BOOM!
The catastrophic shockwaves of their clash instantly pulverized another massive asteroid.
This had been happening nonstop.
To these two titans, the surrounding asteroids were simply too fragile; even the largest rocks—spanning a thousand kilometers in diameter—were completely unable to withstand the apocalyptic collateral damage of their duel.
Yet the two of them showed absolutely no signs of holding back.
Trading devastating blows, their battle rapidly drifted toward a nearby planet.
With a diameter of roughly a hundred thousand kilometers, this world orbited far from the local star.
Plunged in perpetual twilight, its surface was completely entombed in jagged frost.
But today, this serene, frozen world was about to meet its absolute doomsday.
Thanos blocked a furious thrust from Odin, but the sheer kinetic force behind the Skyfather’s attack sent him hurtling down into the planet’s atmosphere.
The atmospheric pressure here was at least twenty times that of a standard habitable world, and the gravity was a crushing thirty times Earth normal.
While this immense pressure barely affected the Mad Titan, fighting in this dense environment was still fundamentally different from maneuvering in the frictionless vacuum of space.
Before Thanos could blast his way back out of the atmosphere, Gungnir flared with a blinding light.
A devastating beam of golden energy shot down toward him.
Odin had clearly realized the planet’s gravity was pulling on his opponent, and he fully intended to keep Thanos pinned there.
But while the heavy atmosphere and gravity restricted movement, they also provided something a vacuum didn’t: physical resistance to push against.
Thanos simply thrust his free hand forward.
The sheer, explosive physical force of his palm strike generated a localized hurricane, violently propelling him backward just in time to evade Odin’s blast.
In the next instant, the golden beam slammed into the planet, blowing out a catastrophic crater dozens of kilometers wide.
Capitalizing on the opening, Thanos rocketed out of the atmosphere, swinging the Tyrant Greatsword in a vicious, upward arc.
Odin executed a bizarre, impossibly sharp turn mid-air, narrowly weaving past the blade.
The purple wave of destructive energy instantly overshot him, crashing into the planet below.
The resulting shockwave carved a brutal, twenty-kilometer-long trench into the planet’s crust.
God only knew how deep it went.
Not missing a beat, Thanos reversed his grip and launched a brutal backhand slash.
This time, Odin had no room to dodge and was forced to cross his spear to block.
CLANG!
The apocalyptic impact instantly knocked the All-Father out of orbit, sending him plummeting straight into the planet’s dense atmosphere.
A cruel smirk curled Thanos’s lips.
He immediately dove in right after him.
Since Thanos spent nearly all his free time locked inside his hyper-gravity training chamber, he was perfectly adapted to moving under thirty times normal gravity.
Odin, on the other hand, was noticeably hampered.
The crushing pressure dragged at his limbs, forcing him onto the defensive as he struggled to parry the Mad Titan’s relentless onslaught.
As their divine energies violently collided, the sky itself was literally torn to shreds.
The violent rifts in the atmosphere caused the dense gases to violently bleed out into space.
In just thirty minutes, the atmospheric pressure plummeted from twenty times normal down to a single standard atmosphere.
The surface of the planet was completely fractured, looking as if it could splinter apart at any second.
The massive trench Thanos had carved earlier had practically split the entire world in half.
The only reason it hadn’t turned into a molten hellscape was because the planet’s core had long since cooled.
CLANG!
Odin barely deflected another heavy downward cleave.
He was breathing heavily, his chest heaving as he forcibly channeled his divine power to fire yet another energy beam to push Thanos back.
Seeing the All-Father panting, Thanos couldn’t help but smirk.
He had finally pinpointed Odin’s fatal weakness.
Whether it was his advanced age, his lack of recent life-or-death battles, or the crippling effect of the planet’s gravity, Odin was noticeably sluggish.
To compensate for his slowing reflexes, the old king was being forced to burn through his divine energy reserves at an unsustainable rate.
The moment Odin ran out of stamina, he was a dead man.
Effortlessly side-stepping the energy beam, Thanos raised the Tyrant Greatsword and launched a vicious counterattack.
Odin hastily brought Gungnir up to block.
But just as Thanos prepared to follow up, a sudden, chilling sense of danger spiked behind him.
He immediately flew backward, putting distance between himself and Odin, and glanced over his shoulder.
He realized his mistake.
Odin’s previous energy blast hadn’t been a desperate, poorly aimed shot.
It had been perfectly angled to shoot straight down the massive trench Thanos had carved earlier—striking dead center into the planet’s destabilized core.
The core was critically detonating.
RUMBLE…!
A series of deafening, earth-shattering roars echoed from the depths of the crust.
But just as quickly as the noise peaked, it abruptly faded into absolute, eerie silence.
The explosion wasn’t over; the atmosphere had simply been completely vaporized.
Without air to carry the sound waves, the apocalypse played out in total silence.
Moments later, the entire planet violently fractured, exploding outward into billions of jagged fragments that drifted into the cold void.
Watching the world shatter, Thanos instantly understood.
Odin had intentionally annihilated the entire planet purely to eliminate the gravitational disadvantage dragging him down.
Kicking off a massive, floating chunk of the shattered planet, he launched himself straight at Odin.
This was undeniably going to be a brutal war of attrition, and preserving every single ounce of stamina was the ultimate key to victory.
…
Meanwhile, back in the main fleet battle.
With the Warriors Three dead, Thor critically incapacitated, and Odin completely tied up, the battle had devolved into a tragically one-sided slaughter.
The ordinary Asgardian warriors simply lacked the raw power to stop the Black Order generals.
Every time the generals waded into the fray, they reaped Asgardian lives by the hundreds.
Sanctuary II wasn’t showing any mercy, either.
A blinding column of energy erupted from the dreadnought’s main cannon, instantly vaporizing a massive Asgardian cruiser in a silent, expanding fireball.
With its payload delivered, the massive ship casually began cycling its reactors for the next shot.
Without reactor power to raise their deflector shields, the Asgardian light cruisers were nothing more than floating metallic coffins.
And while the remaining medium and heavy cruisers desperately returned fire, their desperate barrages couldn’t even scratch the shields of Thanos’s heavy frigates.
As the war raged on, the Asgardian casualties climbed to horrifying numbers, and Thanos’s encirclement squeezed tighter and tighter by the second.
…
Aboard the Asgardian flagship.
Sif frantically carried Thor into the medical bay, gently laying him onto a diagnostic bed.
She carefully placed the severely fractured remains of Mjolnir down beside him.
Thor was deathly pale, his skin completely drained of color.
He was locked in a deep, agonizing coma.
Looking at his battered state, Sif’s heart wrenched painfully in her chest.
Moments later, the automated medical scanners bathed him in a sterile light, rapidly projecting a series of grim holographic diagnostics.
Reading the data, Sif was gripped by sheer, suffocating panic.
Thor’s condition was absolutely critical.
He had twenty-five shattered bones.
Over fifty percent of his muscle tissue was severely contused, and thirty percent of his skin had been horrifically burned away.
But worst of all, a lingering, highly volatile strain of destructive energy was actively burrowing through his veins, violently corroding his body from the inside out.
If that foreign energy wasn’t purged immediately, Thor’s heart could stop at any second.
But Sif was completely powerless to stop it.
Her divine magic was far too weak and unrefined to combat Thanos’s Power of Destruction.
The only people in the entire universe who could possibly save Thor now were the All-Father, Heimdall, or Queen Frigga.