Smith exhaled once and let it go.
The ki came out of him without buildup or ceremony — three hundred million combat power releasing in a single omnidirectional pulse, a pressure wave that had no interest in the crystals surrounding him. They didn't shatter. They ceased. The crimson formation came apart in fragments that were already dispersing before they hit the ground, the Aether's careful architecture dismantled in under a second by something that had no respect for its structural elegance.
Smith was already moving before the last fragment fell.
He crossed the distance to Malekith in a blink and hit him.
The first punch landed before Malekith had processed that the crystal cage was gone. The second came before he could raise a defense. The third and fourth arrived in a sequence so compressed they registered as a single sustained impact — boom, boom, boom, boom — each one driving Malekith backward another step, each one met with a frantic scramble of Aether drawn up as a shield, the crimson energy absorbing and distributing the force that would otherwise have simply ended things.
The Aether was doing real work. Smith noted that with professional interest.
He drove both palms into the Aether barrier in front of Malekith's chest, fingers splayed, and let the energy build in his hands for exactly the time it took to reach the right output.
Then he released it.
The wave punched through the barrier, through Malekith, and through the building behind him. The structure didn't collapse — it became a pressure event, stone and glass and load-bearing concrete turning to particulate matter in a radius that extended fifty meters in every direction. The dust cloud expanded outward and up, and when it thinned it revealed a crater where a university building had stood for three hundred years.
Loki stared at the crater for two full seconds. "Is he dead?"
He was also doing some private math about what would have happened if Smith had used that particular technique during any of their prior interactions. The conclusion of this calculation was deeply uncomfortable, and he set it aside.
Thor was already looking. The crater was clean — deep, circular, utterly final-looking.
From the far perimeter, Pietro's hand was over his mouth. "He never does that," he said, mostly to himself. "He never — that's why he never does that."
Fox scanned the evacuation perimeter reflexively. "Good thing we cleared the area."
The dust finished settling.
Malekith stood up in the crater.
He was bleeding — something was cracked in his torso, the body language of the way he straightened communicating it even at this distance. But the Aether had closed around the damage immediately, the crimson energy threading through the injury at a speed that made healing look mechanical rather than biological. By the time he was fully upright, the blood had stopped.
Smith studied this from the crater's edge. His expression was thoughtful rather than frustrated.
"You took that," he said. "That's surprising."
Malekith's answer was to pull the Aether outward in a sweeping arc — a horizontal wave of red light that hit Smith like a pressure front and carried him back thirty feet before he arrested the movement, feet dragging shallow furrows in the ruined ground.
The retaliation was immediate: dozens of dark red crystal spikes materialized from nothing in the air above Smith, each one angled downward, dropping all at once.
Smith raised both hands and fired.
Energy bolts left his palms in rapid sequence — not the wide-release style of the earlier punch, but tight and discrete, each one targeted, the volley filling the air between him and the incoming spikes with a staccato series of detonations. Boom, boom, boom, boom — the spikes became powder before they reached him, the last few destroyed close enough that the shockwave pushed his jacket back.
"That's all you've got?" He was already closing.
His fist came down at Malekith's skull.
Malekith got an arm up. The force of the block spread outward through the ground underfoot — the earth buckled in a ring around the two of them, cobblestones lifting and separating, every window in the surviving buildings nearby going out simultaneously in a cascade of outward-falling glass.
The Aether pushed back. Smith went up.
He stopped himself mid-air, turned, and found Malekith already repositioning. He reappeared directly behind him with a ki blast compressed and ready—
And then the world changed.
It happened without warning and without any physical sensation — one moment Smith was standing in Greenwich, and the next he was somewhere else entirely. Brown-green landscape. A different sky. Vanaheim's atmosphere, thin and dry, the distant mountains wrong in a way that confirmed the location immediately.
Malekith was standing four feet away, equally disoriented for exactly half a second longer than Smith.
Smith hit him with the ki blast he'd been holding. The detonation tore a mountain off the horizon behind Malekith, the shockwave flattening the nearest treeline. Malekith tumbled through two hundred meters of alien countryside before the ground stopped him.
He was already standing when Smith arrived.
They fought in Vanaheim for eleven seconds. Then the ground opened up beneath them and spat them back out.
Greenwich. Air, not ground — they were fifty feet up, the square below them, the crater still smoking.
Malekith dropped. Smith was already above him, both fists locked together, driving downward with his full weight and momentum behind the strike.
They blinked out again.
Jotunheim this time. Ice. The cold was absolute and immediate, a temperature that would kill a human in minutes. A frost beast the size of a warehouse was already turning toward them — an ancient, territorial response, the way these things had always dealt with anything that arrived in their territory uninvited.
It looked at Smith.
It stopped.
The beast stood perfectly still for a moment. Then it turned and ran, the ground shaking under its retreat, a living creature of immense power choosing distance as quickly as its legs could produce it.
Malekith tracked the retreating beast, then looked at Smith. Something had shifted in his expression — not fear, but the first admission that the calculation might not be running in his favor.
"Even the convergence of the Nine Realms won't save you," Smith said.
"The outcome remains—" Malekith started.
The ice cracked beneath them.
They came back to Greenwich. The square. Ground level.
In the sky above the city, the convergence was visible with the naked eye now — nine realities pressing into a single focal point, the upper atmosphere lit with the aurora-like interference of dimensional overlap. The air tasted wrong. Space was unreliable within a quarter-mile radius.
On the perimeter, Pietro had come to a complete stop. He was watching the sky with narrowed eyes, calculating approach vectors and finding each one compromised. "They've been teleported again," he said. "The spatial distortion is everywhere now. I don't even know where I'd end up if I ran in."
"This is what Smith described," Fox said. "The Nine Realms are stacking. Every doorway in this zone goes somewhere else."
Two SHIELD jets came in low over the Thames, their pilots reading the energy signatures and making fast decisions about engagement parameters. The identification query came over their comms, was answered in the affirmative, and a missile locked onto the Dark Elf mothership still sitting in the square.
The missile launched.
It curved upward at forty degrees and disappeared into a shimmer in the atmosphere.
"Missile deviation, missile deviation—"
The second pilot's hands went to his controls and found them unresponsive as his aircraft crossed the edge of the distortion zone. Both jets vanished into Vanaheim's sky, which was having a very unusual morning.
In the square, Malekith rose to his feet and looked up at the convergence overhead.
The Aether began to come out of him.
Not a directed attack this time — a detonation, the Stone's power releasing outward in all directions simultaneously, a black storm that expanded from Malekith's body and kept expanding, pulling light inward, the sky above Greenwich going dark at the center and spreading. The full deployment. Everything he had come here to do.
"Time has run its course," Malekith said. "You cannot stop this."
Smith looked at the expanding darkness. He thought about the nine realms. He thought about how long it would take the black storm to reach critical convergence mass. He thought about the Space Stone seated in the gauntlet on his right hand.
He crossed the distance to Malekith in a single step and grabbed him by the collar.
The portal opened.
Netherheim had a specific quality of silence that no other place matched — the silence of somewhere sealed, somewhere that the rest of the universe had agreed to forget. The sky, if it could be called that, was the deep purple-black of a space between spaces, and the structure of Hela's containment extended across the horizon in a geometry that had been designed to be permanent.
Malekith looked around, entirely confused about where he was and how he'd gotten there. The convergence was behind them — far behind them, far enough that the window he'd spent ten thousand years engineering was now unavailable to him regardless of what the Aether could do.
Smith threw him.
The punch landed center-mass, the full output behind it without theatrical buildup, and Malekith crossed two hundred meters of Netherheim's grey plain before he hit the ground and skidded another fifty.
He stood up.
The Aether moved over him like a tide, sealing the damage, pulling the cracks closed with the Reality Stone's absolute disregard for the physical laws governing what could and couldn't be repaired.
"An attack like that," Malekith said, and his voice was steadier than it should have been, "cannot kill me."
He straightened to his full height, the crimson energy wrapping him completely, wounds already gone.
Smith looked at him across the grey distance.
"I know," he said.
He cracked his knuckles.
"That's what makes this interesting."