A bitter, howling wind tore across the desolate world.
The air was thick with a biting, omnipresent frost; a normal human wouldn’t last five seconds here before being frozen solid.
Looking down at the planet beneath his feet, a wild thought suddenly sprouted in Thanos’s mind.
Back on his home world, he always kept his power tightly leashed, terrified of accidentally leveling his own palace.
Even during his brutal training sessions, he relied purely on physical conditioning and never once tapped into his Power of Destruction.
Just how much absolute carnage could his full-strength strike actually cause?
There was no time like the present to find out.
The catastrophic energy within him began to surge wildly.
Thick tendrils of purple smoke poured from his skin, making him look like a descending dark god.
Just then, Proxima Midnight’s voice crackled to life in his earpiece.
“My Lord, Sanctuary II and the Outrider legions are prepped and ready to deploy at your command.”
But since he had already decided to test his own limits, he wasn’t about to call his troops down just to have them caught in the crossfire.
“Hold your positions and await my orders.”
Although a bit confused by the sudden halt, Proxima immediately nodded on the other end.
“Yes, My Lord.”
It was almost as if the Ice Crystal planet could instinctively sense its impending doom.
The atmosphere turned incredibly violent.
Fierce, frost-laden gales ripped through the sky as massive, pitch-black thunderclouds rapidly converged—almost like the planet itself was desperately trying to warn the invader to back off.
Thanos completely ignored the shifting weather.
After charging his energy for a few moments, he felt the destructive force concentrated in his fist reach its absolute peak.
With a deafening roar, he drove a devastating punch straight toward the earth.
The moment the volatile energy left his fist, it transformed into a colossal purple sphere, hurtling downward.
Freed from his physical control, the destructive force within began to violently expand.
Within seconds, the sphere swelled to over a hundred meters in diameter, and it was still rapidly growing.
Down on the surface, not every Ice Tribesman had managed to flee.
Those who couldn’t fly, or those simply too stubborn to retreat, were still hiding in the frozen forests, staring up at the demon in the sky.
But right now, every single one of them felt a terrifying, apocalyptic presence pressing down on their chests.
That descending mass of purple energy was somehow more intense than their local sun, radiating an eerie yet blindingly brilliant light.
“No!”
The stronger warriors among them sensed the world-ending power buried within that light.
Howling in grief and fury, they launched themselves from the ground, rocketing toward the sphere while hurling their spears and swords in a desperate bid to halt its descent.
But it was a completely futile effort.
The second their weapons brushed against the orb, they were instantly atomized, entirely erased from existence.
The Power of Destruction was the most lethal, volatile force in the cosmos.
It possessed the raw ability to annihilate anything it touched.
Seeing their weapons fail, the unyielding natives threw themselves directly at it.
This was a battle for their species—for the very survival of their home world.
Even knowing it meant certain death, they didn’t hesitate to sacrifice their lives to protect it.
Agonized screams quickly filled the freezing air.
The moment the Ice Tribesmen collided with the purple sphere, they could only watch in sheer horror as their skin, muscles, and bones were systematically erased.
They wanted to turn and flee, but they were utterly powerless to escape its pull.
Fortunately, while their deaths were excruciating, they were mercifully brief.
Carrying an aura of boundless despair, the catastrophic mass of energy finally slammed into the ground.
RUMBLE…
Amidst a series of deafening, earth-shattering explosions, the orb—now swollen to a full kilometer in diameter—began boring its way straight down toward the planet’s core.
Hovering high above, Thanos watched the spectacle and gave a satisfied nod.
He immediately ordered the fleet in orbit to fall back.
This full-strength attack was actually turning out to be far more devastating than he had originally anticipated; it might genuinely crack the planet in half.
If that happened, the ships in low orbit would definitely be caught in the blast radius.
It was better to pull them back to a safer distance.
Soon, the entire world began to shudder violently.
Massive fault lines fractured the earth, accompanied by a ceaseless chain of violent tremors.
In the distance, several frozen mountain peaks actually began spitting out sparks, showing clear signs of impending volcanic eruptions.
In a matter of minutes, the Ice Crystal planet had devolved into a literal apocalyptic hellscape.
Right then, Thanos noticed something strange.
The surviving natives in the distance had completely abandoned any thought of attacking him.
Instead, they were frantically rushing toward a specific mountain peak.
‘Strange,’ he thought.
‘The world is literally ending.
Why are they all swarming over there?
Shouldn’t they be spending their final moments holding their families?’
Was there something over there that could actually save them?
Piqued by genuine curiosity, Thanos flew over to investigate.
He arrived at the peak in a matter of seconds.
Up close, the anomaly became blatantly obvious.
While beasts on every other mountain were stampeding or fleeing in absolute terror from the apocalyptic quakes, this specific area was dead silent.
It was as if the local wildlife had no idea the world was ending.
The Ice Tribesmen were pouring into a massive cave entrance, and not a single one was coming back out.
Was there a spatial rift inside?
A teleportation device?
When the panicked natives spotted Thanos looming nearby, stark terror flashed across their faces, but none of them tried to run away from the cave.
Instead, they just shoved past each other, sprinting inside even faster.
Seeing this, Thanos casually swiped his hand.
A fierce wave of destructive energy instantly cleared out the surrounding natives, vaporizing them on the spot and carving a brutal, five-meter-deep trench into the stone.
Only then did he casually drift into the cavern.
Once inside, he realized the mountain had been entirely hollowed out, hiding a massive underground chamber.
The countless Ice Tribesmen who had rushed in were all gathered around the base of a towering, pyramid-like structure, bowing their heads in frantic, desperate prostration.
Strangely, they didn’t even react to Thanos’s arrival.
They just stayed glued to the floor, murmuring in a trance.
Hovering directly above the peak of the pyramid was a single gemstone, pulsating with an eerie, mesmerizing yellow light.
Catching sight of the gem, a cruel smirk slowly spread across Thanos’s face.
“The Mind Stone.
So this is where the plot has led me.”
The yellow jewel that had these natives completely entranced was none other than the Mind Stone, one of the six Infinity Stones of the Marvel universe, boasting the absolute power to manipulate consciousness itself.
Calling it a ‘gem’ was almost too innocent; in reality, it acted more like a cursed relic.
Beings strong enough to resist its influence were fine, but the weak were inevitably reduced to nothing more than its fuel.
The Mind Stone floating before him, for example, was actively siphoning away the collective mental energy of the surrounding natives.
‘No wonder,’ he mused.
‘These people have had tens of thousands of years to evolve, yet they’re still stuck as a primitive tribal society.’
Their entire civilization had been stunted and leeched dry by the Mind Stone.