Yellowjacket; Hawkeye's presence affected both Yellowjacket's and Libra's responses to the crisis; Songbird's skewed connections to Hawkeye, the Wasp, and Captain Marvel in the past, present, and future affected Captain Marvel's own decisions regarding Rick Jones's fate. During their efforts to protect Rick, the Avengers battle Immortus across several different eras, including encounters in the American Old West with the Two-Gun Kid, the Night Rider, the Ringo Kid, the Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt, and the Gunhawks, as well as an alternate version of the Avengers from the 1950s, and a confrontation to thwart an alien invasion in a possible future. During their searches, they discover that Immortus possesses the Forever Crystal, an artifact that can control multiple realities. Kang aids the Avengers as part of his 'rebellion' against his apparent destiny, and reveals that Immortus serves a trio of entities called the Time Keepers, with his previous interactions with the team having been motivated by an effort to keep humanity limited to prevent them from developing into a threat to the universe. These entities eventually reveal that, in various futures, mankind will travel into space and establish the warlike Terran Empire, an interstellar dictatorship policed by the Galactic Avengers Battalion and ruled by humans with access to the Destiny Force, which will thrive at the cost of many alien cultures. A future version of the Avengers will apparently be at the forefront of the expansion, but the Avengers reject the idea that mankind must be destroyed or contained to prevent these futures' happening, with Captain America and Songbird arguing that humanity deserves a chance to show that it can be better rather than being condemned for things that have not happened yet. Kang aids the Avengers and, in the final battle, kills the Time Keepers when they attempt to punish Immortus for failing. The Avengers resolve to strike against the Time Keepers even after they learn their enemies' motives, arguing that the Time Keepers only seek to eliminate those that might threaten them, when they do not even attempt to erase themselves, despite the existence of alternate timelines where they themselves became the Time Twisters. During a mass conflict where the Time-Keepers unleash the Avengers of the corrupted timelines against an army of Avengers drawn from the worlds where they remained true to their original purpose, the Time Keepers attempt to force Kang to become Immortus after they kill the