Thor's explanation was short and direct. He laid out what they were dealing with — Malekith, the Aether now fully absorbed, the convergence window, Greenwich — and let the room do the math on its own.
Everyone arrived at worry at roughly the same pace. The understanding that Loki was standing on the right side of this one arrived slightly slower, moving through the group in stages as eyes tracked from Thor to Loki and back. Loki received it without comment, hands clasped behind him, expression appropriately neutral.
"I'm going with you tomorrow," Bulma said. She looked across the room. "Friday — pull up Greenwich."
The display materialized in the center of the space, a clean overhead panoramic: a wide square flanked by university buildings on three sides, the Thames running along the front, open ground at the center. Good sight lines. No natural cover to speak of.
Fox studied it with the eyes of someone who had organized a lot of perimeters. "If this is the battleground, we need the civilians out before anything starts. That means contacting the British government and S.H.I.E.L.D. for coordination."
"There are still troops aboard Malekith's mothership," Loki added. "Soldiers who didn't come down in the Dark World. They'll deploy on arrival."
"I can handle the evacuation." Pietro had his arms crossed, tracking the map. "The whole area. If I bring two or three people with enough speed to help, I can clear everyone out before Malekith's ship comes into visual range. No government notice required." He looked at Smith. "Should I bring Wanda back in?"
"Wanda's at Kamar-Taj," Smith said. "Leave her. This doesn't need her."
He looked at the map for a moment, then laid it out cleanly. "Pietro takes the evacuation. Fox — pull your people in and seal the perimeter. Nobody comes back in once the civilians are out." He paused. "Malekith is mine. Thor and Loki take the soldiers."
Fox raised an eyebrow. "Xu Wenwu and the others are here. And the Paragons. You don't want to call them in?"
Thor spoke before Smith could. "We don't need them." He said it without arrogance — just certainty. "The soldiers are manageable. Malekith is Smith's opponent. If we bring in Xu Wenwu, Loki doesn't get the field time he needs to start rebuilding his name on Earth. And I'm not handing that fight to someone else."
Smith gave him a brief nod. "Same conclusion. Xu Wenwu's team stays out. No S.H.I.E.L.D., no British government notification." He saw Fox start to object and answered the objection before it landed. "Malekith won't start a ground campaign when he arrives. He's there to activate the Aether at convergence — everything else is a means to that end. By the time any government agency finishes verifying the situation, it's already over one way or another."
He let that sit for a second.
"Also, I want the mothership intact after this. S.H.I.E.L.D. would claim it the moment they arrived."
Bulma's eyes lit up with the specific brightness of an engineer hearing about a new acquisition. She made a note.
"One more thing," Smith said. "Anyone who's been developing ki sensitivity — come to Korin after this is settled. It's time to learn how to fly properly. I'll clear it with him." He looked at Fox. "Make sure the word gets around."
Fox nodded and began making calls.
By the following morning, Greenwich was a different place.
The square was empty — not the ordinary morning-empty of a historic district between tourist waves, but the specific emptiness of a space that had been carefully cleared of every person who had any reason to be there. Pietro had moved through the surrounding streets before dawn, a wind that knocked on doors and urged people toward somewhere else with enough urgency that no one had argued. By the time the sun was fully up, the only people left were the ones who'd chosen to be.
Fox's people held the outer ring — spread along the access roads, the riverbank, the paths through the park. Werewolves and vampires sharing a perimeter cordon with the practiced ease of a security operation they'd run variations of before.
At the center of the square, Smith, Thor, and Loki stood in the early light and waited.
Thor swung Mjolnir once, the familiar habit of someone who thinks better when his hands have something to do. "How long?"
Smith looked up.
The sky above Greenwich had already begun to change. Not weather — something older than weather. The atmospheric distortion of nine separate realities pressing toward the same point, reality going slightly soft at the edges the way water goes soft just before it boils. Colors that shouldn't exist at this latitude bleeding into the upper atmosphere.
"It's already starting," Smith said.
The Thames-side air rippled, and the mothership emerged from nothing.
It came in over the river, massive and blade-shaped, descending with the slow and total confidence of something that had never had to hurry because nothing had ever given it reason to. The light hit its dark hull and found nothing to reflect. It stopped at the center of the square and hung there, casting the ground below it into shadow.
From the perimeter, Fox stared up at it. "It's enormous."
"Their aesthetic sense is genuinely terrible," Bulma said from beside him, head tilted back, professional offense in her voice. "What is that shape supposed to accomplish structurally? A circular design would—"
"Form follows function," Pietro said. "And their function is apparently looking threatening."
"It's not even good at that."
"It is pretty ugly," Pietro admitted.
The hatch opened. Malekith came down first, unhurried, soldiers filing out behind him in a continuous stream. His repaired face caught the morning light and confirmed what Thor's lightning had done to the original — the reconstruction was functional but not seamless, the left side rebuilt from the outside in and not quite matching what had been there before.
He looked at the three figures standing in the square and paused.
"Asgardians." His voice carried across the open ground without effort. "You've come such a long way to die."
He was grouping Smith in with them — an Asgardian ally, presumably, given the company. Smith didn't correct it. The taxonomy didn't matter.
"Your cursed warrior was a decent warm-up," Smith said. "I'm hoping you're an improvement."
Malekith's eyes moved to him — a reassessment, quick and functional. He started walking forward. "Your universe should never have—"
"Thor. Loki." Smith was already moving. "The soldiers."
Behind him, he heard Mjolnir catch the air and Loki's twin daggers rasp clear of wherever he'd been keeping them.
Malekith raised one hand and the Aether responded — deep crimson light flowing from his palm in a wide arc, reality warping at the leading edge of the beam where the Stone's power made contact with ordinary space.
It hit Smith in the chest.
The light shattered against him.
Smith stopped walking. He looked down at the dissipating red fragments, then back up at Malekith with an expression that wasn't contempt — just honest assessment.
"You hit harder before the extraction."
Malekith's jaw tightened. He drew the Aether in closer, pulling it around him in a dense shell of crimson energy, building something larger.
Smith raised one hand and compressed a ki blast into his palm — tight, compact, barely bigger than a fist, which meant almost none of the energy was going anywhere except the target.
He threw it.
The explosion picked Malekith up off the ground and carried him backward several hundred meters in a flat trajectory before he went through one of the stone pillars at the far building's facade and came down hard on a parked car, which crumpled under him and stopped his slide.
The soldiers who'd been standing behind him caught the edge of the blast and scattered. Two of them didn't get up.
Thor and Loki were already in the gap before the dust settled — Mjolnir swinging a wide horizontal arc that took four soldiers off their feet simultaneously while Loki moved through the confusion in a series of precise, economic strikes, daggers finding seams in Dark Elf armor with the certainty of someone who had spent a very long time learning exactly where those seams were.
Smith watched Malekith stand up from the wreckage of the car. He shook glass out of his hair, straightened, and crossed his arms in front of him.
He was not done.
Good.
The Aether moved at Malekith's command — not a directed beam this time, but a formation spell, the crimson energy flowing outward and upward and crystallizing into shape. Dozens of dark red rhomboid crystals materialized in the air around Smith, each one roughly the size of a door, each rotating slowly at a slightly different axis. Surrounding him completely.
Then they closed inward all at once.