"Where were you, old man? I was clearly handling it."
Hela's voice carried the particular edge of someone who had been interrupted mid-argument — irritated not by the danger, but by the implication that she'd needed rescuing.
The figure who had descended from the Bifrost paid her complaint little attention. He stood at the edge of the battlefield with the unhurried composure. His golden beard caught the light as his gaze swept the scene with methodical precision — the cracked earth, the dissipating remnants of spellwork, and finally, inevitably, the soft azure glow of the Tesseract in Hela's grip.
"Heimdall reported that you vanished from his sight the moment you entered this area," Odin said. "When you do not reappear, I come to investigate." His single eye moved to Elric, then back to the glowing cube. "It seems the concern was not unfounded."
Fuller. The lines around Odin's eyes were fewer. This was a younger Allfather — perhaps not young by any mortal standard, but measurably earlier in his long life.
It didn't make him significantly less dangerous.
Elric performed the mental arithmetic quickly.
One on one, Odin is manageable. Difficult, but manageable — there power levels aren't so far apart that the outcome would be guaranteed either way.
But.
Hela. Odin. The Space Stone already in active use. And if the Bifrost had just fired, Asgard knew the coordinates. Which meant soldiers were likely already being dispatched. Which meant in approximately—
Too soon.
He had already been reconsidering his position before the old king arrived. Now the calculation was simply complete. There was nothing left to gain here, and a considerable amount left to lose.
He began, quietly and without any change in his outward expression, preparing a teleportation anchor in the back of his mind.
Odin turned to face him fully.
"Boy." The word wasn't dismissive — it was the tone of someone establishing the terms of a conversation before it began. "I do not know who you are, or why you chose to attack a child of Odin. But understand this clearly." He raised one hand, and the air around it stirred with the quiet authority of a man who had once reshaped the Nine Realms with that same gesture. "You will not be leaving here unmarked."
Elric looked at him for a moment.
Then he raised his own hand.
"I wasn't planning to leave unmarked either."
He didn't hold back.
For the first time since the fight had begun, he reached past the careful calibrations and the measured outputs and the tactical restraint — and poured. Ninety-nine percent of his total reserves, committed in a single breath, leaving only the thin thread of energy required to execute one teleportation spell at the critical moment.
The space between them tore.
It began as a point — a singular darkness that had no business existing in open air, a place where light went and did not return. Then it grew. The black hole expanded outward with a speed that made the word 'rapidly' seem inadequate, swelling from the size of a fist to the size of a cart to the size of a building within seconds, and it did not stop. The gravitational pull hadn't fully asserted itself yet, but the potential of it pressed against every surface nearby like a physical weight, and the air itself seemed to lean inward.
Odin's eye widened.
It was, Elric noted with distant satisfaction, the first genuinely surprised expression he'd seen on the Allfather's face.
Good.
The surprise lasted approximately two seconds.
Hela moved with the efficiency of someone who had survived long enough to develop very fast reflexes. The Space Stone blazed to life in her hand, and she did what any sufficiently advanced wielder would do against a spatial anomaly of that magnitude — she isolated it. A bubble of controlled space snapped into place around the black hole's perimeter, severing its interaction with the surrounding environment, compressing its influence, beginning the slow process of suppression.
The black hole strained against the containment.
The containment held.
As expected, Elric thought, already moving his attention to the portal he was constructing behind him. She's good. Too good to let that land clean.
But the Space Stone was occupied now. Both Hela's concentration and the Stone's output were committed to the suppression, which meant the window he needed existed — narrow, but real.
He opened the portal.
Red light split the air behind him, a vertical tear in space that led away from this battlefield.
"You asshole — do you think you can just leave?"
Hela's voice arrived half a second before her power did.
She split her focus — a portion of the Space Stone's output peeling away from the black hole suppression and slamming into his portal like a tide of blue-white force. The red of the portal began bleeding blue at the edges, space stones spatial energy fighting his own working for dominance over the tear.
"Hela. Stop."
Odin's voice cut through the battlefield.
But it was already too late.
The balance broke.
The controlled equilibrium that Hela had been maintaining over the black hole, the careful geometric suppression that had been keeping its gravitational assertion at bay, shattered. The dense wall of spatial energy containing it fractured along a dozen stress lines simultaneously.
The moment — the single, suspended millisecond — stretched.
Then the black hole exhaled.
It expanded in an instant from a contained anomaly to something the size of a mountain, and the gravitational force that had been politely restrained until that moment arrived all at once. Space around the epicentre destabilized in rippling waves. The ground buckled. The barrier Hela had been maintaining around herself and her father — the Space Stone construct that had kept her protected throughout the entire engagement — dissolved under the null-space pressure, its underlying spatial logic unwound by the field distortion.
Elric's vision went dark at the edges.
He turned toward his portal. The red and blue energies were still fighting each other, the tear in space rippling and writhing, its destination now almost certainly scrambled beyond any reliable prediction. It would close within seconds if he didn't—
He gritted his teeth.
Destination unknown. Fine. Fine, I can work with unknown.
"Hela."
Odin's voice had changed. The authority was still there, but underneath it now was something else.
"Go with him."
"What—"
"I cannot summon the Bifrost while that thing is destabilizing local space." He was already moving, planting his feet against the gravitational pull beginning to assert itself across the landscape. "I will be fine. My essence is not so easily damaged." His eye moved to her, and for a moment something in it softened by a fraction. "You are another matter. If you stay here, you can die. You know this."
"I am not going anywhere with him—"
She didn't get to finish the sentence.
Odin moved with a speed that belied his apparent age, crossing the distance between them in three steps. His hand closed around her arm — not rough, but completely immovable — and in one continuous motion he turned and threw.
Not cruelly. But without hesitation.
Hela's trajectory carried her directly into Elric, who had approximately a quarter of a second to register what was happening before she collided with him.
The last thing he heard before the portal sealed shut was the sound or lack of it, of a black hole fully asserting its gravity against the planet.
........
The desert was indifferent to their arrival.
A blue portal split the air above the sand — the original red bled entirely out by Hela's interference, the destination thoroughly scrambled from whatever he'd originally intended. It lasted three seconds, then folded shut with a sound like tearing silk and was gone, leaving no trace except the soft impression of two bodies hitting the ground.
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