The light in Thanos's palm was sparse — fragile, even — but it was real.
Wielding the Infinity Gauntlet for months, snapping it to alter universal biology, extracting the power through his own body: that left residue. The same way Killmonger, in a separate universe's timeline, had absorbed enough from brief contact with the Stones to contest Infinity Ultron directly. Thanos had held all six for far longer. Some fraction of that power had settled into his tissue, his cells, the architecture of an Eternal's exceptional biology.
It wasn't the Gauntlet. But it wasn't nothing, either.
Jordan's answer came from his chest.
The infinite power that had been living in the Energy Star Core since his first Gauntlet snap — absorbed, processed, integrated into his own energy economy — blazed outward as a column of white-gold light and met Thanos's seven-colored burst in the space between them.
The two energies collided at roughly ten meters.
Thanos's dissipated.
The retired Titan Tyrant understood the implications immediately, with the analytical speed of a mind that held the accumulated strategic knowledge of an Eternal civilization. His energy hadn't merely lost. It had been intercepted and eliminated by something stronger, something that hadn't flinched against it or absorbed it but simply outweighed it. He was outpowered. He had been outpowered from the first second.
This wasn't opportunism. He came knowing exactly what he was walking into.
Thanos reached back and closed his hand around the haft of the Tyrant's Blade — the massive double-edged axe half-buried in the field's soil, its weight the familiar weight of a weapon he'd carried through the worst centuries of his existence. He pulled it free in one movement and charged.
The snap's backlash had damaged his body. The retirement had softened nothing — the burns, the cellular disruption from channeling infinite power through a biology not built to contain it. But Thanos was still a demigod Titan. Still the being who had gone toe-to-toe with the assembled Earth Avengers, Steve Rogers's mortal body and all, and made it look like a matter of endurance. Still capable.
The Tyrant's Blade came down on the energy barrier with a sound like a cathedral bell struck by a hammer.
It didn't move through.
The barrier was crimson — Chaos Magic, the primordial-energy variety that predated the physical laws it could override. Thanos's Eternal knowledge processed it in the fraction of a second his blade remained in contact with it, and the conclusion arrived quickly: dangerous, retreat, in the specific way that ancient survivalism overrides tactical commitment.
He started to pull back.
The crimson energy moved.
It had been a barrier. Now it was something with teeth — extending, reaching, wrapping around Thanos's retreating arms and the axe and the attempt at distance with the patient inevitability of a tide coming in around a man standing in shallow water. Jordan's command of chaos magic exceeded Wanda's MCU baseline by the compounding factor of everything he was — the infinite power behind it, the combat instincts of someone who had been fighting continuously for what felt like geological time, the pure directional will that chaos magic responded to above all other qualities.
Thanos fired.
His left fist — the lighter one, the one that had held nothing for several minutes now — channeled blazing cosmic energy into a point-blank discharge. The crimson wrapping tore. He had half a second of free movement.
The chaos magic filled the gap before he finished the thought of using it.
It enclosed his limbs. His head. Complete immobility, the kind that didn't strain against his Titan strength because it didn't depend on mechanical force — it restructured the local conditions around every surface it touched, making movement not difficult but simply no longer a category that applied.
Thanos was still.
Jordan looked at him with the mild consideration of someone who has run a combat sequence to its logical conclusion and found the result unsurprising.
He raised one finger and traced a brief arc in the air. A beam of structured magical energy — the standing wave from Element Pickup, Kamar-Taj principles routed through F-boy's card architecture — produced a gleaming object between his hands.
A new Infinity Gauntlet. Smaller than Thanos's. Fitted to Jordan's proportions. The grooves for each Stone already waiting.
He raised his left hand.
The six Infinity Stones he'd removed from Thanos's Gauntlet rose from where he'd set them and slid into position, one after another, with the particular smoothness of objects returning to where they were always meant to be.
Seven-colored electricity cascaded up his arm.
The familiar state rose through him like a tide: the expansion of perception to universal scale, the sensation of holding every variable simultaneously, the quiet weight of holding infinite authority in a body that had learned, through repeated practice, to carry it without being undone. Omniscience. Omnipotence. The Infinite Jordan state, familiar enough now to feel like a register he could shift into rather than an event.
He looked past the frozen Thanos.
There, beyond the atmosphere of the Garden, a node-jump shimmer preceded a distinctive silhouette — the Benatar, breaking out of faster-than-light travel, decelerating toward the planet. The Avengers' approach vector. Right on schedule.
My past self is approximately thirty seconds from making entry.
He'd have noticed something on the surface. Begun descending. The timeline's closed loop required a silhouette — the vague presence his past self had detected from the Benatar and registered as confusing but not actionable. Jordan needed to create that silhouette and then get out of the way.
Thirty seconds was tight.
He calmly raised his hand and triggered the Time Stone.
Za Warudo.
The infinite power of time erupted — not a beam, not a wave, but a fact — a universal edit applied at the rule level, rewriting the local rate of temporal flow to zero. The Garden froze. The atmosphere froze. Thanos froze mid-Titan-glare. The Benatar above them stopped in the middle of its deceleration, every particle suspended.
Jordan himself froze.
For approximately three femtoseconds.
His own infinite power recognized the time field the way water recognizes a current — resisting it was unnecessary, routing around it was the correct response, and his body had enough baseline energy density to maintain a thin thread of volitional function even inside his own time stop. Past self incoming: even full infinite power couldn't fully contain someone operating at the same power level.
Move fast.
Instant Transmission.
He arrived beside Thanos and got to work.
The original Infinity Gauntlet — the one on the ground where Jordan had set it — came up in his hands. He directed chaos magic through his fingers and across its surface, accelerating the metal's aging by several decades in approximately one second: pitting the surface, deepening the burn damage from the snap backlash, working the texture until it had the specific exhausted appearance of an object that had channeled more power than its design intended and paid for it. He put it back on Thanos's left hand.
Then he turned the Gauntlet's infinite power inward toward Thanos's biology and introduced, with surgical precision, the physiological signature of a snap's backlash — the cellular burns, the tissue disruption, the specific distribution pattern of having pushed infinite power through an Eternal's body in one catastrophic release.
The illusion needed to be complete.
Mind Stone: Jordan reached into Thanos's memory architecture with the controlled delicacy of someone who knew how this went wrong if you weren't careful, and planted a single coherent sequence — the retirement, the decision, the destruction of the Stones on the Garden, the aftermath. Not a forced implant but a completed narrative, integrated with the memories already present, indistinguishable from lived experience. The Titan who woke from this would remember destroying the gems. Would remember achieving his goal. Would remember nothing that contradicted the timeline.
Reality Stone: Jordan swept the planet's recent history clean. The field's soil, the blade marks, the energy discharge patterns, the microscopic traces of a visitor who had arrived from outside the timeline — all of it revised back to the agricultural quiet of a retired farmer's planet.
He stepped back and assessed.
The Garden looked exactly as it should have looked. Thanos, slightly damaged and about to be very confused by what his body had apparently done while he was retired, sat in the field in the late afternoon light, waiting for a timeline to catch up to him.
Jordan raised the new Gauntlet one final time.
Snap.
The white light was brief and absolute — the time field releasing, the frozen universe resuming, every suspended particle picking up exactly where it had been as if nothing had interrupted it. The Benatar continued its deceleration. The atmosphere moved again.
Jordan was already rising.
He broke through the Garden's gravity with minimal effort, trading the agricultural air for vacuum, and set a course that would carry him just within the range of what the Benatar's sensors might register as a departing silhouette — enough to notice, not enough to identify. Something that would register as confusing, get filed under investigate later, and establish the closed loop's final anchor point.
Below him, a blond young man on the Benatar's approach trajectory frowned at something his perception had caught at the edge of his range.
His figure descended through the atmosphere.
The loop closed.
MCU Universe — Main Timeline
The deep blue of a Space Stone portal opened in Kamar-Taj's courtyard, and Jordan stepped through into the smell of old stone and sandalwood and the particular ambient quality of a place where serious people did serious work.
Doctor Strange was there — not the Sorcerer Supreme, not the Avengers' magical advisor. He'd come back from the timeline-repair work as something quieter: an ordinary sorcerer, by his own assessment, working through the specific humility of someone who had held ultimate authority and given it up on purpose. He was, Jordan found, considerably better company for it.
Jordan stayed for a while.
The Time Stone, still in the new Gauntlet's housing, turned out to have a secondary application that Jordan found immediately useful. The Element Pickup ability — the one he'd originally used to copy the plant-hero's power back in the OPM world, and which had been running a standard cooldown timer ever since — was, from the Time Stone's perspective, a local temporal state. Jordan reached into the cooldown's timeline and ran it forward to completion.
The ability reset.
In the weeks that followed, he worked through most of Kamar-Taj's catalogue — the dimensional disciplines, the law-magic array work, the specific schools that Strange's MCU self had either archived or not yet discovered. Strange observed and occasionally corrected his technique, which Jordan accepted without argument, because Strange was correct.
Eventually Jordan found Wong.
The Sorcerer Supreme, who had spent the last several weeks carrying more responsibility than he'd originally signed up for and wearing it with the dignity of someone who didn't intend to complain about it, met Jordan with the specific combination of respect and wariness that Jordan had found was the accurate response to what he represented. They had a direct conversation. It went well. They reached the kind of mutual understanding that sometimes develops between two people who have both, recently, held more power than anyone should carry alone and made reasonable decisions with it.
Wong opened a portal.
Jordan stepped through onto the surface of a battered, ravaged planet, its landscape bearing the specific character of somewhere that had suffered significantly and continued to exist despite it. He looked out at the horizon — cracked earth, a sky with the wrong quality of light, the distant geometry of structures that had once been something other than ruins.
He nodded once, with the quiet satisfaction of someone arriving somewhere that had been waiting.