"I'm frankly disappointed," Lauren said. "Vulcan, end it."
Scott's look-alike burned bright red and accelerated, glowing fist cocked back toward my head.
I shot to the side, my body augmented by the trio of Density Manipulation, Telekinesis, and Gravity Manipulation, barely dodging his strike as I carved through dirt and steel like they were air.
Vulcan followed with a laser from his arm that scythed across the city, bisecting two buildings before nearly hitting me.
I teleported beside him and swung, my leg wreathed in Anathema Fire and augmented by Staggered Carnage.
The blow slammed into a hastily raised energy shield, and the backlash eviscerated the street, bathing everything in fire.
Lauren closed in through the destruction while Vulcan hurriedly discharged his shield, trying to keep the fire from touching him.
I sabotaged his efforts by marking the debris and ruined buildings around him with Explosion and Anathema Fire runes and detonating them.
Fire devoured nearly an entire city block.
The blast drove Psylocke from her perch and bought me the desperate microseconds I needed to weave a katana from demonic fire and telekinesis.
Instinctively, I knew raw power amplification and precision runes were off the table with my unstable Ancient Rune Magic.
So I marked the telekinetic surface of my makeshift blade with durability, density, and fire runes. The blade lit up like a Christmas tree, and the structure stabilized.
Darkness poured out of Lauren, acting as a barrier between her and the encroaching fire, and clashed, exchanging thousands of blows in the span of seconds.
I tore through the darkness, calling on dimensional slashes and fire, mutilating reality and ripping Lauren to pieces. Clones portalled in to replace her before the body even caught fire.
And she gave as good as she got, cracking my telekinetic and Anathema fire cloaks again and again with her precise sword work.
By the end of it, I was barely holding my own, and Lauren was laughing.
"All that fire and rage. Now that's more like it."
"Fuck you!"
I teleported, or at least I tried to, when Psylocke slammed a psychic spike into my mind and shattered my concentration.
My blade unraveled and detonated like a bomb, setting half the city ablaze.
Vulcan finally caught up and punched me again.
Instinctively, I swung back, but he parried my fist and donned his demonic cloak.
A thin, oscillating film of kinetic energy enveloped his body and repelled my power.
His fist rocketed forward.
It punched through a thick layer of Anathema Fire and Telekinesis, past my Cloak of the Demon King, and straight through my stomach.
I felt my spine come apart.
"That's for the burns, you ungrateful little—"
With a roar, I pulled on every scrap of Anathema Fire that had spread through the city, bringing a lake's worth of destruction crashing down on Vulcan and me.
For a moment, he froze in fear and surprise.
Then a blue bolt slammed into his shoulder.
He vanished.
An instant later, he reappeared high above the city just as the flood of fire crashed down onto me.
The flames churned like a whirlpool.
I doubled over.
Spending a chunk of both my demonic and angelic power, I forced my Promethean body to heal.
I felt Psylocke's mental attack slice through several sections of the inferno before it finally halted, burned away by the concept-destroying fire.
I drank in a portion of the purple flames, refilling my demonic reserves, and rose back to my feet.
I was physically healed, but I was far from fine.
Taking them on like this wasn't working.
I needed to switch tactics.
So I did something I hadn't done in a very long time.
I ran.
Not before compressing the remaining fire into a sphere no larger than a sedan and teleporting it straight into Lauren's face.
—
I appeared all over the world at laboratories, commercial forges, and steel manufacturing plants, gathering materials in precise quantities.
Shin's agents were always a step behind me, but I left a variety of runic traps behind to trip them up or delay them for as long as possible before finally teleporting above the vibranium mountains of Wakanda.
Surprisingly, they were the only place on Earth where civilization hadn't been completely wiped out.
My heart sank at the thought of the pain I was bringing down on them, but I didn't stop moving.
I stole several refined bars of vibranium and made a few more false jumps before teleporting to the sun of a long-dead solar system, appearing several miles above its surface.
The false jumps sent Shin's people on a galaxy-wide goose chase.
And bought me a precious few seconds to work.
I used the heat of the star to fuel my forging and enchantments.
Since the base runes I'd unlocked with Arcanesmithing were off the table, I had to get creative, stringing together multiple runes to achieve the same effects.
Even so, I was happy with the results.
The armor was styled after my first Sentinel suit and armed with runes to block all forms of energy, especially mental and kinetic attacks.
Complex arrays covered every inch of it, enhancing all of my affinities and easing spell formation.
Then there were the weapons: a greatsword and a pair of daggers.
Finally, there were the bombs.
Scattered around the sun were small black boxes, not too different from the Anathema bombs I had once used to wipe out vast sections of the Demon World.
Using my remaining runic knowledge, I devised two kinds of explosive devices.
The first was a spatial lock designed to prevent teleportation out of the system.
The second was a series of gravity and Anathema bombs meant to destabilize the star and collapse it.
With any luck, it would be enough to kill Psylocke or Vulcan.
Lauren was another matter entirely.
—
Fury's POV
"Tell me my eyes are playing tricks on me, Hill. Tell me we aren't getting invaded a third damn time."
My second-in-command stood beside me, staring at the thousand or so spaceships racing over the Atlantic toward the ports of New York City.
"Didn't Dante shut down the dimensional passages they were using?" I asked.
"He did," Maria answered, already working through something on her hardlight tablet.
"Our long-range satellites have identified them as demonic vessels," an analyst announced from the back of the situation room.
"There's an eighty percent chance Lauren is behind this," Maria added.
"Saw her chance and took it, huh?" I grunted. "Luckily, we're better prepared this time. Raise the shield, deploy the fleet, and send word to the GDF, the Avengers, and the Asgardians."
Lauren and the demons were in for a rude awakening if they thought they could take my planet. It was high time somebody put them in their place. Permanently.
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