While Jay carved through Selene's army, Domino and Betsy faced their own hell.

  Betsy dodged another spell by inches. The curse hit the wall behind her, leaving a crater that steamed and hissed. Flesh-like tissue bubbled and popped, releasing gases that smelled of rot. Her psychic blades were practically useless here. Every construct she formed had to fight against the dimension's oppressive atmosphere, like trying to swing a sword underwater.

  "Bloody hell!" She rolled sideways, another spell missing her by inches. Purple light cratered where she'd been standing. "These bastards don't know when to quit!"

  Domino's luck worked overtime. Bullets curved in impossible trajectories, finding gaps in defenses that shouldn't exist. A sorcerer raised a shield, but her bullet bounced off a piece of falling debris, ricocheted off a floating stone fragment, curved around the shield's edge and entered through the man's ear, and he dropped.

  Another tried to curse her, but she stumbled on uneven ground, luck making her trip at exactly the right moment. The curse passed over her head close enough to singe her hair.

  But even her luck couldn't make up for the sheer numbers they faced. For every sorcerer that fell, three more took his place in an endless tide of fanatical devotion.

  Even worse, Brian had rejoined the fight.

  Without the Sword of Might, he fought with raw mystical power channeled directly from his connection to Britain or what remained of it across dimensional barriers. Each punch carried the force of an avalanche condensed into a fist. And each kick could shatter steel.

  And he was aiming those strikes at his sister.

  "Brian, please!" Betsy's voice cracked desperate. She threw up a telekinetic shield but her brother's fist shattered it like glass, the backlash sending psychic feedback through her mind and pain lanced behind her eyes. "I know you're in there! Fight her control! You're Captain Britain, for fuck's sake! You're stronger than this!"

  His response was another devastating combination. Right cross, Left hook and then a Knee strike. Each one perfectly placed and aimed to kill. The techniques their father had taught them both, now weaponized against her.

  She barely got her psychic blade up to deflect. The impact sent numbness up her arm. Her construct flickered and destabilized by the force.

  "It's me! It's Betsy! Your sister!" Tears streamed down her face, mixing with blood from a cut over her eye. "Remember? Remember teaching me to fight? Remember holding me when Mum and Dad died? Remember telling me I'd always be safe because you'd protect me?"

  Brian's dead eyes didn't change and didn't show even a hint of recognition.

  He raised his fist for another strike.

  Domino provided covering fire. Bullets forced Brian to dodge, his enhanced reflexes still functioning even without the Sword. But a dark sorcerer caught her distraction, landing a spell that burned through her enhanced tactical suit and scorched just her shoulder thanks to her luck. The smell of burning flesh filled the air.

  "Fuck!" She hissed in pain. The wound healed almost immediately, Wolverine's healing factor closing the burn. Skin knitting back together, nerves reconnecting and tissue regenerating. But the pain remained, nerves screaming even as they rebuilt themselves from the phantom agony from an injury that no longer existed.

  "We can't keep this up!" Domino reloaded, her enhanced reflexes letting her track three different threats simultaneously. Her hands moved on autopilot, muscle memory and probability manipulation combining to ensure every shot counted even as exhaustion made her fingers shake. "There's too many of them! And your brother's gonna put you down if we don't figure something out fast!"

  Betsy knew she was right. The sorcerers were coordinating now, learning from their failures. And Brian's relentless assault was wearing her down. Every block, every dodge and every desperate counter took energy she didn't have to spare. Her psychic reserves were depleting, and her body screaming for rest it wouldn't get.

  A spell caught her off guard. Magical chains wrapped around her legs, yanking her to the ground hard enough to crack her ribs. Pain exploded through her chest, but she tried to phase through them, tried to cut them with psychic energy, but nothing worked. The chains were physical and mystical, both designed to hold metahumans.

  Brian raised his fist for a killing blow. The strike would cave in her skull and paint the obsidian with her brain matter.

  "Brian, no!" Her voice broke completely. "Please! I love you! Don't do this!"

  But no words reached Brian's ears.

  Just as she accepted death from her loving brother's hands, Jay appeared between them.

  His blade caught Brian's punch with a sound like colliding mountains. The impact cratered the obsidian beneath them again, sending shockwaves radiating outward that knocked nearby sorcerers off their feet. But Jay held firm, his Murasama-enhanced body absorbing force that should have liquefied bone.

  "Enough playing around," Jay growled.

  His null field expanded, washing over Brian. The mystical power channeling through Captain Britain's body simply stopped. Cut off like a switch being flipped, but even then, his enhanced strength remained from the physical conditioning he'd earned through years of training and combat.

  Now the magical amplification was gone, but Brian stood strong, skilled and dangerous.

  But he was just a man now. Just flesh, bone and will.

  Jay's other hand shot out, pressing against Brian's chest. Searching as his enhanced senses extending through armor and cloth and skin.

  Jay found what he was looking for. The Amulet of Right, hidden beneath Brian's armor. The mystical artifact that connected him to the Captain Britain Corps, that gave him his powers, that made him more than human. A small piece of worked metal and ancient magic, so important yet so fragile.

  Kim Il Sung's functionality manipulation surged through Jay's palm. Not destroying the amulet. That would have killed Brian, severed his connection so violently it would have stopped his heart. Just disrupting its connection to its wearer and scrambling the mystical frequencies until it couldn't maintain its bond.

  The amulet fought him. Ancient magic resisting modern manipulation. But against someone who'd adapted to Cosmic powers, against someone whose body could negate mystical concepts themselves, the amulet's resistance meant nothing.

  Jay suddenly heard Domino scream and increased his intensity.

  The connection severed with an almost audible snap.

  The Amulet of Right fell from Brian's chest. Dropped through a gap in his broken armor and hit the obsidian with a sound like a coin dropping.

  Brian gasped, and his body spasmed as the connection that had defined him for years, that had made him Captain Britain and had given him purpose, power and identity, was ripped away. The psychic shock alone should have killed him.

  He collapsed. Unconscious before he hit the ground. Alive, but diminished.

  Jay quickly teleported in a burst of blue energy that left afterimages.

  Back to where Jamie advanced on Domino.

  The reality warper's hands moved in patterns that left trails of red strings through the air. Each movement spawned new threads, reality itself becoming raw material for his power to reshape.

  A web of strings caught Domino as she tried to dodge. They wrapped around her torso, her arms, her legs, even her throat, and they tightened with inexorable force overwhelming her probability manipulation. The threads pulsed once, and Domino's scream cut through the dimensional hell like a knife.

  The reality-warping energy invaded her body at the cellular level. Quantum strings finding the spaces between atoms and pulling.

  But Wolverine's healing factor went to war with the intrusion.

  Her cells died and regenerated faster than the strings could corrupt them. Her body became a battlefield. Flesh tearing itself apart at the molecular level and rebuilding in microseconds. Bones dissolving and reforming and nerves burning out and regrowing. And blood boiling and cooling as every single part of her trying to exist and not exist simultaneously.

  The pain was indescribable. Like being burned alive and frozen solid at the same time as every nerve in her body firing at maximum intensity while her bones ground themselves to powder and rebuilt.

  She was dying and being resurrected a thousand times per second.

  She kept screaming. Her throat tore as her vocal cords shredded, but her healing factor repaired them, and she screamed again.

  And hearing her, seeing the woman he loved being unmade piece by piece, Jay saw red.

  Logic evaporated, and tactical thinking vanished like smoke.

  He forgot completely that Jamie was being controlled. That he was as much a victim as anyone else.

  All Jay saw was the person he loved being hurt. Being violated and destroyed.

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  And something primal took over. Something that predated thought itself.

  The thing that made humans into apex predators.

  The thought turned primal: protect yours. Destroy threats. Kill anything that hurts your pack.

  He appeared behind Jamie in a spatial fold so violent it left cracks in dimensional space. His hand closed around Jamie's throat with intent to crush.

  His power theft ability activated with violence that made the air scream.

  Jamie's reality warping, that quantum string manipulation that could rewrite the laws of physics themselves, was ripped from his body, like removing a vital organ while the patient remained conscious.

  The backlash hit Jamie like a hammer made of broken glass and concentrated agony.

  His eyes went wide as the crimson glow flickered, stuttered and finally died. The pentagram on his forehead cracked, and black ichor stopped pouring from the wound. For just a moment, blessed awareness returned to his features. Horror at what he'd become flooded them, mixed with confusion at where he was.

  "What..." His voice was his own, confused and terrified. "Where am I? What did I... oh God?"

  Then darkness claimed him. Unconscious before Jay released him and before he could process the full horror of what Selene had made him do.

  He collapsed, hitting the obsidian with a sound that echoed too loud in the sudden silence.

  The red strings dissolved. Vanished like they'd never existed, and Domino fell, gasping, her body still healing from the internal damage. Her healing factor working overtime to put her back together and make her whole again.

  She looked up at Jay with eyes that showed just how close she'd come to something worse than death. "Jay..." Her voice was a rasp.

  Jay's rage didn't diminish. If anything, it intensified, crystallized into something cold and sharp and absolute.

  And he was going to make Selene pay for every second of suffering she'd caused.

  But the black sorcerers kept coming. They were endless and inexhaustible. For every ten Jay killed, twenty more emerged from the walls as the infinite tide of fanatical devotion that showed no signs of stopping.

  Bodies littered the obsidian platform, and blood pooled in the cracks. The smell of death, burnt flesh, released bowels, and final breaths filled the air. And still they came, still they praised her name, still they died for her with smiles on their faces.

  Jay's tactical mind finally forced its way through his fury. Cold calculation cutting through red rage like ice through steam.

  This wasn't working. They could kill sorcerers all day, and it wouldn't matter. Selene would just keep pulling more from wherever she'd stored them. This dimension was hers, and its rules were hers. And as long as they stayed here, they were fighting a war of attrition they couldn't win.

  They needed to leave this dimension. .

  He looked around, finding Betsy struggling to help her unconscious brother. Found Domino, still recovering, still shaking. Saw Jamie's crumpled form, blood leaking from his forehead where the pentagram had cracked.

  "Betsy!" His voice cut through the chaos. "Grab your brothers! We're leaving!"

  She didn't argue. Her telepathy wasn't working properly in this dimension, too much interference, too much wrong. But her telekinesis still functioned. Her arms wrapped around Brian's unconscious body while purple energy lifted Jamie's form. Both brothers floating beside her, dead weight but precious cargo.

  Jay appeared beside Domino in a spatial fold. His arms wrapped around her, pulling her close despite her protests, despite the blood still leaking from wounds that hadn't quite finished healing.

  "I'm fine! We need to..."

  "Shut up and hold on." His voice was steel with no room for argument.

  His danger sense painted the dimensional boundaries for him. Showed him where Selene's pocket hell connected to real space. The junction was unstable, heavily guarded by mystical protections layered over millennia and forcing through would take everything he had.

  Jay's multiple powers activated simultaneously. Spatial manipulation finding the path, the weak point where dimensions touched. Null field disrupting the barriers, making magic forget how to hold. Murasama's anti-magic properties cutting through what remained, severing connections that had stood for thousands of years. Kim Il Sung's functionality manipulation scrambling the defensive formations, making mystical circuits fire wrong. And finally, Jamie's stolen reality warping pulling at the dimensional fabric itself, creating stress fractures in existence.

  Blue energy erupted around all of them.

  And with violence that made reality itself scream in protest, the Space folded.

  The sensation was worse than arriving. Like being turned inside out while simultaneously being compressed into a singularity.

  Then they were through and materialized back in the British Museum parking lot.

  The contrast was jarring. From hell dimension to mundane reality in an instant. The late afternoon sun felt wrong after the oppressive darkness, too bright and innocent. The smell of car exhaust and fresh bread from nearby shops replaced sulfur, burnt ozone and death. The sounds of traffic, of birds, of normal human life, all of it obscene after the screaming and the combat and the slaughter.

  Bodies still littered the ground. Jim Jaspers' bisected corpse, already starting to smell in the sun. The protesters cut apart by Selene's portal, their signs still clutched in dead hands. Blood painted the pavement in abstract patterns that reflected sunlight in ways that made the stomach turn.

  The normalcy of it all felt like a mockery.

  Jay set Domino down carefully. She was still shaking and healing, but alive.

  Betsy lowered her brothers to the ground with telekinesis, then collapsed beside them completely exhausted.

  But Jay couldn't rest because this wasn't over.

  Blue energy gathered around him again as Domino panicked.

  Spatial manipulation, finding the dimensional breach he'd just forced closed. Tearing it open again with brute force.

  He teleported back to Selene's pocket dimension despite Domino's wasted effort.

  And standing in the center of the carnage, surrounded by hundreds of black sorcerers who'd just watched their prey escape, was Selene.

  Her face was twisted with rage and terror in equal measure. The confidence gone and ancient pride cracked. She finally looked diminished somehow.

  "Say, you old hag." Jay's voice carried across the plane. His Murasama-enhanced form radiated power, dark and light energies spiraling around him like living things. Blood dripped from his nose, from his ears, from the corners of his eyes. The price of forcing dimensional travel twice in as many minutes. "Did you mind-control these fools, too?"

  Selene was sweating now. The effort of maintaining the dimensional space and projecting her power across it taking a visible toll. But her smile remained, confident despite the cracks showing through.

  "Oh no, I didn't even need to touch them." Her voice dripped false sweetness, but it wavered. Cracked at the edges. "They are devoted to my cause! Loyal to my mission! That's the power I command! An army of fanatics who would die at my word! Who worship me! Who see me as their goddess and savior!"

  She spread her arms wide, encompassing the assembled sorcerers. Hundreds of them. All staring at Jay with identical expressions of fanatical devotion. All ready to die. All eager to prove their loyalty.

  "Now do you fear me, Jay? Now do you understand? Now do you want to join me? Surrender, become mine, and I'll make it painless. Resist, and you'll watch everyone you care about suffer before I break you completely! I'll make you watch as I unmake them piece by piece! As I violate them in ways that would make your Domino's suffering seem merciful!"

  Jay's smile widened with predatory anticipation.

  The smile of someone who had stopped pretending to be human and chose violence over morality and found it liberating.

  He reached into his jacket, fingers finding a small dark blue crystal he'd been carrying since his visit to the afterlife months ago. A piece from the Inhuman's collection, given as a trade for services rendered. Something he'd kept as insurance. As a weapon of last resort.

  It was a Terrigen crystal.

  Carl Creel's power shifted. The Murasama properties faded as new ones took their place. Jay's body began to change, black and red giving way to crystalline blue. His skin became living Terrigen, compressed mutagenic potential made manifest. Every cell a source of transformation, and every molecule a weapon designed to trigger Inhuman genes or kill those without them.

  "You and what army?" Jay asked. His voice was casual, like discussing the weather.

  His hand, now crystalline and massive to the size of a small car, extended toward the assembled sorcerers. Diamond-like spikes erupted from his palm, each one a compressed lance of Terrigen crystal.

  The spikes embedded themselves throughout the plane. In pavement, the walls, even the screaming columns, as hundreds of crystalline growths, each one pulsing with contained potential.

  The black sorcerers stared at the crystals with confusion. Some pointed at them, some even tried to destroy them with magic, spells bouncing off harmlessly. Others attempted to teleport away, dimensional portals forming and failing as Jay's null field disrupted them.

  But it was too late. Had been too late the moment the crystals embedded themselves.

  Jay smiled and detonated them remotely.

  The explosion wasn't fire or force. It was transformation.

  Terrigen mist erupted outward in a wave that covered the area. The bluish fog was beautiful in a terrible way. Almost ethereal. Like clouds at sunrise. Like something divine made manifest.

  It touched the first sorcerer.

  His scream cut short as crystallization spread across his body. Stone-like Terrigen encased him from feet to head in seconds, blue crystal consuming flesh and bone and soul. The cocoon that should have contained transformation, that should have triggered latent Inhuman genes and elevated them to something more, instead became a tomb.

  Because these weren't Inhumans with dormant genes waiting to activate.

  These were humans. Plain old Homo sapiens with normal human genetics. Their DNA couldn't handle the forced mutation. The Terrigen didn't trigger evolution. It triggered cellular collapse. Genetic code unable to adapt, unable to transform, simply breaking down at the fundamental level.

  The cocoon crumbled. The sorcerer's body went with it, reduced to dust that scattered in the wind. Ash then nothing as a person was unmade.

  Across the plane, the same fate befell every black sorcerer the mist touched.

  Hundreds of fanatics, each one a trained mystical master, each one individually dangerous, turned to stone and then to ash in the span of seconds. Their screams created a chorus as if a hymn of death. A symphony of endings.

  Some tried to shield themselves with magic. Jay's lingering null field disrupted their defenses, leaving them vulnerable. The mist found them, consumed them and unmade them.

  Others attempted to flee, but the mist spread too quickly, carried on the winds.

  The mass slaughter took less than a minute.

  Hundreds of people. Hundreds of human beings with names and histories and choices. All dying. All screaming and turning to dust that would blow away and be forgotten.

  And Jay watched. Didn't flinch nor let himself feel anything except cold satisfaction.

  This was necessary. This was what it took to stop someone like Selene.

  When the mist finally cleared, only one figure remained standing among the settling dust.

  Selene.

  But the cost of survival was visible.

  Her left arm was gone. Terminated cleanly at the shoulder, cauterized by her own magic. Her right leg ended at the knee, the limb missing entirely. She'd been forced to amputate. To cut away parts of her own body that had been exposed to the mist. Choosing mutilation over death.

  Black blood poured from the stumps.

  Her perfect skin turned ashen grey. The glamour that made her beautiful had vanished completely, unable to maintain itself through the trauma. Revealing the ancient horror underneath. Translucent flesh stretched over bone that was too white, too perfect and too inhuman. Eyes that were pools of absolute black and teeth that were just slightly too sharp.

  This was Selene. Not the beautiful seductress or the confident External. Just the thing that had survived since civilization.

  And standing before her, approaching with measured steps, was Jay.

  His crystalline form had grown during the detonation. Now he stood eight feet tall, his body a mass of sharp angles. Blue crystal armor covered every inch, each piece sharp enough to cut diamond.

  He looked like a demon made manifest. An evil incarnation pulled from nightmares and given physical form. Something that had stopped pretending to be good.

  Selene tried to retreat. Her remaining leg buckled as exhaustion, blood loss and horror of what she'd just witnessed. All of it was too much and she fell, catching herself with her remaining hand.

  "You..." Her voice was broken. All the ancient power drained away, leaving just a terrified creature facing death. "How... how can you wield such... such incompatible powers..." She coughed, blood flecking her lips. "... they shouldn't... it's not possible..."

  Jay stood still thirty feet from her. Eight feet of crystalline death with power radiating.

  "Nothing's impossible," he said quietly. "You just have to be willing to pay the price."

  He looked down at her. At this thing that had violated the Braddock brothers. That had nearly killed Domino. That had built an army of fanatics and sent them to die. That had lived for thousands of years by stealing, consuming, violating everything she touched.

  And he felt nothing.

  Just cold certainty that this needed to end.