"You want to know why I brought you here?"
Smith looked around at the grey emptiness of Netherheim — the sealed sky, the absence of anything that could break, anyone who could get caught in the crossfire, any structure that had taken centuries to build and would take centuries to replace.
"Because on Earth I have to be careful about where things land." He looked back at Malekith, the Aether still burning around him in a continuous defensive shell. "Here I don't."
He took a breath. Let his shoulders drop.
"Ten times Kaioken."
The red aura came out of him like a detonation.
It didn't build gradually — it arrived, an instant transition from baseline to something that bent the air around him into a continuous visible distortion, the crimson light so saturated it seemed to push the grey of Netherheim sideways. The ground beneath Smith's feet cracked in a ring and kept cracking, the fracture lines spreading outward in all directions as the shockwave rolled across the plain. In the sky overhead, where the Nine Realms were still overlapping at the tail end of the convergence, the energy signature was visible — a red point of light in Netherheim, broadcasting to every realm simultaneously, seen by anyone who happened to be looking up.
Malekith drew the Aether tighter around himself.
He could feel the output differential. Every instinct honed over ten thousand years of warfare told him the number was wrong — that nothing outside the Infinity Stones themselves should read this way, that the creature standing twenty meters away should not be producing this.
"How—"
Smith was already there.
The punch landed before the sentence finished, before the Aether could reroute to the point of impact, before anything with a reaction time built around physical reflexes could do anything useful about it. Malekith's head snapped back and his body left the ground.
Smith was behind him before he'd traveled ten feet.
The kick connected with the same economy — not a swing but a drive, the whole body's output channeled through one point of contact. Malekith changed direction violently. Up.
Smith was above him before he got there.
Both fists locked together. He brought them down into Malekith's back like a drop hammer, and the dark elf became a comet heading for the grey plains of Netherheim, trailing crimson light as the Aether scrambled to keep up with damage that was arriving faster than it could be processed.
The impact crater was twelve meters deep.
Smith descended slowly and watched it. The Aether was still working — still sealing, still rebuilding, the Reality Stone refusing to allow its host to simply be destroyed by physics. He could see it moving under Malekith's skin, frantic and brilliant.
He didn't step back. He widened his stance.
"One more," he said quietly.
His hands came apart. Left hand drew back. Right hand came forward, both palms open, the ki gathering between them in that particular dense white light that had a different quality from ordinary energy discharge — heavier, more specific, the Kamehameha wave built from a technique that had been refined across the entire history of the Turtle School and then handed to a transmigrator who'd spent years making it his own.
The Nine Realms were still watching.
"Kamehameha."
The beam left his hands.
White light filled Netherheim completely — not a flash but a sustained column, the kind of output that operated outside the normal vocabulary of what energy attacks were supposed to do. It hit Malekith at the bottom of the crater, hit the Aether barrier, hit the Reality Stone's defenses, and went through all three with the unhurried certainty of something that had not been calibrated to stop.
The explosion that followed didn't roar. It simply was — a total event, the silence after it arriving before the sound had time to.
When the light faded, Smith looked at the space where Malekith had been.
There was a crater, and there was nothing in it.
Above the crater, something floated — catching the dim purple light of Netherheim's sky, tumbling slowly, the outer shell of the Aether reduced to dispersing fragments by the wave's passage. At the center of the fragments, no longer bound to anything or anyone, the Reality Stone hung in the air.
Red. Quiet. Waiting.
Smith crossed the distance without hurrying and held out his hand. The Stone settled into his palm.
He looked at it for a moment. It didn't resist. It didn't react to him the way the Space Stone had — there was no surge, no immediate assertion of its character. It simply existed in his hand, a piece of crystallized reality that had been used as a weapon for ten thousand years and was now being held by someone who hadn't asked its opinion.
He raised the Infinity Gauntlet and pressed it into the second setting.
The Reality Stone seated itself with a sound that was felt rather than heard, and the energy came immediately — not a gentle acclimation but a full assertion, red spreading from the gauntlet up his forearm in a wave that wasn't painful so much as totalizing. Two Stones simultaneously. The Space Stone's cold geometry meeting the Reality Stone's fluid, rewriting logic, and the space between those two opposing natures running directly through him.
His right fist closed involuntarily. He held that, jaw tight, and let the energy map itself to him. Four seconds. Five. Then it settled — not gone, but integrated, available in the way his own ki was available.
He opened his hand.
The gauntlet held both Stones, and both Stones held still.
Smith turned it over once and thought about Wanda. Chaos magic at its theoretical ceiling was reality manipulation — the same domain as this Stone, approaching from a different architectural direction. The synergy between the two would be something genuinely difficult to calculate. He filed that for later.
He opened a portal.
Greenwich.
The square looked like the aftermath of a decision that several parties had disagreed about violently. The Dark Elf mothership sat where it had landed, now empty and silent. Around the perimeter, Fox's people were already beginning the process of deciding what to do about the various pieces of things scattered across the cobblestones. Thor and Loki stood near the center, both of them checking the sky with the expression of people waiting for a situation to resolve.
"Where did he go?" Thor said to nobody in particular.
The portal opened three feet away from him and Smith stepped through.
Thor turned. His eyes went immediately to the Gauntlet — the Space Stone, and now something red beside it, seated and settled, the second slot filled.
"Malekith?"
"Dead."
Thor's expression went through several things quickly and settled on something that wasn't quite relief and wasn't quite satisfaction but lived in the space between them. He let out a breath that had been waiting a while. "You got the Aether."
"Got it."
Loki was looking at the Gauntlet. He was doing the math. He was very good at math, and the conclusion he was arriving at was doing something interesting to his composure that he was managing with effort.
"Two Stones," he said, almost to himself.
Smith looked across the square to where Bulma, Fox, and Pietro were converging from the perimeter. He raised his voice enough to carry. "Enemy's handled. We're going home."
Bulma was already looking at the mothership. She'd been looking at it since it landed, with the specific focus of an engineer in the presence of something she intended to understand completely.
"How do we transport that?"
Smith walked to the ship, crouched slightly, and pressed one hand against the hull. The system space opened beneath his palm — not visibly, just present, the same compressed dimensional storage that held the Gauntlet and everything else he'd decided to keep. The ship's mass transferred in a single moment.
The mothership disappeared.
Loki stared at the empty air where a vessel larger than a city block had been sitting. Then he looked at Smith. He appeared to be reconsidering several things about the past two days in light of new information.
Smith opened the portal home — wide enough for everyone, the Brotherhood's main floor visible on the other side.
"Fox. Lead them through."
Fox nodded and began moving people. The werewolves went first, then the others, the whole group filing through with the practiced efficiency of people who'd been moving through portals long enough that the novelty had worn off.
Smith waited until the last person was through, then looked at Thor and Loki.
"Let's go."
Jane was on her feet when Thor came through the portal.
She'd heard enough from Darcy and the others to understand the shape of what had happened — the Aether gone, Malekith handled, the convergence window passed. She'd been waiting with the particular tension of someone who knew the outcome intellectually and needed the physical confirmation anyway.
Thor crossed the room and she met him halfway. He held on a little longer than he usually let himself.
"It's done," he said, close enough that only she could hear it. "You're safe."
Smith looked around the room — at Pietro already in conversation with Darcy, at Bulma pulling up the mothership's specs in her head with her eyes slightly unfocused, at Fox already on a call, at the general atmosphere of people who'd been prepared for something bad and were now adjusting to the fact that it hadn't come.
"We stopped a universal extinction event," he said, loud enough for the room. "I think that earns a proper celebration." He looked at Fox. "You know what to do."
Fox ended his call. "Already on it."
Thor emerged from his conversation with Jane long enough to smile broadly at this news. A banquet was, in his professional opinion as a son of Asgard, exactly the correct response to a successful battle. The werewolves in the room arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously and with considerable enthusiasm, which made the sound level in the Brotherhood's main floor spike noticeably.
Bulma pulled Smith aside while the noise built. "The ship," she said. "It's in your system space?"
"Yes."
"Release it somewhere outside. I need to get my hands on the tech — but I have a size reducer. You let it out, I compress it, we take it back to the lab in a bag." She was already smiling with the anticipatory energy of someone who had just been handed a very interesting problem. "Their propulsion geometry alone is going to take me months."
Smith looked at her for a moment. A Dark Elf mothership, reverse-engineered by Bulma.
"I'll clear a space in the yard," he said.