Mephisto, who had listened to this exchange with visible amusement, rose from the throne. He straightened his jacket, set the wine glass aside, and began to walk toward Ethan with the unhurried pace of someone who had nowhere else to be and wanted to make that clear.

"Enough of the pleasant conversation," he said. His voice had changed. Not dramatically, but in the way that a temperature drop changes a room without announcing itself. "Let me give you the full scope."

He stopped a few feet away and looked at Ethan directly.

Then he let the borrowed form go.

The well-dressed man dissolved from the outside in, the human appearance peeling back layer by layer to reveal what existed underneath it.

The figure that emerged stood well over eight feet tall, built on a scale that belonged to a different order of existence.

His skin was the deep red of cooling lava, dense and ancient-looking, with a surface that suggested something far older than flesh.

His face was severe and angular, heavy-browed, the jaw wide and set, with eyes that burned a deep and constant amber beneath the heavy brow, the specific amber of something that had been alight for longer than recorded history and had never once considered stopping.

His hands were enormous, each finger ending in something that had not fully decided between a nail and a talon.

Dark material covered his frame, something that moved with the quality of shadow given physical weight, shifting slightly with each movement as though it was not entirely committed to being solid.

There were no theatrical additions, no horns and performance. He did not need any of it. The scale of him and the sheer weight of his presence in the room did everything that theatre would have attempted and did it more effectively.

The temperature in the throne room rose by several degrees.

Mephisto closed the remaining distance to Ethan in two steps. His hand came up and wrapped around Ethan's throat, the grip large enough to cover most of his neck, and he lifted slightly, the chains shifting and creaking with the movement.

Ethan did not flinch. His expression did not move. He looked back at Mephisto with the flat, unimpressed composure of someone who had decided before arriving that they were not going to give this moment what it was asking for.

Mephisto applied pressure. His amber eyes narrowed.

"Your Diana Prince," he said, and his voice in this form carried a resonance that made the stonework of the walls vibrate at a frequency just below hearing.

"Your demigod girlfriend. She entered my dimension, wore armor inscribed with Asgardian runes."

His grip tightened. "She destroyed more of my demons than I have lost in several centuries combined. She pushed them to the edge of extinction in ten days."

The amber glow burned hotter. "Do you have any understanding of the humiliation in that sentence? When I learned from my daughter that she tore my dimension apart while I was away—do you even know what that feels like?"

The temperature climbed another degree.

Doom watched from across the room. His posture carried the particular tension of someone who had entered an arrangement they had not fully controlled and was watching it extend beyond the boundaries of what they had agreed to. But his hands remained behind his back.

"And you," Mephisto continued, his voice dropping lower, "personally entered my dimension and humiliated me in front of the entire demon race. The insults from that have only piled up over the years."

The grip tightened further. "I have spent millions of years building what I am. I have patience that your species cannot measure. And I have waited for this precise moment with complete confidence that it would arrive exactly as I planned."

He leaned in. The amber eyes filled Ethan's field of vision.

"I have made this space into something that can hold anything that enters it," he said.

"I have accounted for your Power Cosmic. I have accounted for your adaptive evolution. I have linked Cynthia Von Doom's soul to mine so that Victor cannot act against me without destroying the only thing he has spent his entire life trying to recover."

A pause, long and deliberate. "And if you resist me in any way, if you attempt to break free, if you cause me any harm at all, every person you have ever cared about will come to understand what it means to have my complete and undivided attention. Your company. Your employees. The X-Men. Everyone who has ever sat at a table with you and called themselves your family."

He held Ethan's gaze.

"I have already made arrangements to leak the existence of your Death girlfriend to entities who will find the information very interesting indeed," he continued. "The consequences of that particular disclosure will keep you occupied for years, if you survive long enough to deal with them."

His grip on Ethan's throat reached its maximum pressure.

"Submit to me," Mephisto said.

His voice had changed—stripped of all charm, all pretense. What remained was something cold… absolute… like a law being spoken into existence. "Completely. Without condition." 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

The air itself seemed to tighten around his words.

"Become what I require. Function as I direct. Give me unrestricted access to everything you are."

His gaze burned with quiet malice. "Or face the consequences of your defiance—consequences that will tear apart the life you've built in this world, Carter."

A faint, cruel smile touched his lips. "I don't believe you'll be granted another chance to reincarnate… to start over from nothing."

He paused deliberately, letting the weight of that sink in.

Then his voice dropped lower—final, commanding.

"The only option you have now… is to kneel."

His eyes locked forward. "Call me your master, Ethan Carter... Say it."

He waited.

The room was completely silent except for the sound of the chains and the low vibration of the castle's stonework under the weight of Mephisto's presence.

Ethan looked back at him.

There was no fear in his expression. There was no panic, no visible calculation, no sign of a person running through options and finding them closing one by one.

There was something else entirely, something very quiet and very certain and very cold, sitting behind his eyes with the particular stillness of something that had already made its decision and was simply waiting for the right moment to act on it.

His eyes began to glow. "Who are you to decided that?"