A year ago, after completing the mission Thanos had assigned him, Corvus Glaive hadn’t returned to report immediately.
Instead, he had set out on his own to scout for new planets.
During this expedition, he stumbled upon a man—or rather, a god—drifting aimlessly through the void.
The castaway claimed to be of the Asgardian pantheon.
His name was Loki.
Hearing this name, Thanos instantly pinned down their current spot in the timeline: it was shortly after the events of the first Thor movie.
To claim the throne, Loki had calculated the exact moment his adoptive father, Odin, was due for the Odinsleep.
He then masterfully manipulated his muscle-brained brother, Thor, into angering the All-Father.
Just as Loki planned, a furious Odin stripped Thor of his divine power and banished him to Midgard—Earth.
With Odin falling into his restorative slumber, Loki successfully seized the throne as acting king.
But ‘acting’ wasn’t enough for the highly ambitious God of Mischief.
He even sent Asgard’s ultimate war machine, the Destroyer, down to Earth to assassinate his own brother.
What Loki didn’t realize was that it was all just a grand scheme orchestrated by his adoptive father.
Unbeknownst to Loki, he was burdened with the bloodline of a Frost Giant.
No matter what he did, he was never going to legitimately inherit the Asgardian throne.
Just as Loki thought he had won, Odin secretly restored Thor’s powers.
Thor smashed the Destroyer, stormed back into Asgard, and Loki ended up tumbling into an uncharted wormhole in the abyss.
The current timeline was pre-Avengers.
In the original plot, Thanos had just found Loki and was preparing to hand him the Mind Stone to orchestrate the invasion of Earth.
But since he knew exactly how that story played out, he sure as hell wasn’t going to follow the script.
Who knew which specific Marvel universe this was?
What if it was the timeline with that absolute lunatic, Infinity Ultron?
‘Hand over the Mind Stone, accidentally facilitate the creation of Ultron, and then get sliced in half by a Vision-laser down the line?’ he thought.
‘Yeah, no thanks.
I’m not that stupid.’
Still, Loki was a highly useful pawn.
While Thanos was deep in thought, Proxima Midnight, who had been trying to train alongside him, suddenly collapsed to her knees.
“My Lord, I can’t hold on anymore,” she gasped.
Thanos shook his head.
“Deep Blue, shut down the gravity system.”
He turned and walked toward the exit.
“I’m going to pay this Loki a visit.
Neither of you are permitted to leave this room until you can fully adapt to a thousand times normal gravity.”
Hearing this, Proxima and Corvus Glaive both blanched, their faces twisting in utter misery.
As infamous and feared as they were across the cosmos, neither dared to even think about defying their Lord’s absolute command.
Ten minutes later, Thanos arrived at Loki’s holding cell.
The first thing that caught his eye was the ridiculously long, horned golden helmet sitting on a nearby table.
The prisoner himself was currently lounging on the bed, casually flipping through a book he had acquired from god knows where.
But Thanos didn’t pay the figure on the bed any mind.
Instead, his gaze drifted toward an empty corner of the cell.
It looked completely bare.
But with his enhanced cosmic senses, he could clearly feel a subtle mass of energy pooling right there.
The moment his eyes locked onto that spot, the energy instantly stopped gathering and faded into stillness, pretending to be nothing more than a trick of the light.
But Thanos knew it was no illusion.
A mocking smirk tugged at his lips.
Loki was the God of Mischief; there was no way he was just going to sit there and wait to be interrogated.
The figure on the bed was clearly an illusion, while his real body was hiding in the corner, heavily cloaked by invisibility magic, waiting to launch a sneak attack the second someone walked in.
Hiding in the shadows, Loki saw the purple giant outside the cell staring directly at him with a knowing smirk.
He immediately realized his little trick had been completely seen through.
Deciding to cut his losses, Loki dropped the illusion and his invisibility cloaking.
He appeared fully armored, looking up at the towering behemoth in front of him.
Honestly, Loki wasn’t short.
At 1.8 meters, he was solidly average for an Asgardian.
But compared to Thanos, who stood nearly two and a half meters tall, he felt ridiculously small.
“Who are you?” Loki asked.
Thanos deactivated the laser grid and stepped inside the cell.
Taking full advantage of his massive height, he looked down at the god.
“You may call me Thanos.”
Being looked down upon so blatantly ignited a flare of anger in Loki’s chest, but his body remained strictly polite.
He gave a slight, respectful bow.
“So, you are Lord Thanos.
I have heard much about you.”
Although Asgard maintained a strict isolationist policy, major cosmic news still managed to filter in.
And the rise of Thanos was undeniably the biggest, most explosive news in the universe right now.
After all, he was the only ruler in the entire cosmos who actively enforced the ‘Population and Resource Reproduction Act’, strictly stripping his citizens of their absolute freedom to breed at will.
It was lauded by his empire as the most scientific and logical population control system.
This was Thanos’s brilliant, sustainable solution to maintain universal balance.
It was infinitely better than his original, brutally unrefined plan of just snapping away half of all life.
However, in a Marvel universe that valued personal freedom far above sheer survival, his draconian laws were universally condemned as evil, twisted, and heretical.
If he wasn’t so overwhelmingly powerful, the galactic community would have crusaded against him as a cosmic tyrant long ago.
Thanos completely ignored Loki’s superficial flattery.
Instead, a playful, cruel edge entered his voice.
“Loki.
The God of Mischief.
Odin’s third son… yet nothing more than a bastard with Frost Giant blood running through his veins.”
At the word ‘bastard,’ a vicious, icy glint flashed in Loki’s eyes.
His hands violently whipped forward.
Whoosh!
In a split second, over a dozen throwing daggers materialized out of thin air, hurtling directly toward Thanos at breakneck speed.
The polite flattery had just been a smokescreen to lower the giant’s guard.
He had been calculating his escape from the very start.
But to his absolute shock, Thanos didn’t even try to dodge.
He just stood there with his arms crossed.
A spark of wild excitement flared in Loki’s heart.
Hidden among those regular daggers was his divine artifact, the Godslayer.
Any weapon worthy of being called an artifact by the Asgardians possessed devastating power.
He had butchered countless powerful enemies with the Godslayer, and this arrogant purple giant was going to be no exception!
In the next instant, a rapid burst of metallic clangs echoed through the cell.
Clink, clink, clink…
And then, a distinct, incredibly crisp ‘Ping!’ rang out.
Loki’s face froze in absolute, unadulterated disbelief.
The divine artifact he had placed all his hopes on had just violently bounced off the giant’s skin like a cheap toy.
Thanos, noticing this particular dagger felt a little different, effortlessly snatched the ricocheting Godslayer out of the air.
He inspected it for a brief moment before letting out a mocking scoff.
“Casually tossing around a dagger forged from pure Uru metal… Asgard truly is as disgustingly wealthy as they say.”
While Uru metal wasn’t quite as exceptionally rare as Adamantium or Vibranium, it was still easily ranked among the top four most precious metals in the Marvel universe.
This single, dagger-sized chunk of Uru could comfortably buy a small starship in the galactic market.
That alone was a testament to its insane value.
Loki completely ignored Thanos’s casual mockery.
His face was twisted in an ugly scowl as he snapped, “First of all, I am not a bastard.
And second… I am Odin’s second son, not his third!”