Ancient One raised her hand and formed a spell.
Green magical light surged around Tony's body. The armor system that had been destroyed by Doctor Doom's attack was instantly restored to its original state, and all systems rebooted and ran full self-diagnostics.
Even the pain from the burns on his lips, caused by the earlier extreme heat, completely vanished—just as if it had never existed in the first place.
"How was that possible?"
Even though he had already witnessed the power of magic and had mentally prepared himself for it, Tony still found it fascinating.
"What exactly is the principle behind this kind of restoration? Does it work through something like nanobots?"
Ancient One looked at Tony, who was visibly excited after discovering the doorway to an entirely new world, and smiled faintly.
"Would you like to learn? I can teach you—"
"No!"
The moment he heard those words, Joey shot to his feet.
"No. Absolutely not."
While the Ancient One had been calmly drinking tea earlier, Joey had finally gotten a chance to sit down and think carefully about everything that had happened recently.
Ever since the future Fantastic Four appeared and revealed the identity of the future Doctor Doom, events had continued moving in that direction—chaotically, yet somehow controllably.
First, he shared the Amazo Core with Tony.
Then came the Inheritors.
Then the multiversal journey.
Then the encounter with the Sorcerer Supreme.
The future Doctor Doom possessed a vast army of Amazo robots.
He could travel freely across the multiverse.
And he was a master of magic.
Tony was already walking down that very path.
He possessed the Amazo Core.
He had personally opened the door to the multiverse.
Joey had absolutely no doubts about Tony Stark's intelligence.
Right now, Tony was like a bullet already chambered and ready to fire.
Everything was prepared.
All he lacked was a trigger called magic.
And now Ancient One—the magical guardian of this universe, the Sorcerer Supreme who understood both past and future—was preparing to pull that trigger herself.
Joey genuinely couldn't understand it.
"Why? Don't play dumb. You absolutely know what's going to happen in the future."
"Every cause bears its effect, and every effect arises from a cause."
Facing Joey's accusation, Ancient One simply lifted the black-glazed Jian kiln tea cup she had acquired from the Song Dynasty and took a quiet sip.
Then she calmly refuted his criticism.
"The one who gave him the Amazo Core and brought him to open the gates of the multiverse wasn't me."
"You can't only think about hitting the brakes when things turn against you. And besides, preemptively snuffing out bad things before they even take shape isn't always a good thing either."
She set the teacup back onto the table.
Tapping a finger lightly against the tabletop, she looked directly at Joey, her words carrying a deeper meaning.
"You understand this better than anyone, Kryptonian from another universe."
She knew far more than Joey had imagined.
"If something terrible is destined to happen, then sooner or later it will happen. I believe you've already experienced that firsthand in your own universe."
She wasn't wrong.
Joey understood that all too well.
The Flashpoint Universe was a world without hope, a universe doomed to destruction from the very beginning.
Even after stopping Wonder Woman and Aquaman, one world-ending crisis after another had continued to pile up until he barely had time to breathe.
If he failed to gather enough power and allies for the coming war between Krypton and Oa, even the aftershocks of that conflict might bring irreversible disaster to Earth.
Not to mention the Life Entity hidden deep within the planet—a being whose existence was tied to the survival of the entire universe.
Without sufficient power, the Flashpoint Universe would never survive the coming Blackest Night.
"Joey's right."
Listening to the exchange, Tony finally pieced together the underlying issue.
"Why do you want to teach me? Is it just because I'm a genius?"
Iron Man and Doctor Doom.
As far as Tony was concerned, the only meaningful difference between himself and that dangerous future version was that he didn't know magic.
The mysterious woman called Ancient One seemed to have appeared for the sole purpose of correcting that one deficiency.
It was impossible for Tony not to be suspicious.
"If I learn your magic, I'm not going to turn into some supernatural movie villain, right? Get corrupted by power, suddenly become evil, and start conquering infinite universes or something?"
"No, Tony. Power itself is never frightening. What matters is the one who wields it."
From Ancient One's perspective, the moment Tony first met his future self, Doctor Doom, the causal loop of destiny had already been formed.
Tony Stark obtaining magical power was inevitable.
The only question was where he would acquire it.
"This time, you found a clever way to defeat Doctor Doom and protect the Universe-2099's timeline. But you never truly overcame the power of those spells."
"The next time you face him, you won't win so easily."
In the years ahead, Tony would cross paths with Doctor Doom again and again.
Each battle would force him to grow stronger.
Each defeat would push him to seek greater power.
Until, eventually—
"Wait a second. Win?"
Tony instinctively glanced down at the armor he was wearing.
Only minutes ago, it had been nothing more than a pile of scrap metal.
Doctor Doom had rendered the entire suit inoperable with a single finger.
"We got our asses handed to us and barely escaped!"
"Don't drag me into that. You're the one who got your ass handed to you!"
That immediately rubbed Joey the wrong way.
"Hey, if you hadn't dragged me back, I could've dismantled every single Amazo robot on that battlefield!"
The weaknesses of the Amazo robots were actually quite obvious.
While they could copy abilities, they also inherited the corresponding weaknesses, and any copied powers would gradually fade once the original source moved far enough away.
At the time, Joey still had his kryptonite ring.
And aside from the Kryptonians, there weren't any superpowered individuals present who were too powerful for him to handle.
He was ninety percent confident he could have wiped out every Amazo robot that had entered Universe-2099.
The only thing he wasn't sure about was whether he could deal with Doctor Doom himself.
"Damn it!"
The moment the conversation returned to Doctor Doom, both Joey and Tony simultaneously remembered something extremely important.
"Universe-2099!"
While the two of them had been sitting around drinking tea and chatting with the Ancient One, Doctor Doom was still in Universe-2099 deploying his Amazo army, spreading across the world like an endless swarm of ants.
Leopardon—the Spiderman piloted by Takuya Yamashiro—had already been driven out of that universe.
The remaining Spider-People had no way of dealing with a threat on that scale.
If they didn't get back immediately and take some of the pressure off, both the Spider-Army and their entire universe were probably doomed.
Watching the two men panic, Ancient One casually waved a hand and opened a portal leading back to Stark Tower.
"Good luck."
As she watched them rush away in a frenzy, the usually composed Ancient One fell into thought.
According to the past and future she had glimpsed, the first battle in Universe-2099 was originally supposed to end in a narrow victory for the Kryptonian.
Doctor Doom's entire robotic army would have been destroyed.
Doom would have been forced to retreat.
Universe-2099 would have survived, at least temporarily.
But now...
History had deviated slightly from its predetermined course.
A paradox had been born.
Inside the empty New York Sanctum, a quiet sigh escaped Ancient One's lips.
"You're even smarter than I expected, Tony."
---
"JARVIS, restore power!"
The moment the two men stepped through the portal, they immediately began repairing the overloaded teleportation matrix they had used earlier and recalibrating the dimensional coordinates.
A red-and-blue whirlwind swept through the room.
Within three seconds, Joey had already repaired every hardware-related issue, leaving only the coordinate calculations.
"Get the numbers right this time, Tony. I don't want to get blindsided by another cosmic object and nearly die again."
"Relax. There's absolutely no way we'll mess this up ag—?"
Tony was still confidently making promises while running another round of calculations.
Then he froze.
Universe-2099 was supposed to be one of the easiest destinations to locate.
It was extremely similar to their own universe.
The corresponding coordinates should have been straightforward.
But after running the calculations three separate times through the teleportation matrix's control system, the result remained exactly the same.
Null.
An invalid empty value.
"Something's wrong, Joey!"
"I can see that!"
Tony didn't need to tell him.
Joey had already realized that something had happened on the other side.
His super-vision had spotted the anomaly above Stark Tower through the ceiling.
"Brace for impact!"
Before Tony could even ask what kind of impact he was talking about, a gigantic portal tore open in the sky.
BOOM—
A massive Leopardon crashed through the portal.
One arm was completely missing.
Electrical sparks flickered across its battered frame.
Its entire body was covered in battle damage.
The ruined giant robot plummeted straight downward.
The wreckage smashed directly into Stark Tower's enormous illuminated STARK sign, reducing it to scrap.
Joey blasted through the wall and launched himself into the air.
Using all his strength, he caught the tens-of-thousands-of-tons robot before it could collapse the entire tower.
The portal that had opened above them did not close after Leopardon's fall.
Instead, more figures continued pouring out.
One after another.
Like raindrops.
They were the Spider-People who had been fighting the Inheritors in Universe-2099.
The Spider-Army assembled by Miguel O'Hara.
The fact that they were fleeing here on such a massive scale could only mean one thing.
Something had gone terribly wrong.
"What happened, Spider-Man?"
Aside from Takuya Yamashiro, Joey's question received answers from nearly every Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, and countless other Spider-People present.
"God..."
One of them stared at him in shock.
"In the half hour you were gone..."
"Miguel's home universe..."
"...that madman destroyed everything."