The Threshold to Join the War — Above the God Level
Lois heard James whisper a name he didn't explain—"Panglaus." He could guess what James meant: a power so high that even speaking its name felt like stepping over a cliff. But Lois didn't truly understand, just as he didn't understand the Victory Society's plan. Were they monsters? Or did they honestly believe they were saving humanity by throwing gods into a killing ring?
What was certain now was one simple, terrifying truth the entire Marvel world felt at once: the story everyone thought they knew had broken in half. People expected a Sarkic blood rite. Instead, a group of human "engineers" had built a God-killing arena and told themselves it was an act of love.
The feeling across the world could be summed up in a single word—absurd. Absurd, and yet real.
James slid to the last page of the diary. On the back, a frantic block of writing leaned sideways, like thought itself had fallen and couldn't stand up again.
[The victor will walk on the wreckage of humanity, bestowing clarity (clarity crossed out), glory (glory crossed out), and tyranny upon those who hold on.]
[In the red of my eyes I saw them—yes I did, yes I did—they saw me…]
[Is this my reward? I am not afraid of the remains—we are our remains. I don't know what they are. I don't know what I am. My throat is gone. My throat is somewhere else. I don't like it there.]
The sentences looped and tangled. It read like the mind that wrote it had been bent and then broken. The chat filled with uneasy silence. Even those who loved horror could not laugh at this.
At S.H.I.E.L.D., agents leaned closer to their screens. Natasha Romanoff frowned. "This is nonsense. He's delirious."
Nick Fury tapped the table and glanced at the earlier footage of warped bodies and buckled rooms. "What if it isn't just madness? What if his body is wrong inside? A spatial anomaly in a living man would make thought… slip." He jerked his chin at the text. "Words could tear like fabric."
Natasha remembered the priest whose torso had folded into an impossible angle, the way the air had seemed to ripple around him. A cold line ran down her spine. "So even the authors of this plot paid the price."
More lines from the back page:
[There must be fire in war, but this fire is slanted and cold, burning from inside the atom. I must clean the wound but my hands are wire and cyanide.]
[I see them towering. They are nothing. They are the shadow of fingernails, and the fingernails are no no no no no…]
[To defeat the Titans of fire, ice, and lightning, we must eat infants and smile; even if wrong, they must die—they must die here—no…]
[The victor will walk on the remains of others, and all will submit.]
The chat recoiled. Even the bravest watchers flinched. The man was falling through thought. He had stood too near the engine that grinds gods. It had scraped him, and his mind made sparks as it collapsed.
James closed the diary and pocketed it. For a few seconds he said nothing. Then, quietly: "There's one thing we must prove."
Lois steadied his breath. "Which is?"
"Which gods actually descended—and which ones fought."
Lois stared at him. "You have a way to know that?"
James looked up at the cracked skylight. "There was a security camera on the church roof."
They climbed to the roof through a stairwell that had turned into a throat. Their boots slid where the stone had softened into meat and then reset, as if the church itself had remembered it was a building and forced its organs to become bricks again. The camera hung crooked and blasted with heat, but when James slid the tiny memory card free, the indicator light winked.
They jacked the card into their field terminal.
The final chapter of Valley Harbor lit the screen.
And the Marvel world stopped breathing.
---
The Recording
At first there was only static and the high hiss of a microphone that had forgotten what silence was. Then the picture steadied. The roofline of the church cut across the lower frame. Above it, reality wavered like water heated from below.
Shapes gathered. Not men. Not even creatures.
A tall spirit, translucent and enormous, flickered like a ghost pulled from a star.
A cloud of flies blasted out of another entity's mouth, and then from another, and another—until rivers of winged bodies poured across the sky.
A sea-urchin thing, all needles, rolled and unfolded—its spines lengthened like spears and pierced the heads of rivals.
A six-winged multitude—part moth, part locust, part angel, part nightmare—drove a scaled, whispering army toward a tower of pallid flowers that stretched into a dream no human could reach.
Names leapt into the minds of millions like lightning hitting iron: the Dark God of Streetlamps, the Piercer, the Doom that Devours, the Voice of Time—the very side-gods the diary and the book had named. It didn't matter if anyone had seen them before. Everyone recognized them now.
Bold event: The camera proved Valley Harbor was a gods' battlefield.
The world erupted.
"Oh my god, there are dozens!"
"No—count! One, two, three—ten at least!"
"They came. The plan actually worked."
At Stark Tower, Tony's laugh was thin and a little wild. "They built a colosseum for deities." Rhodey said nothing, but his jaw clenched. The truth was simpler and worse than any speech: humans had rung a bell, and gods had come like wolves to a bell that sounded like prey.
Kamar-Taj's torches guttered in a draft the Ancient One did not feel. "Their plan… succeeded?" she whispered. The idea froze her from the inside. For centuries, people bent their lives around gods. Tonight, people had bent gods.
"Only a god can kill a god," she said, the words a dry leaf in her mouth.
In the Observer dimension, Uatu's eyes contracted to stars. He had seen pantheons clash, but never like this, never so crowded, never so deliberate. His gaze skated over the minor horrors and locked onto three centers, like the eyes of a storm inside a storm.
"Supreme," he breathed. "Three Supreme."
The camera shook.
Bold event: Above the church, an immense, uneven figure coalesced—stone, soil, and fungal lattice knit into a body fifty meters tall. It sang like a whale through a corrupted speaker. Buildings trembled. The sky flinched.
The Ancient One's stomach fell. "That's no lesser power. That's a throne-level will wearing matter like a coat."
Before anyone could recover, the air cracked again.
Bold event: A second entity appeared—crystalline, radiant from a core too bright to look at, releasing a fifteen-second howl that felt like the first sound the universe ever made. The flies scattered. The needles recoiled. Armies of wings fled.
Gods ran.
The Sorcerer Supreme—who had bargained with dimensions and stared down tyrant demons—swore without meaning to. "What— the—" She stopped. Her eyes widened. "Two Supreme. There must be the third."
Natasha pressed closer to the screen, breath held. Fury leaned in slowly, as if closeness might change what he saw. He had watched mutants and monsters break cities. He had not watched gods panic.
The picture fizzed and crawled with noise. The geiger counter on the terminal began a steady scream. Space jittered on the screen so hard that the pixels themselves seemed to try to crawl away.
Bold event: A third presence arrived—but the image could not hold it. Every frame glitched into salt and lightning. The audio sank into a low hum that felt like a hand closing around the heart.
The video continued for a minute more, then cut. The card spat itself from the port as if the plastic had grown nerves and decided it had suffered enough.
No one had seen the third Supreme clearly—but no one doubted it was there.
Across the world, shock turned to a kind of fierce, fearful joy, the joy of knowing even if the knowledge hurt. Three Supreme Gods had taken the field at Valley Harbor.
---
Threshold: Who May Enter the Arena
News anchors shouted, then hushed, then shouted again. Commentators tried to build ladders of words that would reach the height of what they'd seen. Most fell short.
S.H.I.E.L.D. ran models and burned out processors. The mystic orders cast dice and shattered them. The Foundation, somewhere below ground, tightened anchors and turned keys.
And a truth rose from the rubble of guesses:
Bold doctrine revealed: To participate in the Battle of Valley Harbor, a being had to stand above the god level.
Mortals could not enter, except as fuel, walls, or wounds. Super-soldiers? Wiped. Sorcerers? Shaken to sand. Demons? Only if they could wear the word "god" and not have it fall off. This was a threshold event. The arena rejected anything that could die the easy way.
That was why the streets had turned to flesh and turned back. That was why the priest's mind had torn like paper. The ritual had not only summoned gods. It had raised the floor of reality inside the circle. If you entered and you weren't god-class, the rules re-wrote you as material—terrain, bait, collateral. The Victory Society had not only called gods to a ring. They had built a ring that only gods could stand in without breaking.
Nick Fury stared at the analysis like it was a snake that had learned to type.
"So the threshold," he said, low, "wasn't just distance or access. It was rank. They built a lock only a god's key can turn."
Natasha's mouth flattened. "And people were the metal they smelted that lock from."
Kamar-Taj bell chimed. The Ancient One closed her eyes. "A field that promotes divinity and degrades mortality. Someone engineered a hierarchy wedge. Brave. Wicked. Effective."
Uatu, alone with the silence of his office of forever, completed the thought no one else wanted to say aloud: Such an arena doesn't choose the best god. It chooses the god most able to end the others.
Bold consequence: Only one leaves.
---
Aftermath of Seeing
Lois realized his hands were shaking and forced them still on the terminal case. Sweat had broken across his shoulders, cold as ice, hot as fever. He looked at James. "Are you… going?"
James' eyes were depth—dark, quiet, endless. The field anchor on his belt hummed like a small, brave animal.
He didn't answer at once. He watched the empty screen like it might still tell him something new. He listened beyond the hum, as if the low note of the third Supreme still trembled in the bones of the town.
"I think the Victor already walked," he said at last, voice low. "We're alive. That means someone won. The field dropped. The world healed as much as it could."
Lois swallowed. "Which one?" His voice broke. "Which god won?"
James slid the dead card into a pouch. "We don't know. Someone blurred it. The Watcher couldn't see. The Sorcerer Supreme couldn't name. That's not normal. That's curation." He paused. "Maybe Panglaus."
Lois tasted the name and found it bitter. "If it was Panglaus—did it spare us? Or did the Voice of Time spare us by hiding us? Or did the trembling fog—Ssvlssr—draw a curtain?"
"Does it matter tonight?" James asked. He wasn't being cruel. He was being practical in the way of a man who knows where the floors end and the drop begins. "Tonight we leave. We anchor what we can. We tell the world what must be told."
A long, ragged silence settled.
Below them, Valley Harbor exhaled. The wind stumbled through gutted streets. Somewhere a sign creaked. Somewhere a phone rang and rang and rang, though no one would ever pick it up.
---
What the World Understands Now
Bold truth: Valley Harbor was an engineered arena where only god-class beings could truly fight.
Bold truth: Three Supreme Gods entered. Two were seen. One was only felt, but it was there.
Bold truth: The Victory Society's plan worked. They forced gods to kill gods.
Bold warning: The field that allowed the fight rejects mortals. Step in as a person; you exit as stone, meat, or a memory.
Bold riddle: The world stands. Someone won. Someone erased the details.
Lois steadied his breath again, eyes still on James. "So… are we leaving?"
James looked toward the broken horizon. The last light of day drew a thin, red line across the edge of the world, like a mouth that had closed over a scream.
He nodded once.
Bold decision: They would leave the arena's scar and carry the proof.
Because if a ring could be built once, it could be built again.
And next time, the threshold might be lower.
Next time, the arena might not spit the world back out.
James shouldered the pack, the diary heavy inside. "Move," he said, and they moved—down the stair, through the nave that had tried to become a stomach, out into the air that had finally remembered how to be air.
Somewhere, far above, something old and bright watched them go. Or perhaps it didn't. Perhaps it had already turned away. Victors seldom look back.
But the arena remembers everyone who enters.
And the threshold remains, waiting for the next hand that dares to lift it.
Only a god can kill a god.
Only the living can decide whether to build the ring again.
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