Jordan raised two fingers in a small salute, activated the Space Stone, and stepped backward through the deep-blue dimensional rift. The portal sealed behind him without ceremony.
Thor kept waving for a moment after the light faded.
Then he stopped.
He looked down at his empty hands. He looked at the space where Jordan had been standing. He looked at the borrowed hammer — Strange Supreme's magically-constructed substitute — which was no longer there either, recalled by its creator the moment the chapter of this particular fight ended.
"...Did he give me back my Mjolnir?"
The assembled Multiverse Guardians were silent.
Uatu the Watcher, who had the most comprehensive knowledge of any being present regarding how the last several hours had unfolded, developed a sudden and sincere interest in the middle distance. If someone were to ask him about specific details regarding Mjolnir's current whereabouts, he would prefer, as a matter of principle, not to be identified as a witness.
On Earth, the battle had not improved.
The giant zombie robots — the ones assembled from Infinity Ultron's fallen drone mass, each aggregate the size of a skyscraper, each one apparently incapable of staying destroyed — were still going. Wong had been fighting them for what felt like the entire age of the universe, which was beginning to affect his opinion of both the robots and the day generally.
How, he thought, parrying a chassis-beam the size of a city bus with a ring of Raggadorr, are these things still alive?
The pattern was consistent and maddening: the sorcerers would dismantle a giant. The pieces would scatter across the ground. Then the pieces would find each other again, absorbing whatever machinery was nearest, and the giant would reassemble itself slightly larger than before. They had done this eight times with the same robot.
Wong wiped sweat from his forehead and did not permit himself to say what he was thinking.
Then, without warning, every giant robot in the engagement zone froze.
The red light behind their eyes went out simultaneously, like a power grid dropping across a city. The silence was immediate and complete. Then the enormous bodies came apart — not violently, not explosively, just apart, every connection between every component releasing at once — and the pieces cascaded to the ground in dozens of slow avalanches that piled into mechanical mountains across the landscape.
The battle was over.
The sorcerers looked around at the sudden stillness. Then they looked at the person standing at the center of their formation.
"The Sorcerer Supreme did it!" someone shouted.
The declaration had the quality of a spark in dry kindling.
"The Sorcerer Supreme — boundless power! Invincible in every engagement!"
" Sorcerer Supreme! Sorcerer Supreme!"
Wong found himself lifted — not literally, but swept inward by a tide of enthusiastic sorcerers who had decided that the center of the celebration was wherever he was standing. He was rotated to face several different directions by people shaking his hand. Someone attempted to drape a scarf on him. He bore it with the dignity of a man who had not, in fact, done the thing he was being credited for, but who recognized that explaining this would be both complicated and unpopular.
From across the field, the ordinary Avengers and warriors who had spent the last however-long fighting an apparently unkillable enemy looked over at the stocky, unassuming figure surrounded by cheering sorcerers and arrived at the same conclusion everyone else had.
That's the one who ended it. The Sorcerer Supreme.
Doctor Strange, who was standing at a distance that he was beginning to wish was greater, watched this unfold. He had, in the critical window before the giants were destroyed, maintained the group protective spell — a layered array of golden law-magic distributed across every combatant in the field, absorbing kinetic damage, deflecting energy discharge, quietly preventing the casualty count from becoming catastrophic. He had held that array together through three giant robot attacks and considerable personal strain.
He was aware that this contribution was not currently being attributed to him.
"Was that the Sorcerer Supreme who just — the protective array—"
" Sorcerer Supreme! Amazing!"
" Sorcerer Supreme! Unstoppable!!"
The soldier who had made the first attribution was now leading a full chant. Strange covered the upper half of his face with one hand and counted to five.
The world, he thought, has stopped making any sense.
The dimensional rift opened at the field's edge, and Jordan stepped through into the smell of hot metal and ozone and churned earth.
He took in the scene: Wong at the center of an enthusiastic scrum, Strange off to the side with the expression of a man practicing acceptance, mechanical mountains scattered across the landscape, everyone still alive.
His shadow clone's work, evidently. The ninjutsu barrage had done what it was designed to do — disrupted the drones' communication architecture, severed the distributed intelligence coordinating the aggregates' reassembly, shut the whole operation down remotely once Jordan himself reclaimed the body.
His gaze settled on Wong, who was being steered in another direction by three different people's enthusiasm.
New Avengers Compound
Jordan spread his right hand. The Reality Stone answered — a wave of restructuring force rolling across the mountainside, and the debris covering every surface simply ceased to be debris. Drone components, shattered masonry, the accumulated wreckage of an extended siege: swept away cleanly, as if the battle had been an untidy arrangement that someone had finally gotten around to sorting.
Then the Time Stone's green light rose from his left hand. He directed it downward, into the land itself, and the landscape remembered. Craters filled. Scarred earth re-knit. The forests that Infinity Ultron's drones had churned through over however many hours of engagement walked themselves backward through their own damage, returning to the arrangement they'd held before any of this started. The lakes settled. The hills reassembled.
When it was done, the compound's surroundings looked undamaged.
"Okay, I'm serious." Tony appeared at his elbow, MK85 retracted, and adopted the tone of a man pitching a business opportunity he found genuinely exciting. "If you went into the housekeeping industry, you would clean up. Come on. You and me. We set up a business."
"Tony." Jordan gave him a patient look. "We haven't even opened the clinic yet. One thing at a time."
"The clinic," Tony said, as if reminding himself. Then: "Right, but you could theoretically be in two places at once, couldn't you?"
Jordan opened his mouth. Closed it. Considered the fact that he had, approximately forty minutes ago, deployed a shadow clone in front of this man and most of the Earth's assembled heroes, in plain sight, during a major battle.
Tony had apparently processed this as a general observation about Jordan's capabilities rather than information about a specific technique he currently possessed.
"...I'll think about it," Jordan said.
The war was over.
People smiled. This felt significant after several hours of not smiling. The Kamar-Taj sorcerers moved through the assembled crowd opening transit gates — large, stable portals that deposited the Wakandan forces back in Wakanda, the Asgardians onto the Bifrost's approximate receiving frequency, the Guardians back toward the Benatar.
Carol returned from deep space at this point. She had chased Infinity Ultron's trajectory out past three star systems before the trail went cold and it became apparent that what she was tracking was no longer there. She had turned around, accelerated back toward Earth, and arrived to find the Avengers compound looking freshly landscaped and everyone standing around in the afternoon light with the expressions of people who had finished something.
Her eye twitched.
She held it for a moment, processing, then decided to go to New York to catch up with Nick Fury before returning to space. There were still planets out there that needed help, and this particular collection of people had, apparently, things well in hand.
The veteran Avengers didn't dwell on her departure. The current roster was deep, and the gap in the order of battle left by one Infinity-level combatant was covered several times over by what this engagement had added.
Spider-Man made it back from Titan — slightly overwhelmed by the scale of what he'd walked into, visibly moved by the Tony reunion, and now officially a member of the Avengers by general acclaim. Pending his high school graduation, pending several conversations his aunt was not yet aware of, and pending whatever the Hero Association thought of the whole situation. Reserve status, but still.
Doctor Strange was confirmed as the team's magical advisor before he headed back to Kamar-Taj with his sorcerers. He had a significant amount of timeline cleanup ahead of him — branching sequences that needed pruning, temporal knots that needed careful unpicking — but the Avengers had his commitment, and his card.
Then the shadow clone dissipated.
This happened quietly, the way shadow clones always went — a soft displacement of air, a brief flash of white, and then nothing where there had been a presence. The chakra-constructed Mjolnir that Jordan's clone had given Steve Rogers for the battle went with it, vanishing from Steve's grip between one heartbeat and the next.
Steve stood with his empty hand open for a moment. The expression on his face was the specific one of a man who has held something extraordinary and has just had it taken back by the universe's bookkeeping. Like drawing a legendary weapon in a game and watching the server roll it back an hour later. It was a deeply unglamorous feeling for someone who had, technically, just helped save all of existence.
"Captain."
Jordan was at his elbow.
He produced something from the deck — a card drawn and released in one smooth motion, materializing in the air between them with the particular weight of an object that had significant history. Mjolnir. Not a chakra reconstruction, not a temporary duplicate. The genuine article from Party Thor's universe, recovered from the Mirror Dimension during the resolution with Uatu. Nearly new, if a weapon of divine origin could be called that, the uru metal still humming with its accumulated lightning.
He held it out.
Steve took it with both hands out of reflex. The familiar cold weight settled into his grip. The thunder recognized him — didn't choose him the way it had during the battle, exactly, but acknowledged him, the way a hammer acknowledges the hand that's held it before.
He looked up.
Thor, who had been standing close enough to observe this transaction, had gone completely still. Every muscle. The particular stillness of a being who was deciding between several strong feelings and hadn't landed on one yet.
From the direction of the Guardians' landing zone, Groot and Drax the Destroyer noticed Thor's expression and began moving toward him with the coordinated concern of people preemptively managing a situation.
Stormbreaker, leaning against a piece of rubble nearby, somehow managed to radiate the composed disinterest of something that had watched this happen and found it fully predictable.
"Is this..." Steve looked at the hammer, looked at Jordan, looked at Thor — who now had a visible red tinge developing around the eyes and two large arms wrapped around him from behind by a well-meaning Destroyer. "Is this for me?"
"You've spent half your life on a battlefield," Jordan said. He patted Steve's shoulder once, firmly. "You've earned the right to hold something nice."
Steve looked at the hammer for another moment. Then he smiled — the honest, uncomplicated smile of someone who didn't often let himself have things and wasn't sure how to stand with one.
"I'll take good care of it."
From behind Drax's restraining grip, at a volume that carried across most of the compound, Thor produced a sound that the international diplomatic community would have had difficulty transcribing.