The crater Thor's hammer had carved was wide enough to swallow a house.
Ottar hit the lip of it rolling and came up in a crouch, grey eyes fixed on the center of the ruin. Dust still drifted down from the sky. Thor stood where the hammer had landed, the small weapon resting on his shoulder, lightning snapping along its head. His belly rose and fell with slow, even breaths. He was smiling, and Ottar had seen that smile before, on starving men sitting down to a feast.
"Ottar," Vritra said beside him, low. "Together."
"Yes."
She wasted no more words. Her body unfolded into the World Devourer, ten great heads rising from a mountain of black scale, wings spreading wide enough to swallow the daylight. Ottar's muscles swelled as the beast surged through his blood. Claws split from his fingers, and his vision narrowed to a single line with Thor's thick body at the end of it. He raised his greatsword, and they struck together.
Thor answered with one throw.
The hammer left his hand with a crack like a falling cliff and reached Ottar before Ottar had finished moving. He got the greatsword across his chest in time. It did not help. The blow drove him back thirty paces, boots gouging twin trenches through the mud, steel shrieking in his grip, and the force kept pushing through the blade into his ribs until something gave. The hammer flew back to Thor's palm as if pulled on a cord.
Vritra's ten heads breathed.
Ten lances of fire tore across the plain, hot enough to turn the rain to steam. Thor swung the hammer in a flat circle and the flames split around him, splashing to either side like water around a stone. He stepped through the gap with a speed no man of his size had any right to own. Then he planted a foot, threw himself forward with the hammer leading, and flew low across the field like a spear with lightning streaming behind it.
He struck Vritra beneath her central jaw.
It sounded like the sky breaking. The dragon left the ground, ten heads snapping back, her enormous body hurled upward as if she weighed nothing. Thor rode the hammer after her, climbing in a streak of white, and before she could right herself he was above her with both hands locked around the haft. He brought it down across her spine.
She fell like a meteor.
The plain split when she hit, throwing earth and stone into a ring around the new crater. Thor drifted down after her and landed lightly at the edge of the ruin. He was not winded, and he looked like a man who had only just begun.
Ottar came out of the dust roaring.
Something settled along his arms as he charged. It was a warmth that did not belong to the rain or the fight, and he knew it at once. Somewhere beyond the horizon, inside a black wall of sky, his God King was fighting twenty gods and still reaching across the field for the people he had sent to war. Black fire rolled down Ottar's greatsword, edged in white, and the blade drank the rain and gave back only heat.
In the crater, Vritra lifted her heads. Her next breath came out black.
The fire struck the plain in ten columns, and where it touched, the earth simply stopped existing. No smoke rose. No embers fell. Thor watched it with the smile still on his face.
Then the sky turned blue.
Light washed across the field from far to the east, cold and vast, the death of a sea god written across the clouds. Thor's head turned toward it for exactly one heartbeat. When he turned back, he looked at the black fire on Ottar's blade, and the smile did not leave. It sharpened.
After that, not one spark of it touched him.
Ottar cut, and the blade passed through the place Thor had been. He cut again, a diagonal that would have split a boulder, and Thor leaned away by the width of a finger and let it whistle past his chin. Vritra's breath came in rolling waves and the god slid through the gaps with the easy grace of a river curving around a rock. He was fat and thick and slow to the eye, and he moved like a cat.
Ottar overreached on a downward stroke.
Thor stepped inside the swing and drove his palm into Ottar's chest. The ground exploded under Ottar's back. Before he could rise, the small hammer settled on his sternum with a gentle, awful weight, and Thor leaned on the haft. It felt like a mountain lowered onto his ribs. Ottar strained against it, claws scraping the handle, the black fire on his greatsword guttering uselessly out of reach. His arms shook. His vision went white at the edges. The hammer did not move.
Thor turned his back on him, as if the matter were settled, and walked toward the dragon with empty hands.
Vritra struck first, ten heads lashing forward in a storm of fangs and flame. Thor caught the nearest by the jaws. He did not dodge it. He closed his fists around the upper and lower teeth and wrenched it down into the mud with a grunt. A second head plunged at him and he caught that one too, dragging it to the ground beside the first. A third came screaming from his flank and he threw his whole weight onto it, shoulder into its skull, pinning all three heads under his body while the rest thrashed above him.
She breathed. The black fire poured out across the plain and could not find him. Every head that could burn him was held down, and every head that was free was aimed at the sky.
Thor wrapped both arms around the neck in front of him and twisted.
The crack carried across the battlefield. Her great body convulsed from the tail to the wings, and the ten heads went slack. The scales rippled and drained away, the wings folded in on themselves, and the dragon shrank, dwindling and dwindling, until a woman with golden eyes lay curled in the mud where a mountain had been.
Thor straightened, rolled his shoulders, and looked back at her.
Vritra got her hands under her and pushed. Blood ran from her mouth. A pair of short scimitars flashed in her fists, and black fire crawled along both blades. She came to her feet swaying, and her golden eyes were still sharp.
Thor's own eyes went to the fire. He moved.
His knee drove into her stomach before the scimitars could rise. The breath left her in a ruined gasp, her body folded around the blow, and the blades dropped from her fingers and burned in the mud. He raised his right hand.
The hammer tore free of Ottar's chest, and Ottar gasped as the weight vanished. It crossed the field in a blur and slapped into Thor's palm. He lifted it high above Vritra's face, and the world seemed to hold its breath.
An arc of black fire cut through the air.
It passed across his wrist like a wire through cloth. The hand fell away still gripping the hammer, and the black fire swallowed it. It burned without ash, without smoke, simply gone. The hammer thudded into the mud alone.
Thor spun toward the attacker. A second arc flashed at his throat and he swayed backward so far his spine nearly touched the ground, felt the heat of it pass over his chest, and kicked off the earth. He landed thirty paces away in a crouch. The hammer leapt from the mud into his left hand.
A woman stood in front of Vritra, wreathed in shadow, a long curved blade in her fist. Black fire ran along its edge and dripped off the point.
Vritra pushed herself upright with one trembling hand. "Diana," she said, and coughed. "Thank you."
"All for the Monarch," Diana said.
Vritra nodded. Behind them, a groan rose from the crater. Ottar rolled onto his side, spat blood into the mud, and took hold of his greatsword. He got his feet under him. Black fire flared along the blade again, and he walked to Vritra's side with the beast still burning in his eyes.
Something else was standing there too.
It rose at their backs without a sound, a vast beast of living shadow whose shoulders cleared the lip of the crater. Its eyes burned like coals. It did not roar or growl. It simply stood, the way a mountain stands, and the ground trembled under its weight.
Baal had arrived.
Thor's gaze moved across the four of them, one by one. His grin widened until it split his scarred face.
"Two more," he said.
Vritra wiped blood from her chin with the back of her hand. "You are a strong god," she said. "It is only fair."
Thor laughed, a deep, rolling sound, and let it fade slowly.
"Good," he said. "Now I fight."
He lifted his head, and the sky split.
Through the entire battle, not one bolt had fallen. The hammer had carried sparks and the god had worn them like jewelry, but the heavens had never answered him. Now the clouds tore open from horizon to horizon, and blue lightning roared inside them like a held breath finally let go.
It struck him.
The plain went white. When the light thinned, Thor stood in the crater with his arm spread wide and his head thrown back, and his eyes had turned the blue of the heart of a storm. Lightning crawled over his body in sheets, crackling along his shoulders, climbing his arms, snapping from his fingertips into the ground. The air smelled of iron and burnt ozone.
On his right arm, where the black fire had taken his hand, something was forming. It was not flesh. That was gone for good. A hand of pure lightning knit itself out of the empty air, fingers of white and blue light flexing and closing around nothing.
He closed it into a fist and turned his burning eyes on the four who stood against him.
The God of Thunder had arrived.
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