Chapter 77 : The Avatar of Hrimthul Descends – When Heroes Converge (Part 1)
New York, Manhattan – 3rd's POV
The bolt that Thor hurled from the heavens did not simply strike the street.
It erased it.
The point of impact became a blooming sphere of incandescent white, a miniature sun tearing shadows out of existence. For a fraction of a heartbeat, the world existed only as silhouettes: buildings flattened into paper cutouts, cars reduced to dark shapes, pedestrians frozen mid-motion as if sketched by a trembling hand.
Then the light withdrew—too fast—and something far worse replaced it.
A hollow sound rolled through the city, broad and empty, like the exhale of a dying world.
The temperature dropped instantly. Not gradually, not by degrees—instantly.
Frost spider-webbed across the cracked asphalt. Windows flash-froze. Breath crystallized into floating dust. Deep within the pavement, water expanded faster than physics allowed, splitting concrete with sharp, gunshot cracks that echoed between buildings.
The air itself distorted.
Cold made visible.
Light bending between waves of impossible temperature.
At the center of it all, something began to take shape.
A silhouette first—tall, jagged, not entirely human. Then substance, as shards of ancient ice drew themselves into a body. Spine. Chest. Shoulders shaped like mountain ridges. Arms layered in heavy, angular plates that looked carved rather than grown. Blue energy pulsed through the fractures, threading inside the creature like veins filled with winter.
A face formed last: no eyes, only burning pits of pale azure; no mouth, only a jagged line splitting the lower mask of its visage.
The Avatar of Hrimthul.
Born from realms that predated the gods who claimed dominion over them.
Thor did not hesitate.
"HYAAAH!"
His roar tore through the frost-bitten air as he launched himself into the clearing, Mjolnir already charged with another surge of pure lightning. The hammer cracked like a star against the frozen ground, scattering the fog in a shockwave that should have staggered anything mortal or divine.
The Avatar didn't shift.
Didn't brace.
Didn't care.
Thor closed the distance in a blur. The first strike hit squarely across the creature's chest, splintering ice in a web of fractures. The impact echoed like mountains collapsing.
For one breath, victory seemed possible.
Then the fractures closed.
Not melted—sealed. Ice reforming from within, repairing itself with ancient speed, as if the assault meant nothing.
Thor's expression tightened.
He swung again—faster, harder—each blow landing with the force of tempests.
Each blow answered by the same reaction:
Shatter.
Reform.
Indifference.
The Avatar moved.
A blur of cold. No footsteps, no weight, just a displacement of air so sharp it sliced the fog in clean lines. One frozen hand lashed out, catching Mjolnir mid-swing. Frost erupted across the hammer's surface, crawling over the uru metal like a hungry parasite.
Thor snarled and tried to wrench it free—too slow.
The Avatar flung him.
A god thrown like debris.
Thor crashed into a distant building, brick exploding outward, dust billowing in a violent plume. Cars shattered around him as he skidded across the street, carving a gouge into the concrete with the sheer momentum of his impact.
Before he could rise fully, the cold arrived.
Not the Avatar—the cold.
A wave of killing frost devoured the street in a spreading ring. Asphalt cracked. Lamp posts froze through and snapped. A hydrant burst in a geyser that froze mid-spray, falling as a sculpture of icicles.
Thor inhaled and felt the air burn his lungs.
Even he could feel the wrongness—this wasn't Jotun cold. It wasn't weather.
It was age.
A primordial winter that predated names.
He surged forward again, lightning roaring across his frame.
A war cry.
A refusal.
This time, the Avatar reacted.
It shifted in a stuttering, unnatural movement—like frames skipping in reality—and appeared directly in Thor's path. A backhanded strike hit the god square in the jaw, the sound loud enough to rattle windows a block away.
Thor staggered.
Lightning stuttered.
His breath ripped out in a plume of frozen mist.
The Avatar stepped into him.
Another blow—faster, colder, impossibly heavy.
Thor blocked with Mjolnir; the ice crawling across the hammer deepened, darkened, cracking the surface of the uru as frostworm patterns etched themselves in.
His arm trembled.
The Avatar showed no emotion. No malice. It simply existed to dominate.
Thor swung upward in a desperate arc, lightning erupting in a violent plume that detonated across the Avatar's torso. Ice blasted away in a shower of fragments, exposing glowing runes embedded deep in its chest.
And again—
Sealed.
Reformed.
Whole.
Thor's eyes widened.
The Avatar raised its hand.
The cold pressure around the street deepened, pressing downward like a celestial weight. Every breath turned thin. Every sound deadened.
Loki hovered on the edge of the clearing, half-claimed by fog and the drifting frost that hissed along the pavement. Every breath rattled in his chest. His reserves were shredded; each pulse of magic felt like tearing threads out of wounded flesh. He watched Thor clash with the Avatar—watched the god of thunder be driven backward, step by step, under a cold older than myth—and Loki understood something with crisp, brutal clarity.
If he stayed, he died.
Not dramatically. Not heroically. Just… erased.
So he crafted the lie.
He didn't build a warrior-illusion this time. No proud stance, no regal posture. Instead, the spell pulsed out of him in a dim wash of green, forming a perfect copy of his own body slumped in the corner of a shattered storefront. The illusion sat with its back against a cracked wall, one knee raised, one arm dangling uselessly. Head bowed. Shoulders trembling. A picture of near-collapse.
A man recovering.
Harmless.
Beneath notice.
Dust settled over it. Frost crept across its boots. It even shivered—Loki added that detail deliberately, because nothing looks less threatening than someone exhausted and cold. If Thor glanced, he would only see a brother catching his breath. If the Avatar sensed anything at all, it would dismiss him as irrelevant.
Good.
Because the real Loki had already begun to slip away—slow, careful, deliberate. His true form dissolved into a thin ribbon of emerald magic that wove itself into the falling frost. Not invisibility. Something finer. A redirection of attention, a soft nudge to every observing mind: don't look here. Don't think about this shape. Forget.
Behind him, thunder cracked again. Thor hurled himself into another impossible clash, lightning roaring bright enough to turn the ice to brief diamonds. He didn't spare even a fraction of a glance toward the slumped figure in the corner. He believed Loki was still there. Recovering. Weak but present.
Perfect.
Loki drifted through an alley swallowed by shadow, breath steady now, steps measured to avoid disturbing the brittle frost crusting the street. His mind focused not on guilt, nor on brotherly hesitation, but on survival and what came next. The Avatar would occupy Thor. The city would fracture in panic. And Loki… Loki would remain free to choose his moment.
He vanished into the undercurrent of the city—leaving behind only a shivering, harmless illusion sitting quietly against a wall, ignored by gods and monsters alike.
The battlefield didn't rest for even a heartbeat.
The tremor reached the battlefield long before the creature did.
A deep, rhythmic thudding rolled across the frozen street—heavy, uneven, accelerating. Windows rattled in their frames. A few loose chunks of ice vibrated across the asphalt. Thor, half-kneeling with Mjolnir braced against the ground to keep himself upright, glanced sideways through the curtain of frost, confused, breath still steaming from the Avatar's last strike.
Even the Avatar paused.
Not stopped—merely shifted. Its faceless head angled, as if calculating whether the new vibration belonged to prey or irrelevance.
Then Hulk arrived.
He came down in a blur of green mass and fury, slamming into the street with a crater-making impact that shattered the already splintering pavement. Ice exploded outward in a jagged ring. Cars rocked on their chassis. The shockwave punched upward, kicking loose snow from rooftops in a cascading flutter.
Hulk rose from the crouch of his landing with a guttural snarl, steam rising from his skin as the unnatural cold tried—and failed—to bite into him.
He looked around.
Not with recognition.
With instinct.
With challenge.
With the raw hunger for the biggest threat in sight.
His gaze locked on the Avatar—towering, sharp-edged, radiating cold so ancient it warped the air. Hulk's lips peeled back from his teeth in a feral, eager grin. Rage didn't falter in him; it crystallized into focus. He took one step forward, leaving a cratered footprint.
Thor stared, stunned not by the arrival but by the sheer destructive force of it. He didn't call out. Didn't move toward the monster of green muscle now entering the fray. He simply watched, wary, uncertain if this newcomer was friend, foe, or something worse.
Hulk didn't spare Thor even a glance.
To him, Thor was just another figure on a broken street—unimportant, already beaten, not the biggest thing worth breaking.
Across the battlefield, Loki's illusion—slumped against a wall, head lowered, breathing rough and shallow—flinched at the new shockwave. The projection shivered, hands trembling as if barely holding together. Perfectly vulnerable. Perfectly ignorable. Even Hulk, in all his rage and instinct, dismissed the sight instantly. A wounded man wasn't worth attention.
The real Loki, hidden in a thin ripple of green magic further back, let out a slow, relief-soaked exhale.
Good.
The brute didn't notice him.
Not yet.
Back at the center, the Avatar straightened to its full height. Frost cascaded off its limbs like powdered diamonds. The cold around it deepened, responding to the presence of a new potential adversary.
Hulk inhaled sharply.
And roared.
The sound shattered what little glass remained intact across the block. Snow peeled off rooftops. A nearby streetlamp tore loose from its bolts and toppled. Even Thor felt the shock of it vibrating in the back of his skull.
The Avatar didn't recoil—but it did shift. A fractional turn of its jagged torso. A new calculation. A new danger assessed.
For several brutal minutes, the street became a ruinous arena.
Hulk barreled into the Avatar again and again, each collision shaking the block like a localized earthquake. Pavement split under his steps. Cars flipped from the shockwaves of his charges, slamming into storefronts or crumpling against frozen walls. Every time he landed a punch—a full-arm, bone-shaking impact—the Avatar's chest fractured in explosive bursts of crystalline shards… only to knit itself back together in a hiss of ancient frost.
Thor fought with the same ferocity, lightning carving violent arcs through the cold-heavy air. Mjolnir struck with thunderous detonations that cracked entire facades off nearby buildings. But without coordination, his swings often met empty air where Hulk had forced the Avatar to shift—or worse, toppled rubble down in the wrong direction. Lightning blasted through the street, melting and refreezing debris in erratic patterns.
The Avatar answered every assault with devastating precision.
A sweeping arm of jagged ice sent Hulk crashing through an abandoned bus, metal folding like paper around him. A follow-up strike unleashed a shockburst of primordial cold that rolled across the street, flash-freezing a row of cars and forcing Thor to break through a forming glacier to keep from being encased.
When Hulk returned—leaping from the bus wreckage with a roar—the Avatar met him mid-air with a spine of ice jutting from its forearm, slashing a glowing line across Hulk's shoulder. The brute only roared louder and slammed the creature into the pavement hard enough to collapse the ground into a subterranean utility tunnel.
The fight became a blur of destruction.
Columns of frost exploded outward. Lightning detonations ripped open the street. Buildings groaned, fractured, collapsed. The Avatar—cold, ancient, inexorable—fought both titans at once, shifting between them with impossible speed, carving trenches of ice with every step.
But the fight was only the beginning. Help—expected or not—was already on its way.