Arthur didn't yell. He didn't posture. He simply released the restraints he'd kept on his own power.
He thrust both hands forward.
Fiendfyre.
But this wasn't the testing fire from before. Arthur's will clamped down on the cursed flames with iron control, forcing the chaotic magic into a shape of absolute destruction.
The magma-colored fire twisted, condensed, and erupted with a roar that shook the palace foundations. It took the form of a massive serpentine dragon. Fifty feet long, scales shifting between orange and black, eyes burning with hungry malevolence.
But Arthur wasn't finished.
Just as the fire dragon took flight, his other hand crackled with blinding blue-white energy. He didn't just summon lightning, he imbued it with the same cursed, semi-sentient animation as the Fiendfyre.
Fiendthunder.
A second beast erupted, a dragon made of living, jagged electricity. It didn't roar; it cracked like a whip breaking the sound barrier, its form constantly shifting and snapping with high-voltage fury.
"Hunt," Arthur whispered.
The two elemental leviathans screeched in unison and dived.
Laufey, one-armed and battered, looked up to see his doom approaching from two angles. The Fire Dragon swept in from the left, its maw gaping wide. The Thunder Dragon jagged in from the right, moving at nearly the speed of light.
Laufey roared, summoning every ounce of ancient magic left in his blood.
"I am the Winter!"
He slammed his remaining hand into the ground. A glacier exploded upward, encasing him in a dome of diamond-hard ice ten feet thick.
It didn't matter.
The Fire Dragon struck first, wrapping its coils around the dome. The cursed heat didn't just melt the ice, it consumed the magic holding it together. The glacier turned to slush in a heartbeat.
Then the Thunder Dragon struck the wet, weakening ice.
BOOM.
The conduction was instantaneous. The glacier exploded from the inside out as electricity arced through the water-saturated structure.
Laufey was thrown clear, rolling across the shattered plaza. He scrambled to his feet, desperate now. He fired a barrage of absolute-zero ice spears at the Fire Dragon, trying to extinguish it.
The spears melted before they could touch the flames.
He spun, raising a wall to block the Thunder Dragon. The lightning beast simply phased through the ice, shattering it into dust with a sonic boom, and snapped its jaws at Laufey's face.
Laufey dodged by a hair's breadth, the smell of ozone burning his nose.
"Face me!" Laufey screamed, searching for the mage. "Stop hiding behind your constructs!"
He spotted Arthur hovering in the sky, arms crossed, watching the carnage like a conductor observing an orchestra.
Laufey leaped. Using his immense strength, he launched himself into the air, his remaining hand forming a jagged lance of ice, aiming to skewer Arthur mid-flight.
Pop.
Arthur vanished.
He reappeared fifty feet higher, looking down with cold indifference.
Laufey reached the apex of his jump, hitting nothing but empty air. Gravity took hold, and he began to fall.
Right into the path of the circling dragons.
He landed hard, and immediately the assault resumed.
"Target evasion rate declining," Eve reported. "Regeneration failing to maintain pace with damage accumulation."
Laufey was dancing on the edge of a knife. He ducked under a tail of cursed fire that turned a stone pillar to ash. He leaped over a claw of lightning that gouged a trench in the hard stone.
He tried to counter-attack, summoning a blizzard to disrupt the constructs' forms. But the synergy between the dragons was too perfect: what the fire didn't burn, the lightning shattered. What the lightning didn't break, the fire melted.
Laufey was panting, his regeneration failing, his energy reserves bottoming out. He was just a tired, broken old king fighting forces of nature he couldn't control.
Arthur, sensing the drop in Laufey's resistance, uncrossed his arms.
"Next level."
He slammed his palms together.
Below, the two dragons shrieked. They stopped their individual attacks and spiraled toward each other. Fire met Lightning. Orange met Blue.
They didn't cancel each other out.
They merged.
A colossal Thunder-Fire Dragon formed.
A monstrosity of swirling plasma and cursed electricity, its scales shifting between magma and voltage. The heat and noise were unbearable, warping the air itself.
Laufey looked up. For the first time in millennia, he didn't even try to defend.
There was no point.
The dragon struck.
It didn't explode on impact. It opened its massive jaws and clamped them around Laufey's torso.
Laufey screamed as the cursed fusion magic burned and electrocuted him simultaneously. His flesh charred. His nerves overloaded. His very bones conducted the killing voltage.
The dragon pulled up, carrying the screaming King into the sky. It flew in a tight loop, gaining speed, turning into a blurring wheel of destruction, before diving toward the ground or in this case, the Rainbow Bridge.
As the dragon flew down, it released Laufey at the bottom of its arc, adding its own explosive breath to his momentum.
Laufey was launched like a cannonball. He flew across the city, a smoking, burning projectile, and crashed onto the golden bridge.
He skidded for a hundred yards, tearing up the rainbow-colored surface, before coming to a stop barely ten feet from where Loki lay battered and bleeding.
Laufey groaned, smoke rising from his charred form. He was alive, but only because his biology was absurdly durable. He couldn't move. He couldn't fight.
He was done.
On the bridge, Thor and Loki froze, staring at the smoking ruin of the Frost Giant King that had just fallen from the sky like a meteor.
Pop.
Arthur Apparated next to Thor, casually dusting off his suit.
High above the city, the massive Thunder-Fire Dragon still circled in the clouds, roaring silently—a terrifying reminder of the power Arthur commanded.
"Did I miss anything?" Arthur asked conversationally.
Thor looked at Arthur. Then at the smoking ruin of Laufey. Then at the blinding beam of energy tearing through space toward Jotunheim.
"The Bifrost!" Thor said, his voice desperate. "Can you stop it?"
Arthur studied the mechanism. The energy output was spiking exponentially. The fail-safes had been completely bypassed.
"Analysis complete," Eve's voice rang in his ear. "The mechanism is locked in a runaway feedback loop. Attempting to magically suppress the beam will result in catastrophic energy backlash. Estimated yield: Equivalent to a supernova. Survival probability: 0%."
"I can't shut it down, Thor," Arthur shouted over the roar of the beam. "Whatever Loki did, he broke the controls completely. If I force it with magic, the explosion wipes out Asgard."
Thor's grip on Mjolnir tightened until his knuckles went white. He looked at the bridge, then at the beam destroying Jotunheim.
"There has to be another way."
On the ground, Laufey stirred.
He was a mess of burns and missing limbs, but his hatred was strong enough to keep him moving. His one remaining eye fixed on Loki with murderous intent.
"You," Laufey growled, struggling to rise despite his wounds. "You would destroy everything. Your birth realm. Your own species. For what? The approval of a man who is not even your father?"
"I thought you didn't care about our people," Loki spat, blood streaming from his mouth.
"I do not." Laufey's remaining hand formed an ice blade. "But I will take at least one trophy to Hel."
He didn't attack Arthur or Thor. He lunged for the prone, defeated Loki.
"NO!" Thor reacted on instinct.
He hurled Mjolnir. The hammer struck Laufey in the chest mid-lunge with enough force to shatter mountains.
CRUNCH.
The impact lifted the Frost Giant off his feet and sent him tumbling toward the edge of the bridge.
But Laufey didn't fight the momentum. He embraced it. He scrambled to the edge, threw himself over the railing, and began sliding down one of the massive support struts toward the cosmic ocean below.
It was his chance to escape.
"He flees!" Thor shouted, summoning Mjolnir back to his hand to give chase.
"No!" Arthur stopped him. "The Bifrost, Thor! If you don't stop it, Jotunheim is dust. I'll handle the big guy."
Thor looked at the beam, then at Arthur. His jaw set with grim resolve.
"End him."
Arthur turned toward the falling giant. Extended both hands.
And pulled.
—
The Mirror Dimension
The air shattered like glass.
Laufey had been sliding toward freedom, planning his escape into the cosmic depths where he could recover and plot revenge. Suddenly, the support strut twisted into a spiral. The starry void below turned into a fractured kaleidoscope of gold and violet. Gravity shifted, and Laufey fell up, landing hard on a platform that hadn't existed a moment ago.
"Where—" Laufey spun around, his voice echoing strangely. "What sorcery is this?"
"The Mirror Dimension." Arthur's voice came from everywhere and nowhere. "A space between spaces. Separate from Asgard. Separate from everything."
Laufey searched desperately for an escape. The Mirror Dimension reflected Asgard's golden architecture, but everything was wrong. Buildings floated at impossible angles, stairs led to ceilings, the sky was fractured like shattered crystal.
"Why?" Laufey demanded. "Why pursue me so relentlessly? I have done nothing to you. Nothing to your realm."
Arthur appeared thirty feet above him, floating in the impossible air. His faceplate retracted, revealing a face utterly without mercy.
"I gave you a chance," Arthur said quietly. "You could have shown one moment of decency—one flicker of concern for your own people. And maybe I would have considered letting you live."
He raised his hand.
"But what you said about them... that destroyed any chance you had."
He didn't form a new spell. Instead, he made a beckoning motion.
Above them, the fabric of the Mirror Dimension tore open. A massive portal formed in the fractured sky.
Through it came a roar.
The Thunder-Fire Dragon, which Arthur had left circling over Asgard, dived through the portal. It entered the Mirror Dimension with a shriek of elemental fury, filling the impossible space with heat and noise and the promise of absolute destruction.
Laufey stared up in horror as the leviathan descended. "No..."
Arthur clenched his fist. "Compress."
The dragon didn't strike immediately. At Arthur's command, the massive beast began to coil in on itself. It twisted, tighter and tighter, the fire and lightning merging, compressing, densifying into something far more terrible than its previous form.
The Power Stone crystal in Arthur's chest pulsed, feeding raw cosmic energy into the compression.
The dragon collapsed into a sphere. A miniature sun of white-hot plasma and arcing violet lightning, pulsing with the heartbeat of a dying star. It hovered above Arthur's hand, huge and terrible, casting shadows that burned.
Supernova.
Laufey ran.
Despite the missing arm, despite the burns covering his body, he sprinted across the warped architecture of the Mirror Dimension, desperate to escape the heat that was already blistering his skin from a hundred yards away.
Arthur just watched him run.
He didn't chase.
He simply waved his free hand.
The Mirror Dimension bent.
One moment Laufey was running toward safety. The next, reality folded, and he stumbled back to where he'd started—directly beneath the miniature sun.
"No—" True terror finally crossed the Frost Giant's ancient features. "NO!"
Laufey raised his single hand, screaming, summoning every scrap of ice magic left in his ancient blood. A pathetic shield of frost formed—the last desperate defense of a three-thousand-year-old king.
It evaporated before the sun even touched it.
WHOOSH.
There was no explosion. The heat was too intense for that. There was only erasure.
As the sun consumed him, Laufey didn't burn—he disintegrated. The intense gravity of the compressed spell pulled his atoms apart, and the heat scrubbed them from existence. For a microsecond, his skeleton was visible in silhouette against the blinding light.
Then that too was gone.
"Target eliminated," Eve reported, her voice perfectly neutral. "Magical signature: Extinguished. No regeneration detected. Hostile life signs: Zero."
Arthur held the sphere for a moment longer, ensuring the job was complete.
Then he snapped his fingers.
The massive sun destabilized. It didn't fade—it burst.
It shattered into thousands of smaller spheres of fire and lightning, streaking outward in a silent, kaleidoscopic explosion of red, gold, and violet. A firework display for an audience of one.
"Farewell, King of Nothing," Arthur murmured, watching the colors paint the impossible sky.
He swept his hand, dismissing the Mirror Dimension. The glass shards of reality reassembled, and the world snapped back to normal.
—
The Bifrost – Moments Later
Arthur emerged onto the Rainbow Bridge just as Thor brought Mjolnir down for the final blow.
The Bifrost shattered.
The explosion was cataclysmic, energy discharging in all directions, the ancient mechanism tearing itself apart. Arthur Apparated to stable ground as the bridge collapsed into the void below, rainbow light fragmenting into a thousand dying colors.
The connection to Jotunheim severed. The genocide stopped.
But the bridge was destroyed. The Observatory was gone.
When the chaos settled, Arthur saw them.
Thor hung from the edge of the broken bridge, one hand gripping Gungnir's shaft. The other end was held by someone above. Odin, awakened from the Odinsleep, his single eye blazing with grief and power.
And dangling from Thor's other hand, clutching desperately at his brother's arm, was Loki.
"I could have done it, Father!" Loki's voice was broken, pleading. "I could have done it! For you! For all of us!"
Odin looked down at his adopted son. His face held no anger. No disappointment.
Only sorrow.
"No, Loki."
Two words. That was all.
But they carried the weight of everything. Every lie Loki had told himself, every scheme he'd convinced himself was justified, every desperate bid for approval that had brought him to this moment.
Something in Loki's face changed. The desperation faded. The pleading stopped.
In its place was something worse. Acceptance.
"Loki, no!" Thor's grip tightened. "Brother, hold on!"
Loki looked up at Thor. For just a moment, something real passed between them—something that transcended the manipulation and betrayal.
Then Loki let go.
"NO!"
Thor's scream echoed across the void as his brother fell. Down and down, into the swirling chaos beneath the broken bridge, into the space between worlds.
Arthur watched Loki disappear into the darkness.
He knew what waited out there. The void didn't lead to simple death. It led to other places. Other beings. A titan on a throne of floating stone, always searching for useful tools.
But that was a problem for another day.
For now, Arthur turned away from the broken bridge and walked back toward the palace.
The battle was over.
Time for what came next.