The moment the electromagnetic railgun fired, the personal guard named Algrim, standing rigidly beside Malekith, sensed the impending devastation.
Without hesitation, he triggered the dark stone embedded in his body, fully transforming into a monstrous Kurse. With a thunderous roar, he threw his massive frame directly in front of the Dark Elf King.
The violent torrent of electromagnetic energy instantly swallowed the powerful warrior.
The sheer intensity of the blast acted as a momentary purge, the crackling lightning actively suppressing the dark blood magic coursing through his veins.
Algrim braced himself, abruptly halting the first railgun strike with his bare hands, but the second and third projectiles were already screaming through the air toward him.
"Roar!"
The Kurse bellowed, feeling the genuine threat of death. But he knew his king needed time to fuse with the Aether. Pushing past his physical limits, Algrim dug his heels into the scorched earth, prepared to block the remaining super-railguns with his life.
However, just as he braced for the impact, a sharp dagger whistled through the air from a blind angle, sinking deep into the back of his knee. The joint buckled. Algrim staggered, collapsing heavily onto one leg. It was Loki, striking from the shadows.
With the Kurse momentarily downed, the berserk beam of electromagnetic light blasted right over his shoulder, slamming directly into Malekith's automatically deployed dark energy shield.
Crack!
A crisp sound echoed across the battlefield as jagged fissures webbed across the dark red barrier.
Ethan Hunt leapt from his vantage point, dropping into the clearing. Behind him, a massive cluster of black metal levitated effortlessly in the air. Dazzling blue lightning arced across the jagged fragments, the air shrieking as Ethan manipulated the vectors to forcefully charge them. With a flick of his wrist, he redirected the momentum, turning the floating metal into a violent electromagnetic torrent that poured relentlessly onto Malekith's position.
"No!" Malekith roared, his voice drowned out by the deafening blast as the railgun barrage tore his physical body apart.
Simultaneously, Thor leapt into the sky, summoning the most powerful bolt of lightning he could muster, and brought Mjolnir crashing down directly onto the exposed Aether. The crimson liquid violently dispersed under the divine strike.
"Is it over?" Thor asked, his chest heaving with exertion.
Ethan ignored the fading light, his eyes tracking the battlefield with calculated precision. His expression darkened. "No. We have a problem."
The dispersed Aether hadn't been destroyed. It hung in the air as countless floating, blood-red gems. Mingled among them were the shredded, fleshy remnants of Malekith's body.
One of those mutilated chunks—a severed half of Malekith's face—twitched. Its single remaining eye rolled frantically before locking onto Ethan.
"You will pay the price for that," Malekith's distorted voice echoed directly from the crimson mist.
Instantly, the Aether flared to life. The scattered red fragments converged at a terrifying speed, forming a swirling mass of bloody liquid that rapidly enveloped the severed head. The rest of Malekith's torn limbs and shredded flesh were magnetically pulled into the vortex.
In a matter of seconds, the vortex collapsed, revealing a fully reformed Malekith. However, the Dark Elf King looked significantly thinner and drastically aged, his skin stretched taut over his skull.
"How is that possible?" Thor stared in disbelief. "No one has that kind of vitality."
"Anything is possible when you are wielding a tool that can literally modify reality," Ethan replied, his eyes narrowing. "But judging by how he looks, the price for rewriting his own death wasn't cheap."
Ethan was right. The Infinity Stones were absolute cosmic artifacts, but wielding them carried catastrophic risks. The Space Stone was relatively stable, but if forced, its leaked energy could easily obliterate a solar system. The Power Stone was pure, volatile destruction; anyone lacking the necessary physical constitution would explode the second they touched it.
The Reality Stone—the Aether—was fundamentally corrosive. If a host lacked the supreme mastery required to govern it, excessive use of its reality-warping properties would actively consume their life force as fuel. Malekith had just sacrificed a massive portion of his own vitality to resurrect himself, and his fury was palpable.
"I will drain every drop of your vitality to replace what I have lost!" Malekith snarled, dark magic swirling around his hands.
"Let's see you try," Ethan countered.
He manipulated the vectors beneath his feet, launching himself forward at terrifying, supersonic speeds. The violent displacement of air shattered the debris around him, generating a deafening sonic boom that echoed through the dead city. Ethan closed the distance in a fraction of a second, throwing a devastating, vector-enhanced punch straight at Malekith's chest.
Malekith merely smiled. The Aether swirled around his body, and he casually raised a hand.
Boom!
The roaring shockwave and the immense kinetic force behind Ethan's strike instantly vanished. The moment his fist made contact with Malekith's palm, his velocity vectors were simply neutralized. It was as if his momentum had been erased from existence.
'He altered the physical laws surrounding him,' Ethan realized, his pupils shrinking slightly.
"Your brute force is meaningless to me," Malekith sneered. He clamped his hand down on Ethan's arm. Suddenly, Ethan's arm felt infinitely heavy, as if the gravity acting upon it had been multiplied thousands of times. He was anchored to the spot.
"I have you now. Die." Malekith pulled his other fist back and drove it toward Ethan's face.
Malekith's physical strength wasn't overwhelmingly high, but with the Aether modifying the very concept of his strike, the kinetic payload behind that single punch was artificially amplified to the yield of a tactical nuclear warhead.
The moment Malekith's knuckles grazed Ethan's skin, Ethan's automatic vector reflection activated.
Boom!
The astronomical kinetic energy Malekith had generated was instantly redirected back onto its source. Malekith's entire right arm exploded into a fine red mist. The sheer concussive backlash sent the Dark Elf King flying backward at supersonic speeds, crashing violently through the rusted skeletal frame of a nearby skyscraper.
"You aren't the only one who can dictate the laws of physics," Ethan remarked dryly, brushing the dust from his shoulder as he effortlessly neutralized the crushing gravity on his arm.
Several massive steel girders tore out of the ground around Ethan, immediately superheating as he applied an electromagnetic field, preparing to launch them as railgun projectiles.
But from the ruins, a dark red light washed over the battlefield. The moment the light touched the hovering steel, the fundamental nature of the metal was altered. It instantly crumbled into harmless white sand.
Ethan narrowed his eyes and quickly gathered surrounding electrons, forming a massive, blinding plasma sphere. But before he could launch it, the plasma ball suddenly flickered, turned pitch black, and simply ceased to exist.
"The Aether dictates reality," Malekith's cold voice echoed from the rubble as he stepped out, his arm already regenerating. "As long as I can perceive the mechanics of your attacks, I can fundamentally erase them. Once I find the flaw in your defense, you will die."
"In that case, I'll just have to crush you before you figure it out," Ethan said coldly.
He slammed his foot into the ground.
The entire dead city violently convulsed. The ruined skyscrapers trembled, shattered overpasses defied gravity and floated into the air, and massive fissures tore through the scorched earth. Millions of tons of structural steel shrieked as they were forcefully ripped from the foundations of the city.
Whatever Magneto could do in an urban environment, Ethan could replicate through sheer vector manipulation—and with far greater precision. Since the city was entirely abandoned, he didn't need to hold back.
A sea of twisted metal blotted out the sky.
"The power of an Infinity Stone might be limitless, but your physical vessel is not," Ethan called out, levitating high above the battlefield. "The larger the scale of the reality you attempt to modify, the more vitality it will drain from you."
Ethan brought his hands together. The millions of tons of steel violently compressed, twisting and fusing under unimaginable pressure until it formed a colossal, serpentine dragon of solid black metal.
"Now, let's see you try to rewrite this," Ethan commanded.
The massive steel behemoth let out a deafening metallic screech and plummeted from the sky, diving straight toward Malekith.
While Ethan waged a catastrophic war of attrition against Malekith, Thor and Loki were fighting for their lives on the other side of the battlefield.
Surrounded by a swarm of Dark Elf soldiers, the two brothers fought back-to-back. Despite their endless betrayals and dramatic feuds, when faced with a common enemy, they fell into a flawless, instinctual rhythm. Loki expertly wove illusions and daggers, while Thor's lightning arced through the crowds, actively suppressing the dark elves' blood magic.
They were holding their own—until the massive figure of Algrim rose from the dirt, having casually snapped the dagger out of his knee.
The Kurse shoved his own soldiers aside and charged the two princes like an enraged bull.
"I despise these mindless brutes," Loki muttered, taking a subconscious step back. The sight of the towering monster charging at him triggered deeply unpleasant memories of being violently smashed into the floor of Stark Tower.
"I will handle him," Thor said confidently. He stepped in front of Loki, raising Mjolnir high. The dark clouds above churned, and a massive pillar of lightning struck the hammer. Channeling the power of the storm, Thor launched himself directly at the charging behemoth.
"I am Thor! For Asgard!" Thor roared, bringing the hammer down with world-shattering force.
Algrim didn't even flinch. He threw a devastating uppercut, his fist colliding squarely with Mjolnir. The kinetic shockwave shattered the ground beneath them. Thor was violently launched backward, flying through the air alongside his own hammer.
'Is this a fake hammer?' Thor thought dazedly as he crashed into the dirt.
The Kurse had effortlessly tanked Ethan's railguns and possessed unfathomable physical strength. Before Thor could recover, Algrim was on top of him, relentlessly pummeling the God of Thunder into the ground.
Seeing his brother being brutally beaten, Loki's jaw tightened. They were brothers. Only he was allowed to humiliate Thor.
With a flash of brilliant green light, Loki split into a dozen identical clones, all rushing the Kurse with drawn weapons.
Algrim let out an annoyed grunt. He grabbed Thor by the cape, spun him around like a massive flail, and smashed him through the illusory Lokis, dispelling them instantly.
But as the final illusion vanished, the real Loki materialized directly behind Algrim, driving an Asgardian longsword straight through the monster's spine and out his chest.
"Roar!" Algrim bellowed in pain. It wasn't a fatal wound for a Kurse, but it was agonizing. Enraged, he spun around, grabbed Loki by the throat, and violently pulled him forward, impaling the God of Mischief on the blade protruding from his own chest.
Loki gasped, blood spilling from his lips, but he didn't fall. Instead, he stubbornly grabbed onto Algrim's armor, locking eyes with Thor.
"Loki!" Thor screamed.
Seeing his brother fatally impaled triggered a surge of profound fear and uncontrollable rage. Deep within Thor's eyes, a spark of pure, unbridled lightning flared to life—a power that belonged entirely to him, independent of his weapon.
"I will kill you!" Thor roared.
Mjolnir snapped back into his hand. Moving faster than the eye could track, Thor closed the distance and swung the hammer with cataclysmic force, cleanly decapitating the Kurse in a single, explosive strike.
Thor dropped his weapon, falling to his knees as he caught Loki's collapsing body.
"No, no... don't die," Thor pleaded, his hands covered in his brother's blood. "Why did you do that? Why didn't you just listen to me?"
"I know... I'm a fool," Loki rasped, his skin rapidly turning a pale, ashen gray as the Kurse's cursed blade drained the last of his life. "I did it because I'm a fool."
"You never understand anything!" Thor cried, tears welling in his eyes.
"I just... don't understand anything," Loki whispered, his voice incredibly weak.
"Hold on," Thor sobbed. "I will tell Father of what you did here today. I will tell him of your heroism."
Loki's eyes locked onto Thor's. A faint, genuine version of his trademark wicked smile touched his lips. "I didn't do it for him."
The smile froze. Loki's eyes drifted open, staring blankly into the dark sky. The spark of life completely vanished from his body.
Thor clutched his brother's lifeless form, an earth-shattering roar of agony and rage tearing from his throat.
Meanwhile, the battle between Ethan and Malekith raged on.
The colossal steel dragon plummeted from the sky, its massive jaws unhinging to swallow the reinforced bunker Malekith had retreated into. In a desperate bid for survival, Malekith used the Aether to transmute the entire bunker into solid diamond.
Crunch.
It didn't matter. Under the sheer, crushing weight of millions of tons of vector-accelerated steel, the diamond shattered like glass.
However, just before the jaws clamped shut, Malekith dissolved into a pool of crimson liquid, swiftly retreating across the battlefield.
To a casual observer, it looked as though Ethan was overwhelmingly dominating the fight. But Ethan knew the truth. He was rapidly losing ground.
He couldn't land a killing blow. Malekith was using the Aether to constantly shift his physical density, phase through the earth, and instantly regenerate any superficial damage Ethan managed to inflict. The Reality Stone was quite literally a cheat code against conventional physics.
Furthermore, maintaining the vector calculations to suspend and manipulate a million-ton metallic construct was severely draining Ethan's stamina. Malekith knew this. The Dark Elf King wasn't running out of fear; he was deliberately stalling, testing Ethan's defenses, waiting for his stamina to break. Worse still, Ethan could physically sense Malekith's synchronization with the Aether growing stronger by the second.
'Ethan, find an opening and fall back,' Luna's voice echoed directly into his mind. 'As things stand, you cannot kill him while he is actively shielded by the Aether. The longer this drags on, the higher his synchronization rate climbs. Soon, we won't be able to escape even if we try.'
'I know,' Ethan replied mentally, his eyes tracking the red mist darting through the ruins. 'But he isn't giving me a clean opening to disengage.'
'I cannot directly intervene with physical force,' Luna continued calmly, 'but I can hit him with a concentrated soul attack. It will force his consciousness to stall for a fraction of a second. You need to use that exact moment to hit him with everything you have. While he is forced to regenerate, we run.'
'If we run now, his next target will undoubtedly be Earth,' Ethan warned, a grim edge to his thoughts.
'Do not worry,' Luna replied. 'I have already identified his weakness. But to permanently kill him, my plan requires one final piece. Once we regroup and secure it, I promise you, this creature will meet his end.'
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Word count: 2488
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