instead.
The Twin Peaks technique, he thought, rubbing his palms together once. Homelander's gift. Works on the ears every time.
The assembled heroes looked at what was on the ground. The scene was not clean.
"Is there..." Captain Carter swallowed. "Is there a problem? He seems—"
"He's fine. Relatively." Jordan looked around at the expressions surrounding him, mildly puzzled by the horror register most of them had settled into, and remembered something. "Also — before anyone says anything — this specific individual murdered Tony Stark in his native universe. Uatu has the documentation."
Uatu, who had been standing at a considered distance from the entire proceedings, made the expression of a very old being who had just been cited as a character reference.
"...That is accurate," he said. "He was, by any fair assessment, a bad actor."
A perceptible shift ran through the group.
Oh.
Well then.
Jordan crouched down and pressed two fingers to Killmonger's temple.
Infinite power moved through the contact point — not destructive, not corrective, but containing. The mind behind those eyes was still there: every ambition, every wound, every carefully cultivated grievance. Jordan left all of it intact. He simply built walls around it. The kind of walls that didn't come down.
Death was, in this specific instance, not the point.
Strange Supreme stepped forward before Jordan stood up. "Before you're done — I want to request something." His voice had the careful quality of someone proposing an idea they weren't sure would be accepted. "Use the infinite power to create a space for him. Small. Private. Something he can't leave."
Jordan looked at him.
"A universe," Strange said. "He doesn't need much room. The size of an egg would do."
A pause for consideration. Then Jordan nodded, and the Reality Stone answered the intention — a small, warm, perfectly enclosed space, complete in itself, containing nothing except unlimited time and the dreamer sleeping at its center. Strange cupped it carefully in both hands when it finished forming, solid as glass and lighter than it looked, and tucked it somewhere on his person with the care of someone storing something that required careful handling indefinitely.
Killmonger, inside, would have everything he'd ever wanted to revenge himself on and all the time in the world to do it, and none of it would be real, and he would eventually stop being able to tell the difference.
Jordan straightened up and dusted off his hands. He looked at the assembled Multiverse Guardians — at Strange Supreme, who had circles under his eyes that probably predated this century; at Party Thor, who was holding his borrowed hammer and processing the last ten minutes with visible effort; at Gamora of the Destroyer, who had sheathed the Tyrant's Blade and whose expression communicated a professional acknowledgment that the situation had resolved; at T'Challa Star-Lord and Captain Carter, both of whom were looking at the egg-universe in Strange's hands with the particular attention of people who had just learned something new about what power could do.
"We're settled, then." Jordan smiled — the warm, genuine variety, uncomplicated. He raised one hand. "We'll see each other again sometime."
The Multiverse Guardians, individually and collectively, produced expressions that said the same thing without anyone needing to say it aloud.
Let's hope not.
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