"Goodbye!"
Without the slightest hesitation, Thor tossed his beloved Mjolnir aside and looked up at the chunks of ice, some massive, some small, crashing down from above. His face was filled with acceptance.
"Goodbye..."
Loki and Frigga whispered softly.
Once the dome collapsed and came crashing down, not a single person on the ground would survive.
Those few short seconds felt impossibly long.
In these final moments, some people desperately gave in to their basest instincts, but far more simply buried their faces in their lovers' arms, quietly feeling every beat of the other person's heart.
"Humans and gods... we're all the same."
In the face of life and death, every facet of living beings was laid bare, all their ugliness and all their greatness.
Fenrir pressed his lips together tightly. His extraordinary eyesight allowed him to ignore the darkness around him and take in every detail in the distance.
Whoosh!
Two pairs of thin, shimmering rainbow-colored wings, one larger than the other, suddenly unfurled from his back. At the same time, Fenrir's eyes silently transformed into a pair of enormous compound eyes.
Such deep, alien eyes looked profoundly unnatural on a human face, without the slightest trace of beauty.
But in exchange, his dynamic vision increased severalfold.
Swoosh!
Time seemed to freeze at that moment.
The countless chunks of solid ice that had been plummeting toward the ground suddenly slowed in Fenrir's vision, as though the entire world had been reduced to a fraction of its normal speed.
Fenrir's mind raced.
In an instant, he mapped out a clear route.
Compared to Mothra's true form, whose wingspan approached eighty meters, his smaller human form was actually a tremendous advantage here. The endless fragments of ice had almost completely sealed off the sky, leaving little room to maneuver.
The moment the thought crossed his mind, his magnificent wings beat once.
Fenrir vanished from where he stood.
His figure disappeared entirely from the vast cavern, leaving only a brilliant rainbow streak that flashed through the air. It twisted and darted with impossible precision, avoiding every falling mass of ice in its path.
The ice was falling fast.
But Fenrir was faster.
In the final second before Thor closed his eyes, he saw a streak of rainbow light ignite between the collapsing dome and the shattered ice.
"Fenrir?"
The sight sent a jolt through Thor's heart.
He suddenly remembered the night he had first met Fenrir, when Fenrir had transformed into that butterfly-like creature.
Beautiful.
And dangerous.
Thor blinked.
The brilliant trail flashed across the air.
One second it had been far away.
The next, it had crossed an impossible distance and appeared directly before him.
The shockwave created by Fenrir's tremendous speed blasted a massive hollow corridor through the air behind him. As that familiar presence rushed toward Thor, carrying with it an overwhelming vitality that seemed almost endless, hope immediately reignited in Thor's previously despairing eyes.
"Fen... rir..."
Thor's voice reached Fenrir's ears, stretched into a long, distorted sound by the difference in their speed.
"Save... me..."
Fenrir could even clearly see every muscle in Thor's face trembling with excitement.
Thor slowly reached out toward him, while his other arm remained firmly wrapped around his mother and brother.
The final few hundred meters were nothing to Fenrir at his current speed.
He reached out for Thor while both pairs of wings beat behind him, drawing a beautiful arc through the air.
One hundred meters...
Fifty meters...
Five meters.
As long as he grabbed Thor, Fenrir could easily carry all three of them out of here.
Even now, the first wave of falling ice was still nearly a hundred meters above the ground.
Buzz...
Thor's face was already right in front of him.
Thor saw Fenrir reaching toward him, but before the smile on his face could fully form, it froze completely.
Amid the desperate cries of the crowd, a low hum unlike anything else suddenly sounded.
It was pleasant.
Gentle.
Yet it carried such overwhelming divine majesty that no one could bring themselves to face it directly.
In an instant, it spread across all of Asgard.
The chaotic fragments of ice, the panic and despair on the gods' faces, even the collapsing dome itself seemed to freeze at that exact moment.
All confusion and noise vanished.
The entire world became so silent that even the drop of a needle could have been heard.
Time...
Had stopped?
Fenrir tore his gaze away from Thor, who was only a few meters from him, and instinctively looked around.
The world had changed.
Everything around him remained completely motionless.
But unlike before, this near-perfect stillness had nothing to do with Fenrir's extreme speed.
It was more as though someone had gently placed a hand against the lever controlling time itself and prevented it from moving.
The entire world had stopped.
"This... isn't right..."
But when Fenrir looked more closely, he realized that everything was still following its original trajectory.
The movement was simply so minuscule that it was almost impossible to perceive.
Time had not actually stopped.
It was more like...
An unimaginably powerful force had forcibly pinned everything in place.
Including Fenrir himself.
Fenrir struggled violently and suddenly realized that, without noticing when it had happened, he had been forced out of his high-speed state.
The rainbow light trailing behind him had vanished as well.
Without even realizing it, he had become part of this frozen world.
"I..."
Fenrir frowned.
Both pairs of wings behind him beat furiously, producing enough force to propel him to several times the speed of sound.
Yet all that power seemed to disappear into an endless abyss.
He could not move even an inch.
What kind of power was this?
It wasn't the Time Stone.
And it didn't feel like the Space Stone either.
When Fenrir carefully tried to sense it, he found absolutely nothing.
All he could vaguely tell was that this unfathomable force held no hostility toward him.
If anything, it felt strangely familiar.
Almost comforting.
"Thank you, child of Earth."
"Thank you for everything you have done for Asgard."
While Fenrir stood there stunned, brilliant golden light suddenly appeared without warning, instantly illuminating the darkened world.
An aged yet remarkably gentle male voice sounded beside him.
Fenrir's vision blurred.
Then, without any warning, a figure wearing pajamas appeared before him.
He looked no different from an ordinary elderly man.
There was no distortion, no disturbance, nothing that suggested anything unusual had happened.
It felt perfectly natural, as though he had always been standing there.
Even with Fenrir's senses having grown so powerful, he had failed to perceive the process in the slightest.
"God-King... Odin..."
Fenrir's lips moved slightly.
He never would have imagined that his second meeting with the All-Father would happen under circumstances like these.
"I never expected my slumber to plunge Asgard into such a catastrophe."
Odin's remaining eye regarded Fenrir gently, filled with warmth and goodwill.
"I saw everything you did, and all the mercy you showed the gods of Asgard..."
"Thank you, Fenrir. If not for you, Asgard would likely have already been completely destroyed by Laufey."
(End of Chapter)
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