Loki had gone quiet after his exchange with Smith, but quiet, with Loki, was never inert. He turned it over for a few minutes while the Dark World's grey landscape scrolled past the ship's narrow viewport. Then he looked at Thor.
"You should prepare yourself," he said. "To say goodbye to her."
Thor kept his eyes forward. "Not today."
"Today, tomorrow, a hundred years from now — to you, what's the difference?" Loki's voice had no malice in it, which somehow made it worse. "It's a blink. And every blink, you'll be the same, and she'll be a little less. The thing you care about most will be taken by time, and there's nothing in the Nine Realms you can do about it."
"Would that make you happy?" Thor said, and his voice had an edge in it now.
"Nothing makes me happy." Loki shrugged, utterly sincere. "It's simply a fact. I'm pointing it out as a courtesy."
He glanced across the cabin at Smith, who was watching from near the rear bulkhead with his arms crossed, clearly content to let this play out at its own pace.
"Can the Dragon Balls extend a human lifespan?" Loki asked him. "Hypothetically."
Smith considered it for two seconds. "You can make a wish for it."
Thor turned from the controls. His jaw was set, his eyes steady — the look of a man who had already decided the question and was just waiting for the universe to catch up.
"Then I'll win the championship before it comes to that. I promised myself that much."
Loki tilted his head. "As expected of Odin's son. You have access to artifacts capable of rewriting the fabric of reality, and your first thought is to use them to extend the life of a single woman." He paused, apparently genuinely turning it over. "I can't decide if that's noble or catastrophically wasteful."
"You couldn't even win when my life was on the line," he added, after a beat. "So I'll reserve judgment on whether you can manage it for hers."
"That's enough," Thor said.
Smith uncrossed his arms. "There won't be another Dragon Ball tournament."
Both brothers went still.
The ship's engine hummed. Outside, the dead sky of the Dark World sat on the horizon like a closed eye.
Thor turned around fully. "Say that again."
"The last cycle was the last," Smith said. "No more Dragon Ball battles."
The silence that followed was a specific kind — the kind where two people are recalculating something fundamental and coming up short. Thor's expression had the particular compression of a man absorbing news he wasn't prepared for. Loki, for once, simply looked at Smith without speaking. Even he had found the Dragon Balls genuinely interesting, which was a higher compliment than most things earned from him.
Smith let them sit with it for a moment.
Then: "You don't need to look like that. I'm not keeping the wishes for myself."
He leaned back slightly against the hull. "The Dragon Ball tournament is done. But I'm running a World Martial Arts Tournament going forward. Open registration. You're both welcome to enter."
Thor's expression shifted so fast it was almost funny. A full reset, from quiet devastation to active interest, accomplished in under a second.
Loki recovered almost as quickly.
"Well," Loki said.
"We'll be there," Thor said, at almost exactly the same moment.
They glanced at each other. Neither of them acknowledged it.
The ship crested a ridge and Jane straightened in her seat, looking through the viewport at the massive blade-shaped silhouette sitting on the valley floor below — a vessel built like a weapon, all sharp angles and dark metal.
"That's Malekith's ship," she said.
Smith was already reading the terrain. The valley gave them one good approach — a hillside overlooking the flat ground where the enemy would have to cross to reach them. High ground. Limited sight lines from below. Workable.
"Set it down up there," he said, pointing. "We go on foot from here."
They stepped out onto the hillside into cold, colorless air. The Dark World's sky pressed down the way it always did here — overcast by something that wasn't clouds, a permanent half-dark that made every distance hard to judge.
Malekith had already seen them. His ship's ramp descended, and he came out flanked by soldiers, moving at the unhurried pace of a man whose position he considered unassailable. The damage Thor had done to his face was visible even from distance — the left side reconstructed by whatever healing the Dark Elves possessed, but still wrong in ways that couldn't be fully corrected.
At his shoulder, Algrim moved with the weight and deliberateness of something that had stopped being a person and become a function. The Cursed Warrior transformation had taken whatever Algrim used to be and compressed it into something built for singular purpose. Smith watched him cross the ground and felt a small, anticipatory focus settle in his chest. Thor's hammer had bounced off that thing like a rubber ball. He was curious what wouldn't.
Beside him, Jane breathed quietly. Her skin still carried traces of the Aether's energy cycling beneath the surface, visible in the dim light as a faint red pulse.
Thor stepped forward, placing himself between Jane and the approaching group. His voice dropped low, just for her.
"Ready?"
Smith moved before Jane could answer, stepping up beside her and gripping her arm — not hard, but clearly. Establishing the image. Captor and captive. From Malekith's position, it would read exactly right.
Loki shook his manacled wrists at Thor. His expression was remarkably calm for someone about to walk into an active ambush. "You could do me the small courtesy of removing these before we start."
"Do you trust me?" Thor said.
"Of course not," Loki said, pleasantly.
"Then we're even." Thor reached out and pulled the manacles off anyway.
Loki caught them before they hit the ground, looked at them once, and pocketed them. Some habits.
"For the record," he said, rolling his shoulders, "if this plan gets us both killed, I'm going to be extremely put out."
He took two steps forward and stopped. Thor did the same. They stood side by side on the hillside for exactly as long as it took to sell the appearance of a standoff — and then Loki moved.
His elbow found Thor's ribs. His foot swept Thor's knee. And in the same motion his conjured dagger found the outside of Thor's right arm — not cutting, but the illusion of cutting, clean and precise, the severed limb falling away in a spray of red that looked entirely real from twenty yards.
Mjolnir clattered off to the side, suddenly no longer attached to anything.
Thor went down the hillside in a controlled tumble that looked like anything but controlled.
Jane lurched forward. "Thor—"
Smith's grip tightened. She pulled. She might as well have been pulling at a wall.
Loki was already moving downhill, closing on Thor, his voice pitched to carry.
"Do you think I care about Frigga?" Loud enough for Malekith to hear. Each word placed like a stone. "Do you think I care about any of you?"
He reached Thor and kicked him, hard. Thor rolled, hit the ground, and lay still with his right arm held at an angle that shouldn't have been anatomically possible.
"I want to see you and Odin bleed out at my feet." Loki's voice was absolutely steady. "That's all I've ever wanted."
Smith kept his eyes on Malekith's face. The dark elf was watching, head slightly tilted, the strategic mind behind those ruined features running the math on what he was seeing. His hand moved toward Algrim — but not a signal to attack. A signal to wait.
Algrim stepped forward.
"He was a prisoner in Asgard's dungeon." The Cursed Warrior's voice was rock grinding against rock. "He's the enemy's own brother. Odin jailed him."
Malekith looked from Algrim to Loki to the manacled hands that had just been freed. He processed this. A prisoner. A traitor. A man who had just driven a dagger into the son of Odin to prove a point.
The enemy of my enemy.
He walked the rest of the way to Thor, crouched, and looked at the severed arm and the pain on his face. Then he stood and raised one hand.
Jane rose from the ground without anyone touching her.
The Aether answered — not to Malekith exactly, but to whatever resonance the Dark Elves carried in their blood, some ancient frequency the Stone recognized. It came out of Jane like water finding a drain: through her fingers, her mouth, her eyes, thin tendrils of deep red converging in the space above her and flowing toward Malekith's outstretched hand.
Jane watched the sky darken.
It felt like watching a sun go cold — not all at once, but methodically, the light being replaced by something older and hungrier. The Aether spread across her vision in expanding red, and she understood for the first time exactly what it would look like if that thing had a body large enough to use it. She understood what Malekith intended to do with it.
And then it was gone.
All of it. Out of her entirely, collected, the last thread of red disappearing into Malekith's grip. The weight she hadn't known she was carrying for weeks vanished from her bones in an instant.
Jane dropped.
Smith was already looking at Algrim. The Cursed Warrior's posture had shifted — the subtle realignment of something that was about to act. He'd been waiting for the extraction. Waiting for the moment Malekith had what he came for and the deception became unnecessary.
"Now," Thor said.
Loki swept his hand, and the entire scene of the past sixty seconds rewound in a single gesture — Thor's arm whole again, the blood gone, the fallen pose discarded. Loki's magic had held every detail of the illusion perfectly; up close, Smith hadn't been able to find a single seam.
He filed that away.
Smith was already moving. He crossed the distance to Jane in a fraction of a second, landed beside her falling body, and caught her with one arm. His free hand snapped open. The Space Stone in the Infinity Gauntlet pulsed cold blue, and a portal tore open in the air beside him — clean-edged, stable, the other end showing the interior of the Brotherhood's base.
He pushed Jane through.
The portal closed behind her.
In the Brotherhood's main floor, Jane hit the ground and rolled. She blinked at the ceiling, breathed, and tried to remember what year it was.
Footsteps. Then Darcy's voice, sharp with relief.
"Jane." She dropped to her knees beside her. "You're back. You're actually back."
Back on the Dark World's hillside, the portal had already been closed for half a second.
Thor's hand rose.
Mjolnir answered.
The hammer crossed the valley in a blur, and when it hit the extracted Aether suspended in Malekith's grip, the lightning came with it — a strike that lit the entire sky for a moment, turning the grey overcast to white.