The terrace beneath Natasha vanished.

  She fell, plunging into chilly water as the structure lost cohesion and immediately flooded the street and courtyard below, the sudden shock forcing the air from her lungs. It took a moment for her to even understand what had happened: A massive portion of one of the monastery’s walls, including the terrace she’d been standing on, was just gone. Turned to water, presumably by Sersi’s power. Coughing and spluttering, Nat scrambled back to her feet as the water rushed away, trying to get her bearings again alongside a dozen red-robed sorcerers who’d taken the same fall. Heavy thuds and deep growls of sudden anger nearby signalled that, while Bruce and Shuri had also fallen, it was a pair of Hulks that had joined them on ground level.

  The reverberation of helicopter rotors cut through the sky, the IAF strike group already starting an attack run even before they came into sight. It was hard for Nat to get a good look at them in the heat of the moment, but the aircraft seemed to be holding a loose formation as they traced a wide circle around Kamar-taj. Lines of smoke lanced toward the monastery—Hellfire missiles—followed by stuttering torrents of 30mm cannon fire, tracer rounds stitching the night air like burning needles. At a guess, it looked like four heavy Apaches and an equal number of light attack gunships.

  The missiles were stopped short in midair, exploding with a dulled roar against a massive shield of orange mandala-patterned light that suddenly flared into being. The designs holding the barrier together glowed with power, rippling arcs of energy blooming outward from each impact point as the ground shook. Short bursts of autocannon fire cut through irregular gaps in the shield—places where the magic of the sorcerers that had been on the fallen terrace should have sustained it. From where Nat was, she caught a glimpse of red, white and blue on an upper wall as Steve fought to keep himself and his shield in front of the tracer rounds raking the terrace, focusing on protecting others as they attempted to take cover or return fire.

  The helos adjusted their attack vector, maneuvering around to capitalise on the breaks in the defensive shield. In response, a glimmering figure shot up into the air, bringing with her a protective curtain of familiar red magic to reinforce the barrier. The sky was filled with a rippling storm of metal and explosions against barriers of orange and crimson magic, punctuated by the staccato of autocannon fire. The noise was almost overwhelming. Smoke drifted through the air in dirty grey bands, carried on a downdraft that whipped Nat’s water-bedraggled hair violently around her shoulders.

  She’d barely gotten back to her feet when the pools of water on the ground were blasted to either side in the wake of something moving impossibly fast, almost knocking her right back over. As Natasha whipped her head around to try to track the motion, she caught a brief glimpse of Makkari. The Eternal came to a sudden stop about thirty feet away, pausing directly in front of the Hulk for a brief instant so that the shockwave of her passage crashed into the green giant hard enough to send him staggering back several paces. He roared a challenge in response, but Makkari was already gone.

  Nat lent her hand to one of the nearby sorcerers who was still struggling to recover from the fall, helping him back to his feet just as a wave of basketball-sized, gyroscopic drones swept through the air toward them, firing short bursts of cosmic energy. Natasha ducked low, drawing her sidearm to return fire as she dodged under the initial volley, while the sorcerer threw up a mandala shield to protect them both from the energy weapons.

  It was difficult to track Makkari’s exact position, but the intense burst of her first shockwave was quickly followed by a half-dozen more as she backed up and slammed into the Hulk again and again. While the Hulk was off-balance, Shuri lunged forward with a pantherlike cry, trying to get a hand on the speedster in the brief window between her attacks, but a large orb of golden energy streaked out from past the edge of the monastery and caught her full in the chest. Both Hulks—green and purple—were hurled backwards by the raw force behind the attacks, their passage demolishing a large chunk of the monastery’s sleeping quarters.

  Nat was worried about Bruce and Shuri. The Eternals essentially specialised in dismantling large, powerful creatures like them. But then, she had troubles of her own.

  She hadn’t really expected her Glock 26 to be much good in a fight here, given that even the weakest of the Eternals were almost completely immune to normal small arms fire, but the armour-piercing rounds seemed effective enough against the drones. Still, it felt like she was playing a dangerous game where she was almost as likely to injure an ally with a ricochet. One drone snuck in close and she swatted it out of the air with a max-voltage electroshock from one of the Widow’s Bites at her wrists. Luckily, the sorcerers around her had started to rally as well, mandala shields blocking the worst of the assault wave while strands of sorcerous energy whipped out to send more of the machines to the ground.

  The drones smashed into their component pieces, metal rings bouncing off the wet flagstones, but even then, they didn’t stop moving. Beyond the border of the wall, Phastos stood with both of his arms engulfed in orbiting arrays of metal. With a gesture, golden energy glimmered and the downed machines rapidly reassembled themselves, returning to the fray seemingly none the worse for wear.

  Natasha sighed. Even without Ikaris and Ajak on the Eternals’ side, this was not going to be easy.

  --

  I gestured sharply with my free hand, sending a curtain of chaos magic splashing across the interior of the sorcerer’s defensive shield to plug the gaps that had been letting bursts of heavy gunfire through.

  The helicopters were a little annoying. Even if they weren’t a threat to me personally, most of the people on my side couldn’t exactly facetank a Hellfire missile. On top of that, I’d guess that the attack group’s actual purpose was probably to demolish the monastery and take down the enchantment that was keeping my allies’ minds protected. They needed to be dealt with, but I wasn’t sure what the best approach would be. I absently fingered the spear in my hand for a moment. That wasn’t the right tool here, either, and I was a little worried about throwing it in any case, given what had happened when I’d done that at the compound.

  Even with the Mind Stone, I couldn’t match Druig one-for-one when it came to simple mind control, so trying to mentally wrestle his victims away from him wasn’t a good option. I could just yank the aircraft out of the sky, but that would almost certainly result in the deaths of the pilots and anyone else aboard, as well as causing potentially a lot of extra collateral damage to the city. I still wasn’t completely sure that Druig had fully cleared the streets, and didn’t really want to risk that he hadn’t.

  Portals were the obvious solution—either to scoop the crew out or just remove the helicopters from the battlefield entirely—but under the thrum of the choppers and the concussive blasts of the explosions I’d noticed a deeper, familiar vibration in the middle of my chest. A telekinetic flick brought my sling ring to my fingers, followed by a quick, experimental attempt to open a portal that confirmed my concerns.

  “They’ve got a reality anchor,” I growled into the comms. It was… vexing that the weapon that Tony and Shuri had developed to help fight Kaecilius had been turned against us before we’d ever actually been able to use it to our own benefit.

  “FRIDAY must not have been able to wipe the server before they got into the compound’s database,” Tony responded.

  The Ancient One’s voice rang out from below, somehow clear above the clamour. “Reinforce the shield!”

  The holes in Kamar-taj’s defensive barrier were closing. The sorcerers were rallying, the ones whose contributions to the barrier had been disrupted finally re-joining their comrades’ efforts. Good. A few more seconds and the helicopters could be someone else’s problem—my efforts were better focused elsewhere.

  I glanced down at the battle unfolding at the monastery, hesitating for a brief moment as I decided what my next move would be. “Can we tell where the reality anchor is?” I asked. The sorcerers would be a lot more effective if I got portals back online. Plus, if I were a gambling woman, my guess was that if we found the anchor, we’d find Druig as well.

  “FRIDAY says the effect is centred above the monastery, about a thousand feet up. Flanker-H’s are out of the picture; I’m on my way,” Tony responded.

  I looked up. The night sky above the battle was hazy with smoke and streaked with errant clouds, but looked otherwise empty. The Domo was probably parked right over the top of us, cloaked. If that were the case… “Meet you there. I’m going after Druig,” I said, magic flaring in my free hand as I shot upwards.

  A moment later, I was buffeted and overtaken by a massive updraft of air blasting past me, a faint but visible shimmer of magic power flowing along with it that danced across my skin like tingling static electricity. Where the hell had that come from? The sorcerers?

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  I didn’t really have time to think about it. Instead, I had only a bare half-second to react as the effect seemed to hit something above me and rippled outwards—just enough time to flip into a somersault so that I didn’t plow face-first into the invisible structure. I landed hard, upside-down, in a superhero crouch, spear tucked behind my back as I let my legs absorb the shock of the sudden landing. In the wake of the wave of magical energy, dark stone threaded through with golden cosmic filigree faded rapidly into existence, the effect spreading in a wave out from my impact point as the Domo’s cloak failed.

  A brief exercise of magic shifted my personal frame of reference so that ‘down’ was pointed toward the ship beneath my feet and I straightened, glancing ‘up’ toward the besieged monastery. “Okay, so I know everyone’s very distracted and this is a serious fight, but did anyone see the way I just landed? It was so fucking cool.”

  “Phastos is pulling back, I think he might be getting ready to come your way,” Bucky said back, rudely ignoring my extremely important question.

  “Right,” I responded. That made sense. Better work quick.

  Portalling inside wasn’t an option as long as the reality anchor was online. Instead, red magic spilled from my hands and crawled across the hull, prodding and testing the surface. I frowned. There were no seams or gaps—even though the surface of the ship looked a little like crude, roughly-hewn stone, there was a thin layer of invisible power insulating it from the atmosphere. Cracking through with telekinetic energy might be possible, but blasting through material like this wasn’t exactly my strong suit and it certainly wasn’t something that I could do quickly. Looked like it was time for Plan C. D? One of those.

  Taking a deep breath, I pulled free of my body, leaving it standing upside-down on the underside of the spacecraft while my spirit entered the Astral Plane. Diving inside the Domo’s hull, I—

  Pain.

  --

  Sam swooped through the air above them, a hail of automatic weapons’ fire downing a clustered formation of drones. It didn’t make that much of a difference—even without Phastos directly nearby, the machines were frustratingly difficult to put down permanently—but Nat used the breathing space to duck behind a fallen piece of wrecked terrace, distancing herself from the sorcerers they were targeting. “Thanks for the assist,” she murmured into the comms, taking a moment to reassess now that she wasn’t in immediate danger.

  “No problem!” Sam responded.

  “Could use your help up here with the helos, bud,” Bucky’s voice was tight.

  “On it.”

  “Sam, nine o’clock!” Natasha barked a sharp warning. The flyer’s low sweep had attracted some unwanted attention.

  Orbs of chaotic golden energy streaked through the air toward him, but the Falcon reacted smoothly, twisting his wings in an elegant spiral that sliced a razor-fine path through the cosmic energy blasts. A set of six micromissiles detached from his fight harness as he pulled up, white contrails streaking back toward Kingo as Sam disengaged and started to gain height. The Eternal disappeared for a brief instant, tumbling backward out of the flash of explosions. He recovered quickly, however, hands already starting to track upwards.

  Natasha shot him in the head.

  The round glanced off Kingo’s temple and he flinched, a brief flicker of surprise crossing his face. Nat swore under her breath as he rounded on her, glimmering orbs at his fingertips. She dove back behind her cover and it exploded, torn apart by a chaotic discharge of energy, and she kept moving, trying desperately to keep him from getting a clear shot at her.

  “Kingo!” Sersi called out, and Nat risked a glance in her direction.

  Sersi was kneeling, one hand pressed to the ground as a wide section of it turned to mud beneath the Hulk’s feet as he charged. The green giant stumbled, arms flailing as he tried to regain his footing, but Gilgamesh was there as well, both golden-gauntleted arms poised to deliver a knock-out blow to the crouched woman. Before his arms had time to drop, however, a golden orb smashed into his side, sending him staggering, off-balance, into the muck—Kingo had reflexively switched targets the moment Sersi had called for him, immediately snapping off a precisely-aimed shot.

  The transformed ground solidified again into a dull silver-black, trapping most of Gilgamesh and both of the Hulk’s legs up to the calf. The Hulk immediately started huffing with anger, trying to pull his legs free with no success.

  “Sersi!” Gilgamesh roared.

  “Sit tight for a bit, big guy,” Kingo quipped at him.

  Off to one side, Shuri was snarling and straining at thick ropes of cosmic energy that bound her, looped through metal restraints that were anchored to several points on the ground. One of the anchors popped free and the two Eternals turned to face her, shifting targets to the more immediate threat.

  There was a silvery blur and Pietro was suddenly crouched beside Natasha. “You good?”

  Nat nodded, not taking her eyes off the threats. “Can you distract them? We need to buy Shuri time to get back into the fight.” She paused, waiting a brief instant for a confirmation, but he was already gone.

  Kingo was mid-shot as Pietro slammed into him and ruined his aim, twin blasts of cosmic energy discharging harmlessly into the air. The speedster immediately danced back, circling around to disrupt Sersi with a rapid series of jabs as well.

  The Hulk, fed up with his imprisonment, chose that moment to let out a loud bellow of rage, raising his arms above his head before slamming them downward in massive, two-fisted hammerblow. There was a deafening clang and visible shockwave as redirected kinetic energy blasted outwards, violently scattering the surrounding combatants like bowling pins. The Hulk snapped backwards—his trapped feet holding him in place as the back of his head slammed against the metal behind him with a secondary crack.

  Nat’s ears were ringing. She shook her head, blinking furiously, and staggered drunkenly to her feet. What was that? Had Sersi trapped Gilgamesh and Bruce in a solid chunk of vibranium? She wasn’t even sure they had a way of freeing them from that. Wanda might be able to manage it, but she was otherwise occupied.

  As everyone struggled to recover, the air above the courtyard fractured and a portal to the Mirror Dimension swept downwards, seeking to scoop friend and foe alike into the parallel reality. Natasha was barely able to register it as Makkari suddenly appeared in the middle of the area, a foot-long device shaped like a tuning fork held above her head. The moment the folded space touched the implement, it rippled back out of existence with a sound like shattering glass.

  Shuri, now free from her bindings, lunged toward the Eternal, and the fight was back on.

  Natasha kept an eye on the fight, but she wasn’t stupid—she knew there wasn’t a lot she could contribute directly to a clash between some of the strongest fighters on both sides. Instead, she held back, creeping around the periphery of the battlefield, waiting for an opening she could exploit.

  There. Sersi had been blown away from the others, tumbling into the midst of the sorcerers that had been defending themselves from the remnants of Phastos’ drones. The shockwave had also rather fortuitously cleared the machines from the air—at least temporarily—so the red-robed magic users were now turning their attention to the Eternal that had appeared in their midst. A lash of burning orange magic whipped toward Sersi and she let it wrap around her forearm, easily yanking the sorcerer who’d tried to snare her forward into a punch to the face.

  It only took a brief assessment to realise that the small group of sorcerers didn’t really stand any sort of chance against Sersi, but it also seemed like she was holding back, trying to deal with her attackers nonlethally. Instead of rushing to their aid, Nat took the opportunity to circle around, darting quickly between bits of scattered wreckage as she drew closer to the distracted woman. It seemed as if half the monastery had been demolished at this point, so there was no lack of cover to shield her movements. Somewhat miraculously, Kamar-taj’s library had been spared the worst of the destruction, though it wasn’t clear whether that was completely coincidental or if the Ancient One had deliberately shaped the battlefield in such a way as to keep the enchantment protecting everyone’s minds’ from Druig in place.

  As the last sorcerer was felled and Sersi turned back toward the battle proper, Nat pounced. The element of surprise let her hook a foot behind the other woman’s ankle and shove her off-balance, sending her tumbling to the flagstones. Natasha followed up with an electroshock from one of the Widow’s Bites at her wrists, then launched into a series of rapid kicks and elbow strikes before the Eternal could properly respond. Nat held no illusions about defeating an Eternal in hand-to-hand by herself, though every single strike she landed would normally have disabled any human opponent.

  She’d seen the way that Sersi fought against the sorcerers, however, and it was obvious that she relied far more on her physical advantages than any true martial skill—her normal role was tactical support, she wasn’t truly built for front-line fighting like Thena or Gilgamesh. More than that, Sersi’s primary experience was in fighting Deviants rather than skilled human-sized opponents, so Natasha was hoping she’d be able to keep the woman off-balance and distracted for at least a little while. The longer she could keep Sersi out of the main fight, the better.

  Even so, Nat was forced to pull back and take a moment to recover after a few solid strikes, sucking air through gritted teeth as she tried to ignore the burning pain shooting through her arms and legs. Sersi may look like an ordinary human, but hitting her felt more like fighting a sack full of iron bars. It was worse than fighting a super soldier like Steve or Bucky—at least they had the common decency to not be bulletproof, whereas Nat’s Glock was basically useless against an Eternal except as a minor distraction.

  Natasha darted in again, but Sersi had had a moment to recover and was ready for her. The woman braced her legs, utterly immoveable as Nat almost broke her foot trying to get her to stagger again. Still, Nat had been expecting it. She turned the attack into a sideways roll, acting as though she was trying to strike her opponent in the side.

  In response, Sersi lashed out with a hand and grabbed her, but that was precisely what Nat had wanted her to do. She twisted around, wrenching her body hard enough that a bolt of pain lanced through her back—a bad tendon sprain or ligament injury, she wasn’t sure which, but there were limits to even her flexibility, after all—and whipped both hands into Sersi’s face before the Eternal could do anything else. Both Widow’s Bites discharged at maximum power, delivering a pair of what would normally be lethal electroshocks less than an inch away from the Eternals’ nose.

  Sersi let out a pained yelp of surprise and staggered, head snapping back, as she dropped Natasha to the ground. Nat turned the fall into a roll, letting out a short hiss of her own as she powered through the various pain signals her body was sending her to get back on her feet. Sersi recovered just as quickly, only now she looked furious. Just wonderful.

  EDIT ADDED 21/12/25

  Nikolai was one of the most gentle and loving creatures I've ever met. He never had any fear of people or other animals and wanted to be friends with everyone. He never once deliberately scratched or bit anyone, never even so much as growled or hissed at anyone in his entire life—the only thing he ever wanted (aside from the occasional treat) was to love and be loved. And he did and he was. Very much.

  One of the reasons I originally didn't really consider this story to be a 'true' SI is that I honestly couldn't imagine being thrust into that scenario and not tearing apart heaven and earth to get back to my little boy (much like Wanda herself, I suppose). Having him in my life for the time that I did was a blessing and made me better in every single way.

  As you might expect, I'm an emotional wreck. There won't be a chapter this week. I'll pick the story up again in the new year.