KANG

Every trip Kang the Conqueror took through history split the timeline a little further, and every split grew another Kang — divergent copies of the same man, conquering in parallel. One Kang decided that was an intolerable crowd. Operating from Limbo, he quietly recruited the strongest and most ruthless of his doubles into a Council of Kangs, presented as a parliament for policing reckless variants.

The parliament was a hunting party in formal dress. Behind the meetings, the prime Kang was systematically eliminating his counterparts and swapping the corpses for robot duplicates, so that councils, armies and empires kept functioning while their owners quietly stopped existing. The endgame had no subtle second phase: when the cull finished, exactly one Kang would remain standing in all of time, holding every timeline the others had conquered.

The scheme collapsed inward. Immortus — Kang's own far-future self, and the quiet architect behind the whole affair — arranged for the surviving Kang to absorb the memories of the slaughtered variants. Thousands of lifetimes of conquest, betrayal and death flooded a single skull at once, and the last Kang's mind buckled under the weight of being everyone he had murdered.

Beaten not by the Avengers but by his own accumulated selves, Kang abandoned the field and fled into Limbo to recover. The cull that was meant to simplify him into the sole Kang instead guaranteed his eventual transformation into Immortus — the patient custodian of timelines he had once tried to own outright.