Smith looked at the army converging on his position and shook his head.
"You want to compare your soldiers to Metal Cooler's, you'd need them all built to the same spec as your main body. Same materials, same processing architecture, the same regenerative feedback loop — every unit you destroy gets absorbed and rebuilds stronger." He watched the formation advance. "Metal Cooler had a planet's worth of that. You have a city's worth of foot soldiers and one good body. It's not the same category."
Ultron's expression said he was aware of this and hadn't needed it pointed out.
"You've locked down my world," he said. "I'm returning the favor."
He raised his hand. The signal went out. Every Ultron soldier remaining on the rising terrain turned and moved toward Smith's position simultaneously — the last army of an entity that had spent weeks building it, now deployed in a single concentrated surge.
Smith watched them come.
"Everyone," he said through the combat power detector's comm link, the words reaching the wrist of every Avenger on the terrain simultaneously, "civilian evacuation takes priority. I'll handle Ultron. Keep the corridors clear."
He charged into the formation.
The first unit he reached ceased to be a unit before the impact fully registered — the punch's shockwave propagated outward through the soldiers immediately behind it, and the three meters of formation around the impact point collapsed at once. The soldiers beyond that range opened fire. Laser arrays, energy cannons, the heavier units with the shoulder-mounted hardware that the standard soldiers didn't carry.
The fire hit him. He kept moving.
At 3 billion combat power, the incoming fire was an aesthetic experience. He could feel the heat against his skin in the same abstract way you feel afternoon sun — present, registrable, producing no actual consequence. He walked through the barrage with his hand out and let the ki release from his palm in a controlled wave that split at its apex into a hundred individual nodes, each one tracking a separate target.
The explosions moved through the formation like a line of lights going off in sequence. Units went down in cascading bursts, the architecture of Bulma's cage program already doing its secondary work — each destroyed unit locked out of the network, unable to share data or receive updates, isolated and ended rather than destroyed and redistributed.
"For someone like me," Smith said to no one in particular, or possibly to Ultron watching from above, "numbers stopped mattering a while ago."
The formation thinned. Then it was gone.
On the carrier deck, the last of the escape pods were locking in.
Steve counted heads at the boarding ramp. The number matched. He waved the pod sealed and turned to find Pietro already beside him, also counting.
"That was the last group," Pietro confirmed.
"Tony, Thor, Ivan — still airborne for sweeps?" Steve said into the comm.
Tony came back: "Running the final pass now. Three more in a building on the east block — Jarvis found them in a basement, didn't get the evacuation signal. I've got them."
A minute later, confirmed.
Thor's voice: "The streets are clear on my sweep. Nothing moving except robots."
Ivan Vanko: "Eastern perimeter clear. All targets eliminated or withdrawn."
Wanda, flying slower than the others but covering the ground sectors: "No readings. The Baymax units have completed their sweeps."
Pietro had already run his ground circuit twice and come back empty.
"Alright," Steve said. "Get to the carrier. Everyone off the terrain."
He looked out at Sokovia rising around them — the buildings, the streets, the physical weight of a city lifted from its socket and carried into the clouds. Somewhere below the clouds, there was a crater where the city had been, a negative space the exact dimensions of the place these people had called home.
We'll fix it, he thought. Tony said he would, and Tony means it when it matters.
He boarded.
On the ground below the rising city, Natasha had one job.
She walked toward the sound of the Hulk. She found him two blocks from the evacuation corridor, working through the last cluster of Ultron soldiers.
She waited until the soldiers were down.
"Hulk." She pulled off her gloves — bare hands, no weapons visible, the instinctive trust signal that she'd learned worked on him specifically. "Time to go home. Betty's at the base."
The Hulk heard his name in her voice. Heard the other name. The specific combination of those two things in that order produced a response in him that none of the combat incentives had — a pause, a recalibration, the fury finding a reason to stand down.
He looked at the battlefield behind him. Then at Natasha.
He walked toward her.
The fighter jet came in low from the northeast without any preceding signature on the comm system's proximity alert — it was one of the last units off the production line before Bulma's cage locked the network, running on local processing only, below the detection threshold that the carrier's systems were calibrated for at this altitude. The Ultron unit at the controls saw two viable targets below and made a targeting decision without consulting anything.
The machine gun opened up on both of them.
The Hulk absorbed most of it. His body registered the impacts as noise — sharp, stinging, negligible against his current mass and durability. He didn't stop moving.
Three rounds caught Natasha.
She went down hard, her shoulder and upper arm taking the grazes, blood immediate and significant. Not fatal but she was on the ground and bleeding and the Hulk had turned toward the source of the noise with a sound that started low and built.
The Ultron unit brought the jet around for another pass.
"Pietro," Barton said over the comm, already moving from his position on the carrier's edge. "Natasha's down. She needs—"
Pietro was already there. He'd heard the comm burst and the trajectory and arrived before Barton finished the sentence.
The jet was lining up its attack trajectory on the escape pod cluster. The missile pylons cycled to armed status. The targeting system locked.
The pod cluster had Donnie, Skye, and Jessica Jones between it and the incoming payload, and none of them had seen the approach angle.
Skye saw it first. She was already facing the wrong direction and she turned and put both palms out and pushed.
The shockwave hit the incoming missile while it was still airborne. At Skye's current level, the output wasn't enough to stop it — the missile slowed, tumbled, lost half its velocity as the guidance system fought against the vibrational disruption, but it was still moving and still armed.
Jessica had Lasher out before it got there. The symbiote spread itself flat across the arc of the missile's path, expanding to maximum coverage, the green material hardening as it went.
Donnie put ice on top of it. A solid layer, several centimeters thick, bonded to the symbiote surface in the second and a half available.
The missile hit the composite wall.
The blast was substantially reduced by Skye's interference — what arrived at the ice-and-symbiote barrier was a fraction of the designed yield. It still hit like a hammer. The ice layer blew apart in chunks. The symbiote material behind it tore, the green material shredding under the shockwave and flame, and for a moment it looked like both had been consumed.
Jessica retracted what remained. There wasn't much. She did it anyway, fast.
She looked at the wall of scorched air between the missile's impact point and the pods.
The pods were intact.
"We blocked it," she said. The words came out level, which was its own kind of effort.
Donnie looked at his hands. Looked at the blast pattern. Said nothing for a moment.
Behind them, the Hulk had solved the jet problem. He'd jumped — covering the altitude between ground level and the aircraft with one calculated leap, landing on the fuselage, punching through the hull access panel, and throwing the Ultron unit out through the opening it hadn't intended to create. The unit hit the ground below and stopped moving. The Hulk rode the jet down in a controlled descent.
He carried Natasha onto the carrier deck.
She was conscious, which was the first thing he checked. She put one hand on his forearm when he set her down and didn't say anything, which was her version of acknowledgment.
He looked at her wound. Looked at the medics arriving across the deck. Looked back at the battlefield.
He jumped back off the carrier.
High above the city, the end of Ultron's army coincided with the beginning of the end of the engagement.
Smith moved through the last of the formation without stopping and arrived at Ultron's position in the same motion. Three punches landed before Ultron could establish a defensive geometry. The first staggered him. The second drove him backward. The third put him through the air at speed with no clean trajectory.
Ultron hit the ground and bounced. Came back up with the Mind Stone already charging.
The yellow beam fired directly into Smith's position.
Smith walked into it.
Not through it — into it, taking the beam on his body, feeling the Mind Stone's output pressing against his skin. At 3 billion combat power, the difference between the beam's pressure and his own structural integrity was not a contest. He kept walking.
Ultron watched him come through the beam and arrive in front of him, and the charging protocol on the Mind Stone ran its output calculation again and came back with a number that didn't help.
Smith reached for the Mind Stone.
Ultron's counterattack was immediate and total — every joule of output the vibranium body could produce went into the kick, aimed at Smith's center mass. It connected. Smith left the ground and traveled backward thirty feet.
He stopped in the air on his own power before he'd completed the arc.
Ultron looked at the space where Smith's hand had been, centimeters from the Mind Stone. His hand went to his forehead reflexively.
He almost had it. The calculation ran through Ultron's processing at the speed of the Mind Stone itself. Without the network, without the army, with Bulma's cage running and the cage program locking down every backup path — the Mind Stone is the last asset. Without it, the body is still vibranium and adamantium, but there's no amplification, no energy output above normal structural limits. And there's certainly no fighting Smith Doyle without an advantage.
He activated the holographic phase-shift. Went translucent. Moved.
Smith watched the translucent form head toward the church at the city's center.
He followed at a pace that communicated exactly how concerned he was, which was not very.
Ultron reached the anti-gravity control array. His phase-shifted hand passed through the housing and touched the control panel's physical architecture at the component level, bypassing the interface entirely and triggering the reversal directly at the mechanism.
The array flipped.
The lift field collapsed.
Sokovia dropped.
The sensation was immediate and total — the city losing its impossible altitude in a single instant, the long fall beginning, the terrain that had been rising for the past hours now descending at the speed of something very large falling from very high.
On the carriers, everyone felt it. The floor dropped under their feet and then the carriers' stabilizers compensated, but the first second was unmistakable.
Tony: "Smith. It's falling. Now."
Steve, catching himself on a bulkhead rail: "Are all personnel off the terrain?"
Rapid confirms from each team. Tony, Thor, Wanda, Ivan Vanko, All confirmed on deck by Barton's visual.
Tony: "Everyone's off. Smith, it's just you and Ultron."
Smith had already moved.
He didn't go to Ultron. He went to the ground — the crater below the rising city, the socket where Sokovia had been, now open to the sky. He descended through the falling debris of the city's lower edge, found a clear sightline, and stopped.
He looked up at the falling mass.
Ultron, descending with the city, watched Smith appear on the ground below and understood what was coming. He opened his phase-shift again, intending to pass through the descending land and distance himself from the impact point.
"You took the gem by letting it fall," Smith said, not into the comm but out loud, knowing Ultron could hear him through whatever sensors remained in the area. "That was actually a reasonable exit. If I'd missed the grab attempt, the fall would have bought you time." He gathered ki into both hands, the white energy building. "But I wasn't trying to grab it to trap you. I was testing the reflex."
The Kamehameha discharged upward.
The beam hit the base of the falling Sokovia and the falling Sokovia ceased to fall. It ceased to be. The white energy moved through the mass at the speed of the wave itself — not an explosion, not a scattering, but a total conversion, the ki's inherent destruction efficiency rendering the entire geological structure at molecular level into energy that joined the beam.
From the carrier deck, the Avengers watched a white column of light replace the falling city.
The column sustained for three seconds. Then it narrowed. Then it was gone.
Where Sokovia had been falling, there was clear sky.
Where Ultron had been inside it, there was the Mind Stone, floating in the air at the apex of where the city had been, unaffected — Infinity Stones did not have a material threshold below which they ceased to exist.
Smith rose through the dissipating energy and took it from the air.
He held it for a moment. A yellow gem, roughly the size of a large marble, the light inside it not reflected but generated — something intrinsic, a fundamental property of what it was. He'd lent it to Tony. Tony had built Ultron on its architecture. Ultron had taken it. Now it was back.
He slotted it into the Infinity Gauntlet. The Space Stone's blue and the Reality Stone's red were already there, and the Mind Stone's yellow joined them, and the combined energy of three Infinity Stones ran up the gauntlet housing and down his arm, pressing against his will like something testing a boundary.
At 3 billion combat power, it pressed against a boundary that held easily. He suppressed it.
He looked at the empty sky where Sokovia had been.
Tony's voice came through the comm. "I can see you from up here. That was — I don't have a word for that."
"I'll think of one," Smith said.
On the carrier deck, Thor watched the white light fade and said quietly: "That's a planet-killing strike contained to a city." He said it slowly, pausing between sentences as if each one needed space to settle. "My lightning barely scratched Ultron's armor. Smith's attack vaporized him."
Wanda stood at the carrier's edge and looked at the empty sky. Something in her expression was new — the set of her face, the way her chin had lifted, the stillness behind her eyes. She had known he was strong. She hadn't understood what strong meant in this context until just now.
Bulma, who had arrived on the deck in time to watch the final exchange, processed Wanda's expression in a separate register and filed it. Fox, standing beside her, said nothing, which was Fox's standard operating procedure when Bulma was filing something. Bulma looked at the spot where the city had been, then at the empty spot where Wanda's gaze had been pointed, and made a decision about something that would require no conversation and no announcement.
Steve sank onto the edge of a cargo container and let the weight come off his legs for the first time in three hours. He looked at the sky, at the clear air where a falling city had been thirty seconds ago, at the team around him, and said what needed to be said.
"It's over."