Thor's boots scraped against the metal deck as he pushed himself harder, fingers nearly grazing the hull of the ship. Almost. Just a little more.
Then the door burst open.
The familiar figure came flying out — and unlike their last encounter, there was no stalemate this time. No clash, no moment where they met in the middle and held. She hit him clean, and Thor went flying back like he weighed nothing.
He crashed into the ground hard enough to crater it, a massive cloud of dust rising up around him. For a moment there was just the ringing in his ears and the dirt settling on his shoulders. He groaned and tried to push himself up.
The next punch landed before he got halfway there.
Then another.
Then another.
He couldn't get his footing. Every time he tried to recover she was already on him, faster than before, hits landing harder than they had any right to. Something was different about her. He could feel it in every impact. This wasn't the same fight as last time.
It took an embarrassing number of hits before Thor finally managed to get a clear look at her through the dust and the haze.
He blinked.
There it was. A purple stone embedded in her chest, sitting there like it had always belonged, pulsing with slow steady violet light. The energy came and went in waves, deep and rhythmic, and every time it pulsed he could feel the weight behind it.
The thought landed in his mind immediately and clearly.
Infinity Stone.
He stared at it for half a second longer than he should have.
"...Fuck."
In Asgard.
Elric watched the scene alongside Hela.
Hela looked at the fight for a moment and then looked away, expression flat with boredom. She had seen enough one sided fights in her life to know when one was over.
Elric had lost interest too. He watched for another moment then turned to her. "Can you send the Destroyer down to Thor? Otherwise he might actually die."
He said it plainly because he meant it plainly. Thor was not in a good spot and it was only going in one direction. It was easy to look at the fight and think it was just a rough patch, but the reality was that the gap between them had widened the moment that stone showed up.
For context — Thanos hadn't even gotten a single hit in. He had gone down before the fight really started. But that was a specific situation, with Elric's buffs running and Hela operating at full capacity. The numbers there were not the same numbers as here.
Carol Danvers with the Power Stone enhancing everything she already was built to do was a completely different problem. Her powers and that particular stone worked together almost perfectly, and the result was standing right in front of them on the feed.
The fact that Thor was still alive and breathing after this long was genuinely impressive. He would give him that much.
But impressive or not, the fight had gone on long enough. It was time to wrap it up.
Back on the battlefield.
Tony watched the whole thing with a tight jaw and said absolutely nothing.
Please, he thought, watching Thor eat another hit and skid across the ground. Please just stop making this worse.
Nobody was listening to him. Nobody ever listened to him when it actually mattered.
He had been running the numbers since this whole thing started, the way his brain always did whether he asked it to or not. And the picture the numbers painted was not great, but it was not the worst thing he had ever seen either.
These people were not trying to kill them. That was the clearest data point he had. Look at the field — half the soldiers who had been knocked down were sleeping. Actually sleeping, breathing steadily, not a scratch on them beyond what the fight itself had put there. There was a very clear and very deliberate difference between what these Asgardians could do and what they were choosing to do, and Tony was holding onto that difference with both hands.
So if he had to map out the realistic worst case — surrender. Maybe some form of servitude. A boot on the neck in a political sense rather than a literal one. That was livable. That was something you could work with over time.
A civilization advanced enough to travel between worlds and wage a war on Earth, that still chose not to simply level the place from a safe distance, was not a civilization that was going to grind them into nothing. There was a logic to the restraint they were showing, and Tony trusted logic even when he didn't like where it pointed.
The plan had never been about winning. He was fairly sure nobody actually sane on this field had walked in today thinking they were going to win. The idea was simpler than that — fight hard enough that when things wound down there would be something to negotiate with. Show enough resistance to earn a conversation instead of just having terms handed down from above.
Not a good plan. Not the kind of plan Tony liked. But it was what they had, and looking around at the faces nearby he could see that most of the people still standing were probably thinking along the same lines.
And then there was the mercy thing. The Asgardians had shown it more than once today, clearly and deliberately. That meant something. It made the case for eventual surrender feel more reasonable rather than less, because at least there was evidence the other side was operating with some kind of principle behind their actions.
The problem was things kept finding ways to get worse.
Thor was taking a sustained beating, and if something crossed a line it couldn't come back from — if this ended in a way that couldn't be walked back — Tony had no idea what that did to the whole picture. He didn't want to think about it too hard because the answer wasn't good.
He kept watching and hoped, quietly, that it would stop here and not go any further.
A few hundred yards away, Fury had been running his own version of the same math.
When Carol showed up he had felt something shift. Not hope exactly, but a cautious recalculation. Overwhelming power, single combatant, the kind of force that could cut through a stalemate and push things toward a resolution fast. Maybe even toward a negotiation on terms that weren't completely humiliating.
That had lasted about ninety seconds.
Thor was too strong.
At this moment rainbow light split open the sky.
Fury tracked it immediately, watching it come straight down and land right beside Thor. It vanished in an instant, leaving behind a suit of armor that wrapped itself around him before the dust from the landing had even settled.
Carol came in hard with the next punch, the same way she had been hitting him the whole fight.
Thor caught it. One hand. Clean stop.
Then he swung back.
The difference was not subtle. The hits that had been doing nothing before — the ones that Thor had been absorbing and getting up from over and over — now landed with a completely different weight. Carol was sent skidding hard across the field, and Fury could feel the impact from where he was standing.
His mouth twitched slightly.
So that had not been anywhere close to there real strength. The whole fight. Not even close.
Fury stood there for a moment with genuinely nothing to say about that. He looked at the battlefield and accepted it.
Then his earpiece crackled.
"Boss." The voice on the other end was tight and clipped, the specific tone that meant this was not a routine check in. "Romanoff just made contact. She says she has important information. It's about the Asgardian queen and Sokovia." A short pause. "She's calling it urgent, sir."
Fury's eyes stayed on the field for one more second — on Thor standing in his armor, on Carol regrouping, on a fight that had just shifted shape entirely.
Then he turned away from it.
"Get her to me. Now."