A mushroom cloud roared up from the heart of the ruins, a chaotic maelstrom of red, purple, and gold light furiously clashing high in the sky.
The Mirror Dimension had completely reached its limit.
Transparent shards peeled away from the sky, only to be shredded into nothingness by the raging energy before they even hit the ground. The entire battlefield was plagued by violent turbulence. The surviving Chitauri soldiers had barely managed to stand up before they were violently tossed back into the rubble.
Garp vaulted out of a crater, casually dusting off his shoulders.
"Sengoku, you old fart! Did you really have to make such a massive ruckus?"
Standing atop the giant Buddha, Sengoku's face was terrifyingly dark.
"You have the nerve to say that! If you idiots hadn't been so busy treating Thanos like a punching bag, would I have needed to come wipe your asses!?"
Whitebeard rested Murakumogiri against his shoulder, letting out a booming laugh.
"Gurarara! I think it's quite lively."
Akainu strode out from the molten earth, the blazing flames of Zanka no Tachi, East: Kyokujitsujin retracting back into the blade. He shot a cold glance toward the smoking crater in the distance.
"Where is Thanos?"
Kizaru drifted down slowly, pinching the mangled Infinity Gauntlet between his fingers.
"Oh my, my... that explosion was so fierce, I almost dropped this hot potato. As for that purple freak? He's a stubborn one. He probably isn't completely dead yet."
Right on cue, the sound of tumbling rocks echoed from the crater.
A half-charred Thanos propped himself up from the debris. His shoulder had been burned straight through by Akainu, his chest armor was shattered beyond recognition, and his face was entirely covered in blood.
He stared at the group with a deadly glare, the humiliation and fury boiling in his eyes almost manifesting into physical form.
"You... cannot stop the endgame."
Garp lazily picked his ear.
"Why do you keep repeating the same line over and over, you purple freak? You've taken this many beatings; can't you come up with something fresh?"
Whitebeard chimed in.
"My ears are getting calluses listening to it."
Thanos opened his mouth to speak, but a muffled boom suddenly rolled across the sky.
It wasn't thunder.
It wasn't an explosion.
The sound resonated from the deepest fractures of the Mirror Dimension, carrying a violent spatial tremor. Thor gripped Stormbreaker tighter, while the Tesseract in Loki's arms began to glow frantically.
Loki's expression drastically shifted, his voice pitching up in panic.
"That's not a portal."
Thor looked at him.
"Then what is it?"
Loki swallowed hard.
"The timeline has been torn open."
Just as the words left his mouth, a colossal black rift tore through the center of the heavens.
Blue and purple light flared violently along the jagged edges of the tear as countless metallic shadows slowly emerged from the void. A second later, the nose of a gargantuan warship, vast enough to blot out the sun, thrust out from the rift.
Its hull was bristling with a terrifying array of artillery cannons. The mountain-sized vessel cast a shadow of pure death over the ruins, instantly devouring most of the light on the battlefield.
Tony stared up at the steel behemoth, the blaring red alarms on his HUD nearly blinding him.
"J.A.R.V.I.S., tell me this is a hallucination."
"I'm sorry, sir. This is a one-hundred percent physical entity."
Tony cursed under his breath.
"Well, that makes it even worse."
Rocket Raccoon stood atop a broken wall, his head craned upwards, his jaw hanging open for a long time.
"Who the fck can tell me why, every time we clean up one shtty mess, a mess ten times bigger immediately drops on our heads!?"
Star-Lord grabbed his own head in despair.
"I strongly request to exit right now! The difficulty level of this f*cking dungeon is completely broken! This isn't meant for human players!"
Golden Lion Shiki hovered on a floating boulder, a fanatical, vicious glint erupting in his eyes.
"Jihahaha! A warship that big? Now that's thrilling. I like it!"
Kaido hoisted his kanabo over his shoulder. His scales were still bleeding, but his grin only grew more savage.
"Worororo! Finally, a tough bastard who can take a real beating!"
Saint Jaygarcia Saturn stared at the warship in the sky, his cheek twitching.
"Exactly how many enemies are left in this dungeon?"
Saint Shepherd Ju Peter muttered in response.
"I have a feeling this might not be the last wave."
Saturn snapped his head around and glared at him.
"Shut your mouth!"
The rift ripped open entirely.
Sanctuary II had fully descended.
Countless smaller fighters poured out from the ship's belly like a plague of locusts, densely blanketing the sky. Outriders, Chitauri soldiers, and mechanical leviathans rained down through teleportation beams, slamming into the earth and kicking up a blinding sandstorm.
And at the very front of the flagship, a towering figure slowly stepped forward.
Intact golden armor.
A pristine Infinity Gauntlet.
A massive double-bladed sword in his grasp.
No severed arm, no severe burns, no trace of a miserable defeat.
Another Thanos—a Thanos at his absolute, untouchable peak—stood like a god upon the observation deck of Sanctuary II, coldly staring down at the ruins below.
Down in the crater, the crippled Thanos looked up, his pupils shrinking violently.
"You..."
Prime Thanos looked down and saw him.
Two versions of Thanos, crossing the boundaries of time, locked eyes. A suffocating, deathly silence washed over the entire battlefield.
Kizaru casually adjusted his sunglasses.
"Oh my, my. How did another one pop out of the sky? Can this purple freak be mass-produced on an assembly line?"
Garp blinked in surprise before bursting into earth-shattering laughter.
"Excellent! The one in the sky looks like a much tougher nut to crack! He'll definitely take a better beating!"
Sengoku was so furious he almost laughed.
"Garp! You bastard, is there anything inside that skull of yours besides fighting!?"
Garp answered with righteous conviction.
"Yes, rice crackers."
Watching Sanctuary II, the grin on Whitebeard's face slowly widened.
"Gurarara! A Thanos crawling over from an alternate timeline? Now this is getting incredibly interesting!"
Akainu's expression was ice-cold.
"The one on the ground is half-dead, and now a fully healed one shows up in the sky. Borsalino, hold onto that gauntlet tightly. If you let them take it back, I'll incinerate you along with them."
Kizaru simply spread his hands.
"Oh my, Sakazuki, comments like that put a lot of workplace pressure on me."
Prime Thanos raised his hand, and every single cannon on Sanctuary II began to charge.
Blindingly brilliant patches of energy lit up the sky one after another, like a constellation of death.
He didn't pay attention to the others first. Instead, he looked down at the ruined version of himself in the crater.
"You failed."
Rage surged in the crippled Thanos's eyes.
"These monsters shouldn't exist in this timeline!"
Prime Thanos's tone was entirely devoid of emotion.
"Failure is failure."
As those words fell, the crippled Thanos's face twisted into an impossibly ugly scowl.
Kaido roared with laughter.
"Worororo! I'm dying laughing! You purple freak, you're getting called trash by your own damn self!"
Shiki joined in.
"Jihahaha! This is absolute perfection! I can laugh at this for an entire year!"
The severely injured Thanos glared at the lawless pirates with venomous hatred, his chest tightening so hard he nearly coughed up another mouthful of black blood.
Prime Thanos's gaze finally shifted toward Garp, Whitebeard, Sengoku, and the others.
"Visitors from another world."
He raised his double-bladed sword.
"You have violently disrupted the balance of the universe and altered the endgame that was destined to arrive."
Garp cracked his knuckles loudly, the violent blood-red steam once again rising from his body.
"I absolutely despise you bastards who always run your mouths about the 'endgame'! What the endgame is, only gets decided after my fists are done swinging!"
Whitebeard slammed Murakumogiri into the earth, violently fracturing the ground into a massive spiderweb of cracks, and gripped the shaft with both hands.
"You want to clear the field in front of me? Come down here and try it, if you have the guts!"
The scorching magma beneath Akainu's feet boiled violently, sending thick black smoke surging into the sky.
"I don't care if you're pirates, aliens, or some bullsh*t god. Anyone who blocks the path of Justice will be completely incinerated!"
Sengoku manipulated the Great Buddha, once again raising its thousand arms as boundless Sage Art: Wood Release Chakra surged frantically through the colossal limbs.
"All forces, hear my command! The primary target is that warship! We absolutely cannot let it fire, or everyone still breathing in these ruins is dead!"
Tony immediately chimed in.
"Thank God, finally someone with actual tactical sense is talking! I was just about to remind you guys that ship has more cannons on it than the number of ex-girlfriends I've had in my entire life!"
Thor hoisted Stormbreaker, lightning piercing the heavens.
"I'll go split that pile of scrap metal in half!"
Loki grabbed him.
"Stop! Every time you make a big claim like that, you end up causing an even bigger disaster."
Thor glanced at him.
"Do you have a better idea?"
Loki hugged the Tesseract tightly.
"Of course I do. Turn around and run."
Thor ignored him completely, transforming into a bolt of lightning as he shot toward the sky.
In that same instant, the devastating first volley from Sanctuary II crashed down.
Hundreds of blinding energy beams rained from the sky in a torrential downpour, indiscriminately covering the entire battlefield. Ruins, streets, collapsed skyscrapers, and fighter jet wreckage—everything was locked in the crosshairs of death's artillery.
Sengoku roared.
"Defend!"
The sky-obscuring arms of the Great Buddha spread wide, its thousands of giant palms forming layer upon layer of impenetrable barriers, shielding everyone from above.
Kizaru lazily raised a hand. The brilliant golden Light Dust Release instantly formed a shield of absolute defense, tightly enveloping the Avengers and the remaining civilians who hadn't yet evacuated.
Whitebeard let out a wild war cry and threw a massive punch. A berserk shockwave swept through the air, directly shattering a massive cluster of descending energy blasts.
Garp kicked off the ground and rocketed into the sky. A flawless, airtight web of bloody afterimages formed as he punched the artillery blasts straight out of mid-air.
Akainu drew his blade and slashed horizontally.
"Zanka no Tachi, East: Kyokujitsujin!"
An incandescent line of ultimate heat instantly tore through the rain of artillery, carving a completely unobstructed, empty path straight through the sky.
Riding that path like an angry thunder god, Thor surged toward Sanctuary II. He hoisted Stormbreaker high, bringing it down with the force of a million lightning bolts onto the ship's heavy frontal armor.
Boom!
A blue energy shield flared violently across the outer layer of the warship, dead-stopping the apocalyptic strike.
Thor was sent flying backward by the recoil as Rocket cursed wildly from below.
"You muscle-brained idiot! Hit the weak spots!"
Thor stabilized himself in mid-air.
"Dammit! This turtle shell has a shield!"
Rocket was even more furious.
"No sh*t! It's a massive star destroyer—if it didn't have a shield, that'd be the real miracle!"
Prime Thanos stood as steady as a mountain on the deck, coldly raising his arm before bringing it down in a swift, decisive chop.
"Deploy all forces. Crush them."
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