Thor did not hesitate.
The instant Thanos brushed the dust from his armor, Thor was upon him, a blazing streak of storm-light tearing across Mercury's shattered surface. Mjolnir came down in a blinding arc, forcing Thanos to bring up both the Gauntlet and his free hand in defense. The blow struck with such force that the ground beneath them quaked as a colossal gong sounded from the planet's core.
KRRRRAK-BTOOM!
Thor granted no mercy, no breath, no moment to recover. Fury honed his movements into something both primal and godlike. Each swing of Mjolnir flowed into the next, each impact detonating with thunder that rattled the fractured world. Thanos, the immovable Titan, found himself driven backward, his boots carving deep furrows through molten rock as he absorbed the unrelenting assault.
Bolts of lightning writhed over Thor's form like living serpents, striking at Thanos between each earth-shattering blow, exploding in savage bursts that forced even the Mad Titan to flinch. Thor's lips curled in a snarl, his eyes twin suns burning with wrath.
"You took them!" he bellowed, driving Mjolnir into Thanos's ribs with a force that bent the Titan sideways. "You took my brother! You took my mother!"
Thanos swung in retaliation, but Thor ducked low, ramming his shoulder into the Titan's chest and sending him skidding across the scorched plain in a spray of molten dust. Before Thanos could regain his footing, Thor was there again, unyielding, unstoppable.
"RAAAAH!"
Mjolnir smashed against Thanos's forearm, the impact sending shockwaves across Mercury and hurling plumes of incandescent dust into orbit. Thanos grunted, truly staggered. For the first time in their clash, Thor had forced him into a purely defensive stance.
Another strike.
Another.
Another.
Thor's fury honed every movement to lethal precision. His footwork blurred into a dance of devastation, each strike part of a relentless tempest. Thanos blocked where he could and absorbed what he could not, yet the rhythm belonged to Thor, wild, merciless, driven by grief that burned deeper than any rage. In a sudden twist, Thor whipped Mjolnir behind his back and swung it forward in a near-invisible arc.
CRAAACK!
The hammer crashed into the Titan's jaw, snapping his head aside with bone-rattling force. Even Thanos faltered. Yet the Mad Titan was well acquainted with divine wrath. He let the blow's momentum carry him backward, boots grinding against the ground until he steadied himself. Narrowing his eyes with cold calculation, he felt the Infinity Gauntlet thrum with power.
"You believe grief makes you stronger," Thanos said evenly, his voice unshaken despite the scorch marks marring his chin. "But grief is a blinding chain."
Thor roared and lunged, but in that instant, Thanos struck. His palm shot forward, channeling Ki, pure cosmic will, tempered by the Gauntlet's infinity-forged stability. The energy did not erupt as a simple beam; instead, it coiled into a threaded spear of light, woven with the Titan's precise and deliberate control.
Thor swung Mjolnir in a defiant arc to intercept, but Thanos willed the searing blast to curve unnaturally around the hammer's path.
The energy whip twisted through the air like a serpent of pure annihilation, slipping past the block with predatory grace.
Thor's eyes widened!
SHWAAAAM!
As the blast hooked upward with lethal precision and smashed into his chin. The impact was cataclysmic.
The God of Thunder was hurled backward, a blazing trail of blue lightning marking his flight across Mercury's sky, the heavens trembling as he carved a furious arc before crashing down.
The ground shuddered and split in a web of fractures beneath his fallen form.
Thanos lowered his smoking hand, the Infinity Gauntlet pulsing with calm menace.
"Rage," he intoned, stepping forward as the crater glowed molten red, "is a poor substitute for purpose."
He advanced toward the roiling storm of lightning where Thor, battered but unbroken, struggled to rise and face him once more, the purple energy of power snaking along his armor and clashing with his own lightning, causing both energies to disappear with a distinct pop of energy annihilation.
Thor rose, slowly, painfully, yet with unshakable purpose.
Lightning crawled across his skin, not in chaotic, uncontrolled bursts, but in deliberate coils of divine intent, winding around him like a mantle forged in the heart of a storm.
Each ragged breath drew more of the tempest into him, and when his eyes opened, they blazed with a light fiercer than the sunlit horizon. Then the sky transformed.
Above Mercury's scarred surface, storm clouds swelled and deepened, the bruised purples of cosmic disturbance spreading outward, folding and spiraling until half the planet lay beneath a dome of celestial rage.
The clouds began to turn, and the very planet seemed to turn with them, as though caught in the pull of Thor's fury, with the God of Thunder himself blazing at its heart like the molten core of a divine cyclone.
Within the seething mass above, lightning writhed, not in mere arcs, but as serpents, as dragons, as living phantoms born from the primordial force of the storm.
Vast veins of incandescent power slithered and branched through the heavens, converging as if poised to strike at Thor's will. Mid-stride, Thanos halted, and his eyes narrowed.
He felt it, the crushing pressure, the suffocating weight, the unstoppable tide of oncoming devastation.
The Infinity Gauntlet thrummed with an uneasy, almost sentient vibration against his hand.
Thanos raised his chin, eyes blazing with defiance, and unleashed a roar that split the heavens.
"ENOUGH!"
With a thunderous stomp of his heel, he anchored himself, his other hand flicking a hidden switch on his belt.
In an instant, a translucent sphere of energy burst outward, his personal shield, a pinnacle of Titan craftsmanship, unfurling around him like a radiant dome of rippling force. It shimmered, sang with power, and locked into place just as the skies tore open.
A storm unlike any other descended, a legion of lightning dragons, writhing and roaring, plunging from the heavens in a single apocalyptic cascade.
The tempest condensed into a singular, towering pillar of divine fury, engulfing Thanos in its incandescent wrath.
BWWWWWOOOOOOOOMMMMM!!
The surface of Mercury did not merely crack or burn, it erupted in a cataclysmic detonation that shook the very bones of the solar system.
For miles in every direction, the ground around Thanos liquefied in an instant, erupting into a cataclysmic blast wave of molten debris that vaporized midair, cascading down as glittering shards of glass.
The shattering shockwave tore through the barren world, etching fresh, jagged scars that stretched unbroken to the horizon. In the heart of the devastation, Thanos vanished into the incandescent inferno, his colossal form utterly swallowed, obliterated within a white-blue brilliance so intense it seemed to erase reality itself.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing but thunder. Thunder so deafening it collapsed into silence.
Thunder so profound it rattled the planet's very bones. Thunder so divine it could only be judgment.
Far above, Thor hung in the churning sky, lightning spiraling endlessly around him, his crimson cloak snapping violently in the storm's fury, his face a chiseled mask of anguish and wrath in equal measure.
The storm did not merely answer to him; it existed because of him. And far below, deep within the collapsing pillar of light, something stirred.
The light bent.
It didn't fade, didn't dim, it bent, as if shoved aside by some force tearing through the impossible.
A pillar of divine lightning split open with a sound like the fabric of reality shredding apart.
BOOOOMMM!
KRRAAAAK-CHOOM!!
A shockwave erupted outward, hurling shards of vitrified earth and sending rolling peals of thunder in every direction. The storm-light writhed and twisted, recoiling from the epicenter as if repelled by sheer will.
And then.
Thanos emerged.
Steam coiled from his scorched armor. Slabs of molten glass clung for a moment before sliding from his shoulders. His personal shield crackled, faltered, then shattered into a rain of dying energy fragments, but it had done its duty.
The Mad Titan still stood.
Burned.
Shaken.
But alive.
Framed in the last flickers of lightning, his massive silhouette rose to its full, imposing height. His head lifted, not in fury, but with a cold, immovable resolve.
With the back of his gauntleted hand, he brushed molten slag from his chin.
And then he smiled, a thin, blade-sharp smile.
"Impressive," he rumbled, his voice resonating through the fractured air like distant thunder. "Truly… impressive."
Thor descended from the heavens with measured purpose, lightning still writhing around him in living coils of judgment. His piercing gaze locked on Thanos, jaw tightening as the storm above roared louder, each crash of thunder echoing the pounding of his own heart.
"You should not be standing," Thor growled, the words edged with fury.
"And yet," Thanos responded with unshakable calm, "I stand."
His fingers flexed, and the Infinity Gauntlet throbbed with power.
Not in chaos, not in violence, but in a steady, deliberate rhythm, like the beat of a second heart.
A warning.
A promise.
With deliberate steps, Thanos advanced, his boots grinding into the crystallized remnants of Mercury's surface.
Thor's grip on Mjolnir tightened, arcs of lightning racing down the handle, spiraling around the hammerhead like a hurricane of raw uru-forged might.
Above them, the storm deepened into a void of shadow, as though ready to strike again with all its fury.
Thanos observed it.
Measuring.
Assessing.
Calculating.
"You wield power befitting a god," he said, voice edged with cold certainty. "Yet you are ruled by emotion, by grief, by rage."
A dangerous glint flashed in his eyes.
"And that makes you predictable."
Thor's aura snapped, flaring into a storm of renewed fury.
In an instant, he became lightning incarnate, blurring into a streak of electric blue as he hurled himself downward with a roar born of pure wrath.
Thanos lifted his gauntlet.
The Power Stone blazed to life.
A sphere of crackling violet energy erupted outward, and the second collision was cataclysmic.
THOOOOOOOOM!!!
The impact fractured the scorched, glassed ground beneath them like a shattered mirror, jagged plates of the planet's surface tearing free, rising, splintering, and drifting in the wake of the sheer force unleashed.
Thor drove downward with the full might of the storm; Thanos pressed upward with the infinite strength of the god-slayer.
Neither moved.
Neither yielded.
Lightning and Power Stone energy met in an annihilating fury, each contact bursting into blinding light and detonating with the ferocity of miniature suns.
The crushing pressure between them mounted, and mounted, and mounted, until the ground around them collapsed inward, forming a vast crater that sank deeper and deeper as their clashing energies ground the mantle to dust.
Thor snarled, veins alight with crackling lightning.
Thanos grinned, boots braced, muscles swelling beneath the plates of his armor.
The ground quaked.
Mercury groaned.
The very fabric of space shuddered.
And then...
Thanos overpowered the clash.
With a guttural roar, he surged upward, his colossal fist smashing through Thor's guard.
BWHAAAAM!!
The God of Thunder was hurled backward in a spiraling maelstrom of blue lightning, tumbling across the shattered horizon, gouging a molten scar miles long into the planet's surface before crashing into the crater's far rim.
Thor struggled to rise, but the storm that crowned him faltered.
Flickered.
Thunder faltered.
Lightning waned.
Thanos stood amidst the ruin, smoke curling from the Gauntlet, coils of venomous purple energy writhing up his arm.
"Predictable," the Mad Titan intoned once more, and he advanced toward Thor without pause.
Thanos emerged from the waning storm's wrath, each deliberate step like a titan forged from the remnants of a dying star.
The scorched, glassed earth shattered beneath his boots, while his battered armor smoked and shed molten fragments to the ground.
Veins of searing purple and crimson energy spiderwebbed across his skin, glowing fiercely, but still, he walked. He endured.
Every stride rippled through the ruined wasteland, and each breath drew jagged arcs of Infinity energy across the Gauntlet. The Power Stone pounded with the rhythm of a war drum, the Space Stone sang at a pitch that made the very air tremble, the Reality Stone churned with twisting crimson chaos.
All six stones pulsed together, murderous, sentient, hungry.
Above, Thor hovered in the sky, chest heaving like a warrior standing before Valhalla's gates.
His lightning flickered, flared, and faltered, sustained only by raw fury and unyielding will.
Thanos closed the distance without pause, his silhouette slicing through the drifting smoke like a blade.
His hand rose, fingers curled into the claw of an executioner, Infinity roaring along his arm like the voice of a collapsing universe. He readied the strike to slay a god.
But then, he saw it.
Not in the heavens.
Not in the stones.
In Thor's eyes.
A shimmer.
A glint.
A warped fracture of light and color that did not belong to him, the strange light causing Thanos's brow to furrow.
Slowly, almost unwillingly, he turned, and there, he saw him.
High above the battlefield, framed against the fractured horizon, William hovered like the serene eye of a cosmic hurricane.
His arms were raised high, reaching out towards something beyond comprehension.
A sphere, no, an orb, of pure Ki had manifested above him, though the word "orb" felt woefully inadequate.
It was a hyperdense star-core of unimaginable power, compressed to the size of a small meteor, yet radiating such immense force that reality itself seemed to shriek around it.
Space folded inward.
Time stuttered in trembling distortions.
Light bent toward the sphere as if caught in its inexorable pull. Its surface shimmered with blues, purples, and golds, as well as hues alien to any known spectrum.
Beneath its crushing weight, the air quivered as though the universe itself held its breath.
Ki surged, collapsed, and surged again, sending out concentric waves of warped distortion like shockfronts from a dying star.
Even Thanos's eyes widened.
The Titan felt the pressure from afar, bones groaning, armor molecules strained. This was no mere technique, no common strike.
This was elemental, born from Saiyan rage, divine spark, and the primal instinct of a warrior who refused to fall.
William's aura writhed around him, ruby and magenta flames entwined, his hair lashing in the gravitational tides of his own creation.
The air pulsed with each heartbeat. And from across the expanse, his voice rang out, warped, resonant, deeper than before.
"Thanos." The orb shivered. "You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have absolutely been found wanting!"
The ground trembled violently beneath Thanos as distant thunder growled faintly, the fading echoes of Thor's once-mighty storm lingering in the air.
For the first time since their inception, the Infinity Stones faltered, their radiant glow trembling with an unfamiliar unease, as if attuned to the profound upheaval rippling through the cosmos. Then William, his arms quaking beneath the unimaginable weight, hoisted the orb ever higher, its boundless energy bending the heavens, distorting the very fabric of existence, and pulling all creation toward a singular, momentous instant that would irrevocably decide the fate of gods and monsters alike.
Smoke from shattered mountains and scorched chunks of Mercury coils into the heavens, as if the battlefield itself dares not exhale.
Thor, battered yet unbroken, stands wreathed in the last, defiant flickers of storm-fire.
Opposite him, Thanos, the Mad Titan, plants his feet with deadly resolve, the Infinity Stones crackling with an ominous, murderous energy.
Above them both hovers William, silent and still, cradling in his hands a hyperdense orb of Ki that blazes like a newborn star.
Its gravity bends the air, twists the light, and warps the very fabric of reality around it.
Three titans stand poised.
One world tremble beneath their feet.
A single, inevitable clash looms, promising to decide the fate of all.
Will Thor's godly fury outshine Thanos's relentless will?
Can the Mad Titan endure an assault powerful enough to tear at the seams of space itself?
And what unfathomable force has William called forth, one so terrible that even the heavens shrink from its presence?
The storm churns, the earth shudders, and destiny wavers at the edge of a blade.
The next moment will shake the cosmos to its core.