Odin studied Marcus intently, his single eye searching for any sign of doubt or hesitation. This wasn't just about magical theory—this was about the fate of his daughter, and he needed to be absolutely certain that Marcus could deliver on his promises before he agreed to such a radical course of action.
"Don't worry," Marcus said with a confidence that was both reassuring and slightly unsettling. "I can handle it."
The Ancient One nodded slowly in agreement. She had witnessed Marcus drain the Flame King's avatar completely during the dimensional battlefield conflict, but more importantly, she had sensed the precision of his control throughout the process. He hadn't been wildly absorbing power—he had been surgically extracting exactly what he needed while leaving everything else untouched.
There was a crucial difference between someone who could absorb energy and someone who could selectively drain specific types of power without causing collateral damage. Marcus had demonstrated the latter capability, which made his proposed solution to the Hela problem potentially viable rather than guaranteed catastrophic.
After seeing both of his advisors express confidence in Marcus's abilities, Odin turned back toward the center of the island. Golden lightning began crackling around his hands, the energy building to a crescendo before suddenly lashing out toward a specific point in the grass.
The lightning didn't simply strike the ground—it carved through reality itself, opening a shimmering green portal that pulsed with waves of death energy so concentrated they were almost visible to the naked eye.
"Interesting," Marcus observed, raising an eyebrow at the dimensional architecture on display. "I was expecting something more traditional—maybe a statue or a sarcophagus. But you actually created a pocket dimension to contain her."
The setup was remarkably similar to the spatial prison that had once contained the Reality Stone, though obviously designed for a very different type of prisoner. Instead of simply binding Hela in place, Odin had essentially created a custom-made dimensional cell that could contain both her physical form and the death energy she constantly radiated.
"Is this some kind of standard Asgardian containment protocol?" Marcus asked with amusement. "Because if so, your ancestors had some seriously advanced ideas about cosmic-level imprisonment."
Before Odin could respond to the teasing comment, Marcus's expression became deadly serious. Void energy erupted from his body like black lightning, and four crystalline Aya Essences materialized around him, orbiting at high speed in a complex pattern that seemed to bend light around their trajectory.
"Open the passage," Marcus commanded, his voice taking on an otherworldly resonance as power built around him.
Odin immediately began dismantling the lightning-wreathed seal, while the Ancient One raised her hands and began weaving intricate magical patterns in the air. Reality started to fold and twist around them as she pulled the entire island into the Mirror Dimension, creating an isolated pocket of space where whatever happened next wouldn't affect the physical world.
The moment the portal fully opened, chaos erupted.
"ODIN!!!"
A voice filled with millennia of rage and madness echoed from the dimensional prison, followed immediately by an explosion of black and green mist that shot toward them like a guided missile.
"I'm going to kill you! I'm going to kill all of you! I'm going to burn every last—"
The furious tirade was cut off abruptly as a hand wreathed in void energy closed around the mist, instantly solidifying it back into Hela's physical form. Marcus held the Goddess of Death by the throat, his grip casual but utterly unbreakable.
"Who exactly are you planning to kill?" Marcus asked conversationally, as if he were discussing the weather rather than restraining one of the most dangerous beings in the Nine Realms.
The Aya Essences around him began spinning faster, their crystalline surfaces beginning to resonate with harmonics that made reality itself seem to vibrate.
"Your family dynamics are seriously messed up," Marcus continued, tightening his grip slightly. "Patricidal daughters, absent fathers—you people really need therapy."
As he spoke, void energy began spreading across Hela's body like living shadow. But instead of simply restraining her, the energy was doing something far more fundamental—it was pulling at the very essence of death that formed the core of her divine nature.
"What are you—" Hela began, then stopped as she felt her power responding to Marcus's pull against her will. For the first time in centuries, fear crept into her voice. "You can't... that's impossible..."
Her expression shifted from mindless rage to genuine terror as she realized what was happening. The death energy that had defined her existence for millennia was being systematically drained away, absorbed into Marcus as if he were some kind of cosmic vacuum.
At this point, Marcus had become something more than human. His physical form dissolved into pure void energy, maintaining a roughly humanoid shape but clearly operating on principles that had nothing to do with ordinary matter. As more death energy flowed into him, thick black mist began gathering around his energy-form like a shroud.
That was when the real nightmare began.
"Hahaha... join us..."
"Let us share eternal life in death!"
"Kill them all!"
"Feed us more souls!"
Countless voices suddenly filled the Dimension as the absorbed death energy brought with it the spiritual residue of everyone Hela had ever killed. Thousands upon thousands of tortured souls materialized in the space around Marcus, their forms writhing with the agony of forced undeath.
Even the Ancient One and Odin stepped back involuntarily as the sheer weight of accumulated death pressed against their consciousness. These weren't just ghosts—these were the concentrated spiritual remains of entire civilizations that had fallen to Hela's power over the centuries.
The four Aya essences suddenly blazed with impossible light, their crystalline forms cracking under the strain of processing so much dark energy. Then they exploded simultaneously, sending waves of purified void energy washing over the assembled souls and drawing them into Marcus along with the rest of Hela's power.
When the light faded, both the Ancient One and Odin found themselves staring at something that barely qualified as human anymore.
Marcus's form had solidified again, but he was no longer the casual, confident figure they knew. His body was emaciated to the point of being skeletal, his skin had turned the color of ancient bone, and his entire frame was draped in shadow that seemed to move independently of any light source. The hand that still gripped Hela's throat looked more like the claw of some primordial death god than anything that belonged to a mortal being.
As the last of Hela's divine power flowed into him, she began to collapse. Her armor dissolved away, her imposing presence crumbled, and what remained was simply a very tall, very tired-looking Asgardian woman who looked like she hadn't slept in a thousand years.
"Here," Marcus said, his voice now carrying an ethereal quality that seemed to echo from multiple dimensions at once. "Catch your daughter."
He released Hela, and she dropped toward the ground like a discarded puppet. Odin moved quickly to catch her, his expression a mixture of relief and horror as he realized that the woman in his arms was no longer the cosmic threat she had been moments before.
Marcus, meanwhile, had become something else entirely. The black robes that now shrouded his form seemed to be cut from the fabric of death itself, and if he had been holding a scythe instead of standing empty-handed, he could have easily been mistaken for the classical personification of Death.
But he wasn't finished yet.
Marcus turned toward the dimensional portal that had contained Hela for so long, his hollow gaze taking in the centuries of accumulated death energy that still clung to its edges. The pocket dimension had been saturated with necromantic power for millennia, and all of that residual energy was still available for harvesting.
He raised one skeletal hand toward the portal and slowly closed his fingers into a fist. The void collapse technique activated instantly, compressing all the remaining death energy in the dimensional prison into a single point of ultimate darkness.
"This power is quite nice," Marcus observed as he absorbed the concentrated energy, his voice now carrying undertones that made both the Ancient One and Odin's teeth ache. "But unfortunately, it's still not enough to complete the transformation."
With a casual gesture, he released the excess energy he couldn't immediately process. The wave of pure death that washed out from his position was so potent that both the Ancient One and Odin immediately threw up their strongest defensive barriers, their faces going pale as they realized what they were facing.
Every blade of grass on the island withered instantly. The trees aged decades in seconds, their leaves falling like rain as their trunks cracked and split. Even the stones beneath their feet began to show signs of decay, their surfaces pitting and crumbling as if subjected to centuries of erosion in the span of moments.
"What the hell are you doing?!" the Ancient One shouted, her protective shields flaring as she tried to contain the wave of entropy that was spreading outward from Marcus's position.
"Oh, right," Marcus said, seeming to notice their distress for the first time. "Sorry about that."
The overwhelming aura of death and decay vanished instantly, pulled back into Marcus as if it had never existed. The immediate threat to their continued existence disappeared, though the damage to the island's ecosystem remained as evidence of what they had just experienced.
"Don't worry," Marcus continued, his appearance beginning to shift back toward something more recognizably human. "I'm not going to accidentally kill you."
The black robes that had shrouded his form began to fade, revealing the sleek lines of a new Warframe underneath. This armor was unlike anything they had seen before—its surface seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, and subtle patterns of energy flowed across its form like veins of liquid shadow.
"This is Nekros," Marcus explained as the transformation completed and his normal appearance returned. "My newest warframe, specialized for controlling death energy and necromantic power."
The oppressive aura that had made both the Ancient One and Odin fear for their lives had been a side effect of the frame's passive abilities. In its base form, Nekros could reanimate corpses and drain life force from defeated enemies. But after absorbing Hela's divine power and the accumulated death energy from her prison, those abilities had undergone a dramatic evolution.
"The original version could only affect corpses," Marcus continued conversationally. "Turn dead bodies into temporary allies, absorb their remaining life energy, that sort of thing. But now..."
He gestured at the withered grass around their feet.
"Now it can accelerate decay in anything organic. Stone, metal, living tissue—doesn't matter. Give me enough time and I could probably age a mountain into dust."
"And you don't see how that might be concerning?" the Ancient One asked, her voice carefully controlled.
"This is just the basic version," Marcus replied with a shrug. "If Nekros completes its final transformation, the power will be significantly more dramatic. We're talking about the ability to drain life force from entire continents, maybe even planets."
The casual way he discussed such apocalyptic capabilities sent a chill down both the Ancient One and Odin's spines. This wasn't boasting or threats—this was someone describing the technical specifications of a tool.
After a moment of tense silence, the Ancient One allowed the Mirror Dimension to dissolve around them, returning the island to normal space. The portal to Hela's prison had closed automatically once its contents were drained, leaving behind only a small crater in the grass.
"Well," Marcus said with satisfaction, "I'd say that went pretty well. Everyone got what they wanted."
He looked down at Hela, who was currently unconscious in Odin's arms, her breathing steady but her divine power completely absent.
"She's still an Asgardian, so she'll live for thousands of years and be stronger than any human," Marcus continued. "But the compulsion to kill, the need to spread death and destruction—all of that came from her connection to the death dimension. Without that power source..."
"She might actually be able to recover," Odin finished, hope beginning to creep into his voice for the first time in millennia.
"Exactly. And if you decide later that you want to help her regain divine power, you can always guide her toward something less apocalyptic. God of healing, maybe, or protection. Something that builds rather than destroys."
It was, Marcus reflected, probably the best outcome anyone could have hoped for under the circumstances. Hela was free from both her prison and her madness, Odin had his daughter back, Earth was safe from a cosmic-level threat, and Marcus had gained access to an entirely new category of power.