I wasn't an expert in other dimensions, even less so in the many different hell dimensions of Marvel. But one didn't need to be an expert to know what the place I found myself in after stepping through that portal was: hell.
The very air itself seemed to scream with suffering. The sky was fire, and the ground flames. Should a normal person find themselves here, they would no doubt feel their lungs burn from the heat of the air as their skin charred.
This was a place of suffering, of eternal torment, a place of pure evil, a place without the very concept of good.
Mordred whistled behind him as she too stepped into this place. "Now this… is France!"
She handled it well, not everyone could gaze upon hell itself and still be in a mood to joke around. I for sure didn't feel like joking as I looked around.
The landscape was a cracked ocean of brimstone, jagged and breathing like an infected wound. Great stone spires jutted from the ground at odd angles, defying architecture, reason, and sometimes gravity. Rivers of molten iron flowed between them, their surfaces shimmering with the trapped faces of the damned.
Far off in the distance, a chained leviathan thrashed against a cliff made of fused corpses. Its chains ran through miles of ground, each link larger than a man, thrumming with foul magic. Whatever it was, it had once been something greater. Now it was just another screaming cog in the machinery of this realm.
Hell.
A particular one, surely—though which lord laid claim to it, I couldn't say. Mephisto? Satannish? Blackheart? It hardly mattered. They all ran on the same logic: power, pain, permanence.
Mordred glanced around, one hand on her gun, the other shading her eyes. "So… I was kinda expecting more demons in here… you know, given how many came out of this place."
That was something I agreed with; it was strange. How… empty this place was. I could sense them, see them far away in the distance, demons, cruel, warped abominations. They were fighting one another, tormenting mortal souls damned for eternity, all kinds of evil things.
But they weren't rushing towards us, they weren't trying to get through the portal, in fact, the area around it was empty, suspiciously given the amount that came out of it in an unbroken stream just moments ago.
Mordred picked up on it too.
"Yeah, this is giving me boss room vibes," she muttered, tightening her grip on Clarent II. "You ever play a video game, and the hallway gets real quiet right before you die?"
"I have no idea, and I'm surprised you have… but I understand what you mean." I looked around, glancing at the hidden sorcerer out of the corner of my eye. I'm sure he thought he was hidden well, but it wasn't so easy to escape from my Fea eyes A.
I had been surprised when I first saw them, because that face? That wasn't just any old face, and didn't belong to just any old sorcerer.
I knew that he was evil, or at least would become so; right now, I sensed no real darkness from him. If anything, I could sense a strange devotion from him.
Whatever it was, I decided that since he hadn't fallen to darkness, I might as well give The Ancient One some face and leave him be.*
He was clearly just here to watch, so let him watch. I looked away and back to the open space in front of us. "I feel like we are being lured deeper in."
Mordred gave a low hum, eyes scanning the landscape like a predator sniffing out the trap she was about to spring. "Yeah. And you know what? I'm fine with that."
Her grin was sharp, but there was no humor in it. Just hunger.
I nodded once and advanced. The ground shifted beneath our feet—subtle, but deliberate. The very terrain responding to our presence, or perhaps reacting to a silent command.
We moved across a jagged path of obsidian bones, heat rising in shimmering waves, the wind carrying the screams of a billion tormented souls.
As we moved deeper into this strange pocket of hell, it began to feel less like a domain ruled by chaos and more like a theater. A stage set for something—someone.
It didn't take long for that someone to be unable to hold themselves back. I felt it before I saw it, a great malevolent evil appeared, as it was born by the ground itself, a shadow rose up.
They shaped into a man, or a mockery of a man; it might look human, but it wasn't, it was raw evil given form.
The shadow finished coalescing.
What emerged from the boiling ground was tall—taller than any mortal man. A silhouette cloaked in black fire and oozing malevolence, with eyes like burning voids and a mouth that stretched too wide across a face that only vaguely resembled human. Long clawed fingers flexed lazily as if tasting the heat in the air. Every inch of him radiated power twisted beyond redemption.
He took a step forward, smoke peeling off him like steam from an open furnace.
I narrowed my eyes, waiting for him to speak.
He didn't wait long.
"Ah," the creature said at last, his voice an oily echo, layered over with whispers in languages not meant for human ears. "At last, the goddess herself arrives… and she brings her mutt."
Mordred raised Clarent II at that, but he kept speaking, already drawing himself taller.
"You may not recognize me—yet. But you will." His chest expanded, shadows roiling around him. "I am Blackheart. Son of Mephisto. Prince of Pain. Duke of Endless Lies. The rightful heir to this realm and every soul within it."
He spread his arms wide as hellfire coiled upward behind him like wings. "When your people cry out in fear, it is my name they whisper. When the last lights fade and the last prayers go unanswered, I remain. I endure."
I tilted my head. "No idea who you are."
Mordred snorted, loud and unrepentant. "Is it too late to ask for someone important?"
Blackheart's eyes flared, his voice rising into a snarl. "You dare mock me? You stand in my domain and do not kneel? You speak over my name?"
He thrust a clawed hand into the air, and the ground cracked in rage, screaming faces rising in the molten stone. "I was born of hell itself! My father is the Lie King! I have consumed angels! I have slain gods!"
Mordred wasn't the patient type, never had been, and certainly wasn't now either, so while he monologued, she fired Clarent II right in his face.
It was funny, seeing the red burst of energy blast into his ugly face as he spoke, yet sadly, Clarent II wasn't a true Noble Phantasm; it was a powerful gun, yes, but it did nothing here. "Damn, that's what I call a thick head." Mordred mocked.
Blackheart staggered half a step—not from pain, but from surprise. Then, his body was covered in smoke, and as it cleared, gone was the hideous demon, replaced with a handsome young man, though his eyes were dark pools, cold evil abysses.
He tilted his head toward Mordred, mockery dripping from every syllable. "Cute trick. Was that supposed to hurt?"
Mordred spun her gun around on her finger. "Well I hoped it would blow your ugly mug clean off, but I guess you are just a bit too thick for that."
"I am pain, little knight," Blackheart growled. "You cannot harm me with mortal toys. I am beyond that." He looked over at me, as if admiring a rare gem.
"You, you I have heard so much about, you are a precious soul, a powerful one, in fact." He looked back to Mordred. "Her soul isn't bad either."
In response, Mordred shot him again, and once more, the suddenness of it caused him to tank the shot with his face. He really didn't expect anyone would be brave, or maybe foolish enough to shoot him.
The second shot rippled through his face, distorting his features before the smoke cleared once again. His perfect human mask cracked just slightly, a vein of black fire leaking from his cheek.
Blackheart chuckled. "You'll regret that, little knight. Both of you will. Because I don't just want your deaths."
He walked toward us now, slow and deliberate, his hands clasped behind his back like a man inspecting a painting.
"I want your souls," he purred. "Goddess or not, you still carry a soul, Arthuria Pendragon. Glorious. Radiant. Untouched. The kind that would burn for eons before it breaks."
His smile widened, baring too many teeth. "I'll strip you down to nothing. Your memories. Your triumphs. Your regrets. I'll peel them one by one and feed them to my pets."
I narrowed my eyes, but said nothing.
He turned to Mordred next. "And yours… ah, your soul's a shattered mirror. Rage, shame, desperation—do you think I wouldn't recognize a bastard's howling grief? Oh, I'll feast on it. Slowly."
Mordred's grip tightened, but I raised a hand to still her.
Blackheart's gaze slid back to me. "And when you fall, oh glorious goddess, when you are broken beneath me—your knights will follow. One by one, I'll turn them. Corrupt them. Warp their nobility into something useful. Even your dear Mordred—"
That was as far as he got.
Golden light flared at my side, summoned from within my very soul. A force that could no longer be held back. A judgment passed before words.
I stepped forward.
"You dare," I said, my voice low and cold, "to speak of my knights. To threaten their souls. To whisper about Mordred as if she is yours to touch."
My hand tightened around invisible air—and Excalibur appeared, not drawn from a sheath, but from within. A blade of blinding holy light, radiant and absolute. The sky above us cracked at its emergence. Hell itself recoiled.
Blackheart took one step back. "W-Wait—"
The hellscape around us trembled. Rivers of molten metal hissed as they recoiled from the glow.
"O sword of promised victory,
O last light of the just,
Let thy radiance purge the impure—"
The blade pulsed. Wings of light flared behind me, and from the depths of the realm, souls long lost turned to witness.
"EX—"
I stepped forward.
"CALIBUR—!"
I swung.
"RADIANT SABER!"
The blade of divine fire erupted, a column of incandescent light roaring forth like the wrath of creation itself. It tore across the landscape with blinding speed, a beam wide enough to swallow armies, so bright it rewrote the shadows.
Blackheart had time only to scream.
A soundless scream—because the light silenced even that.
The infernal stone evaporated. Skulls turned to ash. Demons dissolved like smoke under a summer sun. The very concept of Hell was wounded.
The blast carved a trench of sanctified ruin a mile wide, stretching through towers, flesh-walls, rivers of agony—gone. In its place, scorched purity. The fire lingered not as heat, but as holiness, a wound in the realm of sin that could never be closed.
At the center of it all, Blackheart's body disintegrated mid-lunge, face locked in disbelief as the light reached his core.
And when it faded—when the beam thinned and the scream stopped—
There was silence.
Not the silence of dread.
But the silence of peace.
Even in Hell.
Silence hung heavy, stunned.
Even the damned seemed too shocked to wail.
Then Mordred broke it.
"…That's it?" she asked, tilting her head like a confused dog. "That was the big bad? Son of Mephisto? Heir to the throne? Prince of Soggy Pants?"
She leaned her weight on Clarent II like it was a walking stick and looked at me with exaggerated disappointment.
"You sure that was Blackheart? Not… I dunno, Discountheart? Mildly Annoyedheart? I've seen tougher mid-bosses in gacha games."
I glanced at the lingering light where he'd stood, now just a scorched streak of holy silence across a quarter-mile of Hell.
"Let's get out, Excalibur's light have drawn attention towards us, so better we leave now before something worse comes." I said, urging Mordred to leave before the lord of this place came running.
While I knew there was no lost love between that pair of father and son, Blackheart still served a purpose, and now, under Excalibur, he was gone, once and forever, even this scar would likely not disappear fully.
"Hit the son, and the daddy comes running, typical demons," Mordred spat as she fired Clarent II into the ground a few times before following me out of the portal. I was kind enough to wait for Kaecilius to slip out before slashing the portal with Excalibur, causing it to collapse.
(End of chapter)
*1 The phrase "give someone face" comes from East Asian cultural contexts, especially Chinese, and it means to show respect or honor to someone, often publicly or socially. I'll show them some respect or let them save face by going along with them (even if I don't fully agree)." I normally wouldn't think I needed to explain that, but my editor asked what I meant, so figured I might as well add it.