Chapter 355: Farewell, Thanos
"Thank god for Wong — Sorcerer Supreme through and through!" someone gasped in the aftermath of the explosion. Wong had sensed the danger the instant Ethan and Thanos began gathering their power, and had immediately ordered every Kamar-Taj sorcerer to open portals, pulling the Avengers clear of the blast radius.
The portals swept them into a mysterious Mirror Dimension — a space that felt like its own isolated universe, sealed off entirely from the outside world. Safe here, for the moment, from the blast — though the worry gnawing at everyone only grew sharper.
"That was genuinely terrifying. For a second there, I actually thought I was dead," Rocket Raccoon said, still visibly shaken by what he'd just witnessed.
"Groot!" Wanda called out Ethan's name urgently — worry for him overriding everything else, desperate to break out and find him.
"Ethan's fine, right? Let me out, I need to see him!" she demanded, unable to stand the not-knowing another second, needing confirmation of his safety immediately.
"He'll be okay, teacher's wife. Master's basically unbeatable," Tobey-Peter offered, trying to reassure her. Young as he was, his faith in and reverence for Ethan hadn't wavered a bit.
"Relax — trust Ethan. Even if every single person on Earth dropped dead, that guy would still be standing." Young Tony joined the chorus of reassurance too, his tone light, though the tension underneath it gave him away.
Right then, Old Tony raised a question. "Actually — factoring in the amount of power both Thanos and Ethan just unleashed, a conservative estimate says the entire planet should've been wiped out. So why did the blast only cover, what, less than a hundred kilometers?" The question set everyone thinking.
Doctor Strange answered slowly. "Something's actively suppressing the explosion." There was a note of awe in his voice.
"Right — that would be Ethan, using the Space Stone to contain the blast," Strange added, a genuine mix of admiration and gratitude coloring his words.
At that explanation, the Avengers all let out a breath of relief. They understood now — Ethan wasn't just monstrously powerful. He had real courage to match it. When it mattered most, he'd stepped up and shielded the entire universe from catastrophe.
Steve, though, frowned suddenly. "Still — Thanos is genuinely ruthless. He didn't spare a single thought for his own soldiers' lives out there." He stared toward the area still blanketed in white light.
Thanos hadn't given the slightest consideration to the men who'd fought and bled for him. The sheer cold-bloodedness of it left Steve angry, and a little heartsick.
At last, after roughly two and a half minutes, the massive energy explosion finally faded.
As the white light dimmed away, the Avengers watched the battlefield with bated breath, desperate to know how the fight had ended — who exactly had come out on top.
Plants, soil, stone, even the tallest buildings — everything caught in that overwhelming shockwave had simply vanished.
All that remained was a colossal, bottomless crater, carved deep into the land like an open wound.
The Avengers rushed forward and looked down into it — and there was Ethan, half-kneeling on the ground, gasping for breath, while Thanos lay motionless nearby.
Ethan knelt there, chest heaving, his clothes shredded to rags by the blast's aftershock, patches of scorched, scraped skin visible beneath the tatters. But despite how wrecked he looked, his eyes still burned with the unmistakable light of victory.
He knew he'd won this fight. It had been brutal enough to burn through nearly every reserve of strength he had — but he could feel it, clearly: his own power had brushed the very edge of the multiversal tier. Just barely. The faintest sliver of it.
He'd spent the entire clash trading blows with Thanos head-on while simultaneously drawing on the Space Stone to suppress the runaway explosion at the same time.
Right now, Ethan was utterly spent. This fight had pushed him further than anything he'd ever faced.
He'd come within a hair's breadth of his absolute limit — if he'd given Thanos even a moment more to catch his breath, the outcome could easily have gone the other way. But luck had held. He'd pushed through to the very end, and beaten Thanos.
Hands trembling, Ethan reached into his pocket and pulled out a Senzu Bean.
He'd prepared it in advance — a miraculous fruit meant for exactly this: restoring stamina and strength in an instant.
He swallowed it without hesitation, and the bean's power spread through his body almost immediately. A wave of warmth rushed through him, and every trace of exhaustion and weakness vanished on the spot.
Ethan rose to his feet and walked slowly toward the fallen Thanos.
Thanos's own condition was even worse than Ethan's had been. His right hand had been utterly destroyed in the final exchange, and a horrific wound gaped open across his right chest.
He lay there without moving, as if every last ounce of strength had drained out of him.
He knew he'd lost. He'd thrown absolutely everything he had into this fight, and he'd still lost — following the exact same path as the other Thanos before him.
Strangely, knowing his life was counting down now seemed to bring him a kind of quiet peace.
Everything else had simply stopped mattering to him.
He let go of every ambition, every lingering resentment, and simply lay there, waiting for the end to come.
A phrase surfaced in his mind: After I die, let the whole world drown. That was, more or less, exactly where his heart sat right now.
There was still some regret in him, of course — if he'd had more time to adapt to the Infinity Stones' power, he might well have beaten Ethan after all.
But he'd lost. That was simply the fact of it. No use dwelling on what-ifs.
Thanos had to admit, grudgingly, that this man Ethan had simply mastered the Infinity Stones' power more completely than he had.
He'd never had the chance to work with the Space Stone or Time Stone himself.
And the Mind Stone — that one had never suited him at all, which was exactly why he'd handed it off to Loki in the first place.
Setting aside the Power Stone, the only other Stone that had ever really fit his own style was the Reality Stone. A shame, really.
There was no chance left now. His entire army had been wiped out by his own final attack.
It looked like he was going to die far from home, in a universe not his own.
Maybe that was his only real regret — not dying on his own soil.
He wasn't even sure, himself, whether he actually regretted coming here at all.
Maybe I should have refused that invitation, Thanos thought suddenly, a memory surfacing — before he'd come here, some small figure had somehow slipped past every layer of his ship's defenses, broken straight into his warship, and dropped the three-Stone Gauntlet right onto the floor in front of him.
Then vanished. Leaving nothing behind but a small note.
The note had told him: through this wormhole waits the man who killed your men and took the Mind Stone — Ethan — and he holds the remaining three Infinity Stones besides.
Thanos had known, even then, that it could well be a trap. But he hadn't cared. Against raw strength, any conspiracy was nothing but a paper tiger.
And now here he was — defeated. That small figure had clearly had an agenda of his own. But Thanos no longer had the will to care.
He wasn't going to tell Ethan any of it, either — that someone out there had specifically engineered all of this against him.
That was when Ethan finally reached him.
"Farewell, Thanos."
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