They were all working at a furious pace. And in the extradimensional space, Skadi's Hammer, fighting a kind of guerrilla war, had at last, through untold hardship, killed five of the sea serpents.
By now Sin's soul had nearly dissipated altogether, and the hammer was forced to spend ever more energy just to keep its host's soul intact. Under normal conditions it could fell a sea serpent with a single blow; this time the fighting had dragged on for well over a month.
The silver-gleaming, round-headed hammer had gone dull and lightless. Head and haft alike were laced with cracks, and the golden guard had long since been knocked clear in the fighting. The hammer's very essence was ruined beyond saving; the kindest fate left to it was to become a lump of scrap iron.
But it had finally fulfilled its purpose. With all five sea serpents slain, the gate of the place of sealing stood fully open.
Across the surface of Skadi's Hammer surfaced countless lines of cipher-script: the means of escape the World Serpent had set aside in advance. It would unravel the final seal Odin had laid upon the sealed prison.
That sliver of power was not strong, but working in concert with the World Serpent locked within, a pale-purple spiral gate ground slowly open. Skadi's Hammer, bearing the host that was now little more than soul-dregs, hurled itself straight through.
On the far side of the seal lay a vast circular hall, its walls carved with row upon row of runes, every one of them words of sealing and suppression. The walls were thick and solid, curving round in a great ring to support a sharp, vaulting dome. Several iron chains hung suspended in the air, and bound at the center of them was a tall old man.
Skadi's Hammer had torn through the place of sealing and brought with it a fresh surge of power. The fragile balance broke; the chains forged of Asgardian metal snapped one after another; and the World Serpent, still holding to its human form, began to draw its strength back.
Purple mist coiled about him. The old man's arms strained, wrenching free of his bonds in a single motion, his strength so immense that it tore a whole layer of plaster off the wall.
The World Serpent, much like the Odinforce or the power of Thor, was itself a kind of power. The old man had been the World Serpent's vessel from the moment of his birth. He was Odin's own younger brother.
His face bore some resemblance to Odin's, but beneath the majesty and solemnity sat a cruelty wholly at odds with his years.
Looking upon the wretched ruin of Skadi's Hammer, the malice in him swelled until he could scarcely hold it down. By his old temperament, a subordinate this useless he would simply have crushed and been done with, but he had only just won free, and he still needed word of the outside world.
With open distaste he caught the hammer up in his grip. The broken thing not only brought him no power to aid his recovery; it actually demanded that he pour out a measure of his own just to keep the host's mind from unraveling.
A small, fine thread of purple divine power wound its way into Skadi's Hammer. Its essence could not be mended, but it could keep Sin going a while longer.
Sin, on the very brink of dispersing, was suddenly replenished. Her soul guttered like a flame, then drew itself solid once more.
"My master... my father!" Sin, her mind wholly seized by Skadi's Hammer, forced the words out through lips of frozen ice, the sound a grating, garbled clatter.
The old man was deeply displeased with what Sin had become. A subordinate this feeble was of little use to him, and so he read her memories directly.
The more he read, the angrier he grew. Stripped of a body, surviving a full month as nothing but a soul: resilient enough by the measure of an ordinary human, perhaps, but with no training of the mind to draw on, Sin's memories had long since fractured into ruin. He came away thoroughly confounded; the fragments were too scattered, with no thread running through them.
Yet in the memories of both Sin and Skadi's Hammer, one image stood out, etched deep: a woman with flames coiling between her palms.
"How formidable can a mortal without a shred of divinity possibly be? Worthless!" The old man seethed. He felt as though he'd been swindled. All that pure divine power spent for nothing, and Sin had given him next to no real intelligence in return.
His hand clenched. Sin, who had clawed her way back to perhaps thirty or forty percent, had her neck snapped on the spot. The ruined soul shuddered twice and at last vanished into the empty air.
And Skadi's Hammer, bound so intimately to her fate, finally reached its end as well. The hammer had been riddled with cracks to begin with; now they split it open from the inside out, the fissures yawning wider and wider until, with a sharp crack, it broke clean in two.
"Worthless, all of them!" The old man leaned on his staff. His power did not amount to even one percent of his prime, and Sin had squandered a portion of that, a loss that stung the more he dwelt on it. He strode out of the place of sealing and came to a hovering halt above the surface of the sea.
The old man's lips moved, murmuring. He was summoning his retainers: those whom Odin had locked away on distant alien worlds. A formless energy lifted the hair of his head and beard, and once again he was made to pay out a share of his divine power. It left him deeply uncomfortable.
...
At Obama's campaign headquarters in Washington, a crowd waited until half past two in the morning, when the preliminary results were finally revealed: Obama had won the election.
The cheering this time was far warmer. Victory was tied to the immediate interests of every person in the room: the single most important investment of the coming decade, you might say. And, as luck would have it, they'd bet right.
Apart from the boisterous crowd, Daisy walked alone in a corner.
"He's broken free." Loki still wore his self-styled God King's garb, cloaked in invisibility; no one could lay eyes on him. The two of them were conversing through psychic power.
His words came as no surprise. In the very instant the old man had won loose, she'd felt a surge of savagery well up in her own chest, rising out of nowhere, with no cause at all. Rule out the Phoenix seizing control of her again, and the only remaining answer was that the World Serpent had escaped.
"Where is he? Can we go and kill him right now?" she asked the Loki at her side.
"Regrettably, Heimdall has caught no sight of him. He must have used some profound magic to blind Heimdall's gaze." Gungnir in hand, Loki bit the words out viciously.
Daisy could only heave a long sigh. Heimdall, that old fellow, always looked formidable enough, the guardian deity himself, and yet he dropped the ball at every crucial moment. He hadn't kept watch on the Frost Giants, hadn't kept watch on the Dark Elves, and least of all had he kept watch on Hela.
She was quietly turning options over with Loki when the sound of approaching footsteps reached her, and Loki clamped his mouth shut at once.
Bobbi Morse, the Mockingbird, came striding up to her in a black agent's uniform, her figure full and exaggeratedly curved against the lines of it. Unable to see Loki, she lowered her voice to report.
"Ma'am, the Director's on the line."
The video call connected in moments. Before Baldy could get a word out, Tony Stark muscled his way in uninvited, J.A.R.V.I.S. forcing him into the channel by brute means; he wanted to hear what they had to say.
"NORAD just called in. Eight meteor-like masses have appeared out of nowhere in deep space, and they're flying toward Earth." Baldy's face was dark, unreadable.
"You're using a channel this secret just for that? My satellite sensors say those meteors are tiny, like some kind of metal?" Stark sounded distinctly unimpressed. To his mind, Baldy was making a mountain out of a molehill; meteors brushed past Earth's orbit every few days, and a bit of debris falling was perfectly ordinary.
By his own detection and calculations, the eight meteors were minuscule, likely to burn up the moment they hit the atmosphere. Nothing whatsoever to worry about.