Thor's casual question struck the hearts of every Kang survivor like an invisible hammer.
Pure, instinctive fear gripped their throats.
No one dared to answer, no one dared to move.
Pharaoh Kang, leaning against the broken wall, shakily stood up.
His armor was still crackling with electricity, and his face was covered in dust and dried blood.
He stared intently at Thor, his eyes now filled with horror and madness, the greed in them replaced by fear.
"You..." His voice was dry and hoarse, "What exactly are you?"
Thor, carrying his battle axe, tilted his head as if he'd heard something amusing.
"I'm here to collect a debt."
He didn't waste any more words.
Pharaoh Kang seemed to have his last shred of dignity shattered by those words.
"Collect debts? You? A mere muscle-bound Asgardians!" he roared, raising his other hand sharply.
Two items in his palm lit up simultaneously.
One is a fragment of Cosmic Cube emitting a ghostly blue light; the other is a bizarrely shaped, seemingly all-consuming Ultimate Nullifier.
This was a trump card that the Council of Kangs had snatched from a collapsing universe at the cost of countless variant lives and resources.
"Disappear from existence!"
Pharaoh Kang poured all his remaining energy, along with his own life force, into the two artifacts.
A gray-white beam of light, combining the reshaping of reality with the erasure of concepts, condensed and took shape, aiming at Thor's head.
Wherever this beam of light passed, fragments of time, discontinuities in space—everything—vanished into the purest form of "nothingness."
A glimmer of hope had just ignited in the eyes of the surviving Combinator variants.
Then they saw Thor, who was carrying an axe, simply raise his other hand casually.
They didn't even use weapons.
He flicked his finger at the Oblivion beam that was powerful enough to wipe out a galaxy.
A tiny, almost negligible bolt of crimson-gold lightning leaped out from his fingertip.
Thunder and beam of light collided.
That grayish-white beam of Oblivion was like a punctured balloon, silently shattering and disintegrating from beginning to end, finally turning into countless specks of light that vanished into Void.
"..."
Pharaoh Kang's expression froze.
He couldn't understand what he was seeing.
Thor looked at him with a hint of pity in his eyes.
"The toy is a good toy, but unfortunately, you're too naive; you can't even understand how to play with it."
Before he finished speaking, Thor had already vanished from his spot.
The next instant, he appeared before Pharaoh Kang.
Pharaoh Kang's fighting instincts made him want to retreat, to activate the time field, and to do something.
But there was nothing he could do.
Thor's hand slowly and deliberately pressed down on the arm holding the artifact, giving it a gentle squeeze.
Click!
The sound of bones shattering was particularly jarring in the deathly silence of the ruins.
Pharaoh Kang's entire arm, along with the armor covering it, turned into visible powder.
The Cosmic Cube fragments and the Ultimate Nullifier, having lost their support, plummeted downwards.
Thor reached out his other hand and caught the two items steadily, then weighed them in his hand.
"Tsk."
He silently made his assessment.
The feel is truly authentic.
The Ultimate Nullifier —the function of this lighter is self-evident.
Needless to say, the Cosmic Cube, although only a small fragment, contains very pure laws and energy. The only pity is that he already knows most of the laws contained within it, so it doesn't help him much.
Perhaps it could be given to little Rachel as a toy.
"To tear a small piece of power from Loki, they actually went all out with such a trump card. The Council of Kangs really spared no expense this time, but unfortunately, it all benefited me."
Thor played with the two artifacts as if they were new and interesting toys, and then casually put them into his own space.
After doing all this, his gaze returned to Pharaoh Kang.
At this point, Pharaoh Kang had completely collapsed.
He clutched his severed arm, knelt on the ground, and trembled violently.
He couldn't understand it.
Why is this happening?
The victory, achieved by gathering the best talents from thousands of dimensions, employing the strongest weapons, and paying an unimaginable price, was so easily snatched away right before their eyes.
The opponent didn't even show any signs of strain. He never expected that Thor, whom they had been targeting for so long, would actually be so powerful and despair-inducing.
"Why..." he murmured to himself.
Thor had no interest in answering a loser's question.
His gaze passed over Pharaoh Kang and fell upon the floating, pulsating green-gold light behind him.
Those were fragments of the power of time, the power belonging to his brother Loki.
He could sense that the fragment was wailing, because it had been forcibly ripped from the main body and contaminated by forces that did not belong to it.
Thor reached out his hand.
The green-gold light seemed to have found its home and flew into his palm on its own.
A warm and familiar power flows through my hands.
Thor closed his eyes, analyzing the information within.
"I see... That Loki guy wove his existence into all the timelines. These idiots used the power of the Ultimate Nullifier and the Cosmic Cube to forcibly create a 'hole' in the node of the time web, thus tearing off this piece of skin."
He was a little annoyed.
"You think you can move my brother's chair? You even scratched the leather."
He carefully put away the fragment of authority.
After dealing with the spoils, Thor's gaze finally swept over the Converts around him, who hadn't dared to breathe a word the entire time.
Those Kangs all shuddered the instant Thor's gaze swept over them.
Fear prevailed over greed.
A figure dressed in Rome general's armor was the first to react, turning around to try and tear open a time portal to escape.
But it was too late.
"Run?"
Thor grinned, a bright smile that sent chills down everyone's spines.
Did I let you get away?
He raised the axe above his head.
In an instant, the entire ruins of time were enveloped in endless lightning.
Crimson-gold lightning, like an enraged Shenron, was born from Void, roaring and surging, completely engulfing everything in this area.
Each bolt of lightning contains the power of various laws such as destruction, Oblivion, end, and judgment.
They are not destroying matter, but erasing "concepts".
"No--!"
Dozens of Kang variants simultaneously let out desperate roars.
But their voices, along with their very existence, were instantly wiped out by the thunderstorm.
There were no corpses, no remains, and no residual energy.
They were wiped out as if they had never existed on this timeline.
A moment later, the lightning dissipated.
The ruins at the end of time became even more empty and desolate.
Only Pharaoh Kang, who had been severely injured in the initial sneak attack, remained alive on the spot.
Thor did not kill him immediately, but walked slowly to him.
Pharaoh Kang raised his head, his eyes empty; all his pride and ambition had turned to ashes.
"You... won..."
"I'm not curious about that," Thor tapped Pharaoh Kang's forehead lightly with the tip of his axe. "I'm only curious about one thing."
"Who... gave you the Ultimate Nullifier and the Cosmic Cube?"
He knew very well that, given the capabilities of the Council of Kangs, obtaining these two items from certain special universes would be as difficult as ascending to heaven.
There must be other forces behind this.
Pharaoh Kang laughed bitterly, golden blood gushing from his mouth.
"You'll never know... that a new god will eventually replace the old god... it's... destiny..."
His body began to turn into specks of light and decompose.
This was Kang's last resort, to prevent information from falling into enemy hands.
Thor watched him vanish without even flinching.
"Not going to tell me? Whatever."
He muttered to himself, "Anyway, once all the trash on the surface is cleaned up, the rats behind the scenes will eventually show their tails."
He turned around, ready to leave this place that had lost all its value.
Just then...
He paused, then abruptly raised his head, gazing into the deeper reaches of time.
A terrifying energy fluctuation was emanating from that direction.
The intensity of the fluctuations was so great that they caused the recently smoothed-out laws of spacetime to ripple violently once again.
Thor's eyes narrowed slightly.
He sensed two completely different forces.
He was very familiar with one of these forces.
That was the Phoenix Force, and the Phoenix Force at its peak, without reservation.
The laws of fire burn, and the cycle of creation and destruction unfolds within them.
"Qin got into a fight?"
And another force...
Thor's expression turned serious.
It was a pure force, formed from the entanglement of countless negative laws.
Hunger, death, end, Void, darkness, devouring...
It is violent, savage, and filled with the most primal desire for destruction.
This power reminded him of the green, Four-Armed Hulk from before.
But it's also different; it's more chaotic, more... massive.
"Has the mastermind finally come out?"
Thor frowned as he sensed the power that was in no way inferior to that of the lyre.
Immediately afterwards, he took a step forward.
His figure vanished instantly, hurtling towards the source of the collision between the two earth-shattering forces.