Chapter 67: The Supreme Patient amp; The Gates of Hell

The air in the small Queens apartment smelled sharply of ozone, burning sulfur, and fresh blood.

The jagged, fiery orange circle of the portal sputtered and died, leaving the man in the blue mystical robes collapsed on Peter Parker’s living room rug.

The Cloak of Levitation, usually a vibrant and animated relic, lay draped across his shoulders like a shredded, dying animal, twitching weakly against the floorboards.

“Doctor Strange!” Peter yelled, dropping to his knees beside the Sorcerer Supreme.

He pulled his Spider-Man mask off his face, his eyes wide with panic.

Stephen Strange coughed violently, a thick spray of crimson staining the fibers of the rug.

His face was a canvas of deep purple bruises and lacerations, and his breathing was a ragged, wet wheeze.

The protective spells woven into his garments were completely shattered.

“Peter,” Strange gasped, his hands trembling as he tried to push himself up.

“The Sanctums…

they fell.

It was an ambush from the inside.”

Law stepped forward, his silver eyes narrowing as he instantly assessed the critical damage.

“His sternum is fractured.

Three punctured ribs, massive internal hemorrhaging.

He has minutes before his lungs completely fill with blood.” Law raised his hand, the blue hemisphere of a Room beginning to spark at his fingertips.

“Stand aside.

I can displace the blood and repair the tissue without an incision.”

“No,” I said, stepping past the Surgeon of Death.

“Spatial displacement is too precise.

We need him awake, energized, and capable of holding a portal right now.

I’ll handle this.”

I knelt beside the broken sorcerer.

I didn’t possess medical expertise, but I understood the absolute, fundamental flow of kinetic energy better than anyone alive.

During our brief skirmish with the Orchis operatives earlier, I had stored a massive reservoir of kinetic power within my own musculature.

“Hold him down, Parker,” I commanded.

Peter hesitated, looking at my hands, which were now glowing with a vibrant, volatile green aura.

“What are you going to do?”

“I am going to force his body to repair itself,” I stated coldly.

“Doctor Strange, this is going to be the most excruciating pain you have ever felt.

Do not bite your tongue.”

Before Strange could protest, I pressed my glowing palm flat against the center of his shattered chest.

I didn’t strike him.

I channeled the stored Fa-Jin energy directly into his cellular structure, but instead of using it as a concussive force, I inverted the intent.

I pushed the pure, vibrant kinetic energy into his failing cells, forcing a state of hyper-accelerated mitosis.

Strange let out an agonizing, blood-curdling scream.

His back arched off the floor, his entire body going completely rigid.

He could physically feel his bones grating and snapping back into alignment.

The newly forming muscle fibers pulled and stretched like taut steel cables snapping into place, burning with the heat of a furnace.

The lacerations across his face and chest violently wove themselves shut, sealing perfectly over the span of three excruciating seconds.

I pulled my hand back, the green aura fading.

Strange collapsed flat against the rug, gasping for air as if he had just breached the surface of the ocean.

He reached a trembling hand to his chest, feeling the smooth, unblemished skin and the perfectly whole sternum beneath his robes.

The pain vanished, replaced by an overwhelming, vibrating surge of adrenaline.

“By the Vishanti…” Strange whispered, looking up at me with wide, terrified eyes.

“What kind of magic was that?”

“Physics,” I smirked, offering him a hand and pulling the Sorcerer Supreme to his feet.

“Now talk.

What the hell is ripping a hole in the sky above Manhattan?”

Strange leaned heavily against the couch, trying to process the fact that he was fully healed.

He looked out the shattered window at the colossal, swirling blue vortex tearing the clouds apart.

Lightning arched from the edges of the rift, striking the skyscrapers, but instead of alien ships, the shapes pouring from the portal were winged, horned, and wreathed in dark, unholy fire.

“It isn’t aliens,” Strange said, his voice grim, echoing with absolute dread.

“I’ve spent the last three weeks tearing through the multiverse, searching every adjacent dimension for Mayday.

In doing so, I left a trail.

Someone found it.

Someone followed it back.”

“Who?” Peter asked, his fists clenched.

“Me,” Strange replied, looking down at his trembling hands.

“An alternate version of myself.

A variant who didn’t just study the mystic arts, but surrendered to the dark dimension.

He forged a blood pact with a Demon Lord.

He has sacrificed his entire universe to them, and now he intends to do the same to ours.”

“Why?” Jasmine asked, stepping up beside me, her arms crossed.

“Why go through the trouble of invading another dimension?”

“Because of what lies beneath us,” Strange explained, his eyes locking onto mine.

“Deep within the Earth’s mantle, at the very core of this planet, lies the dormant body of a dead Celestial.

A cosmic god.

This evil variant intends to establish a beachhead, drill into the core, and absorb the Celestial’s remaining cosmic energy.

If he succeeds, he will possess enough raw power to launch a campaign to conquer the entire multiverse.

The demonic horde pouring into Central Park isn’t just an army; they are the vanguard meant to secure the drilling site.”

I looked out the window.

The sky was burning.

“We need to hold the park,” Peter said, turning to the door.

“I need to get to the street, swing to the perimeter, and wait for the Avengers to rally.”

“There is no time for traversal, Spider-Man,” Strange said, stepping forward.

His injuries were gone, his mind sharp, fueled by the kinetic energy I had pumped into him.

He raised his hands, the golden sparks of the Sling Ring magic flaring to life.

“If your friends are truly willing to fight a war that isn’t theirs, we go directly to the front line.”

Strange moved his arms in a wide, circular motion.

A massive, ten-foot-tall portal of sparking orange energy ripped open in the center of the cramped living room.

Through the gateway, we didn’t see the streets of Queens.

We saw the Bethesda Terrace in the heart of Central Park.

It was an apocalyptic nightmare.

The ancient oak trees were burning with unnatural, purple hellfire.

Towering, heavily muscled demons with obsidian horns and jagged, bone-forged weapons were swarming the stone steps.

Civilians were screaming, trying to flee toward the perimeter while the ground literally cracked open to vent brimstone.

“Let’s go to work,” I commanded.

I stepped through the portal, my heavy captain’s coat billowing in the heat of the demonic fires.

Law, Robin, and Jasmine stepped through directly behind me, followed closely by Spider-Man.

The portal snapped shut, leaving us standing on the stone balustrade overlooking the terrace.

The defenders of Earth were already there, but they were breaking.

Captain America was bleeding, his vibranium shield ringing with deafening clangs as he desperately bashed away the heavy, spiked maces of three towering demon-brutes.

Cyclops was unleashing a continuous, sweeping beam of concussive red optic force, carving trenches through the encroaching horde, but for every demon he vaporized, five more crawled from the smoking craters.

Above them, Storm floated on turbulent winds, her eyes glowing stark white as she called down jagged strikes of lightning, but the flying, gargoyle-like fiends were swarming her airspace, overwhelming her with sheer numbers.

They were losing the beachhead.

I didn’t wait for introductions.

I didn’t shout a battle cry.

I reached over my shoulder and gripped the dark, heavy hilts of The Jade Wings.

As the twin blades cleared their sheaths, the metal hummed, vibrating with a ravenous, bloodthirsty anticipation.

I focused my Conqueror’s Haki, feeding my sheer Willpower directly into the dark steel.

The blades instantly began to shift and reform.

The standard daggers elongated, the metal stretching and thickening until I held two massive, heavy greatswords.

From their pommels, thick, heavy chains materialized, forged from the exact same dark material.

I wrapped the ends of the chains tightly around my forearms, leaving about twenty feet of slack.

I channeled my stored kinetic energy, anchoring my boots firmly into the stone balustrade.

I threw my arms out.

The heavy greatswords launched forward, soaring over the terrace and plummeting toward the swarming masses of hellspawn below.

Before the blades could hit the ground, I violently snapped my wrists back, pulling the chains taut.

Using the immense momentum generated by the falling heavy blades, I began to spin.

I wielded them like apocalyptic, bladed whips.

The air screamed a high-pitched, terrifying whistle as the massive greatswords blurred into massive circles of green kinetic light.

I channeled my Advanced Armament Haki (Emission) down the length of the chains, coating the spinning blades in an invisible, crushing force that bypassed physical armor.

With a roar of pure physical exertion, I altered the trajectory of my spin, sending the massive, chained blades sweeping across the battlefield below in a brutal horizontal arc.

The impact was catastrophic.

The spinning greatswords didn’t just cut the demonic vanguard; they utterly obliterated them.

The kinetic force combined with the massive sweeping momentum sheared through dozens of heavily armored, ten-foot-tall demons in a single, devastating pass.

Blood black as pitch sprayed across the stone as a massive, hundred-foot semi-circle of pure carnage was cleared right in front of Captain America’s crumbling defensive line.

I mentally clicked the locks on the hilts of The Jade Wings.

Brilliant, thick clouds of heavy emerald smoke erupted from the spinning blades, blanketing the battlefield in an eerie fog.

From the smoke, my menagerie of mythological monsters emerged.

The earth violently shook as The Tank, the colossal Obsidian-Gorilla, dropped into the clearing.

It slammed its massive, stone-like fists into the ground, instantly projecting a 20x Gravity Well.

The demons caught in the invisible radius were immediately crushed flat against the cobblestones, their bones splintering under the inescapable weight of the Grand Line.

Above the tree line, a deafening screech tore through the night as The Transport, the Sky-Rift Roc, took flight.

It beat its massive wings, generating razor-sharp wind shears that sliced the flying gargoyles out of the air, moving with blinding super-speed as it dive-bombed the demonic artillery lines.

From the shadows of the burning trees emerged The Mage, the Glacial-Inferno Unicorn.

It stomped a crystalline hoof.

The temperature plummeted to Absolute Zero on its left flank, flash-freezing a charging platoon of hell-hounds into solid, brittle ice statues.

Simultaneously, its right flank flared with Sun-level heat, incinerating the frozen beasts into clouds of steam in a blinding flash.

The Trapper, the Silken Widow-Maker, scuttled silently into the canopy of the ancient oaks, weaving completely invisible, razor-sharp threads that began silently decapitating winged demons who tried to leap through the trees.

And darting between the legs of the massive beasts was The Wildcard, the Night-Terror Ferret.

Using its Shadow-Skip, it teleported effortlessly between the shadows cast by the hellfire, using its tiny claws coated in Internal Destruction Haki to effortlessly bypass the demons’ thick hides and rupture their dark hearts from the inside out.

Captain America lowered his shield, panting heavily, staring in absolute, stunned disbelief at the sudden appearance of the mythological jade monsters ravaging the armies of hell.

“What…

what are those?” Cyclops shouted over the din of battle, adjusting his smoking visor as the Obsidian-Gorilla literally ripped a demon brute in half.

Spider-Man swung down from the balustrade, landing gracefully beside the Captain.

“Okay, so good news and bad news!

Good news, they’re with me!

Bad news, I’m pretty sure they’re magic space pirates!”

“Pirates?” Captain America repeated, thoroughly bewildered by the sheer absurdity of the situation.

“Our turn,” Law said coldly from above.

Law, Robin, and Jasmine dropped down into the clearing I had created.

A towering demon, wreathed in flames and wielding a massive battle-axe, opened its maw to unleash a torrent of concentrated hellfire directly at Cyclops’s blind spot.

Law simply held up his index finger, projecting his translucent blue Room to encompass the entire plaza.

“Shambles.”

In the blink of an eye, the lethal pillar of hellfire vanished from the air.

In its place, a large, very confused chunk of park bench appeared, instantly incinerating.

High above, directly behind a cluster of flying gargoyles, the hellfire reappeared out of thin air, slamming directly into the demons’ backs.

They shrieked as they were consumed by their own flames, raining burning ash down onto the infantry below.

A heavy-class demon brute charged at Law with a terrifying roar.

Before Law could even draw Kikoku, the twenty-two-year-old Jasmine launched herself forward.

Drawing the Coil Mjolnir from her back, she thumbed the mechanical release.

The heavy, flat hammerhead expanded with a loud metallic whine, increasing its mass instantly.

She ricocheted off a nearby stone pillar with a burst of Geppo, spinning in mid-air to generate immense torque, and brought the heavy hammer crashing down directly onto the demon brute’s skull.

The creature’s horns shattered, the impact driving the beast face-first into the concrete and burying it up to its shoulders in the pavement with a bone-rattling shockwave.

“Who’s next?!” Jasmine yelled, a feral, adrenaline-fueled grin on her face, electricity beginning to spark wildly across her shoulders.

Robin didn’t waste a single millisecond.

She crossed her arms in front of her chest, her sharp blue eyes locking onto a massive swarm of demons trying to flank the X-Men’s right side.

“Cien Fleur: Lethal Bloom!”

A flurry of pink petals materialized in the smoke-filled air.

Instantly, dozens of slender, tanned arms sprouted directly out of the backs, joints, and necks of the demonic horde.

The fiends shrieked, trying to reach behind them to rip the phantom limbs off.

But Robin wasn’t using the paralyzing holds she favored for standard bounties.

From the fingertips of her bloomed hands, sharp, curved panther claws forcefully extended.

The dark claws glistened with a highly potent, deadly purple venom.

Moving with the blinding, explosive speed of the Soru martial art, Robin’s bloomed arms struck simultaneously.

She drove the venomous claws directly into the vulnerable nerve clusters at the base of the demons’ thick necks.

The venom violently corroded their internal biology, stopping their dark hearts in a single, agonizing beat.

Two dozen hellish warriors dropped entirely dead in exactly three seconds, their bodies dissolving into black ash.

“Mein Gott,” Nightcrawler muttered, materializing beside Law with a loud BAMF, the smell of brimstone accompanying him.

The blue-furred mutant stared at Robin with wide, yellow eyes.

“That is…

terrifyingly efficient.”

Law scoffed, resting his cursed nodachi over his shoulder.

“That’s basic Grand Line crowd control.

Try to keep up, demon.”

While the vanguard held the Bethesda Terrace, turning the tide of the beachhead, a different kind of war was raging deep within the Ramble the thickly wooded, maze-like center of the park.

Here, the demonic horde wasn’t fighting superheroes in an open brawl; they were hunting.

A squad of ten elite tracking demons, their bodies gaunt and covered in jagged bone armor, sniffed the air, moving systematically through the thick brush.

Their yellow eyes scanned the darkness, searching for biological anomalies to slaughter.

They found one.

Huddled beneath the twisted roots of a massive, overturned oak tree were two girls.

They were twenty-one years old, completely exhausted, covered in dirt and dried blood.

They were dressed in tattered, sterile hospital gowns that had been ripped and stained during their recent, violently bloody escape from the Weapon Plus facility that had created them.

“They found us,” Gwen whispered, her voice trembling slightly.

Her blonde hair was matted with sweat, but her eyes held the hardened, desperate edge of a survivor.

Laura Kinney didn’t speak.

She slowly stood up from the mud, stepping out from beneath the roots.

Her dark hair fell over her face.

She looked small, frail even, standing before the towering, heavily armored hell-spawn.

The lead demon hissed, raising a jagged, rusted blade to cleave her in two.

Laura closed her eyes.

She took a deep breath, and finally gave into the rage she had spent her entire life trying to suppress.

Her eyes snapped open, glowing with a terrifying, luminescent neon green light.

The change was instantaneous and horrific.

A guttural, echoing roar tore from her throat as the Gamma-irradiated Hulk DNA spliced within her cells violently activated.

She didn’t just get denser; she exploded in size.

The tattered hospital gown shredded instantly as massive, hyper-dense emerald muscles rapidly expanded across her frame.

In seconds, the frail twenty-one-year-old girl was gone, replaced by a towering, eight-and-a-half-foot-tall, incredibly heavily muscled, green-skinned berserker.

SNIKT.

Two massive, foot-long indestructible adamantium claws erupted from the knuckles of each massive green hand, followed by a thick, brutal claw sliding from each foot.

The Hulkverine had arrived.

Laura lunged forward with explosive, Gamma-powered speed that defied her massive new bulk.

She collided with the lead demon, the impact sounding like a truck hitting a brick wall.

She didn’t use finesse.

She drove her massive adamantium claws directly through the demon’s bone armor, sinking deep into its chest, before literally tearing the creature in half with her bare, hulking hands.

The other demons shrieked, charging forward.

“Gwen!” Laura roared, her voice a deep, resonant boom that shook the leaves from the trees.

Gwen stepped out from the roots.

She closed her eyes, mentally triggering the synthetic, weaponized symbiote grafted forcefully into her nervous system.

Black, viscous fluid erupted from her pores, rapidly coating her body.

In seconds, the remnants of her gown were gone, replaced by a sleek, terrifyingly smooth white and black exoskeleton.

The Gwenom protocol was active.

The suit amplified her innate spider-powers to absolute heavy-hitter levels.

She fired a thick, black strand of symbiote webbing, yanking one of the flying demons out of the air.

As the beast plummeted toward her, she willed the symbiote covering her right arm to shift, the fluid solidifying into a massive, razor-sharp scythe blade.

With a brutal, fluid swing, she cleaved the demon’s head cleanly from its shoulders.

The two runaways fought like cornered, feral apocalyptic beasts.

There was no grace, no clever banter, no superhero heroics.

It was a desperate, bloody struggle for survival.

Laura tanked a strike from a demonic broadsword directly to her shoulder.

The blade cut deep into the massive green muscle, scraping against the shining adamantium bone beneath.

But the Gamma healing factor kicked in instantly, the tissue rapidly weaving back together with a hiss of steam as she backhanded the demon, her claws decapitating it in a single swipe.

Gwen bounded off the tree trunks, using her symbiote tendrils to rip the demons’ weapons from their hands before crushing their skulls with super-strength kicks.

They tore through the elite squad in under a minute, leaving the woods littered with demonic ash and ichor.

Laura stood amidst the carnage, her massive chest heaving, the neon green fading slightly from her eyes as she forced the rage down just enough to regain her sanity, though she remained in her towering Hulk form.

“We need to keep moving.

There are thousands of them dropping from that portal.”

“Which way?” Gwen asked, her symbiote mask retracting to reveal her pale, exhausted face.

“The military is going to lock this entire city down.

If Orchis or the Weapon program finds us in this mess…”

“We go through the center,” Laura growled, her deep voice vibrating through the air.

She wiped black demon blood from her massive green cheek.

“Cut a path to the river.”

They sprinted through the woods, bursting out of the tree line and into an open, paved clearing near the Ramble.

They stopped dead in their tracks.

The clearing was already a slaughterhouse.

But not from the demons.

Standing amidst a massive pile of twitching, dissolving demonic bodies were Robin and Jasmine.

Robin was casually wiping a splash of black blood from her cheek, her bloomed arms dissolving into petals, while Jasmine rested the massive, expanded head of her hammer on the ground, leaning casually on the long handle.

Laura instantly dropped into a low, predatory crouch, the massive adamantium claws sliding back out of her green knuckles with a sharp metallic SNIKT.

Her eyes flared neon green once more.

Gwen’s symbiote mask snapped shut over her face, her arms shifting back into deadly, jagged scythes.

They had been hunted, caged, and tortured for weeks.

To them, everyone in this world was an enemy.

Jasmine raised an eyebrow, tightening her grip on her hammer as she looked up—way up—at the towering, green-skinned Hulkverine.

“Well.

Look at you two.”

Robin held up a hand, gently stopping Jasmine from advancing.

The archaeologist’s sharp blue eyes scanned the two women, taking in their feral postures and the sheer, unadulterated trauma radiating from them in waves.

Robin knew that look intimately.

It was the exact same look she had worn when she was eight years old, running from the Buster Call of Ohara, surviving in a world that wanted her dead.

“Stand down, Jasmine,” Robin said softly, her voice carrying a deep, empathetic calm that cut through the tension of the battlefield.

“They aren’t enemies.

They’re survivors.”

Robin took a slow, non-threatening step forward, keeping her hands visible.

“You’re running from something much worse than these demons, aren’t you?”

Laura didn’t lower her claws, and her massive, hulking frame didn’t relax, but she didn’t attack.

She stared down at the tall woman with the dark hair, her enhanced senses trying to detect a lie.

She heard no accelerated heartbeat, no scent of deception.

Only calm.

Before anyone could speak, the tree line around the clearing erupted in dark fire.

Fifty heavily armored, elite demon warriors poured into the clearing, completely surrounding the four women.

The fiends growled in unison, raising their jagged weapons, ready to execute them all in a massive, overwhelming rush.

Jasmine let out a sharp, joyful laugh, the electricity sparking wildly across her shoulders as she hoisted her hammer.

Laura glanced at Jasmine, then back at Robin.

“You fight?” the towering green berserker asked, her voice a low rumble.

“We are pirates, little bird,” Robin smiled, her arms crossing as pink petals began to swirl around the clearing.

“Fighting the entire world is in our job description.”

Gwen’s symbiote mask shifted, forming a wide, terrifying, toothy grin.

“I like these guys.”

Without another word, the four women stood back-to-back in the center of the clearing, forming a lethal, unbroken circle against the incoming horde.

The hunted survivors of the Marvel Universe and the deadly vanguard of the Grand Line were about to show the legions of Hell exactly why they were the true apex predators.

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