The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak latched onto a single foreleg of the beetle monster. The creature tried to wrench free through brute force alone, its six barbed limbs stamping the ground relentlessly while its axe-blade skull sawed at the chains. But that was precisely the spell's strength: Bella, a speck in the monster's eyes, was anchoring it in place.
Every time the beetle snapped a chain, she fed another one in. Her psionic reserves were draining at a frightening rate.
Kong, moments from being gutted against a wall, let loose a thunderous roar.
His voice boomed like thunder. Both fists rose high, every ounce of strength concentrated in his arms. A howling gale preceded the blow as he hammered down on the beetle monster's skull.
The creature's anatomy was deeply strange. Its skin density was low, its musculature relatively loose. When Kong's fists connected, the effect was less like striking armor and more like bursting a water balloon. A wet crack echoed across the cavern, and a geyser of blue blood plastered Kong's face.
"ROAR! ROAR—!" Livid, Kong seized the beetle's head in both hands and tried to rip it off.
"No! Use your fists! Don't let that blood spray everywhere!" Bella shouted from the sideline.
Kong snarled at her twice—fighting was fighting; why make it complicated? But he'd seen enough to recognize her contribution. With a huff, he accepted the advice.
He wiped his face with one massive palm.
Flicked the blue sludge aside with undisguised revulsion.
On any ordinary person, that corrosive blood would have been a death sentence—or at least a maiming. Kong's dense facial fur and his species' innate resistance to these creatures' biochemistry shielded him well enough. He wiped his face clean, pressed one hand down on the beetle's lethal skull-blade to pin it, clenched the other into a fist, and started pounding like he was grinding garlic.
"Go help him! What are you doing just standing there watching?!" Bella's voice cracked with the strain of feeding magic into the chains. She glanced at Thor, who was just standing there on the sidelines watching, and snapped at him.
"Me?" Thor pointed at himself, then at Kong. "You want the mightiest warrior of Asgard to gang up on an enemy with a… a gorilla?"
Every second of concentration was costing her. Even with the spell absorbing over 99.9% of the beetle's thrashing, the residual force still made her want to cough blood.
Teeth clenched, patience gone, she played her card.
"Think about what His Majesty Odin told you! Think about his words to you!"
What exactly had Odin said to Thor? Bella had absolutely no idea. She suspected Thor barely remembered either. But Odin had surely said many, many things to his son over the centuries. The old king spoke in riddles and clouds of mystery—half the time you couldn't parse his meaning even by guessing. Somewhere in that mountain of cryptic pronouncements, there had to be a few lines that fit the current situation.
Thor feared nothing in the Nine Realms—except his father. He cocked his head, searching his memory. A god's recall worked nothing like a mortal's, and sure enough, something surfaced.
Words his old man had spoken five hundred years ago—they applied to today?
Teaming up with a gorilla was an insult to his pride as a warrior. But a decree from the King of the Gods was another matter entirely.
Thor thought it over. He really, truly did not dare defy his father's will. He gripped Jarnbjorn tight: "Hold on, big guy. I'm coming!"
Bella released the Crimson Bands. Magical power surged, reshaping into a screaming gale—the Winds of Watoomb.
The hurricane lifted the beetle monster nearly three meters off the ground. Veins bulged across Bella's forehead as she held the spell for over ten agonizing seconds. Thor seized the opening, bringing Jarnbjorn down in a devastating arc that severed one of the beetle's hind legs.
The spray of blue blood caught him full in the face and mouth.
"Ptuh! Ptuh! What is this stuff?!" Asgardian physiology was genuinely formidable—the high-radiation, high-toxin cocktail amounted to a brief numbness on his tongue. He spat it out, and within moments the sensation faded entirely.
Bella, Thor, and Kong. Even with all three working together, the need to contain the beetle's corrosive blood meant the fight dragged on for another ten-plus minutes before Thor finally hacked through the creature's neck. Bella flash-froze the wound to seal in the blood, and Kong delivered the coup de grâce, hammering the frozen head down into the neck stump with one colossal fist.
"Clean up! This thing is massively hazardous to the environment!" Bella directed her two bruisers.
The beetle monster had barely stopped twitching before its body began to dissolve. That was bad news. Its blood was saturated with radiation and toxins, and its exhaled gases carried heavy radioactive contamination. If the carcass broke down, every hazardous compound inside it would leach into the surrounding ecosystem.
"ROAR—!" Kong was wounded and furious. Fighting was one thing—manual labor? He wanted no part of it.
"Its corpse will destroy the food chain down here. When that happens, you won't have anything to eat. You won't even be able to eat Skullcrawlers anymore. Do I make myself clear?"
Bella dressed the ape down without an ounce of sympathy.
Faced with a choice between going hungry and doing chores, the ape chose chores.
He gathered the scattered limbs, shell fragments, and assorted debris into one pile while Bella encased the entire carcass in ice.
She hadn't been the primary combatant in this fight. With or without her, Thor and Kong together could have defeated the beetle monster. The problem was that those two would never have teamed up on their own, so her contribution mattered more than raw damage.
With the corpse frozen solid, she walked over to the fissure.
Thor and Kong followed, curious.
Even Bella, whose composure was usually ironclad, couldn't help muttering a few choice words under her breath.
Through the fissure, amid a field of glowing magma, she glimpsed scattered points of eerie blue luminescence—as though an even deeper, even vaster world lay hidden below.
They were already in the underground world. What lay beneath the underground world?
"I need your help. We have to seal this opening. We cannot let whatever's down there come up." Her expression was dead serious as she looked between Kong and Thor.
Kong scratched his face, picked his nose with one thick finger, then sat down and stared at the ceiling. Thor launched into a coughing fit, clutching his chest as if he might keel over any second.
Ask them to fight? Sure. Seal something? How? Stack some rocks over it?
"Does Asgard have any sealing spells? The strongest kind you've got?" Bella held zero expectations for Kong. Her focus was entirely on Thor.
Asgardian magic was far from weak—quite the opposite, it was exceptionally powerful. Yet for a host of political and diplomatic reasons, Kamar-Taj had never incorporated a single Asgardian spell into its repertoire. Not one.