Chapter Text
No sooner has Eir set foot out through the infirmary door than she is immediately accosted by Val and Thor at the same time, hardly giving her a moment’s peace after what must have been a very trying time to begin with. Val would almost feel bad about it, but she finds she doesn’t quite have the energy for sympathy—especially because the look on Eir’s face nearly sends Val’s heart plummeting down into her stomach.
Eir holds up a hand to stay the onslaught of questions, and she takes a breath. Then, quietly, she says, “He’s alive.”
Thor apparently sees through that reassurance exactly as well as Val does, because he asks, “Is he going to stay that way?”
“For as long as we keep him in stasis… yes.”
Val asks, “And when you take him out of stasis?”
Eir hesitates, glancing around at all four of them—at Thor and Val in front of her, at Loki sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, at Jane nervously pacing the length of the hallway and fidgeting with that hammer—before she explains, “That wound was killing him. Is killing him. Loki slowed the process, and I… I paused it. If I take him out of stasis now, without some other way to heal that wound…”
“How long would he have?” Thor asks, his voice low.
Eir frowns, sympathy written clear on her face. Sympathy, and grief. “I’m honestly not sure. It could be seconds.”
Fuck.
Fuck.
“What the hell happened?” Val says. “What kind of weapon takes down an Asgardian that quickly—?”
“The necrosword.”
She stops short, Thor’s answer thunking against her heart with a quiver of what she absolutely refuses to call fear. Eir looks at him with wide eyes. Jane stops her pacing and looks at him, too. Only Loki doesn’t react beyond going totally still, listening, looking down at his hands.
“The necrosword,” Eir repeats. “You’re certain.”
“That thing’s supposed to be a story,” Val says.
“Most stories turn out to be true,” Thor says. “I saw it myself. Heimdall saw it first, of course. He saw this… this person, whoever he is, obtaining the sword and then killing a god with it. Then he set his sights on Asgard.”
“Sorry,” Jane speaks up. “Necrosword?”
“It’s an ancient weapon that’s been passed from user to user for millenia,” Val answers. “It has the power to kill pretty much anything, supposedly—”
“—but it slowly corrupts and kills whoever wields it,” Thor finishes for her, and Val nods at him as if to say, yeah, exactly, what he said.
Jane asks, “Do we know anyone that’s survived getting cut by it?”
“I didn’t even think it was real until now,” Val admits. “So, no.”
“Okay,” Jane says, nodding, staring into space as she thinks. Then she turns to Eir. “Okay. So, what if we got you that sword?”
“I—” Eir blinks. “What? I’m sorry?”
“What if we got you the sword?” Jane repeats. “You said you can’t take him out of stasis unless you have some other way to heal the wound, right? And he got that wound from this creepy, magic… necrosword… thing. So if we got you the sword, could you… I don’t know, study it? Figure out how it works, and then use that to save him? I mean, you can’t figure out how to cure a disease without studying what causes it, right? It’s basic science.”
“This… isn’t exactly—”
“It’s not science, I know, I know, it’s magic,” Jane says, “but magic is just science we don’t understand yet. Or, you know, it’s science that I don’t understand yet, but you do.”
Val asks, “Is it possible that it’ll help?”
Eir hesitates, but Val can already tell she’s leaning in the direction of a yes, even before she cautiously admits, “It’s possible.”
“Great,” Val says, hands on her hips. “Then that’s what we’ll do. We need to find this… cursed shadow-zombie murderer, kill him, take the sword, and bring it back here to save Heimdall. Where do we start? Do we know where he’s headed?”
Finally, Loki speaks up. “If he’s out to kill gods, then that narrows it down quite a bit.”
“He wanted Heimdall, specifically,” Thor says. “He said he didn’t want to kill him—”
“Oh, well,” Val scoffs, “he’s done a great job of that—”
“— but that means he wanted him for a reason, doesn’t it?” Thor goes on. “Given that it’s Heimdall, he was probably planning on using his sight, or his ability to conjure the Bifrost. Or both.”
Val nods. “And now he doesn’t have Heimdall.”
“Which means he can only go to places that are known, places he can reach by conventional means,” Thor says. “So if he’s looking for gods, he’ll want to go somewhere he knows he’ll find gods, even without using Heimdall’s sight or the Bifrost.”
“Somewhere he knows he’ll find gods,” Val repeats. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
“I’m thinking it.”
“Oh, no,” Loki groans. “No. Tell me you’re both not—”
“Omnipotence City,” Thor says at the same time that Val does, and Loki sinks lower to the ground with a hand thrown over his eyes.
“Omnipotence City?” Jane asks.
“Omnipotence City,” Thor says again, and he’s got that look in his eye now, the one Val recognizes: He’s latched onto this plan with the sort of determined fervor that he only gets when he’s well and truly excited. The first time she saw that look, it was right before they drove the Grandmaster’s ship through the Devil’s Anus in a straight shot toward what honestly should have been all of their deaths. “It’s a win-win. That place is the gathering spot for all the most powerful gods in the Universe. This God-killer is just as likely to go there as he is anywhere else, and even if he’s not—”
“— we can get the word out,” Val says.
“And we can recruit reinforcements,” Thor adds. “Oh, we could pull together the greatest team ever.”
Val asks, “You think we’ll need that much help?”
“I think it couldn’t hurt, could it? We could recruit Ra, Hercules, Tūmatauenga… Quetzalcoatl, maybe? And— and—” he pauses here, smiling for the first time since Heimdall was hit— “Zeus, the oldest and wisest of them all.”
“Zeus,” Jane repeats, dripping skepticism. “As in… Zeus Zeus.”
“I don’t think he has a second name.”
“Yes, great,” Loki sighs. “Wonderful. Let’s bring the Zeus fanboy to Omnipotence City.”
“I am not a fanboy.”
“Right, and you weren’t a Valkyrie fanboy, either—”
“Look, do you have any better ideas?” Val asks, because no, they’re not going down that particular path, thank you very much. She raises an eyebrow down at Loki, and the look he returns with is a pretty definitive and defeated, no, I don’t have any better ideas. “Great. Omnipotence City. Killer shadow-zombie. Necrosword. Save Heimdall. What the hell are we even doing still standing here?”
Jane was expecting a spaceship. You know, given the whole hunting down a God-killer thing, and the fact that they’re supposedly heading to a place where Gods all come to gather, and the fact that the only Gods that Jane’s ever met all lived on another planet…
Yeah. Logically: Spaceship, right?
She steps up to the edge of the ramp, eyeing what looks like a huge, ancient, wooden Viking skiff, complete with a row of multicolored Viking shields displayed all along its side and a pair of carved dragon heads open-mouthed and silently roaring up at the front. Looks like an ancient Viking skiff, because there are a few key differences. One is the tiki hut covering nearly the entire back half of the boat—pretty sure the Vikings didn’t have tiki huts—and another is the bright purple neon sign that she can just barely see up above the tiki hut door. Then there’s the string lights running from the roof of that hut all the way across to the dragons’ heads, twinkling in the dim early morning haze.
The biggest difference, though, is that there’s no water. The whole thing’s floating a few inches above the ground, suspended by absolutely nothing. Jane even bends over to look, just to make sure she’s not imagining that, and she can see clear ahead to the other side of the boat, where a bunch of Asgardian feet are bustling back and forth.
“This boat is gonna get us to Omnipotent City?” Jane asks, looking up as Val sidles past her.
Val turns, balancing two crates of clinking bottles on her shoulder, one on top of the other. Then she follows Jane’s gaze to the boat.
“This? Oh, no, this boat’s not gonna get us to Omnipotent City. Warsong’s gonna get us to Omnipotent City,” she says, “but we can’t all fit on her back, so…”
She waves at the boat with her free hand, and it’s then that Jane notices the ropes tied up to the front of it, looped around the dragons’ necks and dangling way up front where she can’t quite see the rest of them.
Reins. Those are reins.
Jane blinks.
“Wait, she’s gonna pull this entire thing? Your—” Jane almost says horse, and then corrects— “Pegasus? All on her own?”
“Oh, sure,” Val shrugs her free shoulder, grinning. “She’s pulled much worse than one little rowboat through a couple rifts in space, believe me.”
And with that, Val spins on her heel and walks right up the ramp, bottles clinking away.
“Huh,” Jane says, still tracing her eyes along the boat’s edges, the string lights up above, the curve underneath its hull.
How’s the air gonna stay in it once they’re in space? Probably magic, technically, but she figures it’ll be something to do with electricity and magnetism, maybe, with the boat sort of generating its own magnetic field that holds everything in place, air molecules included. Could be something to do with gravitational force, too. If she had time, she might be able to work out the math into something that almost makes sense.
She’s still thinking about that when she starts making her way to the ramp—
And it’s because she’s so distracted with thoughts of gravity and magnetism of all things, that she nearly runs face-first into Thor.
“Oh!” she steps back, fiddling with the hammer. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Thor says back, and he points with a thumb at the boat. “Getting on the boat?”
“Yup.”
“Cool. Me, too.”
“Cool,” Jane says, and there’s a voice in her head right now that’s just… fully screaming, yelling at her for being so unbearably awkward, God-like powers or no God-like powers. She makes it about another three seconds standing face-to-face with her ex, both of them just standing there like a couple of idiots, before she blurts out, “This is weird, right?”
Immediately, he sags in relief, a puppet with the strings cut. “So weird.”
“Right?” she says. “Oh, my God.”
“Even without the hammer.”
She sputters a laugh. It is a relief, oddly enough, knowing that they’re sort of on equal footing here. She nods toward the boat, and they start heading up the ramp side-by-side.
“How are you, anyway?” she asks. “And not like, I’m asking because that’s something you’re supposed to ask when you haven’t seen someone in a long time. But like, actually, how are you? The whole rebuilding Asgard thing, that’s been going okay?”
“It’s been going great,” he shrugs, and by the easy smile on his face, it’s probably true. “Well. It’s a lot more meetings than I thought it would be. A lot of forms, too.”
“Oh, gosh,” she cringes. “Yeah, let me apologize on behalf of… I guess all of humanity for how much bureaucracy goes into everything we do. Science is exactly the same. You’d think it wouldn’t be, but it totally is.”
They get up to the top of the ramp, and this time Jane gets to appreciate the boat from the vantage point of its deck: It’s enormous, but she doesn’t try to guess how big it is in feet. She’s always been terrible at that. There are benches lined along the boat’s sides, plenty for a few dozen people to comfortably sit, if they wanted to. The tiki hut doesn’t have a door door so much as it has an open doorway, and that neon sign she’d caught a glimpse of from down on the ground reads Cocktails and Dreams in swirling purple font. Inside, she can see Val setting the crates of drinks down on a bartop, unloading the bottles onto shelves.
“What about you?”
Jane blinks, turning toward Thor, who’s leaning back against the outer railing with his arms crossed. It takes her a few seconds to realize what he means, and she gulps.
“I’m… great,” she finds herself saying, and there’s a beat of silence before she holds up Mjolnir as if to say, check it out, look how great I’m doing, I have a hammer and everything! She gives it a quick little up-and-down toss and says, “I have superpowers now, apparently.”
“What, you mean you couldn’t do that before?”
“No, no, believe it or not, I couldn’t,” she says. Then she looks down at the hammer, balancing it with one palm against the corner of its bulky metal end and the other palm gently pressed against the tip of its handle. It feels way more weightless than a thing this powerful ever should. “I don’t… I don’t know how I ended up here, actually. It’s just, I swear it was like Mjolnir was… calling to me? I know that’s gotta sound crazy, but I swear that really is what it felt like.”
“It doesn’t sound crazy.”
She looks up, and she can see in his face that he isn’t patronizing her. He knows exactly what she’s saying about Mjolnir—but come on, of course he does. Look who she’s talking to.
Jane lifts it up, gesturing that she’s about to pass it to him. When she does, it leaves her hand as easily as a baseball and thunks against his palm, and he grips it for a few seconds, just pensively looking down at it in his hand. Then he gives it a quick twirl—a real twirl, where the handle passes around the back of his knuckles and somehow the whole thing stays moving and upright, exactly where he wants it until it’s right back where it started—and without any fanfare whatsoever, he smiles and tosses it back to her.
“Mjolnir isn’t just a hammer, you know,” Thor says, and she nods, because she does know that much, at least. He hesitates there for some reason, though, with some other statement obviously just about halfway out of his mouth, and then he shakes his head. He leans back and crosses his arms again. “I think it probably was calling to you. Sensed it was needed, maybe.”
“Needed?” she asks, punctuating it with a nervous laugh. “I didn’t— I mean… Come on, if that’s the case, if Mjolnir can really sense when it’s needed, shouldn’t it have come back before now? I mean, didn’t you ever need it at any time in the last, what, five years?”
“What, me? Pfft, no,” Thor scoffs, overdramatic with it as always. “What am I? Thor, God of Hammers?”
“Okay,” she laughs again. “Fair.”
And again, here, he hesitates, like there’s something else he wants to say but he’s not sure how to say it. It’s an odd change of pace from the Thor she remembers. That Thor—the one who still had both his eyes, the one whose home still existed several thousand light years away, the one who wasn’t a King yet—he would always say exactly what he was thinking, pretty much every time, the moment the thought occurred to him.
Not this Thor, though.
Finally, he says, “I had Mjolnir when I needed Mjolnir. And I did, I really did need it, at the time. And now Mjolnir’s back, but it’s… not mine, really, not anymore. Nothing wrong with that.” He shrugs, arms still crossed, and gives her a half-smile. “Doesn’t mean I’m not very happy to see it again anyway, of course, because I am.”
Jane tries, and probably fails, to hold back a smile at that.
Alright, well, at least one thing hasn’t changed: He still doesn’t know how to do subtle.
“Right,” Jane says, nodding along. “Well, I’m sure Mjolnir—” she gives the name just the slightest bit of emphasis, lifting it up in demonstration as she does— “is just as happy to see you again, too.”
“I hope so.”
“Yes, yes—” comes a sudden third voice, and Jane jumps, spinning around to find Loki stalking up the ramp and past them with hardly a glance in their direction, another crate of bottles clinking in his arms, and an additional bottle hanging by its neck from one hand— “just refrain from pinning any doors shut with it, and we won’t have any problems, will we?”
Thor squints at him. “You know Val already brought drinks.”
“Which means she brought enough for herself, doesn’t it?” Loki says, and as he heads for the tiki hut, giving them his back, he switches the crate over to one arm so that he can wave the extra bottle over his head with his free hand. “And if I’m being forced to go back to Omnipotence City, I certainly will not be doing so sober.”
He ducks through the doorway into the tiki hut, and Jane waits a second before she asks, “Did he just say back to Omnipotence City?”
“He did, yeah.”
“You, uh… You happen to know anything about that?”
“Nope,” Thor says, popping the p when he says it.
“You gonna ask him?”
Thor shakes his head. “I’ve learned it’s often best not to.”
“Great,” Jane says, wincing. “Awesome.”
The journey to Omnipotence CIty is uneventful, and making their way into the famed Temple of the Gods, even more so. Not a soul accosts them or even really notices them, especially after the Valkyrie scrounges up a veritable mountain of fabric from somewhere—Loki has no idea where—to use as “disguises” while they lie low and slink their way into the arena. And in all that free time, neither Thor nor Jane nor the Valkyrie ever ask Loki what, specifically, he’d done that made him so reluctant to set foot in Omnipotence City again after centuries spent steadfastly avoiding the place.
Thank— well, no. Even saying thank the Norns feels in poor taste, doesn’t it?
Feels a bit too close to saying thank the Gods for his liking.
And what, after all, have the Norns ever done for any of them, anyway? What sets the Norns above any of the gaudy, gilded idiots strutting all around them at this very moment, swishing their colorful robes around and acting like their very presence is a blessing to all who behold them?
Nothing. Not a thing. The Norns didn’t step in when the Dark Elves descended upon Asgard, the Norns didn’t lift a finger when the entire Realm was reduced to nothing but cinders beneath Surtr’s sword, and the Norns certainly didn’t intervene when Asgard’s people were left adrift in the cosmos in the months that followed. And neither did a single soul in any of the other infinite pantheons, for that matter.
Anyway. He’s digressing.
The point is, he’s quite glad they don’t ask, because it’s an enormous relief to not have to get into it.
He’s jarred out of his thoughts when a lightning bolt blasts through the arena—not Thor’s, it’s a bit too showy even for that—and slams straight down into the center of the stage floor. Jane jumps, startled by the sudden noise. The Valkyrie merely frowns, looking around for the lightning bolt’s source.
And Thor, naturally, lights up like a child.
“Oh, here he comes!” he says, and the Valkyrie offers him a that’s nice sort of smile that’s clearly only for his benefit.
And no sooner has he said that than the crowd catches on: The chant Zeus, Zeus, Zeus begins thrumming through every corner of the damned place, boots thundering against the stands, a few thousand hands clapping in time with the chant.
“The man, the myth, the legend,” Val murmurs.
“Oh, wow,” Jane says, genuinely awe-struck, wide-eyed as a new lightning bolt—curiously solid looking lightning bolt this time—zips around the circumference of the arena, once, twice, three and four and five and six times, gathering more and more speed with each lap. Zeus’ usual harem of gorgeous young men and women ride in on a literal flying chariot above the stands, circling in the opposite direction as the lightning but slower, steadier, like a bird of prey until the whole thing settles in its rightful place up on the pedestal where Zeus is set to make his first appearance.
Almost makes you wonder where Hera’s gone off to, Loki very nearly says aloud, but there’s not much time for snide comments. Half a second later the lightning bolt slams down into the center of the chariot, and in a flashing glimmer of sparks, the man and myth and legend himself is just suddenly there, arms thrown out wide, a delighted grin on his face. He is something of a spectacle, shimmering in all that golden sunlight streaming in from above, that thunderbolt continuously sizzling behind him, his nearly incalculable power rolling off of him in waves for those with the power to see it.
The effect is rather lost, of course, roughly five seconds after he opens his mouth.
Jane cringes at the mention of this year’s orgy said like it’s a matter of grave importance—which, of course, to someone like Zeus it certainly is—and she glances first at the Valkyrie on her left, then at Thor on her left, then all the way over at Loki on his left. When none of them say anything, she asks, “Is this guy for real?”
“Honestly, I’m not mad at it,” Val shrugs.
Thor hesitantly says, “Look, I’m sure he has a point, okay?”
“Does he, though?” Loki asks, squinting, just as Zeus begins announcing the awards for most human souls sacrificed in the name of a God, and in lieu of saying anything else, Loki simply waves in Zeus’ direction as if to say, See?
“Alright,” Thor concedes. “So maybe he’s not that great.”
Jane’s still cringing, shaking her head. “Oh, no, definitely not good.”
“Yeah, I don’t think it’s gonna get any better than this,” Val says, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her eyes directed straight ahead at the chariot. “Look, I think it’s pretty obvious that he isn’t gonna help us. That thunderbolt, though? That could be useful.”
Loki blinks. He hadn’t even considered that, but leave it to a Valkyrie to see a battle laid out in front of them and immediately pinpoint the one thing that’ll get them through it the fastest.
“Huh,” he says aloud, eyeing the thunderbolt in question. “You could be right.”
“I am right.”
“Yeah, I mean,” Jane shrugs, waving ahead. “Look at that thing. If anything can take down a God-killer, it’s gotta be that, isn’t it?”
Loki nods, making to stand up. “Right. Give me five minutes.”
“Absolutely not,” Thor interrupts him, one hand gripping tight to his upper arm before he can even think about conjuring up the illusion of himself and slipping away unnoticed.
“He’s right, you won’t be able to sneak past him with all these people watching,” Val says. “Direct approach is better. Jane, you go right. Loki, you go left. Thor and I will go center. We bumrush him, take the bolt, ding-dong—”
“No, no, no, no one’s bumrushing or ding-donging anything,” Thor hastily whispers. “You’re all impossible. This is Zeus. Come on. When the time is right, I’ll go up and talk to him, and I’ll—”
“Who is talking?”
“— shit,” Thor hisses, dropping himself so quickly it’s as if he hopes he can become one with the seat cushion beneath him. Loki ducks his face down so that his cloak is covering him enough to hide his identity before anyone’s attention is drawn to him. He manages to avoid detection, but Thor certainly doesn’t. Everyone in this row of the stands and a few rows forward and back all knew it was him talking, and every last one of their heads swivels toward him to the effect of something like fifty or sixty spotlights.
“Looks like the time’s right now,” Val says under her breath.
Down below, Zeus’ voice booms out: “You there! Did you have something to share with the group?”
“Better talk fast,” Valkyrie adds. “I’m bashing heads in sixty seconds.”
“Literally, heads will roll,” Jane agrees, and Loki has to cough into his hand to hide a laugh.
“Who are you two? Seriously,” Thor shakes his head, then stands, raising a hand toward Zeus and giving his best effort at a placating smile. “Almighty Zeus! Sorry about that. Let me just say, it’s an honor and a privilege to—”
“What is that?” Zeus cuts in. “I cannot hear you all the way up there. Why don’t you come down here and take the stage?”
“Oh, boy,” Loki mutters, sinking lower into his seat.
As Thor begins awkwardly bumping and weaving his way out of the stands to head down toward the stage—to a backdrop of snickers and whispers from the Gods all around them—Jane watches him go and says, “This isn’t gonna go well, is it?”
“It’s not going to go well, no,” Loki agrees.
“Shouldn’t we… I don’t know, go down there with him?”
“If you’d like to, please, be my guest.”
“Not now,” Val quietly cuts in. “Not yet. We’ll go on my signal.”
“Signal, yeah, okay,” Jane nods, and she’s nervously fidgeting with Mjolnir, clearly itching to rush down there and start cracking skulls at the first hint of trouble. Must be something innate to that hammer, Loki thinks. That, or Thor’s got a remarkably consistent type. “What’s the signal?”
“It’ll be ‘go.’”
“Awesome. Got it.”
Down below, Thor has already begun his attempts to call the many Gods to arms, and it’s going… actually, it’s not going terribly, if he’s being honest. Really, if Thor’s audience were just about anyone else, Loki imagines he might have even had a shot at pulling this off. Loki catches the tail end of a sentence about the God-killer and the threat he poses, about how he seeks to end the Gods all across the universe, before Zeus cuts him off.
“That guy, yes,” Zeus says from up on his pedestal, his voice conversational but still carrying easily across the width of the arena as if he’s speaking personally to each individual person in the stands. “Gorr, yes. The God Butcher, they are calling him, I know. But he only killed a couple of… very low-level God. Eh. Boo-hoo. Is not a concern here.”
Jane balks. “He knows?”
The Valkyrie lets out an annoyed sigh and shakes her head, apparently exactly as unsurprised as Loki is.
“Now, if that is all, pretty boy,” Zeus goes on, shooing Thor away with a flick of his hand. “You go back to your seat, and you be quiet. Yes?”
“You’re not hearing me,” Thor insists. “He’s murdering en masse. He attacked Asgard, and—”
Now, here, Thor makes one mistake: He steps forward, trying to get closer to Zeus, and in a blink, there are glowing electric shackles around each of his wrists, bolted to the floor, pinning him in place.
There’s a collective gasp and a few oohs from the crowd, none of them particularly shocked, simply enjoying the free entertainment. Zeus’ harem looks back and forth between them, waiting to see what happens next. Zeus himself stays exactly where he is for a moment, silently eyeing Thor down from up on that sunlit chariot.
And then, finally, he steps down onto the stage.
A low rumble accompanies each of Zeus’ steps—not thunder, not exactly, just a sort of hanging vibration in the air, but it’s enough. Enough to remind everyone who it is they’re looking at. Enough to remind Thor who it is he’s looking at.
“Asgard, eh?” Zeus says, stopping when he and Thor are nearly face-to-face. “Asgardians. Hm. Is funny, you know. I thought we’d seen the last of you when Odin died. But… tell me, is it true you all live on Earth now? Among the humans? How many of you are alive now, hm? A thousand? A hundred?” He leans in closer, waiting, but Thor doesn’t answer. “… Less?”
There’s a murmur that ripples through the crowd. A snicker here and there, but not clear enough for Loki to pinpoint where, or from whom.
“Zeus,” Thor says, and the fury is clear and present in his voice, though he makes a valiant show of squashing it down. “This is bigger than any of us. We have to—”
“Ah, ah. This is how you got in this predicament, yes?” Zeus says, gesturing at the shackles. At his will, apparently, the chains thrum and spark, tugging Thor a few inches lower. “You do not talk back to Zeus. Zeus does the talking. And this is what Zeus is saying. Are you listening now?” He pauses, then says, slowly, like he wants to make sure everyone in the arena hears every word perfectly: “Every God watches over their own peoples. Nothing more, nothing less. You know this. We all know this.”
He raises his arms out, turning in a slow circle to gesture at the crowd all around him before he returns to face Thor.
“Now, now, I know you want to do the right thing. I know. But Asgardian problems, they are Asgardian problems, yes?” Zeus goes on. “And this, this is Omnipotence City. We are safe here. You, my friend, you are safe here. This God Butcher, he will not come here, he will never reach Eternity, and he will not be problem for any G—”
It happens so quickly, so bizarrely, that Loki’s not even entirely sure he’s seeing it right. Not at first.
Midway through the word Gods, Zeus’ voice chokes off into silence. His eyes go very, very wide. Something extends out of his mouth, something long and sleek and black as the night—the business end of a sword that’s been shoved through his skull from behind, but with no swordsman on his other side, no hilt, no nothing.
It seems everyone else in the stands is in the same stunned not quite sure what’s just happened boat as Loki is. A second of pure, utter silence stretches through the entirety of the arena before Gorr finally materializes out of nothing behind Zeus, a black hole at the center of all that gilded gold. He yanks the sword back, and Zeus stays upright for the span of a heartbeat before his legs crumble beneath him.
And then, of course, the whole place goes dark.