Thor's exclamation left him before he had finished processing what he was seeing.
Loki did not respond to it. Something moved in the depths of his eyes at the sound of Thor's voice, something complex and wordless that crossed his face and was gone before it could be named. Then he raised the Mind Scepter and pointed it at both of them.
The Chitauri infantry behind him opened fire simultaneously.
Laser energy crossed the distance in a flat volley, scorching lines through the broken air of the street. Nolan raised both arms and the Ten Rings came back to him, forming a rotating barrier that deflected what came near his head while his boots drove him forward, the Warscythe coming up in his other hand. He went directly at the Chitauri formation and the hunched figure moving at its back, Loki already trying to fold an illusion around himself and disappear into the chaos.
Beside him, Thor stopped being shocked and became something else entirely.
Mjolnir went up.
The thunder that answered was not incidental, it was summoned, dragged down from whatever source Thor pulled it from, and it fell across the Chitauri infantry in continuous strikes that left nothing standing where it touched. Thor moved into the formation like something that had been given permission to stop holding back, lightning spreading across his body with every impact, every swing of the hammer clearing a wider area than the last.
He pushed toward the place where Loki had been.
The complexity of what Thor was carrying in this moment was not visible in his face. What was visible was the force he brought to it. Loki had been his brother, for as long as memory held, and this city held people Thor had chosen. The lover he thought of when he thought of this planet. Friends. The mortals who had stood in the streets and cheered and feared and admired in equal measure. None of them had done anything to deserve Loki's army. There was no argument to be made for mercy that did not collapse under the weight of what was burning around them, and Thor had made his decision before he had fully landed.
The kindest thing he could do for his brother now was to be the one who ended it.
Nolan drove through the infantry and cut toward Loki's last position.
The Warscythe swept through a figure that looked exactly like Loki, and the figure shattered into green light fragments that drifted apart and faded. An illusion. Debris lifted from the street surface in the same instant, chunks of rubble and metal fragments rising and accelerating, firing themselves at Nolan from several directions simultaneously as if from invisible launchers.
He brought the Ten Rings up in a rotating pattern around his head, the only part of him without the vibranium plate's protection, and let them intercept the debris. His instincts were already working ahead of his conscious awareness, parsing the environmental data his senses were providing, looking for the tell that would locate the real body behind the projected decoys.
There: a displacement in the air on his left, a specific quality of distortion that the illusions produced but that Loki's actual physical presence also produced when he moved.
Shadow Step.
The dimensional shortcut deposited him beside the real figure in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and the Warscythe came down before Loki had completed the motion of turning to face him.
Green fragments scattered. Another false image.
Nolan landed, scanned, and felt it before he saw it: a thin line of bright yellow energy spreading toward him from his right, moving at head height, quiet and precise. The mind control vector.
It reached him.
The foreign will that pressed against the inside of his skull lasted approximately one second before his own will drove it back out. The effort of it cracked the street surface under his boots as the tension in his body found somewhere to go.
"Still want to control me?" The words came out in a register that was not quite a roar and not quite speech. "Get out of my head."
The corner of his vision caught the air distortion. He committed to the angle and brought the Warscythe across in a single hard stroke.
Metal broke.
The Mind Scepter took the blade at its upper third and the two pieces separated. Loki's concealment dropped with it, the hunched figure appearing in the open street, staring at the two halves of the scepter with an expression that was not fear exactly but was adjacent to it.
"This is impossible. This is..."
Nolan stepped forward and swung again.
Loki threw up a rapid sequence of false images around himself, each one solid enough to give pause, none of them solid enough to matter when the blade swept through them on instinct rather than sight. The Warscythe found the real body.
Loki went down in two pieces.
The upper half landed on the broken street surface. Ice-blue blood ran from the corner of his mouth and pooled beneath him. One hand closed around the half of the Mind Scepter that had fallen nearby, gripping it with the automatic reflex of someone reaching for the last thing familiar.
Nolan raised the Warscythe.
"Brother Nolan." Thor's voice reached him from close behind, low and controlled with visible effort. "Let me."
Nolan looked at the blade in his hand. Looked at what was on the ground.
He lowered it.
"All right. It doesn't matter who."
Thor came to stand beside him, and for a moment he simply stood there, looking down at what remained of the person he had grown up alongside. Whatever was happening inside him did not reach his face cleanly. He kept his voice even.
"Loki. You know what you have done. The mortals of this city are dying for your ambitions. Why."
Loki raised his eyes. The ferocity in them was not diminished by the ice-blue blood or the ruin of his body.
"Stop performing." His voice was thin but steady. "You enjoy the admiration. You always have. The hero posture, the mortal worship, it has always suited you perfectly. Don't pretend otherwise for my benefit."
He moved his gaze to Nolan, and something in it sharpened.
"My resentment toward you was always about capability. You exceeded me, and I could not accept it. But my hatred for Thor." A pause. "That comes from somewhere much deeper."
A breath that cost him something.
"And do you imagine killing me closes this? The portal falls when I fall, perhaps. But a Chitauri fleet is already in transit. They follow my orders, yes, but their primary function predates me: recover the Infinity Stones for the Mad Titan. You cannot negotiate with that fleet. You cannot outrun it." His expression moved into something that was not quite triumph and not quite grief. "You cannot even leave this planet easily. So you will watch everything here be taken apart, and the whole world will be buried alongside me, and I find that I cannot help but"
The plasma sphere and the lightning bolt arrived simultaneously.
They came from two directions and converged on what remained of Loki in the same instant, the heat and the electrical discharge combining into something total. Where the upper half of a figure in black robes had been, there was briefly a blue luminescence, and then there was nothing: no ash, no residue, no fragment of cloth or metal. The street was simply empty in that space.
Nolan lowered the Heart of the Furnace.
Thor let Mjolnir rest at his side.
They looked at each other across the empty space where Loki had been, and then, without speaking, both of them shook their heads at the same moment.
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