For a breathless moment, Jupiter held its silence.
Then the heavens ripped apart.
A blazing fist of crimson ki erupted within the Great Red Spot, gouging a hollow void nearly a hundred miles across before the crushing pressure slammed it shut with a thunderclap that reverberated across half the planet.
From within the blinding burst emerged William, hair as wild and red as spilled wine, his aura raging against the storm like a newborn star spewing fire.
Lightning danced madly through the maelstrom around him, casting flickers of light over the thick crimson fur streaking his arms.
An instant later, Thor exploded from the churning clouds above, a living thunderbolt, his body shrouded in torrents of multicolored lightning writhing like ravenous serpents.
Infinity Mjolnir spun in his grasp, each rotation bending the tempest into spiraling vortices.
Then came the chill.
Thanatos descended through the storm's ceiling without stirring a single breath of wind, his form unnervingly solid, unnaturally still, as though reality itself warped to accommodate his presence.
Twin scythes dragged through the air, carving tunnels of vacuum that collapsed in violent implosions.
For a fleeting heartbeat, the three figures hovered, the storm shrieking around them.
And then...
FLASH.
Thor lunged forward in a blur, lightning cracking like a war drum as he closed the distance to William.
Mjolnir slammed into William's crossed arms, the impact unleashing a colossal, ring-shaped shockwave that tore through the cloud layer, flattening Jupiter's storms for hundreds of miles as though an unseen giant pressed down upon them.
William was driven backward through the churning air, teeth gritted, his blazing aura flaring so brightly it burned away the surrounding clouds.
Before Thor could follow up, Thanatos streaked between them, twin scythes sweeping in a deadly cross-arc that split the very heavens.
William ducked beneath the first strike, then caught the second in his bare hand, ki erupting from his grip and hurling the Titan backward.
Thor gave chase, twirling Mjolnir overhead as the Infinity Stones embedded within it flared with alien brilliance.
Multicolored lightning arced toward Thanatos like metal to a magnet, only for him to dissolve into shadow and reappear behind Thor.
His scythes ripped through the atmosphere, each stroke slicing clean lines through the tempest like blades drawn through thick fog, splitting the clouds to expose the abyssal darkness of Jupiter's deeper layers.
Thor twisted at the last heartbeat, Mjolnir meeting the scythes with a resounding clang that sent shockwaves pulsing through the planet itself.
The sheer force hurled both warriors backward into the roiling sky.
FLASH!
FLASH!
FLASH!
Their silhouettes flared and vanished in rapid bursts of light as they exchanged a storm of blows too fast for the eye to follow.
William reappeared below them, crouched on a swirling cloudbank like gravity was just a suggestion. Muscles coiled, arms flexed, red ki whipping around him in furious streams.
Then he vanished. The atmosphere erupted as he reappeared between them, slamming his shoulder into Thanatos and sending the Titan plummeting like a meteor.
Before gravity could pull him down, William spun midair, heel snapping across Thor's jaw in a brutal arc.
The blow sent the God of Thunder hurtling sideways through the storm, carving a glowing trail in the clouds as lightning bled from his aura.
Thor smashed through six storm cells, each one bursting into spirals of vapor, before stabilizing, just in time to see William already there.
His fist came down like a comet, compressing the air into a white-hot spear of pressure that made Jupiter shudder from within.
Thor fell into the deeper storm layers, but before William could follow, the air folded behind him, Thanatos had arrived. He didn't swing; he thrust, both scythes flashing forward in a blur, trailing ribbons of vacuum that collapsed into thunderclaps.
William caught the first on his forearm, ki flaring in a ripple of light, and flipped away from the second, though the blade still grazed his cheek, leaving a thin cut that hissed as space warped around it.
Thanatos pressed in with flawless precision, every strike a perfect line of death, while William answered with raw, explosive power, blasts detonating point-blank and punches tearing the storm into spinning walls of vapor.
Their fight became a violent dance across Jupiter's raging skies.
William's aura blazed with the intensity of a crimson star, radiating power and presence.
Thanatos's blades carved through reality itself, leaving behind tunnels of absolute nothingness in their wake.
Thor's lightning cracked across the heavens, snapping through the clouds with the force and precision of a cosmic whip.
The storms twisted into colossal, churning spirals, as though alive and enraged, responding to the unimaginable chaos unfolding within their midst.
Jupiter, a behemoth vast enough to engulf all the other planets of the solar system, trembled to its very core under the titanic force of three godly beings rending its atmosphere and tearing through its immense body with unrelenting fury.
High above Jupiter's roiling clouds, the view from space was a vision of chaos and beauty, a nightmare ballet unfurling in flashes of impossible power.
Three figures danced in and out of sight, their forms barely discernible through the swirling haze, revealed only when their blows collided.
A blazing burst of crimson ki ignited William's silhouette, fierce and unstoppable.
A prismatic strobe of lightning traced the mighty arcs of Thor's hammer, each swing a thunderous declaration.
A chilling flare of dark cosmic energy carved Thanatos's outline as his scythe swept through the air with deadly precision.
They appeared, vanished, then reappeared miles apart in the blink of an eye, every clash captured like a frozen photograph against Jupiter's tumultuous sky.
In one blinding instant, William's knee drove into Thanatos's spine.
In another, Thanatos's scythe tore downward, rending a storm system apart as if slashing through a colossal curtain.
Then Thor erupted between them, roaring with the fury of storms, Mjolnir unleashing lightning like the heart of a volcanic explosion.
The gas giant itself seemed to writhe and glow beneath them, alive with light, fierce, fleeting, and utterly blinding.
The battles pulled them ever downward, each shockwave driving them further into Jupiter's relentless depths, through turbulent storm layers where the air shimmered faintly with heat and friction.
Lightning laced the darkness in jagged webs, each flash capturing their silhouettes in brilliant, stuttering bursts.
With every descent, the weight of the world pressed harder upon them, gravity congealed like syrup, pressure swelled with crushing force, and the vast planet itself seemed to rumble in a low, ominous lament.
The storm writhed with violent fury.
BOOM.
Two divine fists slammed into William's spine, one blazing with prismatic lightning, the other oozing with suffocating darkness.
The strike detonated like a newborn star.
His scream was swallowed by the planet's deafening roar as his body rocketed forward, tearing through a band of churning clouds and gouging a radiant trench through the atmosphere.
Shockwaves surged outward, twisting the storm layers like an ocean of vapor whipped into chaos.
His form was consumed by Jupiter's impenetrable depths.
For a heartbeat, the cosmos held its breath.
Thor's blazing gaze locked onto Thanatos.
Thanatos returned the stare with unyielding, merciless calm.
They moved as one.
CRASH!
Lightning and death clashed in a cataclysm that lit half the planet. Thor's hammer swept arcs of searing brilliance while Thanatos's twin scythes sliced ribbons of pure void, their edges devouring all light.
They broke apart, only for Thor to summon the tempest into his grasp, an explosion of color as six streams of lightning flared outward, spiraling back into his arm with flawless cosmic precision.
RRRAAAAAAGHHH!
The lightning surged.
It expanded.
It swelled until it consumed the entire visible horizon.
Thor hurled his palm forward, unleashing the unbridled wrath of six Stones and the wrath of an angered Asgardian.
A world-shattering torrent of multicolored lightning erupted, lancing through Jupiter's heart, shattering storm bands, ionizing the vast skies, and vaporizing entire cloud layers in a single, unbroken beam of cosmic fury.
Thanatos responded instantly, his palm unfurled, birthing a sphere of absolute darkness.
With a single exhale, he released a beam of pure death, silent, colorless, terrifying, consuming light itself rather than casting it.
The two forces collided, and the solar system seemed to gasp in disbelief.
CRRRRRRHHHHHHRRRRRRRK!
The violent clash tore Jupiter apart from within, shockwaves detonating through its layers like celestial earthquakes.
Lightning sought to dominate; death sought to consume.
Thor roared, every muscle quaking, his veins blazing with the fury of the Stones.
Thanatos snarled, feet rooted in the tempest, black ki pouring from his soul like smoke from a dying star.
For an eternity compressed into seconds, the balance held, until Thanatos moved.
Not with his feet.
Not with his arms.
With sheer, unyielding will.
Far within the roiling storm, one of his forsaken scythes, discarded in the chaos, shivered to life.
It twitched once, twice, before a tendril of black ki coiled around it like a leash drawn tight.
Unseen, unheard, it cut through the darkness with predatory grace, gliding between the rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning, a silent omen of death.
Thor never noticed.
His gaze was locked forward, on the blinding beam, on defiance, on the raw, burning hope of victory.
Behind him, the scythe sliced through the tempest, a whisper in the gale, a shadow amid the lightning, a promise sharpened to a single fatal point.
Then...
SHHK!
Agony flared white-hot.
Thor's breath snagged; the beam sputtered; his knees trembled.
His eyes dropped, slow and stunned, to the black steel jutting from his abdomen, sliding through his armor as though it were nothing, like a monstrous fang growing from within.
A suffocating cold radiated from the blade, creeping through his veins like frostbite, while a ribbon of blood slithered along its edge, twisting upward into the storm like a crimson serpent.
He gagged, coughing scarlet into Jupiter's raging winds, the spray vanishing instantly into the infinite dark.
Thanatos smiled, lowering his guiding hand.
"God of Thunder…" he hissed, his voice curling through the air like smoke, "…you allowed yourself to be distracted."
Thor's fingers strained toward Mjolnir. Lightning flickered weakly. His legs shook. The scythe pressed deeper, and the gas giant itself seemed to wail with him.
Thanatos stepped forward, slow… deliberate… inevitable.
Each footfall dimmed the storm.
Deathly ki oozed from his body like smoke leaking from a dying star, tendrils unfurling across the atmosphere, extinguishing lightning, muting the wind, smothering the very idea of motion itself.
Thor sank to one knee, his breath ragged, the scythe still lodged in his abdomen like a poisoned fang.
The infection spread fast, too fast, inky veins crawling across his skin as the death ki burrowed deeper, hunting for heart, soul, spark.
The storm around him quivered as Thanatos's shadow eclipsed the faint remnants of light.
With a lazy gesture, black ki condensed around the Titan's fingers, swirling outward in spiraling bands.
They wrapped around Thor's arms first.
Then his ribs.
His legs.
His throat.
A cocoon of death.
Each layer tightened, siphoning strength, smothering lightning, drowning divinity.
"You fought well, Asgardian," Thanatos murmured, hand rising to seal the final layer."But all things die. Even storms."
Thor's eyes dimmed.
His lightning guttered.
The cocoon sealed halfway, and then the universe roared.
A primal bellow ripped across Jupiter, rolling through the storms like a shockwave of defiance.
WHRAAAAAAAGHHHHH!
Pressure buckled.
The clouds detonated.
The very planet shuddered.
Thanatos's head snapped up a split second before a red blur tore through the storm like a cannonball launched by the gods.
BOOOOOOM!!
William struck him square in the jaw with a fist that glowed like a dying sun.
The impact was catastrophic.
Thanatos's head snapped sideways, his scythes spun off their axis, and his entire body was blasted out of the atmosphere like a missile punching through water.
A red trail streaked after him as he was sent careening into open space.
Thor collapsed, gasping as the death cocoon shredded apart in violent bursts.
The death ki still wriggled under his skin, but its master's hold had snapped.
He gritted his teeth, planting both palms against the storm.
Lightning sputtered.
Then flared.
Then...
IGNITED.
Prismatic electricity crackled around him, each color fighting a different infection, detonating small explosions across his skin as rainbow lightning burned away tendrils of death ki.
BANG!
BZZT!
KRAK-THOOM!
Each detonation shook the air around him.
Black steam hissed away from his wounds.
Thunder rolled like a beating war drum.
Above him, a crimson comet streaked into the void.
William.
Chasing Thanatos.
The Titan had barely regained his bearings, pulling himself out of a violent spin, when William arrived.
Thanatos's aura writhed, black and shadowy, yet now wrapped in a corona of searing fire, the friction of reentry turning death into flame.
His eyes narrowed into murderous slits.
William appeared before him in a flash of red, teeth bared, hair whipping wildly in the vacuum.
Their fists met.
KABOOOOOOOM!
A shockwave rippled across low orbit, distorting Jupiter's horizon and sending rings of displaced gas into the void.
The force blasted both warriors backward, arms snapping wide from recoil, but they didn't hesitate.
They surged back in, roaring.
And then, Time dissolved.
FLASH!
FLASH!
FLASH!
FLASH!
FLASH!
They became streaks of light slashing across the sky.
Hundreds of blows.
Hundreds of parries.
Blocks, counters, feints, jabs, each one thrown with enough force to crack continents, delivered in the span of a heartbeat.
William's fists blurred into crimson arcs.
Thanatos's movements were surgical, two scythes reappearing in his grip like afterimages of death.
Every collision detonated soundless explosions in the void.
Their silhouettes merged, split, and merged again.
Violent, animalistic, divine.
Red ki roared like wildfire.
Black ki hissed like a collapsing star.
Below, Thor rose slowly into the sky, lightning spiraling around him as he forced the infection out with sheer will, his aura swelling brighter and brighter until he was a second sun rising over Jupiter's storms.
And above him.
Two monsters clashed in the heavens, each strike threatening to tear the sky in half.
The real battle had only just begun.
As the battle roars to its zenith, shockwaves rip through Jupiter's eternal storms, while death and lightning etch the silhouettes of gods across the raging night sky.
A question hangs heavy, rumbling like distant thunder: will William's fractured mind heal in time to realize he has been fighting not merely an enemy, but a cherished friend?
Can the Thunder God withstand the lethal corruption seeping into the core of his divinity?
Will Thanatos be halted before his dark ki consumes the storm-lashed world in ruin?
Or is William's unbridled fury destined to transform Jupiter into his final resting place?
Find out next time… on *Reborn as a Saiyan in Marvel!*