That single hour seemed to drag on into eternity.
After an agonizingly tense wait, the spatial rifts finally tore open, and Odin’s armada vanished from their staging ground, jumping directly into the fray.
The transit was a bloodbath.
As the ships forcefully exited hyperspace, dozens of them slammed straight into the hidden spatial implosion charges and were instantaneously shredded to pieces.
Fortunately for Asgard, the charges had their limits.
While they were absolutely lethal to the unshielded light cruisers, the medium and heavy dreadnoughts only suffered superficial hull damage unless they triggered a massive cluster of mines at once.
Less than twenty minutes later, Odin’s surviving fleet officially entered the battlefield.
BOOM!
Because the light cruisers had entirely drained their reactors to force the jump, they were completely incapable of raising their energy shields.
The moment they drifted into the cosmic proximity mines, they were instantly blown to slag.
There was naturally no sound in the vacuum of space, but watching the silent, explosive demise of those vessels vividly painted the phantom roar of a deafening explosion in everyone’s minds.
It was simply too spectacular to comprehend.
Hundreds of warships blossomed into brilliant, deadly fireworks simultaneously, creating a blinding flash of light that easily outshone the distant star.
Standing on the bridge of the flagship, Odin’s face remained a mask of cold marble, but his heart bled.
Every single one of those small cruisers carried a crew of at least a hundred brave souls.
But before he could even process the heavy losses, a new storm of blinding light erupted in the distance.
Thanos’s assault ships had opened fire.
A relentless barrage of azure lasers carved through the void, instantly turning more Asgardian vessels into expanding fireballs.
This time, even several shielded medium cruisers buckled under the concentrated volley and violently exploded.
“Attack!
All forces, attack!” Odin roared, finally losing his stoic composure as he issued the absolute kill order.
“Hahaha!
Finally, a real fight!” Thor bellowed.
This was exactly what he had been waiting for.
Laughing wildly, he spun Mjolnir, blasted out of the flagship’s airlock, and rocketed straight toward the enemy armada.
One of the unique traits of the Asgardian pantheon was that, upon reaching a certain threshold of divine power, they could literally survive and fight in the vacuum of space.
The exact duration depended entirely on their individual strength.
For elite fighters like the Warriors Three, they had roughly an hour of zero-gravity combat before they had to retreat for air.
Watching Thor recklessly dive headfirst into the enemy swarm, Sif let out a helpless sigh, readied her blade, and launched herself into the void to back him up.
As for the ordinary Asgardian soldiers, they rapidly geared up in specialized space combat suits and scrambled into single-seater fighters, pouring out of the crippled cruisers.
The design of Asgard’s fighters was incredibly retro—they looked almost like sleek, golden chariots, except the steeds were replaced by powerful, wing-like thrusters.
At this exact moment, Odin’s armada numbered roughly twenty-four thousand ships.
Unlike Thanos’s highly specialized fleet, Asgard’s vessels weren’t categorized into distinct assault, frigate, or support roles; they were universally standardized, varying only by size.
They had a hundred and fifty heavy dreadnoughts, three thousand medium cruisers, and over twenty-one thousand light cruisers.
However, because the light cruisers had completely drained their power reserves to break the spatial interdiction, they were effectively sitting ducks—unable to raise shields, unable to fire back.
Following Odin’s command, nearly every single warrior stationed on those crippled ships abandoned their vessels, launching their single-seater fighters into the fray.
In Asgard, there were only warriors who died in glorious battle; there were no cowards who lived on their knees.
The only reason it was nearly every warrior and not all of them was simply a matter of logistics: there weren’t enough fighters to go around, forcing some to remain trapped inside the dead ships.
Meanwhile, the medium and heavy cruisers frantically diverted their remaining scraps of energy to maintain their deflector shields.
Only the absolute largest dreadnoughts in the fleet had enough reactor power to actually return fire.
…
Aboard Sanctuary II, Thanos watched the endless swarm of Asgardian fighters buzzing out of the dead fleet like an agitated hornet’s nest.
A cold, cruel smile crept across his face.
‘These fools really aren’t afraid of death.’
He stood up, grabbing the massive Tyrant Greatsword resting beside his throne.
“Outrider legions!
Full deployment!” he bellowed.
The next second, the heavy bay doors on over seven hundred carriers slid open, and a nightmarish, ravenous black tide spilled out into the void.
The deployment was staggering: six hundred light carriers deployed three pods each, unleashing over three thousand Outriders per ship; a hundred and fifty medium carriers dropped ten pods each, unleashing over ten thousand per ship; and fifty heavy carriers dropped thirty pods each, releasing over thirty thousand beasts per ship.
The Outriders had been explicitly bio-engineered for zero-gravity combat; deploying them for planetary ground assaults had honestly always been a massive waste of their true potential.
Out here in the hard vacuum, they didn’t even need environmental suits or mechanical thrusters to maneuver and launch a ferocious charge.
With his frontline engaged, Thanos ordered Deep Blue to deactivate the spatial interdiction grid, signaling the Black Order generals to jump in and reinforce the battlefield.
That done, he stepped out of Sanctuary II’s airlock, hovering in the freezing void as he coldly observed the Asgardian forces charging through the starlight. This chapter was copied from novelping dot com without permission.
At the very front of the clash, ten thousand colossal Leviathans met the incoming Asgardian fighter swarm.
First came a chaotic, blinding crossfire of lasers, but the distance closed rapidly, devolving into an absolute, brutal melee.
That was right—a melee.
It was the ultimate cosmic irony: fighting the most primitive kind of war with the absolute pinnacle of advanced technology.
This brutal reality was born of necessity.
Kinetic weapons were far too slow for stellar distances, and heavy laser batteries drained a ship’s reactor incredibly fast, forcing long cooldowns.
Thus, interstellar warfare almost always began with a devastating volley of energy fire before descending into a violent, close-quarters brawl.
The massive Leviathans writhed through the void, using the razor-sharp, reinforced bone spurs protruding from their flanks like massive broadswords, effortlessly slicing Asgardian fighters into expanding clouds of shrapnel and fire.
In response, the Asgardian pilots would lay down a brief volley of laser fire before violently accelerating, using their heavily armored, spear-like noses to ram straight into the Leviathans’ flesh like jousting knights.
While the standard-issue energy spears couldn’t reliably pierce the beasts’ thick biological plating, their concentrated laser blasts still carved deep, agonizing wounds.
Amidst the swirling chaos of the dogfights, one particular Asgardian warrior was fighting like a god of war.
Thor swung Mjolnir with devastating fury, unleashing endless torrents of blinding lightning that electrocuted Leviathan after Leviathan.
Completely lost in the bloodlust, he flew right up to the colossal beasts, using pure, godlike physical strength to smash their armored skulls in.
The Warriors Three and Sif couldn’t match his apocalyptic area-of-effect damage, but their individual combat prowess was still deeply terrifying; each of them was fully capable of soloing a Leviathan.
Watching from afar, Thanos instantly recognized the five golden blurs tearing through his beasts.
But he had absolutely no intention of stepping in just yet.
He was keeping his energy strictly in reserve, waiting for Odin to make his move.
Minutes into the bloodbath, the Leviathan vanguard had suffered horrific casualties, dropping from ten thousand beasts down to a little over six thousand.
Just then, the Outrider swarms finally crashed into the enemy line.
Despite being genetically engineered specifically for space combat, the Outriders’ baseline strength was still completely eclipsed by the innate physical superiority of the Asgardian warriors.
On average, a single Asgardian could butcher seventeen or eighteen Outriders before finally being dragged down.
It was a stark, brutal testament to exactly why the Asgardians had managed to conquer and rule the Milky Way for a millennium.
However, Thanos’s heavy assault ships lingering in the rear never once stopped firing.
Every coordinated volley instantly wiped out multiple Asgardian fighters, alongside any Outriders unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire.
As the slaughter reached a fever pitch, fresh spatial rifts began ripping open on the absolute edges of the battlefield, expanding at a rapid pace.
The Black Order’s reinforcements were arriving.