The joy of mining was never about the ore—it was about the dig. One swing might hit rock, or it might hit a gemstone. Rock? No matter—swing again. Still rock? Swing again. Try ten in a row, and the anticipation alone made it worthwhile.
Bella had been happily mining diamonds when the ambush killed her mood.
She'd already banished Loki. No matter how relaxed she was, some overgrown carnivorous plant was not going to catch her off guard.
"What is this thing?!" Her finger traced a white arc through the air. The flytrap's head tumbled free, green sap splattering across the ground. Psionic energy surged outward from her body—Frost Nova, detonating in every direction.
The vines went limp instantly. The decapitated flytrap began retracting into the wall.
Venus flytraps existed on the surface, sure, but those only ate mosquitoes and bugs. One brazen enough to attack a person? Unheard of. And certainly not one this size.
"What a bizarre place." Bella stowed the diamond bag and kept moving.
Fern trees towering thirty to forty meters, their trunks storing water like baobabs. Prehistoric mushrooms over twenty meters tall dotted the landscape. Bella even spotted fist-sized trilobites by a stream. She'd mistaken one for a rock, kicked it flying, and only then realized something was off.
The light down here was plentiful. Not sunlight, and not magma either. She looked toward the horizon.
From where she stood, the source wasn't visible, but she could sense it: something immensely energetic, radiating both light and heat from an enormous distance.
This was nothing like a cave or cavern beneath an island. There was illumination, water, diverse flora and insects—a self-contained ecosystem. A genuine underground world.
"What's producing that light?" Without seeing the source firsthand, she couldn't say for certain. Monarch had floated the idea of an inner-Earth sun, which she thought was absurd. If anything, it was more likely to be Unicron's heart.
She didn't take a single photo. Not one. The implications here were too vast, and she needed far more intelligence before making any moves. The immediate priority was still finding Thor.
"For Asgard!" She heard him before she saw him.
Bella emerged onto a vast, open plain where a man and a beast were locked in furious combat.
Clad in scale armor and a sweeping red cape, armed with the divine battle-axe Jarnbjorn because Mjolnir had been left behind in Asgard, Thor cut an imposing figure. Fear was a foreign concept to him in battle—he could keep this up for another ten days without tiring.
His opponent, roaring and pounding his chest, was the guardian of Skull Island himself: the great ape, Kong.
From the time Old One-Eye's team first discovered him in 1975 to the present year of 2004, Kong had undergone nearly thirty years of growth. He'd shed his infant stage entirely and entered full adolescence. His height had surged from thirty meters to seventy. His body density had increased tenfold, and his weight had ballooned more than tenfold—roughly three thousand tons now.
Skull Island's pretty boy still weighed less than a rounding error compared to Godzilla. Which proved one thing: a diet of squid simply couldn't compete with one of nuclear warheads. The two weren't even in the same category.
But Kong's massive frame demanded a terrifying amount of food.
He'd eaten every last squid on the island to extinction. The Sker Buffalo were docile enough, and they were pets besides, so he'd left their herds alone. Instead, he'd turned his appetite toward the Skullcrawlers in the underground world.
You bullied me when I was small. Now it's payback time.
Skullcrawler meat was vile—sour and astringent—but the supply was practically infinite. Kong had shifted from passive defense to active hunting, regularly descending into the underground to feed. For the past six months or so, he'd been living down here full-time without returning to the surface.
Kong had no concept of "island" versus "underground world." To the great ape, everything beneath his feet was his domain. On this territory, he was the undisputed king—until Loki went and tricked a big idiot into showing up.
Without Mjolnir, but with his divine power intact, Thor's combat effectiveness hadn't dropped all that dramatically.
Kong's transformation, on the other hand, was earth-shattering. Thirty meters and seventy meters weren't even the same concept. Raw power overwhelmed all finesse, and since Thor wasn't exactly a spellcaster, the result of their head-on collision was Thor getting absolutely pummeled.
When Bella's eyes found him, the big man was still holding his ground, panting hard, pointing at Kong: "Not bad! I'll admit you've earned the right to fight me!"
Kong bellowed and seized a nearby stone pillar. The blow came down like a meteor, carrying earth-shattering force.
Bella watched from a distance. Thor was clearly losing, but neither combatant could land a decisive blow. She started working through how to broker a ceasefire.
Loki's illusion magic had vanished the moment he was banished. Whatever he'd told Thor before, those lies should no longer hold sway.
What kept Thor fighting now was honor, courage, and warrior's pride—nothing more.
And Kong? Kong perceived this "human" as challenging his sovereignty over Skull Island. So he, too, fought to the death.
Blow after blow connected with flesh and bone. Kong swung both arms in wide arcs and hammered the ground. Thor, face bruised and swollen, refused to yield. He'd long forgotten why this fight started. Only one thought remained: put the big guy down.
The earth shook. Kong beat his chest in a thunderous cadence. Amid the deafening roars, Bella shouted "Stop fighting!" twice without even hearing her own voice.
Kong was beyond persuasion. In his current state, the great ape was essentially a legendary-tier barbarian: while raging, he was immune to mind control, confusion, energy drain, slow effects, charm, and a whole host of other debuffs.
That left Thor. How could she get his attention and make him disengage?
She studied the God of Thunder carefully. His durability was absurd. Kong had literally hammered him into a wall like a nail, and he'd just rolled his neck and stood back up.
Damage reduction off the charts.
Thor's willpower was solid, too. Odin had clearly invested serious effort in grooming his heir. Strength, speed, endurance, physical defense, magical defense—all formidable, with virtually no weak spots. The sole flaw was his straightforward, somewhat naive personality, which left him critically vulnerable to illusions. He believed whatever he saw.
Bella's illusion work wasn't on Loki's level, but it wasn't bad either.
Disguise herself as Odin? She rejected the idea immediately. Outside of Loki, nobody in the Nine Realms would dare impersonate the Allfather. She absolutely did not have the nerve.
She surveyed the surrounding terrain, and a plan took shape almost at once.