The Fox Hole! 168 (Patreon)

Chapter 168:

– Haru –

It had been decades since I'd last seen the films, but I remembered enough to know the MCU had done the Asgardians dirty. 

They were supposed to be a race of near-gods who lived for thousands of years. Yet by the later movies, just about every Asgardian who wasn't Thor came off as barely tougher than an ordinary human. 

Here, though, the average Asgardian had the strength of at least ten men, and the enchanted armor and weapons they carried into battle made them even more dangerous. There was a reason Thanos waited until Odin was dead before he went anywhere near Asgard.

All that said, strength only goes so far when the other side doesn't care about getting hurt.

Below me, the overflow parking lot had turned into a meat grinder. 

An Einherjar would cave in a wight's skull with one swing of his axe, and three more corpses would be on him before the first one finished falling. They clawed at the seams of his armor, bit at his gauntlets and dragged him down by sheer weight. 

Ten on one. Twenty on one. 

The wights didn't flinch when they lost an arm, didn't slow when their ribs caved in, and didn't stop until there was nothing left that could move. Asgard had trained its soldiers for battle, but nobody had trained them for this. 

Hela hadn't brought a better army. She'd brought more of it than anyone could hope to kill.

Through the green glow of a thousand dead eyes I caught pieces of the wider fight. Steve's shield ricocheted between three helmets and came back to his hand like it had somewhere else to be. Red-and-gold repulsor fire and the crack of electrified whips flashed off to the east, where Tony was keeping Vanko busy. Hela stood near the front of her horde, a black blade in each hand, carving through Asgardian veterans as if they'd personally insulted her. 

Behind all of it, Frigga's green-and-gold dome held steady over the Expo pavilion.

I only got to look for a second before Gungnir came for my throat.

I brought the Dark Moon Greatsword up and caught the spearhead on the flat of the blade. The impact rang out like a cathedral bell, and the shockwave blew a perfect ring in the clouds around us. I actually felt that blow a bit. 

Odin was old, and he was arrogant, and he was a piece of shit, but he'd been winning wars since before most civilizations had invented writing, and he hit like it.

According to legend, Gungnir never missed its mark.

Technically it still hadn't. It had hit my sword every single time.

I felt the Greatsword pulse in my grip smugly. 

"Where is my wife?" Odin roared. Golden light bled from the cracks in his armor, and his single eye burned like a forge. Eight hundred feet above a ruined parking lot in Queens, the Allfather of Asgard looked less like a king than a man who'd just discovered someone had been sleeping in his bed. Which, to be fair, someone had. "What have you done with her, beast?"

I smiled. I couldn't help it.

"Oh, I've done a lot of things with Frigga." I tilted my head, letting my ears flick lazily. "She's an amazing woman. Brilliant. Funny. Way more flexible than you'd expect from someone who spent a thousand years standing politely behind your throne."

There was no mistaking what I meant, and I wasn't trying to be subtle. I wanted every word to land.

Odin's face went from red to purple. The air around him ignited.

Gold poured off him like heat off a forge. The clouds below us boiled away and the light turned the night sky to noon. For half a heartbeat I caught something else beneath it, a dark crimson pulse under his breastplate that my Lord of the Kitchen couldn't read. 

Every ingredient has a label. This one refused to have one.

Hmmm…

Then Odin came at me once again.

I gave ground across the sky, the Greatsword snapping from guard to guard, my tails slapping the spear's shaft aside whenever it slipped past the blade. 

"You are nothing," Odin snarled between strikes. "A mongrel. A kitchen servant who stumbled into stolen power."

"Kitchen owner," I corrected, and kicked him in the chest hard enough to send him tumbling a hundred feet backward. "Get it right."

Below us the fighting went on…

Even with most of my attention on Odin, I could feel the shape of the battlefield beneath us the way you can feel a kitchen during dinner rush without looking at every station.

Hela was the loudest thing down there. She stood at the center of her horde like the eye of a storm, and every wight on the field moved to her will. Some flanked, some pinned and some piled on. She wasn't just directing them, either. 

She'd waded into the Einherjar herself, and the elite of Asgard broke around her like waves on a rock.

But she was holding back. A lot.

I'd seen Hela fight in Asgard's halls the day we escaped Helheim, and I knew what she looked like when she was killing. That wasn't this. 

She broke spears instead of the arms holding them. She knocked men down with the flat of her blades, cracked helmets, and kicked shields out of the way, and when a soldier went down she sent him tumbling instead of opening his throat. 

Where she could, she ordered her dead to pin and disarm rather than tear apart. It wasn't clean. Wights are not precision instruments, and the screams down there weren't all theatrical. But it was far, far less than she could have done.

These were her people. The men Odin had dragged across the stars on a bridge built from his own citizens' lives. Most of them had probably never even heard her name before tonight. Hela meant to rule them, not bury them, and she was fighting with one hand tied behind her back to make sure there'd be someone left to rule.

Then a red blur zipped across the edge of my vision.

It flipped over a sweeping halberd, bounced off an Einherjar's helmet with both feet, and fired two lines of webbing that glued the soldier's shield to the asphalt and his face to the shield. 

The blur landed in a crouch on the roof of a crushed SUV. The suit was red and blue and very obviously homemade, the eyes were too big, and one glove didn't match the other. "Wow, okay, the Renaissance Faire really let itself go," Spider-Man said, ducking a thrown spear without looking at it. "Hi, yeah, sir, you dropped your—oh, that's your sword, okay, you can have—no, you can't have it, I lied—"

The sword went thwip across the parking lot and stuck to a light pole forty feet up.

I watched three Asgardian soldiers try to box him in, watched his body react a full half second before their spears moved, and watched him web one man's feet together, use a second as a vaulting horse, and swing the third into a pile of very confused wights. 

He was good. He was really good, especially for a kid running on instinct and spider-sense. He was also a high school sophomore in a homemade costume, in the middle of a war between gods that had nothing to do with him.

I did not approve.

How the hell had he even gotten out? 

Frigga's barrier should have kept everyone inside. Did she let him out? Or maybe the universe just liked Peter Parker getting into places he shouldn't be. Either way, he was here now, and every Einherjar he webbed up was one more man who'd remember the little red bug that embarrassed him.

I made a note to have a very long talk with him afterward. And probably with Tony. And maybe, God help him, with his aunt.

Odin came at me again, burning brighter than before. Now I could sense the source of it—power was being pumped into him from Asgard itself, a thread of gold stretched across the stars, the whole realm pouring itself into its king.

It didn't matter.

Odin spun and slashed a golden cut that split the clouds behind me, and I simply wasn't there when it arrived. He chained thrust into thrust, faster now, heavier now, the power of an entire realm flowing through every strike. I met all of it.

I wasn't faster than him because I was stronger, though I was. I was faster because I'd been watching. Odin had a rhythm. Everybody has a rhythm. He fought like a man who'd never once had to wonder whether he'd win. 

Every combination ended in a killing thrust because every combination always had, and he'd never needed a backup plan because nobody had ever made him use one.

The next time Gungnir came for my heart, I didn't parry.

I caught it.

My hand closed around the shaft just behind the spearhead, and the impact drove me back a dozen feet through empty air, but I held on. 

Odin's eye went wide! 

He pulled. I pulled harder.

Gungnir tore out of his grip.

For a moment the Allfather of Asgard just stared at his empty hand, like he'd forgotten hands could look like that. I suppose, in a few thousand years, nobody had ever taken anything from him that he didn't let them have.

I tossed the Greatsword to my tails, wrapped two more around Gungnir, and floated forward until we were close enough that I could smell the power burning off him.

Then I slapped him. His head snapped sideways and his eyepatch went crooked.

"That's for being a shitty king," I said, and backhanded him the other way. 

Slap.

"That's for being a shitty husband." 

Slap. 

Odin roared and swung at me. A tail caught his wrist and folded it back against his own chest.

"And this—" I slapped him so hard the gold light flickered out of his armor for a second, "—is for being a shitty father."

My voice dropped. I couldn't help it.

"You locked your daughter in the dark and erased her name so nobody would ever come looking. You stunted Thor until he was just a reflection of you. You raised Loki on a lie and taught him to hate the blood in his own veins." 

Slap. 

"You had the most valuable thing in any world, an entire family, and you treated them like furniture you could rearrange whenever you got bored."

Slap. Slap. Forehand followed by backhand. His beard was a mess, his lip split, and his crown hung askew. I was vaguely aware that the fighting below had slowed. I could hear Tony's voice crackle somewhere, saying "oh my God, is he slapping him!?" and a choked sound from Hela's direction that might have been a laugh.

I didn't care. Family was everything to me. My mother, Kunou and Tanya, my wives and the women I loved, the children I hadn't even met yet. 

Everything I'd built across a hundred worlds, I'd built around people I would burn the stars down for. Odin had been handed exactly that, and he'd spent it all on being obeyed.

I drew my hand back one more time.

"ENOUGH!" Red light exploded out of Odin's body. 

It wasn't the gold of Asgard. It was deep, wet crimson, the color of blood held up to the sun. 

The blast struck me square in the chest and threw me backward across the sky, a quarter mile of air tearing past my ears before I caught myself on a platform of foxfire. My tails flared out instinctively, and Gungnir was still wrapped tight in two of them. 

I'd be damned if I let him have it back that easily.

When I looked up, Odin was glowing red.

It poured off him in slow, liquid ribbons that didn't behave like light should. Where they touched the clouds, the clouds didn't burn or blow away. They changed. A wisp of vapor turned into falling glass. A drift of golden ash from his shattered runes became a swarm of tiny red moths and then, just as quickly, nothing at all. Space itself bent slightly wrong around him, like a picture that had been folded once and badly smoothed out again.

Odin straightened his crown with one hand. The split in his lip sealed itself, though I didn't think he'd healed it. It was more that the injury had simply been edited out of existence. His eye, when it found me, was perfectly calm.

"I tire of this," he said. His voice carried without any effort at all, reaching every corner of the battlefield below. "I am the King of the Nine Realms." The red light swelled, and everything in the world went a shade too vivid, a shade too thin. "And reality is mine to mold as I see fit."

Of course he has a fucking Infinity Stone…

– Frigga –

Frigga wasn't afraid. Not even a little.

She believed in Hela, the woman she loved, and she believed Hela would be victorious. She believed in Haru, the man she had chosen to fall in love with, the man who would one day give her more children. 

Haru would not lose to Odin.

Even so, when red light exploded across the sky, she flinched.

"Odin," Frigga murmured, too quietly for anyone but herself to hear. "What have you done?"

She stood at the center of the stage because it was the best place to hold the barrier from.

Beside her, Pepper Potts flinched, too.

Tony Stark's woman had refused to leave the stage when the battle began. 

Frigga knew that look. She had worn it for a thousand years, every time her sons rode out to war. "He is well defended, you know," Frigga said gently. "Haru is up there with him. Haru will not let anything happen to your Tony."

Pepper let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "I know." She pushed a strand of strawberry-blonde hair out of her face with a hand that wasn't quite steady. "That's why I invited him in the first place. I thought, okay, worst case, there's an assassin. Maybe two. Vanko again, maybe that Winter Soldier guy." She waved a hand at the parking lot, which at that exact moment contained an armored corpse being thrown sixty feet into a light pole. "I didn't expect a freaking alien invasion. I didn't expect a war in the overflow lot."

"Asgard is very good at disappointing expectations," Frigga said dryly.

That got a real laugh out of Pepper. It faded quickly. She looked out over the crowd, and Frigga followed her gaze.

The people were frightened.

Not panicking, not yet. But they would soon if something didn’t change. Every time the battle flared outside, the whole sea of faces flinched at once.

"They're scared," Pepper said quietly. "We've got news crews here, too. Half the country's watching this live." She swallowed. "The people at home are probably scared, too."

Frigga considered the crowd for a long moment.

She had spent a thousand years at Odin's side as a decoration. She had learned to calm frightened court ladies, to soothe ambassadors, to keep a feast hall laughing while her husband plotted war at the high table. Most of that life had been a lie, but the skills had been hers. Odin had used them, but he had never been able to steal them.

"Then we should give them something else to look at," she said.

Pepper blinked. "Like what?"

Frigga's eyes fell on the stage floor a few feet away. Tony's microphone lay where he'd dropped it in his hurry to fly out, its little red light still glowing.

She smiled.

With a twitch of two fingers, the microphone rose from the floor and floated neatly into her palm. 

Pepper made a small, strangled noise. Frigga stepped forward to the very front of the stage, into the white glare of the spotlights, while the ward hummed steadily around her and the war roared on outside. 

She looked out at tens of thousands of terrified mortals and gave them the warmest smile she had. "Good evening, everyone," she said, and her voice rolled through the speakers, rich and calm and amused. "I'm afraid our host has been called away on urgent business. Something about his car's insurance."

A ripple of startled, nervous laughter.

"My name is Frigga. I am a princess of Vanaheim, one of the Nine Realms." She tilted her head, as if the thought had only just occurred to her. "We seem to have a little time on our hands while my family settles a disagreement outside. So I wondered whether any of you might have questions about my alien planet…?"

She had barely finished the word alien before the hall erupted.

Hundreds of hands shot into the air. Then thousands. A woman in the front row was waving both arms, a boy on his father's shoulders was bouncing and shouting "ME! ME! ME!", and somewhere in the press section a reporter had climbed onto a chair.

Behind her, Pepper Potts stared at the crowd in disbelief before she just shook her head...

– Hela –

The next soldier to come at Hela was braver than the first three, and stupider.

He came in low with his shield up and his sword tucked tight against his hip, a textbook Einherjar charge, exactly the kind of thing her grandfather's drill-masters had beaten into recruits five thousand years ago. 

Hela let him come. At the last moment she stepped aside and hooked his ankle with her boot, and as he stumbled past she slammed the pommel of one blade into the back of his helmet. He hit the asphalt face-first and slid.

She stood over him and planted a boot between his shoulder blades before he could rise. "Stay down," she said. "Surrender, and I swear no harm will come to you. To any of you." She raised her voice over the clash of steel and the wet, mindless snarling of her dead. "Do you hear me? Lay down your arms, and you will walk out of this field alive! You have my word as a daughter of Asgard!"

A handful of soldiers within earshot hesitated. One even lowered his spear an inch.

Then three wights hit him from behind, and he went down under a pile of rotting limbs. 

Hela snapped a thought at them. Pin him. Do not tear. The corpses obeyed with all the grace of drunk bears, pressing the man flat into the ground without ripping his throat out. It was the best she could do. 

The White Walkers' dead had been made to kill. Teaching them restraint mid-battle was like teaching a flood to spare the furniture.

The soldier under her boot was crying.

She realized it slowly. At first she'd taken the shaking of his shoulders for exhaustion, or rage. Then he twisted his head sideways against the asphalt, and she saw his face behind the cracked visor. 

He was young, for an Asgardian. A few centuries at most. Barely more than a boy, with tears cutting clean tracks through the soot and blood on his cheeks. "I can't," he choked. "I can't surrender. Please."

Hela frowned. "You would rather die for the man who dragged you across the stars to fight an enemy that has done nothing to you?"

"He has my family!" The words tore out of him. "My mother. My sisters. The king's guard took them from our home in the lower city the night before we marched. He said—" His voice broke. "He said if we fail him, or if we yield, they'll be next sacrifices to power the half rebuilt bifrost!"

Hela went very, very still. Odin was using the lives of his own people to power the Bifrost!?

"He has my betrothed!" another soldier shouted from somewhere to her left. He was pinned beneath two wights, still struggling, his sword arm trapped. "Astrid. Her and her father both. They were taken from the market!"

"My son—"

"My wife and daughter—"

It spread through the nearest ranks. Soldier after soldier shouted it, men who had been fighting with desperation that Hela had mistaken for loyalty. 

It wasn't loyalty. It had never been loyalty. It was fear. Every man on this field was fighting with a blade at the throat of someone he loved.

The lower city. The laborers and the families of absent nobles. 

Hela had known her father was a monster. The disgust that rose in her throat was so violent it tasted like bile.

Above them, the sky flared a deep, wet crimson, as if the world itself had been cut and was bleeding. 

Hela glanced up. She caught a glimpse of a far-off golden figure turned blood-red, and of Haru tumbling back through the clouds before he caught himself on blue fire. The light felt wrong, the way the Bifrost had felt wrong, only a hundred times worse. Something about the shape of things had shifted slightly out of true.

She would worry about that in a moment. Haru could hold. Haru would never lose.

She looked back down at the crying boy beneath her boot, and she lifted her foot. "What is your name, soldier?"

He blinked up at her, bewildered. "...Eirik, my lady."

"Eirik." She crouched down until her face was level with his visor and spoke low, so only he could hear. "Listen to me very carefully. I am going to take Asgard back from that old man. When I do, the very first thing I will do is open every cell and every vault in his palace, and I will find your mother and your sisters with my own hands. I will find all of them." She lifted her chin toward the shouting soldiers around them. "Every mother, every daughter, every betrothed. He will not have them. He will not keep them. You have my oath."

Eirik's lips trembled.

"Until then," Hela said, and straightened, "you are going to stay down, and look as though I beat you very badly. Can you do that?"

He hesitated, then gave a tiny nod.

"Good boy." She sent a single wight shambling over to sit on him for appearances, then turned back toward the field with her blades held loose at her sides, and her rage settled into something cold and patient and very, very deadly. Oh, Father, she thought. I am going to take my time with you.

…She found Steve Rogers by following the sound of his shield. It had a voice all its own, a bright, ringing clang when it hit steel and a deeper thud when it hit flesh. 

Hela traced it across the ruined lot to a little clearing among the burned-out cars, where the wights and Einherjar had both drawn back as if by mutual agreement. Nobody wanted to be in the middle of that fight.

Steve and the Winter Soldier were trying very hard to kill each other.

Well. One of them was. The other was very obviously trying not to.

Hela slowed to watch, and despite herself, she was impressed.

She had dismissed Rogers in the Arctic, and fairly so. He had charged her with nothing but a shield and a righteous expression, and she'd put him in the snow in four seconds. But that had been a mortal fighting a goddess. This was a mortal fighting someone his own size, and it was a very different thing.

He was good. Every motion fed into the next. He used the shield as a wall, a battering ram, a projectile and a blade all at once, and he moved like someone who had spent his entire short life learning that he would only ever get one chance to do anything right.

The Winter Soldier was even better.

He fought with no wasted motion at all. No emotion, either. Knife in one hand, the other a new golden arm etched with glowing runes that Hela recognized at once as Odin's work. He fought dirty, too. He went for knees and throats, used the debris and the dead, and tried to drive Steve into the arms of the nearest wights. When his golden fist struck Steve's shield, the impact rang so loudly that Hela felt it.

Asgardian soldiers trained for centuries and never moved like these two did. 

"Bucky!" Steve caught a knife thrust on the rim of his shield and twisted, wrenching the blade free and sending it spinning into the dark. "Bucky, come on. It's me. It's Steve."

The Winter Soldier answered by driving his golden fist straight through the hood of a crushed sedan where Steve's head had been half a second earlier.

"You know me. You know me." Steve ducked under a backhand and slammed his shoulder into Bucky's chest, driving him back three steps. He didn't follow it up. He just stood there, breathing hard, shield raised, with blood running from his eyebrow and a look on his face that Hela had seen once before, in a mirror in Helheim, a very long time ago. "You're Bucky Barnes. You're from Brooklyn. You used to pick fights for me because I was too small to win them. We were supposed to—"

"I will destroy the enemies of my king." The Winter Soldier's voice was flat and toneless. The runes on his golden arm pulsed as he said it, and Hela saw his eyes flicker for just an instant. Behind them something stirred and was smothered again, like a candle pinched out between two fingers.

"He's not your king," Steve said hoarsely. "Bucky. Please."

"I will destroy," the Winter Soldier said, and came at him again, "the enemies of my king."

Hela watched the golden runes flare and dim, flare and dim, keeping time with the words.

She knew exactly how that felt from the inside, to have your own mind rewritten until you couldn't remember there had ever been a you to rewrite. Frigga had lived it for a thousand years. Odin had done it to his wife, his sons, his own soldiers' families, and now to this broken stranger from a world he despised.

Her grip tightened on her blades.

She could end this in a second. She could cut the arm off at the shoulder, put the Winter Soldier on his back and hold him there until Frigga could unpick Odin's work. But Steve hadn't asked for help, and something in the way he fought, refusing to strike to kill and refusing to stop calling that name, told Hela this was a battle that belonged to him.

Then Hela turned her gaze to the sky, and her green eyes narrowed.

Crimson power wreathed Odin like a burning cloak. She knew what it was the moment she truly looked at it. Her father had found an Infinity Stone of his own—the Reality Stone. And he was channeling an enormous amount of its power.

Wielding an Infinity Stone carried risks. There was a reason the Space Stone had been kept inside the Tesseract. A Stone without a vessel to control it and limit its power could have disastrous effects. 

Hela could already see the sky warping around Odin and Haru. If Odin kept this up, he might start tearing apart the rules of reality over New York City and do damage that could never be undone.

She held out her hand and summoned the Tesseract.

She glanced once more toward Steve and the Winter Soldier. Shield and golden fist still rang off each other in the clearing between the ruined cars. 

Well. Rogers would have to manage without her watching.

Hela closed her fingers around the cube and stepped.

The parking lot vanished. One moment there was asphalt under her boots and the stink of rot and burned rubber in her nose. The next there was only cold, thin air, the hiss of wind, and the city spread out below. 

She hung in the sky at Haru's shoulder, hair snapping around her horned crown, the Tesseract blazing in her fist.

Haru twitched so hard that all ten of his tails puffed out at once. "Jesus—" He caught himself, blinked at her, and then grinned, slow and delighted. "Hey, beautiful. You know you can't just pop up behind a guy in the middle of a fight. I almost stabbed you with your dad's spear."

Hela glanced at Gungnir, coiled in two of his tails like a stolen toy, and couldn't stop the corner of her mouth from curling. "You took it from him…?"

"I took it from him," Haru agreed, very pleased with himself. "Then I slapped him. A lot. You'd have loved it."

"I heard." She had, in fact, heard every single crack of it echo off the clouds, and she had laughed out loud in the middle of a battlefield and terrified three of her own wights. Her eyes went past him, to the burning red figure hovering a quarter mile away. "For now, I need you to be still for a moment."

Haru's ears went flat. He'd felt it, too. 

A stray wisp of cloud drifted between them and Odin, and as it passed through the crimson glow it turned briefly to falling sand, then to feathers, then to nothing at all. Far below, the lights of Queens flickered in a pattern that had nothing to do with power lines.

The Tesseract flared, and Hela poured herself into it.

Not just her magic. Hela reached deeper, into the cold and bottomless well of her divinity, the part of her that had been born Goddess of Death. It had survived a thousand years of darkness and silence when everything else she was had nearly withered. 

She drew it up and fed it through the cube, and the Space Stone took her offering and answered.

Blue light ripped outward from her hand in a perfect sphere. It swept past Haru, past Odin, and on for half a mile in every direction before it stopped. 

Then it closed, folding the sky in on itself like the lid coming down on a box. 

The edges of the sphere hardened into a shell of shimmering azure. Beyond it, the city still glittered, the battle still raged, and the stars still burned. But it was all slightly distant now, slightly muffled, like a painting seen through a pane of glass.

Inside the sphere there was only the three of them.

It cost her. Gods, it cost her. 

Hela had known it would, but knowing was a different thing from feeling the strength go out of her limbs all at once. Her vision greyed at the edges. Her heart stuttered, then pounded. 

The Tesseract grew so cold in her grip that it burned. She swayed in the air, and a warm, furry weight pressed against the small of her back. One of Haru's tails held her steady without a word. Another curled quietly around her waist.

"Hela," Haru murmured. "What did you do?"

"Sealed us all in." Her voice came out rougher than she liked. She lifted her chin and made herself say it louder, clearly, so that the old man on the far side of the sphere could hear every word. "Whatever he does with that stone, it cannot leave this space. He can twist reality in here until it screams, and the world outside will never feel a thing."

She turned her gaze to Odin.

"You won't touch them, Father," she said softly. "Not the city. Not the mortals under Frigga's shield." She smiled, and it was all teeth. "I know how much you love your hostages. I've just taken away every one you had left. The only ones you can reach in here are the two of us."

Across the sphere, Odin stared at her.

The red light still poured off him in slow liquid waves. His split lip was healed, his crown straight, and his single eye burned. Every part of his ancient, arrogant face twisted into an expression of pure, distilled hatred.

Hela had spent a thousand years in the dark imagining the face her father would make when she finally beat him.

This wasn't quite it. But it was very, very close, and she savored every second of it.

– Haru –

Hela was swaying in the air with her hair wild and her crown askew, leaning her weight against my tails, the Tesseract still smoking with cold in her fist. She'd just spent half her divinity putting an entire city out of reach of a madman with an Infinity Stone. 

And she still had the nerve to look at her father like he was something she'd scraped off her boot.

The tail around her waist tightened and reeled her in.

Hela had just enough time to arch one eyebrow before I caught the back of her neck and kissed her. I kissed her deep and slow and thoroughly, the way you kiss someone when you want her to feel it in her toes, right there in the middle of the sky with the Allfather of Asgard watching from a quarter mile away.

She went rigid with surprise for exactly one second. Then she melted. Her free hand fisted in the front of my kimono helpless moan slipped out of her, right into my mouth.

When I finally pulled back, her green eyes were dazed and a little unfocused, and a flush had climbed all the way up her throat. 

It was a good look on her. The Goddess of Death all cute and flustered. I filed it away in the drawer of my brain marked Favorite Things.

"What—" Hela cleared her throat and tried again, with considerably less authority. "What was that for?"

"For being amazing," I said simply. "And for that." I nodded at the azure shell around us. "Now rest for a bit. I've got this."

She opened her mouth, probably to tell me she didn't need rest and I wasn't her keeper. 

Then she swayed again and closed it. I eased her back toward the edge of the sphere and wrapped a thin sheet of foxfire around her to keep her safe from what comes next. 

Here's something nobody tells you about being a Demon Lord—you have to learn to hold back.

I measured my steps on old floorboards, held my strength to a fraction of a fraction when I shook a hand, and kept my foxfire at the temperature of a gas burner instead of a star. That was what it cost to live in a world full of people I loved, who could die if I sneezed wrong.

Ever since I'd eaten Apollo and evolved, it had only gotten harder.

And for the whole fight tonight, I'd been doing it again. 

Fighting Odin with one hand behind my back, because just past the clouds were tens of thousands of ordinary people in a glass pavilion, kids on their fathers' shoulders, and a teenager in a homemade spider suit. If I'd let my aura out the way my instincts were begging me to, the pressure alone would have done what Odin's army couldn't. 

It would have crushed every mortal for a mile.

But Hela had just sealed the sky. Nothing in here could get out. Not Odin's reality warping, and not mine either.

I rolled my shoulders, set the Dark Moon Greatsword's point down toward the city I could no longer touch and I let go.

The air inside the sphere bent. 

My ten tails rose behind me and spread like the spokes of a wheel, each one wreathed in blue foxfire so dense it had stopped flickering and started pouring. Silver ran along the edges of it now, Ranni's moonlight threaded through my flame.

The Greatsword sang. It had opinions, and right now its opinion was that it was about time.

Across the sphere, Odin's crimson aura wavered. His single eye went wide.

"What is this?" His voice cracked. He looked down at his own glowing hands, then at the air bending around me. "I am not—this isn't my doing—"

"No," I said. "It isn't."

The pressure spiked. Down at the edge of the sphere, Hela let out a breathless little laugh behind her shield of foxfire.

"This is all me," I told him. "This is true power. Not something you dug out of your daddy's basement and plugged into your chest."

And then I moved. I was simply there, closing the distance between one blink and the next, so fast the space I'd left behind took a moment to notice I was gone and collapsed in on itself with a thunderclap. 

Odin's eye was still on the place I'd been when my shadow fell across him.

I raised the Dark Moon Greatsword in both hands. Every bit of the power I'd kept leashed was now poured into the blade. 

Then I brought it down!

– Tony Stark –

Tony hovered over the battlefield and stared down at what had, until about twenty minutes ago, been the Stark Expo's overflow parking lot. More than ten thousand cars lay crushed, flipped, melted or flattened into something closer to modern art. Filthy rich or not, that was going to be a bitch to pay for.

"Sir," JARVIS said, "if you'd like, I can provide a preliminary estimate of the property damage—"

Tony winced. "Nope. Pass. Hard pass. I'm choosing to live in ignorance."

"Very good, sir. Also—Incoming…"

"Incoming" turned out to be eight missiles.

They came screaming up out of the smoke in a tight spiral, thick and gold and ugly, each one etched with glowing runes that Tony's HUD flatly refused to identify. 

He saw them, swore, and dropped.

The suit went into a power dive. The first two missiles overshot and detonated above him in a pair of golden fireballs that rattled his back plates. Tony rolled out of the dive, kicked his boots forward and shot back up through the smoke, palms already raised.

"JARVIS, targeting mode!"

"Locked on, sir. Six remaining."

Twin repulsor blasts took out two in midair. He banked hard left, let a third chase him toward a light tower, and pulled up at the last second. The missile hit the tower's base instead, and three tons of steel and floodlights toppled over with a groan. 

"Damn, I’m gonna have to pay for that too…" Tony muttered.

"Three remaining, sir. Two are attempting to flank you from below."

He flipped onto his back, fired a micro-missile salvo from his shoulder pods, and watched the two flankers vanish in a burst of light. 

The last one came straight at his face. Tony pivoted, let it pass close enough to scrape paint off his faceplate, and blasted it from behind.

The sky over the lot went quiet.

Then Ivan Vanko rose out of the smoke.

His armor looked like somebody had tried to describe the Iron Man suit to a Viking blacksmith over a bad phone connection. It had his silhouette, his color scheme flipped, and his arc reactor glowing in the chest. But the plating was thick, hand-hammered and rune-carved. 

The "repulsors" were runes of gold fire burning in its palms, and two long electrified whips hung from its forearms like a pair of angry snakes.

It was hideous. It was also, Tony noted with some deeply uncomfortable professional jealousy, really well made.

"Ivan," he said over the external speakers. "Buddy. Pal. We need to talk!"

The whips crackled.

"Look, I get it." Tony held up both hands in a universal gesture of I'm being reasonable here. "My dad was a jerk to your dad. Honestly, my dad was a jerk to me, so you're in good company. You want to come after me? Fine. That's between us. That's personal. I can respect personal." He jabbed a gauntleted finger toward the swirling blue sphere in the sky, where Haru and Hela and the Allfather of Asgard were busy rearranging the laws of physics. "But you went and signed up with—the evil alien stepdad warlord. That's not personal, Ivan. It's gone far enough. Stand down."

Vanko's voice crackled through his armor's speakers, distorted and metallic, thick with accent and hate. "Nothing is over," Ivan said, "until you are dead, Stark."

Tony sighed. "Yeah. Figured you'd say that…"

A whip came at him so fast the HUD barely registered it.

Tony threw himself sideways, and the whip cracked through the air where his torso had been, a bolt of gold-and-white lightning that split the night with a sound like a gunshot. 

The second came from below. 

He spun, caught it on his iron arm, and immediately wished he hadn't. Fifty thousand volts of something that was not electricity tore through the armor's systems. His HUD went white, then red, then black.

"JARVIS!"

"Rebooting, sir." The display flickered back to life, half of it scrolling warnings. "Arm actuators at sixty percent. Recommend avoiding direct contact with the whips."

"Gee, thanks, I hadn't thought of that."

Vanko came after him, and he was fast. Asgard's smiths had built something terrifying. Ivan fought like a man who'd spent years in a Russian prison dreaming about exactly this, and the suit kept up with every bit of it. 

Tony fired repulsors, and the blasts splashed off the rune-carved plating. He fired missiles, and Vanko's whips snapped them out of the sky. He tried to go high, and Vanko followed. He tried to go low, and Vanko was already there.

They tore across the sky in a running brawl, trading fire and steel and lightning. Tony took a whip across his back and felt a thruster go dead. He took a punch from that massive golden fist, and his faceplate cracked from cheek to temple. He landed a repulsor blast point-blank to Vanko's chest, and all it did was scorch the arc reactor's casing.

"Sir, armor integrity is down to thirty-eight percent—"

"I know."

"—and I feel obligated to point out that his armor integrity is not."

"I know, JARVIS!"

A whip wrapped around his left leg and pulled. Tony went spinning through the air like a yo-yo, slammed into a parked tour bus hard enough to fold it in half, and lay there for one long second in a pile of twisted metal, ears ringing, smoke pouring from his left knee joint.

Through his cracked faceplate he could see Vanko descending toward him—the giant knockoff looked unhurried and triumphant.

Tony thought about Pepper, back under Frigga's barrier, who was watching. About the kid with the prosthetic legs he'd shown off on stage an hour ago. 

And then Tony thought about Milim. Specifically, Milim in the sky over the Atlantic, punching missiles out of the air with her bare hands, then tearing a stealth fighter in half like a paper airplane.

He'd watched that footage something like two hundred times since Monaco. Not because he was obsessed. Okay, partly because he was obsessed, but mostly because a tiny pink-haired girl had looked at a guided missile and decided the answer was punch it. 

Somewhere in the back of Tony's head, a very stupid, very Stark idea had started building itself out of that.

He'd been testing it in the workshop for a week. It had broken three test rigs, a reinforced concrete wall and, once, a Roomba that got in the way.

"JARVIS," he said. "Prototype seven."

A pause. "Sir, prototype seven has never been field-tested."

"So let’s test it!"

"Sir, the projected strain on your humerus alone—"

"JARVIS."

A longer pause. "Rerouting power. Good luck, sir."

Every remaining joule in the suit flooded into his right arm. Tony felt it happen, there was a deep vibration through the gauntlet and into his bones. The repulsor in his palm shut off and three emergency boosters along his forearm unlocked with a series of hard, ugly clunks. The arc reactor in his chest went from blue to white. His HUD lit up with warnings so fast it couldn't keep up.

Vanko landed in front of him and raised both whips.

Tony launched off the wreck of the bus. "IRON MAN FIST!"

Every booster fired at once. The thrust didn't just throw him forward, it shot him forward. He crossed the space between them in less than the blink of an eye, and his fist hit Vanko's chest, dead center, with the force of a small airliner hitting the side of a mountain!

The sound was enormous. The golden armor caved in. The rune-carved plating Asgard's smiths had spent who knew how long hammering crumpled like a soda can. Vanko's arc reactor shattered, and the chestplate folded in around Tony's fist and kept going. Vanko was thrown backward with his whips trailing, ploughed through four cars and a lamppost, and came to rest in the wreckage of a minivan.

He didn't get up.

Tony stood there in the sudden silence. Smoke rose off his gauntlet, alarms screamed in his ears, and his breath was loud inside his cracked helmet. 

He looked at the crumpled black-and-gold shape in the wreckage. He looked at the cave-in where the chestplate had been, and at the stillness of what was underneath.

Ivan was dead…

Then the pain hit. 

"Ow. Ow. Ow." He staggered and grabbed his right arm with his left. "Okay. Ow. That's—yep. Something's broken. Several somethings. JARVIS, how many somethings?"

"Your right humerus, radius and ulna, sir, as well as two metacarpals and a mild dislocation of the shoulder. I did warn you…"

Tony groaned, sinking onto the nearest intact car hood. "Okay. Okay, so maybe 'Iron Man Fist' wasn't a good idea after all…"

"If I may, sir," JARVIS said, in the driest voice he had ever used, "neither was the name…"

Tony scoffed at the disrespect. “HEY! The name is awesome and trademark pending!”

Then Tony heard a very loud noise in the sky above him. His armor was thoroughly fucked, but he managed to make it tilt his head back far enough to look.

The giant, weird blue sphere that had appeared a couple of minutes ago shattered. It exploded outward in a storm of glittering azure shards that rained down over the battlefield like broken glass. In the gap it left behind, two forces were colliding—a churning, sick crimson against a brilliant torrent of blue and silver. 

For one long moment they strained against each other.

Then the blue and silver won.

Something came rocketing down out of the sky so fast it broke the sound barrier on the way. The sonic boom hit a split second before Tony's brain caught up and told him it was a body. Then it slammed into what looked like one of the last intact cars in the entire lot.

The car exploded, of course. One more thing to pay for.

"JARVIS," Tony croaked. "Zoom."

The HUD flickered and magnified a patch of sky. 

Haru hung there in the smoke with his ten tails spread wide behind him and that ridiculous glowing sword in his hand. Hela was beside him, propped against his side, looking down at the burning crater with an expression of deep satisfaction.

Which meant the guy who'd just been spiked into the ground like a volleyball was Odin.

Tony let out a long breath and slumped back against the car hood. "This whole war barely lasted  30 minutes," he said, to no one in particular. "But you know what? I'm glad it's over."

"Indeed, sir."

"JARVIS, hack whatever parking lot speakers we've got left. Loop me in." He pointed vaguely at the field of exhausted, bloodied Einherjar still struggling beneath piles of corpses. "Let's tell the nice Vikings their king just got dunked on and they can all stand down."

"Accessing the public address system now, sir."

Then maybe, Tony thought, staring up at the stars with his arm throbbing in three separate places, they could all go get some shawarma.

Or better yet, he could ask Haru to make victory shawarma.

XXX

Tony forgot the most obvious reason he could not copy Milim’s punch so easily. He is not a cute anime girl… 

Written 10/21/2026