Thor knew better than to think he could destroy a Stone. He'd accepted that the moment his father said the words Reality Stone in the throne room. But an Infinity Stone sitting uncontained in open air, separated from its host and not yet absorbed — that was a different problem. That could be disrupted. Scattered. Made unusable long enough to matter.
He swung Mjolnir through the Aether with everything he had.
The lightning discharged on contact, a full-force strike that lit the hillside like a flashbulb. The Aether shattered — or appeared to. The red mass broke apart into a hundred drifting fragments, spinning outward in a scatter of crimson light, and for one second the whole valley went quiet.
Thor looked sideways at Smith.
Did that actually—
The fragments reversed direction. Each one curved back in a long arc, independent, purposeful, finding each other in the air above Malekith's outstretched hand. They converged, merged, and then simply flowed into his skin like water into sand. Gone in under three seconds.
Malekith didn't even flinch.
Smith hadn't moved, hadn't reacted. He'd been watching Algrim.
The Aether's absorption hadn't been the variable he was tracking.
Malekith gave Algrim one look — a small, economical signal — and turned toward his ship without another word. He had what he'd come for. The convergence was approaching. Whatever happened on this hillside in the next few minutes was beneath his attention.
His soldiers, however, had orders.
They opened fire.
The Dark Elf energy beams came in overlapping lines, three different angles, lighting up the grey air in blue-white. Thor went low, Mjolnir already swinging, the resulting shockwave clearing the nearest cluster of soldiers off their feet.
Loki moved differently — sideways, unhurried-looking, trailing copies of himself that drew fire before dissolving. He pulled two daggers that weren't the ones Thor had given him and put both of them to work.
Then the black hole grenade came.
Algrim threw it underhand, almost casual. It detonated six feet above Loki's head with a flat, contained sound that shouldn't have been able to produce what followed — a miniature singularity, dark matter compressed into a point the size of a fist, already pulling at everything nearby. Stones lifted from the ground. Loki's coat flared upward. His feet left the earth.
He went up fast, arms out, and the black hole had him.
Mjolnir crossed the distance in a blink. Thor caught Loki by the wrist on the way past, the hammer's momentum carrying them both clear of the pull radius. They came down hard thirty feet away.
The black hole collapsed two seconds later, the gravitational energy spent, leaving a shallow crater and scorched earth.
The Dark Elf soldiers used the distraction professionally. Three of them redirected fire at Thor the moment he landed, and he had to bring his arm up to absorb two shots before he could get his footing.
Across the hillside, Algrim turned from Loki.
He faced Smith.
Smith had been waiting for exactly this.
Algrim covered the distance at a dead sprint, his footsteps impacting the dark earth with the density of something that had shed every unnecessary gram of itself and replaced it with force. He threw a straight right hand that could have flattened the hillside.
Smith caught it with his left.
The shockwave went outward from the point of contact like a pressure wave from a detonation — a perfect sphere of compressed air that scattered gravel in all directions and exposed the grey-brown bedrock beneath their feet. The ground between them cracked.
Smith felt it travel through his arm and up his shoulder and assessed it in the same instant.
Stronger than anything in the films. Considerably.
In the movie, Thor's hammer had bounced off this thing. Smith had filed that as a data point but hadn't fully priced it until now. This was the floor, not the ceiling. A Thanos who hadn't spent years collecting Stones and hadn't been holding back had maybe this level of raw output, maybe less.
He matched the next punch. And the next. And the one after that.
They traded at close range, and each exchange hit like a building collapsing — boom, boom, boom, the sound rolling across the valley in overlapping waves. Smith kept his eyes on Algrim's shoulders. The tells were there; the transformation hadn't erased them, just slowed the reaction window.
Fifty feet away, Malekith walked his ramp up behind him. His ship's stealth field shimmered and swallowed the vessel whole. Smith clocked it in his peripheral vision but didn't chase. The convergence would bring him to Earth. The stone would bring him somewhere findable. That was a problem for the next hour.
Right now, he had a better problem.
Thor put Mjolnir through a low arc and sent the last two soldiers spinning. He straightened, shook out his hand, and looked across the field at Smith and Algrim — and his expression went carefully neutral in the way of someone trying to reassess quickly.
The Cursed Warrior was still standing.
He'd been trading with Smith for two full minutes.
Thor had seen what Smith's punches did to the landscape. He shifted his grip on Mjolnir and threw it.
Algrim felt it coming without looking — some perception built into the transformation, or just the instinct of something that had absorbed so many impacts it could read the air. He turned and threw a backhand.
Mjolnir changed direction. It pinwheeled sideways and buried itself in a hillside forty yards away, stone erupting outward from the impact.
"That's my opponent." Smith hadn't raised his voice. He didn't need to. "Stay out."
Thor retrieved Mjolnir without argument and went to find Loki.
Smith rolled his neck once and looked at Algrim straight. The Cursed Warrior's breathing was slightly elevated — the only sign that several minutes of sustained close-range hits had registered.
"Your strength is exceptional," Smith said. "Your durability is even better." His expression wasn't unfriendly. It was the look of someone who had been given something worth paying attention to. "I want to see how far that goes."
He exhaled.
The ki came out of him like a pressure release — white energy peeling off his skin in a continuous wave, not a spike but a sustained output, the ground vibrating at a frequency just below audible. The light it produced washed the grey right out of the Dark World for about fifteen feet in every direction. Algrim's eyes narrowed against it.
Smith closed the distance in a single step and drove his fist into Algrim's abdomen.
The armor didn't bend. It shattered.
The impact pushed through and out the other side, white energy bleeding from Algrim's back in a brief vertical flare before it dispersed. The sound of it arrived a half-second after the visual, a dense crack that bounced off the distant rock formations and came back as an echo.
Algrim bent forward at the waist.
Smith stepped back, fist unclenching. Algrim straightened, slowly. He spat blood — dark, thick — and raised his head.
Didn't fall.
Smith smiled. Small, genuine. "Not bad."
Algrim threw a right hook. Smith stepped outside it, let the arm pass, and drove a kick into the same spot. Then another. Then a sequence of three in under a second, each one pushing Algrim back another step across the ruined ground. The transformed warrior's boots dug furrows in the earth trying to anchor against the rhythm of it.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
"You're the best punching bag I've found in a while," Smith said, almost conversationally, "and I mean that as a compliment."
Algrim pulled something from his belt.
The black hole grenade arced up and detonated two feet in front of Smith's face.
The singularity formed immediately — a full-sized one, larger than the one Loki had nearly been swallowed by, the pull aggressive and immediate. Smith felt the vacuum tug at him, felt his feet lighten. The loose rock around his boots lifted. The air went sideways, feeding into the point.
He fired a quick ki blast directly into it.
The black hole ate it. No flash, no impact, just gone — mass added to the collapse, the pull strengthening briefly before stabilizing. Smith reassessed. His feet were back on the ground, suppressed weight against the pull, but it was drawing seriously.
He didn't particularly feel like being pulled apart at the molecular level.
Algrim was reaching into his belt again. Two more grenades, fingers closing around both.
Smith moved.
He covered the twenty feet in a fraction of a second, appearing at Algrim's rear before the grenades cleared the belt. One heel kick to the small of the transformed warrior's back — channeled, not casual, the kind of force that put craters in rock — and Algrim left the ground.
His trajectory curved. The black hole took him first.
Smith's hands came together, ki flooding into both palms simultaneously, building fast.
"Kamehameha."
The beam left his hands as Algrim hit the singularity's edge.
White light erased the Dark World.
The Kamehameha pierced through Algrim from behind — clean, total, a column of energy that didn't slow. The black hole devoured what remained at the front. The two forces met at the center, and for one second the valley held the combined output of both.
Then the light faded.
The black hole collapsed. The silence that followed was the specific silence of a space where something significant had just stopped existing.
Smith lowered his hands and let the ki disperse.
He rolled his shoulders once, looked at where Algrim had been, and turned toward wherever Thor and Loki had gotten to.