[Castle Doom, Latveria, 28th September 2010]

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.

Ethan's eyes began to glow. "Who are you to decided that?"

Not the soft luminous blue of his Genesis powers warming up. Something deeper. Something that started at the center of his irises and pushed outward with the specific quality of light that exists at the heart of things that are about to become very large and very dangerous.

A grin spread across his face. The grin of a man who had been waiting for exactly this moment and was genuinely enjoying the arrival of it.

"Who the hell are you," Ethan said, his voice carrying the particular clarity of someone who no longer needed to raise it to fill a room, "to decide that? And who the hell are you to ask me to kneel, you demon bastard."

Mephisto's eyes widened and Doom's head snapped toward Ethan.

Suddenly, blue flames erupted from Ethan's body.

Not the measured, controlled release of someone deploying a power carefully.

This was something that had been always inside Ethan and was now coming out all at once, the full force of it expanding outward in a single breath.

The greenish-grey chains covering him from shoulder to ankle burned. Not gradually and not with resistance. They burned in a single second, the runic energy in them dissolving into ash and scattered light as the blue fire ate through every binding simultaneously.

The force of the release threw Mephisto backward.

The demon lord who had stood in this universe's hell for millions of years slid across the throne room floor, his enormous frame leaving deep furrows in the stone, and came to a stop against the far wall with an impact that cracked the masonry from floor to ceiling.

Doom staggered. The castle had begun to vibrate, not the natural vibration of a structure under external pressure but the deep resonant trembling of something reacting to a presence it had not been built to contain.

Every rune he had laid throughout the walls, every working he and Mephisto had constructed together over the days of preparation, began to destabilize simultaneously.

He threw both hands forward and fed more power into the suppression network, trying to hold the framework together, but the feedback running through the runic channels was like trying to hold a river in his hands.

Ethan's golden aura intensified.

The Authority of Genesis was fully awake now, the golden light pouring off him in waves that made the air around him shimmer and distort.

Behind his back, something formed. It started as an outline, a suggestion of shape made from blue fire and light, and then it became something else entirely as it pushed outward and upward and spread its wings across the full width of the throne room.

The blue phoenix screamed.

The sound of it was not a sound that belonged in a physical space. It hit the castle's walls and the castle's walls had nothing to say back to it.

Every trap, every spell, every layered working that Doom and Mephisto had spent days constructing across the length and breadth of Castle Doom caught fire simultaneously. The No Magic Zone dissolved. The power suppression field collapsed. The dimensional anchors burned out of the stonework. The exit seals came apart like paper.

Mephisto reached for the runic network with both hands, his power surging into it in an attempt to reinforce what was left. Doom joined him from the other side of the working, the two of them pouring everything they had into the same framework.

The blue phoenix looked at their effort and increased in size.

Immediately everything burned.

The castle walls cracked and fell outward in sections, the stonework separating cleanly from the foundations as the energy tore through the structure's load-bearing points. The ceiling came down in pieces and then it was simply gone, the throne room open to the sky above Latveria, and what was in that sky was not clouds in any natural sense of the word.

A massive whirlpool of storm had been forming above the point where Ethan stood, a churning column of dark cloud and blue lightning that reached from the upper atmosphere down to within a few hundred feet of the ground, the wind inside it moving fast enough to strip bark from trees across the valley below.

The temperature across the surrounding region had become something that no thermometer was calibrated to describe accurately. It was not cold and it was not hot. It was both and it was neither, the atmosphere itself behaving as though it was receiving two sets of instructions at once and could not resolve the contradiction.

Ethan floated upward through the open roof, the golden aura around him throwing light across the ruins of the castle below, and looked down.

Doom was on his knees on the shattered floor. He was not injured in any visible way. He was simply held there, completely and thoroughly, every avenue of physical movement closed off by Ethan's telekinesis and every channel of coherent thought disrupted by the lightest possible application of his telepathy.

Doom could not move, could not act, could not form the sequence of thought required to attempt either. He remained kneeling on the rubble of his own throne room, and the specific quality of stillness in his posture communicated clearly that he was aware of this and had made his assessment of the situation.

He was not afraid. Ethan could sense that clearly. He was furious and he was calculating and he was watching everything, but he was not afraid, and that was something Ethan noted and filed away with a measure of respect he did not particularly feel like expressing out loud at this moment.

Mephisto had managed to partially resist the telekinetic hold. He was not Doom. Millions of years of experience and the raw power of a cosmic entity that had survived everything the Marvel universe had thrown at it over the length of its history gave him resources to draw on that a human sorcerer simply did not have.

His head came up slowly, the effort of it visible in the strain across his massive frame, and his amber eyes found Ethan floating above him.

"What the hell are you thinking, Carter," he said, and his voice had lost the pleasant, conversational quality it had carried through most of their exchange.

Something rawer sat underneath it now, something that had not needed to come out in a very long time. "Do you have any understanding of what it means to resist me? Do you have any idea what I will do to you and everyone connected to you for this?"

He was already moving his awareness toward his connection with Cynthia Von Doom, reaching for the leverage he had prepared, the thread that linked her soul to his and made Doom complicit in whatever came next.

His awareness reached for it. But... It was not there.

He reached again, certain he had simply missed it, certain the connection he had spent considerable effort constructing was simply temporarily disrupted by the chaos around them.

But the connection was gone. Completely and cleanly. As though it had never existed.

"Don't worry about Cynthia," said a voice behind him, warm and light and entirely unbothered by the ruins and the storm and the floating man generating a phoenix made of blue fire twenty feet overhead. "She is perfectly fine. And your connection to her has been severed."

Mephisto used most of his available strength to turn his head.

Didi stood on the broken ground behind him, her black tank top and blue jeans completely unaffected by the wind tearing through the open castle.

Her dark hair moved slightly in the gale but she herself was perfectly still in it, the way things that do not need to brace against forces are still, because the forces in question have nothing to push against. She was smiling, small and genuine, the smile of someone who had arrived exactly when they intended to and found the situation exactly as they expected.

She stepped off the ground and walked upward through the air as though the air were solid, each step finding purchase on nothing, her path curving up toward where Ethan floated above the ruins.

Ethan watched her come up to him and the expression on his face shifted completely. The cold fury that had been sitting in his eyes since Mephisto had closed his hand around his throat moved to the back and something entirely different came to the front as he opened his arms and she stepped into them.

He kissed her. She wrapped her hands around his neck and kissed him back, and the storm above them did not care, and the phoenix burning behind him did not care, and the demon lord on the ground below them trying to understand how everything had gone wrong had no say in the matter at all.

They pulled back and Ethan looked at her with the specific warmth he reserved for moments when something had gone exactly right.

"You never cease to amaze me," he said. "You know that? Every single time."

Didi's smile widened slightly. "You called. I came. That is how this works."

"And you severed the connection to Cynthia without harming her."

"Of course," she said, as though this had required no particular effort, which for her it likely had not. "She is unharmed and removed from his reach entirely."

"I owe you for this one," Ethan said.

Didi tilted her head slightly, a thoughtful glint in her eyes. "Then let's go on more dates," she replied, as if it were the most obvious arrangement in the world. "And specifically… I'm open to considerably more locations. The world is large, and I do have a list."

She let that sit for a moment—just long enough to make it clear she was entirely serious.

"And," she added, almost as an afterthought, "I want more space in Hell's Kitchen for the Dead End Bar. The current arrangement is becoming… insufficient for the clientele."

Ethan raised an eyebrow, a faint smirk forming. "That's quite a list for one favor."

Didi met his gaze without hesitation. "You said you owed me."

"Done and done," Ethan replied with a smile. "Both of them."

"Then we are settled." She settled her head lightly against his shoulder and looked down at Mephisto below.

Ethan looked down at Mephisto as well. His expression had completed its return to something cold and forward-facing.

"You want to know how she did it, right?" he said, to Mephisto below. "You're sitting there trying to work out which trick my girlfriend used and how she got past everything you prepared."

Mephisto said nothing but the amber in his eyes was working hard.

Didi said nothing. She simply continued to look at Mephisto with that calm, distant expression, and it was somehow worse than any threat.

Mephisto's jaw tightened. His eyes moved across the ruins, across the runes burning out of the stonework around them, across Doom still held motionless on the ground, across the storm overhead, and Ethan could see him running the calculation, assessing whether any path out of the current situation existed that he had not already tried.

"You are making the worst mistake of your existence, Carter," Mephisto said, and his voice had found a new register. "I don't care what trick your death girlfriend used. What you have done here today has consequences that extend far beyond this conversation. The moment she used her powers openly, every cosmic entity in the relevant tier of awareness is going to notice the presence of a Death from another universe operating in this one. That disclosure is already done. You cannot undo it."

He pushed himself partially upright, the muscles of his enormous frame straining against the weight of what was holding him down.

"Not only that," he continued, "I will make sure every person connected to you understands what it means to have made an enemy of me. Your employees. Your company. Everyone who called themselves your people. I am very good at what I do, Ethan Carter. And what I do is not kind."

He was watching Ethan's face as he said it, looking for the calculation, for the moment where the consequences became too large and the retreat began. He had done this before. He knew what that moment looked like on a person's face. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Ethan's face did not do that. He was looking at Mephisto with the expression of someone who had listened to the argument, understood every word of it, and had already decided that none of it was going to change what's going to happen next.

Then he looked at the sky above them.

The massive runic characters were already there, carved into the clouds themselves in lines of deep red light, each one stretching across miles of sky, the full working covering the visible horizon in every direction.

They were recognizable. They were the same runes that had comprised the No Magic Zone that Doom and Mephisto had used to suppress Ethan's powers inside the castle.

Ethan had taken that working, the one they had built specifically to trap him, and applied it to the entire surface of the earth.

He looked back down at Mephisto and produced a blue uno reverse card from somewhere, holding it between two fingers with a grin that was entirely too pleased with itself.

"I believe," Ethan said, "this one suits you."

Mephisto stared at the card. He stared at the runes in the sky. He tried, again, to reach for any of his available powers, any exit, any lever he had not yet pulled.

Everything he reached for found a wall. The working above him was not the original No Magic Zone in its limited castle-scale form. It covered the world. It had his specific aura signature locked out of it the same way Doom's modified harness had locked Doom's signature in. He was, on the surface of this planet, completely unable to access what he was.

He looked up at Ethan floating above him with Didi at his side and the blue phoenix burning behind him and the storm filling the sky, and for the first time in their entire exchange, something flickered in his amber eyes that had not been there before.