Doom's dark green cloak snapped against the back of his power armor without any wind to move it.
One ceramite palm swung in a casual arc, and hellfire erupted from nothing, thick with the smell of sulfur, rolling across the nearest cluster of black-robed agents and swallowing them entirely. His other hand came up simultaneously, fingers extended, and a rapid sequence of shock beams from the Ark Reactor scattered outward through the mass of bodies pressing in from the other side.
The Doom Squad behind him had not stopped firing since the encirclement closed. The sound of their weapons was continuous, overlapping, the detonations rolling together into something that no longer sounded like individual shots.
The black-robed agents did not pull back.
They were chanting something, or screaming something, the sounds coming from the back of their throats in a rhythm that was either prayer or battle-cry, and it did not matter which because the effect was the same. When their fists and feet connected, the air split ahead of the impact. One of them got close to a Doom Squad who had dropped his head to swap ammunition, and the agent's fist came around before the Doom Squad could raise a hand to intercept it.
The ceramite breastplate held. The Doom Squad did not. The force of the punch launched him backward through the air, and when he came down the impact carved a clear fist-print into the ceramite shell.
That was a problem for the Doom Squad.
For Nolan it was something else.
He let two of the agents get close deliberately, and when their punches landed against the vibranium shell the energy of each strike reversed back into them through the armor's surface. Bones broke. One of them went down clutching a shattered wrist. The other managed half a step before his legs stopped cooperating. Nolan moved through the gap they had opened, the Warscythe cutting back and forth in tight arcs, and the agents who had been pressing inward from the far side became a different problem for themselves.
He pulled wide, charged back, stepped over something that had briefly been a man, and drove into the next group at full acceleration. The vibranium shell did not slow. Neither did the Warscythe.
By the time the number of agents still standing had dropped enough for the situation to be clearly resolved, he had already moved to support the sections of the line where Doom and the Doom Squad were still under heaviest pressure. They finished it together, Doom's hellfire pushing the remaining agents into range of the Warscythe's sweep, until the last of them was down.
Nolan held the Warscythe level and let the blood run off the blade.
"Check your equipment," he said, scanning the surrounding buildings and the firelight still blooming from other parts of the city. "We move."
He turned and led them deeper into the mountain city at a run.
They met no further resistance.
After the black-robed agents, nothing. The narrow paths between the ancient stone buildings were empty, littered only with ice fragments from Niwa's storm, the crunch of it under their magnetic boots the only consistent sound. The battle was still audible from other parts of the city: the Servitors and Scyllax units continuing their work in the outer sections. But ahead of the beheading team, nothing moved.
They reached the outskirts of the ancient palace at the city's center and stopped.
The building was enormous, dark, no lights anywhere in the windows or along the walls. No guards on the approaches. No movement on the surrounding rooftops.
"Something is wrong," Nolan said quietly. "Everyone, stay alert."
The metal doors of the palace opened inward on their own, the sound of the hinges grinding in the cold air. Torches caught along the interior walls immediately after, a chain of them igniting in sequence, throwing warm light across stone columns and high ceilings and very little else.
No one came out. No one was visible inside.
Nolan looked at the open doors for a moment.
"Empty city strategy," he said, mostly to himself.
He signalled the Doom Squad to disperse around the entrance and hold position, then looked at Doom through the eyepiece. Doom looked back.
They walked in.
The sound of their magnetic boots carried through the empty palace in long, flat echoes. The torchlight pushed the shadows back far enough to see the shape of the interior: high walls, sparse decoration, the architecture of something built to last rather than to impress. At the far end of the hall, facing away from them with both hands clasped behind his back, stood a tall figure in a plain grey robe.
"When I led the Ten Rings faithful and built this mountain city with my own hands," the man said, without turning, "your world was still in chaos."
He turned.
The face that met them was broad and deeply weathered, the skin bronzed, the eyes carrying something that came from too many years of watching things change and change again. He was not old in any way that suggested weakness. He looked at the two armored figures in front of him with an expression that was almost calm.
"Guardians of Terra," Wen Wu said. "The old men of S.P.E.A.R. found themselves a useful blade and pointed it at an old enemy."
"You made yourself my problem first," Nolan said. "If the Four Sacred Beast had not attacked my base, I would have had no reason to come here."
"A personal grudge, then." Wen Wu considered this with apparent sincerity. "If I told you I did not send them against your base, would you believe me?"
A beat of silence.
"It no longer matters," Wen Wu said. "We have reached the point where only one resolution is possible."
He stepped forward.
The ten rings on his arms responded to the movement. Purple light ran across all ten of them in sequence, steady and deep, and then several rings detached from his forearms and began to orbit him slowly, rotating in overlapping paths around his front and back and sides.
Nolan drove the power armor forward, Warscythe rising.
Doom's ceramite palm opened at his side, and hellfire surged up from the palace floor in a wall, rolling across the distance toward Wen Wu's unhurried advance with a roar and the sharp reek of sulfur.
The ten rings rotated faster.
The hellfire hit the edge of the ring-field and went out. Not beaten back, not deflected: extinguished, as though it had encountered the specific thing it could not survive. Not a single spark reached the grey robe.
Wen Wu's eyes opened fully. A sound built in his chest and broke outward through the palace space, a roar that shook the torchlight in the brackets along the walls.
His arms drove forward together.
The ten rings launched outward in a tight mass, purple light blazing, and hit Doom's power armor like a horizontal storm. The force of it picked Doom up and drove him backward through the air the length of the hall.
The impact when he hit the far wall was loud enough to feel in the floor.