Each footfall echoes. Soft. Bare feet on stone. But the sound carries - rippling outward, overlapping, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere.
The pressure increases.
Eirik drops first. Knees buckling, hands slamming into the ground. The lantern falls from his grip, rolls, goes dark.
Hróðmar follows. The massive warrior pressed flat, gasping, axe clattering beside him.
Sif tries to rise. Can't. An invisible mountain sits on her shoulders. She stares up in horror as Wukong walks past, each step making the weight heavier.
The wind dies. The leaves fall motionless. Even Thor's storm stutters - lightning flickering, uncertain.
The Monkey King walks.
Not fast. Not slow. Just... inevitable. Each step folding the distance between them like silk collapsing. The air around him shimmers with heat that isn't heat, darkness that isn't shadow. His eyes glow golden-red now. His smile is gone.
This is not the playful creature who dodged and tapped and laughed.
This is the Great Sage who defied Heaven. Who fought the Celestial Army. Who learned techniques from realms beyond counting and made them his own.
Thor strains against the pressure. His muscles scream. Mjolnir feels suddenly heavy - impossibly heavy. The lightning around him sputters. Flickers. The storm overhead groans, trying to maintain itself against this wrong pressure that pushes down, down, down.
His knees bend. Just slightly. Just enough.
No!
He plants his feet. Roars. Lightning surges -
The pressure doubles.
His knees buckle.
He drops to one knee. Mjolnir's point braced against the ground. Every muscle locked, trembling, holding against weight that shouldn't exist.
Wukong reaches him.
Stands before him. Above him. Looking down with eyes that have seen empires rise and fall, that have witnessed the birth and death of gods, that carry the weight of immortality earned through defiance.
"You called a storm," Wukong says quietly. His voice carries despite the pressure, despite the dying thunder. "But you don't understand storms. Not really."
He raises one foot.
Steps onto Thor's back.
Not hard. Not crushing. Just... there. Standing on the God of Thunder like he's a stepping stone. The ultimate humiliation. The absolute dismissal.
Thor's arms shake. His teeth grind. Lightning flickers weakly around him -defiant but fading. The storm overhead rumbles, confused, leaderless.
Wukong stands there for three heartbeats. Balanced. Casual. Making his point without words.
Then he steps off. Lands lightly beside Thor. The pressure vanishes instantly.
Thor gasps - sudden relief like surfacing from deep water. Air rushes into his lungs. Mjolnir's weight returns to normal. Around the courtyard, his companions suck in desperate breaths, struggling to rise.
The storm overhead dissipates. Clouds unraveling. Stars emerging once more.
Wukong retrieves his staff. Spins it. Rests it across his shoulders.
"Your father," he says conversationally, like they're discussing the weather, "sends you to conquer dimensions. To bring order." He looks at Thor - still on one knee, still struggling to process what just happened. "But order built on conquest isn't order. It's just... bigger chaos."
He starts walking away. Toward the mountain path. Toward the darkness.
"Go home, Thor of Asgard. Tell your all-seeing father that this realm isn't his to claim. Tell him the Monkey King said so."
He pauses. Looks back over his shoulder.
"And tell him... if he wants it anyway?" The smile returns. Sharp. Dangerous. "He can come himself. I'd love to meet this Allfather."
He laughs - that same delighted sound from before - and walks into the shadows. His footsteps echo for a moment.
Then silence.
Just wind. And stars. And the slow creak of settling rubble.
Thor kneels in the broken courtyard, Mjolnir heavy in his hands, the taste of defeat bitter on his tongue.
Around him, his companions struggle to their feet. No one speaks.
No one knows what to say.
Asgard. The Hall of Glories.
High above the Nine Realms, where golden spires pierce an eternal sky, Odin stands before his throne.
The chamber is vast. Empty. Silent save for the whisper of wind through impossibly tall windows. Starlight streams through - cold, distant, indifferent.
The Allfather does not sit. He stands at the throne's base, one hand resting on Gungnir's shaft. His single eye stares into nothing. Into everything.
The eye glows faintly - pale blue, seeing.
Before him, the air ripples. Not with magic but with vision. The All-Seeing Eye pierces dimensions, crosses the void between realities, watches a courtyard half a universe away.
He sees Thor. On one knee. Mjolnir braced against shattered stone.
He sees Sif pulling herself from rubble. Hróðmar gasping. Eirik trembling.
He sees the Monkey King walking away into shadow, staff across his shoulders, tail swaying. Unconcerned. Unbowed.
Victorious.
Two ravens descend from the rafters. Huginn and Muninn - Thought and Memory - settle on Odin's shoulders. Black wings fold. Obsidian eyes watch their master's face.
The Allfather's expression is stone. Carved granite that reveals nothing. He has worn this face for millennia - through wars won and lost, through betrayals and triumphs, through the rise and fall of countless civilizations.
But his eye narrows. Just slightly. Just enough.
The silence stretches. Deepens. The kind of silence that precedes storms, that lives in the moment before lightning strikes, that exists in the space between heartbeats when fate pivots on a knife's edge.
When he speaks, his voice is barely a whisper. Yet it fills the hall. Echoes off golden walls. Sinks into the very foundations of Asgard itself.
"So..."
The word hangs in the air. Heavy. Pregnant with meaning.
"There are still kings who bow to none."
Not anger. Not surprise. Something else. Something older. Recognition, perhaps. Or acknowledgment. The way one ancient power recognizes another across the void and understands - instantly, completely - that the game has changed.
Huginn caws softly. A question without words.
Odin says nothing more. He simply stares at that distant realm, at the monkey warrior disappearing into mountain shadows, at his son kneeling in defeat.
The vision ripples. Fades. The air returns to normal.
The Allfather stands alone in his empty hall, lit only by starlight and the faint glow of his eye.
Outside, distant. Thunder rolls across Asgard's golden plains.
Natural thunder. Or perhaps not.
Perhaps a storm is coming that even the Allfather cannot fully see.