"What the hell happened, Odin?"
"Why are you… like this?"
In the royal bedchamber of Asgard's palace...
Frigga gently supported her bloodied husband as she led him to the Restoration Pool. With a sweep of her hand, she removed Odin's torn and blood-stained robes, then knelt beside the pool, personally casting healing magic to guide its energy toward repairing his shattered heart.
"I lost, Frigga."
"…Lost?"
Submerged in the glowing waters of the healing pool, Odin stirred, his consciousness slowly returning. As his eyes fluttered open, the first thing he saw was his wife, her brow soaked in sweat, her expression a mixture of worry and heartbreak.
He sighed, weary and hollow.
"You… lost?"
"It's alright," Frigga said quickly, catching the shift in his tone, the kind of lost that meant more than defeat. It meant broken pride. Shattered conviction.
"But it's okay, Odin. You're alive. That's what matters." Her voice trembled with relief, even as fear still clung to her heart. "You still have Asgard. You still have me… and Hela."
Odin said nothing. He simply shook his head and looked upward, his gaze falling on the ancient runes carved into the vaulted ceiling.
His once-mighty power, his pride as the All-Father, had been reduced to nothing before that god. Even the Destroyer Armor, once thought indestructible, had been treated like a mere toy.
The pride of uniting the Nine Realms, the might of Asgardian dominance, it had all been crushed in an instant, as though it never mattered.
"…Odin?"
"Frigga… I need to be alone. Please."
He closed his eyes.
And without waiting for her reply, he sank silently beneath the surface of the Restoration Pool.
"…I understand."
Frigga hesitated, then swallowed the words she wanted to speak. She turned and quietly left the room, closing the heavy doors of the bedchamber behind her.
But as she turned the corner of the hallway, she stopped in stunned silence.
"Heimdall?!"
The Guardian of Asgard, the Keeper of the Bifrost, Odin's most loyal sentinel, Heimdall, stood slumped against the palace wall, unconscious.
"Heimdall?"
"Heimdall!"
"Wake up!"
With a soul-touching incantation, Frigga called out to him. Slowly, Heimdall stirred, opening his eyes as if waking from a deep nightmare.
One of the horns on his helm had been shattered, and the broken, scorched pieces of the Destroyer Armor lay in a heap at his feet.
"My Queen…"
He tried to bow, but his body's agony halted the motion. He winced, unable to suppress the pain.
"What happened to you, Heimdall? Why are you like this? And the Destroyer Armor, what in the realms…?"
Frigga's worry deepened. Odin's condition was already dire, but now Heimdall, whose power even she couldn't fully measure, was this badly wounded. And Odin's prized Destroyer Armor had been left broken and discarded?
"It's nothing," Heimdall said with effort. "I was simply caught in the aftermath of Odin's battle. Just a side effect. It's nothing serious."
He leaned heavily on the wall, gritting his teeth as he slowly stood upright. Adjusting his cracked helm with one hand, he raised the other. The broken fragments of the Destroyer Armor hovered into the air and swiftly reassembled, floating toward Frigga.
"I leave the repairs to you, my Queen."
With those words, he turned and limped away, his gait uneven but his resolve unshaken.
He was Asgard's gatekeeper. So long as he still drew breath, his duty would not falter. Not for Asgard. Not for Odin.
"…Caught in the aftermath?" Frigga whispered.
She had never seen such emptiness in Heimdall's eyes.
She looked again at the armor, the mighty Destroyer, now marred and fragile. She reached out, fingers brushing against a charred gauntlet.
In that moment, her soul was nearly ripped from her body.
A horrifying pull, like touching the heart of a bottomless black hole, seized her from within.
What—?!
"No!"
"Frigga!!!"
A hoarse, broken scream echoed through the palace.
Half-naked and drained, Odin burst from the pool, shattering the chamber doors with a wave of divine force. Without hesitation, he struck the armor with his bare hand, utterly obliterating the thing he had once painstakingly forged.
CRASH!
The fragments fell to the ground in a discordant clatter, snapping Frigga from the trance as she collapsed to the floor.
"O-Odin…?"
She turned her head, and there he was, collapsing into her arms, spent, trembling.
With his final breath before losing consciousness again, he murmured:
"Seal Asgard. Now."
...
Andromeda Galaxy.
The Lothar drifted calmly through the starlit vastness of the cosmos, its bow engraved with a glowing L rune.
Within its command deck, The Other trembled, still reeling from the recent chain of explosions that had ravaged the Kree Territories.
He bowed deeply, reverently presenting a newly restored scepter, the Mind Stone embedded at its core, to his master.
"Prince Lothar… your hair…"
Having unleashed his power to its limit, Lothar now showed signs of backlash. His long golden hair, which had once flowed past his waist, visibly began to retract under the stunned gazes of The Other and Hela, until it returned to its original jet-black state.
"…It's over," he murmured.
The instant his hair turned dark, a wave of weakness surged through every nerve in his body.
"Prince Lothar!"
The Other darted forward to catch him, but Hela was already there, wrapping his arm around her shoulder, steadying him.
"Bit off more than you could chew?" she said, smirking.
"Serves you right."
Her voice dripped with sarcasm, but there was a spark in her eye. Lothar had recklessly overdrawn the power of the gem, ignoring the limits of his own body.
Not that she hadn't enjoyed the rush herself.
The soaring surge of adrenaline…
The thrill that had tingled all the way from her spine to her scalp...
Hela unconsciously licked her dry lips.
She hated to admit it, but…
She wanted to feel that again.
No one had ever fought alongside her like that before.
Wait... what the hell am I thinking?
She blinked, shaking herself free of the thought.
"Meow~"
A soft cry came from the command console, where a Flerken had perched, tilting its tiny head with feline confusion as it stared at the cascading streams of data on the monitor.
With a curious paw, it tapped the screen. Thump. Thump.
"Woz, is the data collection complete?" Lothar asked, ignoring Hela's jab and turning to the light screen operated by Woz.
Every parameter from his Super Saiyan 3 transformation was displayed in precise detail. The numerical magnitude alone was enough to make Lothar blink in disbelief, and Hela's eyes went wide, her skin tingling with unease.
"Congratulations, Prince Lothar!"
"This power you've unlocked—!"
The Other prepared to gush again, ready to launch into his usual sycophantic praise.
But then Woz interrupted, crushing the moment.
"Based on a comprehensive analysis… Prince Lothar, your Super Saiyan 3 transformation has not yet reached its full potential."
With a flick of his hand, Woz pulled up two data sets:
One, from when Lothar first tapped into Super Saiyan 1 on Planet U40 using the Mind Stone.
And the other, from when he independently transformed on Svartalfheim, crushing the Dark Elf King Malekith in a one-sided fight.
The gap between the two was unmistakable.
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