The ten days that had brought her to this mont had been earned in full.
When Ethan and the others had left for their honeymoon trip to other universe, Diana had gone directly to the Ancient One.
She observed that the demons crossing over from the hell dinsions had been a persistent problem, ordinary people touched and influenced and in so cases destroyed by forces they had no knowledge of and no defence against.
Diana had wanted to address it at the source, and she had wanted to test the God Slayer Armour in the conditions it had been made for.
The Ancient One had listened to her plan with the unhurried attention of soone who had heard many plans and had developed the ability to identify the ones worth supporting quickly.
She had opened a safe passage to the hell dinsions and had given Diana a watch like device, a simple device that allowed travel between the many separate hell dinsions, each one a distinct pocket of reality with its own architecture and its own particular brand of misery. She had issued one clear condition.
The watch’s function would run for ten days. At the end of ten days, regardless of where Diana was or what she was in the middle of, the chanism would activate and pull her back. It was a protection asure built into the device itself, not a recomndation.
The Ancient One had also packed Diana food for the journey.
Diana had looked at the small parcel and felt sothing warm move through her chest at the quiet practicality of it. Even the Ancient One, it turned out, understood that a warrior fighting across multiple hell dinsions for ten days was going to need to eat.
The armour had been with her through every hour of those ten days, and in those hours she had developed a relationship with it that went beyond equipnt and use.
It moved with her, protected her and returned to her. It had perford in exactly the conditions it had been built for without a single failure.
She had thought, on more than one occasion during the past ten days, that she could kiss Ethan for making it. Not once but many tis. Possibly a million tis, which she had decided was a perfectly reasonable response to armour that had kept her alive through five separate hell dinsions and had never once let her down.
Five dinsions of demons. Five dinsions of clearing out infestation, tracking leaders, dismantling the operations that fed the flow of demonic influence back toward Earth.
And now she was here. phisto’s dinsion. The source and the primary force behind the flow of demons onto Earth, a being who played with human lives as though they were toys designed for his entertainnt, who had continued that play even after Ethan Carter had co through and made a point about his objections.
Diana intended to make sure the lesson she left behind was more durable.
Before entering this universe, Ethan had given her the basic knowledge about threats she needed to know through telepathy.
So, she knows how phisto operated. The scale of his influence. The history of his interference with Earth’s population. She had understood, going in, what she was dealing with. She had understood it more thoroughly with every dinsion she had moved through since.
Now, after ten days of it, she understood it completely.
phista ca in hard with a combination attack, the kind built to overwhelm a single defensive system by forcing it to handle multiple threat vectors simultaneously. Her magic compressed into directed spikes, three of them, angled at Diana’s joints where the armour’s mobility had to allow for gaps.
Diana twisted mid-air. The Aegis caught the first spike and reflected it in a sharp upward angle. The second she rolled under, coming back up inside phista’s guard. The third she cut through with the Divine Reaver in the sa motion.
She ca out of the sequence with the point of the Divine Reaver angled at phista’s throat, her body carried by the montum of her last movent directly into the space where phista had no clean defensive option remaining.
The watch on Diana’s left wrist cracked.
The face split cleanly across the middle, the chanism inside giving out in one final, quiet failure. The ten days were up.
The light took her before the swing completed.
Diana was gone and phista blinked.
The Divine Reaver had been a breath from her throat. She extended her senses outward in an imdiate sweep, scanning the dinsion for Diana’s presence, for any trace of her energy signature, for anything that indicated she had simply relocated rather than departed.
Nothing. She was gone. Fully and completely removed from this dinsion by whatever chanism had pulled her out.
phista looked at the empty air where Diana had been standing and said several things in a demonic language that did not translate into anything a human throat could produce.
’Coward,’ she thought furiously. ’Running in the middle of a fight. Disappearing mid-swing.’
The wave of relief that moved through her at the sa mont was sothing she had absolutely no intention of examining closely or acknowledging to anyone, ever.
She lowered herself slowly and looked around at what remained of her father’s dinsion.
It was a ruin. The battlefield they had made of this place over the course of the fight was only the most recent layer of damage.
Through the ten days Diana had been active across the hell dinsions before arriving here, the structural integrity of phisto’s territory had been steadily and thodically eroded.
Demon populations that had numbered in the millions across the various pockets of this dinsion were now asured in a few hundred.
The architecture of command that her father had built to sustain his operations against Earth had been dismantled piece by piece from the inside.
A single Demigod in gifted armour had nearly destroyed the entire demon hell. She had been a threat to this dinsion on a scale that phista had not seen before and did not enjoy having to acknowledge.
A demon shuffled toward her from a pile of rubble to the left. It was one of the larger ones, built for the kind of heavy labour that the lower orders were assigned to. It stopped at a respectful distance and trembled in the particular way of sothing that was simultaneously terrified and trying very hard not to show it.
phista looked at it with cold calculation. Her eyes moved across the expanse of ruined terrain, doing the arithtic of what had been lost.
"The human won in the holding cavern," she said. "Use her. Increase the population numbers. We need bodies, and we need them quickly. This place needs to be repopulated." She turned her gaze back to the demon. "Start imdiately."
The demon went with a combination of eagerness and fear that suggested it had been waiting to receive any order at all and was simply grateful for the direction, regardless of its source.
phista watched it go and stood in the silence of her ruined dinsion and let herself think calmly for the first ti in ten days.
Her father was not here. He was operating elsewhere, as he often did, moving his pieces across his various boards with the patience of a being who asured ti in human lifespans the way humans asured it in minutes.
He would return. When he did, he would find his dinsion considerably reduced from the state he had left it in.
She turned the problem over in her mind with the particular clarity that ca after a fight had spent all the excess energy and left only the working parts.
One Demigod with gifted weapons had done this. The Hellbreaker, Aeon, had done considerably more with considerably less effort.
Her father had shared what he knew of him after returning from that encounter, and she had listened carefully.
The fragnt of the Phoenix Force. The adaptive evolution that ant any power used against him beca part of him over ti, growing stronger and more refined with each exposure.
The constant, limitless growth that made every battle an investnt on his side. The cosmic fire that burned through things that had no business being burned through.
Her father had not used his full strength in that fight. He had understood mid-battle that if he brought everything he had to bear, Aeon would absorb and adapt to it, and whatever ca out of that process on the other side would be sothing phisto would face permanently and without any comparable counter.
He had chosen to lose in a controlled and deliberate way rather than create a version of his opponent that could not be opposed at all.
It was the most strategically sound retreat her father had ever made. And it had still not prevented the current state of this dinsion.
phista considered the problem from a different angle entirely.
Force had not worked. Magic had not worked. Escalation had not worked. Her father’s careful retreat had not prevented the Hellbreaker from continuing to be an ongoing problem for their operations.
But there were other approaches.
Aeon was a man and his weakness was not in his power set. His weakness was in what he valued.
’If I could charm him,’ she thought, and the smile that ca with it was slow and entirely private, ’this entire arrangent changes. No more Demigods in gifted armour. No more Hellbreaker making inconvenient visits. A different kind of relationship entirely.’
She would need her father’s return before making any move. But the idea sat comfortably in her mind and she did not dismiss it.
’I will go after him once father returns,’ she decided.
And she allowed herself the private luxury of thinking how interesting that would be.
...
[Texas – Johnny Blaze’s Apartnt, September 28th, 2010, Evening]
The crowd noise from the stadium was still fading in the distance when Johnny Blaze finally got back to his apartnt and dropped into the nearest chair.
The stunt had been the biggest of his career. He had known it before he ran the approach. He had felt it in the particular quality of the silence right before the jump, the one that preceded either glory or catastrophe, and this ti it had been glory.
The bike had cleared the gap with room to spare and the noise of the crowd had followed him all the way down.
He sat in the quiet of his apartnt with the comfortable fatigue of soone who had genuinely earned it, and he let himself have the stillness for a few minutes.
Then he heard it. His na. Low and close, too close for the distance from the door to the chair to account for.
It ca from no specific direction, which was the part that made the hair on the back of his neck rise before his conscious mind had processed why.
He knew that voice and would know it if he heard it at the bottom of the ocean.
He would know it in a crowded room with every other sound competing for attention. It lived in a specific part of his mory that was made entirely of the worst night of his life, and it did not fade no matter how many years put themselves between him and it.
There had been a night, years ago, when Johnny Blaze had been a teenager desperate enough to make a deal he did not fully understand with sothing he did not fully comprehend.
His father had been sick. The cancer was progressing and the dicine wasn’t working and the people around him were running out of things to say. Johnny had made a pact. He had offered what phisto asked for in exchange for his father’s life.
phisto had held up his end of the deal with technical precision.
His father’s cancer had been gone the next morning but his father had died the sa day in a stunt accident.
The deal had been fulfilled. The terms had been t. And Johnny Blaze had spent every year since then carrying the specific weight of soone who had been robbed by sothing that had technically given him exactly what he asked for. phisto had cured his father. And then taken him away in the sa breath. The cruelty of it was not accidental. It was the point.
He moved faster than fatigue should have allowed.
He was outside in seconds, and he saw his bike first. Brand new, the paint still carrying the freshness of recent purchase, sitting on the street exactly where he had left it.
The engine was running by no one was on it. The throttle was at idle but the sound of it was wrong, too purposeful, too present, like sothing waiting rather than sothing simply left running.
He turned when his na ca again.
The man standing at the edge of the pavent looked entirely ordinary at first assessnt. Mid-thirties in appearance. Black hair. Dark eyes that caught the evening light at a slightly wrong angle.
Dressed in clothes that were correct for a human being without quite sitting on the body the way clothes sat on soone who actually needed to wear them.
Johnny’s jaw set hard. His hands closed into fists at his sides.
"You." The word ca out with the weight of every year that had passed since that teenage bargain and everything it had cost him. "Don’t you dare co here. Don’t you dare."
phisto smiled. The easy, unhurried smile of soone who found the reunion pleasant regardless of how the other party received it.
"Johnny," he said, the na sitting in his mouth like sothing handled carelessly. "It has been a long ti."
He began to walk forward at a pace that communicated complete indifference to the reaction he was receiving. "You are doing well for yourself. The work suits you."
Johnny’s body tensed to move. Every instinct pointed toward the sa response: distance, exit and refusal.
He had learned years ago that phisto did not appear without a purpose and that purposes always ran deeper and darker than the opening conversation made them sound. He had also learned, the hardest way possible, what it ant to be on the wrong side of a deal with this particular entity.
He was not going to stand here and find out what the current visit was for.
He shifted his weight to leave but his legs did not respond.
He looked down with the specific horror of soone whose body has just communicated that it no longer belongs entirely to them. His feet were on the pavent. They were not moving. He could feel everything around him with complete clarity, the ground beneath his shoes, the evening air on his skin, the engine note of his bike at his back. He simply could not act on any of it.
phisto continued forward without breaking stride, his expression pleasant and entirely unmoved by Johnny’s situation.
"I am in a hurry," he said. "I will not waste both our ti. The Rider has a job to do for ." His voice was conversational in a way that made every word of it worse. "Whether you agree is not a requirent."
Johnny’s body moved without his direction. It turned. It crossed to the bike. It sat down on the seat with the practiced ease of soone who had spent most of their life doing exactly this.
His right hand closed around the throttle and the engine note rose from idle into the focused, coiled readiness of sothing about to be unleashed.
phisto leaned close to his ear. The warmth of human proximity was absent. What replaced it was sothing older and colder dressed in the shape of closeness.
"Find the woman nad Susan Storm," he said, in a tone that dropped below the register of ordinary sound and landed sowhere else entirely. "And kill her. Slowly. In the most painful way you can manage."
Johnny’s eyes went wide. His mind moved through the instruction and found no exit from it, no angle from which his refusal had any traction, no way to act on the complete and absolute rejection filling every part of him.
phisto straightened and stepped back. He raised the walking stick he carried and brought it down against the pavent once, a single sharp impact that sent sothing through the ground and up through the bike and into the machine itself.
Johnny Blaze left the kerb at a speed the bike was not chanically capable of producing. The fire ca with him, trailing from the wheels in a continuous stream, burning orange-white against the darkening road, the line of it stretching back in a perfect arc as he rounded the first corner and disappeared from sight.
phisto stood on the empty pavent and watched the fire trail fade into the distance.
The smile that settled on his face was not the pleasant, social one he had used for the greeting.
It was the one underneath, older and more honest, the expression that only appeared when a piece had been placed correctly and the sequence had been properly set in motion.
"I hope you enjoy the present," he said, to no one present and soone specific in mind. "Consider it a belated wedding gift, Aeon." A pause, unhurried and deliberate. "You were on your honeymoon, after all. It would have been rude to interrupt."
His laughter moved through the empty street, bouncing off the buildings on both sides, rolling through the silence of an evening that had no idea what had just been set in motion within it.
By the ti it had finished, the shadows had already taken him back.
The street was empty and still, carrying nothing but the faint, fading sll of sothing that had been burning.
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