Karrok was faster now. Stronger. Each heavy blow carried the terrible, burning weight of a consumed life behind it.
When his fist struck the ground, the Mirror Dimension's crystalline surfaces cracked in concentric rings that spread outward like frozen ripples. When he hit the walls, they didn't just break. They shattered into geometric fragments that hung suspended in the impossible air like frozen explosions.
Carol matched his enhanced speed. She met him blow for blow, trading impacts that would have levelled city blocks.
But the dark energy was doing something new. Her photon blasts hit him square in the chest, and he walked through them. The energy flooding his system absorbed and scattered the photon bursts like a river swallowing stones.
He caught Carol's wrist mid-punch and hurled her into a folding wall. The crystalline surface warped around the impact, bending reality itself. Carol tore herself free with a snarl and came back with a concentrated, continuous beam of cosmic energy aimed directly at his torso.
Karrok roared. It hurt. She could see the pain in his blazing eyes and the way his body buckled under the beam. But he didn't stop. He leaned into the onslaught and kept walking forward, one burning step at a time, reaching for her with hands that glowed like heated iron.
"You are strong, Annihilator," he said through gritted teeth. "But I am already dead. And the dead do not stop."
"You're not dead yet, Karrok." Carol cut the beam and dodged his reaching hands. "You're just in a hurry to get there."
Arthur, watching the brutal exchange from across the shattered floor, raised a single finger and struck Karrok with a Reducto Curse powerful enough to shatter a mountain boulder.
The spell struck the general's broad chest and simply dispersed on contact, evaporating like morning mist against a roaring furnace. The dark energy surrounding Karrok's body acted as a total counter to magical interference.
Arthur narrowed his eyes and tested further. A concentrated lance of white-hot fire. A jagged spike of conjured, absolute-zero ice. A spinning, razor-sharp disc of Eldritch energy.
Everything was instantly consumed on contact, swallowed whole by the dark energy without leaving so much as a scorch mark on the alien's skin.
Magic was useless against it. A troubling discovery, given that Thanos himself almost certainly possessed the same, if not greater, ability.
Carol didn't wait for Arthur to finish his magical experiments. She was already back in the close-quarters fight, hammering Karrok with heavy photon strikes that made his knees buckle and his mouth bleed, but still couldn't bring him fully down.
Arthur quickly assessed Karrok's burning life thread through his Death Sight. Minutes left. Possibly much less. They could just evade and wait him out.
"Carol," he called across the shattered floor. "We can let the clock run. His body fails on its own in minutes."
Carol floated backward, putting distance between herself and the general. She looked at Karrok. At the blazing white eyes, the cracking skin, the body consuming itself from within.
"Karrok." Her voice was steady, almost kind. "Tell me where the Chitauri fleet is. I'll give you a quick end instead of this."
Karrok laughed. It was a raw, wet, ragged sound that tore at his ruined throat. "They are heading for your fragile home. That pathetic, backwater planet does not stand a chance against the armada." He met her glowing gaze, black blood dripping freely from his chin. "Perhaps you could slow the inevitable destruction down. Buy your weak people a few more years of miserable life. But my Lord will eventually achieve his glorious purpose. The universe will be saved through balance."
Carol said nothing for a long moment. Then she turned to Arthur. "Can you give him a clean death?"
Arthur offered a small, terrifyingly calm smile. "I might have something."
He closed his eyes.
The Arcane Mage State activated in less than a second. The world sharpened. Colours deepened. The air itself seemed to hum with potential.
Carol felt the massive pressure wave roll outward from where Arthur stood. She had sparred with the wizard dozens of times over the years. She had never felt him become this.
Karrok felt it too. Even through the dark energy flooding his senses, even through the fire consuming his life from the inside out, he felt something change in the smaller man across the shattered floor. A pressure that hadn't been there before. The weight of something vast and ancient and blindingly bright settling into a human frame.
He turned away from Carol. He looked at Arthur.
"What are you?" the dying general asked, his voice trembling.
Arthur raised one hand.
Light gathered rapidly in his palm. Not the cosmic photon energy Carol wielded, but pure, unadulterated magic. Light Magic, drawn directly from the infinite wellspring of Ancient Magic itself. It was white-gold and absolutely blinding, growing exponentially brighter with every single heartbeat.
The dark energy surrounding Karrok contracted. For the first time since it had consumed him, it shrank. The way every shadow in the history of the universe had shrunk from every light that had ever burned.
Karrok understood what was coming. He did not run. He straightened. Drew himself to his full height. Let his arms fall to his sides. He faced the light with the dignity of a soldier who had made his choice and was satisfied with it.
"Goodbye," Arthur said.
He released the spell.
The beam crossed the distance in an instant. It hit the dark energy field and burned through it the way dawn burned through night. Not with force but with inevitability. The darkness peeled away in sheets of dissolving shadow until there was nothing left but the man beneath.
The light reached him. And Karrok, General of the Outrider Legions, servant of the Great Titan, was gone.
Not destroyed. Not obliterated. Unmade.
The ancient light consumed the dark energy, and the physical body it had sustained, leaving absolutely nothing behind. No corpse. No lingering ash. No residue. Just empty, crystalline air where a massive warrior had stood a second before.
Then, something entirely unexpected happened.
As Karrok was unmade, the concentrated death energy he had injected into himself was violently released. A shockwave of dark force radiating outward from the point of his unmaking.
Arthur's chest burned. The triangular mark glowed through his suit. The ambient death energy changed course and rushed toward him like water spiralling down a drain.
It hit him. A torrent of raw death energy pouring into a vessel that was not quite ready to contain it. His Death Sight flared white. The mark on his chest pulsed with sudden, fierce heat that spread through his ribs and down into his core.
Arthur clenched his fists. Held his ground. Breathed through it. The energy settled inside him like water finding its level. Not absorbed. Not processed. Just present. Waiting for something.
He gasped, dropping the Arcane State immediately. The massive magical amplification faded.
The Mirror Dimension collapsed around them, and they fell safely back into the ruined hangar of the Chitauri dreadnought.
Carol landed beside Arthur. Her expression was sharp, assessing.
"That energy," she said. "It went directly into you. Are you alright?"
"Better than alright." Arthur looked at his own hands. They were steady. "It was raw death energy. Once I fully absorb it, it should make me considerably stronger."
Carol raised an eyebrow. "Only you could get a power-up from situations like this." She crossed her arms. "And what was that state you were in? That silver light?"
Arthur raised a countering eyebrow. "What, only you're allowed to have a flashy power-up?"
She didn't smile. "You were incredibly strong in that form, Arthur. Very strong. Why haven't you ever used it in our spars?"
"It has a strict time limit. Seconds to minutes, depending entirely on the intensity of the output. It is heavily taxing on the body. Not exactly practical for a friendly, hour-long sparring match."
Carol nodded, understanding the tactical limitation. "Fair enough."
"We need to leave," Arthur said, looking at the sparking, groaning walls around them. "Get back to your ship."
"What about this massive wreck?"
"I'm going to deal with it."
"How?"
"Completely."
Carol studied him for a moment, then flew for the breach in the hull without another word.
Arthur drew the Arcane State back into his body. The amplification flared. He placed both hands flat against the hangar floor and pushed.
The spell was simple in concept and devastating in execution. Pure destructive force, amplified fivefold by the Ancient Magic flooding his pathways, radiating outward from the point of contact in every direction simultaneously. Not an explosion. A disintegration. A spell he had crafted from countless nights buried in the Asgardian archives.
Every molecule of the ship, from hull to engine core, broke apart at the atomic level and scattered into the void as dust.
Carol watched from a safe distance, floating in the vacuum, as the massive Chitauri warship dissolved around him. It took four seconds. Where the ship had been, there was nothing. Not even debris. Just empty space and starlight.
Arthur drifted in the void for a moment, then dropped the Arcane State and portalled onto Carol's ship. She followed through the airlock a moment later.
—
Arthur sat in the co-pilot's seat. Back to normal. The death energy sat inside his chest like a second heartbeat, patient and insistent.
"I need to go back to Earth," he said, rubbing his eyes. "This energy needs to be processed properly in a safe environment. Not out here."
"The missing fleet." Carol was already strapping into the pilot's seat, expertly switching her glowing displays to long-range sensor sweeps. "It's heading for Earth. We still don't know exactly where it is or when it arrives."
"I know. Come back with me to Earth? We can wait for them there. Prepare the ground."
"No." Her jaw set with familiar stubbornness. "I'd rather find them before they reach Earth's doorstep. Hit them in open space, where collateral isn't a concern."
"Then do that. But Carol—" He waited until she looked at him. "I know exactly what you're thinking. You're wondering why we didn't just do this months ago. You've been tracking them for weeks. You could have destroyed the fleet at any point."
Carol's silence confirmed it.
"The fleet belongs to Thanos," Arthur said. And Thanos is actively hunting the Tesseract. He knows for a fact it's on Earth. If we destroyed this fleet, he would just send another one. Probably a much stronger one. The Chitauri are entirely expendable to him. Cannon fodder. They are easy to deal with. But if we eliminate them too early, Thanos might escalate things. He might send the Outriders in real numbers. His elite generals. Or he might just come himself, sensing a genuine, cosmic-level threat to his plans."
Carol processed this grim logic. She didn't like it. That much was written plainly across her illuminated face. But she was a veteran soldier. She understood the painful necessity of strategic patience, even when every instinct in her body screamed against it.
"I'll find them," she promised quietly. "And when I do, I will make the tactical call on whether to engage them in the dark or keep tracking them to the door."
"Be careful, Carol."
She gave him a flat look that clearly said careful was not a word that existed in her vocabulary.
Arthur smiled faintly, twisted the air with his fingers, and opened a golden portal. He stepped through, leaving Carol and the cold, empty stars behind, and landed safely back home.