Artillery thundered, and Thanos's roaring, mountain-shaking army clashed with the Avengers' forces.
Flashes of light in various colors streaked across the battlefield.
Iron Man Tony and Pepper Potts engaged in their signature yellow-and-blue hero dynamic.
Thor flew back and forth through the air, while a giant-sized Ant-Man crushed scores of enemies beneath his boots, accompanied by Doctor Strange and his sorcerers unleashing their most dazzling spells.
Powerful as the superheroes were, Thanos's army was simply too vast, stretching endlessly as far as the eye could see.
Aside from the elite superheroes carving paths of destruction, the baseline combat strength of the Avengers clearly fell short compared to Thanos's horde.
At that moment, Thanos was engaged in battle with the Scarlet Witch, whose fury made her terrifyingly unstoppable.
Thanos could effortlessly handle Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor all at once, but against the enraged Scarlet Witch, he was completely defenseless.
Realizing he was about to be torn apart by this madwoman, a desperate Thanos had no choice but to activate the artillery barrage of Sanctuary II.
*Boom! Boom!*
The overwhelming firepower instantly upended the ground forces.
Even the Scarlet Witch, who had Thanos pinned down, was blown away by a direct blast.
The sorcerer legions cast protective energy shields to defend themselves, while Doctor Strange used his formidable magic to hold back the floodwaters rushing into the crater.
At that moment, Rory gritted his teeth, slipped out from his hiding spot, and cautiously crept toward Thanos.
The warships ceased their volley, turning their cannons toward the sky as Carol Danvers finally broke through the upper atmosphere and arrived at the main battlefield.
A golden flash trailing a long plume of fire pierced the sky, hurtling at breakneck speed straight toward Sanctuary II.
*Boom!*
The warship was blasted completely through, stunning the superheroes.
With Carol Danvers joining the fight, the tide instantly turned for the Avengers, who launched a counteroffensive against Thanos's army.
Seeing Carol rushing toward the van equipped with the quantum tunnel carrying the Infinity Stones, a battered Thanos hurled his double-bladed sword at the last second, destroying the tunnel.
The instantaneous shockwave blew everyone flying.
As ill luck would have it, the Infinity Gauntlet slipped from Carol's grasp and landed not far from Rory.
"Damn it, I'm going to die."
Rory shrank his head in, playing dead as he tried to blend in with the pile of rubble as much as possible.
The final round for the Infinity Gauntlet had officially entered its climax.
Tony Stark went first, but was knocked away.
Thor and Captain America stepped up next, only to be sent flying as well, with Captain America knocked cold by a single punch.
Carol Danvers attacked twice, but Thanos ripped the Power Stone from the gauntlet and blasted her away with a punch, sending her flying into the unknown.
Tony glanced at Doctor Strange in the distance, then charged once more at Thanos, who now held the stones.
*Bang!*
"I am... inevitable!" Thanos said softly, looking down at the fallen Tony.
*Snap!*
The snap echoed, but nothing happened. Thanos realized with a shock that there were no stones on the gauntlet at all.
The stones had somehow been transferred onto the hand of Tony Stark.
"I... am... Iron Man!"
*Snap!*
*Bang!*
Tony's snap rang out almost simultaneously with the gunshot from the M1911 in Rory's hand.
The moment the snap finished, Rory felt a deep tremor ripple through his soul—an indescribable sensation. The entire world seemed to have changed, yet somehow remained entirely the same.
A deeply discordant illusion.
"Ugh—!"
Thanos suddenly felt something bite his arm. He turned his head and saw Rory holding a pistol.
Thanos took two steps forward, then dissolved into a cloud of dust and vanished between heaven and earth.
"Mr. Stark! Hey, Mr. Stark, can you hear me?" Spider-Man rushed to Tony's side with a trembling voice. "I'm Peter Parker. We won, Mr. Stark, you did it... I'm sorry, Tony..."
Spider-Man choked back tears, hoping Tony would say something.
It wasn't until Pepper Potts walked over that Tony managed to squeeze out two words with immense difficulty.
"FRIDAY."
"Vital signs extremely weak."
Suppressing the deep sorrow in her heart, Pepper held back her tears and said gently, "Tony, we're going to be fine... You can rest now."
Tony took his final breath, and the iconic arc reactor on his chest gradually flickered out.
Unable to hold back any longer, Pepper broke down in a fit of crying.
Just as everyone else was consumed by grief, Rory quietly crept over to the spot where Thanos had vanished, picked up a tiny needle from the ground, tucked it into his pocket, and silently slipped away behind the ruins.
***
"Phage infection experiment number 57 failed. The hormone-active pseudo-atoms in Thanos's blood sample refuse to fuse."
"Chromosomal gene interoperability at 99%, DNA rejection reaction evident."
"Experimental approach: Recombine the DNA sequence, reprogram the chromosomes, factor in the glucose levels of the blood sample, and cultivate a third-generation Thanos bloodline."
Rory recorded his experiment into the active camera.
He removed the blood sample from the microscope, sighed, and walked over to another workbench.
Rory had once thought that the serum used by Captain America was a genetic enhancer, an extra boost provided by some external substance.
But after obtaining Thanos's blood sample, Rory realized how wrong he had been—spectacularly wrong.
The serum injected into Captain America wasn't an enhancement drug; it was an alteration, fundamentally changing the genetic material inside Steve Rogers at its core.
If a human were a hard drive, from birth, that hard drive would have a person's height, appearance, personality, and every other biological trait written into it. The serum's function was to forcibly overwrite this data to achieve individual enhancement.
Steve was still Steve, but he was no longer the Steve he used to be.
Through numerous experiments, Rory finally verified this theory, one he had never considered before.
However, when he tried to extract the genetic information from Thanos's blood sample, he discovered that the genetic heritage of the Eternals' descendants was extremely complex and could not be extracted individually as a discrete unit.
The most effective method was to dilute the data within Thanos's blood sample.
It was akin to compression: condensing a ten-megapixel photo down to one megapixel. The overall information remained the same, but it would become blurry.
Rory had crossed over without any system or golden finger, so he had to create his own.
Theoretically, the "compressed" bloodline form wouldn't change; what would change was the bloodline's strength.
Perhaps it would retain one-tenth of Thanos's power, or perhaps one-millionth—the exact result was impossible to predict.
"Third iterative culture experiment of blood sample commencing."
"Synthesize 1/2 sugar-acid, extract 1/5 aqueous protein and low-molecular-weight substances, and inject an equivalent ratio of DNA for secondary cultivation."
He injected the mixture into the culture tank and waited for the blood sample to form autonomously.
Once finished, Rory sat down at the computer to begin the next set of calculations. The computing power of this machine was limited; if he had a supercomputer with the processing power of Tony Stark's systems, the calculations would be finished in a fraction of a minute.
While Rory was busy researching the serum, the Avengers on the other side had just concluded Tony's funeral.
"Captain, what should we do with those stones?" Sam Wilson walked up to Captain America and asked.
The Avengers Compound had been destroyed, and the new one had yet to be built. To avoid any complications arising from delay, Sam hoped to deal with the stones from the other timelines as soon as possible.
Captain America replied, "Of course we're going to return the stones. By the way, has anyone seen Rory?"
"Who's Rory?"
Aside from the few who had interacted with him, the rest of the Avengers all wore expressions of sheer confusion.