Bella was utterly lost.
She and her lover huddled in a corner with the poor male unicorn, carefully monitoring the ambient magical concentration around them, trying to pinpoint the source of the chaos.
Chaos. Complete and utter chaos. Their rescue of the unicorn hadn't drawn the base's attention at all, because the situation outside had devolved into absolute pandemonium.
Thor had been dispatched to Earth to free Kronos's body from its human-made prison. Without Mjolnir, his combat power had dropped considerably—he could rely only on an Asgardian god's raw physical prowess. For once in his life, he'd actually bothered to use his brain, and had blended into a group of students traveling near the area.
Not that he'd stopped to think about it: what kind of students wander into the middle of nowhere in the dead of night?
After the group fought off two S.H.I.E.L.D. patrols and everyone was forced to reveal their true identities, all five "students"—Thor included—were stunned.
Their little "student" group contained two demons, a vampire, and the woman who'd been flirting with Thor as if she were ready to drag him into bed at any moment. She ripped away her human disguise to reveal her true form: a black-haired, red-eyed, skeletal specter. A Banshee—the wailing harbinger of death from Irish mythology.
All five "students" stood there stupefied. They each had a mission, but the missions were broadly similar: rescue someone. A lover, a comrade, a boss—that sort of thing.
Thor simply could not fathom how he'd traveled all this way alongside such a band of monsters and fiends.
The Banshee dissolved into a plume of black smoke and plunged into the underground base in an instant. The two demons and the vampire scattered and went their separate ways.
Thor's arrival wasn't an isolated incident. The fact that he'd run into vampires and demons only proved that tonight's events at the Cabin in the Woods were enormously significant, with an enormous number of factions involved.
He was a man of action over contemplation. What he couldn't figure out, he simply stopped thinking about, and charged headlong into the depths.
The demons of Hell appeared. The angels of Heaven appeared. Papa Legba of the Vodou tradition descended personally to harvest souls. Five of the Thirteen Vampire Clans came in force to rescue one of their progenitors. Werewolves, shapeshifters, the undead, devotees of dark gods—every conceivable faction showed up.
The ferocious fighting shattered cell after cell in the underground prison. Many captives simply strolled out into the open.
"Whoa, hold up!" Bella and Natasha were leading the poor male unicorn toward the exit when, rounding a corner, Bella grabbed her lover's arm. The unicorn overshot them by ten-odd meters before doubling back on its own.
The two women and one unicorn pressed themselves against the wall and peered around the corner in unison.
A woman in resplendent garments emerged from a cell, her bearing so impossibly regal it defied description. She seemed to radiate some kind of emotional aura—merely glimpsing her silhouette flooded the observer with feelings of joy and elation.
"Who is that woman walking out of that cell?!" Natasha's iron will, bolstered by the Progenitor Virus, shook off the influence quickly. She whispered the question to Bella.
This level of psychic aura didn't affect Bella at all. She studied the figure carefully, not entirely certain. "If I'm not mistaken... that's one of the Nine Muses. Euterpe, patroness of lyric poetry. We're talking about a genuine Greek divinity here." She paused, then added with a sardonic edge: "Next time you see that shadowy director of yours, please pass along my compliments. As a human being, I genuinely admire him. Truly. You people are just... incredible."
A quip tossed off in passing, and the group pressed on toward the exit.
Along the way, they dispatched any evil creature they encountered and freed any benign one they came across.
In addition to the male unicorn they'd originally come for, Bella rescued fifteen winged horses—Pegasi. She had no idea why S.H.I.E.L.D. had imprisoned creatures like these. As far as she could tell, the Pegasi were gentle by nature. Perfect for bringing back to Arendelle to form an air force.
Last of all, she freed an elf woman named Kailin. This elven lady was a scout who had led elven troops renowned for their remarkable speed. She had arrived on Earth through a spatial rift. When Bella addressed her in Elvish, she discovered that Kailin hailed from none other than the Woodland Realm—and was, in fact, a distant relative of Legolas Greenleaf.
No question about it. She was coming along.
Fifteen Pegasi, one unicorn, and three "people." The larger their party grew, the harder it became to move unseen.
Bella handed the bow and arrows from her dimensional pocket to Kailin. The male unicorn charged at the front while the three of them rode the Pegasi, using ranged attacks to clear the path ahead.
"For Asgard!" As their convoy passed through a corridor, they spotted a burly man with a battle-axe chasing down a pack of demons in the distance.
Norse mythology was one of Bella's core areas of study. She'd sketched Odin's portrait from reference, and she recognized several key Asgardian figures on sight—Thor and Frigga among them.
She identified Thor immediately.
What's Thor doing here? Where's Mjolnir? Why is he on Earth at this time? And why does he still have divine power? A cascade of questions surged through her mind.
Thor was furious at the demons for deceiving him and had been running them down without mercy. Even after the demons successfully extracted their target—Alastair, Hell's inquisitor—they were no match for Thor. Hell's forces were the first to withdraw from the battlefield.
Heaven's forces pulled out next. They'd rescued their own: Zachariah, the six-winged seraph. Before Thor could bring his axe to bear on them, they dissolved into streaks of golden light and vanished.
Bella's group fought their way out of the underground base with considerable difficulty, and after several attempts, finally managed to open a portal.
The next instant, a colossal hand—fifty meters tall at least—burst from the earth below. Then came a wrist. An arm. The hand clawed at the surface, bracing against the ground as if trying to stand.
"What in the hell is that thing?! Go! GO!" Bella shoved Natasha and the others through the portal, then dove in after them.
When Thor fought his way to the deepest level of the base and forcibly destroyed the final sealing array, Kronos—the God of Time—broke free. Or rather, Kronos's body, carrying a wholly new consciousness, broke free.
Time was too critical a concept—easy to grasp in theory, nearly impossible to master—for any god to leave in another's hands. Every deity coveted the power to bend time to their will, to wield it as a weapon against their enemies. But after eons of struggle, dominion had fallen to the Titan Kronos.
The other gods were hardly content to let their authority be carved away. They conspired in secret, eventually reaching an unspoken consensus: they banished Kronos's soul to the farthest edge of time, then descended to the mortal world to teach humanity the arts of sealing. Together, they imprisoned the God of Time's body on Earth, locking it into the present moment.
Now a new God of Time had shattered his prison. And at the edge of time, a God of Time from the past—one at the height of his power—still stood. The timeline, once stable and orderly, fractured. The gods suddenly had far more room to maneuver.
Free at last, the God of Time swelled with temporal power until he towered hundreds of meters high. No one save the gods themselves could perceive his true face. He gazed toward the horizon, then shed the excess: a deluge of discarded memories and irrelevant data. In a blaze of light, he streaked toward the edge of time.
Whether or not this was the original hardly mattered. Whether the timeline splintered was irrelevant. He had one objective: seize the authority over time.
The memories he'd cast off fragmented in the sky, scattering into over a hundred shards of light that shot in every direction.
In Texas, 006 was struck by one of those shards—an arrow of light no thicker than a finger—and a torrent of memories flooded his mind.
In a daze, he saw himself locked in battle with Kronos. He felt certain he was no longer 006. He was a god. He was Zeus.