Free Web NovelChapter 64: Chapter 64 - Storm of Complaints
Lucius inhaled deeply, tasted dust and heat, then coughed once in mild disappointment. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com
"Ah." He looked over the empty road and the flat stretch of New Mexico horizon. "What a fresh scent of desert."
The town ahead was still exactly the sort of place the film had promised, with low buildings, too much sky, cheap signs, and roads built for people who measured distance with fuel instead of feet. It was simple and honest in the unflattering way small places sometimes were.
Lucius walked through it. He passed a diner, a service station, a hardware store, trying not to look tired, and enough curious stares to remind him that expensive clothes in a town like this qualified as a local event. After a while, he turned invisible as soon as he judged the angle right, and rose into the air on telekinesis with the easy pleasure of a man slipping back into superiority.
His destination was obvious.
Mjolnir sat inside a temporary SHIELD compound outside town, surrounded by fencing, lights, armed men, and the bureaucratic panic governments liked to build around anything they could not explain in less than three memos. freёwebnoѵel.com
On the way, a ’Speedy’ thought ran through him and stuck.
Was it possible to sacrifice the hammer itself?
Not merely steal it or cheat his way through the enchantment. Sacrifice it. If he could, it would strip out the soul price attached to spells of storm and thunder. Could he bypass the absurd cost by treating divine hardware like any other resource and feeding it to the SMS God?
Lucius smiled in the air.
That was exactly the sort of possibility worth testing.
--
Thor Odinson was not having a pleasant evening.
The fallen prince had heard the townsfolk talking about a hammer in the desert, sitting in a crater behind a government cordon. Men with guns who had ruined what should have been local fun. To anyone else, it would have sounded like a rumour with cheap beer attached. To Thor, it was a lifeline.
He headed for the compound with all the confidence of a man who had spent his very long life mistaking getting spoiled for wisdom.
Getting there was not the problem. The problem began the moment he tried to pass through security like a storm in borrowed flesh.
Coulson had the site locked down properly. Floodlights washed the perimeter. Chain-link fencing and barbed wire framed the outer ring. Agents moved in disciplined patterns, too alert to be local and too tired to be military. Hawkeye had already taken position in elevation, bow in hand, eyes fixed on the blond intruder who was fighting his way through trained men with the stubborn determination of somebody too proud to realise the universe had changed the rules on him.
Thor hit hard and fast. He tore one agent off his feet, drove another into a truck, and kept moving through the chaos with rage doing the work his old strength could no longer quite manage alone. He still fought like a god in his head. The body beneath the illusion was now only human enough to pay for the difference.
Clint drew the bowstring back and held it steady, the arrow lined up on Thor while he waited for the order.
"Say the word."
Coulson watched from below.
Thor had nearly reached the hammer. The man was exhausted, dirty, desperate, and still somehow carrying himself like insulted royalty. Coulson wanted to see one thing first.
"Hold," he said.
Thor reached the crater, climbed down into it, and finally stood in front of Mjolnir.
For one instant, everything in him changed, and hope came back first.
He wrapped his hand around the handle and pulled.
Nothing.
He reset his grip and tried again with more force, then with everything left in him, muscles shaking, breath tearing, frustration rising into denial and then into fear. The hammer did not move. Not a fraction. Not even enough to grant him a lie.
Coulson had expected failure.
What he had not expected was the sound that came after it.
Thor threw his face up to the night sky and roared with the kind of raw, wounded grief that silenced the agents nearest the crater before training brought them back to themselves. It was not simply anger. It was the howl of a man discovering that his old world had stopped answering him completely.
They dragged him out after that.
-
Thor really was the complete package.
Arrogant, handsome, strong, stupid, and now pathetically attached to a hammer like a child locked out of his own house. The divine idiot had been on Midgard for only a couple of days on Earth, and the prince was already preparing to dilute the bloodline for a woman with a truck. Incredible work.
If a prince dropped from the heavens and immediately started cheapening royal stock by throwing his heart at the first determined mortal woman with a truck and a doctorate, then frankly, every disaster that followed was an earned consequence.
Once SHIELD hauled Thor away, the site settled into the tense, watchful rhythm that always followed an event no one wanted to admit had just happened.
That was when Lucius moved.
He drifted down to the outer fence, passed over it unseen, and crossed the perimeter without difficulty. The agents did not know he was there. Their cameras did not catch him.
Mjolnir waited in the crater with all the stubborn dignity of an object convinced it was morally superior to the hands reaching for it.
Lucius landed beside it and looked down.
The runic magic was old and heavy. Condensed with power and intention in a way that made ordinary magical systems seem provincial. The thing was less a weapon than a verdict. Odin’s enchantment sat over it as law turned into matter.
Lucius placed one hand on the grip and tested the obvious first.
The hammer resisted him at once.
The rejection did not feel physical.
It felt juridical, a refusal built on meaning, worthiness, ownership, name, and authority. The sort of insufferable magical clause only kings and sentimental old monsters thought elegant.
Then the sky reacted.
Clouds rolled in unnaturally fast. The air thickened. Light shifted across the compound. Lightning struck twice beyond the fence and once near the outer watchtower hard enough to send alarms shrieking into the night.
Agents shouted. Boots started moving. Floodlights swung uselessly through the dark and dust.
Mjolnir was showing its displeasure.
Lucius ignored all of them.
He was reading.
That was the difference between him and Thor. Thor treated runic magic as a weakness. Lucius treated it like an engineering problem with strange handwriting.
The runes were not closed to interpretation. Especially for him, with the vast knowledge of many runic magical systems for his ritual magic.
They were bound to intent, identity, and conditional authority. Worthiness, yes, but not in the abstract moral rubbish people liked to imagine. Odin had built the challenge around recognition and a line of permission anchored to the interpretation of the bearer of himself. The enchantment and the name that validated the claim.
Lucius’s grin widened.
"Oh, you sentimental old tyrant."
He crouched beside the hammer and etched his own additions directly into the existing structure, altering not the enchantment itself but the route by which it granted its channelling power to its bearer. He did not challenge worthiness on its own terms. He rewrote the question so the hammer was forced to recognise the authority of Lucius Noctis as self-certifying.
In short, he cheated and was proud of it.
The new power in his veins felt glorious. He was feeling the thunder in the air and smelling the scent of ozone. He felt it waiting, coiled like a serpent, its venom not of flesh but of storm and steel. The hammer’s will shimmered around him, a living enchantment, whispering for him to choose the place where it would fall. It was not mere weight in his hand, but a spellbound force, eager to strike, eager to shape destiny.
He scanned the metal with Sersi’s donation to his palette of powers. He memorised the feeling and the mechanism behind it.
With a sinister smile, he pushed his will to Mjolnir.
The storm intensified as the hammer protested. Another bolt hit the far side of the compound. Somewhere above the crater, Barton was looking for the source of the anomaly.
Lucius straightened and pulled again.
Mjolnir rose.
For one delightful second, he simply stood there holding the hammer while the entire old enchantment fumed round him like a nobleman forced to dine with a bandit.
Lucius looked at it with open satisfaction.
"I should call myself Worthy Admiral General Lucius."
The title pleased him enough that he almost kept it.
He stepped back down into the crater, set the hammer in place again, and etched the sacrificial circle around it. The work moved fast under telekinesis, carved lines burning faintly in the dirt while alarms continued above. The agents were still trying to understand why the weather had gone mad.
If he could sacrifice the hammer, the cost of storm channelling would go straight to hell with it. If not, he had already learned something valuable from an object worshipped by morons and thrown by a hormonal blond.
The last line closed.
"Let’s see whether divine hardware screams differently when you feed it to something hungrier."
Lucius stepped onto the first rune with a quiet expectancy.
Then he whispered the word.
"Sacrifice."
