[A/N]: New week, new goal! Let's kick things off with 150 power stones for a bonus chapter!
Blue energy swirled as Jay materialized just outside Kamar-Taj's weathered gates. The Himalayan wind bit at his face, carrying the scent of snow and ancient incense. He paused, breathing deeply as the familiar sights grounded him.
After everything, this place felt like a sanctuary. But tonight wasn't about finding peace. Tonight was about settling a debt that had been poisoning his thoughts since Doom's broadcast.
The guardian monk at the gate nodded as Jay showed his passage token. Better to walk through the front door than face the Ancient One's rolled newspaper again.
Jay navigated the familiar corridors, past students whose whispered conversations followed him like ghosts.
Wong was exactly where Jay expected, hunched over an ancient tome in his domain of organized mess. Without ceremony, Jay set a pizza box on the reading table, interrupting a passage about dimensional anchor points.
Wong looked up with the expression of a man disturbed during delicate work. His gaze dropped to the box, then back to Jay's face.
"So this is the legendary New York pizza?"
"Max made it himself. Took me three attempts to convince him it was for a worthy cause."
Wong lifted the lid with careful reverence. Steam rose, carrying the aroma of herbs that were rare outside Italy and cheese that had been aged to perfection. He took a deliberate bite, chewed thoughtfully, and his expression reached scholarly skepticism.
"The deal?" Jay asked quietly.
Wong was already reaching for a thick folder with his free hand. "Everything we've compiled on the Latverian situation. I hereby pass this Mission to you."
Jay opened the file. His kinetic memory absorbed every detail instantly. Dimensional veil breaches concentrated around Castle Doom. Nether demon energy signatures bleeding through reality's fabric. Three separate scouting missions sent over the past three months. None had returned.
The pattern was unmistakable.
"Victor's been busy," Jay murmured.
Wong noticed the way Jay's jaw tightened. "Perhaps Master Mordo would be better suited for this assignment. Or Master Kaecilius has considerable experience with demon hunting."
"No." Jay's voice carried finality. "This is mine to handle."
Wong began weaving golden sparks into a perfect circle. "Then you'll need passage to Doomstadt. I can mask the portal's signature, but only to a point. If Doom has truly been trading with nether demons..."
He left the warning unfinished.
Through the shimmering gateway, cobblestone streets and Gothic architecture waited under a gray December sky.
"Be careful, Jay. Revenge has a way of consuming those who pursue it too eagerly."
Jay stepped through without responding.
Some debts required payment, regardless of the cost.
The moment Jay's feet touched Doomstadt's ancient stones, his newly acquired senses screamed. The fusion of light and dark force within him had awakened something unprecedented. Emotions crashed over him in overwhelming waves, but these weren't his own. They belonged to an entire nation.
Thanks to his Mental Shield perk and enhanced mental faculties, he could process the psychic deluge without breaking.
The surface layer was heartbreaking in its purity. Love for their ruler radiated from every citizen Jay passed. These people genuinely believed Victor Von Doom had saved them. From their perspective, he'd overthrown a brutal dictator, established merit over corruption, and granted freedoms their grandparents had died dreaming of.
But underneath that golden devotion, something rotten festered.
Fear.
Growing stronger each day.
Doubt that ate at faith like acid.
Jay's Polarity powers responded to the emotional turbulence, pulling fragments of memory from the collective unconscious. He witnessed Doom's return after the worldwide broadcast that had branded Jay as a villain, but the man who emerged from that victory was fundamentally changed.
Scarred. Broken. Refusing all public appearances while his nation slowly began to suffer.
Economic sanctions led by Stark Industries and the US had strangled Latveria's prosperity. Then came the accidents. Diseases without cause. Weather patterns that defied meteorology destroyed crops the small nation depended on for survival.
All while their beloved leader remained locked away in his castle, silent as his people suffered.
Jay forced his enhanced mental processing to filter the psychic overflow into manageable streams. The pattern was clear.
Doom was feeding his people's suffering to something that fed on misery itself.
A businessman in an expensive coat hurried past, muttering prayers under his breath. An elderly woman crossed herself as she looked toward the castle, tears streaming down her weathered cheeks. Children played in the streets, but their laughter carried an edge of hysteria.
"Your leader has been busy," Jay whispered to the wind.
He spent hours moving through Doomstadt like a phantom, cataloging every place where pain gathered thickest.
The hospital was overflowing. Patients filled hallways on improvised stretchers. Dr. Mariana Volkov, the chief physician, had dark circles under her eyes from weeks of sleepless nights.
"Is impossible," she was telling a colleague in accented English as Jay passed the doorway unseen. "These symptoms they make no medical sense. The blood work shows nothing, but people are dying anyway."
In the psychiatric ward, nurses spoke in hushed tones about patients who'd been perfectly healthy until a month ago. Now they sat catatonic, staring at nothing, occasionally whispering about "the laughing demons".
The slums painted their own grim picture. Families huddled together for warmth in buildings that seemed to leech heat from the air itself. Old Dimitri, who'd lived through Soviet oppression, sat on his stoop muttering that something worse than any human tyrant had come to Latveria.
At each location, Jay discreetly placed a light dagger to act as an anchor point. Crystallized lightforce energy that would serve as conduits when the time came.
Seventy markers throughout the city.
Each one carefully positioned where suffering concentrated most heavily, hidden in shadows where desperate people gathered to pray for salvation that seemed increasingly impossible.
As winter darkness claimed the sky, Jay felt the weight of what he was planning.
Monster versus Monster.
With an entire nation caught between them.
Castle Doom rose against the night sky like an accusation. Gothic spires twisted toward stars that seemed dimmer than they should be.
Jay approached through the castle's extensive gardens, now withered and dead despite being tended by an army of groundskeepers. Even the stone gargoyles seemed more malevolent than usual, their carved faces twisted into expressions of hunger.
He merged with the shadows using his darkforce abilities, becoming one with the pools of darkness that seemed deeper than natural night. The sensation was different here. Wrong. As if the shadows themselves were tainted by whatever Doom had been summoning.
The outer walls posed no challenge. Jay flowed through solid stone like liquid. But as he moved deeper into the castle's heart, his danger sense began whispering warnings that made his nervous system feel like it was on fire.
Guards patrolled the upper levels, but they moved with mechanical precision that immediately identified them as Doombots despite their human appearance. Their sensor arrays swept methodically, but Jay's shadow-merged form remained undetectable.
The human staff moved through their duties with the efficiency of people trying desperately not to think about what their employer might be doing in the depths below. Maids cleaned rooms that resisted staying clean. Cooks prepared meals that spoiled within hours. Groundskeepers tended gardens that died faster than they could replant them.
All of them carried the same haunted expression Jay had seen throughout the city. They loved their master, but love was being slowly poisoned by terror they couldn't name.
As Jay descended deeper into the castle's foundations, the wrongness intensified. The very air felt thick and oily. Space itself was beginning to buckle under pressure from something that desperately wanted to break through.
Finally, he reached the source.
The laboratory stretched as wide as the castle above. Broken machinery lay scattered across the floor like technological bones. The few devices that remained intact hummed with barely contained energy, their displays flickering.
But it was what lay at the chamber's center that would make even seasoned sorcerers recoil.
Ritual diagrams covered the floor in mystic patterns that hurt to look at directly. The lines seemed to writhe when observed peripherally, and the symbols burned themselves into his enhanced memory. This was the vilest of Dark magic.
At the ritual's heart lay a simple bed, completely at odds with the technological sophistication surrounding it. And there, holding hands with a woman in her early thirties, was Victor Von Doom.
But not the armored tyrant the world knew.
This version wore elegant civilian clothes, expensive but understated. A metallic theatre mask covered the scarred ruin of his face, but his posture spoke of vulnerability Jay had never witnessed before.
The woman possessed beauty that spoke of a life lived simply and well. Dark hair, kind eyes, laugh lines around her mouth. Jay's comic knowledge provided the context that made this scene infinitely more tragic.
Valeria.
The village girl who'd loved Victor Von Doom before he became Doctor Doom. Before Reed Richards, before the accident, before accumulated hatred had poisoned everything pure in his life. The one person who'd ever accepted him for what he was rather than what he could provide.
"My dearest Valeria," Doom was saying, his voice carrying an intimacy Jay could never imagine, "you understand what I'm offering? To leave your husband, your simple life, and become queen of Latveria?"
Tears streamed down Valeria's face as duty warred with feelings she'd thought buried. "Victor, I... we're not children anymore. So much has changed."
"Nothing that matters," Doom insisted, squeezing her hands. "I see the same woman who used to tend my mother's garden. Who never flinched from me, even when others would turn away. Who told me I could be anything I chose to become."
The irony was devastating.
She'd told him he could be anything, and he'd chosen to become a monster.
"If I say yes," Valeria whispered, "what happens to the person I am now? The life I've built?"
"You become something greater. A queen. A goddess. The woman who stands beside the most powerful man on Earth."
"Yes," she whispered. "I... I accept."
The response was immediate and horrifying.
Emerald flames burst from the ritual circles, writhing upward in spirals. The ritual diagrams carved into the floor blazed to life, pulsing with light that made space bend and warp.
Red symbols appeared on Valeria's skin, spreading like living tattoos across her arms and face. Each mark burned itself into existence with a soft hiss.
"Victor!" Terror replaced love in her voice as paralysis crept through her body. "What's happening to me?"
Doom began his explanation with theatrical flair, but Jay caught genuine regret that Victor couldn't quite suppress. A performance for an audience of demons, Jay realized, showing his supernatural partners that he could deliver what he'd promised.
"My beloved, my life has reached its moment of ultimate transformation. When I was young, I made a choice that has defined every day since. I chose science over sorcery, despite my mother's teachings. Despite the legacy she died to preserve."
His voice hardened.
"That choice cost me everything. But now I can choose differently."
The brands on Valeria's skin began to glow with infernal heat, and her silent scream of agony echoed through the chamber.
"After I returned from battle, scarred and defeated, I made a pact with the cabal of nether demons who claimed they would grant me the magical mastery I'd rejected in my youth. But demons always extract their price."
His voice broke slightly.
"I had to sacrifice something of indescribable value. Something irreplaceable. Something only you could give me. True Love!"
Understanding dawned in Valeria's eyes, and the betrayal there cut deeper than any physical wound.
"You're going to kill me," she whispered.
"I'm going to transform your love into power. Your faith into force. Your trust into the energy needed to remake reality itself."
Doom's mask couldn't hide the tears streaming down his cheeks.
"Farewell, my love. Dear, dear Valeria. I will miss you more than any will ever imagine."
That was when the nether demons materialized.
They rose from the ritual circles like smoke given malevolent form, shapes that hurt to perceive directly, shifting between dimensions. Their eyes burned with the hunger of creatures that had been waiting eons for this moment.
"Tell us, would-be sorcerer," they hissed in unison, voices like grinding metal, "what manner of mystical master are you destined to become if you cannot even sense the intruder who has been observing from your own shadows?"
Jay's voice cut through the chamber like a blade dipped in acid.
"Hello, Victor."
Jay dropped from the ceiling.
He landed with deliberate slowness, savoring the shock that flashed across Doom's masked face.
Jay activated his technomorphing ability, his smartwatch interfacing with every communication system within range. Hidden cameras throughout the laboratory came online, and within moments, the signal was bouncing off satellites to reach every screen capable of receiving it countrywide.
Light daggers formed in both hands as he crashed into the ritual circle, but these weren't weapons meant to kill. They passed through the demons' projected forms, disrupting their manifestation while leaving the accumulated energy intact. Months of studying ritual mechanics had prepared him for exactly this.
"Magnificent!" Doom's laughter filled the chamber. "My second most despised enemy, arriving to witness the moment I transcend every limitation that has held me back. Fate itself delivers you as the perfect witness to my apotheosis!"
But Jay was already in motion.
Muramasa cleared its sheath. The cursed blade cut through the mystical energy, Jay's strikes redirecting flows of power with cuts calculated to the millimeter rather than destroying the ritual outright.
"Clever," Doom acknowledged, his own blade materializing in a flash of emerald light. The weapon pulsed with energy drawn from multiple dimensions, its edge crackling with forces Jay's danger sense couldn't detect. "Though I lacked mystical talent in my youth, my mother's teachings were thorough. The cosmic radiation that scarred my face also restructured my very DNA. I can now channel ambient magical energy in ways that would have been impossible before."
The blade hummed with otherworldly power.
"When this ritual completes, I will command forces that dwarf the cosmic rays that created your precious Fantastic Four. Reed Richards will kneel before me, not as the brilliant scientist he believes himself to be, but as the jealous child he has always remained."
Jay's expression didn't change. "You really think you're going to complete this ritual, don't you? That's adorable. Tell me, Victor. How does it feel knowing that in a few minutes, your entire nation is going to watch you fail?"
"What are you..."
"I'm streaming this live," Jay said casually, even as their blades met in a shower of sparks. "Every camera in this castle, every screen in Latveria. They're all watching you right now. Watching their beloved leader about to murder an innocent woman for power."
The color drained from what little of Doom's face was visible.
"You're bluffing."
"Am I?" Jay's smile widened. "Wave to the camera, Victor. Your people are waiting."
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