[A/N]: Alright, you absolute legends 🤯🔥 you really went and hit 250 Power Stones. So here's your Second Bonus chapter💥 Next up, let's shoot for 500 Power Stones and drop two MORE bonus chapters. You know the drill- comment, share and hype it up 😎✨
Selene's rage reached its crescendo.
Her beautiful facade cracked completely. The glamour shattered like broken glass, revealing glimpses of the ugliness beneath.
"You dare? YOU DARE?" Her voice wasn't human anymore. It was the sound of glass grinding to dust. "I have drunk the blood of dragons! I have outlived eras! And you, a CHILD playing with borrowed powers, think you can insult ME?"
The air around her began to warp fundamentally as reality itself buckled under the weight of her fury.
Jay felt it in his bones. His danger sense screamed warnings so loud his vision blurred.
Domino's luck kicked into overdrive. Her instincts, honed by years of survival, painted a single clear picture: they were about to be moved somewhere very, very bad.
"Jay!" Her warning came too late.
Selene's hands moved in patterns. Ancient gestures that predated eras, drawn from knowledge stolen from Egyptian priests. Black energy exploded outward from her body, engulfing everything within a hundred yards.
The sensation hit like drowning in oil. Thick, suffocating and wrong. Jay felt reality peel away in layers. The parking lot's solid concrete became liquid beneath his feet, then vapor, then nothing.
The transition lasted forever and no time at all. A subjective eternity compressed into a microsecond. His stomach lurched as the taste of copper and ozone filled his mouth.
The world twisted, and so did their insides.
And then snapped back into horrible, alien focus as they materialized somewhere else.
The first thing Jay noticed was the heat. Not like fire or desert sun but the heat of a forge. The kind of heat that made breathing feel like inhaling knives. Each breath scorched his lungs, dried his throat and made sweat evaporate before it could form on his skin.
The sky was wrong. Black clouds roiled overhead, lit from within by crimson lightning that never quite struck the ground. Even the lightning moved in ominous patterns.
The landscape stretched away in impossible directions, angles that made his eyes water when he tried to track them. Mountains floated inverted in the distance, their peaks pointing down at nothing. Rivers flowed upward into the black sky, defying gravity with casual contempt.
They stood on a platform of obsidian that reflected nothing. The stone was perfectly smooth, perfectly black, and perfectly dead in a way that made the lizard part of Jay's brain scream to run.
Around them, the architecture was a nightmare fusion of ancient temples and visceral biology. Stone columns carved with faces that screamed silently, their mouths opening and closing in rhythm with a pulse Jay could feel through his feet. Walls that pulsed with a rhythm like a massive heartbeat, veins visible beneath semi-translucent stone.
This wasn't like the Mirror Dimension Jay had experienced at Kamar-Taj. That place had been reality's reflection, twisted but fundamentally safe. A training ground for sorcerers learning their craft.
This was Selene's domain. A pocket dimension she'd carved from hell itself and shaped to her will over millennia. Every inch of this place answered to her, obeyed her and existed because she allowed it to exist.
Betsy stumbled, her psychic senses overwhelmed by the ambient wrongness. "Bloody hell... where... what is this place?"
"Her home turf." Jay's voice was grim. His enhanced vision swept their surroundings. "A pocket hell dimension. Every inch of this place answers to her. We're fighting in her playground, by her rules, and she's had thousands of years to perfect the home field advantage."
"Correct, boy." Selene's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. A chorus of her voice, layered and distorted, coming from the walls themselves. She materialized on a throne of bone that hadn't existed seconds before, lounging like a queen receiving subjects. The bones looked human. Femurs for armrests, skulls decorating the backrest and some of them still had flesh clinging to them. The missing glamour was back, but more translucent. "Welcome to my private domain. Here, I am not merely powerful. Here, I am God eternal."
She raised one hand. The gesture was lazy, almost bored.
Reality rippled like water.
Figures began emerging from the walls themselves, pulled from the living stone like sculptures birthed from solid rock. Stone parted like curtains, liquid for a moment, then solid again behind the emerging forms. But these weren't her demons. Jay's enhanced vision picked out the details immediately.
Humans.
They wore robes of deep crimson and black, marked with symbols. Their faces were expressionless, but their eyes burned with fanatical devotion. Each one radiated magical power, dark and twisted and utterly corrupted.
"My followers," Selene purred. "Dark sorcerers who surrendered their morality for power. Who gave themselves to me, body, soul and sanity, in exchange for secrets the Ancient One would never teach. Secrets that require... sacrifices. Of others, of themselves and of everything that makes them human."
More and more emerged. Dozens, then hundreds. An army of corrupted mystical masters, each one individually dangerous enough to level city blocks, now moving with unified purpose.
Jay felt his stomach drop. Not from fear that would have overtaken his body just a few months before, but from calculation and the cold realization of what he was about to have to do.
Hundreds of human beings. Corrupted, yes. Evil, probably, but still human.
The weight of it pressed down on him like the dimension's oppressive heat.
But the alternative was worse. The alternative was losing, letting Selene keep the Braddock brothers and allowing this ancient monster to build her empire on stolen bodies and violated minds.
So he made a choice. A terrible, necessary choice.
"Fuck this." The words came out flat and empty. The voice of someone who'd stopped caring about consequences.
Jay's hands moved automatically. He reached for his blade, fingers finding the Muramasa in his hand. Blood welled up as he cut his palm deliberately, deeply, feeling the cursed steel drink his essence. As he absorbed its powers inturn.
Carl Creel's ability activated. The absorption was nearly instant, but Jay felt every microsecond of it. Felt the Muramasa's properties flow into him like liquid metal in his veins. His skin rippled, darkened, and became black as midnight with a dark sheen.
The transformation spread from his bleeding palm outward, consuming his body inch by inch. Red lightning crackled around him in patterns that reminded him of techniques he'd practiced in Kamar-Taj's training grounds, but darker and hungrier. His eyes finally blazed crimson.
But he didn't stop there. White Lightforce blazed from his right side while black Darkforce coiled around his left. The two energies spiraled together, creating a corona of absolute contrast that made him look like a living yin-yang symbol. Light and dark, Creation and destruction and finally, Life and death made manifest in human form.
Selene's smug expression vanished. Her eyes widened, and for the first time in millennia, genuine fear flickered across her ancient features. That weapon. That cursed katana she'd sensed earlier. She remembered its reputation and what it could do to beings like her.
Now this boy had absorbed its very essence into his body.
"It's not possible." Her voice cracked slightly as control slipping and her composure fracturing. "That blade... I thought you were weak to magic? How can you wield something that negates the mystic arts?"
Jay's smile was predatory and hungry. The smile of something that had stopped pretending to be civilized.
"You thought a lot of things, old wretch. Most of them were wrong."
He moved.
The distance between them closed in a heartbeat. One moment, he stood fifty feet away. The next he was there, his hand wreathed in anti-magical energy reaching for her throat. His transformed body moved with speed that shouldn't be possible.
His blade, an extension of his arm now, transformed into a cutting edge that radiated power designed specifically to unmake mystical forces. The strike came down like an executioner's blade, trailing dark energy that ate the light around it.
But Brian Braddock appeared between them.
The Sword of Might came up in a perfect guard position. The textbook defensive form Brian had spent years perfecting. Steel met transformed steel with a sound like the world breaking. The impact created a shockwave that shattered the obsidian platform beneath them, sending cracks spider-webbing outward for a hundred feet.
But Brian's mystical might, all of it, meant nothing against Murasama's anti-magic properties.
In this dimension, Brian's connection to the British Isles was severed. Cut off by dimensional barriers. The Sword of Might, that legendary blade that had stood against demons and dark gods and threats to all of Britain, simply couldn't hold against a weapon designed to unmake the very concept of magic.
The enchantments that made the Sword of Might legendary unraveled. Centuries of mystical reinforcement dissolved like sugar in water. The blade that could cut through anything magical became just very good steel.
And very good steel broke.
The Sword of Might shattered as Pieces flying in different directions. The sound it made was almost sad.
Brian flew backward like he'd been hit by artillery. His armor, that mystical protection that had weathered countless battles, cracked as fractures spread across the breastplate. The impact of Jay's strike had been too much.
His body carved a trench through the obsidian, stone breaking beneath him, before slamming into one of the pulsing walls. The wall absorbed him partially, biological stone trying to consume him before spitting him back out. He lay there, unmoving and armor smoking.
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