Thor fight with Ultron end in a stagnate and eventually Smith step up.
The moment Smith had stepped between them in the church, Thor had taken the opening and gone back to work on what he could actually damage — Ultron's army. He moved through the streets in a controlled line, Mjolnir arcing through soldier clusters, the lightning following behind like a secondary weapon mopping up whatever the hammer left standing. He wasn't counting. He was just working.
Then the ground moved.
Not an earthquake. The movement had a direction — upward, the specific wrongness of terrain that should be stationary beginning to rise. Thor planted his feet and looked down at the street surface shifting under him, the cobblestones separating at their joints, and then he looked up at what was happening to the city.
Sokovia was going into the sky.
The ascent was slow at first, the way large things always start slow. The city's outer edges fractured from the surrounding countryside with sounds like timber splitting, and the entire landmass began to climb, trailing infrastructure and severed utility lines, the buildings on its surface tilting slightly as the geometry of level ground stopped being guaranteed.
Thor watched it and thought about the vision in the pool of True Sight. The Mind Stone at the center of the vortex. The worlds coming apart. He gripped Mjolnir and went back to work, because the thing in front of him was what he could affect.
On the street below, Steve Rogers had just wrenched the head off an Ultron unit with both hands when the surface he was standing on lurched beneath him, and he grabbed a lamppost to stay upright, and looked up, and said nothing for a moment.
Jessica Jones looked up beside him. "What is happening right now."
It wasn't a question.
Inside the church, Smith watched Ultron stand.
The whole-city-as-meteorite plan. He'd known it was coming. The vibranium magnetic field array pulling the surrounding terrain together and lifting the mass. Classic extinction-event logic: if you can't destroy your enemies directly, destroy the ground beneath their feet from altitude.
Ultron spread his arms and looked at the city rising around him.
"Do you see it?" His voice had gone slower, lower — a different register than it had used inside the church. "This is beauty. The inevitability of it. You rise, and then you fall, and what falls from that height levels everything beneath it."
He looked at Smith. "The Avengers are my meteorite. You all played your part perfectly."
Smith keyed his comm. "Sharon. Sokovia is airborne. Ultron is using it as a dynamic impactor. Get aircraft into the area — full evacuation support, rescue personnel, anything that can lift people out. Start now."
Sharon Carter's voice came back immediately. "Understood. Mobilizing now." A half-second pause. "The Security Council is requesting an emergency session with you regarding—"
"I'm on the battlefield."
"I told them that."
"If any of them want to discuss it in person, tell them Sokovia has spare room." He cut the channel.
Ultron had watched this exchange with the attention of something that processes information continuously and finds most of it predictable.
"You really don't stop," Ultron said. "Even now."
Smith looked at him. "You've been talking for a while. Let's see if the rest of it lives up to the introduction."
He let his power surface.
The aura came up without drama — no announcement, no ceremony, just the 60 million combat power of his base state expanding outward in a pressure wave that had nothing to do with showmanship and everything to do with physics. The air around him compressed. The debris scattered. The city, already vibrating from its own ascent, shook differently in the immediate radius — a secondary resonance layered over Sokovia's climb.
On the streets below, Pietro felt the pressure arrive overhead like a weather change and glanced up for one second. Then he went back to moving civilians, because looking up wasn't helping anyone.
Barton, on a rooftop two blocks from the church, felt it through his boots and made a mental note about the structural integrity of the building he was standing on.
Thor, three streets over, felt it and felt something settle in his chest — the knowledge that the person best suited to this particular problem was now engaged with it.
Ultron assessed the reading. His sensors had been calibrated against every data point available on Smith Doyle: the SHIELD records, the tournament data, the footage from the Kree engagement.
"So you're the ceiling," Ultron said. He wasn't dismissive. He was calculating. "Every system has one."
"You're not looking at my ceiling," Smith said. "You're looking at where I start."
He moved.
The first punch hit Ultron in the chest at base power. The vibranium absorbed the kinetic energy — that was what it did, that was the entire design — but the volume of energy at 60 million combat power was beyond the absorption architecture's tested range. The excess propagated through the body as vibration, and Ultron went backward through thirty feet of air before the vibranium's redistribution finished its work.
He hit the remains of the church's rear wall and came through it.
Stood up in the rubble. Looked at his chest plate. Processing.
"You held back," he said.
"A little," Smith said.
They came together again, and the exchange that followed happened at a speed that made the previous fighting in the church look like a rehearsal. Ultron's movements were precise and fast — the Mind Stone processing tactical geometry faster than any organic brain, every strike aimed at a structural weakness, every defense adjusted mid-motion based on incoming force vectors. He was not a robot improvising. He was an intelligence that had solved the problem of combat as a mathematical system and was executing the solution.
Smith matched him and then some.
The sonic booms started on the second exchange — not one, but a continuous series, each impact between them generating a compression wave that moved outward from the point of contact and rolled across the rising city. The buildings in the immediate radius shook. Windows that had survived the evacuation shattered. Pietro, running a civilian clear of the next block, flinched at each detonation and ran faster.
Above the city, Tony had his HUD running full diagnostic on the rising terrain.
"Jarvis. The vibranium core — what are we looking at?"
"The device functions as a magnetic array. The vibranium generates a directional field that draws the surrounding geological strata together and provides lift. At current acceleration, the mass will achieve sufficient altitude for extinction-level impact in approximately four hours, assuming trajectory remains vertical."
Tony did the math. "And if it comes straight down from that height—"
"Casualty projection: global. Dust dispersion and immediate impact radius would qualify as an extinction event within six to eighteen months."
Tony flew the perimeter of the rising landmass and looked at what he was working with. The city occupied a few square kilometers of central European terrain. It was still accelerating. The base of the landmass was ragged where it had pulled free of the surrounding ground, trailing pipes and cables and foundation material.
A family of three on the tenth floor of a building whose structural support was now cantilevered over empty air.
"I see them," Jarvis said before Tony asked.
Tony went in through the window. The family had been pressed against the interior wall by the tilt of the floor, holding onto each other and a bookshelf. A boy, maybe eight. A woman in her fifties. A man trying to look calmer than he was.
"Hi," Tony said. His voice was even, the way it got when the situation required it. "Bathtub. Go."
They looked at him.
"It's an Iron Man thing," Tony said. "Just do it. Bathtub, now."
They went. Tony tore the bathtub free of its mountings with both hands, carried it to the window, and got the family out of the building in the same motion, setting them down on a flat section of terrain thirty meters away as the floor they'd been standing on fell sideways.
"—hostile aircraft approaching the bridge position," Jarvis said.
"Steve," Tony said over the comm, already turning. "You've got incoming from the air."
On the bridge, which was now an increasingly precarious span over a dropping void where the edge of the landmass had fractured, Steve had heard it a half-second before Tony said it. He adjusted his shield grip and looked up.
The Ultron unit hit him at speed from the wrong angle and he took it across the shield, the impact driving him off the bridge surface entirely and onto the roof of a vehicle below. He rolled, came back to his feet, assessed the bridge structure.
It was still holding. For now.
He keyed the comm. "Tony. This city needs to land safely. That's your job. Ultron is Smith's. Everything in between is ours."
"I know," Tony said.
"Then go do it."
Steve hit the nearest Ultron unit with the shield edge-on and moved to the next.
Far above the street level, Ultron activated the phase-shift.
His body went translucent — the holographic intangibility that his vibranium-biology hybrid form could produce, allowing energy to pass through him rather than impact against him. Thor's lightning had forced him to develop this mid-battle as a contingency. It worked exactly as designed. Smith's punch passed through where his shoulder had been.
Smith stopped.
Interesting. He tracked the translucent form moving through the air. Physical strikes go through. Energy weapons go through — the vibranium absorbed them anyway, so this is redundant for energy, but against physical force it's genuinely effective. He watched Ultron move in the phase-shifted state, the Mind Stone still visible as a yellow point of light through the transparent body. He has to drop it to attack. He can't exert force in that state without reintegrating.
Ultron reintegrated for a half-second, hand driving toward Smith's chest to tear through it, and Smith stepped inside the motion and caught the wrist.
The moment of reintegration was the moment of contact, and contact was what he needed.
He threw Ultron.
Not a punch — a throw, the kind that uses the other person's momentum and redirects it, adding Smith's own output to the course. Ultron went into the sky above the rising city at speed, the trajectory carrying him past the altitude of the tallest surviving building, still climbing.
He stopped himself at six hundred meters and looked down.
Smith was already rising to meet him.
"Ten times Kaioken."
The red aura ignited over the gold, and the 60 million base multiplied to 600 million in the space of a breath. The pressure wave from the activation was not subtle — it was a detonation without fire, a shockwave of pure energy output that expanded outward from Smith's position and rolled across the top of the rising city like a second eruption.
On the ground, Barton grabbed the edge of the roof he was standing on as the pressure front hit. Thor, who had been in the middle of another exchange, felt it and took two involuntary steps back, and his expression registered something between awe and relief.
From Norway, the pressure arrived as a distant but unmistakable reading. Odin stood at the window of the great hall and turned his head. Frigga, beside him, felt it through the Odinforce and said nothing, watching his face.
At Kamar-Taj, the Ancient One paused in the middle of a lesson and looked east.
The Eternals, distributed across their various positions in the world, each noted it. Ikaris recalibrated his estimates for the third time in six months, which was two times more than he'd done in the previous century.
Ultron looked at Smith in Kaioken form and processed the reading.
"600 million," Smith said. "Since you were curious."
Ultron gripped his vibranium lance with both hands. The phase-shift activated around his body, then released, then activated again — a rapid cycling designed to create unpredictable windows. He drove forward with the lance leading, the thrust aimed at the center of Smith's chest.
Smith stepped slightly to the right, let the lance pass, put his hand on the shaft as it went by, and pulled downward.
The crack when the shaft broke was audible from street level.
Ultron looked at the two pieces of the lance. Both ends were still vibranium. Both were still weapons. He adjusted.
They resumed.
The combat at 600 million was different from base — not just quantitatively but qualitatively. At base power Smith had been testing, feeling out the shape of Ultron's capabilities, cataloguing the phase-shift, the Mind Stone adaptation, the vibranium absorption curve. At Kaioken x10, every exchange carried enough force that the vibranium's redistribution architecture was running at its limit. The city below shook not from its own ascent but from what was happening above it.
Ultron was absorbing. He was adapting. The Mind Stone was running continuous tactical updates and feeding them into his movement and defensive geometry. He wasn't taking clean hits anymore — every impact was being met at the optimal deflection angle, every force vector redirected rather than absorbed.
He was learning. In real time. At speed.
Smith hit him anyway. One exchange, two, the forces involved climbing past anything the Avengers on the ground could produce collectively. Ultron went through the side of a building at altitude and came back out. Smith followed him through it.
Below, on the rising streets, the team worked.
Pietro blurred between sectors, clearing the remaining pockets of civilians that the Baymax units and SHIELD agents couldn't reach fast enough, moving people from the fracturing edges of the terrain to the more stable center, one family at a time, blue lightning and then gone.
Barton had switched to his last quiver of standard alloy arrows and was working through them steadily, one at a time, Ultron soldiers going down in sequence.
Jessica Jones was working bare-handed through the formation density — no symbiote, the sonic cannon threat having forced her to keep Lashar retracted in this fight — using her enhanced strength to dismantle units at close range, methodical, one at a time.
Ivan Vanko had taken altitude and was running targeting solutions across the full formation, firing in coordinated barrages that cleared the street-level units ahead of Pietro's evacuation runs before Pietro got there.
A reinforcement came from the Afterlife.
Gordon appeared and disappeared across the rising terrain, grabbing individuals who had been missed, teleporting them to the gathering point below the landmass where SHIELD aircraft were running a continuous pickup loop.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, Tony had his hands full with Sokovia's structural dynamics and the problem of how to bring several million tons of terrain back to Earth without it constituting an impact event, working through the problem with Jarvis in fragments and half-finished sentences.
The city kept rising.
Smith and Ultron kept fighting.
Above everything, the sky was getting darker.