Odin was undeniably old. Even Leander Hayes, standing mere paces from the legendary monarch, could distinctly sense the underlying decay gnawing at the divine power within his towering frame.
The Allfather had reigned over the cosmos for nearly ten millennia. Although the reservoir of divine energy coiled inside his ancient nervous system was still structurally immense, the sheer, unyielding weight of time had left his physical vessel exhausted, weary, and dangerously brittle.
"Are you boldly implying that the historical records of my father, King Bor, were fundamentally fraudulent?" Odin asked, his voice dropping into a hoarse, gravelly rasp that echoed ominously off the stone walls of the archive.
"I am simply articulating an empirical reality, King Odin," Leander countered, his expression devoid of even a microscopic trace of fear. "I assume you are already fully aware that the basic molecular structure of the Aether defies total destruction, aren't you?"
Leander's tone remained entirely level, his posture radiating a cool, unshakeable confidence. The Space Stone integrated into his personal framework granted him an absolute tactical escape vector; at any given millisecond, he could simply tear open a wormhole and exit the local grid. He didn't believe for a single second that the aging monarch possessed the spatial manipulation metrics required to permanently seal off the surrounding continuum.
Even if the prime, legendary version of the Allfather might have successfully locked down the dimensional barriers, the current, structurally decaying Odin simply did not have the operational capacity to hold him.
"Hold on, Leander—terminate this line of dialogue immediately," Thor interrupted, stepping hastily between the two as he attempted to mitigate Leander's brutal, unfiltered candor before it sparked a royal incident.
"Leander?" Odin murmured, his solitary left eye narrowing into a razor-sharp slit as he pivoted his attention completely toward the youth. "Are you the specific Midgardian entity designated as Leander Hayes—the one who originally secured and brought the Cosmic Cube back to the surface of Earth?"
"That is my identity," Leander said, nodding calmly.
Although his current physical height left him half a head shorter than the towering Asgardian patriarch, he spoke with an innate, unyielding dignity and absolute honesty that refused to be diminished by the royal setting.
"Fascinating," Odin remarked after maintaining a silent, incredibly tense psychological evaluation of Leander's frame for several agonizing seconds. The old king's weathered face settled into a cold, inscrutable expression. "It appears Thor has managed to acquire a remarkably formidable companion for himself."
Thor, entirely blind to the hidden strategic calculations firing inside his father's mind, saw the localized atmospheric tension soften slightly and immediately seized the opening. He stepped toward the pedestal, his voice laced with urgent anxiety. "Does the text outline any specific methodology for purging the pathogen from Jane's system, Father?"
"It does not."
Odin cast a brief, heavily contemptuous look toward Jane Foster's unresponsive form, turned on his heel, and swept out of the historic chamber without uttering a single secondary syllable.
The elite Asgardian chief healers, completely out of their depth when confronted with the exotic fluid dynamics of the Aether inside Jane's body, offered no additional medical interventions, leaving the room in silent frustration.
Faced with a total lack of operational support inside the royal vaults, the trio—Leander, Thor, and Jane—exited the subterranean compound and returned to the open-air terraces of the golden palace.
As they walked, a thread of strategic suspicion lingered deep within Leander's mind. Why did Odin completely abandon his interrogation regarding the Tesseract? Did his sensory arrays actively register the hidden signature of the Space Stone humming within my core, or is he playing a much deeper political game?
Thor, meanwhile, was entirely consumed by raw, emotional panic regarding Jane's deteriorating biological timeline. Nearly two years of forced operational separation had done nothing but deepen his romantic attachment to the mortal scientist, twisting his worry into a hyper-fixation.
"Jane, are your current equilibrium and cognitive functions operating at a normal baseline?" Thor asked, his large hands hovering over her shoulders.
"Oh, I am operating at peak academic performance right now, Thor!" Jane breathed, her eyes darting across the glittering golden skyline of the capital city with unadulterated, near-manic excitement. She tightly gripped the fabric of Thor's silver-armored arm, tugging him toward the balcony. "This is absolutely spectacular, Thor! Is this truly the sovereign heart of Asgard? The literal foundation for the entire pantheon of Norse mythology? It's magnificent! You are absolutely obligated to give me an exhaustive structural tour of this civilization!"
"Nothing would bring me greater joy than to escort you through our grandest landmarks!" Thor boomed, his previous anxiety evaporating as he pulled Jane flush against his chest. With a familiar, violent whistle of displaced air, Mjolnir flew straight into his outstretched right hand, its leather strap wrapping tightly around his wrist.
"Hold on a moment," Leander said, his eyebrows rising in mild disbelief as he stared at the pair. "Are you two seriously planning to dump me on an alien plaza and fly off into the sunset?"
"What exactly are you stressing about, Leander?" Thor laughed, spinning his hammer in a rapid, blurring circle that began to lift his boots off the stone terrace. "Asgard maintains an absolute, ironclad safety index. Just ensure your exploration path avoids the highly restricted security sectors. You require my father's explicit royal clearance to access the high-security treasury vaults or the subterranean dungeons, but everything else is open territory!"
The God of Thunder absolutely did not want a highly analytical, incredibly observant third wheel hovering around while he attempted to establish some intimate, long-overdue emotional synchronization with his girlfriend. After all, he was a passionate, hot-blooded fifteen-hundred-year-old prince who had finally reunited with his long-distance partner. He deserved some privacy.
Whoosh!
With a concussive burst of wind, Thor shot straight into the upper atmosphere, his crimson cloak trailing behind him as he carried Jane over the golden spires.
Left entirely to his own devices, Leander let out a light chuckle. Eager to perform a comprehensive geological and technological audit of this alien realm, he stepped off the palace balcony, taking flight to explore the sovereign terrain of Asgard under his own power.
Simultaneously, deep within the shadows of the grand throne room, Odin had summoned Lady Sif and the Warriors Three to execute an exhaustive tactical debriefing regarding the true nature of Leander Hayes.
Ultimately, aside from the singular, unsanctioned deployment where Sif and her companions had defied royal decrees to land on Midgard during the Destroyer crisis, almost no living Asgardian had ever set foot on Earth's surface. Only Loki had previously dropped into that sector alone, but Odin had intentionally excluded his adopted son from this intelligence loop, operating under the safe assumption that the trickster would provide nothing but corrupted data.
"Step forward, Sif," the Allfather commanded from the apex of the golden throne.
"I am at your absolute command, Father of All Things," Sif declared, her armor clinking loudly as she knelt on one knee, her heavy broadsword and shield resting against her thigh.
"Arise. I require your unshielded analytical evaluation regarding a specific entity," Odin said, his lone eye boring into the goddess.
As he looked at her, a brief flicker of paternal disappointment crossed his mind. Sif was a flawless genetic and cultural archetype—a lethal, highly disciplined warrior who represented the ideal political match for Thor's eventual ascension. Yet his stubborn son had chosen to tether his lifeforce to a fragile, short-lived mortal like Jane.
Shaking off the domestic distraction, Odin focused back on his primary intelligence objective. He had initially sought to extract data regarding Leander from Heimdall, but the gatekeeper had delivered a deeply unsettling report: the moment Leander made physical contact with Thor's deployment zone on Earth, his energetic signature had completely vanished from the All-Seeing Eye's radar. The boy had become a complete ghost to the cosmos, manipulating a level of stealth that mirrored Loki's master-class illusions.
Therefore, his only remaining source of empirical data lay with the warriors who had fought alongside him.
"Sif, during your previous tactical deployment to the Midgardian sector two years ago, what was your definitive military assessment of this mortal, Leander?" Odin asked, his deep, rumbling voice cutting through the silent hall.
"Are you referring to the exceptionally young warrior currently operating alongside Prince Thor?" Sif asked, pausing for a moment as her memory banks retrieved the combat files from the New Mexico deployment. "If that is the entity in question, Allfather... even though our operational overlap was limited to a handful of hours, I can state with absolute certainty that his lethality index is extraordinarily high."
"Elaborate on his specific combat talents," Odin demanded, his face remaining entirely expressionless.
"When our strike team initially established contact with Thor, Leander was already holding the perimeter beside him," Sif reported, her eyes narrowing as she recalled the details. "Immediately following our arrival, the automated Destroyer armor was deployed to the sector via Loki's authorization."
"During the opening seconds of that engagement, Leander was the very first asset to vanish from our visual array. He executed a high-velocity flank, establishing physical contact with the Destroyer before our team could even form a defensive line. His movement speeds are entirely anomalous for a human."
"Continue," Odin muttered.
"I distinctly recall reviewing the battlefield geometry and noting that the Destroyer had been bound by the shattered remnants of heavy metallic cables," Sif continued, her voice turning analytical. "Leander was standing perfectly motionless a short distance away, maintaining absolute cognitive focus without shifting his stance."
"When I initiated a direct melee assault against the armor, I registered a massive degradation in its operational velocity. Its tracking systems and kinetic output were severely compromised, as if an invisible, highly dense gravity field was actively restricting its joints."
Sif took a deep breath, her eyes widening slightly as the pieces of the historical puzzle finally clicked together in her mind. "Analyzing those metrics now, I realize Leander possessed some exotic methodology for physically restraining the Destroyer's Uru chassis. Furthermore, during the climax of the skirmish, he casually commandeered my own specialized weapon, manipulating it through the air via telekinetic force to strike the target. It appears his power script allowed him to suppress the armor, though he lacked the absolute destructive yield required to shatter it permanently. Ultimately, it was Thor's reclaimed divinity that delivered the final kinetic blow."
"Fascinating... So he can manipulate and weaponize forged metals without making physical contact, yet his constructs are incapable of instantly piercing the dense molecular matrix of royal Uru," Odin murmured softly to himself, his fingers tapping against the golden shaft of his spear as he processed the data. "Very well, Sif. Your data has been successfully logged. Return to your staging grounds and resume your combat training."
"By your command, Great Allfather." Sif executed a flawless royal salute, dropping to one knee before smoothly backing out of the grand chamber.
Left entirely alone in the massive expanse of the throne room, Odin raised the legendary golden spear, Gungnir. With a slow, deliberate movement, he tapped the butt of the weapon lightly against the polished palace floor.
Thoom.
A massive, profoundly dense wave of divine Odinforce erupted from the point of contact, sending a low-frequency sonic hum vibrating through the entire foundation of the palace, echoing in perfect synchronization with the planetary core of Asgard itself.
"Leander... my sensory arrays have clearly logged the distinct, space-warping frequency of the Cosmic Cube buried deep within your energetic matrix," Odin whispered into the empty, echoing hall, his hoarse voice dripping with ancient malice. "It appears you have successfully bypassed our security parameters, seized the artifact, and systematically hollowed out its primordial power for your own personal ascension."
"You pose as a loyal companion to my heir, but you must not mistake my patience for ignorance. You shall not deceive the throne of the Aesir. I will extract the absolute truth of your origins."
Meanwhile, completely unconcerned with the royal espionage playing out in the palace, Leander Hayes was currently rising through the upper atmosphere, his body enveloped in a soft golden shimmer as he surveyed the wider geography of Asgard.
He flew higher and higher, completely breaching the atmospheric envelope until he entered the cold vacuum of the immediate orbital space. From this supreme vantage point, the entire panoramic structural reality of Asgard was laid bare before his eyes.
It was an undeniably beautiful, yet deeply bizarre continental landmass floating completely unprotected in the star-filled void. The actual geographic surface area was remarkably miniscule, consisting of nothing more than a few hundred jagged mountain peaks, localized river basins, and a centralized urban grid—making the sovereign capital of the gods significantly smaller than a standard, county-sized municipal city back in China.
Because the physical geography was so incredibly restricted, the total sustainable population was naturally sparse, topping out at the previously calculated twenty thousand inhabitants.
Satisfied with his orbital mapping data, Leander initiated a controlled descent, dropping through the clouds in a smooth, silent glide. As his boots neared a secluded, beautifully manicured royal garden layout, he was met by the sight of an exceptionally elegant, long-haired woman dressed in flowing silk robes, accompanied by a small retinue of three handmaidens.
The moment Leander dropped from the sky without a vessel, the royal guards and handmaidens immediately drew their concealed short swords, their faces twisting into aggressive glares as they stepped forward to shield the noble woman from this strangely dressed, unannounced foreigner.
Frigga, the Queen of Asgard, looked past her guards' weapons, her gentle eyes locking onto Leander's calm, poised demeanor. A warm, intensely perceptive smile broke across her face, and she raised a soft hand, gesturing for her security detail to stand down and chamber their blades.
"I have listened to Thor speak of your exploits with immense frequency, young man—he describes a fierce warrior whose true chronological age is remarkably close to your own," Frigga said, her voice carrying a comforting, maternal warmth as she advanced toward him. "You must be the Midgardian known as Leander, correct?"