Algrim worked through the cellblock systematically, hitting each barrier until it failed, not pausing, not looking at what he was releasing. The chaos was the objective. The contents of the cells were irrelevant.
He reached Loki's cell.
He stopped.
The cell was different from the others — not in its containment level, which was comparable to the most secure in the block, but in everything inside it. Books arranged with precise intent. A cup turning lazy circles in the air, apparently of its own accord. A man lying on his back on the bed with his hands folded across his chest, watching Algrim with the attentive calm of someone watching weather through a window.
Algrim measured the distance to the barrier. Looked at Loki. Looked at the barrier again.
He turned and walked away.
Loki tracked his departure with the same unhurried expression. Then, addressing the space Algrim had occupied: "The stairs on the left. If you want to reach the upper levels without running into the main guard rotation."
Algrim paused. Glanced back once.
Then he took the left staircase.
Loki resettled on his bed and picked up his cup again. One way or another, the next few hours were going to be considerably more interesting than the last few weeks.
The alarm reached Thor and Smith at the same moment — not the sound of it specifically, but the change in the palace's ambient noise that preceded the sound, the way a building shifts its acoustics when something significant begins happening at its foundations.
Frigga turned toward the direction the soldiers were moving. "The dungeons."
Thor's expression went immediately to Loki. "It's him."
"Go," Smith said. "I'll stay with her."
Thor was already moving. Then Smith reconsidered. "Actually —" He looked at Frigga, then back at Thor. "You're fine on your own. I want to see this." He fell in beside Thor. "You told me Loki received a proper sentence. I'm choosing to believe you, but I'm also choosing to verify."
Thor looked at him with the expression of someone navigating two things simultaneously — mild offense at the implied doubt and genuine understanding of why it existed. "The trial was legitimate. He's serving his time."
"Good. Then we go look at the riot and I stop wondering."
Thor nodded and broke into a run, arm extending toward Mjolnir. The hammer came to his hand with a crack that echoed off the corridor stone. He was airborne in the next second, Smith pulling up alongside him using nothing but the same unhurried ki application he used for everything, managing his speed to stay at Thor's shoulder rather than simply arriving ahead of him.
The dungeon entrance looked like a jailbreak, which was because it was. A cluster of released prisoners had made it to the outer corridor and were working up the specific courage of people who'd committed to a bad decision and had to see it through.
Thor landed in front of them. "Return to your cells," he said, with the authority of someone who meant it and had the backing to enforce it. "Do that now and this ends here."
One of the prisoners hit him in the head with a hammer.
It was, objectively, a brave thing to do. It was also a profoundly ill-advised thing to do.
Thor straightened up slowly. The hammer hadn't left a mark. He reached up and touched the spot with two fingers, more from surprise than injury. His expression moved through several stages and arrived at something that was past anger and into the specific cold territory beyond it.
"I take that back," he said.
Smith was already laughing. He raised one hand and released a ki blast that was sized precisely for crowd management — enough force to remove six people from a corridor quickly and safely, not enough to cause anything permanent. The cluster of prisoners left the floor and landed in a heap against the far wall.
Thor looked at the cleared corridor, looked at Smith, and then looked at the remaining prisoners with Mjolnir in his hand and lightning already running down his forearm. He stopped holding back. The fight that followed was brief, decisive, and contained a genuine edge that had been absent from the opening offer of amnesty.
On the far side of the palace, Odin had already assessed the situation with the economy of a man who had managed crises for several thousand years.
"Armory team to defensive position," he said to the nearest soldier, crisp and unbothered. "Hold the dungeon entrance. Move."
Frigga approached from the garden corridor with Jane beside her, both of them reading the controlled urgency in the soldiers' movement. Sif came from the other direction, fully armored, her warriors arrayed behind her.
Odin turned to look at them. "Minor disruption. Nothing to concern yourself with."
Frigga looked at her husband with the expression of a woman who had heard this specific reassurance many times and had learned to measure it. "You never lie," she said. Her voice was dry, not quite teasing.
Sif caught Jane's eye briefly — the kind of look that carries complex information without requiring words — and looked away.
"To your chambers," Odin said to Frigga. "I'll send for you when it's clear."
Frigga took a sword from a passing soldier with the practiced ease of someone for whom this was not an unusual thing to do. She looked at Jane. "From here on, you do exactly what I tell you. No questions."
Jane nodded quickly. "Yes, ma'am."
Odin gave Frigga one last look — something in it that had survived several thousand years of marriage and whatever it takes to sustain a look like that across that kind of time — then turned and walked toward the sound of things happening.
"Be careful," Frigga said to his back.
Odin, without turning: "Your worry is the reason I keep coming back."
At the Rainbow Bridge control room, Heimdall sensed it before his eyes found it — a wrongness in the space ahead of him, the specific distortion of technology designed to deceive his sight.
He ran. At the end of the bridge he left the ground entirely, daggers already in hand, and cut through the invisible ship with two clean passes of Dwarven-forged blades. The stealth field collapsed. The hull opened. The reactor, destabilized by the second cut, detonated and scattered burning debris across the bridge corridor.
Heimdall landed on the railing and looked at the wreckage.
Then he looked up.
The mothership was a hundred times the size of the scout he'd just destroyed. The sky behind it was dark with smaller craft already releasing from its bays, falling toward the palace in a pattern that had clearly been planned before any of this began.
He ran back to the control room at a dead sprint.
Asgard's defense grid came online — energy cannons rising from their housings across the palace roof and outer walls, tracking and firing in the coordinated pattern of a system that had been built for exactly this. Dark Elf ships broke apart in the air in strings of controlled explosions. Dozens. More. But the numbers were sufficient that dozens more broke through the screen and continued their descent.
Heimdall reached the command console and drove the Divine Sword into its housing. The palace shield began to rise — a massive barrier of energy extending outward from the building's foundation, climbing toward the incoming fleet.
A ship clipped the rising edge and exploded against it.
The shield continued rising.
And then stopped.
The energy died from the top down, the barrier collapsing back toward the foundation and vanishing. Somewhere below, Algrim had found the shield core. The Asgardian engineers who had built the system had never designed it against someone who could walk through the cell barriers that were supposed to hold him.
The shield was gone.
In the seconds that followed, Malekith boarded a blade-shaped craft and pointed it at the palace hall.
The ship hit the hall at speed, shearing through columns of stone and gold in a cascade of structural debris before it ground to a stop in the wreckage of the entrance.
The dungeon riot had been over for approximately ninety seconds.
Smith stood in the cleared corridor and looked at the unconscious and the groaning and the generally defeated, and said, "I didn't even get through the warmup."
Two seconds of silence.
"You're stronger," Thor said. He was breathing normally. His lightning had dissipated back into the ambient air.
"You've improved significantly too." Smith put a hand briefly on Thor's shoulder. "You're not the Hammer Guy anymore."
The lightning had been summoned and controlled directly — no Mjolnir intermediary, hands bare, the power running from him rather than through the weapon. Two years of post-tournament training had moved Thor from a fighter who borrowed his godhood through an enchanted object to one who understood that the hammer had always been incidental.
Thor turned and looked at him. "I am Thor," he said, with the careful dignity of a man making a distinction that mattered to him. "Not the Hammer Guy."
Smith's expression stayed neutral. His eyes didn't.
Then the alarm from the upper palace changed pitch, and both of them looked up at the ceiling at the same time.