I could only stare in silent fury and shock at the viciously grinning Shuri, her clawed hand still held dangerously close to Jessica's face. The rage in her expression and the fire in her eyes were clear indications of her fury, but Shuri's clawed fingertips resting almost gently on the skin near her eyes prevented Jessica from moving. Instead, she merely gripped the blackened chain that was wrapped tightly around her neck with both her arms, trying to create enough room for her to breathe. Despite her enormous strength and durability, the enchanted links of the Ghost Rider's chains barely gave way as she wrestled with it.
"What's the matter, Michael? Cat got your tongue?" Shuri asked with a chilling laugh, showing off a smile that was just a little too wide for her face, and a mouth that was filled with needle-like teeth.
Whatever the hell she had done to herself since I last saw her in my vision in Wakanda, now years ago, it has left her… less than human. And considerably older somehow, since I'm looking at a full-grown woman in her mid-twenties rather than a young teenager.
"Release her. Now." My words come through gritted teeth, my size making them ring out across the burned down neighborhood that we were standing in, the result of my last clash with Belathauzer.
Other than a slight narrowing of her eyes, Shuri doesn't show any reaction to my threat, despite the fact that she has to look up nearly a hundred feet in order to lock gazes with me.
"Now, why would I do that? I have no intention to give up a… meatshield as effective as this one." She says with a grin, hoisting Jessica a little higher, whatever dark powers she has made a pact with giving her the strength to overcome Jessica's own.
"Because if you do not unhand her, right now, I will bathe the very starways in your blood. Every agony that humanity has collectively suffered under your attack on me, I will repay onto you a thousandfold!"I roar at her, barely even thinking straight even more, my anger at her and my worry for Jessica and the child overriding my common sense.
I take one giant-sized step forwards, Harpe raised high in order to scythe her down in a single move, but instead of backing away from me, Shuri merely straightens, showcasing a sick grin as she removes her hand from Jessica's face… and instead lets it hover over her belly.
The movement is enough to completely freeze Jessica and I in our motions, stilling to the point we may as well have been carved from stone.
"Don't…" I say, but my voice is a lot softer now, to the point that I'm almost sounding like a lion tamer warily approaching a particularly dangerous animal.
"Or what? What was it you said? You'll bathe the starways in my blood, right? See, the problem with that plan is, in order to get to me, you'll have to go through her. I know you. I know what kind of monster you are, Michael. I figured you out all the way back when I was still a foolish little girl. You are too selfish, too cowardly to ever make such a sacrifice! All you do is take, and take and take even more, but you'll never be willing to face that pain yourself!" Shuri screams at me, tears coming from her void-colored eyes that carve smoking tracks through her cheeks, making her look like a WoW Banshee.
I desperately try to cool her anger. I know that I won't be entirely successful, but from the looks of her, eyes widened and chest heaving, she's way over the edge right now. It makes her unpredictable. Dangerous. Considering how close she is to Jessica and my child… all I'm looking for here is to take the edge off her rage. Maybe then I can keep her from suddenly and randomly lashing out at her surroundings and instead keep enough sense that she'll focus all that anger on me instead.
"I understand, Shuri. I do. I've hurt you. What I did that day, it gave you every right to hate me. So it should be me you should focus on. All these people, they have never harmed you. They never even knew about Wakanda in the first place! There was no need to go after them, it's me you want! Let the woman go! Harming her isn't going to make you feel better, but me? How often have you dreamt of this, I wonder? How many nights have you spent imagining, over and over again, how it would feel? How it would feel to stand over my corpse, to have avenged your mother, to know that things had been set right again? So face me! Here and now! All those dreams, all those desperate days and nights, you can make them come true rightnow! Fight me and let the woman go, she doesn't matter! It's me you want and I'm right here!" I yell at her, backing away a bit and spreading my arms wide, inviting her to close the distance and take advantage of my lack of a guard.
For a few moments, I can see conflict in her eyes, as she looks up and down my form with a calculating and almost hungry expression. Her grip on the chain looped around Jessica's neck slackens somewhat, as she removes the hand that had been hovering over her belly, closing it into a fist instead.
"Shrink down to normal. Remove your helmet, scythe and shield. Your helmet and shield, throw them far away from here. I will not have those… Elder Gems anywhere near me."
Briefly, ice crashes down my spine as I try to understand how Shuri knows about the Infinity Stones, but I then I notice the way that her voice turned somewhat questioning when she mentioned the Stones and the way that her eyes are slightly unfocused as she flicks her gaze between my helmet and my shield, all the while holding her head a little sideways, a slight, confused furrow in her brow.
Spotting the Darkhold strapped securely to her waist with even more chains, I realize that she probably doesn't know about the Infinity Stones. She's merely being whispered the answers by the Hellish book.
Radcliffe did say in canon that it blasted the universes' deepest secrets straight into your mind: presumably, those secrets include the six primordial forces of the universe itself. I'm quickly shaken from my flash of insight as Shuri continues, the distant look in her eyes now gone and her voice a lot more alert now that she's no longer listening to the whispers of Hell.
"Approach. Slowly. I'm watching you with more than merely my eyes, Michael. One move. You make one wrong move, and this bitch will be dead before you even have a chance to blink. We clear?" she asks in a cool tone, but I can hear the suppressed excitement in her voice.
As much as I want to simply burst forwards and slice her in half, there are two things stopping me: firstly, I'm almost completely tapped out from that final attack against Belathauzer. I'm more tired than I can remember being in a long time, I have barely any magical reserves left and my body aches all over, not to mention the damage I've done to my own armor. But more importantly, I know that I'm not fast enough to get to Shuri before she can kill Jessica.
I briefly contemplate contacting Sterns and Oliver. The sapient truck is probably fast enough to get close to Shuri before she can react, but even with his Tesseract-powered teleportation he's probably not fast enough to free Jessica from Shuri's grasp and teleport back out again, before Shuri counterattacks or harms Jessica and the baby. Sterns can definitely create a sniper-like weapon that can take Shuri's head off from dozens of miles away, but as smart as he is, even he needs time to slap something like that together, and Shuri might have some deadman switches on her, which again might risk Jessica and my child.
Besides, with her focus on me, I doubt I can contact either one of them without her noticing anyways and I have no intention to test how serious her threat was. Still, there's one trick that I hope to pull of that I'm fairly certain Shuri won't be able to see coming.
So, without any real choice, I shrink back down to my regular size in flash, which startles Shuri, but thankfully she doesn't react beyond a tensing of her muscles. Slowly, I raise my right arm to the side, before I let go of my scythe, which falls to the still glowing ground with a heavy slam, its blade sinking deep into the molten stone and holding the weapon upright. I remove my shield from my forearm, holding it by the sides, before I twist my body and throw it far up and behind me like a frisbee, letting it disappear into a rapidly shrinking dot. Turning back to face Shuri, I slowly raise my hands to my helmet, which I take off with a smooth movement. Looking down at it, I can only now see the damage Belathauzer has done to it when he tried to melt my face off with Hellfire from his throats: much of the outer layer has been slagged, the visor is full of cracks and is blackened and the plates that are supposed to slide over the Mind Stone are barely even hanging on to the helmet itself.
The Mind Stone doesn't show any sign of damage, of course.
With a frustrated sigh, I throw the helmet up and to the side, letting it sail over a remaining block of buildings that weren't brought down by my fight with Belathauzer, before I look back at Shuri again with a raised eyebrow. Seeing my look, she gives me one more once-over, before she gives a short jerk of her head. I approach her warily, my eyes gliding from the manic expression on Shuri's twisted face to the desperate one Jessica's wearing.
Her eyes are wide and locked with mine, and she's still struggling to get her fingers between the Hellish metal and her own skin, but she's making her movements as small as possible. Thankfully, her own durability and enhancements appear to have prevented her from suffering from a lack of oxygen, but even so, the blackened metal is clearly causing her a lot of discomfort.
"I'm sorry honey. I should never have allowed you to fight in your condition." I say to her, getting only a small, but vehement shake in return, Jessica's message loud and clear to me even if she doesn't say a word.
"You couldn't have kept me away even if you tried."
"No talking!" Shuri bites out, giving a warning tug on the chain around Jessica's neck.
The move makes me halt my steps for just the briefest moment as my eyes explode with heat, my expression in such a rictus of fury that Shuri takes an unconscious step back before she recollects herself with a snarl, giving a harsher pull on Jessica's chain.
"Quit it with the light-show Michael! Remember: one move."
At her words, I focus all of my willpower in fighting back the heat that's threatening to spill from my every pore, only achieving in dimming the glow that's coming from my eyes and veins with the greatest difficulty. I can feel that I'm not entirely successful, but considering our current situation, this is the best that Shuri's gonna get and she knows it.
Closing the remaining distance, I come to a stop at a distance of roughly fifteen feet away from where Shuri's sitting on her futuristic speeder. As close as I am, I can now clearly make out the Dormammu sign that has been carved into her forehead and the void-like coloring around her eyes. My guess based on her Ghost Rider form appears to be correct: instead of shallow, tattoo-like cuts in her flesh (like the Ancient One had and Kaecillius would have had in canon), Shuri's sign has been carved far deeper, into the bone of her forehead, exposing the white of her skull through her ebony skin even now.
The wound still seems raw and is slightly bleeding, but Shuri doesn't even seem to acknowledge the horrific wound on her forehead, her eldritch eyes solely focused on me.
"I did what you asked, Shuri. Let her go: she isn't the one you want." I say, trying to keep my voice as level and calm as I can make it, but the rage is barely hidden underneath the surface and I know that Shuri picked up on it, even if she doesn't seem to care about it at all.
"Isn't she though? You took my family away from me, Michael! My father! My mother! My brother couldn't even stand the sight of me! He hates me! Because of what you made me! You ruined everything! You destroyed my family!" Shuri screams, her voice breaking as more tears burn marks through her cheeks with a painful hissing noise and the rising of smoke.
Taking a deep breath, I can see the black of Shuri's tiny pupil flash into a yellow ember, before flames start to eat their way from her skull through her skin outwards, her flesh breaking apart in a very disturbing way.
It's different from the transformations that I saw in the Nicholas Cage movies and from Robbie Reyes' version in the Agents of SHIELD show. While both of those had appeared painful, there had also been a sense of transition: something being replaced by something else.
Shuri's version though, seemed… wrong. As if the Spirit had to be pulled from within her, fighting all the way. It was burning her as much as it was transforming her, an almost intentionally violentmanifestation in its host body. Despite having her flesh literally burned away to her very skeleton, even as Hellfire replaces what is destroyed, I can't take advantage of her transformation to dash in and get Jessica away from her.
While both Johnny Blaze and Robbie Reyes were somewhat out of the count for the duration of the transformation, Shuri simply kept looking straight at me, not blinking at first due to sheer focus and shortly afterwards due to not having any eyelids to blink with. Her eyes were the last of her body to be burnt away and within the split second that her sockets became empty I tensed my muscles, hoping that this was my chance.
Before I could even move an inch, literal fire exploded from the empty sockets, and for the first time I was directly confronted with the gaze of the Ghost Rider. Again I noticed how off Shuri's version was, with its fanged teeth and the mark of Dormammu carved in the bone in its forehead, the void-like texture extending from the empty sockets all the way down to cover the cheekbones.
"She's your family. That makes her guilty of what you have done to mine. And the guilty… will burn." The hollow voice of the Ghost Rider rings out to me, and Hellfire bursts from the skeletal hand that's holding Jessica's chain.
Time seems to slow down as I stare in horror as the Hellfire cascades down the blackened links of the chain, racing to Jessica's neck. I'm already moving before the second link has erupted into flame, the tarmac underneath me shattering under the force of my take-off, but I know that it's useless.
I'm too late.
Jessica's screams of agony ring out across the burnt out neighborhood and cuts me right to the bone, making me roar in rage as I close the remaining distance, sheer bloodlust overriding the little rational thought that I had left.
"Stay right there! Or she dies right here and now! Do not fucking test me Michael!"
Shuri's words crash like ice into my veins. I almost disregard her words completely, intent on simply charging forwards and punching her head off her shoulders. I'm halted in my tracks when Shuri pulls Jessica in front of her, hiding behind her and using Jess as a meat-shield.
The pause is enough for me to take in the situation: the chain is burning Jessica's skin, but I can see how the links snake over each other, the chain coiling itself around her neck, Shuri's grinning skull taunting me from just behind Jess' shoulder. Two skeletal hands wrapped around both ends of the chain send a message that I cannot afford to ignore.
One more step, and Jessica loses her head.
I have to act, now. Jessica's Amber Armor is failing against the magical properties of the Hellfire. The burns that are forming on her unbreakable skin are bad enough already, but if this goes on for much longer, then Jessica will die either way, decapitation or no.
I need an opening. Even if I hadn't thrown away my weapons, the way that Shuri was keeping Jessica between me and her would've still made them useless. And I wasn't going to slam a scythe through Jessica in hopes of hitting Shuri.
Thankfully, I had an idea how to create that opening, no matter how brief it would be.
It would just have to be enough.
"Stop! Please stop! I'm guilty, you said it yourself! She didn't even know me back then! She never knew, I never told her! I never told anyone! I'm guilty, burn me!" I roar at Shuri, but more importantly, at the Spirit of Vengeance within her.
As I had suspected (or rather, hoped for), the Spirit is responsive to my plea as Shuri's flaming skull turns towards me, it's burning eye sockets increasing in intensity. Unfortunately, my other suspicion proves to be correct as well, and I get confirmation that Dormammu's mark gives Shuri some measure of control over the Ghost Rider, as the Mark burns with a light that falls outside of the spectrum that humans can comprehend, and Shuri shakes her flaming skull with an annoyed growl.
"You stupid… Obey!" she howls out, but it's directed at the spirit inside of her, and that gives me enough time to make a desperate move.
During the time that we had been talking, my regeneration had been working overtime to repair the sheer amount of abuse that I had put my body through ever since I made it back to Earth. My armor was still damaged until I could take it back to the Forges in Othrys and my magical reserves would take more time to replenish, but at least my body was approaching fighting shape again.
Which meant that, the very moment that Shuri wrested the Ghost Rider under her control again, there was a brief window of no more than a second in which her grip on the chain slackened. I shot forwards at speeds rivaling that of bullets and the like. In the blink of an eye, I had crossed the distance between us, landing on Shuri's speeder with enough force that the metal of the flying bike warped underneath my armored boots. Her empty, burning gaze snapped towards me the moment I came to a halt, but I was still faster to react than her, my hands already closing around the chain halfway between Shuri's hands and Jessica's neck.
Both were glowing white-gold with Extremis heat and my chi, though I roared in pain as they closed around Hellfire-covered links, which burnt my hands really badly, though still not on the same level as Belathauzer's dagger had done (which I still felt even now).
Shuri immediately yanked on the chain, trying to follow up on her earlier threat, but because of my grip on it, the links from my hands to Jess' neck remained slack (though worriedly enough they were still on fire). With a frustrated scream of sheer rage, Shuri leaped towards me, one skeletal clawed hand reaching towards my face as she almost flew off her seat, her jaw opened unnaturally wide and flame spilling from between her needle-like teeth like the foaming of a rabid animal.
She's too late.
In a single move, I stretch out my whole body, striking out with both legs which sink even further into the plating of her speeder, while I simultaneously rip my hands to the sides, breaking Jessica's chain, finally extinguishing the flames. For a single moment, we hang there in the sky, before reality kicked in again and Shuri was blasted away from me as Jessica fell to the molten concrete.
Before I could move to help her get that damned chain off of her, the broken links in my left hand suddenly shot out and wrapped themselves around me all the way op to my elbow, almost like a demonic snake. I tried to brace myself, but between my exhaustion and the sudden attack, I was too late and Shuri reeled me in close to her, while simultaneously madly accelerating her speeder.
It took less than a second before we closed the distance between us, and before I could do more than open my eyes, I saw two long blades suddenly extend from the narrow nose of the flaming, skull-covered speeder.
"Oh."
Pain exploded in my abdomen as their momentum caused the twin blades to pierce my armor and embed themselves deep into my belly, their tips emerging from my back. Some clinical part of my mind noted that the speeder wasn't made out of regular Earth material, since even the sharpest steel blades would've simply snapped on my armor or my skin. The rest of me was more concerned with the fact that Shuri hadn't let up on the throttle, ramming both of us into the shattered street below.
The crash caused the ground to crater around my body as I gasped for breath. The impact totaled the already beaten up speeder which had barely survived its head-on collision with me, and Shuri was thrown to the ground next to me with a painful smack and the clear sound of snapping bones. However, as I tried to lift the large piece of speeder-turned-scrapmetal off my battered body without further aggravating the supersharp blades currently turning my guts into salsa, I could spot her working herself to her elbows from the corner of my eye.
Both her legs had been utterly mangled and one of her arms was bending the wrong way, but Shuri didn't really seem to care all that much about her current state, her burning sockets solely focused on me. She crawled towards me with a disturbing speed, made all the more horrifying by her widely grinning skull, the jaw crooked and hanging open as it was knocked loose from the impact, her legs and broken arm dragging behind her, accompanied by the sound of bone resetting itself ringing out across the burning battlefield.
I tried to move away, but the speeder on top of me (and the blades inside of me) prevented me from doing more than crawl a few inches, before a cackling Shuri crashed into me, sending a new wave of agony from my abdomen to the rest of my body. Skeletal, clawed fingers scrabbled at my face, scratching my durable skin as Shuri tried to find purchase with her still working hand. She managed to wrap her hand around my jaw, and literal damned strength forced me to look up at her burning skull, the mark of Dormammu seeming to glow ever brighter.
Unfortunately, I can't count on the Ghost Rider to distract Shuri this time. While it likely hated her for chaining it, for now they were on the same line: exacting Shuri's vengeance on me.
And considering that I was in fact guilty, the Spirit of Vengeance was probably just fine with seeing me burnt to ashes.
"It took the forces of Hell and calling upon Dormammu himself… It took becoming the Ghost Rider… All of this pain and death… all of it, just to get you where you are now. Broken. Beaten. Mine. No more running away, no more hiding behind your allies Michael: it's time you pay for what you did to me. Time for you to face your evil and be consumed by it. Michael…" Shuri trailed off into a whisper, lowering her skull until we were only inches apart.
"… look into my eyes."
This was the moment that I had been hoping/waiting for. My final trick that Shuri wouldn't see coming. She had me remove my weapon, shield and helmet and made me throw the latter two far away, scared by their power. If my suspicions were true and she was listening to the whispers of the Darkhold, then she probably attributed my feat of telekinesis in the Hell-spawning cavern (when I severed her chain by letting my scythe fly up behind me) to the powers of my helmet.
What I had been counting on (and hoping for) was that she didn't realize that I had developed telekinetic abilities of my own, and that if she did, she didn't realize one crucial aspect about my armaments: they were the only objects in the universe of that size and weight that I could manipulate effortlessly.
Saturated with my chi and forged by a blacksmith, a wizard, an Asgardian and a dinosaur, all of my weapons and armor responded to even the lightest touch of my mind, even from over a mile away. So, while I had thrown the shield and helmet away per her orders, I have been recalling them with my mind ever since, until they were hovering just out of sight behind the mounds of rubble surrounding us.
The very moment that Shuri said those infamous words to me, I had tugged on my helmet with all of my mental might, sending it crashing through the burnt out remains of what was once an apartment building, before I had called down the power of the sun to destroy a Dark God.
Which meant that, right as dark energies began to build in Shuri's eye sockets, a golden helm slammed through the surrounding rubble and crashed onto my head. Fire spilled from Shuri's eyes in an instant, but in a flash was met by the yellow energy of my Mind Stone…
… and the world fades away into darkness.
It's like someone's playing a movie, but everything's fast forward, shot in darkness and wholly covered in fire. Actually, it's less like a movie and more like the Mirror that Galadriel shows Frodo. It's constantly shifting, hurtling down one path and then abruptly switching to another track entirely for seemingly no reason whatsoever.
"-ichael! Michael talk to me!"
"-et out! Get out! OUT!"
"-at's going on?!"
"Michael!"
And everything is on fire, did I mention that part already?
"- need to break it!"
"-are linked, the damage-"
"-out! Get out! GET OUT!"
"MICHAEL!"
I'm reminded of my episode when I first wore the Mind Stone, just a literals stream of memory and thought, slamming into me and dragging me along. Except now the river is on fire (I'm starting to see a theme here).
"-Hell with this!"
"- need to find a way-"
"-out! Out! OUT!"
"MICHAEL!"
The memories are from my perspective, as if I've lived them before, and am simply remembering them all. But I'm pretty sure that I've never talked about the origins of Ghengis Khan with the Mandarin, or faced Dormmamu directly in his own realm.
"-OUT!"
"MICHAEL!"
Just what the hell is going on? The last thing that I can remember is Shuri about to use the Penance Stare on my ass, while I intended to blast her head clean off with my Mind Stone. Clearly, something had backfired, considering I didn't feel as if my soul was currently being judged by a Spirit of Vengeance, but these memories definitely ain't mine.
"MICHAEL! WAKE UP!"
"GET OUT!"
"I'm almost done, just give me a minute!"
"Where the hell is the Ancient One?!"
I try to brace myself against the flood of memories that try to drag me under, fighting for control. I'm both drowning and set on fire at the same time, but I grit my teeth and fight against the current that's tearing at my skin. I force myself to look at each memory as it's played out in front of me, and slowly a coherent picture forms as I puzzle the shattered fragments back together.
"It's been almost half a minute-!"
"-are still connected!"
"Can't you-"
"Such dark magics-"
"GET OUT!"
"MICHAEL!"
This... this is Shuri's rise to power. A dark mirror to my own. Where I started working with the Government, Shuri managed to get the support of terrorists and criminals. Where I used science to upgrade my body, she turned to mysticism. Where I tried to rage against the God I met in another Plane, she submitted herself completely (though it's not like she had much choice. One does not say "no" to the likes of Dormammu without some very powerful artifacts on your side). Where I grew softer because of the friendships that I made and the family that I was building, Shuri kept sinking in further and further into her own Vengeance (literally, apparently), alienating the last family that she had left.
The more the picture comes together, the tighter the river of fiery memories swirls around me, trapping me in the eye of mental hurricane. The deeper I look into Shuri's memories, the more desperate my psychedelic surroundings start to feel. Someone doesn't want me looking at the skeletons in their closet.
Tough luck bitch.
This is the least of your worries after threatening my family.
Reaching out with both hands and letting out a roar, I plunge deeper into the swirling column of memory, flashes of locations and conversations pressing themselves deeper into my mind's eye. I can see... something emerge from the swirling memories and fire. An ethereal figure slowly stalks towards me, made of flames and seemingly unbothered by the hurricane swallowing us both.
The Spirit of Vengeance keeps closing in on me, I can feel it's anticipation as it leans forward, arms spread wide and gaping maw pulled up into a grin.
Yet out of nowhere, a different energy intrudes on this mental hellscape. It's large and forceful, unyielding against the cyclone of memories. It constricts the forces around me, but leaves me alone for some reason.
And then the entire world heaves and the faint screams that I've kept hearing all this time suddenly thunder in my ears.
"MICHAEL!"
Jessica's shout makes me shoot upwards, which I quickly regret with a wince of pain. Looking down, I can see that someone has cut away the scrapped remains of Shuri's speeder, but the two blades are still sticking out of my abdomen.
Fighting through the pain, I try to focus on my surroundings. I'm still lying where Shuri had crashed us into the ground, and from what I can tell, barely any time has passed since the whole... mind-whammy thingie.
I can spot Jessica to my left, holding my head in her hands as she looks at me with a worried expression. My eyes immediately drop down to her neck and I can feel my heart plummet as I take in the burn scars that circle her throat. My hand slowly comes up, one large thumb gently caressing the unmarked skin right underneath where the flesh is gnarled and twisted, my words failing me.
I look back up into Jessica's eyes as her small hand closes around mine. She gives me a shaky smile, her eyes watery as we simply stare at each other.
"Jess... I-"
"It's alright Michael. I'll be fine." she cuts me off, her voice raspy and hoarse and we both know that she's lying.
Even her regeneration can't simply heal a wound inflicted by the literal flames of Hell. At least the wounds are only skin deep, considering that it didn't seem to hinder her speech, meaning the underlying flesh is left intact.
It isn't much, considering the circumstances, but at the very least we can be grateful for that. So I answer her smile, before I focus back on my surroundings. Sterns is to my right, shutting of a torch and retracting it into his gauntlet, while cut apart remains of Shuri's Hell-speeder are strewn around him.
His expression is murderous, his lips pressed into a thin white line and angry tears in his eyes. Looking past him, I can see why: Oliver is back in his truck form, just sitting there on the melted tarmac, completely shut down.
"Sterns? What happened?" I manage to say, desperate to focus on anything else but Jessica's injuries, trying to ignore the little voice at the back of my mind that kept on insisting that it was all my fault.
Sterns is quick to answer, his voice curt and clipped as he keeps working on the blades that are currently forming two railings for my spine to hold onto.
"We found you lying here with the Ghost Rider hanging over you. There was a beam, connecting your heads, made of fire and yellow lights. Jess was there, but she wasn't sure if kicking Shuri away would hurt you. She managed to get a hold of me and Oliver, and I started working on getting that bike off of you. The blades are gonna be a hell of a lot trickier to remove, but I'm confident that you'll live. We were here for nearly a minute before the Ancient One came through a portal. From what I understand, she could feel the massive energies between the two of you while you did… whatever the hell that was. Don't know what happened between you and the Rider, but both of you were screaming and she kept yelling 'get out!'." Sterns says in hurried tone as deploys of quickly hardening foam around the two massive wounds in my stomach.
"How did you get me out?" I ask, and Jessica is the one who answers, each raspy breath sending a lance of guilt through my chest.
"The Ancient One summoned a whip and literally lassoed the Ghost Rider, pulled her off you and sent her flying through a building. Or what was left of it anyways. They're fighting now. Oliver was helping, but she took some sort of device from her belt and set off an EMP of some kind and he just… shut down."
I let out a growl at that, and try to work myself to my feet, but Jessica is pushing me down.
"You can't fight right now. Wait until Sterns gets the blades out, then let yourself heal. You're not gonna save the day in this condition." She says firmly, her slim hands keeping a firm hold of my shoulders.
"The Ancient One… needs help." I manage to growl out, seeing Sterns and Jess exchange a worried look at that, though Sterns doesn't stop his work on treating my impalement.
"I'm sure she'll be fine." Jessica tries to assure me.
Which is, of course, when a Hell portal opens up not ten feet away from us, a frothing Ghost Rider sprinting through it with a crazed howl and fire spilling from its open maw.
Fuck you, Murphey, and fuck your stupid Law.
The Ancient One certainly has done a number of Shuri's demonic form, judging by the myriad of new cuts in her tactical clothing and the fact that there's a magical spear sticking out of her chest.
Not that the Ghost Rider seems to care. The broken bones have mostly healed, or at least to the point that Shuri's capable of making a mad dash towards me, a screech coming from her lipless maw, mad fire bursting from empty eye-sockets.
Seems that having her Penance Stare backfire on her after being met by the energies of the Mind Stone (which apparently sent me on a trip down her memory lane) has eroded what little sanity and stability she had left.
Seeing her throw herself at me like some rabid animal, I tense my muscles, baring my teeth at her as I try to meet her attack.
Jessica's way ahead of me though, bursting from where she was sitting next to me in a shower of broken concrete, appearing as a blur before she slams into Shuri, sending the insane Ghost Rider flying down the street. Considering her bared teeth and flaming eyes, Jessica's pissed and more than happy for the opportunity for some well-deserved payback.
Shuri digs a deep furrow in the burnt tarmac, but comes to a stop by slamming her claws into it, leaving deep grooves as she brings herself to a halt. She doesn't pause to assess the situation though, barely even acknowledging the hit form Jessica, instead immediately summoning another portal and jumping through, emerging several feet above me.
Again, Jessica is faster on the uptake than either Sterns or me, flying in and tackling Shuri in midair, flying her into a burnt out building with an enormous crash. Almost immediately following that, I can hear a resounding impact come from within the ruined building, followed quickly by several subsequent crashes, before with the final crash I can Shuri being launched straight out of the roof of the building, courtesy of what's probably the mother of all uppercuts delivered by Jessica.
For a moment, Shuri's flying through the air, before she disappears into yet another portal, but this time I'm expecting her. Without any real tactic or reasoning, Shuri's solely focused on getting to me and ripping me to shreds, ignoring everything (and everyone) else. So, when a portal opens up a few feet behind me and she comes raging through again, Sterns and I are ready.
He immediately lobs a disc with a worryingly large amount of glowing parts in it, while I quickly recall my shield, holding it in front of us, the Power Stone shining brightly, almost as if in anticipation.
With a cheery beep, the grenade detonates with tremendous force, causing a purple glow to burst from my shield and surround me and Sterns in a perfect force-field bubble in response, while Shuri is sent flying dozens of feet away, her flames almost extinguished and her clothes smoking.
"A grenade? Really? A bit... mundane." I ask with an aside glance at Sterns, who's looking at Shuri's still form with a closed off expression.
"Not just any grenade. Kree-derived tech. Call it the Splinter-bomb, based off Whitehall's Diviner-research. Disintegrates the body on an atomic level." He says with an ice-cold tone that makes the skin of my scalp crawl.
Right. Do not fuck with Oliver.
Ever.
As we're watching Shuri, who's struggling to get back to her feet again, we can see the Splinter-bomb do its work, parts of Shuri's body turning to a stone-like substance.
"It's working." Sterns says with a dark satisfaction, but I'm not so sure.
"Aren't they supposed to… you know… work a lot faster?"
Sterns opens his mouth to answer, but that's when Shuri's empty sockets suddenly twist in my direction, the fire within them nearly exploding with rage. Most of her extremities are already covered in the stuff, as is the side of her skull.
Somehow, I get the feeling this isn't enough.
"Get down!" I roar, pushing Sterns down behind my shield, as Shuri tilts back her skull and lets out the loudest scream I have ever heard in my life.
Hellfire explodes from her body as the mark of Dormammu starts glowing bright enough to appear like there's an inverted sun nestled on Shuri's forehead, a swirling vortex of Demonic and Dark powers surrounding her and ripping the stone away, leaving shadowy light and burning Hellfire in their place.
Still, while I expected Shuri to immediately rush into another mindless attack, staving off her own atomic disintegration like that apparently took a lot out of her, as she almost immediately falls to her knees once the last of the stone has gone.
Her flames are significantly smaller now, to the point that her skull is more smoldering than aflame, and while Dormammu's mark barely dims its unholy light, I can see glowing cracks spreading from where the mark is carved into the bone.
Hosting such enormously powerful forces in your body will definitely take its toll: I should know.
Shuri looks up at me, part of her skull missing, cracks spreading from the mark in her forehead and her Hellfire clearly running on empty. Still, I know that this isn't the end.
Not by a long shot.
She takes a deep, gasping breath as she slowly straightens, and I do so as well, trying my very best to ignore the two carved blades that have gone straight through my stomach and are now slightly poking out of my back, my armor mangled and my helmet slagged.
We make for a sorry pair, but the thought of throwing in the towel never even crosses our minds.
Even as we have our stand-off, our bodies are repairing themselves at an impossible rate. The inverted light from Dormammu's mark is drawn back into the carved grooves of Shuri's skull, acting like some sort of fuel, since the more she draws in, the brighter the flames become, quickly reaching their previous intensity. Shuri's body remains shattered and broken, but as long as the Spirit has enough power left in the tank, it's host will never stay down.
And with Dormammu filling up said tank... well, it's just bad news for everyone.
My own regeneration is nothing to scoff at either though. The majority of my healing was based off Extremis, which had allowed Killian to regenerate entire limbs in a matter of seconds.
Combined with the other enhancements I had added to my body, and my regeneration was far superior to what he had had.
With a growl, I grab the shorn off edges of the blades still lodged in my gut and in a single smooth movement, I pull them out of my body. The process is excruciating, but I simply grit my teeth and push on, and after a few moments, the tips of the curved blades has finally left my mangled flesh. With a disdainful snort, I let the glowing blades fall to the ground, my superheated blood causing the tarmac to burn where they land.
Staring straight into Shuri's burning eyes, I hold out my arm to the side, palm splayed wide open. After a few seconds, a whistling sound can be heard, before my scythe slams into my hand, it's blade gleaming in the afternoon sun, it's edge almost appearing hungry.
As my skin nits back together, I spit out a glob of blood to the side, ignoring the hiss it makes as it burns its way through the shattered stone, twirling Harpe a few times in my hand, before falling into a combat stance.
"Bring it, bitch."
In response, Shuri tilts back her skull, the glow of her mark increasing in non-brightness, before it's sucked inwards, the void around her empty sockets enlarging until they encompass most of her face, almost reaching her chin. And then the light is visible pulled in and Shuri's flames roar to even greater heights, its edges tinted with colors that I cannot fully comprehend and can't quite remember each time I close my eyes.
It's somewhat similar to the effect that happens whenever I augment my flames with my Chi, but... darker.
I can almost see how Dormammu's energy travels through Shuri's skeletal body, before she clenches her fist, raising it high above her head, before swinging it down, a fiery whip of dark energy bursting forth and scoring a deep groove in the molten tarmac.
As Shuri straightens, I can see that the cracks in her skull have spread further from Dormammu's mark in her forehead. It's clear that the more she pulls on the Dark Dimension to keep the Spirit of Vengeance going, the greater the strain on whatever remains of her.
It seems that she's willing to make that sacrifice if it means she can kill me.
Depending on how long this fight will keep on dragging out, she just might, even if it completely destroys the remains of her body and soul in the process.
And then I can't ponder any further, because Shuri attacks, swinging her burning whip forwards at speeds that would be impossible to even see for most people.
I'm not most people.
With a speed that seems impossible with my size, I raise my shield to the side, easily catching the flaming construct of dark energy on the force-field that automatically snaps out from the Power Gem, deflecting the blow with ease. Because of the properties of the Power Stone, there's barely any feedback to me.
Had I tried the same move before I went to space, then sheer momentum would've still staggered me, if not sent me flying regardless.
Now however, I immediately counterattack, sending a thick beam of pure mental energy from my forehead lancing at Shuri, who's still reeling in her whip for a follow-up attack. As the screaming energy beam races towards her, she roars in defiance, before whipping her torso down and to the side, almost definitely damaging her spine considering the angles and forces involved.
The beam of the Mind Stone just barely misses her, just barely grazing her shoulder, before it continues into the mountain of rubble behind her, throwing up a fountain of gravel and rubble.
Shuri whips back her torso, arm raised high to leash out with her whip again, only to just now see the scythe that I had sent flying right in the wake of the blindingly bright energy beam. The spinning blade slams into her, cutting clean through her left shoulder as if it isn't even there before careening further.
The shoulder and arm slide off Shuri's mangled torso, falling to the ground as the Ghost Rider stands rooted to the ground for the briefest of moments out of sheer shock. As it falls however, the removed limb seems to burn up completely, the blackened bone crumbling away and completely shattering into dust upon impact with the molten tarmac.
Shuri has barely enough time to completely comprehend the sudden attack, before a curved blade suddenly emerges from her chest.
'Oh yeah! How does it feel!?'
Keeping up my mental pull on my scythe, Shuri's lifted off her feet as Harpe carries her towards me at startling speeds. Right as she's mere feet in front of me, I raise my shield in a backspin, clotheslining her with Power Gem. The resulting blast slams her away from me, digging an enormous trench through the street, coming to a stop in a crater that's several feet deep.
Harpe had been knocked clear due to the force of the blow, and I recall it to my hand again, ready to attack once more. For a moment, I think that the last blow had finally been enough to put Shuri down, but right as I think that, I can feel a... wrongness in the air.
I imagine this is what it would feel like to stand next to a Dementor.
There's a voiceless whisper on the wind, unheard words softly whispering on an unseen current.
arise my herald... arise once more...
Shuri's flames rise once again in concert with the brightness of the Mark of Dormammu, enveloping her body in a dark inferno. As she rises again (not by working herself back to her feet, but by literally floating upright, like Dracula waking up from his coffin or something), I can see vast glowing cracks spreading across the battered remains of her skull, nearly shattering it into a hundred little pieces.
As she fully straightens, flame and dark energy quickly start swirling around her left shoulder, before with a sudden violent heave, a new arm shoots from the socket. It's a similar trick to what Belathauzer had managed to pull off during our fight. The limb isn't flesh and blood (or in this case, bone), instead a construct of highly condensed demonic and Dark energies.
No matter how much I cut her, as long as the Spirit of Vengeance is being fueled by energy from Dormammu, it can still keep calling on more Hellfire in order to patch up its host, even if said host is literally coming apart at the seams.
Meanwhile, I'm starting to tire. Shuri had chosen her allies well. While Belathauzer hadn't managed to inflict massive amounts of damage to me, I had been forced to give it my everything to kill him in a way that wouldn't raze all of New York right down to the bedrock. And that stab wound in the side of my chest was still hurting like a bitch!
I was running on fumes, and the more damage my body took, the less effective I would be. Clearly my opponent had no such issues holding her back.
As I was considering my situation, Shuri flexed her new arm a few times, before her empty sockets turned back towards me. The void marring her skeletal face seemed to almost burn with power, and somehow, that fanged-filled maw managed to turn up into an even larger sinister grin.
I grip my weapons tighter as I get her message loud and clear: it's time for round two.
"This... is the end!" she screams at me.
However, right after Shuri pushes off, arms spread wide and clawed fingers splayed out, Jessica drops down from the sky right behind her, cratering the ground underneath even further as she lashes out, managing the place Shuri in a chokehold, brutally halting her rushed advance.
"Now!" Jessica roars, and for a moment I think she's talking to me, until a wizarding portal slams into existence in front of them. The Ancient One exits at a dead run, her clothing singed and her left arm dangling uselessly at her side, a determined expression on her face, made all the more fearsome by the large burns covering the entire left side, exposing the muscles and sinews underneath.
My eyes widen when I realize what their plan is, but even as I push off, roaring "DON'T!" at the top of my lungs, I know that I'm too late.
Sliding to a stop less than a foot away from the struggling Shuri, the Ancient One brings in her working right arm close and low to her torso, before she slams it forwards with a yell…
… pushing the Spirit of Vengeance straight out of Shuri…
… and into Jessica.
As Hellfire covers her and starts sinking into her, Shuri's flesh and blood form is restored, missing large patches of skin and muscles as she falls to her knees with a chocked off gasp. Her artificial arm falls apart in a mass of glowing shadows, exposing the horrific (and completely smooth) cut where her shoulder used to be.
Not that I even remotely care about her right now, my horrified eyes fixed on Jessica's burning form.
One small mercy is that she's not screaming at least, but she's gritting her teeth and squeezing her eyes shut in clear pain… right before she's completely covered in fire.
"JESSICA!" I roar, bursting forwards, but the Ancient One holds up her arm to stop me from getting any closer.
"You! What did you do?!" I round on her, my eyes and veins glowing with my rage, but the Ancient One doesn't even look at me, instead staring at the pillar of Hellfire in front of us.
"I do not know if this will work or not. Be prepared for anything, but do not act rashly. Interfere now… and we may lose her... forever."
I nearly take her head off before I manage to control myself, turning to look at Jessica's burning form with a desperate gaze, trying to see anything through the roiling Hellfire that covers her entirely.
After nearly a full minute, the Hellfire is suddenly… sucked inwards, sinking deep into Jessica's body until only her hands and head are covered in flame. Her hands are skeletal, and her head has become a skull, but the corona of flame surrounding it is larger than I have ever seen on a Ghost Rider, almost appearing like hair that's floating underwater.
"Jess?" I try hesitantly, but the Ghost Rider doesn't look at me, its head instead turning down… at where Shuri's desperately clinging to life, bleeding out on the ground.
Besides her missing arm, she's missing large patches of skin and flesh where Stern's Splinter-Bomb nearly de-atomized her, including the right side of her head. Glowing cracks spear through the flesh surrounding the Mark in her forehead, spilling dark blood. With those types of injuries, most humans would've died already. Shuri isn't really human anymore though, as is made clear when we can clearly see tendrils made of multicolored lights within a spectrum that exists outside of reality can be seen form the large gaping wound in the side of her head... and the tendrils start reaching out and weaving back together.
With a single swing of its arm, the new Ghost Rider summons a whip made of fire and swings it at the prone young woman, effortlessly reeling her mangled form in, catching her by the throat with one skeletal hand and reeling her in close.
"What was it you said?" the hollow voice comes from the open jaw of the Ghost Rider, sending a chill down my spine as I'm not sure if I'm still looking at my Jessica… or something else entirely.
"Ahh… yes, I remember now." The skull says, its grin somehow appearing to grow even wider, Shuri letting out a gurgling whimper as she weakly struggles against its grip.
"Look into my eyes. Bitch."
And with that, the empty sockets of Jessica's skull explode with Hellfire, as a burning light comes from Shuri's eyes, which keeps growing brighter and brighter, while Shuri's agonized screams continue to increase. After a few moments, her eyes catch fire as her screams reach a fever pitch, and I can spot Sterns from the corner of my eye as he quickly turns away with a queasy expression on his face.
Jessica doesn't let up on the Penance Stare though, the flames surrounding her skull growing to match the twin infernos that are blazing from Shuri's mangled eyes. For a few more moments, where Shuri keeps twitching and screaming, flames keep bursting from her void-colored sockets…
… until it's suddenly all over. Shuri's screams die out, her twitches stop, the fire lessens and Jessica unceremoniously tosses the woman's corpse to the ground with a low growl. Twin trails of smoke come from the two gaping holes where Shuri's eyes once were as her body lies motionless on the torn up concrete ground.
The end of Shuri of the Golden Tribe.
At least, that's what I think until the corpse twitches. The glow from Dromammu's mark hasn't dimmed in the slightest, I quickly notice. In fact, it's quickly growing even brighter, before with a shattering sound, the cracks from Shuri's forehead lance even further, slashing down across her torso and even further down towards her legs.
Again I feel that chilling cold coming from everywhere and nowhere, but this time the sound is definitely real, instead of some eerie whispers from thin air.
They come from Shuri's mouth.
"Impressive... But ultimately... useless... you will never defeat me... Hyperion."
Shuri's corpse gives a mocking laugh, before her head turns towards me with jerking movements. I'm standing slightly behind her though, so she can't turn it far enough to face me... or so I think right up to when Shuri simply keeps turning her head even further, until her chin is resting above her shoulder blade.
Her eyes are burnt from her head, and Shuri's definitely dead, but somehow her lips still peel back in a mockery of a smile.
"My rise... is inevitable..."
"The fuck it is!" I roar, slamming down the blade of Harpe straight in the middle of the Mark.
An unholy scream rings out as Shuri's corpse stiffens, a swirling vortex of light erupting from the cut in the Mark. The energy keeps increasing, trying to push the blade out of Shuri's skull, but with a roar of effort and sheer rage, I push the enhanced blade even further, before the sound of shattering glass booms out across the battlefield.
And just like that, the dark energy has left Shuri's body completely, leaving an ordinary (if unusually battered) human corpse in its wake.
"To think he has such power... that not even death stops his Chosen..." the Ancient One softly murmurs.
I barely even pay attention to her, since I have much more important matters on my mind right now as I warily approach the motionless Ghost Rider, whose staring at the dead Shuri at her feet.
"Jessica? Babe? You okay in there?"
For a moment, the flaming skeleton doesn't react to my questions and I fear the worst. Then, she gives a slow nod before turning to look at me. I try to spot something of Jessica in that burning gaze, but other than the same leather trenchcoat and ripped jeans and shirt underneath, there's nothing that shows me I'm looking at Jessica.
Still, when her jaw drops low and she starts speaking to me, I can't help but let out an explosive laugh of relief, despite the situation.
"It's me, Michael."
Her next words vanish my relief like snow before the sun.
"I'm not alone. It's pressing in ony my thoughts. It wants to take over. It has a job. I have a job. And… I need… transportation?" Jessica slowly says, as if the mere act of speaking is an enormous battle of the mind and will.
What she says next completely took me by surprise though.
"Where's Susan?"
AN: Oof! I originally intended to wrap up the whole Invasion Arc in this single chapter. When Michael and Shuri mind-whammied each other, I wanted to maybe spend five lines on that part. Just a simple Michael POV: "I saw Shuri get Nightshade, team-up with the Mandarin (it's canon that he's descended from Genghis Khan btw), through him use/become the Black Sky of the Hand, which brings her into contact with Dormammu, who tells her to take the Ghost Rider, use it to track down the Darkhold and use it to open a portal to Hell, which would weaken the Sanctums and Earth's defenders, after which Kamar-Taj can be breached and a portal to the Dark Dimensions be opened. Oh, and get the order to kill me in the meantime by using two armies and a Dark God as a mere fucking diversion". Instead, we're almost at 17k… and the Invasion is still not finished! Aarrghh! Why can't my characters fucking listen to me for once and stick to the goddamn script! Whatever, I'm out. Finals are next week, I've got a lot of administrative and bureaucratic bullshit to get through in preparation for next year and I'm bone-tired right now. I hope that you guys at least enjoyed the explanation from how Shuri went from Nobody to Nightmare in only a year. We'll get to your regularly scheduled murder and mayhem in the next chapter. Cheers!
AN2: So, massive Edit here. I took out all of Shuri's flashbacks, raised the stakes by having Jessica be hurt and expanded on the end fight more, trying to show why the Ancient One thought that making Jessica the new Ghost Rider was necessary. For those of you who are sad to see Shuri's Road to Darkness go (if you are, you are in a very small minority), they can still be read over on Spacebattles, where I've chopped them up into neat little after credits scenes and slapped them onto earlier chapters. I would have done the same here, but the editing mode of is just too unwieldy for that. Yeah, anyways, let me know what you think of the changes. Cheers!
Fun Fact: The Penance Stare doesn't work on beings with more than two eyes. Amongst beings of the two-eyes variety that the Stare hasn't worked on either are: Venom, Deadpool and the Hulk. It also doesn't work on the Punisher and in his case, it's explicitly stated it's because he feels absolutely zero remorse for anyone he has killed. A future version of the Punisher ended up becoming the Ghost Rider himself, as well as a Herald of Galactus, turning into the Cosmic Ghost Rider. The other notable moment that the Ghost Rider was shared with another power was when the Red Hulk fused with Venom and then became the new host for the Spirit of Vengeance. It was pretty badass (though sadly shortlived).
Special shout-out to all of my amazing patrons! Thank you for your support, IronmanMarkIV, Shaman95, justlovereadin, Daniel Dorfman, DavidJP, CJ Elsen, Sam, Carn Krauss, ReaperScythe, Thordur Hrafn, Kyle Reese, Khan, RLStrained, Vu, Roman Krupkin. Thanks again, you guys are amazing!