Due to the heavily reinforced spatial interdiction, it took Odin’s fleet over an hour just to pry open the hyperspace rifts.
The second they stabilized, hundreds of unmanned drones vanished into the void, jumping through to scout the path ahead.
A little over ten minutes later, Odin stood aboard his flagship, watching the holographic tactical map.
One by one, the blips representing the drones snuffed out mid-jump.
A lucky few actually managed to reach the destination, but they were instantly obliterated before they could transmit a single frame of visual data.
Odin’s expression darkened even further.
It was blatantly obvious: the enemy had the capability to intercept and destroy vessels during transit, and their defensive perimeter on the other side was absolute.
Not a single drone survived.
Hyperspace technology was the single most crucial milestone for any intelligent civilization taking to the stars.
However, a fleet didn’t just tear a giant hole in reality and swarm through all at once.
Each warship had to generate its own localized spatial corridor, which then pulled the vessel into the rift.
Once that sequence initiated, the jump was locked in; it could not be aborted.
Furthermore, hyperspace rifts were strictly one-way—there was no turning back mid-transit, and enemies couldn’t counter-invade through the exit.
The fact that the enemy could actively destroy unmanned ships mid-transit proved they possessed terrifying technology Asgard couldn’t even comprehend.
“Lucy, what now?” Odin asked.
Opening multiple rifts to scatter the enemy’s attention had been Lucy’s best tactical workaround.
But clearly, the enemy had perfectly anticipated it.
Lucy shook her head in deep frustration.
“We are out of options, All-Father.
A head-on assault is our only choice.”
Thor’s eyes instantly lit up.
“Finally!
We should have just done this from the start instead of wasting time with all these pathetic tricks.”
Odin offered a weary shake of his head before his lone eye hardened.
“Then let it begin.”
…
Meanwhile, near the wormhole.
Several heavy transport ships were currently towing a colossal asteroid into position.
This was raw material for constructing the new interstellar fortresses.
If Odin had chosen to slowly slog his way here, he would have eventually been greeted by ten fully operational fortresses that would have torn his fleet to shreds.
A moment later, a fresh convoy of massive freighters emerged from the wormhole.
Thick, worm-like mechanized umbilicals extended from their hulls, snaking out to latch onto the surrounding warships to replenish their reactors and munitions.
Everything was operating with flawless, mechanical precision.
Aboard Sanctuary II, Thanos remained seated upon his throne, idly turning the Mind Stone in his massive hand.
Deep Blue’s holographic avatar materialized in the air before him.
“Master, we are detecting massive spatial rifts opening thirty billion kilometers away from our current position.”
Thanos slowly opened his eyes.
“Oh?
So he finally ran out of patience.
And he chose the absolute edge of the star system, no less.”
The local star system spanned roughly ten billion kilometers in diameter.
Thirty billion kilometers placed the Asgardian fleet comfortably on the outer fringes—not too close, not too far.
If Thanos advanced at sub-light speeds, it would take him over two days to reach them.
That would give Odin’s fleet the exact window they needed to fully recharge their reactors.
Clearly, Odin had a way to pinpoint his exact coordinates.
A name instantly surfaced in Thanos’s mind.
Heimdall.
The man whose gaze pierced the Nine Realms.
It had to be him.
Even with Thanos’s hyper-advanced technology, actively monitoring a few tiny warships tens of thousands of light-years away in real-time was impossible.
“Order the fleet to advance on the target coordinates.
The Black Order is to remain on standby for immediate reinforcement.
Halt all construction on the interstellar fortresses,” Thanos commanded.
He had ordered the fortresses built on the assumption that it would take Odin a significant amount of time to locate him.
He hadn’t expected to be discovered within days of stepping into the Milky Way.
Now that the decisive battle was upon them, finishing the fortresses was pointless.
If he won, he would march straight into Asgard itself.
If he lost, half-built defense platforms wouldn’t save him.
The spatial interdiction zone prevented them from jumping in.
Had he known Asgard’s technology was so pitifully obsolete that they couldn’t even break a basic lockdown, he wouldn’t have bothered dispersing his generals to set up elaborate ambushes in the first place.
“Engage Dark Photon tethers.
Spin up the FTL drives,” Deep Blue announced, its synthesized voice echoing across the command channels.
“Initiating Spatial Slipstream.
Prepare for faster-than-light transit.”
As the automated commands cascaded through the fleet, the two thousand five hundred warships, spearheaded by Sanctuary II, surged forward at a hundred times the speed of light.
If wormholes were the highways between galaxies, and hyperspace jumps were the bridges between star systems, then the Spatial Slipstream was the fast lane between local planets.
A single star system could span anywhere from a few billion to several trillion kilometers.
Crossing that distance at standard lightspeed could still take years.
And since localized hyperspace jumps dangerously drained a ship’s reactor, the highly efficient Spatial Slipstream was the ultimate solution.
By using immense energy to slightly compress the fabric of space ahead of the fleet—effectively folding the distance—the warships could travel at sub-light thrust while achieving FTL velocity.
It was top-tier cosmic engineering.
Odin almost certainly didn’t have anything like it.
Just over half an hour later, Thanos’s fleet arrived at the target coordinates.
Staring out into the void, he saw a massive expanse of absolute, pitch-black nothingness.
The spatial rifts were actively tearing open, absorbing all surrounding starlight.
Without needing a single word from Thanos, the highly autonomous Deep Blue instantly initiated combat protocols.
“Destination reached.
Disengaging Spatial Slipstream.
Exiting FTL transit.” “Maximum power to all deflector shields.” “Engines to full combat thrust.” “Main and secondary laser batteries, begin charge sequences.” “Deploying cosmic proximity mines and spatial implosion charges.” “Prepping Leviathans for deployment.” “Outrider legions, stand by for launch.” “Fighter squadrons, prime engines.”
As the rapid-fire commands echoed across the network, the colossal armada sprang to life like a well-oiled machine.
Frigates flared with brilliant energy shields, assault ships powered up their devastating laser batteries, and support craft blanketed the void with deadly cosmic mines and implosion charges.
From the massive carriers, the Chitauri fighter swarms, ravenous Outriders, and towering Leviathans mobilized.
These Leviathans weren’t the sluggish, heavily armored troop transports seen lumbering through a planet’s atmosphere.
Out here in the zero-gravity vacuum of space, these colossal, whale-like bio-dreadnoughts were terrifyingly agile, serving as devastating heavy artillery units.
With his forces fully deployed and lying in wait, Thanos set aside his training.
He sat quietly on his throne, his eyes locked on the expanding darkness, waiting for the enemy to step into the light.
‘Let’s hope,’ he mused inwardly, ‘that this fight will finally be entertaining.’