Ethan began to descend. He came down slowly, Didi still at his side, and as he descended he looked at Mephisto below him with an expression that had no warmth in it at all.

"You underestimated me," he said, his voice carrying clearly through the wind. "You underestimated my girlfriend. You looked at her and saw limitations you recognized from a version of the concept you were already familiar with, and you decided that familiarity was understanding."

He touched down on the broken ground and took one step toward Mephisto. "You had no idea what Didi actually is. You had no idea what she is capable of when she decides to act without restraint."

Didi followed him down and stood slightly to his side, looking at Mephisto with that same calm, distant expression.

But she smiled at his remarks, and for a fleeting moment her thoughts drifted to the strange bond or telepathic connection she shared with him. That connection had reached out to her after the moment he shattered the runes and tore through the spells that had bound him.

The instant he broke free, his voice touched her mind.

"Rescue Cynthia von Doom from the hell dimension," he said, his tone calm but carrying an unmistakable urgency. "And sever her connection with Mephisto."

There was no pause, no doubt, and no need for further explanation.

Didi moved and space folded around her presence as she stepped beyond realms, slipping into the twisted fabric of the hell dimension as if it were nothing more than a thin veil. The oppressive energy, the suffocating heat, and the endless screams that defined that place did not so much as graze her awareness.

Cynthia von Doom stood at the center of it all, bound not by chains but by something far more insidious. Her soul was entangled, tethered deeply into the domain itself, and at the core of that connection stood .

Or rather, someone else.

Didi's gaze shifted slightly, and her expression remained calm.

Mephista.

The daughter stood guard, her presence radiating a lesser but still formidable echo of her father's power. She did not speak nor threaten. She simply stood in Didi's way, as if that alone would be enough.

Didi did not slow down. She raised her hand, and in a single, effortless motion, she struck.

The sound that followed was not loud, yet it carried through the entire dimension like a ripple tearing reality apart. Mephista's body was launched backward, her form crashing through layers of hell itself as she was sent flying across half the dimension.

When she finally came to a stop, she was barely conscious, her existence flickering on the edge of collapse. One more strike would have erased her completely.

Didi did not even glance in her direction again.

Her focus had already returned to Cynthia.

With a simple extension of her will, she grasped the threads binding Cynthia's soul. The connection resisted for less than a second before it unraveled completely, snapping apart under her authority as though it had never existed.

Cynthia collapsed the moment the final thread binding her soul was severed, her body giving in to the sudden absence of the hellish force that had sustained and tormented her at the same time.

Didi did not let her fall for long.

With a simple wave of her hand, space bent to her will, and Cynthia vanished from the infernal realm. In the next instant, she reappeared within one of the quiet guest rooms of the Carter Residence, her form resting gently upon the bed as if she had merely fallen asleep.

The violent chaos of the hell dimension was replaced by stillness.

Didi remained where she was for a brief moment longer, standing amidst the crumbling fabric of that dark realm. She exhaled softly, her expression calm, untouched, as though she had done nothing of consequence.

In truth, she had not.

What she had done tonight would ripple across realities. Powers like hers were not meant to be used so freely in a realm that did not belong to her, and beings far older and far more watchful would have felt it.

She knew that. Yet the thought did not trouble her.

Ethan had asked her to act, and that alone was enough.

There was no hesitation in her choice, and there would be none in facing whatever followed.

As for the consequences of using her powers so openly in another reality, Didi's gaze softened slightly as a quiet understanding settled in her mind.

Ethan would have already accounted for it.

He would not have told her to move so freely without a plan. That was simply not who he was. Every action he took carried intention, even when it seemed otherwise.

She trusted him completely on this matter.

That trust was absolute.

Now, back to the present.

A faint smile curved along her lips, and a trace of amusement flickered through her thoughts.

'If this devil ever learns that I slapped his daughter to the brink of death, I wonder how he will react.'

The thought lingered for only a moment before fading.

It did not matter.

From what she could sense, Mephisto's fate had already been decided. And if Ethan had deemed this necessary, then there was no question.

The demon had already lost.

Ethan placed his foot on top of Mephisto's head and pressed it down to the ground with a measured, deliberate force. The impact was not gentle. The stone cracked under the weight of it.

"Who's kneeling now," Ethan said quietly. He looked down at the back of Mephisto's skull and his voice dropped into something that was not shouting but was somehow more final than shouting. "What was it you said again. Right. Kneel. Submit. Call you master."

His foot pressed harder. "You absolute asshole. Who the fuck do you think you are."

The earth trembled. Not locally and not just in Latveria. Across the world, seismometers registered a low, continuous vibration that no geological explanation could account for.

Suddenly, reality bent to his will as Ethan pulled the entire castle into the Mirror Dimension, isolating it completely from the world beyond.

The blue phoenix above them expanded, its flames climbing from deep blue toward white at the edges, the heat of it spreading across the open sky.

Mephisto's skull cracked under the pressure and healed and cracked again, the regeneration struggling to keep pace with what was being applied to it.

Ethan looked down at him and his voice became very quiet and very level.

"I am the one who decides what I do," he said. "Not you. Not anyone else. But me." He took his foot off Mephisto's head and stepped back, and his eyes were the deep luminous blue that meant every power he had was fully online and fully awake. "And what I have decided is that I am not going to waste another second of my time giving a speech to a pathetic worm who does not deserve the breath it would cost."

He looked up at the phoenix. Then he looked back at Mephisto.

Meanwhile, Didi had walked away from the confrontation with the unhurried ease of someone with somewhere specific to be. She moved across the broken ground toward where Doom knelt, still motionless in Ethan's hold, and crouched slightly to bring herself to his eye level. The iron mask looked back at her with nothing readable in it, but Doom's eyes behind the lenses were very much present and very much watching.

"Your mother is safe," Didi said, simply and directly. "She is no longer in his reach. You can see her after Ethan has decided what to do with you."

She could roughly piece together what had happened.

She smiled, and it was a genuinely kind smile. "I know that is not a small thing to hear after so long. You do not have to thank me."

Doom looked at her for a long moment. His expression was invisible behind the mask but the quality of his stillness had changed completely from the controlled tension it had carried throughout the last hour.

He could not seem to find words even if he had the chance to. But this silence communicated more than most sentences could have.

Back to the main topic, Ethan did not look away from Mephisto.

He raised his right hand, extended his index finger, pointing it slowly upward toward where Mephisto was now suspended in the air above him, held in place by the combined weight of everything Ethan had brought to bear on this situation.

The blue phoenix above them oriented toward the direction of that single extended finger, its enormous eyes opening fully, their color shifting from blue to a deep and burning green.

The golden aura around Ethan intensified until the light of it was uncomfortable to look at directly.

Mephisto saw what was coming. He pulled at every reservoir of power available to him, every million years of accumulated strength, every layer of his nature as a demonic entity of this universe, and threw it all into a single working.

The hellfire blast that came from his hands was not the calibrated, tactical version he had deployed in normal situations. This was everything he had, shaped into a single attack, the kind of force that could unmake a dimension if properly directed. It hit the air between them and expanded as it traveled, growing as it came, carrying the weight of everything he was behind it.

'Well,' Ethan thought, looking at the incoming blast with his finger still extended. 'Let's end this.'

"Die," he said. "You mongrel."

He moved his finger and the blue phoenix moved towards it's direction.

It moved in the sky, growing larger as it move, the blue of it deepening and the golden aura around it expanding until the two colors merged into something new at the leading edge. It's eyes are glowing green. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

It hit Mephisto's blast head-on and the impact broke the mirror dimension Ethan had pulled the castle into, the dimensional barrier shattering outward in sheets of fractured light, the pieces of it dissolving as they spread.

The phoenix did not stop. It kept moving, through the debris of the broken dimension, through everything in its path, and it hit Mephisto.

The demon lord expanded. His form grew and grew as he poured everything into his resistance, swelling from the scale of a large man to something continental, something that filled the remaining dimensional space around them, his amber eyes burning at a scale that was visible from the surface of the broken dimension like twin suns.

The blue phoenix matched him. It matched him and exceeded him and opened its mouth.

Mephisto, who had existed for millions of years, who had survived the most dangerous forces the Marvel universe had ever assembled against him, who had made gods and heroes and entities kneel at various points across the long catalog of his history, looked into the phoenix's open mouth and felt something he had not felt in longer than most civilizations had existed.

He felt fear.

The phoenix swallowed him whole. The explosion that followed was not contained to a single point. It expanded outward across the dimensional space in a shockwave that dwarfed a supernova the way a supernova dwarfs a candle, the light of it filling everything, the force of it propagating through the surrounding reality in waves that would register on instruments across the universe as an anomalous event that no existing theoretical framework could adequately explain.