Void Fortress, control room.
The glow of a holographic projection lit Tony Stark's face.
Seventeen hours.
He had worked at full intensity for seventeen hours straight.
He had long since taken off his signature armor, and his black tank top was soaked with oil and sweat.
His eyes were bloodshot, but the light burning deep in them was fiercer than ever.
Across from him, Reed Richards's fingers flew.
His body was still weak, but his hands moved so fast over the holographic keyboard that they blurred.
Two of the greatest minds were locked in a near-mad collision of ideas in the void.
"Sir, progress has reached 98%."
JARVIS spoke as rapidly as a machine gun.
Data cascaded down in curtains of light. Every second, thousands of lines of code were generated, tested, discarded, and rebuilt.
Chu Hang stood before the viewport, quietly watching the fortress change.
The once-lifeless planetary wreckage was sprouting dense tangles of metal vines.
They twisted and fused together, locking hundreds of fragments into a single whole.
Stranger still, pale gold liquid flowed beneath the vines.
They were blood vessels.
And blood pulsed through them.
The dead fortress was becoming a half-biological, half-mechanical living warship!
The transformation was astonishingly fast.
Whoosh—
Something cut through the air.
Clark Kent flew back inside, silver metal dust clinging to his red-and-gold cape.
He had been helping install defensive nodes around the perimeter. Every weapon made from Mapmaker wreckage needed a final energy connection from his Heat Vision.
He went to Chu Hang's side and murmured in his ear.
Chu Hang merely shook his head, his gaze fixed on the enormous engine taking shape in the distance.
It was the Cross-Dimensional Engine.
It had been forged from fragments of the Law of Space extracted from the wreckage of 3,700 universes.
Once