Eighteen hours after Otto announced the takeover of Manhattan, at 8:00 AM Eastern Time on June 2nd.
After several hours of fierce combat, Thor and the others finally carved a path through Kang's nearly infinite fleet of warships. As they began their assault on Kang, they discovered a deeply frustrating reality: first, these vessels from the future possessed incredibly powerful force field shields that were nearly impossible to breach.
Second, as soon as one was destroyed, an identical ship—even the exterior paint was exactly the same—would instantly refresh out of thin air, appearing in the vicinity to brazenly mock the helplessness of the superheroes. Thor might eliminate one ship, only for another version of that same ship from a different timeline to immediately emerge and fill the gap.
It was only now that they managed to break through the enemy's defenses and finally reach Kang's flagship. Thor raised his divine hammer, summoning and teleporting the entire contingent, including the Avengers and the Thunderbolts, inside.
"I'm starting to doubt if we can ever truly win a battle against Kang. Perhaps we'll finally succeed in killing him, only to find another Kang from a second ago appearing right in front of us," Hank Pym remarked, maintaining an uncharacteristically pessimistic outlook. To combat Kang, he had brought Ultron along, hoping the machine might be of some assistance.
Captain America, however, remained unfazed. He simply said in a low voice, "We fight to the end, Hank. It's the only thing we can do."
"Honestly, thirty-first-century technology isn't quite as... advanced as I imagined," Tony Stark mused after carefully observing their surroundings. "No doubt, if Kang really does come from our future, then Earth must have experienced a massive technological regression at some point."
At the very least, Kang's level of technology sat within a range where Tony could grasp the general concepts. Considering how humanity a thousand years ago imagined the future, such stagnation seemed impossible—unless a Third World War had occurred, bombing all of humanity back to a wasteland era.
Walking at the very front, Doom wordlessly cast a spell. Even in the thirty-first century, science had yet to probe the true essence of magic. Good; that meant he still had a role to play here.
And so, the team pressed onward. Only Thor remained slightly behind, continuing to use the Bifrost to summon more and more reinforcements. As they advanced, a question began to surface in their minds.
"If Kang has the Time Gem, why hasn't our bearded Sherlock Holmes shown up?" Tony asked as they walked. Facing this question, Doom—the sole magical authority present—said nothing. He was busy calculating how to seize Kang's future technology for his own use.
In other words, Doom did not believe for a second that they would lose.
As they progressed, massive robots resembling ancient Egyptian scarabs appeared in the corridors, blocking the heroes' path. Hulk was the first to charge, slamming a fist into a giant machine and letting out a roar. With punch after punch, Hulk smashed the scarab robots aside, leaving the hallway littered with mechanical wreckage.
Hulk prepared to move forward but was stopped by the machines again—these scarab robots seemed to undergo a reversal of time, their frames rapidly self-repairing until they were perfectly intact before resuming their attack. Not only that, but the entire corridor was partitioned into several sections by force fields, and an increasingly vast, nearly endless swarm of scarab robots began to pour out.
Kang was stalling for time. He was currently in his command center, staring at a specific casing and feeling a sense of mounting difficulty. To counter the multiversal incursion crisis set to appear in 2015, Kang required a power originating from the same source as the incursions: the Cosmic Cube.
Thus, using the alias Mr. Gryphon, he had joined A.I.M. By utilizing the data they had stolen from Hydra regarding the Tesseract, he had manufactured a vessel capable of containing spatial rifts from the Beyond Realm—the shell of a Cosmic Cube. Next, he only needed to open a rift to the Beyond Realm and draw its power into this container to complete a Cosmic Cube.
Then, Kang the Conqueror encountered an unprecedented problem that he could not solve: when Kang created a Cosmic Cube in the thirty-first century and attempted to bring it back to the twenty-first century, he discovered he was physically unable to do so.
The reason was that the Cosmic Cube, as an object capable of reshaping the entire universe, altering reality, and even completely rewriting fundamental mathematical logic, possessed a natural flaw. This flaw was fatal to Kang: the power of the Beyond Realm was tied to linear time.
In other words, a Cosmic Cube could not time travel. It could not be targeted by any space-time engines, including the Time Gem, and no temporal abilities or equipment could affect it. Therefore, once Kang created one in the thirty-first century, he had no way to bring it back to the year 2013.
However, Earth in the year 2013 lacked the technological conditions and capacity to open a rift to the Beyond Realm, making it impossible to manufacture a Cosmic Cube in that era from scratch.
This was why he was stalling. If not for this obstacle, he would have already raised the Cosmic Cube to annihilate all the superheroes.
"The most important thing now is to bring the semi-finished Cosmic Cube into this era. Since a completed Cube is destined to be immune to the influence of time, I can only complete part of the work in the thirty-first century and then finish the rest in 2013."
Muttering to himself, Kang frowned. This sudden complication prevented him from utilizing his greatest advantage, forcing him to rely on his technological footlings to buy time.
By the time twenty-six hours had passed, the Avengers and the other heroes finally broke through all obstacles to reach the bridge. But once there, they found no sign of Kang the Conqueror.
Doom scanned the surroundings and reached a conclusion: "He was here recently. He clearly left abruptly due to some urgent matter."
"How likely is it that he's afraid of us and ran away, Tony?" Pym asked.
"He might play dirty and try to wear us down with endless time, but he wouldn't choose to just flee. There's no point in that."
Tony found Pym's question baffling. He didn't think Kang actually feared them, but if Kang wasn't here, where was he? Tony walked onto the bridge, looked at the residual energy data, and turned around to ask a question.
"What's the situation in Manhattan now?"