"Tsk."
Loki surveyed the armed personnel surrounding him, his expression darkening with displeasure.
That bastard who called himself Professor Paradox had simply left with Thor—no explanation, no briefing, no tactical overview. Just gone.
And that armored jackass who'd appeared later, hiding behind his metal mask like a coward? He'd been even worse. Condescending. Dismissive. The way he'd casually swatted them both into the sand still burned.
I haven't even agreed to your plan yet, you time-hopping lunatic!
Loki's hands twitched, and twin daggers materialized in his palms with a whisper of green light. The gesture was slight—barely noticeable—but every TVA officer's weapon immediately tracked to him with mechanical precision.
"Time variant detected," one of them announced, voice flat and emotionless through their helmet's vocoder.
A Black woman stepped forward from the ranks, point some kind of scanner device at Loki. Her orange and black uniform strained at the seams.
"I am placing you under arrest," she declared with officious authority, "on behalf of the Time Variance Authority for violating the Sacred Timeline. Drop your weapons and surrender peacefully."
Loki considered this for exactly half a second.
"Is that so?" He smiled, all teeth and malice. "Then catch."
He moved.
The dagger in his right hand spun through the air in a perfect arc, embedding itself with surgical precision in the chest cavity of the nearest TVA officer. The man's temporal weapon clattered to the sand as he collapsed, green energy crackling around the wound.
Every remaining officer immediately raised their weapons, dozens of barrels now trained on Loki's head.
"Didn't you tell me to put down my weapon?" Loki asked innocently, spreading his empty hands. "I put it down. Right into your colleague's sternum. Why don't you go catch it?"
He was in a foul mood. Being humiliated by Doctor Doom had stung his pride raw. And Professor Paradox—that sanctimonious know-it-all—hadn't bothered to explain the plan in detail.
Since that's the case, Loki thought with dark satisfaction, I'll do this my way.
The woman's face had gone ashen. She fumbled for her earpiece, fingers trembling.
"Prisoner is resisting violently!" she shouted into the comm. "Requesting immediate backup! Multiple casualties—"
Reality tore open around them.
Dozens of orange rectangular portals materialized across the desert like wounds in space itself. Armed soldiers poured through each opening—fifty, a hundred, two hundred. Within seconds, thousands of TVA enforcement personnel surrounded Loki in concentric rings, weapons raised.
But they were facing the greatest mage in the Nine Realms.
This Loki—the one who'd served under Ben Parker, who'd wielded Mjolnir itself, who'd learned from the Ancient One and survived cosmic wars—was not the same failure who'd been knocked unconscious by his brother mere hours ago. He'd lost Thor's power when he returned the hammer, yes. But his magical abilities had only grown stronger in compensation.
Loki's hand swept through the air with casual elegance.
Six daggers materialized from nothing, spinning like helicopter blades as they shot forward. Each one found a target—throat, eye socket, the gap between helmet and chest plate. Six TVA officers dropped before they could pull their triggers.
Then the gunfire began.
Thousands of temporal weapons discharged simultaneously, a wall of energy bolts converging on Loki's position. His body jerked and spasmed as round after round punched through him, shredding his form into a perforated mess.
But each wound bled green light instead of blood.
No impact splatter. No physical resistance. Just magical energy dissipating harmlessly into the air.
Because the Loki they were shooting was, of course, an illusion.
This was how an assassin-mage truly fought. The exposed figure was bait—phantom and misdirection, both real and fake simultaneously. While the enemy wasted ammunition trying to decipher which shadow held substance, the real predator's fangs were already closing around their throats.
More daggers materialized from empty air behind the TVA lines, each one coated in corrosive emerald magic. They didn't just cut—they infected. The enchantment burrowed into wounds like living parasites, eating through temporal armor and flesh alike, leaving victims writhing in agony as their own life force turned against them.
Screams echoed across the desert.
The woman was hyperventilating now, her previous authority evaporating into pure panic.
"Support! We need support!" She mashed the comm button so hard it cracked. "Emergency reinforcement request! Class-5 variant threat!"
This wasn't making sense. Her team had arrested variants of Loki from dozens of timelines before. Most were troublemakers, yes—schemes and illusions and irritating escape attempts. But they'd never caused casualties like this. Never moved with such lethal efficiency.
Loki was supposed to be a synonym for failure. For grandiose plans that collapsed into humiliation.
But the variant before her now? There was nothing grandiose about his approach. No theatrical speeches or complex schemes.
Just daggers. Just illusions. Just a three-move combination that left her entire squadron dying in the sand.
She'd lost thirty officers in under two minutes.
Reality warped.
A figure materialized between her and the carnage—no portal, no warning, just existence where emptiness had been a heartbeat before.
He wore a purple trench coat that billowed dramatically despite the absence of wind, the fabric seeming to shift and blur at the edges as though not entirely anchored to this dimension. His face remained hidden beneath a hood, but the disdain in his voice was palpable.
"Useless trash," he said, not even glancing at the woman. "You need me to handle such a small fry?"
The woman's fear transformed instantly into something deeper—not just terror, but reverence tinged with visceral dread.
"Lord Eon!" She bowed so low her forehead nearly touched the sand.
The Time Variance Authority had changed dramatically over recent weeks. The most obvious shift: the mysterious Time Keepers had recruited a cadre of special enforcers, each one possessing abilities that made standard TVA personnel look like children playing with toy weapons.
And each enforcer had a personality to match their power—cruel, capricious, utterly without mercy.
Eon stood at the top of that terrifying hierarchy.
"Another strange character," Loki muttered, studying the newcomer with narrowed eyes.
He'd been considering whether to dial back the violence and allow himself to be captured—infiltration from within, the classic approach. But something about this purple-coated figure made his tactical instincts scream danger.
Eon moved.
One moment he stood twenty meters away. The next, he'd closed the distance to nothing, one hand sweeping through the air in a gesture of contemptuous dismissal.
Loki's illusions shattered like glass.
Every phantom duplicate, every carefully layered enchantment, every misdirection he'd woven—all of it unraveled simultaneously. The magical constructs didn't fade or disperse. They were simply deleted, erased from reality as though they'd never existed.
His true position stood revealed, exposed and vulnerable.
How—?
Loki's shock lasted exactly one heartbeat.
In the second heartbeat, Eon vanished from his position and reappeared directly in front of Loki, moving faster than even Asgardian reflexes could track.
His arm had transformed into a blade of purple energy—solid light that hummed with dimensional distortion.
The blade punched through Loki's abdomen with terrible ease, lifting him off his feet. The God of Mischief gasped, blood flooding his mouth as the energy weapon hoisted him high into the desert air like a trophy.
"Hmph." Eon's voice held nothing but boredom. "Loki. That's all you amount to?"
He flicked his wrist casually, and Loki's body flew from the blade to crash into the sand six meters away. The impact drove the air from his lungs, left him choking on blood and sand.
The obese woman rushed forward, her fear momentarily overcome by bureaucratic concern.
"Lord Eon," she said carefully, "Miss Minutes specifically instructed us to bring him in alive—"
"Don't worry." Eon didn't even glance at her. "Isn't he a god? He won't die so easily from a little hole in his stomach."
The truth was, Eon had no interest in killing this particular variant. He was just an insignificant minor character, barely worth the effort of execution.
What Eon wanted—what he craved—was access to the other Ben Tennysons that Maltruant had brought through the dimensional barriers. Those variants possessed functional Omnitrixes. If he could drain their energy, absorb their genetic templates, perhaps even steal their watches...
Unfortunately, his own Omnitrix had been damaged beyond simple repair. And he was no match for those variants in direct combat.
Especially not the one who wielded powers stolen from the Beyonders themselves.
Eon was a clone. A Chronian consciousness that had used "Life energy" to seize Ben Tennyson's body through the Omnitrix's genetic storage systems. The possession had been successful, unlike Zs'Skayr's failed attempt with the original Ben.
But after claiming his host body, the Omnitrix had been destroyed in an accident. And the stolen flesh had begun deteriorating, cells breaking down day by day as the fundamental incompatibility between Chronian consciousness and human DNA asserted itself.
To survive, to achieve immortality, he needed to constantly hunt parallel universe versions of Ben Tennyson. Absorb their power. Steal their watches. Cannibalize their genetic stability to shore up his own failing existence.
He'd modified the damaged Omnitrix into a horrific patchwork device, creating equipment that should never have existed.
"Collar him with a time lock," Eon ordered, already turning away. "Then repair the timeline branch he created."
Honestly, he'd been too lazy to deal with these trivial arrests before. But now that they were stuck working for the TVA—now that even Maltruant couldn't eliminate the remaining resistance members without drawing unwanted attention—keeping a low profile meant playing the role of loyal enforcer.
For now.
If that bastard would just show some initiative, Eon thought bitterly, we wouldn't have to waste time on this tedious charade.
A figure appeared in his mind—someone wrapped in a black hoodie, face hidden in shadow, radiating an aura of barely-contained madness.
He shook his head in frustration.
If Nega Ben and Mad Ben had worked together properly, they could have conquered entire multiverses by now. But no—those two were too busy indulging their respective psychoses to coordinate effectively.
The woman approached Loki's prone form cautiously, a temporal suppression collar gripped in her trembling hands.
Loki groaned, blood still seeping from the hole in his abdomen. His healing factor was already working but the wound had been deep.
She fastened the collar around his neck with shaking fingers. The device activated immediately, dampening his magical abilities to near-nothing.
Then she grabbed him by the ankle and unceremoniously dragged him toward the nearest orange portal, leaving a trail of crimson in the sand.
Meanwhile, outside the boundaries of normal spacetime, beyond the walls of the multiverse itself...
Doctor Doom, Professor Paradox, and Thor materialized in a space that defied conventional physics.
Thor carried the still-unconscious variant Loki over one shoulder like a sack of grain, the trickster's limbs dangling limply.
The God of Thunder looked around with open curiosity, momentarily distracted from his burden.
They stood in what appeared to be a library—but calling it merely a "library" was like calling the ocean "wet." Accurate but hopelessly inadequate.
The walls stretched upward beyond sight, lined with books whose spines bore titles in languages that predated written language itself. Some volumes glowed with inner light. Others seemed to shift and change their contents when viewed from different angles. A few appeared to be screaming.
Below the towering shelves, massive doorways dotted the floor at irregular intervals. Each door was unique—some ornate, some plain, some that seemed to exist in more than three dimensions simultaneously. They resembled entrances to an impossible maze.
"Where are we?" Thor asked, his voice echoing strangely in the vast space.
"The Library of World," Professor Paradox explained, his cane clicking softly against the crystalline floor. "A conduit between universes, built by the Beyonders during the era when they still believed 'life' was a valuable experiment worth preserving. It was a gift they gave to the multiverse."
His expression turned melancholic.
"Now that they've abandoned this place—now that they've decided all life is merely a contamination to be purged—we use it as a temporary refuge. A headquarters for our resistance."
The three of them—plus the unconscious Loki—wandered through the enormous library for several minutes, passing between shelves that contained the collected knowledge of dead universes.
Finally, they encountered another figure.
A man sat cross-legged in the center of a reading circle, surrounded by floating books that orbited him like satellites. He appeared utterly ordinary—medium height, unremarkable features, wearing a simple jumpsuit.
But the power radiating from him was anything but ordinary.
"You're late," Molecule Man said without opening his eyes. "I've been waiting for hours. What did you manage to accomplish on this little excursion?"