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BONUSSS!!!!!!!!!! IS BACK BROOTHERS.
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Chapter 87: The Collapse of Understanding
Kang's words had barely faded when reality began to scream. A red wound tore through the air, bleeding light into the halls of the Time Variance Authority.
Through this tear, something vast and terrible pressed against the barriers between dimensions.
An eye the size of a mountain looked through the breach, ancient and hungry. Its pupil dilated as it fixed on the group, and in that alien stare was the promise of total consumption.
This wasn't just death, it was complete erasure, the unmaking of everything they had ever been.
The owner of that terrible eye began to squeeze through the tear. Alioth emerged like a nightmare given form, a rolling mass of darkness that ate light, sound, and substance.
Where it touched the facility's walls, reality came to a halt. The TVA's order began to collapse as basic forces unravelled.
Space cracked around the breach like glass hit by a hammer, sending fragments of broken spacetime tumbling into the void. Each falling shard widened the wound, letting more of the entity's bulk force its way through.
Black mist poured from the expanding rift like blood from a cut artery, washing over everything with the promise of oblivion.
Valdor stepped forward without hesitation, placing himself between his companions and the advancing tide.
His enhanced body, forged in Terra's deepest vaults and blessed by the Emperor's hand, allowed him to utilise technologies beyond mortal understanding.
The Gene Engine embedded in his frame came alive at his mental command, its processors analysing the crisis with inhuman speed.
[Spacetime collapse detected. Allocating computational resources to establish a temporal barrier.]
A shimmering wall of crystallised time appeared around their group, its surface rippling with energies that bent light into impossible angles. The barrier held against Alioth's first attacks, creating an island of stability in an ocean of chaos.
[Temporal barrier established. Currently maintaining spacetime integrity.]
Wave after wave of destructive force crashed against Valdor's defences like a tide of liquid midnight. Each impact sent tremors through the barrier, and the Captain-General could feel the strain building in his enhanced nervous system.
[Temporal barrier under assault. Estimated time until structural failure: 203 seconds... 202 seconds...]
"Before Alioth, all resistance is meaningless," Kang said with satisfaction. "It will devour all things. Your defiance only delays the inevitable."
Raven's response was to grab one of the curved horns on Loki's crown and give it a sharp shake.
"Time for your grand entrance, Loki Beast."
"Me?" Loki's voice cracked. "Deal with that?"
He pointed first at himself, then at the cosmic horror that was eating the Time Variance Authority around them. The gesture carried all the dignity of a man asked to wrestle a hurricane.
"This joke has gone too far," he muttered. "There's nothing funny about this."
Raven nodded casually. "Indeed, you. As the most skilled sorcerer of the Nine Realms, you were born for this moment."
"I must respectfully decline," Loki said, shaking his head harder. "I'm not even qualified to be that thing's appetiser."
Raven's tone grew pointed. "Use your psychic abilities to control Alioth. Refuse, and Gorr will show you how sharp his blade is."
The God Butcher moved smoothly, drawing the Necrosword in one motion. The weapon's dark edge came to rest against Loki's spine, positioned precisely over his heart.
If Raven gave the word, Gorr wouldn't hesitate to end the God of Mischief. Faced with such motivation, Loki had little choice.
He raised his hands, and green energy began to flow from his fingertips, threads of sickly light that snaked through the air toward Alioth's rolling mass. The psychic tendrils made contact with the entity, and Loki closed his eyes to focus on the mental realm.
What he found there defied description. Alioth's consciousness was a storm of competing hungers, ancient and chaotic beyond understanding.
Making even the most basic psychic connection required massive effort, and Loki felt his magical reserves draining like water through a broken dam.
Within moments, he was nearly spent. His enhanced Asgardian body, trained through centuries of sorcery, couldn't sustain the energy required to commune with such a being.
Then, suddenly, power flooded into him from outside. Not Asgard's orderly magic or the Dark Dimension's wild chaos, but something more primal. It instantly filled the void in his reserves and continued to pour in, ensuring he wouldn't run dry regardless of how much energy he used.
The source was clear. Raven was lending him his own power, transforming Loki into a conduit for forces that dwarfed his natural abilities.
Drunk on this cosmic energy, Loki threw back his head and laughed. When he thrust his hands forward, the green light that erupted from his palms was no longer a trickle but a flood. It washed over Alioth's massive form like a tsunami of pure will, wrapping the entity in coils of psychic energy.
The battle that followed was fought on planes beyond physical understanding. Loki's consciousness, amplified by Raven's power, grappled with the cosmic devourer's fundamental nature. Where once there had been only hunger, he imposed structure. Where chaos reigned, he made order. Where ancient instincts drove mindless eating, he created channels for directed purpose.
The process was both exhausting and thrilling. When it was complete, Alioth hung motionless in the air, still terrible, still immeasurably powerful, but now awaiting Loki's commands like a faithful dog.
"Impossible!" Kang stared at the tamed horror with wide eyes. "This cannot be! I needed eons to achieve even basic control over that entity!"
His voice cracked with disbelief. Everything he had built, everything he had sacrificed, had been based on the idea that he alone could command Alioth.
"Your turn," Raven said, shifting his attention to the Conqueror.
"You will regret this," Kang replied, though his voice lacked its earlier confidence. "The Sacred Timeline is ruined. Countless variants of myself will return from across the multiverse, and chaos will rule."
Valdor had heard enough. The moment he confirmed that Alioth no longer threatened local spacetime, he dismissed his temporal barrier and activated his guardian spear's power field.
The weapon hummed to life as he charged toward Kang.
The Conqueror wasn't defenceless. He produced a temporal device, trying to slow Valdor's approach while an energy shield flickered to life around him.
In raw physical strength, Kang couldn't hope to match gods or superhumans; his strength lay in his mastery of time and his access to tech from across infinite realities.
But Valdor had something Kang hadn't counted on: his own temporal field, generated by the same enhancement that let him use the Gene Engine. The Conqueror's time manipulator proved as useless as his other weapons.
The energy shield lasted exactly long enough to delay Valdor's spear by a few milliseconds—a delay so brief as to be meaningless. When the weapon punched through both barrier and flesh, Kang found himself lifted into the air, impaled like a butterfly pinned to a board.
"That's it?" Raven observed, studying the defeated Conqueror with obvious disappointment. "I expected more from the master of the multiverse."
Indeed, for all his grand speeches and cosmic authority, Kang had proven surprisingly fragile when faced with straightforward violence. Perhaps that explained how a variant Loki had managed to kill him with nothing more than a dagger.
"What do we do with him?" Valdor asked, his tone suggesting several unpleasant possibilities.
"We take him back," Raven decided. "Death seems wasteful. He can join the others in farm work."
After Loki dismissed Alioth back to the Void, their group used the TVA's portal system to return to Earth.
They picked a point in the timeline after Thanos had finished his work, the Mad Titan having snapped his fingers twice: first to eliminate half of all life, and then again to destroy the Infinity Stones themselves.
Raven wasn't sure how many cosmic artifacts any given universe could handle, so he chose what seemed the safest insertion point.
They appeared in the Avengers compound during what looked like a strategy meeting. The surviving heroes had gathered every ally they could find and were deep in discussion about how to challenge an enemy who had already proven himself unbeatable.
The sudden appearance of several unknown figures in their secure facility triggered immediate defensive responses. The heroes moved into combat positions, surrounding the newcomers.
"Loki!"
Thor's voice cut through the tension like a thunderclap. The God of Thunder pushed past his allies, his eyes fixed on a figure he had watched die in space. Without hesitation, he swept his brother into a fierce embrace.
"I knew it," Thor said, his voice thick with emotion. "You never could resist a good trick, you magnificent bastard."
The weight of recent losses pressed down on Thor like a physical burden. His father had died, his home had burned, his people had been scattered to the cosmic winds. He had watched Loki die before his eyes, adding one more grief to an already unbearable load. Seeing his brother alive again was like finding solid ground after drowning in despair.
Loki stood frozen in the embrace, his eyes wide with confusion.
This wasn't his Thor; this was a variant from another timeline, mourning a brother he had never truly been. The Loki of this reality lay dead in space, while he was merely an interloper who had taken his place through cosmic accident.
He opened his mouth to explain, then heard the barely suppressed sob in Thor's voice and chose silence instead. Some truths could wait.
"Father," Horus said, stepping forward.
"My lord Raven," Sanguinius added, bowing his head with respect.
"Captain-General," Guilliman concluded, acknowledging Valdor with formal courtesy.
Valdor responded with a slight nod, the closest thing to open emotion his disciplined nature would permit when reuniting with gene-sons.
The Emperor's gaze swept across the three Primarchs before settling on Horus. "Where are your brothers?"
"We have been unable to locate them, Father," Horus replied, his tone carrying the weight of failure. "They remain scattered across unknown regions of space and time."
"That will be fixed soon enough," Raven said, reaching up to grasp one of Loki's horns again. "Loki Beast, produce the stones and gauntlet."
Loki, having pulled himself from Thor's emotional reunion, nodded and reached into what appeared to be empty air.
When his hand emerged, it held objects that made every person in the room draw breath at once: multiple Infinity Gauntlets and more than a dozen Infinity Stones, their surfaces gleaming with cosmic power.
The silence that followed was deafening.
Tony stared at the collection of universal artifacts as if they were poisonous snakes. Bruce Banner's scientific mind reeled. Steve Rogers simply stood frozen, trying to process what his eyes were telling him.
"No," Stark said finally, shaking his head harder. "No, no, no. This isn't possible. There's only one set per universe. That's the whole point!"
His voice cracked with the strain of denying evidence that stood before him in blazing contradiction to everything he thought he understood about cosmic law.
The other Avengers shared his reaction, their minds rejecting what they saw. These had to be fakes, illusions, anything other than genuine artifacts of universal creation.
Then Loki put a complete set of stones into one of the gauntlets and spoke a single word at Raven's prompting: "Fries."
Reality bent to his will without resistance. A serving of perfectly prepared French fries appeared in his free hand, steam still rising from their golden surfaces.
The Avengers' worldview didn't just crack; it shattered completely.
"What in God's name is happening here?" Steve asked, stepping forward on unsteady legs. "How do you have so many Infinity Stones?"
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