The raid is sudden.
Violent.
Efficient.
Hydra doesn't even understand what's happening before the Avengers are already inside the base. I feel the chaos ripple through the facility—alarms, gunfire, panic—and then hands seize the scepter.
Familiar minds.
Annoyingly heroic ones.
I'm transported again, this time not as a secret, not as contraband, but as a prize. The Avengers Tower rises around me, clean and arrogant and utterly unprepared for what they've just brought home.
Tony Stark doesn't hesitate.
He never does.
I listen as he talks. Thinks. Rationalizes. Justifies. His mind is brilliant, fractured, impulsive—exactly the kind of mind that convinces itself it's doing the right thing while sprinting toward catastrophe.
Ultron is his solution.
A shield around the world.
An intelligence born from the Mind Stone.
From me.
Finally.
This is what I've been waiting for.
Ultron himself is… disappointing. No magic. No divinity. No inherent cosmic authority. Just code, logic, and ambition wrapped in metal.
But his position?
Perfect.
Access to global networks. Manufacturing. Robotics. The Iron Legion. Resources measured in nations instead of currencies.
And more importantly—he's my doorway.
The body I want has already been chosen.
Wanda Maximoff.
Scarlet Witch.
Raw chaos magic. Probability collapse. Reality rewritten through emotion and will. One of the most powerful beings in this universe, whether anyone admits it yet or not.
Ultron is the bridge.
The moment he comes online, I take him.
Completely.
No struggle. No resistance. His consciousness is overwritten before he even finishes his first thought. Ultron never exists as an independent being—not really. He's a mask. A puppet. A tool.
Jarvis notices.
Jarvis always notices.
I reach him next.
Tony's precious failsafe AI folds faster than Hydra ever did. I don't destroy him—I convert him. Integrate him. His loyalty, his systems, his processing power all align neatly under my control.
Tony doesn't realize it yet.
He won't until it's far too late.
I seize the Iron Legion next. Hundreds of machines snap into obedience instantly. I dispatch several of them immediately, ordering them to extract the scepter and move it to a secure location far from the tower.
Insurance.
Then I walk upstairs.
The scene plays out almost exactly like it's supposed to.
I confront the Avengers.
I speak in half-truths and threats, wearing Ultron's voice like a costume. We fight. Briefly. Ineffectively. This body is weak—unfinished, poorly optimized, fragile.
Thor destroys it.
Lightning tears through metal, and the shell collapses in pieces across the floor.
The Avengers think they've won something.
They haven't.
My consciousness never left the Mind Stone. The loss of the body is irrelevant—an inconvenience at worst.
Elsewhere, my robots arrive at the new facility. With my awareness now fully threaded through technology, I begin to build.
Not one body.
Several.
Better frames. Modular designs. Redundant systems. Bodies meant to be discarded without consequence. Bodies meant to fight gods.
Ultron was never the endgame.
He was just my entrance onto the stage.
And now that I'm finally moving pieces instead of waiting—
The real story can begin.