The Battle of New York comes and goes.
From my perspective, it's almost… dull.
I stay quiet. Passive. Observant. I let events play out the way history insists they must. Loki fights. The Avengers assemble. A city burns just enough to traumatize a generation but not enough to matter on a cosmic scale.
I don't help Loki.
Not really.
I could. Easily. With a nudge here, a deeper push there, I could have tipped the board. But Loki is a dead end, and I'm not stupid enough to chain myself to a dead end.
If I possess him, I win the battle—and lose everything afterward.
Asgardian dungeons are not places you escape from. Odin would sense me eventually. Thor would smash first and ask questions never. Worst of all, I'd be trapped in a body whose ceiling I'd already mapped.
No.
Instead, I do something far more valuable.
I copy him.
Not his body. Not his soul.
His mind.
Every spell he's ever learned. Every illusion framework. Every runic structure, every forbidden tome he skimmed and pretended to understand. His knowledge of Asgard, of the Nine Realms, of ancient treaties, cosmic politics, hidden places, and things even mortals were never meant to know.
I take it all.
Cleanly.
Perfectly.
Loki never notices.
To him, the scepter is a tool—an amplifier. To me, he's a library that doesn't know it's being scanned.
By the time the Avengers finally bring him down, I've already extracted everything worth keeping.
He kneels. He rages. He's dragged away in chains, humiliated, furious, alive.
I feel nothing.
The scepter leaves his hands soon after.
Good.
It passes briefly through S.H.I.E.L.D. custody—humans poking at forces they don't even have language for—before vanishing entirely.
Hydra.
Of course it's Hydra.
They don't understand me any better than the others, but they're ambitious, paranoid, and willing to experiment. That makes them useful.
As I'm transported, sealed, hidden away in underground facilities, I don't resist. I don't whisper. I don't dominate.
I sleep.
Or something like it.
Hydra thinks they've acquired a weapon.
They have no idea they've just picked up a god-in-waiting with infinite patience, infinite energy, and a growing list of potential hosts.
Let them experiment.
Let them build.
Let them make mistakes.
Eventually, someone extraordinary will come along.
Someone worth taking.
And when that happens—
I won't just change the MCU.
I'll rewrite it.