Joey had no idea how he had fallen into this gray, lifeless world, nor why he had suddenly been dragged into a completely senseless battle against the Fantastic Four.
But one thing he did know:
This time, he was truly done holding back.
Accidentally turning Abomination into a pile of paste with one punch earlier had left him overly cautious ever since.
But these were the Fantastic Four.
Surely they could take a beating, right?
With that thought, Joey stopped suppressing his bio-field and slammed his forehead directly into the Thing's incoming stone fist.
The headbutt instantly shattered not only the Thing's fist, but half the rocky arm attached to it as well.
Joey's heat vision swept across the battlefield, interrupting Invisible Woman before she could reinforce her force fields again.
At the same time, Joey began struggling against the restraints binding him.
Unfortunately, rubber body was merely a simplified description of Mr. Fantastic's powers.
The actual strength and elasticity of Reed Richards' body were absurd far beyond ordinary imagination.
No matter how Joey stretched Reed's rubber-like arms farther and farther away—or even scorched and cut at them with heat vision—it accomplished almost nothing.
The more he struggled, the deeper he became trapped in an endless elastic prison.
That was Joey's perspective.
But Reed Richards, the one directly enduring Joey's terrifying strength with his own body, was sweating bullets.
He had already realized the massive gap in physical power between himself and his opponent.
The only reason he could still restrain Joey at all was because he was using technique to redirect overwhelming force.
But once this guy figured it out...
Wait.
During the exchange, Reed suddenly realized something far more horrifying.
Should this person even possess this level of strength at this point in the timeline?
Even in the future, that monster shouldn't have such pure physical strength!
Still deep in thought, Reed suddenly felt a tremendous force yank violently from the far end of his stretched body.
Then he lost his balance completely.
Oh no, that's bad.
Looks like he figured it out.
Reed immediately tried to release the restraint and retract his body, but it was already too late.
Joey had forcibly launched himself into the air while still bound, grabbed hold of Reed's massively extended arm, and began spinning.
Using his own body as the pivot point, Joey swung Mr. Fantastic around like a gigantic chained meteor hammer.
It became a full-speed, lethal blunt-force tornado.
Human Torch and Invisible Woman barely managed to evade the attack thanks to flight.
But the massive, cumbersome Thing was catastrophically unlucky.
Before Reed could soften and disperse his body again, he slammed directly into the Thing.
The enormous impact blasted the Thing away, launching him toward the distant horizon over the ocean.
Invisible Woman immediately tried to support her teammates by deploying another invisible force field and preparing a sneak attack.
The instant Joey noticed, he released Reed entirely and hurled the thoroughly disoriented Mr. Fantastic straight into the ruined foundation of the destroyed mansion.
Then Joey clapped his hands together.
BOOM.
A massive shockwave erupted outward from his palms.
By sensing the slightest disturbances in airflow and soundwaves, Joey pinpointed Invisible Woman—despite her being completely invisible even to his super vision.
One burst of heat vision immediately forced her back into visibility.
Watching her defensive force field struggle desperately against the overwhelming heat, Human Torch circled behind Joey at blazing speed and roared:
"Flame Storm!"
A gigantic plasma tornado erupted from Johnny's burning body and surged toward Joey.
"When you shout out the name of your attack, it kinda ruins the surprise."
Joey's super vision scanned straight through Johnny's body, clearly seeing that he had already transformed entirely into high-temperature plasma.
Facing the incoming inferno, Joey simply inhaled deeply and exhaled.
"What was it called again...? Ah right—Freeze breath."
An arctic gale swept across the battlefield.
Human Torch and his flame tornado froze simultaneously and shattered apart.
The overwhelming cold instantly forced Johnny back into human form.
Without his flames, he could no longer maintain flight.
He screamed as he plummeted toward the ground, smashing repeatedly through chunks of ruined debris along the way.
Every impact landed perfectly on the most painful possible areas.
"Oh... those looked like they hurt."
Watching Johnny bounce helplessly through the wreckage before finally crashing to the ground, Joey felt his mood improve considerably.
Then he pointed toward the only remaining member of the Fantastic Four still capable of fighting.
"Which means you're next, Invisible Woman."
Watching all three of her teammates fall one after another, Susan Storm clenched her fists tightly.
"Damn it..."
She stopped hiding entirely and instead sharpened her force fields into blade-like waves of energy before charging directly at Joey in one final desperate attack.
"I swear I'll kill you, Doctor Doom!"
"Oh ho, you're approaching me? Instead of running away, you're—wait a minute..."
Joey had almost instinctively started reciting classic hero-villain showdown dialogue with her.
But the moment he heard that name, he suddenly froze in bewilderment.
"Doctor Doom... me?!"
Invisible Woman's charge didn't stop.
Just like Human Torch, her flight speed was incredibly fast. In the blink of an eye, she had already arrived directly in front of the utterly bewildered Joey, driving forward behind a sharpened blade of force-field energy.
Joey casually swung one hand.
It looked less like a counterattack and more like someone lazily swatting away a fly.
Her defensive field and energy blade shattered instantly, completely erased in a single strike.
The collapsing force field sent Invisible Woman flying backward through the air.
She was already exhausted to begin with and could barely stay conscious.
Joey was still debating whether he should go catch her when Mr. Fantastic suddenly stretched both arms outward and pulled Susan safely down from the sky.
Looking at Joey hovering overhead—his down jacket and jeans burned through with multiple holes—Reed finally realized the other man had no intention of finishing them off while they were down.
A bitter smile appeared on Reed Richards' face.
"Everybody stop... We already lost."
Only then did Joey finally notice the condition of his clothes.
Belatedly activating the combat suit gifted to him by his father, living metal spread across his body, repairing and covering the damaged clothing.
A dark blue bodysuit formed across him, marked with the dark-gold crest of the House of El.
Behind him, the red cape extended from his shoulders and fluttered dramatically in the air.
The moment Reed saw that symbol, the last bit of hope in his desperate gamble completely disappeared.
Supporting Susan beside him, Reed looked up at Joey.
"This is clearly a massive misunderstanding. Can we talk?"
— Mr. Fantastic Explains Things —
"...Don't you think this creates a grandfather paradox?"
After hearing the explanation, Joey became even more annoyed.
He had basically just gotten dragged into another pointless beating for no reason.
"You're supposed to be one of the smartest people in the universe. How did you come up with such a stupid fucking plan?"
The cause of everything actually wasn't that complicated.
In Reed's future timeline, the Fantastic Four's archenemy—Doctor Doom—had already become unstoppable.
Driven into complete desperation, Reed decided to make one final gamble:
Solve the problem from the past.
"The Terminator plotline is so overused nobody even does it anymore, okay?!"
"It wasn't about simply killing him," Reed explained.
"The plan was to obtain his past self and force that version to collide with his future self. In theory, the resulting temporal paradox should completely erase him from existence."
"I don't care about your stupid plan."
Joey pointed angrily at himself.
"What I want to know is how the hell you four Fantastic Dumbasses mistook me for Victor von Doom."
Victor was, of course, Doctor Doom's real name.
At Joey's point in history—the past relative to Reed's timeline—Victor was probably still just an international student from the small Eastern European country of Latveria.
Most likely still Reed's classmate.
If they wanted to deal with Doctor Doom, then they should've gone to New York State University and looked for him there.
Instead, they barged into Tony Stark's mansion, dragged Joey into this weird dimensional space, and beat the hell out of him for no reason.
What kind of nonsense was that?
Faced with Joey's question, Reed slowly shook his head.
"No. Victor isn't Doctor Doom."
"When Doctor Doom destroyed New York during the extermination of the Avengers... I watched Victor die right in front of me."
Right.
Welcome to parallel universes.
Hearing that, Joey barely even reacted anymore.
Doctor Doom being someone else entirely? Sure. Why not.
At this point he was long used to worlds refusing to follow the script.
"So who is Doctor Doom, then? Don't tell me it's actually me."
"That's the problem," Reed answered grimly.
"We don't know who Doctor Doom really is."
That was exactly why the Fantastic Four had attacked Joey on sight.
"A long time ago, he cast a spell that erased his true name from the entirety of space-time itself."
"He probably realized we might eventually attempt something like this."
"So we used the Book of the Vishanti to perform a temporal divination spell. Through it, we identified a critical moment in history—"
"The moment he first created the Doom Robot Army capable of sweeping across the entire multiverse."
The strange dimension the five of them currently stood within was a paradoxical timeline that should never have existed.
It was the Fantastic Four's past.
Joey's future.
A theoretically unreachable point in existence.
According to Reed's calculations, the combination of magical divination and his time machine should have allowed them to precisely drag the relevant person connected to that historical moment into this space.
Instead...
They had summoned a completely unfamiliar innocent bystander.
"I truly am sorry."
"Our reckless actions nearly harmed a completely innocent person."
"Please don't worry. This paradox timeline is temporary. Soon enough, we'll all return to our own respective times."
"Perhaps this desperate gamble was doomed from the beginning. Maybe nothing can stop Doctor Doom and his robot armies from devastating the multiverse."
The moment Reed mentioned the robot army, even someone as mentally resilient as him covered his face and sighed in visible despair.
"God... you have no idea what those machines are like."
"They can perfectly imitate every single one of our powers—"
"And use them even better than we can."
"First the Avengers and SHIELD fell."
"Then the X-Men and mutantkind."
"After that... the entire universe."
"And then the universes beyond that."
"We're only alive now because we got lucky..."
"...Holy shit."
Listening to Reed describe those robots, Joey finally understood everything.
He knew exactly who this future "Doctor Doom" truly was.
Reed's time calculations had actually been frighteningly accurate.
And Joey was never some irrelevant outsider.
The Fantastic Four only needed to arrive one minute earlier—
And inside this paradox timeline, they would've encountered the person they truly wanted to kill.
Tony Stark.