Domino watched the field redistribute with the new assets and felt something in her shoulders that had been present since the Tribunal said "Begin" ease by one notch.
She brought up the Colt.
The Beyonder that had gotten past Eddie's initial sweep, the one that'd been tracking Luv from a secondary angle while its companions drew attention, took the shot in the center of what served as its chest. The Death Stone energy in the round rewrote the local physics at the point of impact, and the entity that had been calculating timelines since before this multiverse had timelines discovered that Domino's luck, backed by her Death Stone authority, could locate the one angle from which something outside multiversal law was still vulnerable to consequence.
It didn't pursue Luv further.
Domino was already turning.
Two new presences dropped into the arena from a fold in space that smelled wrong as hell.
Mephisto landed with the studied elegance of a being that'd been making entrances since before humanity had architecture to make them into. His red coat was immaculate. His expression was the one he wore when he had information that other people didn't and found the asymmetry amusing, and behind him, moving like something that would rather be anywhere else but isn't given a choice, came Selene.
The Black Queen was still Selene, the bone structure was the same, the ancient power underneath was the same, the vampiric vitality that'd sustained her for millennia was present and functional, but she moved on a hellfire chain that ran from Mephisto's wrist to a collar at her throat. When she moved she moved to the extent that the chain permitted and no further, the way something that's been contained moves when containment has become the main reference point for every action.
Mephisto looked around the arena with the appreciation of someone attending a spectacular event they'd managed to get free tickets to, and his yellow eyes went to Jay, to the rainbow light still rising from the arena floor around Jay's position, to the white suit and the energy register of six Infinity Stone resonances operating inside human biology. He looked for a long time.
"Oh," Mephisto said, with the tone of a being who's reigned in Hell since before humanity learned to sin and has just found something that still genuinely surprises him, "oh, that is interesting. That is very interesting indeed."
The Ancient One had been in the process of a working that required both hands and the majority of her attention, something that was disassembling the Goblin Force at a structural level.
She felt Mephisto's arrival before she saw it, the wrongness of infernal presence registering on her senses the way a bad smell registers on everything else, and she finished the working because the Goblin Force didn't pause for her to attend to other things, and then she turned.
Her expression when she saw Selene was one that the Ancient One didn't typically permit herself, the expression of a teacher who's watched a student be harmed and has had time to form a very clear opinion about who's responsible.
She began composing the most comprehensive eradication working she'd ever attempted, and what she was building between her hands was the accumulated precision of centuries of practice directed at a single target. The target was the Black Queen who'd nearly killed Jay twice and had spent their last encounter treating the deaths of innocent people as a logistical matter.
Domino had formed her own assessment approximately two seconds after Mephisto landed.
She pointed the Colt at him and shot him directly in the crotch.
The Death Stone round was calibrated just right, not lethal, not even close, just enough to find the exact register of infernal biology that produced the maximum effect in the minimum duration, the kind of shot that communicated a damn clear message about how Domino felt about their last interaction and what her current patience budget was regarding his presence in an arena where her son was fighting.
Mephisto's elegant composure fractured briefly.
"That," he said, when he'd reconstituted sufficient dignity to produce speech, "was deeply uncalled for, Lady Death. I follow my bargains to the letter. I cannot help it if others misinterpret my standing in various arrangements."
"You were in that pocket dimension," Domino said, "when Selene and Jay were fighting. You were there when she had him, and you stood there and called the torture interesting, wanting to steal his soul for your collection." She was already reloading, the Death Stone's violet running along the barrel in the pattern it produced when she was deciding whether the next shot was going to be more or less precise than the last. "I was weak then. I'm done being weak now."
Mephisto looked at the Colt, then at the ankh at her throat, the Death Stone in its setting throwing violet light across the space between them, then at Domino's face, which was carrying the expression of a woman who was currently the governing authority on death in this multiverse and had formed a damn clear position on whether Mephisto's soul was something she was going to spend a lot of time worrying about.
His calculation adjusted itself.
"I am, of course," Mephisto said, with the measured caution of a being recalibrating a situation it'd misread, "merely here to observe. My involvement in these proceedings is entirely incidental. The External is simply accompanying me, as per the terms of her current arrangement, which I assure you are entirely above board from a contracts perspective."
The Ancient One's working completed.
It hit Selene not as an attack but as an administrative action, which was somehow worse, and the Ancient One had spent the last two minutes not building an offensive spell but a binding one. What it bound was the connection between Selene's accumulated stolen vitality and the body drawing on it, severing the vampiric engine at its load-bearing point. Selene couldn't drain, not here, not while this working held, not from the arena's living participants or the energy around her or from anything else that maintained the pretense of being alive.
Selene felt it the moment it landed.
"You," she said, looking at the Ancient One with the hatred of someone who's just had the foundational mechanic of their existence shut off in a room full of enemies.
"Yes," the Ancient One said. "Me."
Mephisto made a sound that was close to discomfort, and the Black Queen, stripped of her primary power source and still on a chain he was holding, wasn't the strategic asset she'd been when he arrived, she was a liability now. The Lord of Lies had survived as long as he had by being very clear-eyed about when assets became liabilities.
"We'll be going," he said.
"Not yet," Domino said.
Her finger hadn't moved off the trigger.
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