"I'm done here," Smith said, letting the residual energy of the transformation bleed off into the stale air. "I'll leave you to it."
He turned toward the portal point, the golden sparks already beginning to trace a circle, but stopped. "Think about what I said last time. You and Odin reach an agreement—no harm to the people of Asgard—and I'll talk to him. You could be out sooner than you think."
Hela's expression shifted at the mention of the All-Father. Something moved behind her pale eyes that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite contempt; it was colder and far older.
"I don't think it will be much longer anyway," she said, her voice echoing faintly in the dead realm. "Based on what I know of how this works—my grandfather went through the exact same thing. Odin won't be able to contain the accumulation indefinitely."
Smith filed that intelligence away. She had worked out the ticking clock of the Odinforce and Ragnarok entirely on her own, without any prompt from him. That was highly useful to know.
"The people of Asgard are innocent, regardless of what happens between you and him," Smith said, his tone uncompromising. "That's all I'm asking you to hold onto."
He paused, offering one last piece of the board. "Also—Odin's timeline may shift significantly more than you're expecting. Be ready for that."
Hela studied him, her gaze sharpening. "Can he find something to slow it? Some artifact to manage the pressure?"
"That's an open question."
She was quiet for a long moment. Then, with the measured, aristocratic precision of a queen setting her terms: "If you want a real conversation about any of this next time, bring food. Proper food, and wine—something from a realm with actual seasons. We can discuss it then."
"Deal."
He opened the portal and stepped through.
Outside the dimensional seal boundary, Smith stood in the dead air of Netherheim's outer edge and ruthlessly analyzed what she had just told him.
Hela at baseline—sealed, isolated, operating at less than one percent of her peak—had nearly matched his new power level. Peak Hela, standing on Asgardian soil, running the full accumulated output of her prime, sat somewhere terrifyingly close to 100 million.
The math perfectly tracked with what the Thor films had shown in another timeline: the God of Thunder at full, awakened thunderstorm capacity hitting her with everything he had, producing absolutely no visible result. She had barely been home at that point, nowhere near her ultimate ceiling.
He had originally come here to show strength. He had ended up rapidly recalibrating his understanding of the cosmic ceiling instead.
Not unwelcome information, he decided.
He pulled the newly acquired Saiyan spacecraft out of his system storage. He looked at the digital card materialize into physical reality. Single occupant, egg-shaped, compact enough that it fit neatly in the palm of his hands before he set it down on the rocky ground and let the capsule technology expand it to full size.
He had the Space Stone. He had instantaneous portal capacity. He absolutely didn't need this obsolete piece of Frieza Force hardware for transit.
He climbed in anyway.
The circular control panel was intuitive in the specific, seamless way that system-granted items tended to be—as if the ingrained knowledge of how to pilot it had arrived directly into his brain alongside the object itself. He manually punched in Earth's coordinates and let the ship's engine run.
The first several hours of the journey were genuinely remarkable.
Experiencing space at blinding speed from inside a moving physical craft was fundamentally different from stepping through a magic portal. Portals were instantaneous; they gave you nothing but the destination. The spacecraft gave you the view. It offered the crushing scale, the actual unmediated dark between stars, the profound sense of distance as a physical, isolating experience rather than a mathematical abstraction.
He understood viscerally, for the very first time, exactly why every civilization in this universe with space-faring capacity had found the void either magnificent, humbling, or a terrifying mix of both.
Then, he had been strapped into the cramped cockpit for a full day with absolutely nothing to do, and the majesty had rapidly ceded ground to numbing boredom.
He was casually scanning the deep space ahead when a rogue planet finally came into view.
It was roughly Earth-sized. Readings indicated no atmosphere worth measuring. Surface telemetry showed absolutely no thermal signatures, no electromagnetic activity, and zero biological markers of any kind. It was a barren, dead rock, orbited quietly by two equally dead satellites that had probably been lifeless for longer than Earth had even existed.
Smith unbuckled his harness and opened the main hatch.
The freezing vacuum didn't instantly kill him—he was still actively working around his biological space-survivability problem, but at this close distance to the open hatch, with the ship's minimal life-support field still active, he had enough of a breathable margin.
He stood in the doorway, extended two fingers, aligned the shot, and fired.
A blinding needle of concentrated ki punched through the void.
It went through the planet in a perfect, straight line. Entry, transit, core-piercing, and exit—all in under a single second.
Then, the catastrophic stress fractures propagated outward from the glowing entry wound infinitely faster than the planet's gravity could compensate. The crust shattered. The planet violently came apart in a slow, expanding, apocalyptic sphere of magma and debris. The shockwave caught the nearest satellite and instantly shredded it into dust, then caught the second moon a few seconds later as the fiery debris field relentlessly expanded.
Smith leaned against the hatch, bathed in the orange light of a dying world, and watched it burn.
The scale of it was something no Earth-based fight had ever produced.
Not the Fraternity island demolitions, not the heavy ki blasts against heavily reinforced fortresses, not even the full-power, bloody exchanges with opponents who could casually level cities. Those had all been large in the localized way that human structures were large. A planet was large in a way that required a different reference frame entirely.
This was the entry standard. The absolute floor of what it meant to actually matter in this brutal universe.
He thought about that for a long, quiet moment, watching the planetary debris field slowly spread and cool in the dark. Then, he sealed the hatch and let the Saiyan ship continue its long journey toward Earth.