When Miles opened his eyes again, the ashes of a cosmic explosion seemed to linger deep within his pupils, and his expression was utterly dazed.
"What's wrong, boss?"
Psylocke's cool voice sounded beside his ear. She keenly sensed that Miles's psychic fluctuations were extremely unstable, like the sea barely settling after a raging storm.
"...How much time passed just now?" Miles murmured instinctively, then connected to the data network on reflex. The answer appeared instantly.
Three seconds.
[Only three seconds?]
A powerful sense of temporal dislocation washed over his consciousness. The cosmic epic that had seemed to span billions of years and the brief three seconds of reality violently collided and tore at each other in his mind, nearly making him vomit.
Only after quite some time did that sense of fragmentation slowly fade, allowing his consciousness to fit his body once more.
Then, still shaken, he looked again at the Mind Stone in his hand. After hesitating for a long time, he took a deep breath and finally made his decision.
Holding the gem in his palm, he carefully pressed it back into Ultron's forehead.
"Are you done studying it already?" Tony asked in surprise. "I thought you'd take it back and not return it."
"It's enough." Miles shook his head, a trace of exhaustion in his voice that even he had not noticed. "It showed me some... very special things. I need some time now to think things through."
As soon as he spoke, a faint breeze quietly swirled around him, stirring his hair before vanishing in an instant, as though it had merely been an illusion.
Only Psylocke's gaze shifted slightly among those present.
That was not wind.
It was an exceedingly subtle psychic aftershock leaking from Miles's body before he swiftly reined it in... Yet psychic