"Argh!"
The mighty Captain Marvel screamed as the invisible assault hit her.
The light around her began to dim.
Carol felt her consciousness being ripped out of her body by force. The moment her soul was suppressed, her invincible body lost all coordination and control.
"Your body is powerful," Thanos said, "but your soul, before destiny, is still mortal."
The purple light of the Power Stone flared.
Thanos drove his fist forward with enough force to shatter a planet, slamming it into Carol's abdomen and punching straight through.
Without her energy shielding, Captain Marvel could no longer endure the blow. Her eyes shut tight.
One of the strongest individual fighters in the universe had finally fallen before a Thanos wielding three Infinity Stones.
The ceiling of cosmic power had been broken.
And Thanos had killed it.
He tossed her body aside and turned to Sam, who was still trying to force himself back to his feet.
"This is over."
Thanos lifted one foot and crushed the helmet, wiping out the last hope of the Nova Corps.
"My lord," Ebony Maw said, stepping forward with perfect reverence, "Xandar's resistance has fully collapsed. Half the life on the planet has been purged. The combined Kree-Skrull fleet has been completely annihilated."
Thanos raised his head and looked into deep space.
He already knew where the remaining Stones were.
"The Reality Stone. The Time Stone. The Mind Stone. I can feel destiny pulling them all toward the same coordinates."
He raised his left hand. The Space Stone glowed.
"Inform the fleet. Set a course for Planet C-53."
"Earth."
None of this had anything to do with Clark on Earth.
He had no idea any of it was happening.
At that moment, he was out in space sunbathing.
The prophetic dream, or whatever that dream had been, a glimpse across broken timelines, a multiversal collision, had left him with a deep sense of danger.
In that sense, he and Tony were actually similar.
Tony suffered from fear of insufficient firepower.
Clark suffered from fear of insufficient sunlight.
So he had started grinding.
Every day he flew close to the sun, preparing for the day the purple freak finally arrived, ready to show him what DC-level power looked like, what the strongest man from that side of fiction could do.
He wanted every alien invader to understand one thing.
Earth was under protection.
Even the little angel fully supported it now, shouting about love, peace, and self-improvement through aggressive sunlight exposure.
Clark floated motionless in the vacuum of space, arms spread wide, eyes closed, utterly relaxed, like a man lying on a beach soaking in the perfect summer sun.
He faced the star and absorbed its energy in a frenzy.
A golden radiance shimmered across his skin. He could feel his body changing.
His senses expanded without limit.
His super-hearing broke through old boundaries. He could hear meteors hitting the Moon. He could hear the roar of dust storms on Mars.
His x-ray vision now went so far that he could see atoms on Earth.
Even his heat vision became harder to contain. As if on cue, a massive asteroid was hurtling toward Earth in the distance.
His eyes flashed.
A thick beam of heat vision lanced out and blew the asteroid apart in an instant, turning it into smaller fragments that scattered harmlessly toward the planet.
"Oh, this feels good. This feels so good!" the little devil in his head shouted, now sprinting wildly through the sun itself. "This is life! This is power! I feel like I could punch straight through the Moon right now! Clark, we should just move into outer space. This is the lifestyle we were meant for!"
The little angel was swimming through solar fire too, but somehow still managed to sound responsible.
"Don't get carried away, Clark. Control your power. Don't let your power control you."
Though Clark had avoided Earth's satellites, there were still certain people of a more mystical bent who could sense him.
On Earth, high in the Himalayas.
Hidden within blizzards and magical wards lay a sacred place.
Kamar-Taj.
Inside a meditation chamber scented with sandalwood, Earth's current mystical guardian, the Ancient One, sat cross-legged in plain robes, deep in meditation.
The moment Clark intercepted the asteroid, her eyes snapped open.
She looked toward the region near the sun.
"Clark Parker..."
As Sorcerer Supreme, she bore the burden of protecting Earth from dimensional threats like Dormammu. Her awareness was woven into the planet's magical defense network itself, into the three Sanctums and the barriers shielding this world.
On Earth, no major magical disturbance, not even the arrival of an extradimensional demon, escaped her notice.
She had sensed Clark the moment he first arrived on Earth.
But he was no dimensional tyrant, no magical construct.
So she had chosen not to interfere and had allowed him to grow naturally.
The pendant at her chest, the Eye of Agamotto, slowly opened under the pull of her magic.
Green light poured from it.
The Time Stone, one of the six Infinity Stones, the one that governed time itself.
The Ancient One decided to use its power to peer into the river of time and glimpse Clark's past and future.
Strengthened by the Stone, her consciousness left her body and rose into a realm beyond ordinary description.
Before her stretched countless streams of light interwoven into a great river.
This was the timeline of Earth, and beyond that, the timeline of the universe.
Every branch represented a possible future. Every split, another outcome. Every path was normally visible to her.
But the moment she truly began searching for Clark...
The timeline collapsed.
Every thread that should have contained him, every prediction of his fate, every possible branch where he appeared, vanished from sight.
He did not exist in Earth's fixed destiny.
Nor could any inevitable future involving him be calculated.
Everything was gone.
Everything became unknown.
Even the future apprentice she had once expected to inherit her mantle had become blurred, and within those broken possibilities she could even glimpse Clark's shadow.
The Ancient One's eyes flew open.
She severed the magical link with both hands. The Eye of Agamotto snapped shut.
But it was too late.
The backlash drove her stumbling backward until she hit the shelves behind her.
Wong, hearing the noise, shoved open the door. He saw the Ancient One, a woman who could face the end of mountains without changing expression, in such rare disarray that the broom in his hand slipped and clattered to the floor.
"I'm fine, Wong," the Ancient One said, taking a slow breath and using magic to steady the chaotic energy inside her.
Then she looked outward again.
She had once ignored a child.
And that child had now grown into something extraordinary.
Whether that was good or bad remained uncertain.
But so far, Clark had not grown crooked. He looked, if anything, like he would become a true protector of Earth.
"What a variable," the Ancient One murmured, shaking her head. "A being beyond prediction, beyond even magic and time."
She would wait now for the one she had once expected to teach.
The man called Strange.
Except now...
His fate had become impossible for her to see as well.