Chapter 245: Thor's Return and the System Upgrade
The thing about wielding someone else's signature weapon in front of them was that it required a certain commitment to the bit.
Ethan had the Rumble-Rumble Fruit. He had lightning of his own, better lightning in some technical respects, lightning that didn't require a hammer as an intermediary. But the Destroyer had proven impervious to most things, and more importantly, Thor was standing fifteen feet away looking at a version of himself that had been removed from its context and wasn't sure what was left.
So Ethan fought the Destroyer with Mjolnir and the Rumble-Rumble Fruit combined, which produced an effect that was in some ways indistinguishable from Thor at full capacity, and watched Thor watch him do it.
This is the most theatrical thing I have done since the Spider-Society, he thought, ducking under a sweep of the Destroyer's arm and bringing the hammer up into its midsection. And that involved an entire transformation sequence with sound effects.
The Destroyer staggered. It was not damaged — nothing had damaged it — but it was being managed, which was different.
He kept one eye on Thor.
The Asgardian prince was in a place Ethan hadn't quite anticipated. The grief had cycled back around into something darker, the specific spiral that happened when someone ran out of external things to be angry at and turned inward. Ethan recognized the quality of it. He'd seen it before in Hell's Kitchen, in people who'd had one too many things taken from them before they had the tools to absorb it.
He didn't like what he was seeing.
The Destroyer fired. Ethan blocked it, half his attention still on Thor.
"Perhaps I was born a mistake."
"Perhaps I don't deserve Mjolnir."
"Perhaps I should disappear."
None of that was audible — Thor wasn't speaking out loud — but it was visible in the specific way people's faces look when they're having that conversation with themselves. Ethan had learned to read it.
He made a decision.
"Thor!" He put everything behind it — not aggression, not performance, just the direct force of someone who needs to be heard through the noise in someone else's head. "You are Thor. Asgard's people are waiting for you to come back. Your friends are fighting because of you, not despite you. Are you going to make their injuries mean nothing?"
It landed. Not perfectly, not cleanly — but it landed, the way the right word sometimes lands when someone is right at the edge of something.
Thor's focus came back.
He looked at Ethan. He looked at the Destroyer. He looked at the hammer in Ethan's hand.
Then he looked up.
"Father."
Ethan had enough transmigrator context to know what came next. He stepped back, threw the hammer clear, and gave the sky room to do what the sky was about to do.
The lightning that came down was not the Rumble-Rumble Fruit. It was something older and more personal, the specific property of a man and the sky having a conversation that had been interrupted and was now resuming. It found Thor the way things find people when they belong to each other.
The armor assembled itself around him from fragments that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.
Thor caught Mjolnir.
He held it for a moment, and the quality of the silence was the quality of something that had been out of alignment clicking back.
"Thank you, brother," he said to Ethan. "I'll take it from here."
He hit the Destroyer with the hammer in the specific way that ended conversations.
The sound it made when it stopped was the sound of something that had completed its purpose, or had its purpose completed for it.
In the settling quiet, Ethan looked at his hand. The palm was slightly red — Mjolnir, it turned out, had opinions about the force distribution involved in fighting a Destroyer with it for several minutes. Nothing serious. Inconvenient.
The System had been running notifications he hadn't fully tracked during the fight:
「Congratulations, Host! Thor Odinson's Friendship Level has risen to ★★★!」「Congratulations, Host! Thor Odinson's Friendship Level has risen to ★★★★!」「…」「Congratulations, Host! Thor Odinson's Friendship Level has risen to ★★★★★★!」「Congratulations, Host! Thor Odinson has become Family!」「System detecting: 25/25 Family members reached.」「System update commencing: 24:00:00」
Twenty-five.
Ethan looked at the countdown. Twenty-four hours.
He walked to Tony, who had been watching the entire sequence with the expression of a man who has been recording everything and is going to spend a significant amount of time with the footage later.
"It works," Tony said, meaning Thor restored.
"It works," Ethan confirmed.
He flexed his hand. The redness was already fading.
"That hammer," he said, "is genuinely difficult to fight with. The grip geometry is wrong for the way I move. It's built for someone with a different center of gravity."
Tony looked at him. "You fought the Destroyer with Mjolnir and your complaint is the ergonomics."
"The ergonomics," Ethan said, "are bad."
Tony started to say something and then decided against it.
Across the field, Thor was helping Sif to her feet. Fandral had apparently found his sword. Volstagg was dusting himself off with the energy of someone who considers being knocked forty feet a reasonable occupational hazard.
Twenty-four hours.
Let's see what comes next.
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