A gaping wound tore open the once-impenetrable storm cloud swirling within Jupiter, and as the beam fizzled out, there stood Thor and Thanatos, each wrapped dramatically in their own shimmering aura, like superheroes and villains who'd both clearly read the same 'How to Look Cool in Battle' manual.
Their eyes met in a moment of silent agreement, probably something like, "Alright, let's smash this thing," before they turned their attention downward to the planet's chaotic storms, which were now flailing to reclaim their lost territory.
In the center of the maelstrom lurked the god-beast, glaring at them with eyes that screamed pure, unfiltered rage (and maybe mild indigestion).
RUMBLE!
Thunder grumbled somewhere in the cosmic distance as Thor of Asgard launched himself forward, Mjolnir sparking with rainbow lightning that twisted into six distinct hues, each one conveniently matching an Infinity Stone, as if he had coordinated it for a festival.
"WILLIAM… WAKE THY ASS UP!" he bellowed, swinging Infinity Mjolnir toward the god-beast's jaw.
William's eyes tracked every tiny movement, then locked onto Thor's multicolored, over-caffeinated glare, and with such ridiculous speed that even his afterimages had afterimages, he snatched the hammer mid-swing with his right hand.
"GRAHHH!" William roared with feral intensity as he yanked Thor downward toward his rising left hand, already mid-uppercut. In that instant, Thor erupted with green lightning, shifting himself backward in time just before his hammer could be caught.
Spotting William's hand poised to intercept, Thor twisted midair into a tight spin, striking William's hand with the shaft of Gungnir before driving the intended blow into his face.
Through his permanent snarl, William could swear he saw a fleeting glimmer of surprise.
BANG!
CRACKLE!
Mjolnir slammed into William's cheek, the impact caving part of his face and hurling the feral Saiyan to the left, his body blazing like a red flare within Jupiter's swirling, storm-laden atmosphere.
"AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!"
Halting his backward flight with a violent burst of ki, William whipped the surrounding cloud bank into a dense mass, so solid that part of it condensed into liquid and fell into Jupiter, vanishing forever.
Around him, not merely red lightning but searing red plasma surged in rhythmic waves, his trembling muscles straining as his form seemed to grow in stature.
His head snapped upward, sensing imminent danger, just in time to see Thanatos descending from above, scythe raised for a lethal downward strike meant to cleave William in two like brittle wood.
The scythe descended with the finality of a divine executioner's guillotine, its blade screaming through the roiling Jovian atmosphere.
Mere inches from cleaving his skull, William's hands shot upward, palms slamming against the weapon's curved edges with a resounding clang that echoed across the storm like a titan's gong.
His fingers dug into the metal, claws striking sparks as the blade halted mid-swing.
For a moment, the cosmos itself seemed to hold its breath.
Above him, Thanatos snarled, muscles coiling, every vein igniting with inky black ki as he channeled his full might downward.
The scythe groaned under the strain, its long haft bending as the Mad Titan forced it against the Saiyan's unyielding grip.
William responded with a guttural, primal growl that rumbled through the tempest like a tectonic upheaval.
Rivers of red and gold god-ki surged through his arms, molten energy spiderwebbing across the scythe's surface like living circuitry.
Instantly, the storm reacted, clouds erupted outward, winds shifted violently, and Jupiter itself quaked under the clash of wills.
Thanatos roared, throwing his full cosmic mass into the strike, but William stood immovable.
His feet anchored into the storm as though it were solid earth, a crater forming in the swirling gas beneath him as his aura flared in a violent bloom.
Space twisted around them, light bending, colors distorting, the pressure so extreme that nearby atmospheric particles condensed into incandescent droplets before vanishing in bursts of heat.
Then William's eyes snapped open, blazing with primal hunger, and he pushed.
A sound like an entire mountain range being wrenched from the earth thundered through the raging storm.
The scythe jolted upward, an inch, then another, then three, as William's god-ki erupted like a cataclysmic supernova.
Thanatos bellowed in shock, his iron grip faltering as his boots skidded in midair under the onslaught of overwhelming force.
With a final, primal roar, William ripped the scythe from its lethal arc, hurling it violently aside.
Thanatos clung to it still.
The Mad Titan was wrenched through the air like a ragdoll in a hurricane, his colossal body smashing sideways with such devastating power that a shockwave tore through Jupiter's clouds, carving a massive, fleeting chasm in the storm.
Before Thanatos could recover, before he could even gasp for air, William was there.
A blur of crimson fur.
A blaze of burning eyes.
A growl like the cosmos itself grinding its teeth.
His clawed left hand locked around Thanatos's throat.
Unyielding.
The Mad Titan's eyes bulged wide. Black ki burst from his lips as William hoisted him effortlessly, one-handed, as though presenting a conquered prize to the universe. The crushing force splintered the Titan's armored collar, the metal crumbling like ancient stone.
And then...
CRACK!
William yanked him forward, their foreheads colliding, not as two fighters meeting in combat, but as celestial bodies smashing together in cataclysm.
The impact birthed a perfect spherical shockwave, hurling Jupiter's storms into vast spirals of displaced vapor.
Lightning tore through the chaos in jagged webs, and the sound was so immense it didn't echo; it simply ceased to exist.
Thanatos's skull caved inward at the point of contact, a crater splitting his forehead as black, viscous blood, shimmering like liquid void, burst outward in a grim halo.
William's grip was unyielding.
He hauled the Titan in once more.
CRACK!
The second headbutt reverberating like the shatter of worlds, fractures spreading across Thanatos's face like fissures in marble.
A third followed.
CRRRAAAACK!
Rending his helm clean in two, shards spiraling into the storm like blazing shrapnel.
William's snarl widened, feral and unrestrained, god-ki flaring until the tempest itself bent beneath his sheer force.
Thanatos hung in his grasp, bleeding, dazed, enraged, as William drew back for a fourth strike, promising destruction beyond all that had come before.
RUMBLE!
A colossal, multihued bolt of cosmic lightning tore through Jupiter's eternal darkness, descending with the wrath and precision of a vengeful deity.
At its blazing heart, William and Thanatos were struck full force by the cataclysmic discharge.
In the instant of impact, reality itself seemed to invert, as the sounds of creation and destruction merged into a single, endless scream.
Both combatants were hurled downward, shrieking, spinning, engulfed in flames, through successive, crushing layers of Jupiter's vast atmosphere.
With each tier they pierced, the environment twisted further into alien extremes. Pressure surged to unimaginable magnitudes. Gravity sharpened into a merciless weapon.
The air thickened into a glowing, near-liquid mass.
The roaring gales of the upper atmosphere gave way to a stifling, oppressive stillness as they descended into a domain where even light perished in slow, agonized surrender.
It was a realm no god would willingly dare to enter. Yet Thor plunged in without hesitation.
FWOOOM!
He rode the lightning downward, his entire form entwined in the violent choreography of six-colored cosmic electricity. It coiled along his limbs like predatory serpents, wound around Mjolnir, spiraled up his arms, and wove across his chest with a sentience all its own.
The deeper he descended, the more absolute the darkness became, until at last all light collapsed into a suffocating void.
All but one thing, a silhouette.
A vast, malevolent silhouette adrift in the blackness.
Thanatos.
In the midst of the crushing void, the Mad Titan remained upright, his aura throbbing like a dying star adrift in an endless sea of darkness.
Thor's jaw locked with such force that arcs of lightning flashed from between his teeth, and his voice split the oppressive blackness like a thunderclap.
"FOR MY BROTHER. FOR MY MOTHER. FOR ASGARD!"
The storm itself seemed to answer, its energy tightening, coiling, and concentrating until Thor was no longer a man but a living spear of cosmic fury.
Then he moved; he did not fly, but moved, so swiftly that his form became a blazing pillar of rainbow lightning, a streak of multicolored vengeance tearing through the silent abyss.
Thanatos turned at the faintest sense of danger, but far too late.
With a cataclysmic KRAAAAAA-THOOOM, the Infinity Mjolnir struck squarely into his spine.
The force was overwhelming. Thanatos's body contorted into an unnatural V-shape, folding inward as his chest and back strained, unsuccessfully, to occupy the same point in space.
A scream erupted from him, reverberating through the void like the last gasp of a collapsing universe.
Then...
BWOOOOM!
The Mad Titan was hurled away, spinning through the abyss like a tattered meteor, carving a radiant trench through the dense matter of Jupiter's core as he plunged further into the consuming darkness.
Thor remained suspended above, shoulders rising and falling with heavy breaths, lightning slithering over him like ravenous predators.
And far below, in the suffocating black, something angry and restless began to stir.
A faint tremor traced its way up Thor's spine, an almost imperceptible warning.
It was the primal whisper of instinct, the kind only forged through millennia of survival across battlefields drenched in blood and crackling with lightning.
His pupils contracted sharply, a silent acknowledgment that something was amiss.
Before the realization could fully crystallize in his mind, his body acted on pure reflex, propelling him in a hard diagonal burst, like a comet veering suddenly off its course.
FWOOOM!
A dense orb of red god-ki ripped through the space where his head had been an instant earlier, leaving a molten trail through the abyss.
The violent displacement of matter compressed nearby gases into fleeting, luminous ribbons that tore apart as quickly as they formed.
Thor held his breath, resisting the instinct to exhale, as the darkness itself began to stir.
Then...
VWHUM!
VWHUM!
VWHUM!
VWHUM!
Dozens of orbs burst forth from the roiling shadows below, each one throbbing with contained energy, their rhythmic vibrations transforming the oppressive silence into a relentless, suffocating cadence of raw power.
They emerged from every conceivable direction, left, right, behind, even from beneath, approaching at angles no divine senses were ever meant to follow.
Thor spun, yet he did not panic.
He moved with the poise of a celestial dancer draped in cosmic lightning, a god whose every sinew, every subtle shift, and explosive motion had been honed through ten thousand lifetimes of war.
Lightning coursed around him as he wove between incoming blasts, his form blurring into streaks of shifting, multicolored light.
WHACK!
A single punch reduced an orb to a glittering vapor.
KRACK
A swift kick redirected another, hurling it downward to erupt like a newborn star.
SWING...
CLANG!
Mjolnir crashed into three orbs at once, the impact blooming into a crimson-and-white fire burst.
Thor twisted, spiraled, and pivoted, each movement sharp, deliberate, and graceful, a lethal dance upon a world where no living thing should tread.
Unaware of it, unable to comprehend it, far above him, beyond the cloud labyrinth and the fading shockwaves of shattered energy, William hovered in silence.
Unmoving and silent, a shadow with eyes that burned, the Saiyan hovered above the turbulent cloudbank, his aura pulled so tightly around him that not even the storm dared to stir.
The air itself seemed frozen in fear.
In William's right hand surged a vast sphere of red-gold energy, growing with each heartbeat, swirling with molten ferocity as lightning cracked from its surface like hunting whips.
It was a miniature sun, forged with murderous intent.
Thor never once looked up; he couldn't, his focus consumed by the relentless barrage of ki orbs hurtling toward him.
William's gaze narrowed, predatory and precise, his earlier rage honed into pure, lethal purpose.
Then, without ceremony, he released the massive orb.
For a moment, the world held its breath.
Gravity seized the blazing sphere, pulling it down, silent at first, then roaring as it tore a spiraling crater through Jupiter's shadowed atmosphere.
A millisecond later, William vanished into the storm, his aura so tightly bound that the clouds betrayed no hint of his passing.
Behind Thor, the heat swelled… but realization came far too late.
The massive sphere of ki dropped from William's hand like a newborn star, its descent twisting the clouds into spiraling vortices.
For a single heartbeat, Thor could only glance upward, eyes widening as the brilliant core of the attack seared across his vision, then it engulfed him entirely.
The ensuing detonation didn't roar like thunder; it screamed like a dying sun.
A titanic, multicolored explosion erupted outward, stripping away layers of Jupiter's atmosphere and birthing a tempest of spiraling auroras visible even from Mars.
The shockwave surged across the gas giant, shaking it to its very core.
Hovering high above, William's god-ki aura clung tightly to his skin as he watched the blast erase everything for miles.
Thor should have been nothing but memory.
Even an Asgardian shouldn't survive such devastation.
Yet the thick red fur along William's forearm bristled, each strand snapping rigid as if sensing an ancient predator's return.
His pupils tightened.
"What?" he growled.
Deep within the churning storm of destruction, light erupted.
A raw, primal WAR CRY ripped through the expanding sphere of ki, shattering clouds into vapor. Multicolored lightning tore outward, ripping apart the sea of annihilation like the fists of an enraged god.
Thor emerged, as though a legend were carving itself into existence before William's eyes.
Lightning twisted around him like living serpents, crackling and hissing as he forced the ki explosion back through sheer, unrelenting fury.
His form shimmered and blurred under the immense power, but William could still see the frenzy burning in his eyes, the grief of losing his mother and brother transmuted into an unstoppable force.
Thor anchored himself in mid-air, muscles tightening across his shoulders, and swung Infinity Mjolnir.
The hammer was not merely aglow, it was channeling.
The combined influence of the Infinity Stones merged seamlessly: Power amplifying the strike, Space redirecting its momentum, Mind stabilizing the energy conversion, Reality reshaping chaos into order, Time aligning its flow, and Soul igniting Thor's will to its peak.
The chaotic swirl of ki transformed into a disciplined cascade of cosmic energy, a vast river of destruction, which Thor hurled directly at William.
With only moments to react, William raised his arms in a desperate crossed guard before the blast struck, a colossal impact, like a freight train made of countless others, infused with six elemental forces.
The shockwave ripped through the clouds, launching William upward with such force that Jupiter's swirling atmosphere smeared into streaks of color before his eyes.
He surged through the planet's upper layers, breaching the high atmosphere with such force that a circular shock corona flared into existence around him.
For a fleeting instant, as he reached the threshold of space, William looked upward, and even from this vast and improbable distance, the battle raging over Earth was visible.
Gigantic explosions blossomed like dying stars, beams of raw energy shredded the void, and entire vessels burned in orbit, their wreckage cascading downward like molten rain.
The solar system itself seemed aflame.
Far below, Jupiter writhed as another immense power erupted. From the depths of its stormy heart, Thanatos emerged, his armor fractured, his expression contorted with wrath.
His scythe had split into twin crescent blades, each gripped tightly in his massive hands. Hovering before him, Thor crackled with lightning, Mjolnir throbbing like the living heart of a tempest.
Then the clash began. The gas giant was transformed into an arena for gods.
Thanatos moved first, a streak of shadow and crimson, his blades carving arcs so keen they sliced entire cloud banks behind Thor.
Each blow tore miles of atmosphere apart, leaving gaping wounds of boiling gas that folded inward.
Thor countered with equal ferocity, every swing of Mjolnir unleashing lightning bursts so intense they ionized the surrounding air, forging a volatile furnace between each strike.
Each collision fed the fury of Jupiter's storms, and the planet's voice grew louder with every heartbeat.
Death incarnate battled the Storm Incarnate in a cataclysmic dance of destruction, while William plummeted toward them like a blazing meteor, god-ki spiraling around him in a crimson vortex, his eyes alight with primal resolve.
The three forces were on the verge of converging once more.
"Next time… on Reborn as a Saiyan in Marvel!
As William plummets toward the turbulent core of Jupiter, Thor and Thanatos engage in a cataclysmic duel, their power splitting storms and threatening to rend the planet itself apart.
The question looms, will William master his untamed Saiyan might, or be consumed entirely by the frenzy? Meanwhile, Thor must endure the relentless assault of the Mad Titan's twin scythes, holding the line until the Saiyan can rejoin the fray.
When these three cosmic warriors converge once more, the fate of the solar system hangs in the balance, with unimaginable destruction poised to unfold.
Don't miss the next chapter… on Reborn as a Saiyan in Marvel!"