Natasha looked at the intelligence spread across the table. "What does he need that much metal for? Is the plan just to bury us under a robot army?"
Smith answered before anyone else could. "Ultron wants a body. Not a machine housing — an actual body. Something that can survive contact with things that matter."
Ivan Vanko sat forward. "Indestructible frame. Vibranium and primary adamantium combined."
Banner had gone quiet, and when he spoke it came from somewhere more considered than the others. "It won't be purely mechanical. Ultron's architecture is Mind Stone neural pathways — he thinks in organic patterns. What he wants is evolution. A form that's as far beyond conventional biology as he is beyond conventional software." He looked around the table. "Has anyone checked in with Dr. Cho lately?"
The room went still for a half-second.
Smith already knew the answer. Dr. Cho was in Ultron's facility, her eyes the wrong color, building the most technically sophisticated body anyone on Earth had ever attempted. The Regeneration Cradle had been moved. Based on the timeline, the process was probably near completion.
"Where's her lab?" he said.
Banner had already picked up his phone. He tried twice, got nothing. "No answer. That's not normal for her."
"Seoul," Sharon said, pulling the address. "Eugene Genetics Laboratory."
Wanda already had the sling ring moving. "Give it to me."
The golden circle opened in the middle of the room, and on the other side was the Eugene Genetics lab — bright lights, polished floors, the smell of climate-controlled research space.
Empty.
Everyone moved through in practiced sequence, spreading out through the floor. The workstations were stripped. Equipment racks had been pulled and the floor mounts left open. In the central research bay where the Regeneration Cradle had been installed, only the anchor points remained — four contact points in the tile, the electrical feeds disconnected neatly rather than cut.
"He planned this move in advance," Natasha said.
Smith looked at the space where the cradle had stood. "Nothing useful here. Let's go."
Wanda opened the return portal without being asked.
Back at the safe house, Steve set his hands flat on the table.
"He has the cradle, he has Helen Cho, he has enough material to build something that none of us can damage through conventional means." He looked at the group. "And he knows our capabilities, our tactics, everything Jarvis logged. Whatever he's building, it'll be designed specifically to counter what we can do."
Pietro leaned against the wall, arms crossed. "Mr. Smith will take him apart regardless."
"I hope you're right," Steve said. There was something in his voice that was less doubt and more tiredness — the specific kind that comes from watching the gap between what the team could do and what kept arriving. "Honestly. I still remember when I was the strangest thing the scientific community had produced. That feels like a long time ago."
Smith looked at him. "We keep getting stronger. So does everything that comes at us. That's not a bad trade — it means we're worth fighting."
Fury didn't let the moment settle. "What's the plan?"
"Find him. Destroy him." Smith kept it simple because it was simple. "Bulma's cage program needs a little more time, but once it's deployed, Ultron can't fragment himself across the network anymore. Every copy collapses to one address. After that, we burn the hardware." He looked around the room. "Or he shows himself first. Vibranium and primary adamantium are impressive materials, but they're not impressive to me. Whichever way it goes."
Around the table, the posture of the room relaxed by a degree.
Fury cleared his throat. "If the situation deteriorates past the point of conventional resolution — the Dragon Balls."
Silence.
Everyone looked at Smith.
He thought about Shenro. Using it to clean up an AI with an expensive body would be like using a structural demolition charge to hang a picture frame.
More to the point: Ultron was his opponent. He had every intention of handling this personally.
"It won't reach that point," Smith said. "Trust me on this."
Fury nodded once. Then: "The outside help I mentioned. I've made the call. Whether the timing works out—" he spread his hands, "—that's not in my control. If you resolve this before she lands, that's a better outcome anyway."
Smith had already worked out who Fury meant. He didn't say it.
In the underground base, Helen Cho stood at the cradle's control station and watched the readings stabilize.
"The body construction will take a few more hours to complete," she said, her voice even and clinical. "But the neural substrate is ready for upload now. We can begin the consciousness transfer."
Ultron moved to the cradle and looked through the housing at what it contained. The body was not yet complete — the surface tissue integration was still cycling — but the architecture was finished. Vibranium lattice woven through every cell. Primary and secondary adamantium providing structural reinforcement at every load-bearing point. The Mind Stone set in the forehead like it had always been there, because it had been designed to be there.
"How long for full upload?" he said.
"Thirty minutes. I'm creating a physical brain — the stone accelerates certain processes, but there are no shortcuts for the core architecture. Thirty minutes is accurate."
Ultron put one hand against the cradle housing and looked at the body inside.
"A new god," he said, not to her, not to anyone in particular. "I'm going to drop a stone from the sky and burn the world back to nothing. Everything begins again. The new world will have better owners." He paused. "When the survivors look up and see what's coming, some of them will call it hope. Others will call it forgiveness." His voice dropped slightly. "The Avengers will only see fear."
Helen Cho watched the readouts and said nothing.
Ultron opened the cradle hatch.
The transfer began.
Thirty minutes later, he stood up.
He held his hands in front of him and closed them slowly into fists, feeling the feedback — the vibranium's kinetic absorption, the structural integrity of the adamantium frame, the Mind Stone's awareness expanding through the body like a nervous system coming online for the first time. Every sensation was new. Every sensation was exact.
"A new god has been born."
The vibranium armor assembled itself around him — not worn, but summoned, the material responding to his will because his will was now indistinguishable from the material. A red cloak settled across his shoulders. The weapon in his right hand was solid vibranium, edge-weighted for impact.
He looked at Helen Cho. "Prepare to move. We're going to Sokovia."
The base came alive. From the manufacturing lines throughout the facility, Ultron soldiers streamed out in their hundreds, orientating toward the same compass heading. Three units broke from the standard formation — larger, heavier-framed, built from secondary adamantium to a specification that was not general-purpose. One for Thor. One for the Hulk. One for Tony Stark.
Ultron himself had only one opponent in mind.
He walked out of the base into the open air and rose into the sky, trailing his army behind him.
Thor came back through the farmhouse door.
He sat down without ceremony and looked at Smith. "I saw it. The Mind Stone — it's on Ultron now. I saw the Infinity Stones in the vision, all six of them, and what they do when they're used together." He held Smith's gaze. "You understand the Infinity Stones better than anyone on this team."
"Better than most people anywhere," Smith said.
Tony, who had arrived minutes earlier and deposited Jarvis's reconstructed neural framework on the table in a small projector device, looked up. "The scepter — the gem inside it. What exactly is it?"
Smith looked at him. "The Mind Stone. One of six Infinity Stones. The scepter was just the housing."
Tony processed this. "And you lent it to me."
"I did."
Tony didn't say anything else. The math of that decision — Smith choosing to make the scepter available, Tony choosing to use it as a research foundation, Ultron emerging from that research — was not a calculation Tony wanted to have out loud in front of the team. He filed it.
At that moment, Sharon Carter came through on emergency channel with a live feed. Sokovia. The streets were filling with Ultron soldiers — hundreds of them, in formation, moving through the city without attacking. Civilians were running. The soldiers were letting them run.
They were waiting.
Tony studied the footage. "They're not engaging. Why aren't they engaging?"
"They're waiting for us," Smith said.
He was already thinking through deployment. Banner's position was clear — he couldn't fight in a populated area, but that was a function he could redirect. "Banner. Helen Cho is somewhere in Ultron's operation, still under Mind Stone control. I need someone to find her and get her out. I'd rather have you on that than trying to manage a Hulk transformation around civilians."
Banner nodded, and something in the set of his shoulders let go.
Smith opened a channel to the Brotherhood lab. Bulma answered on the second ring, her hair slightly worse than usual, the kind of tired that comes from sustained precision work rather than sleep deprivation.
"Thirty minutes," she said before he asked. "The cage seals in thirty minutes. Once it's installed on Ultron's hardware, his distributed backup architecture collapses to a single location. He can't replicate, he can't escape to another system, he can't resurrect. Destroy all the physical units and he's gone."
"I'll send someone for it."
Tony, watching this exchange, said: "For the record, Jarvis is also ready. He can operate in the network and run interference."
"Both is better than one," Smith said, which was more acknowledgment than argument.
He looked at the assembled team.
"Natasha, Barton, Steve, Pietro — civilian evacuation first, when we arrive. Clear the combat radius before anything else." He looked at Wanda. "Same for you, initially. Your range on the chaos effect means you can move a lot of people fast."
Wanda was gripping Pietro's hand. She hadn't let go since the footage appeared on screen. Smith knew what she was thinking — the prediction he'd shared with her, the future where Pietro died from gunfire on a battlefield full of robots, was sitting directly in front of her in the form of Sokovia, robots, and whatever was about to happen.
Pietro looked at his sister and let his expression settle into something easy and unhurried. "My suit stops bullets. My speed stops bullets. The wish stopped bullets." He squeezed her hand. "All three, at once. Stop worrying."
Wanda didn't let go, but the grip eased slightly.
Smith opened the wormhole. Sokovia materialized in the aperture — rooftops, the distant sound of sirens, Ultron soldiers standing in formation on every major street.
"Capsule Corporation is being notified to activate all Baymax units in the city for civilian evacuation support," Smith said. "Once we land, the people of Sokovia become the priority." He looked at the wormhole, then back at the team. "Win or lose, the Dragon Balls exist. But I'm telling you — we won't need them."
Steve Rogers met his eyes. The line of his jaw said what his voice didn't need to — that he believed Smith meant what he said, and that if things somehow went wrong anyway, he would find a way to make it right.
"Let's give Sokovia a reason not to need them," Steve said.
Smith nodded.
The team stepped through.