Bella wanted to rescue the others, but they didn't exactly need her help.
Every last one of them was a seasoned veteran. Unless they stumbled into something truly inexplicable—a supernatural crisis with zero leads—these were elites under normal circumstances, more than capable of getting themselves out of trouble.
Old One-Eye, the big boss who'd undergone the harshest training of them all, had barely been unconscious before he was already on the move. He'd slipped away ahead of everyone else, and there was no point even discussing him.
The remainder—Professor Serizawa, Dr. Graham, the Russells, and the twelve S.H.I.E.L.D./Hydra agents—had snapped out of Loki's illusions the instant Bella hurled the trickster into the temporal turbulence. Peak ability aside, these agents were roughly on par with Natasha before her virus enhancement, and far more experienced. Even unarmed, the operatives managed to support the scientists and get everybody out.
"Where's Miss Bella? Has anyone seen her?" The Japanese professor genuinely cared about Bella. Terrified that his student had been left behind, he kept asking the group.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. contingent was also looking for their director. Where was he? A man that big, that dark—how could he just vanish?
Not all of them could be Hydra. Old One-Eye had to have a few loyal subordinates. Eventually the group reached a consensus: Bella was most likely with their director.
Loki had never considered them a threat. He'd swept through the camp with a single wave of illusion magic, then dumped them all in a heap without a second thought. No prison, no guards—the moment they woke, they simply ran.
"Professor? Where are we?" one of the agents asked Serizawa.
Above their heads hung a ceiling of stalactites, the rock face looming over thirty meters high. They appeared to be inside an enormous cavern. Firelight flickered in the far distance, but the air here was dangerously thin, and their path kept angling downward. How deep were they going?
"Stop! This route isn't right! Have you noticed the ambient temperature keeps climbing?" Serizawa called a halt, his voice tight with urgency.
One of the American agents checked his multifunction wristwatch—95.2°F. The agents using Celsius glanced at their own instruments: 35°C (95°F), and still rising.
"This path is wrong. We need to double back and get to the surface as quickly as possible." Serizawa's constitution was decent enough, and Dr. Graham and the agents were in even better shape, but the Russells were in rough condition. The Demon Nun encounter had already rattled them badly; now they were drenched in sweat, gasping like a pair of overworked bellows.
"Skull Island was almost certainly a volcano buried deep beneath the ocean floor long ago. Eruptions over millennia built the island we see today. The Skullcrawlers all originated from the seabed—their earliest body plans resembled sea serpents, and they only developed forelimbs through later evolution. Their vision also exhibits classic deep-sea biological characteristics. It was the volcano's internal geology that eventually brought them to the surface." He paused, scanning the group's faces. "We may be at the base of that volcano right now. Inside the Skullcrawlers' nesting grounds."
A collective intake of breath. Those monsters were beyond anything they could fight—armed or otherwise.
Having laid out his theory, the professor shifted to encouragement: "Don't lose heart. If those Skullcrawlers can reach the surface, we can certainly find a way out too."
The group ran around the crater-like area in confusion, searching for an exit. The magnetic field down here was wildly erratic. Strange tremors rumbled from deep within the earth. Fortunately, the tunnel system was straightforward, and after an arduous trek they finally made it back to the surface.
While they'd been stumbling around in the dark, Bella had arrived at a massive sinkhole on the island's eastern side. It wasn't the volcanic vent itself but sat roughly thirty-five degrees off from it—a passage carved from below by untold generations of Skullcrawlers clawing their way upward.
Those creatures were tireless. Through sheer numbers and brute force, across unknowable centuries, they had bored a tunnel clean through from the deep earth to the surface.
The vertical distance from the sinkhole to the bottom exceeded seven thousand meters. It took Bella a considerable stretch of time to descend into Skull Island's underground world.
The temperature below was brutal. The smell of sulfur burned in her nostrils with every breath. Along the way she passed countless Skullcrawler skeletons—silent testimony to the staggering toll this species had paid to claw its way out of the island.
Professor Serizawa's group had fled from the tremors, putting as much distance between themselves and the shaking as possible. Bella did the opposite, tracking the vibrations deeper, chasing the signature of Asgardian divine power toward the very bottom of the underground world.
After the better part of a day, she finally found the battle's aftermath. It was staggering.
Skullcrawler corpses blanketed the ground. Several specimens over thirty-five meters long had been torn into segments, their corrosive blood sprayed across every surface. The rock walls were riddled with pockmarks where the acid had eaten through.
Stone pillars ten meters in diameter and over a hundred meters tall lay snapped in half.
The ground, walls, and ceiling were scarred with sharp, unmistakable slash marks.
Bella didn't slow down. Ignoring the scorching heat, she followed the trail of destruction and descended several more li. The exact figure was hard to gauge, but the vertical drop for this stretch alone had to exceed two thousand meters.
She felt as though she'd descended an entire Mariana Trench.
Had she reached the planet's interior? Monarch had always championed the Hollow Earth hypothesis. Was it actually true? Was it really hollow beneath the crust?
Bella hesitated briefly. The air grew thinner by the minute. The ambient temperature had long since surpassed 100°C (212°F). Even with a constitution far beyond any normal human, her skin felt scalding and every breath was a struggle. She hastily cast an environmental adaptation spell on herself, restoring her body temperature to normal, then pressed on for another hour.
Two hundred degrees. Three hundred. Five hundred.
Just as she was starting to wonder whether she'd taken a wrong turn, the temperature began to drop. For every hundred meters she descended, it fell another notch. The surrounding rock shifted from fiery red to dark brown.
"My mind is steel! Wait—diamonds!"
Rubies, emeralds, and diamonds suddenly dazzled her vision. Crystals studded the walls, and the diamonds among them caught and threw back light in brilliant cascades.
Bella wasn't the greedy type, but as King of the Lonely Mountain, appraising gemstones was a basic skill. She very much liked shiny things. Without a second thought, she gripped the hammer in one hand and a bag in the other, moving briskly, happily chiseling out a sackful of large diamonds.
"Holy crap!" Mid-dig, a plant about five meters tall with thick, fleshy stems lunged at her. It looked exactly like an oversized Venus flytrap, its hideous trap-jaws snapping toward her head while several sturdy vines shot from its root system, trying to coil around her ankles.