[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 😎✨
Then darkness claimed him. Unconscious before Jay released him and before he could process the full horror of what Selene had made him do.
He collapsed, hitting the obsidian with a sound that echoed too loud in the sudden silence.
The red strings dissolved. Vanished like they'd never existed, and Domino fell, gasping, her body still healing from the internal damage. Her healing factor working overtime to put her back together and make her whole again.
She looked up at Jay with eyes that showed just how close she'd come to something worse than death. "Jay..." Her voice was a rasp.
Jay's rage didn't diminish. If anything, it intensified, crystallized into something cold and sharp and absolute.
And he was going to make Selene pay for every second of suffering she'd caused.
But the black sorcerers kept coming. They were endless and inexhaustible. For every ten Jay killed, twenty more emerged from the walls as the infinite tide of fanatical devotion that showed no signs of stopping.
Bodies littered the obsidian platform, and blood pooled in the cracks. The smell of death, burnt flesh, released bowels, and final breaths filled the air. And still they came, still they praised her name, still they died for her with smiles on their faces.
Jay's tactical mind finally forced its way through his fury. Cold calculation cutting through red rage like ice through steam.
This wasn't working. They could kill sorcerers all day, and it wouldn't matter. Selene would just keep pulling more from wherever she'd stored them. This dimension was hers, and its rules were hers. And as long as they stayed here, they were fighting a war of attrition they couldn't win.
They needed to leave this dimension. .
He looked around, finding Betsy struggling to help her unconscious brother. Found Domino, still recovering, still shaking. Saw Jamie's crumpled form, blood leaking from his forehead where the pentagram had cracked.
"Betsy!" His voice cut through the chaos. "Grab your brothers! We're leaving!"
She didn't argue. Her telepathy wasn't working properly in this dimension, too much interference, too much wrong. But her telekinesis still functioned. Her arms wrapped around Brian's unconscious body while purple energy lifted Jamie's form. Both brothers floating beside her, dead weight but precious cargo.
Jay appeared beside Domino in a spatial fold. His arms wrapped around her, pulling her close despite her protests, despite the blood still leaking from wounds that hadn't quite finished healing.
"I'm fine! We need to..."
"Shut up and hold on." His voice was steel with no room for argument.
His danger sense painted the dimensional boundaries for him. Showed him where Selene's pocket hell connected to real space. The junction was unstable, heavily guarded by mystical protections layered over millennia and forcing through would take everything he had.
Jay's multiple powers activated simultaneously. Spatial manipulation finding the path, the weak point where dimensions touched. Null field disrupting the barriers, making magic forget how to hold. Murasama's anti-magic properties cutting through what remained, severing connections that had stood for thousands of years. Kim Il Sung's functionality manipulation scrambling the defensive formations, making mystical circuits fire wrong. And finally, Jamie's stolen reality warping pulling at the dimensional fabric itself, creating stress fractures in existence.
Blue energy erupted around all of them.
And with violence that made reality itself scream in protest, the Space folded.
The sensation was worse than arriving. Like being turned inside out while simultaneously being compressed into a singularity.
Then they were through and materialized back in the British Museum parking lot.
The contrast was jarring. From hell dimension to mundane reality in an instant. The late afternoon sun felt wrong after the oppressive darkness, too bright and innocent. The smell of car exhaust and fresh bread from nearby shops replaced sulfur, burnt ozone and death. The sounds of traffic, of birds, of normal human life, all of it obscene after the screaming and the combat and the slaughter.
Bodies still littered the ground. Jim Jaspers' bisected corpse, already starting to smell in the sun. The protesters cut apart by Selene's portal, their signs still clutched in dead hands. Blood painted the pavement in abstract patterns that reflected sunlight in ways that made the stomach turn.
The normalcy of it all felt like a mockery.
Jay set Domino down carefully. She was still shaking and healing, but alive.
Betsy lowered her brothers to the ground with telekinesis, then collapsed beside them completely exhausted.
But Jay couldn't rest because this wasn't over.
Blue energy gathered around him again as Domino panicked.
Spatial manipulation, finding the dimensional breach he'd just forced closed. Tearing it open again with brute force.
He teleported back to Selene's pocket dimension despite Domino's wasted effort.
And standing in the center of the carnage, surrounded by hundreds of black sorcerers who'd just watched their prey escape, was Selene.
Her face was twisted with rage and terror in equal measure. The confidence gone and ancient pride cracked. She finally looked diminished somehow.
"Say, you old hag." Jay's voice carried across the plane. His Murasama-enhanced form radiated power, dark and light energies spiraling around him like living things. Blood dripped from his nose, from his ears, from the corners of his eyes. The price of forcing dimensional travel twice in as many minutes. "Did you mind-control these fools, too?"
Selene was sweating now. The effort of maintaining the dimensional space and projecting her power across it taking a visible toll. But her smile remained, confident despite the cracks showing through.
"Oh no, I didn't even need to touch them." Her voice dripped false sweetness, but it wavered. Cracked at the edges. "They are devoted to my cause! Loyal to my mission! That's the power I command! An army of fanatics who would die at my word! Who worship me! Who see me as their goddess and savior!"
She spread her arms wide, encompassing the assembled sorcerers. Hundreds of them. All staring at Jay with identical expressions of fanatical devotion. All ready to die. All eager to prove their loyalty.
"Now do you fear me, Jay? Now do you understand? Now do you want to join me? Surrender, become mine, and I'll make it painless. Resist, and you'll watch everyone you care about suffer before I break you completely! I'll make you watch as I unmake them piece by piece! As I violate them in ways that would make your Domino's suffering seem merciful!"
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