Then Daniel bent down and grabbed Mjolnir by the handle and pulled.
It didn't move.
"Poor little nephew," Luke's voice came from behind him, dripping with satisfaction. "It seems you aren't worthy."
"Fuck off," Daniel said through his teeth.
He pulled again, harder, every muscle in his arm engaged, and the hammer didn't even shift. The worthiness enchantment sat there completely unmoved, ancient and indifferent, caring nothing about how badly he wanted it.
Daniel decided he didn't care about the enchantment either.
Death energy erupted from his grip, black and absolute, flooding into Mjolnir like a tide with nowhere else to go, forcing itself into the metal, into the inscription, into the very core of what Odin had built into this weapon across centuries of divine craftsmanship.
The enchantment pushed back, the way it always had against everything that had ever tried to break it.
Daniel pushed harder.
Cracks spread through the magic like fractures through ice, the worthiness inscription splintering under the weight of something it was never designed to handle, lightning bleeding out from the hammerhead in wild erratic bursts as the weapon's own power destabilized, thrashing inside its own containment.
"You think worthy means anything to me," Daniel said, voice dropping low, death energy now pouring off him in visible waves that darkened the air around his entire body. "You are coming home with me. That's all there is to it."
The sky split open.
Lightning came down in a single massive column, ancient and deafening, crashing directly into Mjolnir as Daniel ripped it off the ground with one hand, the enchantment shattering completely at the moment of contact, and the hammer sang as the lightning poured through it and into him, wild and uncontained and fully his.
"Yeah," Luke said, watching Daniel heft Mjolnir like he'd owned it his entire life. "I should find another hammer from another universe."
Then something screamed down from the sky.
Luke looked up.
Carol was back, blazing, furious, coming down at terminal velocity with every ounce of power she had left behind her like a comet tail, the revenge in her expression visible even from that distance.
Luke looked at her for a long moment.
One persistent woman.
'Singularity Manifest.'
The space in front of him warped without sound, reality folding inward at a single point as a black hole tore itself into existence directly in Carol's path, small but absolute, the kind of thing that didn't negotiate with anything that came near it.
Carol hit the boundary of it at full speed and stopped, her forward momentum dying instantly as the sucking force latched onto her, energy blazing off her in every direction as she fought it, pouring everything she had into pulling away from it.
It didn't matter.
The singularity simply increased its pull.
"Just give up," Luke said, watching her struggle with the detached calm of someone observing the weather. "I don't like you. You're too much for me."
Daniel stood beside him holding a god's hammer, watching Captain Marvel get slowly consumed by a black hole, and genuinely didn't know where to start with that sentence.
She doesn't like you either uncle, Daniel thought. She just wants to eat you. That's a very different thing.
He decided to keep that to himself.
The black hole grew.
The horizon around it bent, light curling inward at the edges as the singularity expanded, pulling everything in its radius toward that single consuming point.
Carol's own energy began getting stripped away from her, the photon blasts she was using to push herself free getting eaten before they could even fully form.
She was losing ground and she knew it.
Every last thing she had went into her legs, into her flight, into the raw desperate push away from the pull, and for a moment it actually worked — her body inching backward, the distance between her and the event horizon growing by centimeters against everything the singularity was doing.
Then a punch came straight into her face.
Her head snapped back, momentum reversed completely, and she fell forward directly into the black hole's pull with nothing left to fight it.
The singularity took her head first.
Then it collapsed, clean and quiet, like it had simply finished what it set out to do, and Carol's body dropped to the cracked street below.
Luke landed beside it.
He looked down at her for a moment, then opened his inventory and stored the body.
'Still the body of Captain Marvel,' he thought. 'One of the strongest superheroes to ever exist. This will definitely give good exp.'
Practical as always.
"That is so creepy," Daniel said, watching the body disappear with an expression caught somewhere between disturbed and deeply confused. "Why are you storing a dead body?"
"For many purposes," Luke said. "But definitely not what you're thinking."
"How do you know what I'm thinking?"
Luke looked at him straight in the eye with the flat expression of someone who had known this person their entire life and said nothing.
Daniel held the eye contact for exactly two seconds before looking away.
Right. This was the uncle who could read him like a open book since he was seven years old. The man didn't need words. He just looked at you and somehow already knew what strange direction your brain had taken, which was somehow more embarrassing than being called out directly.
"I think normal things," Daniel said, not convincingly.
Luke said nothing to that either.
*****
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