The storm-lashed skies of Jupiter churned into a living warzone.
Each blow, whether driven by lightning, death, or the raw force of primal god-ki, tore vast swaths of the gas giant's atmosphere into space, leaving gaping wounds in the planet's swirling skin before the crushing pressure sealed them shut again.
Shockwaves thundered through Jupiter's depths, like earthquakes made from sound and fury, each clash painting violent ripples of color across the roiling cloudscape.
Thor clenched his jaw, blood mingling with sparks of electric light at the corners of his mouth.
Pain radiated from the vicious scythe strike to his abdomen, death ki crawling along his nerves like frostbite woven from shadow. Still, he fought on, for this battle had become more than vengeance.
It was about saving his friend.
Lightning bolts, so dense they burned white-hot, hammered into Thanatos, yet Thor pivoted mid-strike to intercept William's wild, feral blows, each one capable of shattering him. William's aura, a blazing storm of red and gold steeped in ancient power, radiated a primal rage greater than anything Thor had faced.
The God-Beast was consumed by instinct and wrath, each strike reverberating through the gas giant like a colossal bell.
"WILLIAM… ENOUGH!" Thor bellowed, the storm roaring through his voice as lightning danced along Infinity Mjolnir. "COME BACK TO YOURSELF!"
But he could not do it.
He could not raise the hammer and unleash the Infinity Stones' full might against his friend. He could not risk erasing William, unraveling his soul, or, worse, awakening something buried and cosmic within him. There were forces even gods dared not test.
Thor fought to restrain. To quell the fury. To bring William back.
And Thanatos understood.
The Mad Titan's grin stretched impossibly wide, the sinister curl of a predator who had uncovered a fatal weakness in his prey. His jaw cracked and unhinged with a subtle, grotesque shift, revealing rows of block-like teeth, razor-sharp, capable of grinding bone to dust and tearing through the very weave of existence.
"You hesitate," Thanatos rasped, his voice warped and hollow, echoing with the chill of the grave. "How… predictable."
From him poured a flood of black ki, spilling like ink into water, coiling and writhing as it reached into realms forbidden to both mortal and divine eyes. The temperature plummeted. The storm's fury dulled. Even the concept of warmth seemed to flee in terror from the void surrounding him.
And then, two silhouettes began to solidify behind him. Two presences that should have remained in the underworld for eternity.
Thor's breath caught. His eyes widened in dread.
"No… not them…"
Frigga. Loki.
They were no illusions, no fleeting echoes of memory, but their true souls, bound in death's chains and manipulated like puppets on invisible strings.
Their forms shimmered into existence, spectral bodies cloaked in shadows, Frigga's once-gentle features now contorted by darkness, Loki's sly grin rendered hollow, his eyes empty as the abyss. Enshrouded in Thanatos's suffocating ki, they moved with an unnerving synchronicity, just as they had in life.
In their hands gleamed weapons forged from condensed deathly essence, Frigga brandishing a spear of spectral frost, Loki twirling twin daggers forged from the breath of death itself.
With the grace of memory and the precision of specters, they surged forward, charging Thor with lethal intent.
Thor staggered backward, his heart pounding like a war drum. This was the nightmare he had prayed would never come to pass. Every instinct screamed at him to fight, yet every cherished memory pleaded for him not to harm them.
"Stop… STOP!" His voice cracked, raw with anguish, as he swung Mjolnir in a desperate guard. "This isn't you, this isn't real!"
Thanatos only answered with a grotesque, earth-shaking laugh that seemed to split the air.
"Kill your family… or die with them."
While Thor's focus fractured under the weight of pain and trauma, Thanatos's gaze drifted toward William.
The beastly Saiyan floated within a maelstrom of red and gold energy, fangs bared, scarlet fur bristling, pupils narrowed to blazing slits. William felt that gaze, a predator recognizing another, and turned slowly to meet it.
Their eyes locked.
Red. Black. Hate meeting hate.
As if a cosmic dam had shattered, both warriors hurled their hands forward, unleashing a storm of ki blasts, small, dense, invisible until the instant before impact.
Scarlet and obsidian orbs tore through the tempest, the heavens igniting like a battlefield of dying stars. Most collided mid-air, bursting in flares so bright they bleached Jupiter's clouds for miles. Others found their mark, one red sphere carving into Thanatos's shoulder, one black bolt grazing William's ribs, each strike thundering like distant artillery swallowed by the storm.
Their silhouettes, caught in the strobe of destruction, danced across the clouds like eternal phantoms locked in war.
And above it all…
Thor fought desperately against the corrupted souls of his own mother and brother.
The storm was no longer merely a storm, it had become a crucible, a roaring realm of lightning, ki, and death…
…where gods, monsters, and the unyielding fury of a Saiyan battled for ultimate supremacy.
Jupiter convulsed, truly convulsed, not merely shaken, but wracked to its core.
Its titanic storms coiled into spirals so vast they warped the planet's natural spin, as William and Thanatos vanished into a blinding blur of crimson and obsidian light, their motions too furious for the atmosphere to comprehend.
A thousand-mile column of clouds collapsed inward, only for the two to erupt back into existence.
CLASH!
Their fists collided in a cataclysmic shockwave that tore a cone-shaped void through the storm layer and hurled a geyser of superheated hydrogen screaming into the void of space.
Thanatos skidded back half a meter, his boots gouging twin furrows of condensed vapor, while William stood unshaken, his raging crimson aura whipping the tempest into a howling cyclone.
Thanatos' grin widened, and then he vanished, a streak of pure darkness. William answered without thought, meeting him with relentless force, their impact birthing a rippling ring of power like a sonic boom forged from ki itself.
Thanatos struck first, palm to jaw, knee to ribs, reverse elbow steeped in ravenous shadow, yet William felt only the faintest sting. His retaliation was not born of art or discipline, but of unrestrained, obliterating power.
His fist slammed into Thanatos's gut so hard the Titan's eyes bulged.
The blow compressed several cubic miles of atmosphere behind Thanatos into a collapsing wall of vapor, before Thanatos rocketed downward like a meteor, spiraling through storm layers with trails of black light streaming behind him.
William was already there.
A blur of red fur and divine fury.
He grabbed Thanatos's ankle mid-fall and swung him like a warhammer, the Titan's body ripping through storm cells and igniting them in explosive bursts.
Thanatos slammed his scythes together, black ki detonating outward in a dome that blasted William back, carving a hollow void in the clouds.
"Good," Thanatos rasped, teeth bared in delight. "Show me the monster."
Thanatos lowered two fingers toward the void, and in an instant, a sphere of black ki coalesced, small, dense, and utterly silent.
It was not the kind of attack that erupted in chaos; it was the kind that erased existence itself.
He unleashed it, the beam cutting a perfect line through Jupiter's atmosphere, piercing its depths and sending a pillar of black vapor spiraling into the sky.
William materialized in its path and met it head-on, his fist detonating with a burst of crimson starfire that split the death beam into twin streams, each tearing across space hundreds of miles apart.
Thanatos's grin stretched wide.
"You split it," he murmured, voice dripping with delight.
"Beautiful."
William answered with a roar, raw, divine fury echoing through Jupiter's storms like the death cry of a collapsing sun.
His palms thrust forward, unleashing a relentless barrage of crimson ki blasts, each glowing like molten meteors.
Thanatos batted them away with casual disdain, a flick of the wrist, a sweep of the hand, a single kick, but William pressed harder, faster, more feral.
The barrage swelled into a storm, then a torrent, then an all-consuming cataclysm.
Thanatos's defenses slowed, faltered, and at last failed, one blast slamming into his chest, shattering his armor in a flare of crackling energy.
He was hurled backward, laughing as the force carried him away.
Thanatos halted in mid-air, suspended in a moment of eerie stillness.
Black ki poured from him, not radiating like an aura but flowing like liquid night, dripping into the atmosphere and snuffing out every trace of light it touched. His bones cracked as his frame expanded, shoulders broadening; his grin tore unnaturally far back across his face.
Two jagged horns erupted from his skull, curling forward like a crown forged for a demon king.
With a sickening rip, vast dark wings burst from his back, flexing with a wet, grotesque rustle. "Now… let's see if you can keep up." The darkness detonated outward.
Thanatos launched himself across Jupiter like a shot from a cosmic railgun, ripping through storm layers so fast they flared into fire from sheer friction.
William barely had time to brace before...
KRAK-BOOM!
An elbow slammed into his sternum, sending him hurtling through a spinning thunderhead.
He crashed into the storm's interior, gouging a swirling crater in the vapor, only for Thanatos to materialize behind him, then ahead, then to the side, then above.
He flickered around William like a phantom caught in strobe light, each flash punctuated by a brutal strike: a scythe-like slash across the ribs, a crushing hammer-fist to the spine, a knee to the temple that snapped his head sideways, dislocating his jaw.
Spinning with arms wide and aura blazing, William countered, slamming a spinning backfist into Thanatos's face with such force the air warped like molten glass. Thanatos was sent rocketing upward, and William gave chase.
The two clashed above the upper storm layer, where lightning tore across the heavens like jagged fractures in reality itself.
Thanatos conjured both scythes in a blur of motion, each swing rending black fissures through the atmosphere.
William evaded most of the deadly arcs, enduring the rest with unflinching resolve, then lunged.
He crashed into Thanatos with the full, unstoppable might of a Saiyan consumed by berserk godhood, grappling him in mid-air before hurling him downward in a violent flip.
They spiraled through the turbulent sky, locked together like savage beasts locked in a death struggle.
Thanatos smashed his forehead into William's face, breaking his nose, but William retaliated with feral brutality, sinking his teeth into Thanatos's shoulder and tearing away a chunk that pulsed with glowing death ki.
The god's scream warped into a distorted, cosmic roar as William's pupils vanished in an eruption of primal rage.
His fists rained down with such force that their shockwaves shredded entire storm cells into ribbons. Down they plummeted, deeper and deeper, into the crushing layers of Jupiter.
Here, the pressure was monstrous, the storms became endless oceans of force, and lightning flowed not as flashes but as roaring rivers of plasma.
And within that alien abyss, they fought on like demons forsaken by the very fabric of the universe.
Thanatos's ki exploded, surging with raw, unrestrained fury as the layers of the atmosphere around them shuddered violently. He threw his arms wide.
"ENOUGH!"
Every speck of darkness in his presence condensed into a coiling spiral of black fire, pulsing with destructive intent, before detonating outward in a cataclysmic burst. The shockwave consumed William entirely, and the planet itself groaned from its very core.
The force hurled William back hundreds of miles through Jupiter's deep storm layers, smashing him through titanic walls of pressurized gas that ignited in incandescent bursts from the sheer impact.
From the heart of the blast, Thanatos emerged, murder blazing in his eyes. No grin now. No taunt. Only a ravenous hunger for destruction.
In the next instant, William erupted upward from the depths, his aura flaring like the birth of a newborn star collapsing and fusing into existence. His fur stood on end, muscles wound tight as steel, and his eyes glowed a searing, murderous red.
Thanatos charged.
William charged.
The atmosphere between them imploded inward. Lightning arced toward their clash. Winds howled in tortured fury. For the briefest heartbeat, Jupiter's colossal rotation slowed.
Their fists collided.
KA-THOOOOOOOOOM!!!
The impact birthed a shockwave so immense it tore a colossal pillar of atmosphere straight into space, a towering beam of storm clouds stretching from the planet's deepest layers to its exosphere.
From the void above, it looked as though Jupiter had been struck through from within by the hand of a god.
Thanatos staggered, black, glowing blood dripping from his lip in a slow, ominous trail.
William's chest rose and fell with the force of a raging furnace, each breath molten with fury.
Their eyes locked, unblinking, two titans bound in silent understanding.
This was no end, only the opening act.
The very surface of Jupiter shuddered beneath them, its titanic lightning storms, each the size of continents, twisting together into a single apocalyptic superstorm.
The air itself seemed to hum with the promise of devastation.
William cracked his knuckles, the sound sharp as a gunshot in the charged air.
Thanatos rolled his shoulders, muscles coiling like drawn steel.
And then, with a sound like the fabric of reality itself being torn apart, the next round began.
The storms writhed into a spiraling maelstrom as William's chest swelled with a feral, primal inhale. His fangs caught the crimson glow, gleaming like blades, while his aura split and cracked with molten lightning.
And then.
HRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!!!
In his throat, a sphere of condensed crimson god-ki roared to life, its vibration making the very air quiver. Sparks of red lightning tore across his fur, wild and uncontrollable, as the pressure warped the air around his muzzle like molten glass. The gas ignited, unfurling into thin, wavering sheets of flame.
Thanatos felt the surge, and he answered.
His newly formed horns, jagged and obsidian, slick with dripping shadow, began to hum with an alien resonance. Between them, a bead of black ki materialized, silent yet impossibly dense. At its birth, the clouds for hundreds of miles collapsed outward, blasted away as though from the heart of a collapsing star.
The bead swelled.
And swelled.
And swelled.
It consumed the light.
It swallowed the sound.
It devoured the very fabric of space.
The crushing force between the horns ignited the surrounding storms, lightning flaring into incandescent filaments before vanishing into nothing. Jupiter's vast atmosphere wailed, a tortured shriek of air, as Thanatos drew ever more death-ki into the burgeoning, all-consuming orb.
Black fire slithered up his horns, writhing like living shadow. Along his shoulders, fissures of void-light split the air itself, spilling an impossible radiance. Then, with a voice that rumbled like the death of stars and the collapse of galaxies:
"DIE SCREAMING."
William struck first.
A blazing torrent of crimson starfire erupted from his mouth, a roaring column that shredded the sky, transmuting miles of atmosphere into searing plasma. It tore through Jupiter's clouds, twisting them into a vast spiraling torus, a hurricane of molten brilliance surging outward in every direction.
Thanatos answered a heartbeat later.
From his maw burst a lance of pure annihilation, silent, black, edged with spectral white fractures that bled death itself. It carved through the storm like a spear from the dawn of creation.
The beams met.
KA...
THOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
The impact exploded with a force so absolute that Jupiter's upper hemisphere blazed white for a single blinding instant. A colossal sphere of unleashed energy bloomed outward, the shockfront devouring storms, lightning, and clouds alike.
It did not simply shake Jupiter.
It reverberated through the bones of the solar system.
Light from the detonation raced across the void, reaching the icy orbits of Europa and Ganymede in mere seconds, drenching their frozen plains in a searing glare of crimson and shadow.
The shockwave surged past the magnetosphere and spilled into the abyss, a warped convulsion of pressure that distant astronomers would one day record as a shiver through the very weave of charged particulate fields.
Even the Sun recoiled.
The raging tempests of Sol faltered, and for a fleeting heartbeat, the solar winds bent unnaturally from their ancient course.
At the epicenter, two figures strained against the impossible collision: William, jaw unhinged, unleashing every shred of primal, godlike fury into his beam; Thanatos, horns ablaze with black ki, answering with the cold, insatiable hunger of death itself.
Their beams writhed and howled, twisting and churning in a deadlock neither could break.
The pressure mounted, higher, hotter, heavier, until reality itself seemed to tremble.
Around them, the boundaries of their clash folded inward, warping into a quivering sphere where light and shadow merged, coalescing into a flawless black-crimson sun suspended between them.
Next time… Reborn as a Saiyan in Marvel!…[1]
The storm-wracked skies of Jupiter quake beneath the fury of gods and monsters, as William, consumed by the raw essence of primal godhood, collides with the nightmarish, death-born might of the transformed Thanatos!
Their cataclysmic energy beams crash together, birthing a black-crimson star of unfathomable power, a searing cosmic furnace threatening not only the vast gas giant but the fragile stability of the entire solar system!
Thor fights with unyielding resolve against the twisted specters of his fallen kin, torn between duty, grief, and the harrowing truth of Thanatos's unholy resurrection.
As Jupiter shudders under the titanic strain and the very fabric of the universe trembles with the echoing shockwaves of their apocalyptic clash, one question burns brighter than the black-crimson star itself: Who will remain standing when the final light fades?
Can Thor pull William back from the abyss of annihilation?
Can William master the monstrous rage threatening to consume him whole?
Or will Thanatos's doomsday power erase all three from existence?
Find out next time… on Reborn… as a Saiyan… in Marvel!
[1] Read with Doc Harris voice lol