Thor swung Mjölnir.
The hammer didn't just move through space. It unmade it. Reality screamed, tearing like fabric as the weapon arced toward Zeus. The force behind the swing carried enough power to obliterate universes, to shatter dimensional barriers, to reduce entire timelines to nothing.
Zeus didn't dodge.
He raised one hand, and his lightning met Thor's universe-ending strike. The collision created a sphere of annihilation, a point of impossible energy where matter, antimatter, and everything between ceased to have meaning.
The blast radius expanded.
Tony watched from the present as the golden memory showed the devastation. Lesser gods threw up shields that shattered instantly like glass under a hammer. Pillars that had stood for eons cracked, turned to dust, then ceased to have ever existed at all. The stone floor buckled, reality itself rewriting around the epicenter of divine collision.
Beside him, Yuki gasped. Grimmey leaned forward, his expression intense.
In the memory, Elerie raised both hands. Temporal barriers erupted around the explosion, containing it. But even her power strained, time itself threatening to collapse under the weight of the forces being unleashed.
"Zeus." Her voice cut through chaos. "You'll breach the 9th Dimension. The titans will notice."
"Then perhaps Thor should reconsider his target," Zeus replied, calm despite the maelstrom of energy swirling around him.
He pushed.
The sphere compressed, then exploded outward in a cascade of raw divine power. Thor flew backward, crashing through three pillars. Each impact would have destroyed planets. The far wall cratered, dimensional rifts opening like wounds in reality where his body struck.
The fifty Norse warriors charged.
"For Asgard!" Their battle cry shook the hall.
Greek gods met them mid-charge.
Ares led, his war cry drowning even thunder. His blade cleaved through the first warrior's shield, through his armor, through the space he occupied. The Norse god's essence scattered like dandelion seeds in a hurricane.
"More!" Ares roared, already turning to the next opponent, his grin feral and satisfied.
A berserker swung an overhead strike that carried the weight of collapsing stars. Ares caught the blade between his palms. The shockwave flattened everything within a hundred meters, sending lesser gods tumbling like leaves in a storm.
"Better," Ares grinned, then headbutted the berserker hard enough to create a localized temporal distortion. Time stuttered around the impact point, the warrior experiencing the blow across multiple timelines simultaneously.
Apollo materialized in golden light, three arrows already drawn on his divine bow. "My apologies."
The arrows flew faster than causality. They hit before they were fired, probability itself bending around their trajectory. Two warriors dodged across timelines, their forms splitting into quantum possibilities. The third took an arrow through the shoulder, divine light erupting from the wound and spreading across six alternate realities simultaneously.
The warrior screamed in multiple dimensions at once.
Hephaestus stomped, and the ground didn't just heat—it became heat. The fundamental state of matter changed, stone transforming into pure thermal energy. Norse warriors scattered, their enhanced durability meaningless against transmutation at the atomic level.
In the present, Marcus's voice narrated over the golden projection. "It wasn't a battle. It was gods unleashing everything they'd held back for centuries. No restraint. No mercy. Just raw divine violence."
The memory showed Loki facing Hades, grinning despite the carnage around them. "Shall we dance, lord of the dead?"
"If you insist," Hades replied, his voice carrying the finality of entropy itself.
Hades gestured, and black flames erupted in a circle around them. Not fire. Entropy made visible. The end of things given form. Everything the flames touched aged trillions of years in seconds, experiencing heat death instantly. A Norse warrior caught at the edge simply stopped existing, not killed but aged beyond the point where his essence could maintain coherence.
Loki split.
Not illusions. Actual splits. He divided his probability across sixteen quantum states, existing in multiple positions simultaneously. Each version moved differently, attacked differently, thought differently. Some wielded spears. Others daggers. Some cast spells while others engaged in physical combat.
"Trickery," Hades observed, unimpressed.
He raised both hands, and the shadows rose. Not metaphorical darkness. Actual absence. Void given purpose. The shadows consumed fourteen Lokis instantly, erasing them from probability as if they'd never existed.
The remaining two merged, golden spear appearing mid-motion in hands that shouldn't have been empty a moment before. Loki drove it toward Hades's heart with the force of a dying star going supernova.
The spear passed through empty air. Hades was already elsewhere, having moved through death itself to a different position, literally dying and resurrecting in a new location faster than perception could track.
"You'll need to be faster," Hades said from behind him, black flames already gathering.
Loki spun, grinning. "Working on it."
His form blurred, speed increasing exponentially with each movement. He attacked from seven angles simultaneously, each strike carrying enough force to shatter continents, to crack tectonic plates, to unmake geological formations that had stood for billions of years.
Hades blocked each one, black flames forming shields that consumed kinetic energy and converted it to entropy, to the heat death of localized reality.
They danced, god of death and god of chaos, neither gaining ground. An eternal stalemate between ending and change.
Across the hall, Hela faced Athena.
"Wisdom versus death," Hela said, shadows coalescing into twin blades that dripped darkness. "Let's see which concept is more fundamental."
"Wisdom," Athena replied, spear and shield manifesting in her hands. "Death is inevitable. Wisdom determines everything before and between."
Hela lunged.
Her blades didn't cut. They severed. They separated things from the concept of wholeness, making them cease to be unified. Space itself parted around her strikes, reality splitting where the edges passed.
Athena's shield met the first blade. The impact created a paradox—death meeting wisdom, ending meeting understanding. Reality couldn't reconcile the contradiction and simply skipped over the moment, creating a temporal gap in causality.
Athena's spear darted forward. Not at Hela's body. At the concept of her attack. The strike hit the idea of aggression itself, disrupting Hela's intent before it could manifest into action.
Hela stumbled, her momentum stolen, her attack unraveling before it could complete.
"Conceptual warfare," Hela said, impressed despite herself. "You're better than expected."
"I've been practicing longer than you've existed," Athena replied, her stance perfect, economical, the product of millions of years of martial refinement.
They reset, circling each other like predators, looking for openings that might not exist.
Thor had recovered from Zeus's initial strike. He pulled himself from the crater in the wall, shaking off dust that had once been divine stone. His armor was scorched, cracked in places, but his grip on Mjölnir remained firm.
Zeus stood waiting, lightning playing across his armor like restless serpents. "One hit and the mighty Thor needs recovery time?"
Thor's smile was feral, wild, free. "Just catching my breath."
He raised Mjölnir toward the ceiling's opening, toward the dimensional void beyond. Power gathered. Not just his power. The storm itself responded, primal forces from higher dimensions answering his call. Lightning that existed before light was invented. Thunder that predated sound. Wind that blew through timelines instead of across landscapes.
The hammer vibrated. "Weng. Weng. Weng."
Each pulse sent shockwaves through multiple dimensions. In the 8th, demigods felt their realms shake. In the 7th, entire worlds experienced freak storms. In the 6th, 5th, and 4th, reality stuttered, momentarily forgetting how to maintain coherent physics.
Zeus's eyes widened fractionally. "Impressive."
He raised both hands, and his lightning answered. But this wasn't electricity. This was authority made manifest. The fundamental power that had overthrown titans, that bent existence to his will, that could unmake creation with a thought. Raw dominion over reality itself.
The forces met mid-air.
The explosion was catastrophic.
In the present, Tony felt Yuki grab his arm, her grip tight despite knowing this was just memory. Grimmey's hands were clenched into fists.
The golden memory showed Elerie screaming, her temporal barriers straining under impossible pressure. The collision threatened to breach dimensional boundaries. In the lower dimensions, the 3rd through 7th, Sequential Time shattered. Mortals experienced multiple timelines simultaneously, felt themselves winning, losing, living, dying, all at once. Past and future collapsed and reasserted randomly across six dimensions.
In the Hall itself, the gods felt the distortion differently, not as temporal chaos, but as reality trying to decide which state should exist, which outcome should manifest in Eternal Present.
Elerie reasserted control through sheer force of will, stitching Sequential Time back together in the lower dimensions while stabilizing the Eternal Present in the Hall. Sweat, impossible for a god, appeared on her forehead.
"STOP." Her voice carried weight that made even Zeus pause. "You'll breach the 9th Dimension. The titans will descend. This isn't a warning. It's inevitability stated as fact."
Zeus and Thor both reduced their output. Marginally. Just enough to keep reality from completely unraveling.
But the fighting continued at a slightly lower intensity. Gods still died, still scattered their essence across dimensions, but reality remained... mostly stable.
The golden Hermes watched from the central platform, torn. His father was winning. The Greek gods outnumbered the Norse. But Meltiy sat trapped, guarded, caught in the crossfire of divine politics and violence.
Then he saw his chance.
The three gods who'd been watching her—Ares, Apollo, Hephaestus—were engaged in combat across the hall.
Hermes moved.
Not quickly. Impossibly. He didn't cross the distance. He deleted it. One moment he stood on the platform. The next, he existed beside Meltiy's throne, the intervening space simply ceasing to be relevant.
A Norse warrior, bloodied and disoriented, stumbled toward her with raised axe, not seeing who she was, just seeing a target.
Hermes's hand caught the warrior's wrist before the motion completed. "Sleep."
Divine command flowed through the touch. The warrior's consciousness simply... stopped. He collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.
Meltiy stared up at him. "Hermes..."
"We're leaving. Now." His voice was urgent, desperate.
"Zeus will..."
"I don't care." He offered his hand, his expression carrying everything he couldn't say in words. "Do you trust me?"
She grabbed the silver crow pendant and ripped it free, breaking the chain. "Yes."
Hermes pulled her close, activating his full speed. The world didn't blur. It ceased. Reality became a series of still images as Hermes moved between moments, faster than causality, faster than light, faster than the concept of velocity itself.
He ran toward the dimensional fissure Thor had created earlier, moving so fast that even supreme gods couldn't perceive him. In their perspective, Hermes and Meltiy simply vanished, present one instant and gone the next.
They were three steps from escape when Zeus's voice cut through everything.
"HERMES."
Not a shout. A command backed by absolute authority, by the fundamental power that made Zeus king of gods.
Hermes's legs locked mid-stride. He crashed to his knees, momentum carrying him forward but his body refusing to obey. Meltiy tumbled from his grip, rolling across the stone floor.
Zeus appeared before them, manifesting as if he'd always been there, as if space had simply rearranged itself to place him in their path.
"Treachery," Zeus said softly, his voice more disappointed than angry. "From my own son."
Hermes tried to stand. Couldn't. Divine compulsion held him like gravity holds planets, like physics holds reality together.
"Father... she's innocent."
"Irrelevant." Zeus looked at Meltiy with cold calculation. "She's leverage. You understand politics, Hermes. You've played messenger long enough. You know how this works."
"This isn't politics. This is cruelty."
"They're the same thing." Lightning gathered in Zeus's palm, crackling with barely restrained violence. "I'm disappointed. I thought you understood your purpose. Your duty."
"The way ambition destroyed yours?" Hermes forced the words out despite the compulsion crushing down on him.
Zeus's expression hardened, became stone. "Careful."
"Why? What will you do? Kill me?" Hermes smiled bitterly. "You need me. Your messenger. The only one you trust across dimensions. You need me almost as much as I needed you to be better than this."
Zeus's hand wavered. Lightning flickered, uncertain.
Then Thor's hammer caught him in the ribs.
The blow materialized from a dimensional pocket, Mjölnir appearing at relativistic speed with the full force of Thor's divine strength behind it. The impact sent Zeus flying across the hall, his grip on Hermes breaking, his authority momentarily disrupted.
Thor landed beside them, breathing hard, his armor cracked and smoking. "Run."
"But..."
"RUN."
Hermes grabbed Meltiy and dove through the fissure. Reality twisted, stretched, compressed. They tumbled through the space between spaces, the nowhere connecting everywhere, falling through dimensions like falling through infinite nothing.
They emerged in the 9th Dimension.
Hermes collapsed, essence depleted from the exertion. Beside him, Meltiy lay still.
Too still.
In the present, Marcus's voice cracked. "And that's where everything ended."
The golden light began to fade.