Chapter 222: Yukari's Power Move
In the crater's depths, Yukari's grip tightened on the hammer handle, and the expression on her elegant face shifted into something it didn't wear often: genuine, unperformed surprise.
Ryū had mentioned the worthiness enchantment. She'd absorbed this as a data point, not a warning. Either she'd satisfy whatever criteria the hammer used, or she'd find a different angle. Both options seemed viable. The hammer was a weapon, not a judge of character — the distinction between "worthy" and "currently being held by someone who will not accept the alternative" should be navigable.
What she had not prepared for was the weight.
The hammer didn't resist in the way something heavy resisted. It resisted in the way a mountain resisted. The distinction was that a heavy object could be moved with sufficient force. This felt like it had decided, with complete finality, that it wasn't going anywhere. The crater floor might as well have grown up around it.
Yukari held her position and considered this.
The Shiba had lifted it without apparent effort. One paw. Casually. A small dog with round eyes and a miniature cape.
And she, the Sage of Gensokyo, the gap youkai who had spent several thousand years accumulating power that most practitioners would never approach in a lifetime — could not make the hammer acknowledge her.
The implications could be read two ways, and she preferred not to dwell on either of them.
Fine.
She abandoned the gradual build and let everything out in a single pulse.
The ground responded immediately. Not with a single impact, but with a continuous vibration that built rapidly — loose stones dancing across the crater floor, the creaking of stressed metal from the equipment above the rim, and then a deeper sound, the kind that came from large things being forced to move against their preference.
The canopy, which had been leaning since the Shiba's lightning demonstration, made one decisive sound and came down entirely.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents above — trained, experienced professionals — went down in sequence, the shaking reaching a frequency that made controlled standing functionally impossible. Coulson hit the ground shoulder-first and stayed down. Several research staff sat where they fell and did not immediately attempt to get up. The heavy equipment at the crater's edge rocked, one unit tilting past its recovery angle and toppling with a crash that added to the general noise.
Fissures opened from the crater's centre outward, spreading like cracks in cooling glass, widening as they went. Coulson, lying on the ground and unable to do much about it, watched a split thirty centimetres across appear two metres to his right and continue growing.
Is the hammer doing this now? Was it doing something different before? Is it making earthquakes in addition to everything else it does?
His mental model of events was not keeping pace with events.
The Chat Group members were standing normally. Not bracing, not widening their stances. Watching with the mild interest of people who have seen this category of thing before and are curious how it resolves.
Whitebeard had his arms folded. "Even Yukari can't lift it? A remarkable hammer."
Kaguya nodded agreement. "Physical strength isn't Yukari-nee's main path, but her body-type ability still exceeds mine. If that's insufficient—" She paused. "Though if she keeps going, the nearby residential areas — if there are civilian casualties—"
"She's managing it," Ryū said. He'd been watching the output calibration. "She's not at full power. She's holding back. Full power from Yukari looks substantially different from this."
He was right. Yukari was operating at roughly sixty percent, and the constraint was intentional. The Ancient One was observing from somewhere she hadn't been able to fully locate. Dismantling a small American town during what was supposed to be a pleasant five-day group holiday would be difficult to explain and would almost certainly invite a response she didn't particularly want right now. The group activity had four days remaining. There was no reason to make it more complicated.
Sixty percent. The hammer had not moved.
An expression appeared on Yukari's face that was technically a smile in that it deployed the muscles associated with smiling. The warmth one normally associated with the expression was not present.
The hand holding the hammer handle began to emit a faint luminescence.
"You have some level of consciousness in there, don't you." The tone was pleasant. Conversational. "If you don't give this sage a little face today — I want you to consider carefully what you think will happen. I can take you apart piece by piece and have your material reformatted as a toilet. A functioning toilet, nothing decorative. I am being completely, literally sincere about this."
The hammer vibrated. A small, subtle movement, like something objecting.
The glow on her hand became more visible.
The hammer vibrated again. Longer this time. Then shorter. As if working through something.
Then the weight simply wasn't there.
Yukari lifted it.
Single-handed. Straight up. Without the kind of explosive effort she'd been feeding into the attempt for the last several minutes.
"Ha!" Her expression shifted to the genuine article — actual satisfaction, unambiguous. "As expected! The Thunder God's hammer has recognised this sage as a person of righteousness and virtue!"
Ryū stared at her.
He had watched this from beginning to end. He had heard every word she'd said to the hammer. He had seen the sequence of events in its entirety.
She had verbally threatened a magical weapon. The weapon had assessed the threat, concluded that compliance was preferable to the described alternative, and surrendered its resistance.
And she was now describing this as the hammer recognising her as a person of righteousness.
This was specifically, precisely, and exclusively a thing that Yukari could produce. No other being in the Chat Group would have thought to issue demands to a piece of enchanted metalwork. Several of them could have applied more raw force. None of them would have found leverage in the hammer's own survival instincts.
The more troubling part — the part he kept coming back to — was that it had worked. The hammer had rudimentary consciousness. He'd said as much when the Shiba asked. And whatever that consciousness had assessed about Yukari in the moment she made her threat, it had decided that holding its position was not worth the cost.
Mjolnir, forged from the core of a dying star, wielded by Asgardian royalty for generations, had been bullied into compliance.
This youkai sage has no floor. There is no lower bound on what she will do.
He started to add something in his head, some appropriate epithet, and then something in his peripheral vision stopped the thought entirely.
A figure had arrived at the crater rim.
Standing some distance away from the group. Jaw at an angle that suggested it had considered departure.
The hair was gold. Long, loose, the kind of hair that implied either deliberate cultivation or divine genetics. The frame beneath it was substantial in the way that made everyone else in the immediate vicinity look like they'd been assembled from slightly smaller components.
Ryū held the face against his memory for approximately half a second.
That's—
He knew that face.
Not the Shiba. Not any dog. The actual one.
Thor. The Asgardian. The MCU's.
The question of why he was here right now, ahead of the timeline Ryū remembered, probably had an answer that started with "butterfly effect" and ended with "us arriving in this world and the Shiba touching his hammer."
He'd arrived in time to see the whole thing.
He'd seen the Shiba lift Mjolnir with one paw and drop it back because the handle was inconveniently thick.
He'd seen Yukari threaten it into submission and then lift it herself.
He was standing at the crater's edge looking at his hammer in another person's hand, and his expression was doing several things simultaneously that no single word adequately described.
His emotional state was, Ryū suspected, genuinely complex.
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