Lucius appeared in the air above Puente Antiguo under full invisibility and immediately decided the town still looked exactly as provincial as he remembered.
That was not necessarily an insult. Provincial places had a kind of accidental honesty to them. No skyscrapers pretending to be civilisation. No polished financial district trying to hide greed under glass. Just a dry New Mexico town in the path of a god's public humiliation.
Below him, Thor stood in the street facing the Destroyer.
The size difference alone should have ended the argument before anybody opened their mouth. Thor, even stripped down to mortal flesh and bruised pride, was still a large man, somewhere around six and a half feet of blond muscle, arrogance, and delayed character growth. The Destroyer towered over him at roughly twice that height, all dense uru metal, royal engineering, and the kind of design only immortal people could look at and call practical.
Lucius, floating invisible nearby, disliked the head immediately.
It was a ridiculous piece of work.
The faceplate sections slid and folded apart before the beam attack in a way that clearly prioritised dramatic intimidation over sensible weapon housing. Too many moving parts. Too much ceremonial arrogance. Too many opportunities for dust, damage, or one competent engineer to ask why the people who built it had never heard of streamlined venting or internal focusing arrays. It looked like a furnace designed by an old man.
That, to be fair, was probably close to the truth.
Thor stepped forward anyway.
Lucius listened as the blond moron delivered his plea to the machine and, by extension, to the brother operating it from half a universe away.
"Brother, whatever I have done to wrong you, whatever I have done to lead you to do this, I am truly sorry. But these people are innocent. Taking their lives will gain you nothing. So take mine. And end this."
It should have sounded noble.
Instead, it sounded like the last emotional negotiation of a man who had spent the film losing every argument except the one with himself.
The Destroyer answered with action rather than philosophy. It turned its back half a fraction as if winding up a point, then swung round and backhanded Thor hard enough to send him crashing through the air and down the street.
Lucius watched him fly and decided that was probably the clearest sentence anyone had spoken all evening.
Jane Foster ran to Thor at once. The mortal lover drama could always be trusted to arrive on schedule. She dropped beside him in panic while the others shouted, moved, flinched, and tried to process the fact that their local mystery was apparently negotiating with divine artillery.
Lucius did not join them.
He slid in beside the Destroyer instead and laid a finger lightly against the armour's frame.
Sersi's gift gave him the deep read. Matter, structure, composition, lattice, density, stress memory, internal flow. Phastos's mind gave him the next step, not just understanding what the machine was, but immediately seeing what it should have been if anyone involved had valued efficiency over intimidation.
The uru metal opened under his perception first. It carried the same underlying structure as Mjolnir.
First, as a dense, responsive material, not passive like ordinary alloys but almost eager in the presence of power, as if it had been selected for its willingness to carry force without complaint. Beneath that sat the true core, the Odinforce stored within it and routed through the construct as both fuel and ammunition. That was what drove the Destroyer's ranged attack. Not some separate battery or elegant secondary mechanism. Odinforce, concentrated and channelled through one overdesigned face structure that unfolded like a ceremonial flower before vomiting devastation at whatever had annoyed the throne.
Lucius followed every line of it.
The weapon design offended him nearly as much as the power source. If one were going to build a royal execution platform, one might at least have the decency to build a better muzzle arrangement. Phastos's gift was already sketching corrections in his head. Tighter channelling. Cleaner articulation. More efficient energy release. Better combat posture. Less devotional nonsense. The machine had strength. It lacked taste.
By the time he pulled his hand away, he understood the Destroyer down to the last atom.
That was one prize handled.
He drifted back across the street and took position near Thor's body just as the next part of the old worthiness drama reached its appointed cue.
He did not have to wait long.
Mjolnir came in like a decision made at speed.
The hammer tore through the air, through distance, through every excuse Thor had been living under, and slammed into his hand, while thunder rumbled up above, the armour returned, and the old power reopened inside him.
Thor rose.
Lucius withdrew before the returning thunder struck Thor and then slipped back at once.
This was the part he had actually come for.
He expected hidden new structures, some grand second layer, some secret addition buried under the restored transformation. Instead, he found something more irritatingly elegant. Nothing new had been inserted. The old channels were simply active again. The dimmed pathways through Thor's body, muted under Odin's punishment, had reopened and lit up under restoration. The system had always been there. The enchantment had not added a new god. It had reauthorised the old one.
Lucius followed the power flow deeper and felt the true source of it: cosmic energy.
Not raw in the way sorcerers stole it from other dimensions, and not cleanly external either. This was blended into Thor's own life force, a personal and biological current fused with something wider and infinite. The same principle touched Odinforce, too, only denser, older, more saturated with the king's own existence. A unique mix each time, but the foundation was the same.
So, in the end, everything came back to cosmic energy and the biological lottery.
If a being was lucky enough to be born with the right structure, like an Asgardian or a Vanir, then the universe simply shook its head and let the impossible in. If not, there were still other routes. Wizards, for instance, cheated like smugglers or thieves, to be more precise and siphoned what they wanted from somewhere else. It all came down to access, compatibility, and the refusal to ask permission from the wrong authority.
Thor, fully restored now, took the fight back to the Destroyer with all the renewed confidence of a man whose software patch had finally downloaded.
Lucius, having gotten exactly what he wanted, found the emotional reunion around Jane immediately unbearable.
The blond monkey had been given power, status, thunder, armour, mythic validation, and yet there he was still orbiting the same mortal woman like prophecy had mistaken him for a lovesick intern.
"Seriously," Lucius muttered under his breath, "this man was destined to destroy Asgard."
He sneered once at the whole lovey-dovey arrangement and teleported away before the sentiment could spread.
--
He reappeared in the lab at Alkali Lake with the kind of mood that only theft, murder and good data had ever given him.
The lucky slab still sat where it belonged. The soldiers still waited for orders. The facility still smelled like cold metal, bad intentions, and military disinfectant trying to pretend it counted as morality.
Lucius went straight to the slab and tapped his fingers against it as though greeting a productive acquaintance.
"Bring me wood," he ordered the nearest soldiers.
They moved at once.
He was going to make his own Destroyers before visiting Ross. Not identical, obviously. He had standards. But the principle mattered, and wood, or anything else, was a perfectly respectable starting material when one had matter manipulation and intended to insult a god-king's engineering by improving on it from memory.
While he waited, he turned his attention to the more immediate reward.
Storm and lightning.
He sat on the edge of the slab and began testing the new pattern in his head, comparing what he had felt from Thor in passive circulation and active expression. The structure sat there almost like an added module waiting for installation, not something alien, but close enough to adaptation that his mind was already trying possible routes.
Unlike Thor, he did not need a hammer. That was the whole point of being a wizard with bad boundaries.
He disappeared from the lab and reappeared high over the Alkali Lake forest.
Lucius let the power structure unfold in thought.
He did not imitate Thor exactly. That would have been crude and, worse, derivative. He took the storm pattern, broke it apart, rewove it through his own framework, and fed it with cosmic energy under a logic his mind could keep. The clouds responded first, thin grey at the edges, then darker, then blackening with unnatural speed as he pulled the weather together. Lightning began jumping between them in jagged white veins. Thunder answered a heartbeat later.
He inhaled and kept going.
The important part was not using it once. The important part was to make it a habit, allowing the mind and body to stop treating it as an external trick and start treating it as another innate skill.
So he let the structure settle.
He adapted it to Eternal physiology, fitted it through his own pathways, and forced the pattern to stop feeling borrowed.
When he opened his eyes again, they were burning electric blue.
He looked down, found the first moving target below, and willed the thunder to strike.
The bolt hit instantly.
It speared out of the cloud mass with the hungry violence only weather got away with, struck the ground below, and erased the target in a burst of white and black and torn sound.
Lucius narrowed his eyes and looked properly.
One of the soldiers he had ordered to bring wood had been crossing the yard at exactly the wrong moment.
Now he was not.
Lucius shrugged.
"Wrong place, wrong time."
Then he teleported back to the lab to see whether the others had at least managed not to drop the timber.