The man was tall and angular, with the kind of deep, piercing eyes that could see straight through people, through their masks and lies and careful personas, and read a billboard on the other side. He stepped over the threshold, carefully avoiding the puddle of blistering metal. Those sharp eyes roamed the foyer for any hint of movement. They had only a moment, maybe less. A gust of wind snagged at his hair.
"Stop right there," Strange commanded.
Make that less.
He looked up to meet the caretaker's hard glare. Instantaneous matter displacement without the need for a portal, he mused. The rumors were true; Stephen Strange was powerful indeed. He was also wearing a set of striped pajamas, the fabled Cloak of Levitation only just now settling about his shoulders as if it'd flapped after him in a panic.
"Sorry to disturb your rest," the man apologized, lips twitching, not sorry at all.
"Uh-huh," said Strange. Curls of dark hair flopped against his forehead. "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"
"Ah, forgive my oversight. My name is Shenmu," he answered, tucking a hand in the small of his back and bowing, ever so slightly. There was no respect in his tone, and the gesture came off as vaguely mocking. "As for my business, I've come to inquire about a magical artifact."
"A magical artifact which I…" Strange trailed off, left the question dangling.
"Are in possession of, yes. The antikythera. I've come to take it back."
Strange's eyes narrowed. "…Sounds Greek," he hedged.
"It is."
"Mm-hmm. Well, I am sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about."
"And yet, it is here," Shenmu countered lightly. "I can sense it… quite close by, in fact."
His eyes roamed the foyer again, making note of the bookcases, the leather chairs, the cart of liquor cruets. He meandered over to the latter, running his fingers over the heavy crystal stoppers. Strange slowly descended the stairs, aware that while they'd been talking, a second intruder had come into the house. She was thin and vacant-looking, with a cloud of pre-Raphaelite red hair that made her pale skin seem to luminesce.
"I'm not an unreasonable person, Master Strange," Shenmu continued. "Give it to me, and we'll part on good terms. I'll even fix the door."
"A generous offer. You've got nice manners for a thief," Strange deadpanned, eyeing the destruction sidelong. The floorboards were bubbled and black where the molten metal had dripped. "You think you can demand an artifact of unknown provenance and expect me to just- hand it over to you?"
Shenmu turned, wandering back across the foyer, and Strange turned with him.
"Just that like, yes. No need for this to come to blows."
"I don't even know who you are," said Strange flatly. "And I don't make deals with strangers who break into my house in the middle of the night. You need to leave. Right now."
Something moved at the door, and Strange edged to one side in order to keep it in view. His eyes went up – and up and up, the hulking mountain of flesh seven feet tall or more. One leather-clad shoulder brushed the doorframe as he ducked inside, splintering the hinge. Strange's eyebrows climbed towards his hairline. The brute wasn't nearly as big as Thanos, but even so, the effect was impressive.
"Goddamn," Strange observed dryly.
He lifted off the ground in one sweeping, elegant motion, cloak rippling in waves. The act was as much unconscious reflex as it was deliberate show of power. Shenmu watched with interest – but it was a bored sort of interest, like watching the antics of a pigeon. He also had a hand in the pocket of his robes.
Strange lunged forward, drawing his magic out into an eldritch whip. Shenmu's hand emerged grasping a dorje, its original brass finish gleaming under a grimy patina that spoke of hundreds of years and hundreds of hands. He shook it once and the bell chimed softly, the sound doubling and tripling, echoing in the foyer as though a hundred bells were chiming at once, each slightly out of sync with one another, so that the whole was jagged and discordant, like a tumble of crystalline shards.
Strange fell out of the air.
He hit the ground completely unprepared for the drop. His ankle turned and sent him stumbling sideways trying to regain his balance, sucking a breath over clenched teeth. He transitioned the awkward pinwheel into a counter-attack, whirling one hand over his open palm and weaving his magic to fling out a deadly fusillade of darts.
Nothing happened.
His fingertips were empty.
Strange posed there for a minute, stunned. He looked down at both hands as though they'd betrayed him somehow. Shenmu smirked. Strange made another abortive gesture at him, but without the dao firewheels to show for it, the motion came off as hokey, like a television Evangelist making a show of calling down the divine.
His momentum played out, Strange grabbed at the newel post to steady himself.
Shenmu gestured at the woman.
"There may be initiates upstairs," he said coolly. "Deal with them."
She nodded and went up the staircase, high-heeled boots clicking. Strange reached out as she passed him, then sagged back again, blinking rapidly. His hands felt utterly dead. Not in the sense of physical numbness or paralysis, but something far worse, as though he'd been utterly divorced from the energies of the universe. Magic had become such a part of him, as easy and unconscious as breathing, that he felt its sudden absence as though someone had stripped every nerve from his body. A hypoesthesia of the soul.
And that sound-
Strange's eyes cut to the dorje. This started when he unshrouded it. Destroying, or otherwise gaining control of it should reverse the energies at play. He swayed in that direction, testing his ankle's willingness to support his weight. When the pain flared, he weighed his ability to coerce it by force.
Shenmu let go of the dorje and it stayed in midair, shaking gently. "The mechanism, Master Strange," he said pointedly.
"I told you- I really have no idea what you're talking about."
Shenmu sighed and turned towards the first-floor library. The dorje followed him like a little dog. Strange hadn't realized it before, but the man's hair extended almost all the way to the ground, white as milk despite the fact that he couldn't have been older than fifty.
"Hey, Rapunzel! We're not finished talking!" Strange snapped at his retreating back. He made as if to go after him, but came up short as the big man abruptly shed his trenchcoat on the floor.
It folded with a heavy whump, like skinning an entire cow, revealing biceps the size of bowling balls and abdominals stacked like bricks in a kiln. Every inch of the man's pale skin was covered in lines of scarification, like streaks of infection extending from a wound, but there was artistry to the design, not just random injuries, or the mindless repetition of something self-inflicted. The pattern was deliberate, a living canvas of hidden symbols. Several places looked as though gold had been poured into the wounds while they were still raw.
Strange had barely processed the fact before the man conjured two gleaming silver rings, each the circumference of a trash-can lid, and separated them with a deadly snick, one in each hand. Firelight slashed along their edge, undulating along the Damascus patterns in the steel.
Strange took a wobbly step back.
Well, shit.
The upper hallways of the Sanctum were dark and deserted. The woman went from door to door, nudging them open with her boot, one hand held at the ready. She found several guest apartments that looked as though they'd never had a visitor in their lives, while several more showed signs of semi-recent habitation. In every case, however, the beds were empty and neatly made. Nobody had been roused from them.
She continued on.
The master bedroom was at the end of the hall. She cracked the door and peered inside warily. The prospect of finding initiates had been slim to begin with – according to all reports the New York Sanctum stood largely empty, with its caretaker living a bachelor's lifestyle – but Master Shenmu was nothing if not cautious. There must not be any witnesses tonight. Not that she was concerned about dealing with a handful of low-level neophytes, but if there was another sorcerer on the premises, perhaps visiting from the main lodge in Kamar-Taj…
It behooved her to be cautious, even if the amulet she wore shielded her from the dorje's negating chime. She swept the door all the way open.
The bedroom was dominated by floor-to-ceiling bookcases that took up most of the walls. Many shelves displayed great, empty gaps were the books on either side had tumbled into the breech. The missing volumes were heaped on the desk, the nightstand, the floor – wherever there was an inch of available space, their edges bristling with crumpled Starbucks receipts, Post-It-Notes, and tasseled bookmarks inserted between the pages. The biggest of these enclaves was the tottering stack next to the bed, sharing company with several glossy, more modern publications from The American Journal of Medicine. The sheets were empty and tussled, with most of the brocade duvet lying in a heap on the floor. The Eye of Agamotto gleamed on the bedside table.
The woman approached with glinting eyes. Given that very few people were privy to what, exactly, had transpired during the final battle with the Mad Titan, information regarding the whereabouts of the Infinity Stones varied. Some sources claimed they'd been used up. Others insisted they'd been returned to their original hiding places. Still others maintained that they'd been pitched into the maw of the sun, to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. But if the Time Stone had been returned to the amulet, and if that amulet was here now-
She picked the Eye up by it's cord. Her thoughts danced, wondering whether she should present the Stone to Master Shenmu, or keep it for herself. Surely with such a thing she would surpass him, no longer a runaway waif rescued from a woman's shelter in Barcelona, indebted to serve his every whim…
She reached up to pry the amulet apart.
"Hey, lady. Does that look like it belongs to you?"
Something shot out of the darkness with a loud fwip. It stuck to the amulet, and she cried out in surprise as it was abruptly wrenched from her grasp. Whirling to follow the movement, she spotted a shape crouched on the ceiling, hanging upside down as easily as a chandelier.
Peter sized the woman up.
Petite, skinny, honestly kind of pretty, his first thought was that Strange was having his girlfriend over for the night and he really ought to bail before he eavesdropped on something private – but the tingle hadn't dissipated. In fact, it'd only got stronger as he'd come across her tossing doors open up and down the hall, her stealthy movement and flat expression reminding him sharply of the cleaner in a mob movie he'd seen once. He tossed the Eye from hand to hand.
"What are you doing creeping around? You friends with Stephen? Cause from where I'm sittin', this totally looks like a B&E."
She flicked a hand in his direction, and a stab of green sparks sizzled through the air. Peter arched like a cat, and the missile zipped harmlessly by.
"Whoa, you can do magic, too? Why is yours green?"
Another sparkler missed him by inches and singed a smoking cigarette-hole in the wardrobe. Peter sprang onto a bed poster, a spiraling piece of woodwork as thick as streetlamp, and flung a gob of webbing into her face. She staggered back, spluttering.
"Chill out! I just want to talk!"
She obviously wasn't in the mood for talking. She clawed at her face, tearing the webbing off along with several chunks of hair. Stacking green mandalas formed around one wrist, which in the mystical and obfuscated language of wizards, meant she was getting ready for a serious attack. Peter stuck a web to the rug and yanked.
Either she was taken entirely off guard, or she wasn't that agile to begin with. Whatever the reason, her legs blew out like she'd encountered a patch of black ice, whipping her skull off the floorboards with an audible crack. Peter let go of his web.
"Sorry, sorry! Are you alri- WHOA!"
An air burst of magic detonated the room, smashing armchairs and other paraphernalia against the wall. Blasted off his perch, Peter hit the ground on his back, spine arched, rolling the momentum into a handspring. He skittered behind the safety of the bed as a storm of heavy books accelerated at him like paving stones.
"Hey, hey, hey! You're gonna break something with those!"
The missiles dove at him anyway. Leather bindings ripped open with a sigh of dust and old, brittle glue. Glass shattered overhead. Something wet pattered on Peter's skull; the air smelled like expensive alcohol.
Oh, come on now! Stephen's gonna be so pissed.
He leaned out a tiny fraction. The woman was getting back on her feet, her expression twisted with pain and rage. A tiny green mandala encircled her empty hand, and she used it to pull down more books. Victorian-era lamps popped and smashed against the far wall. She obviously meant to hurl anything that wasn't nailed down, and then go after the paneling when she ran out of ammo.
Peter ducked back down as a tome the size of a poster-atlas went careening past his face. The tingle was urgently phoning it in, informing him that a MOAB was getting ready to drop on his position, so whatever he did, it had to be in the next few seconds. Peter's eyes shot towards the bed again. Maximum effort. Sorry Stephen.
He somersaulted over the bed, fingers gripping the mattress as he did so. The enormous king-size launched like a S.H.E.I.L.D Helicarrier, blotting out the moonlight from the windows. Books and vases dropped out of the air as the woman instinctively threw up her arms.
The SERTA demolished her without blinking.
She blasted back out into the hall, limbs beating a staccato rhythm on the floor as she tumbled over and over, like a sneaker in a dryer. One of the curio cases splintered as she crashed into it, all momentum abruptly coming to a halt. Peter cartwheeled down to the floor, ready to leap away again if anything tried to play badminton with his face.
The woman twitched.
Her body ached like she'd been hit by a truck. She groaned and flopped over, feeling the acid burn of regeneration already taking effect, caulking the spiderweb of fractures, the bone-deep bruises, the blood leaking from a skinned elbow. A curtain of ginger hair flopped into her eyes as she threw a horrified look back the way she'd came. For minute she couldn't see the bedroom, and she wondered if she'd been hurled through a portal. Then the mattress flumped out of the doorway.
Loose papers filled the air like so many dry, rustling moths. Compared to the dim glow of the hallway, the master bedroom was almost completely dark, illuminated only by shafts of moonlight pouring through several windows in the back. That thing – Strange's familiar, his- his homunculus, whatever it was – crouched in the middle of a sea of broken glass, inching towards her on all fours, reflected light glinting in huge, slanted eyes.
With a bubbling shriek, she scrambled to her feet and fled.
"Hey! Lady- dammit, get back here!" Peter hollered, surprised.
How it she even moving? That should've conked her, or at least given her a serious time out. What is this chick made of?!
He lunged down the hallway after her, transitioning from floor to wall to ceiling, hands and feet pattering loudly, leaving prints of bourbon behind.
While Peter pursued the enemy, Strange retreated.
He pivoted away as another max-power swipe went past his abdomen, gouging a deep wound in the banister. The chakrams weren't enchanted; they didn't have to be. Strange suspected they were sharp enough to behead a cow. He curled his fingers, but the magic remained out of reach.
He'd been hoping the obstruction of line-of-sight would break the spell, which didn't make a whole lot of sense in retrospect; otherwise "Shenmu" wouldn't have just strolled off with the dorje. He had to go after him. Not only was there the obvious dilemma of a hostile sorcerer roaming the Sanctum unsupervised, there was also the matter of whatever "mechanism" he obviously meant to toss the place looking for. Strange wasn't about to let either offense slide.
Of course, there was also the small problem of what he intended to do about it.
The half-naked brute continued to press him around the foyer, leaving Strange with little choice but to keep backing up. His ankle hurt, but not badly. The sound was much worse, like a retractor probing his cranial membrane. It was starting to make him sick. He juked left, towards the library door. The brute ducked one shoulder and intercepted him like a halfback. Strange violently rebounded into a table.
One of the chakrams went up, shining like a deadly, crescent moon. Strange took a deep breath, realizing he'd instinctively gripped the edge of the table. He forced his hands to soften and relax.
The chakram came back down in a whistling arc. Strange waited until the last second before fading to one side, one hand slapping down on the big guy's forearm. His weapon embedded in the furniture, splitting the table with a horrid shriek of twisting wood. Strange could smell the thick odor of the man's body, an unpleasant medley of dragon's blood and sour, unwashed sweat. His other hand swept around and struck two flagellating, phoenix-eye strikes to the underside of the brute's armpit. The martial arts taught at Kamar-Taj had not been his focus of study, but he'd learned nonetheless.
The big man's arm went slack.
Strange gripped him by the shoulders and prepared to follow up with a knee strike.
There was an unnatural convulsion in the man's musculature, starting in his deltoids and rippling down to the ligaments of the hand. He let go of the chakram's leather-wrapped handle, and before Strange could react, turned so suddenly that his thick arm collided with the sorcerer's middle like a felled tree, sweeping him off his feet and tossing him backwards through the door.
Strange flew several yards before crashing to the floor in a heap. He gulped for breath, his diaphragm in spasm, and ending up crawling for several feet before he finally managed to stagger back up, driven by the frantic instinct not to be caught facedown. The brute retrieved his chakram. Leaden footsteps shook the floor.
He should have lost motor control to that entire arm! Strange protested, stumbling away. Even if he's trained to resist that level of pain, anatomically speaking, the entire muscle group should be in contraction. It should be physically impossible for him to form a fist.
The brute's clenched grip on the chakram seemed to disabuse the notion, however. Strange staggered through the mini rotunda, brushing the table for support, before finally emerging where he'd been trying to go all along.
The library, including the internal mezzanine that overlooked it, was bigger than most Upper West Side penthouses, and the main reason why the Sanctum's books outnumbered the dust mites, with hundreds, perhaps thousands of tomes stored in traditional bookshelves or retractable, honeycomb racks. Light sconces were spaced every few feet along the walls, casting a warm, inviting glow that mingled with moonlit shards of color drifting down from the rose window eighty feet above their heads. The effect was altogether welcoming – or it would have been, had it not been for the burglar.
Shenmu's back was turned when Strange came staggering into the room, trying to outpace the brute coming after him with all the slow, single-minded intensity of a glacier. The other man threw a disparaging glance over one shoulder.
"Putting up a good fight, I see."
"Wouldn't want to disappoint," Strange gasped.
The dorje was only twenty paces away. He staggered towards it with one hand outstretched. With every step the resonance in his head grew worse, until it felt like his skull was going to split from the pressure. Grey, soupy nausea churned in his gut as his fingers brushed the faint bubble of magic radiating around the artifact. Between the chimes he could almost hear the suggestion of mantra, of whispers stretching into the infinite, digging into his ears, his mind, scouring his meridians like a chef de-veining a shrimp. The strength went out of his legs, and despite his best effort, Strange slewed sideways like a drunk.
Shenmu chuckled and continued to prowl the edge of the room, taking the chiming dorje with him as though it was attached by an invisible tether. He walked his hand along the bookcases, pinky-thumb, pinky-thumb, like he was using a caliper to measure distance on a map.
"Look at you," he sneered. "No qi. No eldritch fire. The Lodge of Sorcerers has grown weak. Arrogant. Tell me, do you know why?"
Strange gripped the edge of a bookcase and struggled not to retch, sweat dribbling down his face. A shadow darkened the library door, indicating the brute had finally caught up with him. Strange put his back to the wall and slid away, relying on its strength to hold him up. His shoulder bumped a rack of weapons, sending most of them crashing to the floor. Shenmu continued to talk over the noise; obviously he hadn't actually required a verbal response.
"Ignorance," he proclaimed. "Ignorance, and the unwillingness to use power. You could have used the Infinity Stones to reshape the world. You could have made it a paradise. Instead, you restored the status quo."
Disgust dripped from the words. He came to a halt at the gap between two bookcases, long braid swaying. Pinky-thumb. Pinky… thumb. Strange found it hard to pay attention to whatever he was doing with the odd gesture, not with an ogre swiftly bearing down on him.
Something long and narrow crowded into his peripheral vision.
Strange spared it a quick glance, then seized an Egyptian fan ax from it's rack. It was a magnificent weapon, six and half feet of tempered bronze topped with a bladed crescent, like a papyrus stem rising from the primordial Nile. It was a weapon designed to fell gods and other extra-dimensional beings, and in the hands of a master of the mystic arts, should have sent waves of raw magic slicing across the library.
Strange swiped it at his attacker like a sharpened stick.
The brute paused. He stuck a hand out, testing Strange's reach. Strange clacked the ax off the extended chakram. Aware of being hemmed in by the wall, he slowly stepped away from it. The big man advanced again. Strange jabbed at him threateningly.
He could feel himself being sized up by narrow eyes that seemed both too small and too close together, shinning in his face like greasy brown BBs. A silver earring swung from the man's left lobe. The ax tremored in Strange's grip. He'd never been great with a polearm. His swordplay was better. Neither was sufficiently good when his arms ached down to the bone. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his throbbing head.
The big man eyed him with quiet menace, waiting.
There was a crash as Shenmu suddenly drove his hand through the wall. Strange jolted and instinctively looked over to see what'd happened. In hindsight, taking his eyes off the guy getting ready slit him open from crotch to crown wasn't a particularly smart thing to do – but the big man had looked, too.
Shenmu reached inside the wall, brushing plaster and splintered boards to the floor as he widened the hole. Something glittered in the light of a nearby sconce. Shenmu gently retrieved it from the alcove and held it in his arms like a baby. The object was about the size of a shoe-box, made of glossy, polished bronze, its surface broken by several raised dials, like the faces of a clock, and etched with inscriptions Strange was too far away to read.
"What- what the hell is that?" he rasped, surprised.
Shenmu let out a laugh. "You see? You don't even know what's inside your own home, Sorcerer Supreme," he said scornfully, flicking crumbs of plaster from the mechanism.
"F-Former Sorcerer S-Supreme," Strange croaked.
Something warm and wet rolled over his upper lip. He lifted one hand to touch his face and his trembling fingers came away smeared with blood, his eyesight skewing so badly he appeared to have multiple arms, like an apparition of a Hindu deity. Strange sluiced sideways onto the floor, the ax dropping uselessly into his lap. The big man turned back to look as if suddenly remembering the sorcerer was there. Whatever would have occurred at that point was suddenly, loudly interrupted by a screaming female voice and the sound of a door banging open on the mezzanine.
"Master Shenmu! Master, we have to go! Something's here!"
The red-haired women abruptly appeared at the railing, running so hard she had to use both hands to keep from sailing headfirst into the gallery below. Shenmu looked up at her with thinly-veiled annoyance.
"What are you going on about, woman?"
"There's something up here!" she repeated shrilly. "A- a chimera. A fucking daemon! It's not affected by the field!"
"And?" The boredom in his voice was palpable. "Couldn't you handle a simple familiar?"
"You don't understand. It's-"
"Look out below!"
Something cannonballed into her from behind. The loft railing cracked, and she plummeted into the main library with a shriek. Shenmu glanced down as she face-planted in front of him, then looked back up just in time to see her attacker stick to the upper wall.
"And... suddenly there's a bunch of you. Hi. Hello. Where'd you all even come from?" Peter demanded, looking down into several pairs of eyes.
The obvious leader of the bunch, a tall man with suggestions of both Chinese and Arabic descent visible in the sharp, narrow angles of his face, was looking at him with amusement. Peter didn't like his eyes. They glittered up at him like cold stones.
"Seriously, do you know what time it is? Visiting hours are from 9 to 5," Peter continued, annoyed. "It's been a really long day, and I don't appreciate getting kicked out of bed by– Stephen?"
Peter suddenly noticed him slumped on the floor against one of the bookcases, blood leaking from his nose. He looked hurt. More than that, he looked sick. Every muscle in Peter's body tightened like an overwound sprocket. He rolled over on the wall, eyes narrowing, menace and aggression visible in every line.
"You, big guy," he ordered in a low voice. "Back off. Right now."
Why isn't he using his magic? He should be beating their asses like a set of bongo drums, not sitting there with- what is that, an ax?
Strange's glassy eyes rolled towards him, lips trying to form words.
Poison? Sedative? Blowgun dart! Do these assholes have a blowgun? That's how it always went down in the movies, anyway, whenever they needed to take the main character out of action for a few scenes. Ugh, what is that godawful noise?
It was a faint thing – like wind chimes jangling in a distant, violent breeze, or a xylophone being beat by a malicious toddler – but it set Peter's hairs on end. His tingle was going haywire, liking it even less than he did. He glanced at the little bell floating in the middle of the room. It wasn't exactly a giant AA battery labeled "Source of Zurg's Power", but honestly, it might as well have been.
"Well… that's certainly interesting," Shenmu commented, staring at Peter. He paid no attention to his lackey trying to peel herself off the floor. "I would have expected any summons to have been banished."
"Look at you, thinking you know everything," said Peter.
He flicked a web at the bell. A gauzy bubble of energy deflected it before it got close. Crap. He vaulted down the floor and tried to penetrate it with his bare hands. The field resisted strongly, like shoving against a giant wall of ClingWrap. Mr. Creepy Eyes didn't move, but Conan the Destroyer swiveled on him like a tank churning the mud at Verdun. One meaty fist – and the circular blade it was holding – punched forward to squash him.
Peter let it go past, and socked the guy in his broad, ugly face.
The result was 200-some pounds of beef sailing across the room to bury his head in a bookcase, both ankles scorpioning up to clobber the back of his head. Books rained down on his back in a series of dull, concussive thuds. Peter promptly dismissed him. He strained against the field again, feeling a dull nausea start to climb into the back of his throat, but this time his hands popped through with a viscous tearing noise.
Peter seized the bell and backflipped away. The metal felt icy, icy cold against his bare skin. It was still chiming softly.
"Shut it off," he ordered sharply, shoving it at Creepy Eyes.
Shenmu raised an eyebrow. "Impressive," he commented, "...but, no. I don't think I will."
If his eyes were creepy, his voice was even worse. Peter glared daggers. He looked down at the bell, searching for an off switch, or something- anything similar. Lots of stuff these days had the whole magitech thing going. Stuff from Asgard, stuff from other planets. Shenmu laughed coldly.
"What are you going to do, creature? Tear it in half like an ape?"
"Great idea."
Peter seized the bell in both hands and torqued in different directions. The artifact sheared in half with a deafening crack, like standing too close to the unimaginable power of a lightning strike. Rings of magic unspooled, one inside the other, like the spinning cage of a gyroscope, expanding outward in one sudden, concussive release. Bookcases splintered, walls broke. Shenmu ejected backwards off his feet and hit the wall. Fractures daggered through the floor as if an earthquake had shook the building in too many directions. The rose window smashed and came raining down in a hundred tumbling, glittering shards.
Peter looked down the mangled bell. "Holy. Crap," he breathed.
"THE MECHANISM!" Shenmu howled. "You broke the mechanism!"
He was already upright, frantically looking over the metal box in his arms. Peter had no point of reference as to what it looked like before, but he assumed the dent in its side was new. He matched glare for slanted glare as Shenmu gaped at him. There was real terror in his eyes now, and not just for the safety of his precious box.
"The- the artifact," he stuttered. "It was indestructible! Thousands of years! Earthquakes, fires! The sacking of Tibet! How could you possibly- with your bare hands-"
"'Cause screw you, that's how," said Peter coldly.
There was a gust of wind at his back, and a shadow blotted out the moonlight as Strange rose high into the ruined gallery. Mandalas sparked around his wrists, whirling outward in stacking, concentric rings. The sorcerer's face was grey to the lips, but his expression was utterly, undeniably pissed.
"SHENMU!"
Peter smirked under the mask. "Aaaand you're dead."
He wheeled out of the kill zone as Strange unleashed a barrage of magic. Clutching the box to his chest like a man protecting his infant daughter, Shenmu parried the bombardment with an open palm, deflecting it into the walls. A cabinet containing a number of long, narrow boxes detonated to matchsticks. A deep cut opened on Shenmu's cheek as a mandala sliced too close. He hurled a gout of purple fire in response. Strange slapped it into the ceiling. Both hands whirled back around, pressed together, and then separated to reveal a blazing orb in the cage of his fingers, shuddering and spinning like a trapped magnatar.
Whatever it was, Shenmu apparently chose life.
He gestured at the wall, and a spinning portal cracked open through the bookcase. A puff of exotic spices and damp asphalt wafted into the library, and Peter caught a glimpse of brilliant turquoise waters before Shenmu dove through the portal without looking back. The woman scrambled after him in a panic, obviously knowing he wasn't going to wait for her. Peter tossed a web at her ankle, but the portal spun shut and lopped it off before he could pull her back to his side.
The library grew silent. Peter could hear water gushing somewhere, and the puddle rapidly spreading across the floor seemed to bear out his theory of a ruptured pipe. Strange slowly drifted down to the floor. He stumbled sideways, then jolted oddly as if one side of his Cloak had decided to pin itself to thin air. Peter frantically slung an arm around him.
"Hey, whoa-whoa. It's okay. It's okay, I gotcha..."
He snagged an overturned chair with his web and yanked it over, guiding Strange to a seat. Peter tugged his mask off with one hand, unwilling to let go of the sorcerer's arm in case he decided to go unconscious. He looked like he was dying.
"Are you okay?! Do you want me to call the hospital? I can take you if-"
"S'alright, Parker," Strange croaked. "I'm alright."
One of the lamps popped in a shower of sparks. Peter threw it a narrow look, wary of anything that might try to jump out. Speaking of which-
"The big guy, where is he?" Peter asked, spinning both ways to look. "I left him right over there with his… with his head in the wall." He gestured at the hole as if to underline the fact that it was empty.
Strange chuckled. It was a thin, uncomfortable sound. "I imagine he took the opportunity to run while he had the chance," he said. He took a deep, shuddering breath-
Then promptly threw up on the floor.
Peter leapt aside with a startled yip. After an awkward moment, he put a hand on Strange's back and tried to scuff some warmth into his spine.
"That, uh- that's okay! Better out than in. Get the rest of it up… you know, if you've got any left. You'll feel better."
"No, I uh- I think that's it."
The collar of Strange's cloak leaned in and gently wiped the blood from his nose. Strange halfheartedly tried to wave it off. The Cloak swatted his hand with a surprisingly loud thwap, then went back to dabbing his goatee. Defeated, Strange dropped his hand back into his lap. A cheesy smile crept across Peter's face.
"Heh. That's cute."
"Don't you start."
Looking marginally better, Strange wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve. A very pale blue, stripy sleeve. Peter's grin turned evil.
"Hey, Stephen. Nice old man pajamas."
"Nice underwear," Strange shot back.
Another water pipe burst and sprayed them both in a soft, drenching mist.