Thunderer

The destroyer stood under the desert's sun like a gleaming pillar of unforgiving and merciless judgement, the low whirring sound of its movement seeping into the air around it and making the pebbles on the tarmac move as if heralding an earthquake. The rainbow cascade that had delivered him onto Midgard had retreated with the same speed it had arrived, but it almost looked like some of that light had remained in the construct of shining Uru: it wasn't a weapon realized for any thought spared for camouflage or quiet takedowns.

It stood without any sort of martial pose, it stood with the subtle implication that all that made a humanoid fighter truly dangerous wasn't needed.

Yamamoto should know, as he was one and the same. Still, the ancient shinigami kept his eyes half-lidded as he peered with interest at the newcomer, who had started to walk toward the group of fallen Asgardians around him.

"You know no shame, do you Loki?" the rhetorical question came from the still-conscious woman, who forced one arm under her body and began to push herself to a sitting position while she began to drag her legs into a crouch, earning herself some quiet praise in the mind of Genryusai Yamamoto, who quickly deduced that the metallic contraption had come with ill intent for the stupid boy that he had forced into confronting his actual self.

Perhaps guessing at the faint curiosity that the one-armed elder felt for the recent events, but still working with the assumption that Loki wouldn't miss the events about to unfold, Sif managed to utter out loud as she forced her body to move beyond the crippling exhaustion that plagued her: "You betray your home, and then you send the Destroyer to kill your brother, the rightful heir to the throne?"

Her body shouted in protest at every little movement, but her own words had put into clear focus the true nature of the events at hand, and her resolve only hardened, her rage focused on a razor's edge, and while the minor part of her mind was trying to decode the obfuscating words that the elder had previously spoken, the better part of her was dedicated to every moment that was bout to unfold.

Bruised and battered, exhausted as she had never been since the first time she had picked up a sword and more or less bullied her way into training amidst the golden warriors of Asgard, Sif rose on wobbling legs that were forced into stillness by her own will. She almost felt like the hand puppeteering herself, her aching body a distant thing as she blinked the white spots away from her eyes.

"A child shouldn't be allowed to decide for himself." the wizened and stern voice of the ancient warrior that had quite literally schooled the Warrior Four rang above the rhythmic marching of the destroyer, "why would anyone with a speck of wisdom deem him acceptable as ruler of an entire people?"

Sif dragged herself to her shield and strapped it to her left arm while her right claimed once more her sword: a sword that had fallen countless foes before, but that on that day had only managed to bite thin air. Then her mind processed the words of the one-armed elder, and the flicker of a frown managed to make its way on her beautiful features, coloring her pale visage with something akin to fury for the disrespect that kept being poured on the rightful heir of the Eternally Golden Realm.

There was no time to reply as the ancient warrior remained standing with his back straight but making no move to halt the Destroyer, which, after an imperceptible moment of hesitation, lowered the Uru plates that contained the solar storm within, and a burning fierceness immediately shone bright enough to rival the sun far above and a beam was shot...

A deep divot was scoured on the side of the empty park, the ground giving in along with the corner of a building that simply ceased to exist as the soulless contraption was shot back along the road and kept rolling over the bare ground at the edge of the human settlement. With the vastness of the desert behind it, the destroyer truly looked like the machine it was as its plates whirred, changing the direction in which its articulations could bend in order to raise it upright faster than what would have been otherwise possible.

Sif blinked, not fully processing what had just occurred, only for her eyes to focus on the few steps between the divot on the ground and her fallen friends, who hadn't stirred from her forced unconsciousness, while Thor kept seizing on the ground.

"Hollow puppet, hear my words." the godly commandment was given with more authority than even One-Eyed Odin could exhude, and one another Realm, Sif fancied she could see Loki flinching, "Attack me again, and il tear your home from the skies into endless flame."

Standing once more, the dents in the indestructible armor popping into place as pushed from the unrivaled power held within, the Destroyer pointed a single finger, not at the one that had just punched it with greater force than what a Mjolnir thrown by Thor could deliver, but at the fallen god himself, still howling with his jaw clenched as the tarmac turned his frail human skin into a red, raw mess.

"You're a thousand years too young for me to move to shorten your path." Yamamoto scoffed, entirely uncaring of the fate that had almost fallen on the unconscious Asgardians around him, "Walk around me, and pray that your closeness does not irritate me enough to actually hit you."

Sif wavered between dumbstruck awe and the sudden impulse to throttle the insanely powerful old man: "You could stop the Destroyer."

It was a consideration uttered with the utmost surprise, with a spark of reverence that their previous bouts hadn't quite managed to reveal, and with it, it carried a single thing: expectation. You can save us, why don't you? How can you stand there with all your power and do nothing to protect the powerless?

With the experience of millennia leading a warrior people, of seeing countless of his shinigami grieve for a fallen comrade, only to accuse those stronger of not having done enough, Yamamoto looked at the girl that he had almost regarded as a proud fighter until an instant before. "The boy can't even face himself, and he wishes to face the universe as ruler of your people. You four break orders, and now wish for another to spare you the consequences? How shameful."

If the strongest protected all from everything, what would happen when he was gone? If those who were weak never had cause to aim for strength, would they ever be anything but sheep ready to be slaughtered at the first difficulty? How is it possible that none of this has been thought to you, who appear to be the one closest to your promised next ruler? The question only raised a great swell of disappointment towards those who were meant to shape the next generation of those who would end up protecting this Nine Realms that the blond child had blabbered about.

Sif saw none of those questions in the now closed eyes of the elder fighter, she understood none of the deep reasoning behind those words, and so, she simply reverted to her own proven and true tactics when the others of the Warrior Four lagged behind and Thor was in the sky playing with his hammer: doing everything by herself.

Without shouting in order to spare her breath, she squared her shoulders and charged the Destroyer. As she ran, she couldn't help but notice that the Uru contraption had begun to reach for Thor once more, but this time, it was following a large circle in order to avoid coming too close to the one-armed man.

Pain was a curious thing: how much was too much?

Or better yet, at which point another wave of agony would no longer impact the suffering of someone? At which point the weight piled upon the shoulders of someone became meaningless?

Hurting beyond anything that words could hope to convene, Thor suddenly felt himself calm down.

Lightning and Thunder crashed through his frail, mortal body while being constricted by Odin's last spell, which had deemed him unworthy. And at some point, a point reached through an eternity of agony that made the very concept of time non-existent, the trueborn son of Odin and Frigga was strewn about under stormy skies upon a vast landscape of green, rolling hills, with the grass waving violently under the onslaught of the battering winds.

The pain, the hurt, was everpresent: his body failing him, falling apart because of his inner storm, was matched only by the spiritual agony of seeing everything he had always been, discarded by his own father. Odin-King, the greatest of Asgard's rulers, who had deemed him, the product of his own teachings and example, worse than a failure. Thor wasn't unfamiliar with failure, when he was young, he had to fail in order to learn in the military fields where he later excelled, and Loki had never been one to not lord over him his superiority in any academic field.

And with the veritable mountain of hurt weighing on his shoulders, Thor willed himself to stand on his feet, simply deciding that he had enough, and so he stood. In the grey light that seemed to seep through the sky-encompassing storm far above him, the castaway royal of Asgard opened his blue eyes, and who he found, somehow failed to truly surprise him.

Clad in his kingly vests, with his face relaxed and his one eye closed, Odin stood in front of his discarded son, his spear nowhere to be seen as the harsh wind and suddenly pouring rain failed to touch him. His breathing was deep and regular, as if...

"You must be truly near death, to meet me at the edge of my Sleep." Odin's mouth didn't move, and yet his voice rang above the chaotic rumble of the storm above. If a hint of sorrow could be discerned in his tone, the storm above surely swallowed it as it seemed to pour itself lower towards the ground.

"Father." Thor simply stated, maybe for the first time in his life overwhelmed by the situation, or maybe, simply aware of his own mortality. Clad in the mortal's clothes that Lady Jane had provided him, he seemed even lesser than he felt himself when next to the regalia-clad Odin. Then an obvious hope fluttered to the forefront of his mind, and standing still under the distant and yet encompassing weight of his physical and spiritual agony, he asked the most obvious thing: "Can you save me?"

"It is time for you to save yourself." once more, the king's peremptory voice rang, and perhaps belatedly, his son realized something, his mind sluggishly processing what had just been told to him.

"Wait, you said... Sleep?" Thor frowned as the pouring rain began to reach him, pelting him as he witnessed the overhead storm lurch closer to the soil, closer to him. Somewhat instinctually, he knew that his suffering would end with another eternity of pain once that storm reached him. Would he be taken into the skies against his will as he had done to countless other enemies of Asgard? Would a lightning bolt strike him dead, or would he suffocate as the winds stole the breath from his lungs?

Blinking, the blond fallen god returned to the matter at hand: "But... I must be the prey of some illusion, Loki told me that you perished in your Sleep because the effort to banish me was too great!"

"You are prey of the same illusions that plagued me in my youth, and those aren't borne of Loki's trickery." The words of Odin, as it happened from time to time, were so simple in their obfuscations that Thor heard nothing of their hidden meaning, while his mind focused on a very simple concept: either he was dreaming of his father right now, in some illusion born from the pain that cursed through him, or this was truly Odin in his Sleep, and Loki had lied to him when he had revealed himself as the King that could bring his brother back home.

"I cannot undo my own enchantment, Thor." Thor, not son: not for the first time, the fallen god was reminded that he was no longer who he had always been, stripped of what truly defined him, he knew that the overhead storm would surely destroy him sooner rather than later.

Still, some of the rage that had been sparked during this conversation flared anew, and he found himself clenching his fists as he took a stumbling step forward "And you wouldn't even if you could."

The silence that followed was answer enough, and Thor felt a swell of righteous fury rise within him: wasn't he Crown Prince? Wasn't he the mightiest of Asgard's warriors? The bravest? The once that had always risen to the challenge with a dauntless spirit?

"I always strived to be worthy of you!" Thor wanted to pull his hair out, to punch, to harm, to inflict upon anything a fraction of the agony that was shaking his entire being: "Didn't I fight with honor countless times?"

"You only and always strived to please yourself." the impassible visage of the sleeping Odin breathed calmly in his deep slumber, but the censure in his voice was clear.

At that, Thor took another step towards his father, his movement fractionally less wobbly than before as the agony that defined his current state of existence was disregarded as the meaningless distraction that it was. "You'd still deem me unworthy, when you lay asleep and let Loki do as he pleases?"

"Vain glory, empty honor, hollow duty, strength granted instead of earned, power born instead of built." with every word, the scorn in Odin's voice could be heard more clearly, and the storm grew closer as Thor walked forward, utterly uncaring of both the distant hurt that his father's word inflicted and the now familiar agony that he drowned under his righteous fury.

When he stood in front of the being that he had once called his father, the thunderer let go of what little restraint he had managed to keep, and as he punched forward, rejecting all of Odin's wrong assumptions and impossible expectations, refusing to listen to a word that hypocrite of a King was trying to say, the storm reached him, and lightning was his once more as his entire world was devoured by the thundering sky.

AN

Well, it's been a long wait, hasn't it? Still, I'm glad to be back!

I can't have Thor turn into a shinigami, that would really send my story out of whack, and I don't want him to become his canon self, as that would simply destroy the entire build-up of these past chapters. I tried to not be too blatant about the parallelism of Thor rejecting his father's judgment and thus breaking through the binding of his power.

A little bit more of characterization for old man Yama, a bit of OP-ness that kinds of defines him, and the true meat of the chapter: Unworthy Thor. I'm kind of happy with the pacing of this fic, and I'll try to keep it fast progressing with the same speed. I'd say that the next chapter closes the first Arc of the story, and I'm eager to listen to everything y'all have to say.

With this chapter (on 10-29-2023), I officially declare that I have ended up setting up a Pa Tre On, and that I'll be taking down my previous site, since I've got the sneaking suspicion that my fics got downloaded from there in order to be then copy-pasted behind paywalls to begin with. If you want to throw some money my way, I'm not going to tell you not to: seek out Cloud9Stories on Pa Tre On and use the usual link that I'll provide there! Thank you kindly for your attention!