CHAPTER 136 - QUICK HOMECOMING

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We were beamed back to earth without much fanfare except a mild sending off from Thor. Even though I could produce a 3D projection of the inner dome of the Bifrost, I was nowhere close to deciphering the primordial runes etched into the very structure.

It would require an Odin-level of knowledge of runes to recreate the Bifrost but thankfully, with the spatial coordinates I assimilated from the logs of Thanos' ship, I'll soon be able to quantum-shift across galaxies. 

"Hmm? Where's everyone? And why is smoke coming from the Compound?" Wanda pointed out as soon as the scenery around us turned familiar. 

I sighed exasperatedly as I soon understood what was happening. 

"Let's go. Doom is attacking the Avengers." I said as I flew towards where Doom was holding the Ant-Man by his neck while stepping on the Falcon's downed form. 

His eyes contracted as Scott and Sam's bodies disappeared from his grasp and were directly beamed up to the Overwatch's medbay. 

'Looks like I'm finding more uses for quantum-shifting. It's basically teleportation and translocation at this point.' I idly mused and waved my hands, only for Doom to get pummeled into the ground by a fist construct that appeared directly above him. 

"Seriously?" Why is Banner always exempt or incapacitated during important fights? Poor guy was hit with a spell before he could even Hulk out. 

"Pietro, help Stark clear out the troops of Doombots." I informed the speedster calmly even as a car passed through me. "Wanda, Selene has ensnared Steve and Yelena. Try holding her back while I round up with Doom."

After giving out those orders, I finally turned around to face Doom who now wielded six pairs of magic circles around his hands. 

"And here I thought we had an understanding, Your Highness. Why then the sudden hostility?" I asked as I floated closer to him. 

"The Infinity Stone, and Doom gives you his words to seize the attack." He said. I could already hear Wanda and Selene going crazy with their magic spells in the background. 

"And I remember telling you that I can't, under no circumstances, give you the stone." I stressed out, knowing fully well how futile it was. 

"A shame." He appeared on my side and magic binds immediately shot out to bind me, only for them to crash against the force field barrier I had put up. 

I threw a casual punch at Doom but my hand easily went through his armored body that was now glowing with patterns of a magic circle while the real Doom appeared behind me and activated a pair of magic circles around his hands that instantly turned to worn out bandages that were quickly wrapping around my other arm. 

'Sealing? Not quite. But I know he's definitely suppressing something.' 

Unlike what he might've been expecting, I wasn't worried about what he was trying to do. 

"I might not be a master of the arts, but I'm not ignorant of it." With a little tug on the Mind Stone, Doom's magic broke apart into motes of light. 

Magic was just another facet of energy manipulation, that's why at a high enough point of it, it becomes hard to distinguish it from science. 

"Enough playing around." He tried flicking to another location but I already had the entire Compound in a 360° view so I immediately noted his movements and my hand extended faster than a bullet and grabbed him. 

I didn't give him the chance to speak as I teleported the both of us to the clouds where the clouds were slowly getting darker. 

A single spark of electricity was all that was needed for the world to turn white as lightning struck us without remorse. 

With the electromagnetic spectrum of my abilities, I kept fumbling with the growing charges of lightning in the clouds; increasing it to the point that all the clouds around us had lightning bubbling around us. 

A second spark of electricity and the deafening sound of thunder assaulted our ears as I drowned Doom in a literal ball of lightning. 

"Would have been better had you started with the mirror dimension." I remarked as I threw Doom's spasming body to the ground in cuffs and shot towards where Selene and Wanda were duking it out. 

"Seriously?" I muttered irritably as I saw Selene occasionally summoning Steve and Yelena to her vicinity, forcing Wanda to tone down on her output which made it all the more harder for Wanda to keep up with the dark priestess. 

"Pietro-" 

"On it." The speedster got the two compromised fighters and beamed them up to Overwatch. 

"Natasha and Laura fall back now." They didn't hesitate and quickly beamed back up to the Overwatch. 

I cocked my fist and increased its density by magnitudes, increasing the strength of my Hulk physique by an ungodly factor. 

Tearing through the flimsy sound barrier like tissue paper, my form shrunk down to an ant's size, further boosting the density due to the compression of my body mass, as I shot towards an obvious Selene and brought down my hand from the top of her head. 

One punch. And Selene's body exploded into a shower of blood and gore while the entire area around her exploded with her, leaving only a 100 meter deep hole after the dust cleared off. 

"Pissed off much?" 

"She's annoying as hell."

"That's another thing we can both agree on… but are you sure she's really dead?"

I shrugged. "Even if she's not dead, which is very likely, I doubt she'll walk that off with a shrug. If she's still not dead, she's halfway there with that punch." 

I shifted out of my hero costume back to my human form and beamed us back to the Overwatch. 

"You couldn't have come at a more better time, Vision. Morgana out there was handling our asses to us after she couldn't find you." Tony, now out of his suit, made the first comment upon our arrival. 

"Me? Why?" I asked confusedly. Wasn't she more interested in Wanda? 

"How would I know? You just had to stick it in the craziest one you could find, uh?" He joked as we arrived at the medbay. 

"Diagnosis."

[Their theta and delta waves have been heavily impacted, and almost warped in its reverberating pattern]

[CAUTION: Extreme care is advised when trying to repair their brainwaves] 

The diagnosis was heard by everybody inside the bay so we automatically turned to the resident expert at manipulating brainwaves – Wanda.

While I could use the Mind Stone, or even my own telepathy to tweak them back to normal, the nature of Wanda's chaos magic was the best natural solution, most especially when the mindjack was done by black magic. 

"So, Doom?" I turned to Natasha and asked after we left Wanda to do her thing. 

"Yeah, that was a clusterfuck and a half. He outright demanded the Infinity Stone and started attacking when we refused. We had thought it was only him, but who would have thought Selene would partner up with someone like Doom? Like you saw, the result wasn't pretty." She said, giving me a brief summary of what had transpired and led to the present situation. 

I scratched my head irritably, followed by a tired groan. "I left for just a few days and everything almost turned to shit."

"Almost." She repeated before changing the progressively bleak topic. "So how was your unplanned trip?"

"Well…" Now it was my turn to fill her in on what happened from the time we got accidentally beamed up to a besieged planet where we fought flaming demons from hellfire before we met up with Thor. 

It then went to our days in Asgard before swiftly moving to our little adventure traveling through the galaxies of outer space. At this point, Natasha was already regretting on the missed chance of a space mission. 

"Killed Thanos, the big bad, along with his entire army, retrieved the Time Stone, and made our way back here without anybody knowing what we did to Thanos' empire. That's basically it."

"Wow. Sounds like a hell of a time you guys had. Thankfully you're back." She said. 

"But I was here the entire time." I was. From the moment we left, my consciousness woke up in one of my prototype skins. So technically, and quite literally also, I never left. 

However she shook her head. "Hearing you talk through a scrap robot replacement and seeing you in your main body are two entirely different things."