The ten days that had brought her to this moment had been earned in full.
When Ethan and the others had left for their honeymoon trip to other universe, Diana had gone directly to the Ancient One.
She observed that the demons crossing over from the hell dimensions had been a persistent problem, ordinary people touched and influenced and in some cases destroyed by forces they had no knowledge of and no defence against.
Diana had wanted to address it at the source, and she had wanted to test the God Slayer Armour in the conditions it had been made for.
The Ancient One had listened to her plan with the unhurried attention of someone who had heard many plans and had developed the ability to identify the ones worth supporting quickly.
She had opened a safe passage to the hell dimensions and had given Diana a watch like device, a simple device that allowed travel between the many separate hell dimensions, each one a distinct pocket of reality with its own architecture and its own particular brand of misery. She had issued one clear condition.
The watch's function would run for ten days. At the end of ten days, regardless of where Diana was or what she was in the middle of, the mechanism would activate and pull her back. It was a protection measure built into the device itself, not a recommendation.
The Ancient One had also packed Diana food for the journey.
Diana had looked at the small parcel and felt something warm move through her chest at the quiet practicality of it. Even the Ancient One, it turned out, understood that a warrior fighting across multiple hell dimensions for ten days was going to need to eat.
The armour had been with her through every hour of those ten days, and in those hours she had developed a relationship with it that went beyond equipment and use.
It moved with her, protected her and returned to her. It had performed in exactly the conditions it had been built for without a single failure.
She had thought, on more than one occasion during the past ten days, that she could kiss Ethan for making it. Not once but many times. Possibly a million times, which she had decided was a perfectly reasonable response to armour that had kept her alive through five separate hell dimensions and had never once let her down.
Five dimensions of demons. Five dimensions of clearing out infestation, tracking leaders, dismantling the operations that fed the flow of demonic influence back toward Earth.
And now she was here. Mephisto's dimension. The source and the primary force behind the flow of demons onto Earth, a being who played with human lives as though they were toys designed for his entertainment, who had continued that play even after Ethan Carter had come through and made a point about his objections.
Diana intended to make sure the lesson she left behind was more durable.
Before entering this universe, Ethan had given her the basic knowledge about threats she needed to know through telepathy.
So, she knows how Mephisto operated. The scale of his influence. The history of his interference with Earth's population. She had understood, going in, what she was dealing with. She had understood it more thoroughly with every dimension she had moved through since.
Now, after ten days of it, she understood it completely.
Mephista came in hard with a combination attack, the kind built to overwhelm a single defensive system by forcing it to handle multiple threat vectors simultaneously. Her magic compressed into directed spikes, three of them, angled at Diana's joints where the armour's mobility had to allow for gaps.
Diana twisted mid-air. The Aegis caught the first spike and reflected it in a sharp upward angle. The second she rolled under, coming back up inside Mephista's guard. The third she cut through with the Divine Reaver in the same motion.
She came out of the sequence with the point of the Divine Reaver angled at Mephista's throat, her body carried by the momentum of her last movement directly into the space where Mephista had no clean defensive option remaining.
The watch on Diana's left wrist cracked.
The face split cleanly across the middle, the mechanism inside giving out in one final, quiet failure. The ten days were up.
The light took her before the swing completed.
Diana was gone and Mephista blinked.
The Divine Reaver had been a breath from her throat. She extended her senses outward in an immediate sweep, scanning the dimension for Diana's presence, for any trace of her energy signature, for anything that indicated she had simply relocated rather than departed.
Nothing. She was gone. Fully and completely removed from this dimension by whatever mechanism had pulled her out.
Mephista looked at the empty air where Diana had been standing and said several things in a demonic language that did not translate into anything a human throat could produce.
'Coward,' she thought furiously. 'Running in the middle of a fight. Disappearing mid-swing.'
The wave of relief that moved through her at the same moment was something she had absolutely no intention of examining closely or acknowledging to anyone, ever.
She lowered herself slowly and looked around at what remained of her father's dimension.
It was a ruin. The battlefield they had made of this place over the course of the fight was only the most recent layer of damage.
Through the ten days Diana had been active across the hell dimensions before arriving here, the structural integrity of Mephisto's territory had been steadily and methodically eroded.
Demon populations that had numbered in the millions across the various pockets of this dimension were now measured in a few hundred.
The architecture of command that her father had built to sustain his operations against Earth had been dismantled piece by piece from the inside.
A single Demigod in gifted armour had nearly destroyed the entire demon hell. She had been a threat to this dimension on a scale that Mephista had not seen before and did not enjoy having to acknowledge.
A demon shuffled toward her from a pile of rubble to the left. It was one of the larger ones, built for the kind of heavy labour that the lower orders were assigned to. It stopped at a respectful distance and trembled in the particular way of something that was simultaneously terrified and trying very hard not to show it.
Mephista looked at it with cold calculation. Her eyes moved across the expanse of ruined terrain, doing the arithmetic of what had been lost.
"The human woman in the holding cavern," she said. "Use her. Increase the population numbers. We need bodies, and we need them quickly. This place needs to be repopulated." She turned her gaze back to the demon. "Start immediately."
The demon went with a combination of eagerness and fear that suggested it had been waiting to receive any order at all and was simply grateful for the direction, regardless of its source.
Mephista watched it go and stood in the silence of her ruined dimension and let herself think calmly for the first time in ten days.
Her father was not here. He was operating elsewhere, as he often did, moving his pieces across his various boards with the patience of a being who measured time in human lifespans the way humans measured it in minutes.
He would return. When he did, he would find his dimension considerably reduced from the state he had left it in.
She turned the problem over in her mind with the particular clarity that came after a fight had spent all the excess energy and left only the working parts.
One Demigod with gifted weapons had done this. The Hellbreaker, Aeon, had done considerably less with considerably less effort.
Her father had shared what he knew of him after returning from that encounter, and she had listened carefully.
The fragment of the Phoenix Force. The adaptive evolution that meant any power used against him became part of him over time, growing stronger and more refined with each exposure.
The constant, limitless growth that made every battle an investment on his side. The cosmic fire that burned through things that had no business being burned through.
Her father had not used his full strength in that fight. He had understood mid-battle that if he brought everything he had to bear, Aeon would absorb and adapt to it, and whatever came out of that process on the other side would be something Mephisto would face permanently and without any comparable counter.
He had chosen to lose in a controlled and deliberate way rather than create a version of his opponent that could not be opposed at all.
It was the most strategically sound retreat her father had ever made. And it had still not prevented the current state of this dimension.
Mephista considered the problem from a different angle entirely.
Force had not worked. Magic had not worked. Escalation had not worked. Her father's careful retreat had not prevented the Hellbreaker from continuing to be a problem for their operations in the future.
But there were other approaches.
Aeon was a man and his weakness was not in his power set. His weakness was in what he valued.
'If I could charm him,' she thought, and the smile that came with it was slow and entirely private, 'this entire arrangement changes. No more Demigods in gifted armour. No more Hellbreaker making inconvenient visits. A different kind of relationship entirely.'
She would need her father's return before making any move. But the idea sat comfortably in her mind and she did not dismiss it.
'I will go after him once father returns,' she decided.
And she allowed herself the private luxury of thinking how interesting that would be.
...
[Texas – Johnny Blaze's Apartment, September 28th, 2010, Evening]
The crowd noise from the stadium was still fading in the distance when Johnny Blaze finally got back to his apartment and dropped into the nearest chair.
The stunt had been the biggest of his career. He had known it before he ran the approach. He had felt it in the particular quality of the silence right before the jump, the one that preceded either glory or catastrophe, and this time it had been glory.
The bike had cleared the gap with room to spare and the noise of the crowd had followed him all the way down.
He sat in the quiet of his apartment with the comfortable fatigue of someone who had genuinely earned it, and he let himself have the stillness for a few minutes.
Then he heard it. His name being called. Low and close, too close for the distance from the door to the chair to account for.
It came from no specific direction, which was the part that made the hair on the back of his neck rise before his conscious mind had processed why.
He knew that voice and would know it if he heard it at the bottom of the ocean.
He would know it in a crowded room with every other sound competing for attention. It lived in a specific part of his memory that was made entirely of the worst night of his life, and it did not fade no matter how many years put themselves between him and it.
There had been a night, years ago, when Johnny Blaze had been a teenager desperate enough to make a deal he did not fully understand with something he did not fully comprehend.
His father had been sick. The cancer was progressing and the medicine wasn't working and the people around him were running out of things to say. Johnny had made a pact. He had offered what Mephisto asked for in exchange for his father's life.
Mephisto had held up his end of the deal with precision.
His father's cancer had been gone the next morning but his father had died the same day in a stunt accident.
The deal had been fulfilled. The terms had been met. And Johnny Blaze had spent every year since then carrying the specific weight of someone who had been robbed by something that had technically given him exactly what he asked for. Mephisto had cured his father. And then taken him away in the same breath. The cruelty of it was not accidental. It was the point.
He moved faster than fatigue should have allowed.
He was outside in seconds, and he saw his bike first. Brand new, the paint still carrying the freshness of recent purchase, sitting on the street exactly where he had left it.
The engine was running but no one was on it. The throttle was at idle but the sound of it was wrong, too purposeful, too present, like something waiting rather than something simply left running.
He turned when his name came again.
The man standing at the edge of the pavement looked entirely ordinary at first assessment. Mid-thirties in appearance. Black hair. Dark eyes that caught the evening light at a slightly wrong angle.
Dressed in clothes that were correct for a human being without quite sitting on the body the way clothes sat on someone who actually needed to wear them.
Johnny's jaw set hard. His hands closed into fists at his sides.
"You." The word came out with the weight of every year that had passed since that teenage bargain and everything it had cost him. "Don't you dare come here. Don't you dare."
Mephisto smiled. The easy, unhurried smile of someone who found the reunion pleasant regardless of how the other party received it.
"Johnny," he said, the name sitting in his mouth like something handled carelessly. "It has been a long time."
He began to walk forward at a pace that communicated complete indifference to the reaction he was receiving. "You are doing well for yourself. The work suits you."
Johnny's body tensed to move. Every instinct pointed toward the same response: distance, exit and refusal.
He had learned years ago that Mephisto did not appear without a purpose and that purposes always ran deeper and darker than the opening conversation made them sound. He had also learned, the hardest way possible, what it meant to be on the wrong side of a deal with this particular entity.
He was not going to stand here and find out what the current visit was for.
He shifted his weight to leave but his legs did not respond.
He looked down with the specific horror of someone whose body has just communicated that it no longer belongs entirely to them. His feet were on the pavement. They were not moving. He could feel everything around him with complete clarity, the ground beneath his shoes, the evening air on his skin, the engine note of his bike at his back. He simply could not act on any of it.
Mephisto continued forward without breaking stride, his expression pleasant and entirely unmoved by Johnny's situation.
"I am in a hurry," he said. "I will not waste both our time. The Rider has a job to do for me." His voice was conversational in a way that made every word of it worse. "Whether you agree is not a requirement."
Johnny's body moved without his direction. It turned. It crossed to the bike. It sat down on the seat with the practiced ease of someone who had spent most of their life doing exactly this.
His right hand closed around the throttle and the engine note rose from idle into the focused, coiled readiness of something about to be unleashed.
Mephisto leaned close to his ear. The warmth of human proximity was absent. What replaced it was something older and colder dressed in the shape of closeness.
"Find the woman named Susan Storm," he said, in a tone that dropped below the register of ordinary sound and landed somewhere else entirely. "And kill her. Slowly. In the most painful way you can manage."
Johnny's eyes went wide. His mind moved through the instruction and found no exit from it, no angle from which his refusal had any traction, no way to act on the complete and absolute rejection filling every part of him.
Mephisto straightened and stepped back. He raised the walking stick he carried and brought it down against the pavement once, a single sharp impact that sent something through the ground and up through the bike and into the machine itself.
Johnny Blaze left the curb at a speed the bike was not mechanically capable of producing. The fire came with him, trailing from the wheels in a continuous stream, burning orange-white against the darkening road, the line of it stretching back in a perfect arc as he rounded the first corner and disappeared from sight.
Mephisto stood on the empty pavement and watched the fire trail fade into the distance.
The smile that settled on his face was not the pleasant, social one he had used for the greeting.
It was the one underneath, older and more honest, the expression that only appeared when a piece had been placed correctly and the sequence had been properly set in motion.
"I hope you enjoy the present," he said, to no one present and someone specific in mind. "Consider it a belated wedding gift, Aeon." A pause, unhurried and deliberate. "You were on your honeymoon, after all. It would have been rude to interrupt."
His laughter moved through the empty street, bouncing off the buildings on both sides, rolling through the silence of an evening that had no idea what had just been set in motion within it.
By the time it had finished, the shadows had already taken him back.
The street was empty and still, carrying nothing but the faint, fading smell of something that had been burning.