What a rush! Battered and bruised as he was, Thor couldn't remember the last time he'd faced an opponent this powerful.
In fairness, the Material Plane wasn't short on beings capable of thrashing the God of Thunder. Not exactly a dime a dozen, but you could find a few if you looked. The Astral Plane, the Dream Dimension, the countless pocket realms—those teemed with entities far stronger than him. Thor was nowhere near invincible.
The issue was that everyone feared his father. Nobody dared go all-out against the son of Odin. Those who could flee did so on the spot. Those who couldn't threw a few halfhearted punches and conceded—no shame in it.
Kong had no idea who Thor's father was. He held nothing back.
"Glorious! Glorious! Come, take another strike!"
Thor raised Jarnbjorn high, leaped a hundred meters into the air, and swung the axe in a massive overhead arc aimed squarely at Kong's skull.
Kong didn't speak human languages, but that didn't make him stupid. His intelligence was considerable, and he'd long since figured out that this tiny ant packed a serious punch—especially that axe, which actually hurt.
He snatched up one of the underground world's ubiquitous giant mushrooms and wielded it like a club. A hurricane-force upswing connected with a thunderous boom, catching Thor dead center.
Apes and gorillas, it turned out, were natural stick-fighters. Kong's low-to-high strike not only launched Thor skyward but also, with surprising finesse, knocked Jarnbjorn clean out of his hands.
The divine battle-axe spun end over end, sailing more than three hundred meters before clattering to a stop.
After ten-plus days of fighting, each combatant knew the other's patterns. Both had adapted.
Thor hit the ground, and without missing a beat, copied Kong's playbook. He ripped a giant mushroom from the earth—ten-plus meters tall—planted his feet, torqued through his hips and legs, and drove the stem into Kong's kneecap. As the great ape howled and pitched forward, Thor launched himself upward and drove a fist into Kong's jaw from the side.
The punch snapped Kong's head from left to right, staggering him sideways. The ape was furious. He shoulder-charged a nearby hill, then hoisted a boulder that had to weigh over a hundred tons. With a grunting heave, he hurled it straight at Thor.
By then Thor had recovered Jarnbjorn. He didn't flinch, didn't dodge—one swing cleaved the boulder at the one-third mark and kept going, carving a gash seven or eight meters long across Kong's forearm.
"Hm?" In the same instant Thor's axe bit into Kong's arm, Kong's backhand sent him flying. In the blur of being launched, Thor's peripheral vision caught a woman sprinting for her life. Behind her, a monstrous silhouette was closing fast.
She was quick and clearly not helpless—ice spikes, ice arrows, lightning arrows, slow effects, a barrage of spells streaking toward her pursuer—but the creature behind her was roughly Kong's size. Six legs. A rigid exoskeleton. Judging by the way each stride split the earth, it had to weigh north of two thousand tons.
"What's going on?!"
Thor didn't immediately grasp the situation, but the sight of that slender figure fleeing in desperation triggered every heroic instinct he had. Such a pitiful, fragile, helpless maiden surely needed his aid!
"Time out! Time out! Something came up! I'll come find you next time!"
Without waiting to see if Kong understood, Thor grabbed his axe and leaped. One massive downward swing connected with the beetle monster's back.
Jarnbjorn didn't break through. Sparks flew off the shell, and before Thor could process this, the beetle monster's hind leg swatted him away like a bowling pin.
Bella sighed at the sight. Continuous high-intensity spellcasting had drained her to the bone. Her face was the color of old parchment, blood stained the corner of her mouth, and her expression was nothing short of haggard.
This was not her plan. She'd originally intended to disguise herself as Loki and bluff Thor into leaving.
Then she'd noticed a fissure in the rock hundreds of meters long. Curiosity got the better of her—she'd taken two casual glances—and this beetle monster had erupted from below.
Zero combat preparation. Caught completely off guard. She'd been running ever since, and right now she was barely clinging to survival.
The beetle monster's blood was a blue liquid carrying extreme concentrations of radiation and toxins. Bella was no stranger to poisons herself, but the initial exchange had still hit her hard.
The creature's skull was crowned with a blade-like crest, thick and lethal. Bella had no idea how to counter it. Worse, the beetle's mind wasn't a single consciousness but a collective hive intelligence—mind control and Mind Blast were both useless.
It pursued relentlessly, never giving her a moment to stand still and cast.
"Get over here and help! This thing came from even deeper below! It was lying in ambush the whole time, waiting to sneak-attack you all!" Bella shouted at Kong while dodging frantically, unable to find a window for her heavy spells without someone to tank the hits.
"ROAR! ROAR!" Kong didn't want to fight either. After ten-plus days against Thor, he was starving. He beat his chest in protest, clearly objecting to being ordered around.
"Think about your parents! Think about the responsibility they left you! I know you understand me—you have to help! We have to kill this thing, and we have to seal that fissure!"
Whether it was Bella's status as female earning her some goodwill with the great ape, or the mention of his parents that gave Kong a moment's pause, something got through.
With a snarl, he snatched up a stone pillar and smashed it into the beetle monster. The impact was like two planets colliding.
"Huff… huff… huff—" With reinforcements engaging, Bella broke away, sprinting another five hundred meters before stopping. She braced her hands on her knees, fighting to steady her breathing.
She wasn't sure her theory was right, but the beetle monster reminded her of something from Pacific Rim—that same aura of wrongness.
"ROAR!!" Kong had burned through too much stamina earlier. He was losing. Within two exchanges, the beetle monster's skull-blade had raked a gash across his chest—thirty meters long and over a meter wide.
He roared furiously, signaling Bella for backup.
"Coming, coming! Hold on! I've got something big!" Bella muttered under her breath. This was an enemy that called for giant mecha, and here she was fighting it bare-handed.
She began casting at speed.
Bella had read the Book of the Vishanti. She could basically perform every spell Doctor Strange knew. The problem was incomplete mastery—she couldn't form psionic spell-scripts for most of them, so each use required converting psionic energy into magical power and casting through Kamar-Taj methodology. Slow, clunky, and without advance preparation, deeply impractical.
"Midgard has sorcerers now?" Thor appeared beside her, apparently unharmed after being swatted by the beetle monster, watching with casual interest.
"Yep, yep." Bella answered absently. Three seconds later, her arm shot forward. Five deep-crimson chains erupted from her palm and coiled around one of the beetle monster's forelegs.
The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak.