The four men remained entirely trapped, completely unable to break free from the invisible telekinetic vice grip holding them. Only John Constantine remained mobile, scurrying frantically across the dust-covered floorboards as a swarm of floating, razor-sharp kitchen knives pursued him through the air. Yet, despite the chaos tearing the house apart, there wasn't even a physical trace of an visible enemy.
"John!" Tony Stark yelled, his back pressed hard against the plaster wall by the invisible force. "What the hell did you do?!"
Constantine dove behind a heavy oak coffee table, lifting the wooden surface just in time to block a volley of incoming carving knives. THWACK! THWACK! The blades embedded themselves deeply into the wood.
"I honestly thought that porcelain doll was the spirit's physical anchor!" Constantine shouted back, panting heavily as he checked his remaining ammunition. "As it turns out, I was dead wrong! The doll was just a scrying focus—he was using it to observe us!"
Before Constantine could finish his explanation, he was forced to drop flat to the floor again as a floating cleaver sliced cleanly through the top of the coffee table.
Right then, the ambient lights in the hallway began to violently flicker. At the top of the stairs, a brilliant, crackling humanoid creature formed entirely of pure, roaring flame slowly began to descend.
"Well, looks like we're really going to die this time," Wade Wilson's muffled voice echoed from the corner. He was still wrapped tightly from head to toe in sparking copper electrical wires. "Hey, Tony. Before my soul gets dragged down to the bargain-bin Hell, can you fulfill my final wish of being a billionaire? Just wire the cash over. My Visa card number is 4827—"
"Alright, shut the hell up, Wade!" Tony snapped, his gauntlet struggling to raise against the invisible telekinetic pressure. "You won't die even if the rest of us do! Your healing factor is literally a cheat code! Hurry up and use that mouth of yours to think of an actual way out of this!"
Wade squirmed his body violently against the floor like an oversized, red-and-black caterpillar, but it was entirely to no avail. The wires only sparked brighter.
"Ugh... ah~" Wade suddenly let out a soft, disturbingly rhythmic moan. "Ooh, that's actually... so comfortable~ The voltage is hitting the perfect spot on my lower back~"
"Shut your damn mouth, Wade!" Tony's brow twitched violently as three imaginary black lines dropped down his face. He looked at Deadpool, completely and utterly speechless. 'How can a freak like this exist in any universe? And why, out of all the heroes on Earth, did he have to be on my payroll?'
If they survived this night, Tony was absolutely docking the mercenary's entire commission.
The fiery entity slowly walked down the final step. Tony Stark, Sam, and Dean all simultaneously held their breath, their muscles tensing as the creature approached. The air in the room grew suffocatingly thick with heat and psychological dread.
However, the fiery figure didn't seem to want to cause them any physical harm. It bypassed Constantine entirely, walking straight over to the wall where Sam and Dean Winchester were pinned. The entity came to a complete halt, its glowing, faceless head tilting slightly as if carefully examining the faces of the two brothers.
Suddenly, the intense fire enveloping the entity erupted outwards in a massive, blinding wave of thermal energy.
The expanding shockwave swept harmlessly through the entire room. Instantly, the copper wires binding Wade and Dean snapped into melted pieces, the invisible telekinetic force pinning Tony and Sam vanished, and the floating blades chasing Constantine clattered uselessly to the floorboards.
As the external flames rapidly dissipated, the true, peaceful form of the spirit was finally revealed to the room.
"Mom!" Sam shouted, his voice cracking with an intense surge of disbelief and childlike excitement.
Dean, however, simply stared intently at the woman's face, his body locked in a defensive posture, completely frozen. Having experienced so many traumatic, deceptive encounters with the supernatural, Dean no longer dared to blindly trust his own eyes. He couldn't help but wonder if this was just another cruel, shapeshifting trick played by the house.
Sam, on the other hand, had no such cynical doubts. Compared to logic, he believed entirely in the deep, emotional resonance vibrating through his soul.
But just as Sam took an eager step forward to touch his mother's face, Mary Winchester raised her pale hand, gently waving it to stop his next move.
"Sam... Dean... I'm so sorry," Mary whispered, her ethereal voice filled with a centuries-old maternal sorrow.
Before the brothers could ask her what she meant, Mary's gentle expression violently shifted into one of defiance. She turned her head, looking directly up at the dark ceiling structure.
"Get out of my house!" she roared.
Mary's spiritual form streaked into the roof like a flash of blinding white light, her hands plunging into the structural beams to violently drag the true, hidden poltergeist out into the open, carrying the corrupted spirit away into the ether with her.
However, just as the group gazed up at the newly quiet ceiling, a malicious disturbance materialized once again.
Thick, dull yellow flames began to aggressively rise from the plaster, carrying the pungent, choking scent of burning sulfur. The glossy surface of the ceiling suddenly rippled, transforming into a massive, supernatural mirror that forced a horrifying scene to unfold directly before everyone's eyes.
In the reflection, the glowing soul of Mary Winchester, which had just departed to find peace, was violently intercepted by a looming, cloaked shadow. With a casual twist of the shadow's clawed hands, Mary's soul was violently compressed into a small, screaming ball of light and mercilessly shoved into a heavy glass jar.
Seeing this visceral desecration of their mother's soul, both Winchester brothers instantly boiled over with a feral, uncontainable rage.
The entity within the reflection slowly turned its head, its gaze piercing directly through the mirrored glass to lock eyes with the brothers standing in the living room below. Revealing a sharp, sinister smile, the illusion violently shattered, and the ceiling returned to normal.
But before a single weapon could be drawn, the temperature in the room spiked, and a middle-aged man in a sharp black suit abruptly materialized in the center of the living room.
"Sam, Dean," the man chuckled, his voice dripping with smooth, aristocratic malice. "Long time no see, boys. The last time we all gathered under this roof... if I recall correctly, it was in your nursery room."
The man tilted his head up, his human eyes violently bleeding away to reveal a pair of burning, unmistakable, solid-yellow irises.
The Yellow-Eyed Demon. Azazel.
"Hand it over!" Sam screamed, his knuckles turning white as he gripped his hex-engraved knife. "Hand over our mother's soul, you son of a bitch!"
"Give it back, now!" Dean roared, his silver-plated pistol aimed dead center at the demon's forehead.
The two brothers were entirely fuming, the physical appearance of their family's ultimate executioner obliterating any remnants of tactical caution. They closed in from both sides, their eyes locked onto the small glass jar sealing Mary's glowing soul, which Azazel was casually tossing up and down in his palm like a baseball.
"Now, now, let's not do anything rash," Azazel purred, catching the jar with a click of his fingernails.
This casual display of absolute leverage successfully forced the Winchester brothers to freeze in their tracks, their breaths hitching as they stared at the fragile glass.
"Originally, the only guests I intended to invite to tonight's little festivities were you two precious boys," Azazel murmured, his yellow eyes sweeping across the rest of the room. "Of course, I suppose it doesn't really matter if a few extra elite playthings tags along... well, except for you."
Azazel pointed a single, jagged finger directly at Wade Wilson.
POP.
Before Deadpool could even finish practicing his next line, his entire physical body instantly vanished from the room, leaving behind only a faint scent of ozone.
"Alright," Azazel smiled warmly, smoothing his lapels. "Now that we've cleared out the annoying plaything of the Goddess of Death... let us continue with the main event."
The Prince of Hell stepped over a shattered chair, his yellow eyes locking onto Sam.
"Years ago, I meticulously toured this country and injected a very select group of special infants with my own demonic blood," Azazel explained, his tone laced with pride. "A grand experiment designed to grant certain chosen vessels psychic abilities far beyond the limitations of mere mortals. The true hour to select my ultimate general hadn't officially arrived yet on the calendar..."
Azazel's smile faded into a grim scowl. "...but because those arrogant Gods of Death from the Soul Society have aggressively occupied our sovereign territory in Hell, my schedule has been forcefully moved forward. I need to find the strongest psychic vessel among my children right now."
He raised his arms, his yellow eyes flaring with immense demonic power. "A general capable of leading the demonic armies of the Pit to systematically slaughter the Shinigami."
Azazel waved his hand casually at the remaining four men.
FLASH.
A sudden, dizzying wave of vertigo slammed into their psyches. When Tony, Constantine, Sam, and Dean finally regained their sensory balance, the walls of the old Winchester house were completely gone.
They were standing in the dead center of a desolate, fog-shrouded crossroads inside a completely abandoned, decaying ghost town.
"This is the dimensional manipulation of a Prince of Hell..." Tony Stark muttered, rapidly tapping the console on his wristwatch. "Jarvis! Report tactical status! Jarvis?"
Only static responded. There was no connection to the satellite array; the localized demonic barrier had completely severed external communications.
Realizing they were entirely cut off from the grid, the four men had no choice but to weaponize and carefully walk down the main street of the ghost town. Instantly, the air grew heavy as invisible conspiracies, curses, and malicious spiritual traps began to converge upon their positions from the shadows of the abandoned buildings.
This was a cruel, supernatural trial where only a single victor could emerge alive, and all other participants were mathematically programmed to die.
'We absolutely cannot accept those terms,' Tony thought, his jaw clenching as he raised his armored gauntlet.
Fortunately, right before Azazel's spatial teleportation had snapped them out of reality, Tony's automated smart-glasses had successfully transmitted an emergency high-energy distress beacon back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. tactical camp.
Now that they had no physical way to breach the pocket dimension on their own, they could only pin their survival on the mysterious Gods of Death they left behind at the base.
"Is it exactly here, Rukia?"
"Yes," Rukia Kuchiki answered, her fingers tracing a glowing, ethereal pink thread floating in the air. "According to the directional frequency of the Reiraku, Tony Stark and the others are trapped directly within this precise coordinate. There appears to be a massive, high-density demonic barrier concealing the spatial pocket. We need to breach it."
"Leave it to me," Renji Abarai grunted, stepping forward onto the cracked desert earth. "I'll shatter the damn thing in one shot."
Confirming the target coordinates, Renji reached down and firmly grasped the hilt of his Zanpakutō. His spiritual pressure instantly exploded outward, kicking up a massive gale of desert sand.
"Bankai!" Renji roared. "Sōō Zabimaru!"
The dense, red spiritual pressure surged wildly around his body, violently reshaping his attire. A heavy, white fur mantle draped across his torso, and a legendary weapon materialized over each of his shoulders. On his right arm rested the sleek, deadly saw-toothed blade of Orochi-Ō (Serpent King), while his left shoulder bore the colossal, skeletal arm of the Baboon King.
Renji leaped into the air, hovering effortlessly above the empty, flat desert plain. He leveled the serrated Orochi-Ō blade directly at the empty space before him.
"Sōō Zabimaru..." Renji bellowed, his spiritual pressure condensing into a blinding, cobalt-blue aura.
"Zaga Teppō!"
A colossal, terrifying skull of a red spiritual serpent materialized around Renji's entire body. The moment the massive energy jaws snapped shut, a concentrated, apocalyptic cannonball of pure spiritual energy was violently detonated forward.
The blast tore through the air. The exact millisecond the Zaga Teppō collided with the invisible spatial boundary, a deafening sound like a million sheets of glass shattering simultaneously echoed across the desert.
The destructive energy beam successfully broke through the demonic barrier, obliterating the pocket dimension's coordinates and slamming straight down onto the hidden town below.
BOOM!!!
The sudden, catastrophic shockwave entirely leveled the abandoned town to the ground, reducing the structures to microscopic splinters and creating a massive mushroom cloud of dust and debris that rose hundreds of feet into the sky.
"Hey! Renji!" Rukia screamed, her eyes widening in pure horror as she stared blankly at the massive crater where the town used to be. Not a single intact building remained standing on the scorched earth. "You... you didn't accidentally vaporize our own allies with that shot, did you?!"
"Uh..." Renji rubbed the back of his neck, his Bankai deactivating as he looked down at the absolute destruction. "They're tough cookies, right?"
As the thick cloud of dust slowly began to clear from the center of the crater, a metallic coughing sound echoed from the rubble.
Tony Stark, his Iron Man armor covered in a thick layer of grey ash, slowly used his repulsors to blast a fallen structural beam off his chest. Beside him, Constantine was shaking dirt out of his trench coat, while Sam and Dean were wheezing but entirely intact, having been shielded by Tony's hard-light barriers at the last possible microsecond.
Tony raised his faceplate, glaring up at the sky with an utterly exhausted expression.
"Isn't what you guys call a 'rescue' a bit too much?!" Tony yelled, wiping ash off his golden visor. "We almost died at your hands before the demons even got a turn!"
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