Seeing that Roarke had truly been destroyed, Ethan exhaled a long, heavy breath, letting the tension bleed from his muscles.
He surveyed the surrounding devastation.
The ancient ruins of Göbekli Tepe had been entirely reduced to a literal hell on earth. The apocalyptic clash with the demon lord had violently terraformed the landscape, leaving behind nothing but a massive, smoking crater of scorched earth.
Boiling magma continued to bleed from the jagged tear of the Hell Gate, slowly filling the bottom of the crater and choking the night air with the suffocating, rotten-egg stench of raw sulfur.
At a glance, the devastated valley looked virtually indistinguishable from the underworld itself; a few of the more resilient demon species could have comfortably set up a permanent residence here.
However, the surviving demonic grunts and lesser devils were far from comfortable. Their grotesque faces were twisted in absolute, unadulterated terror.
After all, their supreme boss had just been permanently eradicated—literally beaten to a pulp by a glowing golden book.
Panicked and leaderless, the remaining demons followed the frantic retreat of a few high-ranking devils, practically trampling each other as they scrambled back toward the Hell Gate.
In their minds, this terrifying Earth was entirely too dangerous; the fiery pits of Hell suddenly seemed like a much safer sanctuary.
Meanwhile, with Roarke's dark magic no longer acting as an anchor, the spatial fissures connecting the two realms began to rapidly shrink and destabilize.
Ethan watched the mass exodus with cool indifference, not bothering to waste his kinetic energy on fleeing grunts. Instead, he manipulated the gravitational vectors around his body, floating down to land softly beside Thor.
As Asgard's greatest warrior, Thor looked completely exhausted. The Thunder God was sprawled flat on his back inside a massive crater of his own making, looking like he never wanted to wake up again.
A few yards away, a smaller, perfectly circular impact crater held his legendary hammer, Mjolnir.
Just as Ethan considered helping the prince to his feet, an incredibly piercing, high-frequency screech shattered the silence.
It was the distinct, agonizing sound of the spatial fabric being forcibly torn apart. Ethan snapped his head around. The shrinking Hell Gate had suddenly violently expanded.
A towering silhouette cloaked entirely in a roiling black mist physically blocked the shrinking portal.
A pair of massive, blood-red eyes glared out from the darkness, locking directly onto Ethan with a chilling mixture of absolute cruelty and boundless greed.
"You still want to fight?" Ethan frowned, his posture instantly shifting back into a combat-ready stance. The shadowy entity lingering in the doorway was undeniably one of the rival Devil Kings who had been watching the chaos unfold.
"The real question is, mortal: can you still fight?" the entity within the black mist mocked, its voice echoing with dark resonance. If the ultimate defensive power of Earth was truly capped at this exhausted level, the Devil King had no intention of letting such a prime soul-harvesting opportunity slip away.
Ethan could sense the shifting atmospheric pressure; the other lurking Devil Kings were undoubtedly getting restless, eager to swarm the weakened realm.
"To be completely honest with you, I really don't want to get serious here, primarily because this is my planet, and I like it in one piece," Ethan said smoothly.
He slowly stood up to his full height and turned his back on the demon. "But you shouldn't mistake my restraint for fear."
Ethan calmly walked over to the small crater holding Mjolnir. He stared down at the legendary weapon, forged from the core of a dying star. Ethan reached down and firmly grasped the leather-wrapped hilt.
Instantly, Mjolnir began to violently tremble. Odin's ancient worthiness enchantment immediately activated, acting as a mystical safety lock to reject the unauthorized user.
But to Ethan, the magical spell was entirely meaningless. He wasn't trying to lift the hammer through pureness of heart or Asgardian magic; he was bypassing the system using absolute, overbearing physics. He locked onto the localized gravitational vectors acting on the hammer's mass and forcefully reversed them.
BOOM!
As Ethan physically forced Mjolnir off the ground, the mystical restrictions placed upon the weapon began to violently clash with his kinetic manipulation.
Blinding arcs of raw, uncontained lightning and cosmic energy exploded outward. This was the true, terrifying density and power contained within the neutron star material.
The thick, unnatural clouds blanketing the night sky were instantly shredded. A hyper-storm materialized out of nowhere, swirling violently around Ethan's form.
The very earth shook uncontrollably, tearing open massive, jagged fissures across the valley.
Countless shattered boulders and chunks of masonry began to float aimlessly into the air, caught in the chaotic, anti-gravity field leaking from the manipulated stellar mass.
"So," Ethan said, his voice amplified by the roaring thunder. Surrounded by an endless vortex of hurricane-force winds and blinding lightning, Ethan manipulated the air currents to elevate himself high above the battlefield.
He casually pointed the crackling head of Mjolnir directly at the Hell Gate. "Which one of you ugly bastards wants to go first?"
Silence fell over the dark side of the portal. The encroaching Devil Kings suddenly went entirely still. As long as they possessed basic sensory perception, they could clearly feel the apocalyptic, world-breaking kinetic aura radiating from the man and the hammer.
A direct strike with that much concentrated vector mass would permanently eradicate even a Lord of Hell.
Prior to this exact moment, the whispered rumors of Mephisto being brutally hammered back to Hell had been treated as a hilarious joke among the demonic elite.
They had all assumed Mjolnir was just a shiny, oversized toy Odin had gifted his spoiled son. Now, staring down the barrel of that exact weapon fully unleashed, the terrifying reality set in.
The hammer was very, very real.
Suddenly, the rival Devil Kings felt a reluctant twinge of genuine admiration for Mephisto. The fact that the old devil had physically tanked a blow from that weapon and survived was a miracle. Of course, that brief admiration was heavily outweighed by profound contempt.
We are cunning, manipulative entities of darkness, they thought collectively. Why in the Nine Realms would you try to physically block a kinetic weapon of mass destruction with your own face?
What an embarrassment to demons everywhere.
"Make up your minds," Ethan demanded, the wind whipping his clothes. "Neither I, nor Jonathan here, have much patience left."
"Mortal! You are courting death!" the Devil King anchoring the spatial rift roared. The roiling black mist surrounding his body instantly boiled over, condensing into the massive, terrifying shape of a shadowy black dragon.
With a deafening roar, the dark construct lunged through the portal, snapping its jaws toward Ethan.
The Devil King himself, however, executed this entire aggressive maneuver flawlessly without ever letting a single inch of his actual, physical body cross the threshold into Earth's dimension.
Faced with this cowardly, probing attack, Ethan simply tightened his grip on Mjolnir and gave it a casual, downward flick.
He seized the directional vectors of the massive super-storm he had gathered.
The raging tempest of highly compressed air and pure electrical energy violently broke its atmospheric banks, flooding forward like a catastrophic tidal wave aimed directly at the Hell Gate.
The moment the giant shadow dragon made contact with the concentrated torrent of vectorized lightning, it was instantly vaporized into nothingness. The dark construct couldn't even slow the storm's momentum for a microsecond.
Seeing his ultimate attack casually swatted away, the Devil King anchoring the rift let out a heavy, defeated sigh and immediately chose to retreat.
Hell was a brutal realm that strictly adhered to the law of the jungle. If even the infamous Mephisto had been severely injured dealing with this human, they would be fools to press the attack.
No demon ever engaged in a guaranteed loss-making business just to harvest a few terrestrial souls.
As Ethan's terrifying, vector-amplified storm poured directly into the unstable spatial rift, the fragile dimensional boundary quickly warped. The conflicting energies triggered a blinding, catastrophic detonation.
The resulting blast yielded a shockwave that far exceeded the rapid, destructive spread of a modern thermonuclear bomb, albeit contained largely within the mystical spectrum.
Accompanying this massive shockwave were violent, erratic spatial fluctuations. Countless micro-fissures in reality rapidly tore open and collapsed across the area.
Some brief glimpses led to bustling human cities, others to barren deserts, the cold vacuum of deep space, or even the shimmering, crystalline energy of Asgard's Bifrost.
CLANG!
Realizing the escalating danger of holding the weapon, Ethan quickly manipulated gravity to drop Mjolnir heavily back onto the dirt, preventing the localized gravitational distortions from causing any further environmental damage. He let out a genuine, exhausted sigh.
"It's finally over," Ethan muttered, rubbing his temples. The continuous calculation of such massive kinetic and spatial vectors had left even him feeling a deep sense of mental fatigue.
Whoosh!
The moment the hammer hit the dirt, the safety enchantment re-engaged. Mjolnir immediately soared back into the air, flying automatically into Thor's waiting hand.
However, the God of Thunder was currently in an incredibly strange, deeply disturbing psychological state. Thor sat in the dirt, staring blankly ahead as if his very soul had been ripped out. His lips were visibly trembling as he muttered incoherently to himself.
"What exactly is wrong with him?" Ethan asked, looking down at the traumatized prince in sheer bewilderment. Thor's eyes were glassy, filled with a profound, almost childlike sense of grievance.
"What do you think? You completely broke his ego," Luna said, walking over casually. If someone were to lean in and listen very closely to the muttering God of Thunder, they would hear him repeating the exact same broken mantra over and over again.
"I am Thor... I am the God of Thunder... My father gave this hammer to me... It belongs to me..."
Completely oblivious to the deep psychological scars he had just inflicted on an alien prince, Ethan simply turned his attention elsewhere. "Where did everyone else go?"
"The Convergence of the Nine Realms is reaching its peak. Earth's spatial fabric is inherently unstable right now," Luna explained, spreading her hands. "You just violently detonated a major inter-dimensional node. The resulting spatial shockwave caused the local reality to splinter. The others likely fell into those temporary micro-fissures."
"Nadya and the boy are currently being protected by a literal angel, so their survival probability is high," Luna continued. "But as for your two S.H.I.E.L.D. friends..."
Before Luna could finish detailing her grim hypothesis, Ethan's smartphone began to ring in his pocket. He pulled it out; the caller ID displayed Coulson's encrypted S.H.I.E.L.D. frequency. It seemed the agents were still somewhere on Earth.
"Hey, Coulson," Ethan answered, an amused smirk playing on his lips. "Where exactly did the universe spit you out? Please tell me you didn't accidentally fall into Hell."
"It is not quite that exaggerated, Ethan, but the reality is not much better," Coulson's deeply anxious, stressed voice crackled over the line. "According to the GPS, Melinda and I have been dropped somewhere in the United Kingdom. And listen to me very carefully: I have encountered some major trouble again!"
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Word count: 1872
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