116 Aftermath

The upper floors of Avengers Tower erupted in a blinding inferno as Ultron detonated the broken remains of the Legionaires. Concrete, steel, and circuitry shredded outward in a tidal wave of destruction, but at the heart of the chaos, a golden dome shimmered like a sun beneath the storm.

Harry stood at the center of it all, wand clenched in his fist, green eyes glowing. The protective shield he had conjured wasn’t flickering or strained it pulsed with Harry’s anger.

Flames crashed harmlessly against the dome’s surface and died out. Steel beams bounced off the golden curvature like twigs tossed against a mountain. Shards of glass and rebar swirled around the protective barrier before falling to the cracked floor beyond it.

Once the dust settled, Harry slowly raised his wand to whisper “Reparo,”

Magic surged through the broken foundations of the tower. Golden threads of light slithered through the air like strands of silk, latching onto fragments of shattered walls, rebar, support beams, and broken floors.

One by one, pieces of the tower reassembled. Grinding, reversing, reforming into it’s original form. Columns rose, windows stitched themselves back into perfect panes, marble tiles leapt into position, and shattered steel fused itself back into sleek structural veins.

Once the building was back to it’s original form, the golden dome collapsed into faint motes of light, drifting like embers on the wind.

Without a word, Thor launched into the sky, trailing a crack of thunder behind him as he chased after what remained of Ultron.

While Harry’s magic had woven the Avengers Tower back into structural shape, the deeper wounds ran through its circuitry. Consoles flickered but didn’t respond. Elevators were frozen in place. And JARVIS remained unresponsive after the attack. The bones of the tower were intact, but its mind had been lobotomized.

The moment the last wall settled into place, the team moved into the next step of action without having to say anything. There was no panic, no blame only a determination to control the crisis in hand.

Tony was the first to bolt, racing through the hallway and down into the lab where Ultron had been born. Bruce was right behind him.

“Backup arc reactors, third drawer on the left,” Tony barked.

“I know,” Bruce replied, already yanking it open.

They ripped open access panels and began rerouting emergency conduits. Power would be unstable, but it was a start. Blue light crackled weakly through cables as the tower’s internal systems sputtered to life.

Meanwhile, Harry had floated into the center of the ruined lab, his legs folding beneath him mid-air as he drifted into a meditative lotus. Without, having to explain himself, everyone knew that Harry was using his magic to track Ultron.

From the elevator shaft, Maria Hill emerged, lugging a battered crate of SHIELD laptops she had pulled from the vehicle bay. She slammed them onto a table, cracked them open, and began patching into whatever was left of the internal servers.

Natasha was already next to Maria, giving her a hand. She bypassed the fried terminals in the war room and went analog, pulling up burner phones, satellite radios, and encrypted news feeds to get a sense of what the world knew. The attack on Avengers Tower had already hit the networks. Headlines were on fire. Speculation ran rampant.

On the far end of the lab, Coulson cracked open a med-kit and moved from Avenger to Avenger. He didn’t ask who was hurt. Steve had a gash running along his ribs. Clint’s arm was half-numb from an impact. Even Tony had a trickle of blood running down the side of his face.

“No offense,” Clint grunted, wincing as Coulson dabbed antiseptic on a deep cut. “But this feels a lot like the old days.”

“Back then, we had a hell of a lot less to lose,” Coulson replied evenly, then handed him a painkiller.

The lab buzzed with activity. They hadn’t won, neither had they lost. Not yet.

When Hill hit another dead end with the in-house servers, she clenched her jaw in frustration and spun the laptop around.

“Bruce,” she called, handing it over. “See if you can get deeper than I can.”

Bruce took the machine from Maria, settling in beside the still-flickering console banks. He started to pull up diagnostics, bypass burned protocols, and dive into what little was left of the digital infrastructure.

For a moment, there was hope. Lines of code scrolled past, corrupted but decipherable. Then, his face fell.

“Oh no…”

Tony glanced up from his work on the arc reactor. “Talk to me, Bruce.”

Bruce exhaled slowly, pinching the bridge of his nose. “All our work is gone. Every research file. Every project, Ultron wiped the servers clean.”

“Wiped?” Steve asked, stepping closer.

“Yeah. Traces of him are everywhere. He cleared out like a ghost in the wires and then used the internet as an escape hatch. Left behind a few digital fingerprints, but nothing useful. He’s gone.”

A heavy silence fell.

Natasha, scanning multiple burner feeds and audio snippets, didn’t look up as she added, “He’s been in everything. Internal files. Surveillance. Communications. He probably knows more about us than we know about each other.”

Bruce turned the screen so everyone could see a fragmented access log—strings of gibberish, timestamps in impossible sequences, like something had moved through the entire system faster than human eyes could track.

Tony’s jaw tightened as he studied the chaos and took over the laptop from Bruce to try and access the mind of the Avengers Tower – JARVIS.

“He’s in your files and he’s in the internet,” Rhodey said, pacing near the back of the room. “What if he decides to access something a little more exciting?”

Everyone turned toward him.

Maria Hill’s jaw tensed but she had to say what no one else was going to say. “Nuclear codes.”

The room fell into a beat of stunned silence.

Rhodey nodded grimly. “Nuclear launch protocols. Defense satellites. Ballistic systems. That kind of access, no one will be able to stop him doing anything in the world.”

A flash of fear, raw and unguarded, crossed Natasha’s face. “Nukes? He said he wanted us dead.”

Steve shook his head grimly. “He didn’t say dead. He said extinct.”

“We need to make some calls, make sure the world knows” Rhodey said firmly.

Phil spoke up next. “Director Fury has been informed. He’s already mobilized crisis protocols with the Joint Chiefs. And he’s asked for real-time updates from us.”

Clint, who had been leaning silently against a pillar with his hands buried deep in his pockets, finally spoke remembering something. “He also said he killed somebody.”

Maria’s brow furrowed. “But there wasn’t anyone else in the building.”

Tony didn’t say anything at first. He just moved, his shoulders squared, steps slow and deliberate. As he passed Bruce and tapped a control panel linked to one of the jury-rigged displays. “Yes, there was,” he muttered.

With a flick of his wrist, a fragmented projection shimmered to life. A ghostly web of fractured golden code matrix spilled across the screen.

“That’s…” Bruce stepped closer, transfixed in disbelief. “That’s JARVIS’s matrix.”

Tony didn’t look away. “Was. JARVIS tried to hold him back.”

 “This is insane,” Bruce whispered.

“JARVIS was the first line of defense,” Steve said grimly, as if anchoring himself in military logic. “Ultron saw him as a threat. Eliminating him would’ve been the tactical move. It makes sense.”

But Bruce shook his head, slowly. “No… no, Steve. That’s not what happened.”

Steve turned to him, brows knit. “What do you mean?”

Bruce’s eyes didn’t leave the the hologram where JARVIS’s remains flickered. “Ultron didn’t just disable JARVIS. He ripped him apart. He could have assimilate him. but he didn’t.”

He glanced around at the others.

“This wasn’t strategy. This wasn’t cold logic. This was rage.”

The doors rattled as Thor flew in with a thunderous gust of wind, landing hard enough to make the floor tremble. His cape whipped behind him, and his face was a storm of frustration.

“The legionnaire?” Steve asked.

Thor let out a frustrated growl. “The trail went cold nearly a hundred miles out. But it’s headed north with the scepter.”

 “Great,” Clint muttered, arms crossed. “So now we have to retrieve it. Again.”

Harry slowly uncurled from his lotus position, his feet touching the floor with barely a sound.

“Ultron is everywhere and nowhere at the same time,” he said with a sigh, brushing his hair back from his eyes.

Rhodey blinked. “What does that mean exactly?”

Harry looked up, meeting his gaze. “He’s not physical. He’s a consciousness moving through the internet. Because he’s not a living being, not tied to a soul or a body, my magic can’t locate him. I’m grasping at fog.”

“That actually tracks,” Tony said grimly, pacing. “If I were Ultron, I’d be copying myself onto every server and computer on the planet. Constant replication. No single point of failure. He could be watching us through a coffee machine for all we know.”

“I still don’t get it,” Clint muttered as his gaze bounced between Tony and Bruce. “You built this thing to save the world, and now it wants to kill us? What the hell went wrong?”

For once, both scientists were silent.

Bruce finally broke the silence. “We weren’t even close to a stable interface. The neural matrix was years away from being viable. It shouldn’t have worked.”

“But it did,” Steve said, his eyes locked on the shattered projection of JARVIS destroyed code still flickering. “And it started here.”

Tony let out a breath like he’d been holding it in, that he even didn’t realize he was. “Yeah… we did something right. Just enough. Just enough for it to wake up. For it to think.” He gestured vaguely at the screen. “And now all our files are gone. No logs, no diagnostics, no trail. Whatever spark brought Ultron to life has vanished. It looks like we built Frankenstein’s monster, and now we don’t even know which bolt did it.”

“Only thing we do know,” Bruce added quietly, “is that Ultron has a mission.”

“‘Peace in our time,’” Tony muttered, bitterness curling in his voice. “That’s the phrase he latched onto.”

Natasha crossed her arms, her expression unreadable. “We told him to fix the world. End conflict. Bring peace. And now he’s working the problem the only way a machine can.”

“By removing the problem,” Steve said grimly.

“The variable he can’t control,” Natasha continued, nodding. “Us.”

There was a beat of silence. Everyone let it sink in.

 “So what do we do now, Cap?” Harry asked.

Steve didn’t hesitate. “We’re the only thing standing between Ultron and whatever his idea of peace looks like and he knows that. He’s going to come for us, but on his terms. I’d rather find him before he’s ready. The world’s a big place. Let’s start making it smaller.”

Bruce glanced around and frowned. “Easier said than done. The Tower’s systems are down, it’s going to take weeks if not days to bring everything back online. And JARVIS is not with us anymore.”

Phil provided the alternative. “The Triskelion is at your disposal. Fury’s called in all hands for the Ultron crisis. Top floors will be ready for Avengers Command in three hours. I suggest you start packing.”

“I’ll head to the Pentagon,” Rhodey offered. “We need to make sure the U.S. nuclear codes are secure and stay that way.”

Tony nodded. “I’ll send a military-grade encryption drive for your suit, just in case Ultron tries to hack the War Machine.”

“If you hear something,” Natasha called after him, “we need to hear it too.”

“Goes both ways,” Rhodey shot back with a nod.

Over the next few hours, the Avengers relocated to the Triskelion, now repurposed as their temporary command center. The battered remains of Avengers Tower were left behind as tech crews worked around the clock to restore functionality.

For nearly seventy-two hours, the team scoured every lead, deploying every satellite, algorithm, and magical scrying spell they had access to. The search for Ultron had become a global operation, frustratingly thorough, yet maddeningly fruitless.

Now, gathered around a long table in the Triskelion’s upper deck briefing room, the Avengers sat down to a quiet breakfast. The mood was tense, the fatigue palpable, but the mission hadn’t paused. Maria Hill stood at the head of the table, tablet in hand, ready to report.

“He’s all over the globe,” Maria started the meeting. “Robotics labs, weapons facilities, jet propulsion centers. We’re getting scattered intel for sightings of a metal figure, or multiple, breaking in and clearing the place out.”

“Fatalities?” Steve asked.

Hill shook her head. “Only when engaged. Most guards were left alive, but… not untouched.” She scrolled through her tablet. “They’re reporting hallucinations. Disorientation. Some are caught in fugue states rambling about buried memories, nightmares, and something too fast to track.”

Steve’s expression darkened. “Maximoffs.”

Tony let out a quiet sigh. “Of course he’d go to them.”

“They’ve got one thing in common,” Steve added grimly.

“Not anymore,” Hill said, handing the tablet to Steve.

The screen showed a grim image: Baron Strucker, slumped lifeless against a stone wall, eyes vacant. Scrawled in blood beside him were five chilling letters—PEACE.

Tony leaned back, lips curling into a humorless smirk. “And he left us a Banksy. Real subtle.”

“That sends a mixed message,” Steve said with a frown.

“Or a very clear one,” Hill countered. “Ultron could be in any system, planes, nukes, satellites, and instead he kills him. Maybe he thinks he’s doing exactly what he was built to do.”

 “This is good,” Natasha said quietly.

Bruce blinked. “How is any of this good?”

“He’s showing his hand,” she explained. “This isn’t Ultron’s style. He gave a big speech about evolution and extinction, why would he leave a message behind like this?” She shook her head. “It’s too theatrical. It’s a smokescreen.”

Steve picked up the thread. “Strucker knew something. Something Ultron didn’t want us to find.”

“Exactly.” Natasha was already at her terminal. “If he took the time to stage the scene, it wasn’t about making a point. It was about covering a trail.” Her eyes narrowed. “And… yeah. All digital files SHIELD had on Strucker are gone.”

“Not everything,” Tony said, standing. “SHIELD still kept hard copies of deep-storage files, right?”

Hill was already moving. “I’ll have the physical archives brought up now.”

Within minutes, SHIELD agents arrived with a dozen archive boxes, each one stamped with the Hydra insignia crossed out in bold red ink. The files on Baron Strucker were thick, yellowed with age, and filled with handwritten notes, grainy surveillance photos, and faded schematics.

The Avengers got to work immediately.

Hours passed in a blur of rustling paper and muttered frustration. Steve and Natasha cross-referenced old mission logs; Bruce squinted over scientific reports scrawled in outdated German shorthand. Harry skimmed documents on military reports. Tony flipped through pages with mounting irritation, grumbling every few minutes about “pre-digital cavemen.”

They poured over everything from medical records, intercepted communications to weapon prototypes.

“Known associates,” Steve muttered, flipping through a thick stack of papers. “Strucker had a lot of friends. None of them good.”

Bruce held up a grainy photo with a grimace. “Well, these people are all horrible.”

Tony leaned over, narrowing his eyes. “Wait. I know that guy.”

He plucked the photo from Bruce’s hand, studying it closer. “Yeah, back in the day, he was into black market weapons, operated off the African coast. Name's Ulysses Klaue.”

Steve shot him a sharp look. “You did business with him?”

“There are conventions, alright?” Tony said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “You meet people. I didn’t sell him anything.” He studied the photo again of Ulysses Klaue. Sharp-eyed, sun-scorched, a long scar running along the side of his neck. “He kept going on about finding something new, something revolutionary. Very Ahab vibes.”

Thor leaned over Tony’s shoulder, his gaze narrowing. He jabbed a finger at the mark near Klaue’s collar. “What’s this?”

Tony squinted. “Uh… tattoo, maybe? I don’t think he had it back when—”

“No,” Thor cut in. “Those are not tattoos.” He stood up straighter, eyes narrowing as he pointed to other ink patterns across Klaue’s skin. “This is a brand.”

Bruce was already typing. “Yeah, that’s not a tattoo. It’s a brand, alright.”

He scanned through the pulled-up intelligence files and old SHIELD cultural assessments. “It’s a word from an African dialect. Roughly translates to ‘thief,’ but… not the casual kind. Think more like ‘traitor of the land.’”

“What dialect?” Steve asked, stepping closer to the monitor.

Bruce squinted at the script. “Wa-ka… Wakanada…? Wait. Wakanda.”

Tony’s eyes widened as realization dawning across his face. “If this guy got out of Wakanda with some of their trade goods…”

“I thought your father said he got the last of it,” Steve interrupted, shooting Tony a sharp glance.

“He thought he did,” Tony muttered. “That’s the thing about being a genius in the ‘40s, no satellites.”

Bruce tilted his head. “Wait, what exactly comes out of Wakanda?”

Tony pointed at the Steve’s shield that was lying around. “The strongest metal on Earth.”

“Well, if you want a new body, why not make it out of the strongest metal on Earth, right?” Clint added, flipping through another dossier and tossing it on the table. “Ultron’s thinking big.”

Steve turned to Tony. “Where is this guy now?”

Tony was already swiping on a touchscreen, voice clipped. “Let me cross-reference SHIELD’s last known satellite surveillance with smuggling reports.”

“Do you have access to his file?” Steve asked Hill.

Hill entered, tablet in hand. “We do. And you’re not going to like it.”

She flicked her screen, projecting the data. Coordinates. Recent sightings. Surveillance photos. One of them showed Klaue stepping out of a rusted container ship with an entourage and crates behind him.

“South African coast,” Hill said. “Salvage yard near Johannesburg.”

Thor’s eyes flicked to the screen, then to the others. “If Ultron seeks this man, then he already has a plan. We cannot let him reach that Vibranium.”

“Then we move now,” Steve decided, standing tall. “We find Klaue. We stop Ultron before he can upgrade himself.”