In the quiet morning light of Old Bridge Town, the atmosphere was deceptively peaceful. The local diner was filled with the smell of sizzling bacon and fresh toast, but the real surprise was in the small research kitchen.
Thor, having shed the mantle of the brooding, broken prince from the night before, was surprisingly busy. He was navigating the cramped kitchen with practiced ease, brewing a massive pot of coffee for everyone. There was a new, humble rhythm to his movements—a man trying to find a place in a world where he was no longer the center of attention.
Erik Selvig sat at the table, nursing a slight headache from the previous night's drinking bout. He had pieced together most of what had happened, and though he was still wary of the "God of Thunder" standing by the stove, he kept his peace. The man had looked after him, after all.
"Coffee, Doctor?" Thor asked, offering a steaming mug with a genuine, calm smile.
"Thanks," Erik muttered, still squinting at the sunlight.
Fifteen miles away, the peaceful morning was violently interrupted. A massive surge of energy tore through the atmosphere, invisible to the naked eye but deafening to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s sensors. On the monitoring screens back at the temporary research center, a cylindrical vortex spiked in the data—the signature of the Bifrost—before vanishing into the desert floor.
The alarm at the base wailed. Coulson didn't hesitate. "Lock onto those coordinates. Tactical teams, move out!" he barked, leading a dozen subordinates toward the SUVs.
In the middle of a barren field, four figures stood amidst the settling dust. Lady Sif and the Warriors Three looked around at the dusty, flat landscape of New Mexico. Seeing the faint, shimmering outline of a town on the horizon, they adjusted their capes and began a brisk, determined march toward it. They had a king to find.
Back at the lab, Leo sat in the corner, nursing a lukewarm coffee. He was idly toying with his miniaturized Vibranium reactor. The blue glow was noticeably dimmer, down to about fifty percent capacity. He watched with a half-smile as Jane Foster stood in front of a whiteboard, her hands waving frantically as she tried to explain the Nine Realms and the World Tree to a skeptical Erik.
"It's not just a myth, Erik! It's an advanced map of the cosmos! The energy bridges, the gravitational anomalies—it all fits if you look at it as a multi-dimensional structure!" Jane's voice was full of the fire of discovery.
"It's a beautiful theory, Jane," Erik sighed, leaning back. "But the scientific community won't accept 'magic' as a variable without some kind of solid, repeatable evidence."
THUD. THUD. THUD.
A violent knocking rattled the glass door, nearly shaking it off its hinges. A two-meter-tall armored giant with a fiery red beard—Volstagg—was excitedly pounding on the glass. His eyes were wide with child-like wonder as he spotted the blonde man at the counter.
"FOUND YOU!!" he roared, his voice muffled by the glass but still vibrating in the room.
Beside him, Sif, Fandral, and Hogun stood grinning, their faces alight with relief and joy. They had found their friend.
Thor froze, the coffee pot halfway to a mug. He stared at them, stunned for several heartbeats, before a massive, beaming smile broke across his face. He dropped the pot and rushed to the door.
Erik's mug slipped from his fingers, shattering on the tile floor. He stared in absolute, slack-jawed shock at the four strangely dressed warriors outside. "I... I must have finally lost my mind. I'm dreaming. This is a dream."
Thor threw the door open and pulled them into a bone-crushing collective embrace. The air was filled with the sound of hearty laughter and Asgardian back-slapping. For a moment, the weight of the exile was forgotten.
After the initial chaos, Volstagg stepped forward, bowing with surprising grace to the confused humans in the room. "Forgive our intrusion. We are Lady Sif and the Warriors Three. We seek the Crown Prince."
Erik instinctively glanced at Jane, then at Leo, his eyes wide. Jane, however, didn't look scared; she started to laugh, a breathless, giddy sound. She had been right. Every crazy theory, every late-night calculation—it was all real.
Leo's brow furrowed, and he quietly tucked the Vibranium reactor into his backpack. 'They're here,' he thought. 'Which means the Destroyer, under Loki's command, won't be far behind. The clock just hit zero.'
Thor beamed at his friends. "Nothing in this world or any other could make me happier than seeing your faces. But..." his expression darkened with worry. "You shouldn't have come. You're risking everything."
Fandral clapped Thor on the shoulder, his voice light and confident. "Nonsense! We've come to take you home, brother. The halls of Asgard are too quiet without your shouting."
Thor shook his head slowly. "I can't go back, Fandral. My father is dead because of my pride. The peace treaty with Jotunheim rests on my exile. If I return, I bring war to our gates. I cannot be the cause of more death. Loki told me—"
Leo sighed loudly, rubbing his temples. "God, this guy is such a sucker for a sad story. He still believes Loki's 'Dead Dad' routine."
...
Meanwhile, the S.H.I.E.L.D. motorcade arrived at the landing site. Coulson stepped out, inspecting the intricate, burnt circular patterns etched into the sand.
"Get the linguistics team down here," Coulson ordered. "I want to know if these symbols match the ones found on the hammer's landing site."
But he never got his answer.
The sky above them began to churn. A massive energy fluctuation, ten times stronger than the last, tore through the atmosphere. A strange, dark vortex cloud formed directly overhead, swirling into a terrifyingly large tornado. The sheer pressure caused the ground to tremble, sending vibrations that reached Thor and the others ten miles away in the town.
The clouds rushed downward, slamming into the desert floor with a shockwave that kicked up a wall of dust hundreds of feet high.
Back in town, everyone had run out into the street. Darcy squinted at the horizon. "Okay, did someone else just drop in? Is this like an Asgardian tour group thing?"
As the dust settled at the landing site, a massive, gleaming iron figure emerged. It stood over three meters tall, its body made of segmented, overlapping plates of dark, ferocious steel.
"Did Stark make that?" one of the agents asked, his hand hovering over his sidearm. "It looks like a nightmare version of the Iron Man suit."
"I doubt it," Coulson muttered, looking at the monolithic machine. "Tony never tells me anything, but he usually likes more red and gold."
Coulson picked up a megaphone, his professional calm masking his rising anxiety. He walked forward toward the towering machine.
"Hello! You are operating an unauthorized weapon in restricted airspace. Please identify yourself and power down immediately!"
The Destroyer stopped. It stood motionless for a second, and then the metal plates on its face began to retract inward, row by row, revealing a glowing, orange furnace of pure energy within.
Coulson turned to an agent beside him, giving a small, smug nod. "Watch this. Talk first, shoot later. It works every time."
It seemed that after his encounters with Tony Stark, Coulson's fear of giant robots had been replaced by a somewhat dangerous sense of familiarity.
He was wrong.
A terrifying hum filled the air as destructive energy surged from the Destroyer's core, converging in its head. The "face" of the machine became a blinding energy emitter.
Coulson's instincts finally screamed. "GET DOWN!"
He rolled to the side just as a searing beam of orange light tore through the air. The ray hit two S.H.I.E.L.D. SUVs behind him, instantly vaporizing the metal and triggering a massive, dual explosion.
The blast was so large that the people in Old Bridge Town saw the fireball on the horizon.
Thor stared at the smoke rising in the distance. He knew that energy signature. He turned to Jane, his voice low and urgent. "Jane, you have to get out of here. Right now."
"What are you going to do?" she asked, clutching his arm.
"I'm staying. My friends are here. My responsibility is here," Thor said with a newfound, quiet authority.
Volstagg stepped forward, his hand on the hilt of his massive axe. "Thor will fight with us! We shall fall together if we must!"
Thor looked at his mortal hands, then at his friends. "Guys, look at me. I'm a mortal. I'm just a man. I'll only hold you back in a fight like this. But I can help the people here. I can get them to safety."
Jane stepped forward, refusing to budge. "If you're staying, I'm staying."
Darcy raised her hand, looking around frantically. "Um, guys? I know we're doing the whole 'dramatic stand' thing, but I have to mention... when we walked outside, Leo disappeared."
Thor looked at the group. The Destroyer was moving fast. "Sif, you and the boys prepare for battle. Jane, Erik, come with me—we need to evacuate every citizen on this street. Darcy, find the boy. He's small, he might be hiding."
The group dispersed into a flurry of activity, leaving Darcy standing alone on the main road. "Great. Retreat, find the kid, don't die. No problem. LEO! WHERE ARE YOU?"
...
The Destroyer ignored the remaining S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. Its programming was simple: find Thor. It strode toward the town, its heavy metallic footsteps cracking the asphalt.
Leo, however, wasn't hiding.
He flew directly over the Destroyer's head, his body a golden blur, and landed silently beside Coulson, who was coughing amidst the wreckage of his motorcade. Out of nine vehicles, only three were left standing. A dozen agents lay motionless in the sand, victims of the initial blast.
"Coulson, you still in one piece?"
"Barely," Coulson coughed, leaning against a scorched door. "Leo, that... thing. It's not Stark's. It's more powerful than anything I've ever seen. It's headed for the town."
"That's the Destroyer," Leo said, his eyes glowing with a cold, golden light. "The ultimate defense of Odin's vault. And it's currently being remote-piloted by a very angry King. I'll handle it."
Leo didn't wait for a response. He waved his arm toward the scrapped S.H.I.E.L.D. vehicles. Immediately, the metal groaned and shrieked. A dozen arm-thick spikes of jagged steel tore themselves free from the wreckage, sharpening themselves mid-air through Leo's telekinetic manipulation.
With a sharp crack, Leo and the spikes vanished. A series of sonic boom clouds erupted in the air as he broke the sound barrier, hurtling toward the encroaching giant.
Coulson watched the golden streaks disappear toward the town and sighed. "Is this why Fury trusts him? He's just like Carol... we either trust him to win, or we just watch the world burn."
He climbed into one of the remaining cars. "Move! We're not missing this!"
Leo reached the Destroyer in seconds. He hovered high above the metal giant, looking down at the hollow armor. He didn't use a hammer, and he didn't use magic. He used the fundamental laws of physics.
With a flick of his finger, the dozen metal spikes accelerated. They weren't just falling; they were being propelled at five times the speed of sound.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The impacts sounded like a battery of heavy artillery. Each spike slammed into the Destroyer's back and shoulders, the sheer kinetic energy forcing the three-meter giant to stumble forward, its metallic feet dragging deep furrows into the road.
The Destroyer stopped and began to turn its head upward, the orange glow in its visor intensifying. Loki, watching through the machine's eyes from Asgard, had found a new target.
Leo smiled behind his mask. "My turn."