What is happening?
That single thought flashed through Hela's mind in the instant before pain exploded across her jaw.
She had been mid-strike, her blade cutting through the air toward her target, when suddenly he simply wasn't there. He had moved—no, teleported—with a speed that her eyes couldn't track. And then she felt it: a devastating impact against her chin that sent shockwaves through her entire skull.
Her feet lifted off the ground. The familiar sensation of weightlessness washed over her, but with one crucial, terrifying difference—she couldn't control her body. Her limbs refused to respond. Her magical defenses, which should have activated automatically, were stunned into silence by the sheer force of the blow.
The world became a blur of motion and color.
BOOOOOM!
She crashed through a massive boulder, the stone exploding into fragments around her. Her body tumbled and skidded across the barren ground, finally coming to a stop nearly a hundred meters from where she'd started. Dust and debris rained down around her.
Pain radiated through her entire body, sharp and immediate. She gasped, struggling to draw breath into lungs that had been compressed by the impact.
This can't be happening.
She was Princess Hela of Asgard, daughter of Odin All-Father, trained since childhood in combat and magic. She had fought giants twice her size, battled sorcerers with centuries of experience, led armies across realms. She was one of the strongest warriors in the Nine Realms.
How could she lose to a nobody who just appeared out of nowhere?
Her training kicked in before her thoughts could spiral further. She pushed herself up on one elbow, shaking her head to clear it, already preparing a counterattack—
A shadow fell over her.
Her eyes snapped upward. He was there, standing above her, silhouetted against the red sky. His expression was cold, furious, completely merciless.
She raised her arms instinctively to defend, crossing them above her head as she channeled magic into a protective barrier—
He didn't care.
His leg came down in a devastating axe kick. It struck her crossed arms with the force of a falling meteor. Her hastily erected barrier shattered like glass. The impact bent her arms at unnatural angles—not quite breaking them, but sending lances of agony through bone and muscle. And without any pause, without any resistance, the kick continued downward.
It crashed into her stomach.
WHAM!
All the air exploded from her lungs. She felt something crack inside her—ribs, definitely, possibly more. Blood welled up in her mouth, hot and coppery, and she couldn't stop it from spilling past her lips.
Her vision swam. Pain overwhelmed her senses.
And through it all, she saw him raise his hand again, preparing another strike.
Elric felt rage burning. Every ounce of restraint, every calculation about consequences—all of it had been burned.
Before, if he had encountered Hela, he might have fought her but would have held back. He would have feared Odin's retaliation, worried about the consequences of seriously harming an Asgardian princess. He would have calculated risks and pulled his punches.
Not anymore.
Ever since he'd regained memories of his previous life, he had lived in fear. Fear that some cosmic being would accidentally destroy Earth. Fear that he'd be swept up in one of the thousand cosmic wars constantly raging across the universe. Fear that despite knowing the plot, despite all his preparations, something would go catastrophically wrong.
That fear had kept him cautious. Measured. Always holding something in reserve.
But now? Stranded thousands years in the past, with no guarantee he could return, with no idea if decades would pass in his original time while he was trapped here?
He didn't care anymore.
"If Odin wants to come," he muttered through gritted teeth, "let him come. I'll beat the shit out of him too."
Behind him, dozens of black swords materialized in the air—gleaming blades of pure magical energy, each one capable of piercing fortress walls. They hung suspended for just an instant, pointing at Hela's prone form.
Then they vanished, launched at speeds that made them invisible, leaving only trails of displaced air.
Hela barely managed to roll aside as the swords hammered into the ground where she'd been lying. Explosions of dirt and stone erupted, each impact cratering the earth.
But Elric wasn't done. He teleported again, appearing directly in front of her escape path, and his fist came down in a brutal hammer blow aimed at her head.
"When will you learn that trick doesn't work against me?" he snarled.
"You—!"
Hela's words cut off as a brilliant blue glow suddenly erupted around her. It expanded in the blink of an eye, forming a sphere of crackling energy that pushed Elric back.
His instincts screamed danger. He teleported away immediately, putting fifty meters between himself and whatever was happening.
BOOOOM!
A massive explosion consumed the area where he'd been standing. The force was immense—not just physical, but spatial, warping reality itself in a small radius. Anything caught in that blast would have been torn apart at the molecular level.
"I wasn't expecting to have to use this," Hela's voice rang out from within the dissipating energy.
As the blue light faded, Elric saw her standing, one arm hanging limply at her side, blood still trickling from her mouth. But in her other hand, she held something that made his blood run cold.
A cube. Blue. Glowing with infinite power that seemed to compress entire dimensions into its geometric form.
The Tesseract.
The Space Stone.
"I really hate relying on external power," Hela said, and despite her injuries, there was a note of genuine excitement in her voice—the thrill of a warrior who had finally found a fight worth her full strength. "But you've left me no choice."
The cube flared brighter, responding to her will.
A beam of pure spatial energy lanced toward Elric, blue and impossible, moving at speeds that defied conventional physics.
He didn't hesitate. "Teleport!"
He vanished an instant before the beam reached him, reappearing a hundred meters to the left.
The beam struck the ground where he had been standing, and what happened next defied description. It was as if reality itself had been erased—not destroyed or vaporized, but simply removed. There was no explosion, no debris, no dust. One moment the ground existed; the next, there was nothing. A perfect void, as if someone had taken an eraser to existence itself.
A chill ran down Elric's spine.
He had grown so much stronger. He had started to believe that he could at least fight against someone wielding an Infinity Stone—that he could hold his own, even if he couldn't win.
One hit, he realized, staring at the void where solid ground had been moments before. One hit from that and it's game over. No regeneration, no second chances. Just... gone.
The Space Stone didn't destroy things. It didn't need to. It simply removed them from existence, shunting them into null-space or scattering their atoms across dimensions. There was no defense against that except not getting hit.
Hela lifted the Tesseract again, and Elric saw space itself beginning to warp around her. She was preparing something bigger.
"You're fast," Hela acknowledged, her voice strained but steady. "Faster than anyone I've fought before. But let's see you dodge this."
The air around her fractured like broken glass. Dozens of spatial rifts opened simultaneously, each one a portal to compressed destruction. Blue energy built within each rift, gathering power.
Elric's mind raced. He couldn't teleport away from area-effect attacks covering such a wide radius. He couldn't tank the hit—even his strongest defenses would be meaningless against spatial erasure. He needed a different approach.
His hands moved in complex patterns, channeling magic at a frantic pace. Multiple spells activated simultaneously, layering on top of each other.
"Dimensional Anchor! Reality Stabilization! Spatial Lock!"
The air around him solidified, not physically but conceptually. He was trying to lock down the local space-time, making it harder for the Space Stone to manipulate reality in his immediate vicinity.
It wouldn't stop the attack, but it will slow it down enough for him to react.
Hela released the gathered energy.
Dozens of spatial beams erupted from the rifts surrounding her, converging on Elric from every angle. There was no safe direction to dodge, no gap in the coverage. It was an execution technique, designed to leave absolutely no escape.
The beams closed in, reality-erasing death approaching from all sides.
And Elric calmly made his move.
"Dimensional Shift!"
Instead of teleporting away, he teleported sideways—shifting himself into a parallel dimensional layer, existing in the same physical space but on a slightly different vibrational frequency of reality.
The spatial beams passed through where he had been, converging on empty space. But he felt them even in his shifted state—the Space Stone's power reaching across dimensional boundaries, trying to pull him back into phase.
He couldn't hold this position for long. Seconds at most.
He phased back into normal reality behind Hela, his hand already glowing with compressed magical energy. She was vulnerable, focused on maintaining the Tesseract's power output—
Her head turned, impossibly fast, and she smiled.
She anticipated this.
A spatial barrier erupted around her, a shield of compressed space-time that would reflect or deflect anything that touched it.
Elric's attack splashed harmlessly against the barrier, dissipating into scattered light.
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