"Found you."
The voice spread across space like reality itself was vibrating from it.
"Piece of garbage narcissistic asshole."
Luke stepped through the dimensional fracture, his body completely black, not like armor but like an absence carved into human shape.
Golden rings rotated behind him like miniature event horizons while the black sphere in his chest distorted everything nearby. Light bent around him, fragments of ruined planets pulling toward his presence before disappearing entirely.
Golden eyes locked onto Tony.
The crack behind him kept widening as dimensional walls strained from his arrival alone.
Tony stared through his white armor for a second then exhaled.
"Wow," he said casually. "You look even more emotionally unstable than before."
Ultron observed both of them. Every calculation returned contradictions. The being standing across from him didn't behave according to physical laws. Space around Luke constantly destabilized and reformed like reality struggled to process his existence.
"You are the entity he described," Ultron said.
Luke glanced at him briefly.
"And you're the genocidal toaster."
Ultron continued analyzing. No stable biological pattern. No consistent energy state. His existence shifted constantly between matter, gravitational distortion, dimensional overlap, and something that resisted categorization entirely.
Tony floated nearby with his arms folded.
"See?" he said to Ultron. "Told you he was a problem."
"You're not my problem," Luke said without looking away from Tony. "I came for this shining piece of shit. Mind your business."
He cracked his fist.
The sound alone distorted nearby space.
"This individual," Ultron said calmly, "appears emotionally compromised."
Tony snorted. "That tends to happen after someone loses everything."
Luke's gaze snapped toward him.
The temperature dropped.
"Keep talking," Luke said quietly. "I'll tear your spine out through that overpriced armor."
Tony looked completely unimpressed.
"There it is," he said, glancing at Ultron. "You see why I'm trying to kill him?"
Luke took one step forward.
Reality cracked beneath his foot.
"I'm going to enjoy crushing your skull," he said.
Then Ultron moved.
All six stones lit simultaneously and a beam of combined cosmic energy tore through space toward Luke.
Luke lifted one finger.
The beam vanished. Not blocked, not redirected. Swallowed into the void around his body like it had never existed.
His golden eyes moved to Ultron.
"Don't show off Infinity Stones in front of me," he said. "You have them attached to your body. Mine became part of me. Using them against me is useless."
He disappeared.
Ultron's sensors found nothing.
Luke reappeared behind him and drove his hand straight through the vibranium shell, grabbed both sides, and ripped Ultron in half. Pieces scattered across dead space as dimensional fractures exploded outward from the impact.
"I said don't intervene."
Tony watched from a distance, visibly uncomfortable at how casual that had been.
The two halves drifted apart.
Then stopped.
Blue light flickered across the pieces and reality folded around them, the separated halves pulling back together, metal reconstructing, damage erasing completely.
Ultron reformed.
The green glow faded from his chest.
"The Time Stone," Tony muttered.
Ultron looked down at where the hole had been then back at Luke.
"Interesting," he said. "You bypassed the vibranium entirely."
Then six lights appeared behind Luke.
Purple, blue, red, green, yellow, and orange rings rotated through the void behind him, each one radiating the signature frequency of an Infinity Stone. The surrounding spacetime immediately became unstable from their presence alone.
Nearby stars stretched unnaturally while gravitational fields collapsed into chaotic distortions.
Then the rings closed behind him.
The universe cracked.
Tony watched entire sections of space fracture apart like stress lines spreading through glass. Galaxies folded inward, not exploding but collapsing dimensionally as the local spacetime framework lost cohesion. Constants that governed the universe—gravity, time flow, electromagnetic behavior—began fluctuating wildly.
Ultron reacted immediately.
Energy erupted from his body as all six stones embedded within his chest activated simultaneously, attempting to stabilize reality through direct universal manipulation.
Nothing happened.
For the first time, Ultron's calculations failed entirely.
"This is impossible," he said while scanning the expanding fractures. "The integrity of spacetime itself is being removed."
Tony's armor flooded with alerts.
"No," Tony muttered while watching the readings. "It's worse than that."
Then everything disappeared.
There was no sensation of movement or teleportation. One moment they existed inside a universe. The next moment the entire concept of location ceased to function.
Tony immediately noticed something wrong.
His armor's navigation systems could not establish coordinates.
Not because they were lost.
Because coordinates themselves did not exist here.
Distance readings returned undefined values. Quantum mapping failed instantly. Time progression became inconsistent across every onboard system, causing internal clocks to desynchronize from one another within milliseconds.
Ultron looked around carefully while the lights in his chest dimmed.
"We appear to have entered a non-structured dimensional environment," he said. "A region lacking conventional physical laws."
Tony immediately checked the Infinity readings.
Then his expression changed.
"The stones are dead," he said quietly.
Ultron looked down at his chest.
The six stones still existed physically, but they emitted no energy at all.
"No," Tony corrected while pulling up more data. "Not dead. Disconnected."
Ultron remained silent while Tony continued analyzing the environment.
"The Infinity Stones operate by interfacing with universal constants," Tony explained quickly. "Space, time, reality, mind—they draw authority from the cosmological framework of a universe."
He looked around the endless white-black void surrounding them.
"But this place doesn't have one."
Ultron processed the statement instantly.
"No spacetime lattice," he concluded.
"No quantum field structure," Tony added.
"No entropy flow," Ultron continued.
"No causality," Tony finished.
For several seconds neither spoke.
Then Ultron looked toward Luke standing motionless nearby.
"You brought us outside universal architecture itself," Ultron said.
Luke's golden eyes stared back at them calmly.
"Yeah," he replied. "Welcome to the Void."
*****
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