Chapter 241: Thor and His Four Hapless Friends
The beam had come from outside and landed between them with the precision of a full stop. Both transformations dropped.
Ethan and Tsukasa looked at each other, then at the gap in the wall, then back at each other.
"Next time," Tsukasa said.
"Next time," Ethan agreed.
Tsukasa tilted his head with something that was almost approval. "Your form is solid. Probably only the old Zi-O could run with you at full tilt." He paused. "I wasn't at full tilt, by the way."
"Neither was I," Ethan said.
"I know." Tsukasa opened the dimensional gate with the ease of someone who has done this ten thousand times. "Next time I will be."
He stepped through and was gone.
Tony stared at the space where the gate had been. "Did he just compliment you and threaten you in the same breath?"
"That's how he does things," Ethan said.
"And you're okay with that."
"It means he's coming back."
Tony processed this. "I'm going to need a much better suit."
The System notification arrived in Ethan's awareness while Tony was still processing:
「DING!」「Congratulations, Host! Tsukasa Kadoya has been added as a friend!」「Attribute Gained: Dimensional Gate!」
Ethan absorbed this quietly. The Dimensional Gate — Tsukasa's ability to open passages between worlds, usable whenever a Kamen Rider's presence existed in the target world. That was a significant mobility upgrade. He filed it alongside the question of which worlds it opened and let the implications develop on their own.
"Right," he said. "Thor."
"I was going to bring that up," Tony said. "I completely forgot about Thor."
"I know."
"The match was very engaging."
"I know."
They moved.
The scene outside was exactly as absurd as Ethan had expected.
A five-meter black mechanical construct — the Destroyer, moving with the specific unhurried confidence of something that had been sent to kill one person and did not particularly care what it had to go through to get there — occupied the center of the field. Around it, in various states of being knocked backward, were four people in Asgardian armor holding swords and shields.
"Robot versus Vikings," Tony said. "I'm seeing robot versus Vikings."
"Those are Thor's friends," Ethan said.
"I can tell they're friends because none of them are winning."
Volstagg was back on his feet and going in again with the particular stubbornness of a very large man who has not yet been informed that this isn't working. Fandral was doing something with a blade that would have been effective against most things. Sif had found an angle and was using it. Hogun was quiet and methodical and also not making a dent.
The Destroyer's face panel opened.
The heat beam that came out was the kind that left crystalline edges where it touched ground, the kind that suggested whatever it hit was not going to be in a condition to have opinions about it afterward.
Tony had already gone.
He intercepted the beam's sweep, took it on the armor, pushed through it, and dragged Jane Foster and the two others clear of the radius before the second pass could come.
"You're welcome," he said, to people who hadn't processed what had just happened yet.
Ethan watched from the edge of the field.
Wait.
He wanted to see if it happened the way it should. The Destroyer was here for Thor, which meant Thor was coming to the Destroyer, which meant the moment was approaching. He could step in if it went wrong. He had a dozen abilities that could end this in a few seconds. He also had a reason to wait.
If he becomes worthy here, without the hammer finding him, it's different. It matters that he walked into this voluntarily.
The Destroyer's attention had tracked to Tony — a threat assessment, recalculation. The beam shifted.
Tony absorbed it again and said something over the external speaker that was probably not complimentary.
"You could help," Tony said.
"I'm watching," Ethan said.
"You're watching."
"For a specific thing."
"I'm getting melted—"
"You're fine. The suit can take it."
"The suit is very warm—"
Thor came around the building at a run.
Not with the swagger of someone who expected to win — with the deliberateness of someone who had decided to do something regardless of outcome. He'd made his calculation somewhere between the interrogation room and here and the calculation had come out the same way it always did when Thor was at his most genuinely himself.
He walked up to the Destroyer and stopped in front of it.
He said something — Ethan couldn't hear it at this distance, but he knew what it was. Take me. Leave them.
The Destroyer hit him.
It was not a glancing blow.
Thor went down and stayed down, and the field was quiet for a moment, and Jane Foster made a sound that crossed the distance clearly.
Then the hammer moved.
It wasn't dramatic. It was simply that something had changed in the quality of the air, and the hammer that had been immovable for three days lifted from the crater it had made and crossed the distance to Thor's hand in the time it took to register that it was moving.
The lightning came next.
Tony's suit, which had been reading ambient temperature as significantly elevated for the past several minutes, reported a new electrical phenomenon of a scale it was not entirely prepared to categorize.
Thor stood up.
He was Thor again — not the confused exile yelling in a diner, not the man sitting on the floor of an interrogation room with nothing left to hold onto. The armor was back. The hammer was back. The lightning was doing what lightning does when it has somewhere to go.
The Destroyer had approximately thirty seconds left of operational existence.
Ethan watched this and felt something that was hard to name exactly. Not surprise — he'd known it was coming. Something more like the specific satisfaction of watching something become what it was supposed to be.
"Okay," Tony said, from somewhere inside a cloud of steam his suit was venting. "That's more like it."
The Destroyer went down.
Thor stood in the field, hammer in hand, and looked around at the damage and his friends and the two people who had come from elsewhere.
His eyes found Ethan.
"You were here," he said.
"I was here," Ethan said.
"You didn't help."
"You didn't need it."
Thor looked at this for a moment. Then something in his face shifted — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. "You knew," he said.
"I had a reasonable theory," Ethan said.
Tony pulled his helmet off and looked at Thor, then at the fallen Destroyer, then at the hammer. He was doing the engineering assessment automatically, cataloguing materials and energy signatures. He paused on the hammer.
"Can I—"
"No," Ethan and Thor said simultaneously.
Tony put his hands up.
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