Vibranium was, by any reasonable metric, an extraordinary material.
By Jordan's current metric, it was a Tuesday.
If he'd wanted to, he could have used the reality rules embedded in the Herrscher of Infinity Core to assemble a vibranium planet in the solar system—something large enough to park comfortably between Earth and Mars, close enough to wave at. The fact that Wakanda had been sitting on the world's largest natural deposit for longer than their nation's history and still hadn't worked out a fraction of the material's theoretical applications was, frankly, a little endearing.
Which was precisely why he hadn't gone to Wakanda and asked them for any.
How embarrassing that would have been.
Instead he'd spent approximately forty minutes in Dr. Kuseno's materials warehouse, which felt, to Jordan, like an amount of effort roughly equivalent to unpacking groceries. The result was a vibranium cube large enough to build a substantial research base, positioned against the far wall with the solidity of something that would still be there in several centuries. He'd run heat rays across it at precise angles before leaving—portioning it into workable blocks suitable for forging, cutting, and experimental use—until the cube resembled a large, gleaming puzzle waiting to be assembled.
At market rates, the vibranium now occupying Dr. Kuseno's warehouse was worth approximately half of Stark Industries.
Tony Stark, not present but somehow aggrieved: ???
Jordan brushed his palms together in the gesture of a man who has completed a task, though nothing had actually gotten on his hands.
"That should cover your upcoming research, Doctor. Plenty of margin."
"It—yes." Dr. Kuseno was still looking at the cube with the expression of a man whose instruments for measuring significant things have all simultaneously maxed out.
"Same arrangement as always," Jordan added, heading for the door. "Finished product—I want a copy when the armor's done."
"Of course. Of course, naturally—"
"I'll be off, then."
"Yes. Take care, Jordan."
The door closed. Dr. Kuseno stood in his materials warehouse for a moment after the sound of departing footsteps faded, looking at the vibranium, then at the documentation now filling a substantial portion of his server storage, then at the general middle distance.
He had been a scientist for most of his adult life. He had watched the field develop through several eras. He had seen young researchers arrive with ideas that changed things, and he had learned to recognize the specific quality of disruption—the kind that required you to revise not just your methods but your assumptions.
Every technology Jordan brought him triggered that revision.
Not just technically. Conceptually. The modular nanosuit framework alone would occupy the mechanical engineering community for a generation. The Regenerative Cradle was going to require the biotech field to invent several new categories before it could properly describe what was in it. And now this.
The maddening part, Dr. Kuseno reflected, was that Jordan himself seemed to experience none of this as significant. A man who had achieved the kind of indifference to recognition that most researchers only approximated after decades of success and a conscious philosophical practice—and he'd apparently arrived at it without either. He handed over epoch-defining research the way other people left restaurant recommendations.
Jordan, for his part, wasn't experiencing anything as complicated as indifference.
The technology had come to him through the accumulated luck and effort of whatever version of the world had produced it. It had cost him nothing beyond the work of understanding it. Giving it to the doctor who was going to use it on Genos, and getting to watch that process, was simply the natural next step. The only interesting question was how the kid would look when he found out.
Answer: absolutely devastated with gratitude, probably, which was its own form of entertainment.
Jordan stepped out of the research compound's gate and was gone before the access control panel had finished registering his exit.
He left a shadow clone behind in W-City.
This was standard operating procedure now—every city in the region had one. The clone was already in position when Jordan addressed it, standing with the particular brand of effortless ease that Jordan's shadow clones had apparently inherited as a personality default.
"Citizen safety," Jordan said. "Yours."
The clone adjusted the brim of a baseball cap that was not yet physically present but was clearly already being worn in his mind, the gesture complete and unhurried. "Tch." A long exhale. "Troublesome."
Jordan looked at his own face and observed the Araki lines.
They were, somehow, more defined than his own. The jaw was the same jaw. The eyes were the same eyes. But something in the rendering had been sharpened—the quality of a face that had been drawn for drama, for a specific aesthetic that occupied a very particular and extremely theatrical space in Jordan's personal internal reference library.
And the verbal tic, already developing. The cadence of it.
I know exactly which part of me decided to be in charge of this one.
He patted the clone on the shoulder.
Overwhelming, he thought, sense of security.
He snapped his fingers and was elsewhere.
The War God shadow clone snapped his fingers immediately after and got to work.
His casual clothes shifted in a single frame—replaced by a black high school uniform with gold chain detailing, the kind of outfit that occupied the specific aesthetic territory between "delinquent" and "final boss." A baseball cap materialized in his hand. He examined it briefly, then set it on his head at an angle that placed the brim directly over half his face, leaving visible: a jaw, a mouth set in a particular expression, a shadow.
From beneath the brim, a tuft of black hair emerged at the back.
The aura that rolled off him was, conservatively, a Category 17 typhoon.
It should be noted: the Shadow Clone Technique had not received the Evolutionary Power allocation during the Titan Limiter Break. There was no specific clone-enhancement in the system.
There didn't need to be.
The clone's baseline was the original body's baseline, and the original body's baseline was now built from infinite power anchored across six Infinity Stone spectra. When the clone formula—take the original's attributes, apply the splitting coefficient—processed those numbers, what came out the other end was still a figure that exceeded every measurement category the OPM world had developed for threat assessment.
A shadow clone with that foundation, plus the full card library, plus ninjutsu and the Mind Network connection: sufficient to protect the entirety of the supercontinent where humanity currently survived.
The old arrangement—one clone per several cities, rotated—had been retired. This version had better coverage.
The clone's operational protocol was simple: he didn't insert himself into every monster encounter. If professional heroes were on scene and managing the situation, he stayed back. What humans needed was protection, not a permanent safety net that made genuine heroism impossible. He intervened for Demon-level and above—the category where "the heroes on scene cannot handle this" crossed from possibility to certainty.
The Mind Network pulsed.
The War God shadow clone's gaze sharpened. He turned his head on an exact bearing, the way a compass needle settles, and looked at nothing visible.
Then his silhouette blurred and disappeared.
J-City. Gold Coast.
The afternoon was the kind that the tourism board photographs and uses for everything.
Sunlight at the right angle. Blue sky clear enough to look architectural. The sea was behaving itself—long, gentle waves rolling in and withdrawing with the regularity of something that knew it was being watched, leaving a cool edge of foam across the sand that caught the light at the right moments. The air smelled of salt and sunscreen and summer, the particular combination that makes people feel briefly that everything is fine.
The beach was well-attended.
Tourists occupied the available sand in the various configurations of people who have given themselves permission to do nothing productive: some prone under parasols, some upright in the water, some occupying the ambiguous middle distance between shade and sun. The bikini quotient was, by any reasonable assessment, high.
Among them, at a stretch of beach slightly removed from the densest crowd, a woman knelt alone over an elaborate sandcastle.
Blonde—the particular wavy gold of hair that catches light from multiple directions simultaneously. Yellow bikini, which on any other day would have been the most notable thing in the immediate vicinity. Tanned skin over the kind of muscle definition that develops from years of actual training rather than aesthetics: visible in the arms, in the thighs, in the clear V-line of her abdomen. Her face, currently bent over the sandcastle with the focus of someone conducting delicate work, was fine-featured and symmetrical.
The sandcastle had walls. Turrets. What appeared to be a functioning drainage moat.
She was, in the most earnest possible way, entirely focused on it.
Several tourists in the parasol configuration had rearranged their attention.
The beach shook.
Not violently—the first tremor was the kind that makes people look up and frown. Was that—? But enough to be felt through the sand, through the sun loungers, through the soles of anyone standing. The blonde woman lost her balance at a critical moment in the turret-finishing process and both hands came down.
Into the sandcastle.
The two impressions they left were precise and symmetrical and significantly deeper than the average human hand-press into wet sand. She stared at what had been the finished east wall for a long moment.
Her lips trembled.
"Was that an earthquake?" someone behind a parasol asked.
"Just a small one, probably—"
The second tremor was not small.
It ran through the beach lengthwise, throwing several standing tourists off their feet, sending the contents of coolers into the sand, causing the calm sea behind the waves to develop a texture that calm seas don't usually have.
And at the junction of ocean and beach—exactly where the waves ended and the dry sand began—the ground rose.
Ten meters, in the space of a few seconds, the sand and rock beneath heaving upward with the unmistakable logic of something enormous pressing toward the surface from below. A hill where there had been flat beach. The shape of it wrong in the specific way that natural geology is not wrong.
The tourists who had been rearranging their parasols toward the blonde woman rearranged themselves instead—backward, fast, in the universal direction of away from that.
Danger. Danger. Danger.
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