[New York City, Nearby Construction Site]

The crane groaned as hellfire poured through its steel frame, the metal darkening and warping under Ghost Rider's grip until it was no longer a construction tool but a weapon, a massive burning arm of scorched iron that swung down toward Diana with enough force to flatten a car.

But Diana was already moving.

The shimmer of a Requip spell rippled across her body in a single breath, the Wonder Woman armor dissolving and replacing itself with something different.

The God Slayer armor settled onto her frame, dark silver plates edged in gold, forged for battles against things that should not die.

The tiara was gone, replaced by a close-fitted war helm. The bracers were broader, the greaves thicker, and the energy that hummed through the armor carried the weight of a warrior who had spent ten days in five different hell dimensions and come out the other side with more kills than she had entered with.

The crane arm came down.

Diana caught it with one hand, the impact shuddering through the armor's plating, and drove it sideways into the half-finished concrete wall beside her. The structure cracked and buckled. She stepped through the dust cloud without slowing.

Rider then circled her on the burning bike, chain whipping in a wide arc. The links screamed through the air and Diana raised the Aegis of Dawn.

The chain hit the shield face and the full counter spell triggered instantly, the impact doubling and reversing, the force slamming back through the chain and into Rider's grip with twice the weight it had left with. The bike skidded. Rider's arm wrenched backward and he snarled, a sound like a furnace door torn off its hinges.

She pressed forward before he could reset.

The Divine Reaver came out in a clean horizontal slash. Rider leaned back on the bike and the blade passed inches from his chest, but inches was enough for Diana. She had fought demons that moved faster than thought in the frozen dark of Tartarus.

She had killed things that laughed at swords. She read the dodge before it finished and brought the blade back across in a tight return arc that opened a line across his ribs.

Rider hissed. The wound smoked with hellfire but it was real. The Reaver had cut him.

He abandoned the bike and landed on both feet, and the construction site became his armory.

A stack of steel rebar rose into the air, wrapped in hellfire, and launched at her like a volley of burning spears.

Diana deflected three with the Aegis, cut two with the Reaver, and took the last one across the pauldron, the hellfire scorching the God Slayer armor's surface without penetrating. She rolled with the impact and came up inside his reach.

The Reaver drove into his shoulder.

Rider grabbed the blade with his bare hand and held it there, smoke pouring from his palm, and swung the iron chain at her head with the other. Diana ducked under it, twisted the sword deeper, and drove her knee into his torso with enough force to crack concrete.

He stumbled back, pulling himself off the blade, and the wound began to close almost immediately, the hellfire knitting his form back together from the inside.

'Strong regeneration. Of course. Because why would anything be simple.'

She did not give him room to breathe.

The God Slayer armor was doing exactly what it was made for.

She drove him back across the construction site, through a half-poured concrete floor that cracked under the force of their exchange, past a row of scaffolding that collapsed as Rider threw it at her in desperation.

She cut through the scaffolding mid-air.

Rider conjured a wall of hellfire between them, a solid curtain of orange and black that roared twenty feet high.

Diana walked through it. The God Slayer armor held. She emerged on the other side with her sword arm already moving and the Aegis raised, and the full counter threw his next chain strike back at him hard enough to wrap the links around his own frame.

She was on him in the next instant, the lasso of truth out and settling around him before he could burn free of the chain. The golden light blazed. His legs buckled. His arms locked at his sides and the hellfire around him guttered and dimmed, suppressed by the truth the lasso demanded.

Diana stood over him, breathing steadily, the Reaver pointed at his skull, and looked at the smoking ruin of the construction site around them.

Half the block was destroyed. Rebar jutted from cracked concrete at every angle. Three cranes were either collapsed or burning. The street beyond the site perimeter was cratered.

Her expression tightened. She had pulled him here to limit the damage and had still managed to turn a construction site into a war zone.

She looked back down at Ghost Rider and began to hit him. Not with the sword, not with technique, just her fist, methodical and relentless, driving into his skull again and again. The lasso held him in place.

It accomplished very little. His skull cracked and reformed. Cracked and reformed. His regeneration ran on hellfire and hellfire was something he had in abundance.

He did not scream. He barely flinched. He simply looked up at her between hits with those hollow burning eyes and waited.

"I will kill Susan Storm," he said. His voice was gravel dragged across hot iron. "I will tear her apart in the most complete way possible. You cannot stop what has already been set in motion."

Diana stopped and crouched in front of him, the lasso taut between her hands, and looked at him steadily. "What do you mean. Why do you want to kill her."

Rider strained against the lasso. The golden light pulsed harder.

"Answer me," Diana said, her voice dropping into something quiet and absolute. "Why do you want to kill Susan Storm."

The silence stretched. The lasso blazed.

"I was ordered," Rider said through clenched teeth, the words dragged out of him against every instinct he had. "Ordered to kill her. In the most brutal way possible."

Diana's eyes narrowed. "Who ordered you."

Rider's frame shuddered. His hollow eyes burned brighter as he fought the lasso's compulsion with everything he had, and the lasso simply burned brighter in return, patient and certain, demanding the truth it was owed.

"Mephisto."

The word hit like a stone dropped into still water.

Diana went very still. Mephisto. The demon lord. One of the most powerful and dangerous entities in this universe, and he had sent his Spirit of Vengeance specifically after Susan Storm with orders to kill her as brutally as possible.

'Why Susan. What did Susan do to earn the attention of a demon lord.'

Before she could form the next question, a heavy concussive boom rolled across the city from the direction of the Baxter Building. The sound was wrong, too large, too concentrated, and it hit Diana in the chest like a warning she had already missed.

Her eyes went wide. "Sue."

The anger came up fast and clean and she did not try to contain it. She pulled her fist back and drove it into Ghost Rider's skull without holding anything back, the full strength of a demigoddess in God Slayer armor behind a single strike.

The skull shattered. The hellfire in his eyes went out. His body went limp and collapsed to the cracked concrete, the lasso going slack as he ceased to be a threat... For now.

She was airborne before he hit the ground.

...

New York City, Baxter Building Vicinity]

Diana came in fast from above and pulled up short, hovering for a fraction of a second as the scene below registered.

Anna Marie was in the street in her casual clothes, her body wrapped in a white aura of cosmic energy that pulsed and hummed with the power Ethan had given her, and she was currently driving her fist into the face of the well-dressed man with the cane, sending him skidding across the pavement with each hit.

Jean Grey knelt beside Johnny, both hands extended over his chest, a green magical healing circle glowing steadily from her palms. A silver-haired girl stood nearby, composed and watchful, saying nothing.

Susan was on her feet. Shaken but upright.

Diana landed beside her. "Susan. Are you hurt."

"I am alright." The relief in Sue's voice was immediate. "Anna and Jean arrived just in time."

Jean glanced up briefly from Johnny, the healing circle still turning. "He will be back in shape within minutes. His injuries are severe, which is why it is taking this long, but he will be fine."

Sue let out a slow breath. Diana felt the tension in her own shoulders ease by a fraction.

"What happened here," Diana asked, keeping her voice low.

Sue looked toward the man Anna was currently fighting. "He appeared out of nowhere after the battle. Walked up to me while Johnny was down and offered me a deal. Said he could give me exactly what I needed to get out of this mess."

Her jaw tightened. "He knew exactly how bad the situation was. I think he had been watching."

Diana looked at the man, at the way he moved even while taking Anna's hits, unhurried even in retreat, absorbing each strike with the patience of something that had no real reason to be afraid of anything.

The wrongness of him was familiar in the specific way that ancient things were familiar, the same feeling she had standing in front of the oldest demons in Tartarus and other hell dimensions, the ones that had been there before the dimensions had names.

'This one is not what he looks like. Not even close.'

[A Few Moments Earlier]

The man had stood with his cane and his smile and waited, comfortable and composed, as Susan Storm knelt over her barely-breathing brother and tried to decide what she was willing to do.

He had looked at Johnny's slow-healing burns and then back at Sue with the expression of someone who had arranged the board exactly the way they wanted it and was simply waiting for the other player to notice.

"The offer is straightforward," he said pleasantly. "I give you what you need. You give me something small in return. Everyone walks away satisfied."

Sue stared at him with her hands still pressed to Johnny's chest and the rune stone glowing faintly between her palms, and said nothing. Because she had been raised by a man who taught her that when something seemed too simple, it was because the complexity was hidden somewhere you had not thought to look yet.

Johnny's breathing was shallow. The rune was working but not fast enough. And this man knew it, and he was still smiling.

She opened her mouth.

Suddenly a blur crossed her vision so fast it registered as motion before it registered as a person, and then the man was airborne, launched across the street by a single punch to the cheek that hit him like a freight train, and Anna Marie landed in his place in her jeans and jacket, white cosmic energy already blazing around her like a second skin.

"It's about damn time I found you, you sick demon."

Anna's Southern drawl had gone sharp and flat the way it did when she was genuinely furious rather than performatively so.

She rolled her shoulders and the white aura intensified. "You got about two seconds to explain yourself before I rearrange that borrowed face of yours permanently."

Mephisto, wearing the body of a man in his late thirties with a carved cane and a very expensive suit, straightened from where he had landed against a parked car, adjusted his collar, and smiled at her. It was the smile of someone who had been hit harder by better and found it mildly entertaining.

Anna did not wait for the two seconds to expire.

She flew at him in a blur and the fight moved down the block and away from Sue and Johnny, Anna hitting with the full weight of the cosmic power Ethan had given her and Mephisto absorbing each strike with the unhurried patience of something very old and very confident in its own survival.

A portal opened beside Sue a moment later and Jean stepped through it, moving directly to Johnny without pausing. The green healing circle bloomed from her hands before she had fully knelt.

"I am sorry for being late," Jean said, her voice focused and even. "We came as quickly as we could."

Elizabeth stepped through the portal behind her and took a position near the perimeter, silver hair still, saying nothing, watching everything.

Sue looked at Jean and then at the healing light spreading over Johnny's chest and felt something loosen in her that had been wound very tight for the last hour.