William's eyes, now narrowed and intense, glowed a terrifyingly bright gold and crimson, the divine ki and regular ki forming dense swirling patterns that, if one looked too closely, would feel like they were being pulled inward, as if by a faint but persistent gravitational force.
His body was wreathed in an armor of red fur that bristled along his wrists and ankles like flames as he exchanged blow after blow with the Mad Titan himself.
BOOM
BOOM
CRACK
Thanos managed to block the two-hit combination that Williams had launched, but just as he was about to counterattack, Williams' fist inexplicably vanished from his hand, reappearing mid-air just below his guard where it slammed down with divine fury, directly into Thanatos's abdomen.
The sound of Thanatos's ribs breaking echoed through the vast expanse of space, even though there was no atmosphere present, and was accompanied by a low growl of rage.
With a swift, almost ethereal movement of his arm, Thanatos unleashed a blast of energy that pulsed with the very essence of countless souls.
The force struck William squarely on the temple, sending him hurtling through the depths of Jupiter's core like an artillery shell.
The sheer impact of his passage ripped open multiple circular rings throughout the massive gas giant.
The impact William endured was imbued with a force of such intense soul energy that it resonated deeply with his very essence.
It was the kind of energy often associated with the realms where the line between life and death blurs, leaving its mark on William's soul, disrupting the fragile balance that existed between his different transformation states.
His body, now hurtling through the vastness of space, sends a wave of intense pain through him.
He instinctively grips his head with his clawed hands, his eyes constricting rapidly as he battles the feeling of his very soul being torn apart.
Thanatos did not let this chance go lightly and began shooting off towards William from above bringing both feet down in a singular devastating stomp.
BOOOOOM
William's body folded like a rusty lawn chair as his body abruptly and violently changed direction.
This process continued, with Thanatos pursuing William across the solar system.
Thanatos delivered blow after blow to the defenseless Saiyan, his fists growing red with each impact.
In a moment of feral rage, Thanatos decided to deliver the final blow, aiming for the blue marble in the distance where the glowing bronze shield flickered dangerously, threatening to collapse completely.
The only reason it remained standing was because, in his current deranged state, William couldn't bring himself to deactivate it.
At that very moment, William arrived with a surprising speed, smashing headfirst into the barrier with such impact that it instantly began to crater around him, expanding outward in a series of increasing circular segments.
These segments continued to grow in size and spread across the entire barrier over the course of time.
As the shield's defenses seemed on the verge of breaking down, Thanatos descended upon William with the force of a meteor forged from the very essence of oblivion and death.
He slammed William through the barely holding barrier of bronze, the impact leaving a trail of devastation in its wake.
BANNNNNGGGGG... SHATTTTER
The barrier surrounding Earth, which for so long held back the encroaching forces, finally began to unravel and collapse in upon itself.
Massive shards of energy, resolute in their purpose, plummeted towards the planet as gravity took its hold.
The remaining shards, now engulfed in the intense flames of the atmosphere, dispersed into individual motes of light, vanishing into the ether before they could cause damage.
Above the Earth, Thanatos floated like a celestial judge, his gaze sweeping over the world and its inhabitants.
He observed as William plummeted to the ground, his grin widening into a grotesque, almost monstrous expression, and his newly formed horns momentarily casting him in a sight both terrifyingly divine and terrifyingly demonic.
He raised his hands out in a gesture of generosity, the sun's light illuminating his form and enhancing the already divine aura that surrounded him.
In one hand, a crackling and twisting black energy flowed along his massive fingers, taking the form of dreary rivers of darkness that snaked their way towards the center of his palm.
As it reached the center, the energy coalesced into a dense orb, so opaque that no sliver of light could manage to escape its surface as if he was holding a gravitational singularity in the palm of his hand.
Thanatos did not stop with a single judgment.
As the black singularity stabilized in his right hand, he slowly raised his left.
Reality reacted before he finished the motion.
Where the first orb drank light like a starving god, the second rejected darkness entirely.
It formed as a sphere of blinding contradiction. Pure existence.
Pure life.
Pure, undiluted ki.
Not radiant in a warm or holy sense, but tyrannical in its brilliance.
Stars near it dimmed, not because their light was consumed, but because it was outshone, reduced to pale imitations in the presence of something unbearably real.
Thanatos now held annihilation in one palm and creation in the other, twin singularities screaming opposite truths into the fabric of the universe.
Between them, space warped, folding inward and outward at the same time, as if reality itself could not decide whether it should be erased or affirmed.
Below him, William fell.
He tore through cloud layers like a meteor, fire and friction wreathing his red fur in incandescent trails.
The planet rushed up to meet him, oceans and continents spinning into view far too fast.
His body was still convulsing, his muscles clenched tight, and his jaw was pulled back in a silent, wordless snarl. Gravity and momentum were finally taking their toll, completing what Thanatos had begun.
Then the world stuttered.
Scarlet energy bloomed beneath him, delicate and furious, threads of chaos magic lacing themselves around his descent like invisible hands.
Wanda felt him.
Not as a signal or a call, but as a scream in the fabric of power itself.
With a surge of adrenaline, she caught him just as he was mid-fall, her magic screaming in protest as it struggled against the sheer force of the impact, which felt like being struck by a god.
The result was not gentle, but it was survivable.
William struck the ground with a force that shook the very foundations of continents, causing the earth to collapse inward beneath his feet and a massive crater to form outward, radiating in fractured rings of jagged rock and earth.
Mountains trembled.
Cities miles away felt the quake roll through their foundations.
But the planet did not die.
Dust and molten stone hung in the air as silence followed, heavy and expectant.
Seconds passed.
They stretched.
Then, slowly, something moved within the crater.
William rose.
His steps were unsteady, boots grinding against cracked bedrock as he hauled himself upright.
His chest heaved, breath coming in ragged pulls that fogged the air with heat.
His face contorted into a fierce snarl, his teeth bared, and his eyes, now burning with an intense gold and crimson light, radiated a palpable aura of killing intent.
An aura swirled and twisted around him, a living storm that threatened to break free, contained only by the very fabric of his being.
Then he stopped.
Something lay half-buried in the rubble near his feet.
A mask.
Red.
The surface of the object was woven from a shimmering material called spirit silk, which was slowly unraveling, transforming into individual, glowing motes of light that ascended gracefully into the air, much like dying embers.
It dissolved right before his very eyes, its fragile existence becoming unmistakable and fleeting.
William froze.
His fists clenched.
Too tightly.
Blood welled up beneath each of his fingers as he bit deeply into his palms, leaving thin, crimson trails running down his hands and dripping onto the cracked, stone surface directly below.
There was no reaction whatsoever. No movement, no flinching, no sign that he was even aware of what was happening.
Because somewhere within his very mind, something that had remained dormant and hidden for so long was finally beginning to awaken.
His true consciousness screamed.
Not in sound, but in defiance.
It clawed at the walls of his instincts and his raging anger, tearing at the chains that kept him trapped in this feral state.
Memories slammed into him. Faces. Voices. Purpose.
The mask burned itself into his vision like an accusation.
The bond holding him snapped taut, strained to the breaking point.
William's aura exploded outward in response.
Red, gold, and a deep shade of dark seemed to surge out from his body in powerful waves, and the very earth around him began to liquefy under the intense pressure before being violently flung outward.
The sky above twisted as ki lashed upward like a challenge hurled at the heavens themselves.
High above the planet, Thanatos watched.
One hand held oblivion.
The other held existence.
And below, the beast he thought broken began to remember what it was.
The scream that tore out of William was a sound that seemed to rip something right free from his soul.
At its very core, the sound was a raw, fractured thing, harsh and feral, a noise that seemed to scrape directly from the very bottom of his chest, dragging through his broken teeth.
Within its depths, it carried the raw, visceral pain of rage and instinct, all interwoven into a chaotic, animalistic howl that seemed to be hurled directly at a universe that had taken far too much and offered no meaningful response.
Then it changed.
The pitch wavered.
The violence in it cracked.
What followed was no longer a beast's cry, but a voice discovering loss in real time.
A roar shaped by grief.
The sound of someone realizing, too late, that the fight had already taken things from him.
Someone.
Maybe several someones.
The scream deepened, slowed, became human, heavy with the weight of absence.
And something inside William broke.
Not shattered. Unlocked.
Deep within his soul, an omega-shaped sigil ignited.
It burned white-hot, not with corruption or fury, but with a terrifying clarity.
Divine ki flooded outward from it in a violent surge, washing through his body like a purifying fire.
His normal ki was driven back, dispersed almost completely, reduced to faint echoes beneath the onslaught of something far older and far cleaner.
The red fur vanished in a series of rapid waves, peeling away in a shower of sparks, leaving behind only faint traces.
It stubbornly clung to his wrists, his chest, and even his lower legs, as if a part of the beast still refused to fully release its grip.
At the center of his chest, the Omega formed.
The symbol etched itself deeply into his flesh, its shape unmistakable, a perfect mirror to Darkseid's own mark yet firmly his own, unique.
It pulsed in time with his heart.
With each passing beat, his body responded with a ripple effect, further refining his ki energy. It compressed, transforming into something sharper, denser, and entirely different.
With every heartbeat, William became less what he was and more what he was becoming.
The world noticed.
The weather patterns across the entire globe started to undergo noticeable changes, though they were initially not particularly dramatic. Yet, there was an unsettling sense of inevitability about these shifts.
Winds shifted across continents.
Pressure systems collapsed and reformed.
The sky was darkening rapidly, taking the form of swirling spiral patterns as the clouds began to pull inward, all converging towards a single, central point.
A tornado began to form around William.
Not of wind, but of immeasurably dense energy.
It twisted itself slowly and deliberately, causing its rotation to bend light and distort the very air it was passing through.
The ground beneath him seemed to groan in protest, as though it couldn't bear his weight.
Satellites adjusted orbit.
Instruments screamed.
While historians might disagree on the exact date it began, there was one thing they could all agree on.
The day Earth's sky learned fear.
William's eyes snapped open.
The feral slits were gone.
His gaze was clear again.
Focused.
Aware.
Despite their seemingly ordinary appearance, yet they pulsed with an aura of godly ki, a vibrant light surging through them in rhythmic flashes, mirroring the Omega's radiant glow emanating directly from his chest.
Despite the fact that his hair remained its usual wild state, there was a distinct change in its shape. It now seemed to rise and flow, as though it were sculpted directly from living flame rather than flesh.
He lifted his head.
Far above the upper reaches of the atmosphere, Thanatos remained, still maintaining the rigid posture of judgment.
William clenched his hands.
His fingers trembled.
His teeth clenched together with a grinding sound, his jaw clenched shut as his resolve hardened into something completely unwavering.
Thanatos saw it.
For the first time, his expression shifted.
He released the orbs.
They fell.
Their descent was wrong.
They moved at a pace that was simultaneously both incredibly slow and utterly impossible, as if time itself had to bend around them, perhaps out of deference, or maybe out of a profound sense of fear.
As they began their descent, they began to orbit one another, the two objects, black and blindingly white, circling each other in a tightening, ever-shrinking spiral.
A faint electric trail connected the two, crackling with opposing truths as annihilation and existence tugged at each other, pulling them in opposite directions.
Halfway down, they merged.
The collision did not explode.
It compressed.
The resulting orb pulsed with an impossible density; the very act of creation seemed to coincide with the inevitable verdict of destruction.
The space surrounding it seemed to be warping, its fabric-like structure folding inward as if drawn towards a point of intense pressure.
Light warped.
Distance became uncertain.
The attack screamed without sound as it continued its descent.
Above, a god prepared to pass judgment.
Below, a man stood inside a storm of his own becoming.
And between them, the universe braced itself.