Chapter 5: Destiny
The final battle erupted across the ruins of the Avengers compound like a cosmic storm.
Explosions bloomed in brilliant cascades of color as heroes and aliens clashed in desperate combat. Iron Man and Rescue moved in perfect synchronization, their red-gold and silver-blue armor cutting through swarms of Outriders with repulsor blasts and micro-missiles. Thor's lightning carved paths of destruction through enemy ranks, while Ant-Man's massive form crushed dozens of aliens with each thunderous step.
Doctor Strange and the Masters of the Mystic Arts wove impossible geometries in the air, their spells creating barriers of golden light and portals that redirected alien weaponry back at their attackers. The very fabric of reality bent around their gestures.
But for all their individual power, the heroes were vastly outnumbered. Thanos's forces stretched to every horizon—a living tide of claws, fangs, and plasma weapons that threatened to overwhelm even Earth's mightiest defenders.
Then the tide of battle shifted.
Thanos himself entered the fray, and even the mightiest Avengers found themselves outmatched by the Mad Titan's raw power and tactical brilliance. Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor working in perfect coordination could barely slow him down.
That's when Scarlet Witch arrived.
Wanda Maximoff descended on Thanos like a force of nature, her scarlet energy crackling with grief and rage. The woman who had lost everything—her brother, her lover, her hope—unleashed power that made the Infinity Stones themselves seem dim by comparison.
For the first time since the battle began, Thanos looked genuinely afraid.
"You took everything from me," Wanda snarled, her accented voice carrying the weight of cosmic fury.
"I don't even know who you are," Thanos replied, struggling against the telekinetic forces that were literally tearing his armor apart.
"You will."
Thanos found himself helpless against her assault, his supposedly invincible form being dismantled piece by piece. In desperation, he activated Sanctuary II's orbital bombardment systems.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Particle beams rained from the sky like the wrath of gods, indiscriminately destroying friend and foe alike. The overwhelming firepower shattered the battlefield, sending both armies scrambling for cover. Even Wanda was forced to abandon her attack on Thanos to protect herself from the orbital strike.
The Masters of the Mystic Arts conjured massive shields of eldritch energy, while Doctor Strange himself held back what appeared to be a tidal wave of superheated plasma. The very air shimmered with deadly radiation.
From his hiding place in the rubble, Rory gritted his teeth and made a decision that would either save the universe or get him vaporized in the next thirty seconds. He slipped out of cover and began working his way toward Thanos, keeping low and using the chaos as camouflage.
The orbital bombardment suddenly ceased as a new threat appeared in the sky.
Captain Marvel blazed through the atmosphere like a living comet, her binary form trailing fire and cosmic energy. She struck Sanctuary II with the force of a small star, punching clean through the massive dreadnought's hull and emerging from the other side in a shower of alien metal and plasma.
The warship began breaking apart in Earth's atmosphere, its wreckage raining down like meteors.
With Captain Marvel's arrival, the Avengers finally had the advantage they needed. The tide of battle turned as Earth's heroes pressed their assault with renewed vigor.
But Thanos wasn't finished.
As Carol Danvers raced toward the quantum tunnel van carrying the completed Infinity Gauntlet, the Mad Titan hurled his double-bladed weapon with perfect accuracy. The weapon struck the van's quantum core, triggering a massive explosion that sent everyone flying and scattered the Infinity Stones across the battlefield.
The Gauntlet landed mere yards from where Rory had taken cover.
"Oh, hell," he muttered, ducking his head and trying to blend in with the debris. "I'm so dead."
What followed was the ultimate game of cosmic keep-away.
Tony Stark was the first to reach for the Gauntlet, only to be backhanded across the battlefield by Thanos. Thor and Captain America followed, working together to try and overwhelm the Titan, but even Mjolnir and the shield combined couldn't match Thanos's raw strength.
Captain Marvel made two separate attempts to secure the Gauntlet, coming closer than anyone else to success. But Thanos managed to grab the Power Stone from the Gauntlet's palm and used it to deliver a punch that sent her flying into low orbit.
Finally, Tony Stark made one last desperate play. As Thanos slipped the completed Gauntlet onto his massive hand and prepared to snap his fingers, Tony lunged forward in what appeared to be a futile final attack.
"I am... inevitable!" Thanos declared, raising his Gauntlet-clad hand.
SNAP!
Nothing happened.
Thanos stared at his hand in confusion, only to discover that the Gauntlet was now empty. Somehow, impossibly, all six Infinity Stones had been transferred to Tony Stark's armor, their cosmic energies already beginning to burn through his mortal frame.
"And I... am... Iron Man," Tony whispered.
At the exact moment Tony snapped his fingers, the crack of a gunshot rang out across the battlefield. Rory, who had worked his way close enough to touch Thanos, fired his M1911 pistol point-blank into the Titan's forearm and injected something into the wound.
The Snap's energy washed over the battlefield like a wave of pure creation and destruction combined. Rory felt something fundamental shift in the very structure of reality—a sensation like watching the universe rewrite itself at the quantum level.
All across the battlefield, Thanos's forces began crumbling to dust. The Mad Titan himself staggered backward, staring at the small wound on his arm where Rory's needle had penetrated his supposedly invincible skin.
"What did you—" Thanos began, then stopped as his own body started to disintegrate.
He took two steps backward and vanished into nothingness, just another casualty of the Snap that would undo his genocidal crusade.
The battle was over.
"Mr. Stark!" Peter Parker's voice cracked with emotion as he rushed to Tony's side. "Mr. Stark, can you hear me? It's Peter. We won, Mr. Stark. We did it." Tears streamed down the young man's face as he watched his mentor slowly dying from the cosmic energies that had saved the universe.
When Pepper Potts knelt beside her husband, Tony managed to speak one last word to his AI assistant.
"Friday?"
"Life signs critical," the artificial intelligence reported quietly.
Pepper took Tony's hand in hers, her voice gentle despite her tears. "Tony, we're going to be okay. You can rest now."
The arc reactor in Tony Stark's chest flickered once, then went dark forever.
As the heroes mourned their fallen friend and celebrated their impossible victory, Rory quietly made his way to where Thanos had disintegrated. He retrieved a small syringe from the ground—the same one he'd used to inject the Titan—and slipped it into his pocket along with the precious blood sample it had drawn.
Then he melted back into the rubble and debris, unnoticed by the grieving Avengers.
Two Weeks LaterHidden Laboratory, Undisclosed Location
"Experiment number fifty-seven: Eternal bloodline integration... failure."
Rory spoke into a digital recorder as he examined a blood sample under his microscope. "The hormone-active compounds in Thanos's blood sample continue to reject fusion with baseline human DNA. Chromosomal compatibility remains at ninety-nine percent, but cellular rejection is still occurring at the mitochondrial level."
He removed the sample slide and walked to another workstation covered with complex biochemical equipment.
"Hypothesis: The Eternal genetic matrix is too complex for direct integration. Attempting dilution and compression approach for next iteration."
Rory had initially assumed that the Super Soldier Serum used on Captain America was simply an enhancement—a boost provided by some external chemical compound. But after analyzing Thanos's blood, he'd discovered something far more profound and disturbing.
The serum hadn't enhanced Steve Rogers. It had rewritten him.
Think of a person as a hard drive, Rory mused. From birth, their height, appearance, personality, and physical capabilities are encoded in their genetic information. The Super Soldier Serum's function was to forcibly alter that programming to achieve superhuman enhancement.
Steve Rogers was still Steve Rogers, but he wasn't the same Steve Rogers who had entered the vita-ray chamber as a ninety-pound asthmatic.
Through countless experiments, Rory had confirmed this theory. But when he tried to extract usable genetic information from Thanos's blood, he discovered that the Eternal bloodline was impossibly complex—thousands of years of genetic evolution compressed into a format that human science could barely comprehend.
The only viable approach was to "compress" the genetic information, like reducing a ten-megapixel image to one megapixel. The overall structure would remain intact, but the resolution—and power—would be dramatically reduced.
Since Rory lacked the cosmic-level enhancements that some heroes received through accidents or alien intervention, he would have to create his own advantages.
Theoretically, the compressed bloodline would retain the same basic properties as Thanos's genetics, but at a fraction of the strength. Maybe one-tenth the power of the original. Maybe one-thousandth. The variables were impossible to predict.
"Beginning third-generation blood sample cultivation," he continued recording. "Combining glucose and amino acid compounds, extracting excess water and low-molecular-weight proteins, and introducing modified DNA sequences for secondary incubation."
The sample went into a specialized cultivation chamber that Rory had built from salvaged Stark Industries components and equipment "borrowed" from various research facilities.
As the sample began its cultivation process, Rory sat down at his computer to run the next series of calculations. The machine was painfully slow compared to what Tony Stark had been working with—computations that would have taken minutes with an arc reactor-powered supercomputer required hours on his cobbled-together system.
While Rory worked on his potentially world-changing serum, the Avengers were dealing with more mundane concerns.
"Cap, what's our timeline for returning the Stones?" Sam Wilson asked as he approached Steve Rogers outside the temporary command center they'd established in a repurposed S.H.I.E.L.D. facility.
The main Avengers compound was still a pile of rubble, and construction on a replacement facility wouldn't begin for months. In the meantime, they needed to handle the delicate matter of returning the Infinity Stones to their proper places in the timeline.
"Soon as possible," Steve replied. "The longer we hold onto them, the greater the risk of creating temporal paradoxes. Speaking of which—has anyone seen that kid who time-traveled with us? Rory?"
Sam looked puzzled. "Who's Rory?"
Most of the assembled heroes—the ones who hadn't been present during the time heist—looked equally confused. In the chaos of the final battle and Tony's funeral, it seemed that one displaced time traveler had simply slipped through the cracks.
Somewhere in his hidden laboratory, surrounded by bubbling test tubes and quantum equations, Rory smiled as he watched his latest experiment begin to show promising results.
After all, in a universe where radioactive spider bites create heroes and gamma radiation turns scientists into monsters, who was to say that Eternal blood couldn't transform an ordinary human into something... more?
The future, it seemed, was about to become very interesting indeed.
End of Chapter 5
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