The moment Brunnhilde emerged from the ramshackle cabin, Ben's eyes narrowed with recognition. However, he didn't immediately identify her as the Last Valkyrie or real name Brunhilde—the woman before him bore little resemblance to the version he'd recognize from the MCU.
This Valkyrie possessed the classical beauty of Asgardian nobility: porcelain skin that seemed to catch and reflect the alien light of Sakaar's binary suns, features carved with the precision of a master sculptor, and cascading golden hair that fell like liquid sunlight across her shoulders. Even in her current state of exile and defeat, traces of her former glory remained—the proud set of her shoulders, the way her eyes surveyed the battlefield of existence with the calculating gaze of one who had once soared above countless wars.
Yet those same eyes now held a weight that seemed to press down upon her very soul as she studied Ben and the unconscious form of Loki sprawled beside him. The complexity of emotions that flickered across her face—pain, longing, bitter resignation—spoke of wounds that ran deeper than any physical scar.
"Asgard," she whispered, the word escaping her lips like a prayer turned curse. "Why must you haunt me like a fever dream that never breaks?"
The melancholy that settled over her features was almost palpable, transforming her from warrior to tragic figure in the span of a heartbeat. But the vulnerability vanished as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by the cold efficiency of someone who had learned to survive by suppressing sentiment.
Without ceremony, she produced two disc-shaped devices from her belt—sleek, alien technology that hummed with barely contained energy. With practiced precision, she hurled them through the air, watching as they adhered to both Loki and Ben with soft, almost musical chimes.
Ben recognized the devices immediately. In the films, these high-voltage restraints had brought down even the God of Thunder, their surging electric output tuned to overload the nervous system of enhanced beings. Few creatures in the known universe could stay standing once that current hit.
But Ben felt no concern. The Omnitrix offered him countless alternatives: Diamondhead could simply shed the affected portions of his crystalline form, while Upgrade could absorb the device entirely and render it harmless.
Satisfied with her work, Brunnhilde hoisted both prisoners with surprising strength.
She'd done this countless times before—the muscle memory of a scavenger who had learned to view sentient beings as nothing more than commodities to be bought and sold.
As she dragged them toward her battered spacecraft, it became clear that she had no idea who Loki truly was. Loki was just another face in a sea of potential gladiators, his identity lost to the years of willful ignorance that had defined her exile. She had spent so long avoiding news from the Nine Realms that entire dynasties could have risen and fallen without her knowledge.
"Pathetic specimens," she muttered, casting a disparaging glance at her captives' seemingly frail forms. The disappointment in her voice was unmistakable—she was clearly debating whether they were worth the effort to transport to the arena or if she should simply sell them to the mining operations that honeycombed Sakaar's crust.
The question resolved itself when Loki finally stirred from his unconsciousness.
Unlike the version of events Ben remembered from the films, Loki had suffered direct exposure to the Bifrost's energies during his fall from the Rainbow Bridge. The cosmic forces that had torn him from Asgard and hurled him across the void had left him in a state of near-catatonic shock, his consciousness scattered across dimensions until this very moment.
Now, as awareness returned with all the subtlety of a hammer blow, the reality of his situation crashed down upon him with devastating clarity. The King of Asgard——had become a prisoner, a plaything in the hands of some backwater scavenger.
The humiliation was unbearable.
"How dare you!" Loki's voice cracked like a whip across the confined space of the ship. "You dare to lay hands upon the son of Odin, the new king of Asgard! Release me this instant, or face the unbridled wrath of the God-King!"
Brunnhilde had been prepared to ignore her cargo entirely, but something in Loki's proclamation made her pause. She turned slowly, her expression shifting from bored indifference to sharp curiosity, though darker emotions lurked beneath the surface.
"God-King?" The title seemed to stick in her throat. "What of Odin? What has become of the All-Father?"
For a moment, hope and dread warred openly on her face. The Valkyrie had loved Odin once—not as a woman loves a man, but as a warrior loves a just cause, as a daughter loves a father who had elevated her beyond the bounds of ordinary mortality. His fall would mean the end of everything she had once believed in, yet part of her almost craved that confirmation, that final proof that her exile had been justified.
Loki's lips curved into a knowing smirk, his natural instinct for manipulation overriding his current predicament. He would never admit to the web of deceptions and failures that had led to his father's weakness, never confess to the role he had played in Asgard's growing troubles.
"That knowledge is far beyond your station, scavenger," he said, his voice dripping with false authority. "All you need understand is that you kneel before me. Perhaps I will show mercy when my armies arrive to claim this worthless rock!"
Brunnhilde's eyes narrowed to slits.
The sheer audacity of the claim, combined with Loki's obvious delusions of grandeur, struck her as almost comedically absurd. She had known true royalty, had served at the right hand of gods who commanded the respect of entire civilizations. This posturing fool bore no resemblance to the nobility she remembered.
"I must have been drinking more than I thought," she said, shaking her head in disbelief. "To think I'd waste even a moment listening to a raving lunatic."
The casual dismissal cut deeper than any blade could have. Loki's face contorted with rage, his careful composure cracking like thin ice over a raging torrent.
"If you truly are what you claim," Brunnhilde continued, her voice heavy with dark amusement, "then Asgard must be racing toward Ragnarok with unprecedented speed."
"You dare mock me?!" Loki's voice rose to a near-shriek.
The accumulated humiliations of recent days—his defeat at the hands of mortals, his fall from grace, his capture by this nobody—all crystallized into a single, overwhelming fury. He could perhaps accept defeat from worthy opponents, could even stomach the forces that had cast him so far from home. But to be dismissed by a mere lowlife scavenger, to have his claim to rule questioned by someone so far beneath his station—it was intolerable.
"I am the greatest sorcerer in all the Nine Realms!" Loki snarled, his eyes blazing with desperate pride. "I will demonstrate exactly what it means to face the wrath of a god!"
In the next instant, twin daggers materialized in his hands with a flash of emerald light—elegant blades forged in the workshops of Asgard, their edges keen enough to part the very fabric of reality itself.
Yes, the self-proclaimed greatest mage of the Nine Realms had drawn his knives.
But even this display of dramatic irony paled before what followed.
The moment Brunnhilde saw her prisoner start to resist, she calmly tapped the trigger on the remote shock collar. What happened next would've been laughable if it weren't so pitiful—the Loki standing proudly, poised for some dramatic battle, shimmered and vanished in a puff of light. Just another illusion.
The real Loki, who had been quietly inching toward the ship's exit, let out a startled yelp as the collar discharged. A surge of electricity shot through him, dropping him to the deck in an undignified sprawl. So much for the God of Mischief—his grand escape ended with a twitch and a thud.
"The greatest sorcerer in the Nine Realms?" Brunnhilde's laughter was sharp and cutting. "The God-King of Asgard? This is what passes for god these days?"
She shook her head in disgust before turning her attention to Ben, who had been observing the entire exchange with barely concealed amusement.
"And what about you?" she asked, her voice steady but sharp. "How long are you planning to keep up this act?"
Ben had indeed been feigning unconsciousness, but Loki's spectacular failure had been too entertaining to sleep through. He opened his eyes and sat up, stretching muscles that had grown stiff from lying on the ship's metal deck.
"You're one of the Valkyries," he said. It wasn't a question.
Initially, Ben hadn't been certain of her identity—the differences between this version and the one he remembered had been too pronounced. But her reactions to mention of Asgard and Odin, combined with the distinctive tattoo he'd glimpsed on her upper arm, had confirmed his suspicions.
Brunnhilde's expression hardened, but she didn't deny the accusation.
Her silence was answer enough for Loki, who struggled to sit upright despite the lingering aftershocks pulsing through his nervous system.
"A Valkyrie?" he gasped; his voice slurred but still carrying traces of his earlier arrogance. "There are still survivors of that extinct order?" He turned toward Ben with newfound interest. "And who might you be, stranger? Where is that accursed crystal monster?"
Ben ignored the question entirely, his attention focused entirely on the woman before him.
He had to admit, this version of Valkyrie was stunning.
"Valkyrie?" The woman's laugh was bitter as winter wind. She grabbed a bottle of some alien liquor from a nearby shelf and drained it in several long pulls, her eyes never leaving Ben's face. "I am no longer worthy of that title. I have no interest in involving myself in the affairs of Asgard, now or ever."
The pain in her voice was raw, unfiltered—the sound of someone who had lost everything that once gave her life meaning. She turned away from both prisoners, focusing instead on the ship's controls with the desperate intensity of someone trying to outrun her own thoughts.
The spacecraft lurched into motion with a series of mechanical groans and shudders that spoke of poor maintenance and worse piloting. Brunnhilde's hands moved across the controls with the erratic precision of someone operating under the influence, causing the ship to weave and buck through Sakaar's turbulent atmosphere.
Ben and Loki were thrown from side to side as the ship careened through the sky, their bodies slamming against bulkheads with bone-jarring force. The constant motion, combined with the ship's recycled air and the lingering effects of their capture, left both prisoners fighting waves of nausea.
"You're flying under the influence!" Ben shouted over the din of protesting engines. "On Earth, they'd throw you in prison for this!"
Brunnhilde's only response was to take another drink.
The nightmare flight continued for what felt like hours but was probably only minutes before the ship finally began to stabilize. Through the viewport, Ben could see they had crossed most of Sakaar's inhabited regions, the endless sprawl of scrap metal cities and industrial wastelands giving way to the planet's most infamous landmark.
The Grand Arena rose before them like a monument to controlled chaos—a towering structure of salvaged technology and alien architecture that seemed to defy both physics and good taste. Its surface was a patchwork of different materials and design philosophies, each layer telling the story of the countless civilizations that had contributed to its construction over the millennia.
Cyberpunk aesthetics merged with classical Roman amphitheater design, creating something that was simultaneously ancient and futuristic. The entire structure was crowned by a massive totem tower that stretched toward the vermillion sky, its surface covered in carved portraits of legendary gladiators who had earned their place in the arena's bloody history.
Ben's eyes were drawn to the newest addition to the gallery—a portrait that was clearly still under construction. The face depicted was gaunt and angular, with four eyes that seemed to burn with inner fire and a distinctive horned helmet that marked the wearer as something far more dangerous than a typical gladiator.
Something about those features struck him as familiar, though he couldn't quite place where he might have encountered them before.
His contemplation was interrupted as Brunnhilde brought the ship to a landing that was only slightly more controlled than a crash. The ship touched down on one of the arena's many docking platforms with a series of impacts that rattled every bolt and rivet in its frame.
"Listen carefully," Brunnhilde said as she secured the ship's systems, her voice carrying the flat authority of someone who had delivered this speech many times before. "I'm about to sell both of you to the highest bidder. If you want to survive what comes next, I suggest you show proper respect to this planet's ruler—the Red King. Cross him, and your deaths will be neither quick nor pleasant."
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