“Pathetic…”
Hearing Loki’s indignant outburst, Thanos didn’t bother laughing anymore.
He just shook his head, feeling a genuine, almost overwhelming sense of pity for the miserable god.
Loki desperately wanted nothing more than Odin’s approval, but from the very beginning, the All-Father had only ever viewed him as a convenient pawn to keep the Frost Giants in check.
Odin had dangled the false hope of standing on equal footing with Thor in front of his face, only to brutally snuff out that hope in the end, allowing him to fall into the abyss of space.
As Odin grew older, he seemingly became a benevolent king who no longer waged thoughtless, bloody wars.
But that was simply because he had gained the Eye of Wisdom and learned of the Celestials’ existence.
Forced to suppress his burning ambitions out of sheer self-preservation, he had traded brute force for cunning political manipulation.
This was a man who, in his youth, grew so insanely paranoid about his own flesh and blood—Hela—eclipsing his glory that he sealed her away in Hel, willingly sacrificing his entire elite Valkyrie legion just to get the job done.
It was glaringly obvious: to Odin, all familial bonds and lives were perfectly acceptable sacrifices on the altar of his own absolute power.
Someone like that actually turning over a new leaf?
The sun would rise in the west first.
There was an old saying on Earth: it wasn’t that old people turned bad, but that bad people got old.
To claim Odin had somehow become a fundamentally good person in his twilight years was the biggest joke in the universe.
Seeing the blatant pity on Thanos’s face, Loki’s pride was instantly stung.
He bristled defensively, flaring up like a cornered animal.
“What is that look?!” Loki snarled, his voice cracking with rage.
“Are you pitying me?!
What is there to pity?!
I am the future King of Asgard!
I am the future ruler of this universe!
When the time comes, every single one of you will bow at my feet!”
Watching this seemingly unhinged, hysterical rant, Thanos furrowed his brow.
“Enough,” he rumbled with deep annoyance.
“Put away your pathetic little tricks, God of Mischief.”
There was absolutely no way someone bearing the title of the God of Mischief would completely lose his mind over a few mocking words.
It was nothing more than a calculated act—deliberately feigning an emotional breakdown to make his captor believe he had psychological vulnerabilities that could be easily manipulated.
Over the last five hundred years, Thanos had seen far too many of these self-proclaimed geniuses trying to play the exact same game.
Hearing his title dropped with such cold contempt, Loki instantly realized his act had been completely seen through.
His face snapped back to a mask of absolute, chilling calm in a fraction of a second.
“Tell me,” Loki said flatly.
Seeing the god seemingly resign to his fate, Thanos didn’t answer immediately.
He knew full well that this guy was an incredibly toxic chess piece.
If he tried to manipulate Loki, Loki would undoubtedly be manipulating him right back in the shadows.
A snake like this couldn’t be strategically trusted with tasks; he could only be held.
After a moment of thought, he finally spoke.
“I don’t need you to do a single thing.
You just need to sit here and be a good little bargaining chip.”
He had only come down here to confirm that the prisoner was actually the real Loki.
Having satisfied his curiosity, he turned around and walked out.
Seeing Thanos leave without a second of hesitation, genuine panic finally cracked Loki’s composure.
“Wait!
I have value!” he shouted, rushing toward the laser grid.
“I can bring you the Infinity Stones!
I know exactly where the Space Stone is—!”
But no matter how frantically he yelled, Thanos didn’t even pause, walking away down the sterile corridor without so much as a backward glance.
…
Now entirely certain that he had the real Loki securely in his grasp, Thanos officially recalled the remaining three commanders of his vanguard: Ebony Maw, Cull Obsidian, and Supergiant.
Together with Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive, they formed the dreaded Black Order.
They were his most capable enforcers, the very reason he could spend all his time locked in a Gravity Room while his empire continuously expanded across the stars.
Once the full Black Order was assembled on Tyro, he officially initiated a Level One War Mobilization.
This absolute directive dictated that every single civilian activity, industry, and resource across his entire empire had to give way to the war effort.
The first step of the mobilization involved dragging ten massive asteroids—each roughly ten thousand kilometers in diameter—into the crushing orbit of a black hole, hollowing them out to build heavily armed interstellar fortresses.
These stations represented the absolute pinnacle of his empire’s technology.
If their energy shields were fully activated, Thanos figured… well, it would probably take him around ten solid punches to completely shatter one.
He hadn’t actually tested it out yet, so it was just a rough estimate.
Next, he drastically increased the mandatory population reproduction quotas across all his subjugated worlds.
This was a grim but necessary preparation for the impending war with Asgard.
A genuine clash between two cosmic superpowers was never going to play out like a neat little movie script, where a few top dogs brawled it out in a wasteland and the winner took all.
That was just a severely simplified narrative designed to fit a limited runtime.
In a true, all-out galactic war against a faction like Asgard, the death toll of his foot soldiers would easily start in the hundreds of millions.
If it dragged on into a brutal war of attrition, those casualties could quickly balloon into the tens of billions, or even trillions.
With all these preparations set in motion, the final focus naturally shifted to the mass production of warships.
His goal was absolute: to assemble an invincible armada of ten thousand cosmic dreadnoughts within a single year.
…
Over a year quickly passed.
Inside the Sanctuary, Thanos sat heavily upon his high throne, quietly observing his five lieutenants kneeling below.
After more than a year of brutal, relentless training, their combat power still wasn’t quite up to his ultimate standards, but they had undeniably improved by leaps and bounds.
Hopefully, they wouldn’t just be swatted away like irrelevant cannon fodder this time around.
After a moment, he gestured for his attendants to bring forth his personal armaments: the Tyrant Greatsword and the Tyrant Armor.
The Tyrant Greatsword was a two-meter-long, double-bladed weapon formed by connecting two massive broadswords.
It was forged primarily from Adamantium.
This perfectly explained why, in the original cinematic timeline, he had been able to hack Captain America’s shield to pieces with just a few heavy strikes.
After all, Adamantium was one of the few metals in existence demonstrably harder than Vibranium.
His Tyrant Armor gleamed in an imposing gold laced with stark black accents.
Beyond its nigh-impenetrable physical defense, it boasted incredible magical resistance.
This was because, alongside the Adamantium base, it had been heavily alloyed with Uru metal.
The Uru was exactly what provided the armor’s anti-magic properties.
He remembered well how, in the movies, a fully unhinged Scarlet Witch had him pinned down and completely outmatched.
It was the Tyrant Armor that had kept him from being instantly crushed to death by her chaos magic.
That crucial delay was what gave him the fleeting window needed to order Sanctuary II to rain fire in that desperate, indiscriminate bombardment.
Fully equipped and radiating sheer menace, Thanos raised his head.
He gave the heavy Greatsword a few test swings, the massive blades slicing through the air with an ominous hum, before pointing the tip straight toward the heavens.
“A new era of war has begun,” he rumbled, his voice echoing through the massive hall.
“Are you prepared?”
The Black Order immediately dropped to one knee, their voices ringing out in unison.
“You are our guiding light, My Lord!
Wherever your gaze falls, that is the world we shall conquer!”
“We swear on our lives to follow in your footsteps, until the very edge of the universe is unified under your absolute rule!”
“We are your most loyal servants!”
Following the Black Order’s fanatical oath, the countless soldiers stationed around the grand hall dropped to their knees as a rippling wave, their voices joining the deafening chorus of absolute loyalty.
Among them stood the monstrous Outrider bioweapons, the screeching Chitauri, and even the surviving warriors of his own Titan race.