phisto, who had listened to this exchange with visible amusent, rose from the throne. He straightened his jacket, set the wine glass aside, and began to walk toward Ethan with the unhurried pace of soone who had nowhere else to be and wanted to make that clear.
"Enough of the pleasant conversation," he said. His voice had changed. Not dramatically, but in the way that a temperature drop changes a room without announcing itself. "Let give you the full scope."
He stopped a few feet away and looked at Ethan directly.
Then he let the borrowed form go.
The well-dressed man dissolved from the outside in, the human appearance peeling back layer by layer to reveal what existed underneath it.
The figure that erged stood well over eight feet tall, built on a scale that belonged to a different order of existence.
His skin was the deep red of cooling lava, dense and ancient-looking, with a surface that suggested sothing far older than flesh.
His face was severe and angular, heavy-browed, the jaw wide and set, with eyes that burned a deep and constant amber beneath the heavy brow, the specific amber of sothing that had been alight for longer than recorded history and had never once considered stopping.
His hands were enormous, each finger ending in sothing that had not fully decided between a nail and a talon.
Dark material covered his fra, sothing that moved with the quality of shadow given physical weight, shifting slightly with each movent as though it was not entirely committed to being solid.
There were no theatrical additions, no horns and performance. He did not need any of it. The scale of him and the sheer weight of his presence in the room did everything that theatre would have attempted and did it more effectively.
The temperature in the throne room rose by several degrees.
phisto closed the remaining distance to Ethan in two steps. His hand ca up and wrapped around Ethan's throat, the grip large enough to cover most of his neck, and he lifted slightly, the chains shifting and creaking with the movent.
Ethan did not flinch. His expression did not move. He looked back at phisto with the flat, unimpressed composure of soone who had decided before arriving that they were not going to give this mont what it was asking for.
phisto applied pressure. His amber eyes narrowed.
"Your Diana Prince," he said, and his voice in this form carried a resonance that made the stonework of the walls vibrate at a frequency just below hearing.
"Your demigod girlfriend. She entered my dinsion, wore armor inscribed with Asgardian runes."
His grip tightened. "She destroyed more of my demons than I have lost in several centuries combined. She pushed them to the edge of extinction in ten days."
The amber glow burned hotter. "Do you have any understanding of the humiliation in that sentence? When I learned from my daughter that she tore my dinsion apart while I was away—do you even know what that feels like?"
The temperature climbed another degree.
Doom watched from across the room. His posture carried the particular tension of soone who had entered an arrangent they had not fully controlled and was watching it extend beyond the boundaries of what they had agreed to. But his hands remained behind his back.
"And you," phisto continued, his voice dropping lower, "personally entered my dinsion and humiliated in front of the entire demon race. The insults from that have only piled up over the years."
The grip tightened further. "I have spent millions of years building what I am. I have patience that your species cannot asure. And I have waited for this precise mont with complete confidence that it would arrive exactly as I planned."
He leaned in. The amber eyes filled Ethan's field of vision.
"I have made this space into sothing that can hold anything that enters it," he said.
"I have accounted for your Power Cosmic. I have accounted for your adaptive evolution. I have linked Cynthia Von Doom's soul to mine so that Victor cannot act against without destroying the only thing he has spent his entire life trying to recover."
A pause, long and deliberate. "And if you resist in any way, if you attempt to break free, if you cause any harm at all, every person you have ever cared about will co to understand what it ans to have my complete and undivided attention. Your company. Your employees. The X-n. Everyone who has ever sat at a table with you and called themselves your family."
He held Ethan's gaze.
"I have already made arrangents to leak the existence of your Death girlfriend to entities who will find the information very interesting indeed," he continued. "The consequences of that particular disclosure will keep you occupied for years, if you survive long enough to deal with them."
His grip on Ethan's throat reached its maximum pressure.
"Submit to ," phisto said.
His voice had changed—stripped of all charm, all pretense. What remained was sothing cold… absolute… like a law being spoken into existence. "Completely. Without condition."
The air itself seed to tighten around his words.
"Beco what I require. Function as I direct. Give unrestricted access to everything you are."
His gaze burned with quiet malice. "Or face the consequences of your defiance—consequences that will tear apart the life you've built in this world, Carter."
A faint, cruel smile touched his lips. "I don't believe you'll be granted another chance to reincarnate… to start over from nothing."
He paused deliberately, letting the weight of that sink in.
Then his voice dropped lower—final, commanding.
"The only option you have now… is to kneel."
His eyes locked forward. "Call your master, Ethan Carter... Say it."
He waited.
The room was completely silent except for the sound of the chains and the low vibration of the castle's stonework under the weight of phisto's presence.
Ethan looked back at him.
There was no fear in his expression. There was no panic, no visible calculation, no sign of a person running through options and finding them closing one by one.
There was sothing else entirely, sothing very quiet and very certain and very cold, sitting behind his eyes with the particular stillness of sothing that had already made its decision and was simply waiting for the right mont to act on it.
His eyes began to glow. "Who are you to decided that?"
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