[A/N]: The Second GOAL of the week is to achieve 500 Power Stones and unlock TWO more bonus chapters. Comment, share, and you know the drill 😎✨
They died screaming her name, praising her and thanking her for the privilege of dying in her service. This kind of devotion transcended sanity and made death preferable to disobedience.
And while Jay carved through Selene's army, Domino and Betsy faced their own hell.
Betsy dodged another spell by inches. The curse hit the wall behind her, leaving a crater that steamed and hissed. Flesh-like tissue bubbled and popped, releasing gases that smelled of rot. Her psychic blades were practically useless here. Every construct she formed had to fight against the dimension's oppressive atmosphere, like trying to swing a sword underwater.
"Bloody hell!" She rolled sideways, another spell missing her by inches. Purple light cratered where she'd been standing. "These bastards don't know when to quit!"
Domino's luck worked overtime. Bullets curved in impossible trajectories, finding gaps in defenses that shouldn't exist. A sorcerer raised a shield, but her bullet bounced off a piece of falling debris, ricocheted off a floating stone fragment, curved around the shield's edge and entered through the man's ear, and he dropped.
Another tried to curse her, but she stumbled on uneven ground, luck making her trip at exactly the right moment. The curse passed over her head close enough to singe her hair.
But even her luck couldn't make up for the sheer numbers they faced. For every sorcerer that fell, three more took his place in an endless tide of fanatical devotion.
Even worse, Brian had rejoined the fight.
Without the Sword of Might, he fought with raw mystical power channeled directly from his connection to Britain or what remained of it across dimensional barriers. Each punch carried the force of an avalanche condensed into a fist. And each kick could shatter steel.
And he was aiming those strikes at his sister.
"Brian, please!" Betsy's voice cracked desperate. She threw up a telekinetic shield but her brother's fist shattered it like glass, the backlash sending psychic feedback through her mind and pain lanced behind her eyes. "I know you're in there! Fight her control! You're Captain Britain, for fuck's sake! You're stronger than this!"
His response was another devastating combination. Right cross, Left hook and then a Knee strike. Each one perfectly placed and aimed to kill. The techniques their father had taught them both, now weaponized against her.
She barely got her psychic blade up to deflect. The impact sent numbness up her arm. Her construct flickered and destabilized by the force.
"It's me! It's Betsy! Your sister!" Tears streamed down her face, mixing with blood from a cut over her eye. "Remember? Remember teaching me to fight? Remember holding me when Mum and Dad died? Remember telling me I'd always be safe because you'd protect me?"
Brian's dead eyes didn't change and didn't show even a hint of recognition.
He raised his fist for another strike.
Domino provided covering fire. Bullets forced Brian to dodge, his enhanced reflexes still functioning even without the Sword. But a dark sorcerer caught her distraction, landing a spell that burned through her enhanced tactical suit and scorched just her shoulder thanks to her luck. The smell of burning flesh filled the air.
"Fuck!" She hissed in pain. The wound healed almost immediately, Wolverine's healing factor closing the burn. Skin knitting back together, nerves reconnecting and tissue regenerating. But the pain remained, nerves screaming even as they rebuilt themselves from the phantom agony from an injury that no longer existed.
"We can't keep this up!" Domino reloaded, her enhanced reflexes letting her track three different threats simultaneously. Her hands moved on autopilot, muscle memory and probability manipulation combining to ensure every shot counted even as exhaustion made her fingers shake. "There's too many of them! And your brother's gonna put you down if we don't figure something out fast!"
Betsy knew she was right. The sorcerers were coordinating now, learning from their failures. And Brian's relentless assault was wearing her down. Every block, every dodge and every desperate counter took energy she didn't have to spare. Her psychic reserves were depleting, and her body screaming for rest it wouldn't get.
A spell caught her off guard. Magical chains wrapped around her legs, yanking her to the ground hard enough to crack her ribs. Pain exploded through her chest, but she tried to phase through them, tried to cut them with psychic energy, but nothing worked. The chains were physical and mystical, both designed to hold metahumans.
Brian raised his fist for a killing blow. The strike would cave in her skull and paint the obsidian with her brain matter.
"Brian, no!" Her voice broke completely. "Please! I love you! Don't do this!"
But no words reached Brian's ears.
Just as she accepted death from her loving brother's hands, Jay appeared between them.
His blade caught Brian's punch with a sound like colliding mountains. The impact cratered the obsidian beneath them again, sending shockwaves radiating outward that knocked nearby sorcerers off their feet. But Jay held firm, his Murasama-enhanced body absorbing force that should have liquefied bone.
"Enough playing around," Jay growled.
His null field expanded, washing over Brian. The mystical power channeling through Captain Britain's body simply stopped. Cut off like a switch being flipped, but even then, his enhanced strength remained from the physical conditioning he'd earned through years of training and combat.
Now the magical amplification was gone, but Brian stood strong, skilled and dangerous.
But he was just a man now. Just flesh, bone and will.
Jay's other hand shot out, pressing against Brian's chest. Searching as his enhanced senses extending through armor and cloth and skin.
Jay found what he was looking for. The Amulet of Right, hidden beneath Brian's armor. The mystical artifact that connected him to the Captain Britain Corps, that gave him his powers, that made him more than human. A small piece of worked metal and ancient magic, so important yet so fragile.
Kim Il Sung's functionality manipulation surged through Jay's palm. Not destroying the amulet. That would have killed Brian, severed his connection so violently it would have stopped his heart. Just disrupting its connection to its wearer and scrambling the mystical frequencies until it couldn't maintain its bond.
The amulet fought him. Ancient magic resisting modern manipulation. But against someone who'd adapted to Cosmic powers, against someone whose body could negate mystical concepts themselves, the amulet's resistance meant nothing.
Jay suddenly heard Domino scream and increased his intensity.
The connection severed with an almost audible snap.
The Amulet of Right fell from Brian's chest. Dropped through a gap in his broken armor and hit the obsidian with a sound like a coin dropping.
Brian gasped, and his body spasmed as the connection that had defined him for years, that had made him Captain Britain and had given him purpose, power and identity, was ripped away. The psychic shock alone should have killed him.
He collapsed. Unconscious before he hit the ground. Alive, but diminished.
Jay quickly teleported in a burst of blue energy that left afterimages.
Back to where Jamie advanced on Domino.
The reality warper's hands moved in patterns that left trails of red strings through the air. Each movement spawned new threads, reality itself becoming raw material for his power to reshape.
A web of strings caught Domino as she tried to dodge. They wrapped around her torso, her arms, her legs, even her throat, and they tightened with inexorable force overwhelming her probability manipulation. The threads pulsed once, and Domino's scream cut through the dimensional hell like a knife.
The reality-warping energy invaded her body at the cellular level. Quantum strings finding the spaces between atoms and pulling.
But Wolverine's healing factor went to war with the intrusion.
Her cells died and regenerated faster than the strings could corrupt them. Her body became a battlefield. Flesh tearing itself apart at the molecular level and rebuilding in microseconds. Bones dissolving and reforming and nerves burning out and regrowing. And blood boiling and cooling as every single part of her trying to exist and not exist simultaneously.
The pain was indescribable. Like being burned alive and frozen solid at the same time as every nerve in her body firing at maximum intensity while her bones ground themselves to powder and rebuilt.
She was dying and being resurrected a thousand times per second.
She kept screaming. Her throat tore as her vocal cords shredded, but her healing factor repaired them, and she screamed again.
And hearing her, seeing the woman he loved being unmade piece by piece, Jay saw red.
Logic evaporated, and tactical thinking vanished like smoke.
He forgot completely that Jamie was being controlled. That he was as much a victim as anyone else.
All Jay saw was the person he loved being hurt. Being violated and destroyed.
And something primal took over. Something that predated thought itself.
The thing that made humans into apex predators.
The thought turned primal: protect yours. Destroy threats. Kill anything that hurts your pack.
He appeared behind Jamie in a spatial fold so violent it left cracks in dimensional space. His hand closed around Jamie's throat with intent to crush.
His power theft ability activated with violence that made the air scream.
Jamie's reality warping, that quantum string manipulation that could rewrite the laws of physics themselves, was ripped from his body, like removing a vital organ while the patient remained conscious.
The backlash hit Jamie like a hammer made of broken glass and concentrated agony.
His eyes went wide as the crimson glow flickered, stuttered and finally died. The pentagram on his forehead cracked, and black ichor stopped pouring from the wound. For just a moment, blessed awareness returned to his features. Horror at what he'd become flooded them, mixed with confusion at where he was.
"What..." His voice was his own, confused and terrified. "Where am I? What did I... oh God?"
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