Thanos's voice echoed between heaven and earth, every word striking the ruins like a sledgehammer. The Black Order's warships adjusted their guns, tens of thousands of energy cannons charging at once with a low, terrifying hum. Purple light gathered at their muzzles, staining the entire sky an ominous dark violet. Outrider drop pods kept falling like a shower of black meteors, blasting countless craters into the ground. Hideous alien creatures crawled out of the hatches, snarling hoarsely as they began to encircle the center of the ruins. Lin Xiao looked up at the purple figure in the sky, then at Bruce Banner, kneeling amid the rubble and engulfed in six-colored light. He pressed his Communicator, his voice frighteningly calm. "All units, final defensive protocol. Protect Dr. Banner at all costs. Until he snaps his fingers."
The rifts in the sky were still widening.
These were not ordinary gaps in the clouds, but tears in space itself. Strange blue-violet arcs flickered along their edges, crackling like wounds in the universe bleeding. Through them lay the depths of space, distant nebulae, and stellar trajectories that did not belong to this point in time. The largest rift stretched across the horizon, more than ten kilometers long and wide enough for a warship to pass through.
And Sanctuary II was forcing its way out of that rift.
Its bow emerged first, its menacing metal structure covered in energy burns—scars left by its forced passage through the temporal barrier. Deep-purple energy lines spread and pulsed across the hull like veins. Slowly, inch by inch, the ship squeezed out of the rift, metal scraping against the edges of space with a teeth-grating shriek. With every advance, more fragments of spacetime peeled away from the rift's edges and dissolved into blue motes in the air.
The Black