Knowhere was burning.
Levi stepped out of a spatial rift. Beneath his feet, molten metal still glowed red-hot. The air was thick with the stench of char and ozone.
Everything around him was dead. The Collector's prized treasures had all been reduced to indistinguishable scrap.
A massive purple figure stood at the center of the ruins, his back turned to him.
It was Thanos.
On his left hand was the Infinity Gauntlet, the purple Power Stone embedded within it glowing steadily. In his right hand, he held a writhing mass of red energy—the Reality Stone.
The Collector, Taneleer Tivan, lay twisted on the ground nearby, his face frozen in sheer terror.
Thanos turned around. His deeply lined face was calm, his gaze devoid of surprise, as if he had been expecting Levi all along.
"You're here."
"I'm late," Levi said. "Didn't expect you to move this fast. Looks like you've already been to Xandar."
His eyes fell on the Reality Stone. "That doesn't belong to you."
"No," Thanos said evenly. "It belongs to no one. It belongs to the destiny of the universe. Just like this place—bloated, chaotic… in need of cleansing."
He raised his gauntleted left hand slightly, the Power Stone flickering.
"The universe's resources are finite, yet life expands without end. From my homeworld of Titan to your Earth, it is always the same. I am merely here to correct an inevitable error."
"And your solution is to randomly kill half of all life?" Levi asked.
Thanos didn't answer directly. Instead, he lifted the Reality Stone and waved it lightly over the ruins.
The flames instantly extinguished. Collapsed structures reassembled. Shattered glass display cases became whole again. Tivan's corpse vanished, as if he had never died.
A second later, the illusion shattered—and everything reverted to the burning wasteland.
"No," Thanos said, his voice laced with near-fanatical conviction. "It is salvation. The remaining half will know abundance and gratitude. They will thank me—for giving them a future without hunger and war."
"A reality wrapped in lies is still fake," Levi shook his head. "You're just a self-righteous tyrant."
Thanos fell silent. To him, debates over ideology were meaningless.
He pressed the writhing red energy into the Infinity Gauntlet. The Aether flowed obediently into the second slot, forming a crimson gem.
Now, two stones shone in tandem.
"Then let me show you… what true reality is."
The moment he finished speaking, Levi moved.
With a single step, he vanished. The next instant, he appeared before Thanos, throwing a straight punch infused with the Law of Power.
This punch could shatter stars.
Thanos neither dodged nor blocked.
The fist landed squarely on his jaw.
It did nothing.
That world-breaking force was absorbed and nullified the instant it touched Thanos's skin, erased by a more fundamental and overbearing rule.
"Your power is impressive," Thanos rolled his jaw slightly, a hint of approval flickering in his eyes for the first time. "But that's all."
Then he threw a punch of his own.
Simple. Direct. No flourish.
This was the ultimate expression of the Law of Body—anything struck must break.
Space warped instantly in front of Levi, forming an invisible barrier.
Crack.
The barrier shattered.
Levi was forced half a step back by the aftershock, his entire arm going numb.
They looked at each other.
Both understood—conventional methods were useless.
The battle erupted again.
Levi raised a finger.
[Law · Gravity Crush]
The air around Thanos solidified, compressed into invisible steel. Yet Thanos merely sank slightly, a faint purple aura surfacing over his muscles, and forced the pressure apart.
Levi's hand curved into a claw, slicing through the air.
[Law · Severance]
An invisible blade cut toward Thanos's neck—but stopped one centimeter from his skin, as if striking an absolute barrier, and shattered on its own.
His body itself was the most unbreakable law.
Levi stopped.
Thanos stopped.
"Your laws are unfocused," Thanos said, like a teacher critiquing a student. "Space, power—even a trace of reality. But they lack foundation. They're only superficial applications."
Levi ignored him.
He took a deep breath and stopped probing.
Spreading his arms, an invisible domain expanded outward from him, instantly covering a hundred-meter radius. Within it, flames froze. Dust hung motionless.
When he spoke, his voice carried like a divine decree.
"Within my domain, all laws are mine to rewrite."
He looked at Thanos and established the first rule.
"No gods here."
The moment the words fell, Thanos's massive body sank abruptly.
He felt the connection between himself and that indestructible, eternal law severed by a higher authority.
He was no longer an undying Titan—just flesh and blood.
Levi vanished again, reappearing before Thanos.
The same punch.
No laws. Just pure physical strength—enhanced by the Super Soldier Serum and divine physiology.
Boom!
His fist struck Thanos's chest with a dull crack of breaking bone.
Thanos staggered back three steps, each one fracturing the molten ground beneath his feet.
He looked down.
A deep dent had caved into his chest. Purple blood seeped from torn flesh.
He was injured.
For the first time in millennia, someone had truly wounded him with raw physical force.
Thanos looked up. There was no pain in his eyes—only cold fury, and a spark of exhilaration at meeting a worthy opponent.
"An interesting domain," he said in a low voice, slowly raising the Infinity Gauntlet.
The Reality Stone flared with an eerie crimson glow.
"But you seem to have forgotten—reality is mine to decide."
A flash of red.
The dent in Thanos's chest vanished.
Not healed—erased. The wound, the impact, the blood—gone as if they had never existed.
Levi's brows knitted tightly.
He could rewrite physical laws—but Thanos, with the Stones, rewrote reality itself. In front of an Infinity Stone, his domain felt like a child's make-believe rules.
As he spoke, Thanos opened his right hand.
A blue cube rested quietly in his palm.
The Tesseract.
Levi's pupils shrank.
Loki.
The God of Mischief—once imprisoned by him, then taken back to Asgard by Thor.
He had handed the Tesseract to Thanos.
A flicker of shock crossed Levi's face, and Thanos clearly enjoyed it. His hand clenched.
Crack!
The Tesseract shattered piece by piece.
Blue spatial energy burst forth, only to be forcibly contained in his palm by the Power Stone.
From the fragments, a brilliant blue gem emerged.
Thanos picked up the Space Stone and pressed it eagerly into the third slot of the Gauntlet.
Buzz—
A wave of energy, several times more terrifying than before, swept across Knowhere.
Levi's domain trembled violently. Cracks spread along its edges, on the verge of collapse.
"Now," Thanos said with a hint of mockery, "it's my turn to define the rules."
He raised his hand. The Space Stone blazed.
Within Levi's domain, space twisted.
The ground beneath his feet stretched miles away, while distant debris appeared within arm's reach. Up and down reversed. Left and right lost meaning. Gravity flickered—vanishing one moment, multiplying a hundredfold the next.
The stable laws he had constructed were completely dismantled at the fundamental level.
"No one can stand against the balance of the universe."
Thanos's form warped, folded, and compressed—until he became a point of light and vanished.
Only Levi remained, standing amid the ruins of broken laws, his expression grim.
He tried to tear open space and return to Earth—but the influence of the Space Stone had yet to fade.
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