The Martian sky ignited in a storm of blazing explosions, each blast scattering fiery light across the countless fractures webbing the protective bubble around the mutated Eternal. It tore through the thin atmosphere like an unchained meteor, wild and furious.
Across the scarlet wasteland, William surged forward like a living comet.
His Super Saiyan 4 form was a fearsome spectacle, black-and-green Saiyan armor melded seamlessly with midnight fur streaked in silver, each strand catching the light like distant stars. From his elbows and knees jutted deadly bone spikes, while jagged ridges along his knuckles formed a built-in arsenal of destruction.
Every strike hit with surgical precision, shattering against the barrier shielding Thanos. Sparks erupted, and fractures spiderwebbed outward across its surface.
Each blow sent the Mad Titan hurtling back, yet his resolve never wavered. Consumed by a furious rage, Thanos unleashed a maelstrom of ki that clashed violently with William's primal energy, blasting outward in waves of raw dominance and hatred.
Space and Time themselves buckled as the blue and green Infinity Stones burned with unrestrained might. Wounds sealed in an instant, and a lattice of portals flared into existence, each one locking onto William's position.
The Saiyan never faltered. He lunged again, a relentless torrent of claws, fists, and bone spikes tearing through the warped air, his assault savage, unyielding, unstoppable.
Yet the battlefield seemed to fight back. Reality twisted, stone trembled, and the fragile Martian air combusted in the wake of each collision.
William's eyes blazed like molten gold, the predator within him rising to meet the challenge. Every strike, every clash, every flare of his aura carried the weight of a war that spanned galaxies, bending the world itself to his will.
This was no longer a mere battle; it was a cataclysm, a storm fierce enough to rend planets asunder, and neither warrior would surrender.
From within the multitude of portals encircling Thanos like an army poised for command, bursts of brilliant light and ominous voids spun together, brimming with unfathomable destructive power.
The Mad Titan had meticulously aligned these gateways across the universe, channeling the searing force of exploding stars, the lethal radiation of erupting pulsars, and even the crushing gravitational might of black holes.
All of this was unleashed in a single, devastating convergence, hurtling toward William with the singular purpose of erasing this formidable threat from existence.
The colossal beam of energy and crushing gravity tore a jagged scar across the Martian sky, an all-devouring torrent that warped light and twisted reality in its wake. Stars flared and guttered in terror as the force of the assault rippled outward, a howling pillar of cosmic annihilation.
William did not waver. His blazing golden-red-black aura flared defiantly, tail snapping behind him, fur standing on end like a forest caught in a tempest. With a roar that split the heavens, he hurled himself straight into the heart of the beam.
Agony surged through every fiber of his being, each heartbeat a furnace of searing torment. Muscles shredded, bones groaned, and his very blood hissed under the crushing gravity and infernal cosmic fire. Yet from deep within the maelstrom of pain, the unyielding instinct of a Super Saiyan 4 awoke.
This form had never tasted true defeat. It adapted. It transcended.
Rivers of molten power traced jagged paths across William's body, silver lightning crackling over fur and bone spikes. Slowly at first, then with rising force, his form began to harmonize with the chaos. The beam's blistering heat became sustenance; its gravitational snare transformed into a ladder to ascend. Pain and destruction became momentum.
With a feral snarl, William's golden eyes sharpened, pupils cutting like blades through the haze of the cosmic onslaught. He was no longer enduring, he was mastering the attack, twisting its might to carve a path through Thanos's ultimate strike.
The beam roared around him, shredding the fabric of reality as he drove forward. Time itself faltered in his wake, and he became an unstoppable comet of wrath and pure, adaptive ki, blazing a trail through the impossible.
As the towering pillars of light and gravity reached their zenith, William burst forth from the other side in a blaze of power.
Thanos, caught completely off guard by the sheer audacity of the move, had only a heartbeat to register what was happening.
His eyes widened in shock, the Infinity Stones shimmering with frantic, unstable energy. Before the Titan could muster his defense, William's fist, charged with an overwhelming surge of roaring, concentrated ki, slammed into his jaw with the force of a supernova.
The collision erupted in a violent detonation, hurling Thanos backward, his teeth scattering like molten stars across the void.
"Not… today," William growled, his voice a primal symphony of Saiyan fury and unyielding instinct.
Behind him, the beam imploded in a spiraling vortex of collapsing energy, its roar fading as William descended with the lethal grace of a predator.
His aura blazed, black fur shimmering with streaks of silver, bone spikes jutting like weapons, and arcs of ki sizzling over every inch of his form.
Thanos staggered, battered and disoriented, the crushing weight of the unexpected onslaught bearing down on him like a cosmic hammer.
William's grin burned with feral triumph, his eyes blazing with the intensity of twin suns.
Thanos spat violet blood into the dustless Martian wind, the ichor sizzling upon contact with the ground as the Time Stone instinctively surged to rewind the damage, only for William's crushing, reality-warping aura to disrupt it, forcing the Titan's regeneration to falter and stutter.
For the first time in centuries, something alien coiled in Thanos's chest. Pressure. William offered no reprieve.
With a thunderous crack, the Super Saiyan 4 vanished, no flare, no warning, only a predator's disappearance. The air where he had stood convulsed, as if the universe itself gasped in terror.
Thanos barely raised his arm before.
CRACK!
A bone spike tore across his forearm, gouging a smoking trench through cosmic-hardened flesh.
The Mad Titan snarled, twisting space itself to eject his foe, but William was already inside the distortion, shredding it like fragile parchment.
BOOM!
His elbow spike smashed into Thanos's ribs, armor buckling inward as fractures spiderwebbed across its surface. Thanos answered without hesitation.
The Power Stone roared to life, not in a burst, not in a pulse, but in a cataclysmic detonation.
The ensuing shockwave obliterated a mountain-sized swath of Martian terrain behind William, hurling a crimson cloud into orbit.
Yet the Saiyan slid back only inches, boots gouging molten trenches into the ground, tail bristling with feral defiance.
Thanos brushed the streak of violet ichor from his chin, his grin curling back into place, sharper and more menacing than before.
"All that… for a single drop of blood."
The words thundered from him, each one steeped in the raw, oppressive power of the Soul Stone, reverberating through the air like a death knell, every syllable a hammer blow against William's resolve, threatening to shatter his spirit entirely.
But the Saiyan merely advanced, each step exuding unstoppable power.
The ground beneath his foot shattered, collapsing into a deep crater with a thunderous crack.
"I'm just getting started!" William roared, his aura igniting into a swirling tempest that twisted and warped the very light around him, the sheer force radiating from his body shaking the air itself.
The Mad Titan's eyes narrowed, then flared wide, before he moved. Space folded in on itself, time twisted, and the very fabric of reality shattered in an instant.
Thanos materialized behind William, the Space Stone wrenching him across dimensions in a single blink.
In the same heartbeat, the Time Stone surged, accelerating his personal timestream, funneling years of built-up momentum into a single devastating punch.
It crashed into William's spine with the force of a meteor.
GRAAAAGH!!
The impact hurled William forward, but it did not shatter him.
With a savage snarl, he twisted in mid-air, his tail snapping around Thanos's neck like a living chain, bone spikes biting deep into flesh.
The Titan tried to vanish again, to slip free through folded space, but William was finished letting him control the battle.
The Saiyan's muscles flared with power, adapting, resisting, evolving against the pull of the void. For the first time—
William ripped Thanos from the heart of his own warp, dragging the titan violently back into real space amid a maelstrom of tearing distortions.
The two warriors slammed into existence with cataclysmic force, the air screaming around them. William struck first.
Silver lightning exploded down his arms, fur standing on end, bone spikes glinting like drawn blades.
Ki roared from his core, collapsing in on itself like a dying star about to explode.
He drove his fist into Thanos's sternum with earth-shattering might.
KRAKOOOOOM!
The detonation of force tore across half the planet, uprooting mountains and hurling canyons into the sky. Thanos's armor disintegrated under the blow, his ribs folding inward as his body was launched across Mars like a railgun slug of flesh and metal.
William rose to his full height, chest heaving, eyes blazing with the fury of twin suns.
"Get up," he growled, his aura scorching the ground in molten lines.
"I'm not finished breaking you."
Thanos struck the Martian surface with such cataclysmic force that the planet's crust caved inward, fracturing into a vast web of glowing magma veins. A colossal shockwave of crimson dust erupted skyward, blooming into the thinning atmosphere like the final breath of a dying star.
For a heartbeat, silence reigned.
Then...
SHOOOOOM
A torrent of deep violet light exploded from the crater, accompanied by the primal roar of an enraged god.
Thanos emerged slowly, each step dragging molten rock in his wake. His helmet and armor had been obliterated, vaporized under the sheer might of William's strike.
His chest was a mangled ruin of shattered bone and ruptured cosmic flesh, yet the Titan stood unbowed, a towering embodiment of wrath.
The Infinity Stones blazed with unprecedented ferocity, as though rebelling against William's defiance.
The Time Stone flickered wildly, unable to fully mend the catastrophic internal devastation.
The Space Stone pulsed in violent spasms, shattering the ground beneath his feet.
The Soul Stone burned hot and furious, its orange glare bending the air into a disorienting psychic haze.
With deliberate calm, Thanos wiped a streak of violet blood from his lips.
"Impressive," he rasped, his voice grinding like colliding worlds. "But you misunderstand me, Saiyan."
His hand clenched into an iron fist.
"I do not fail, for I am Thanos, destroyer of worlds, taker of women, and slayer of gods."
William's lips curled into a wild, predatory half-grin, his eyes alight with unspoken challenge.
"You already have," he murmured, the words dripping with a dangerous certainty.
In an instant, the air erupted in a deafening detonation, a shockwave tearing through the space with unrestrained fury.
And then, as if swallowed by the chaos itself, both figures were gone.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
The two warriors clashed in a storm of fury, their strikes swifter than lightning and carrying the force of exploding stars, before breaking apart once more.
Thanos dragged the back of his hand across his jaw, smearing away a streak of glowing blood, the purple ichor scattering into sizzling sparks as it struck the scorched Martian ground.
His breaths came ragged now, uneven, the cadence of a tyrant slipping out of sync.
Not because the Stones had abandoned him, their infinite reservoirs still roared with cosmic might, but because the Mad Titan himself could no longer anchor his will amidst the chaos.
Each bone-shaking blow from William splintered Thanos's concentration.
Each violent collision dislodged another shard of the focus he so desperately needed to command the Stones.
Each thunderous shockwave frayed the fragile thread binding his ambition to their obedient power.
The Space Stone flickered like a dying star.
The Power Stone's pulse lost its steady rhythm.
The Mind Stone pounded against his thoughts like an unrelenting migraine.
With a guttural roar, Thanos met William's next lunge with a crushing gravitational wave, the impact erupting outward in a ring of distorted reality.
Yet William tore through it like a demon born from the shatter point, claws slicing the air, his aura blazing in a storm of black and crimson heat.
Thanos staggered.
He wasn't being crushed by the raw might of the Stones, he was being utterly eclipsed by the warrior standing before him.
In a blur, William closed the gap, his eyes blazing with a wild, unyielding resolve. His fist drew back, pulling into existence a spiraling vortex of ki so concentrated the very air screamed in protest. The final strike was perfectly aligned, a clean, annihilating punch aimed to shatter the Titan's jaw and hurl him hurtling into the sprawling Martian valley far below.
And then...
The world froze.
A suffocating force snapped into place around William's body, invisible chains forged from pure, unshakable will. His muscles locked. His limbs became iron bars. His bones groaned under the crushing weight of a telekinetic grip so absolute it was as if the cosmos itself had decreed he would not move a single step further.
Only his head resisted, turning with a monumental effort, and that's when he saw him.
Drifting above the battlefield like an austere phantom, his pale form framed by a flowing cloak that danced through the scorched and trembling air, was Ebony Maw.
Arrogant. Composed.
He wore the smug serenity of one who considered himself beyond the reach of gods and monsters alike.
"Oh, how fortunate," the Maw purred, gliding closer, fingers poised delicately as if conducting some grand, unseen symphony. "The mighty Saiyan halted at the very precipice of triumph."
His eyes gleamed with unrestrained satisfaction.
"Your ferocity is commendable… yet tragically misplaced."
Below, Thanos released a trembling breath, the war between fury and relief flickering in his gaze as the Stones' power surged steadily within the gauntlet. Their radiance sharpened, no longer faltering, rekindled by his restored focus.
Ebony Maw inclined his head, his predatory eyes locking upon William with calculated interest.
"You should take pride, few beings in all existence have driven my master to the edge of desperation."
His smile deepened, shadowed with menace.
"Unfortunately for you… that moment ends here."