Okay, so it took me five tries to get to Asgard. The first time I ended up in the ruins of what the signs said used to be Broxton, Oklahoma. The second took me to a town in what I assumed to be Iceland based on how the people were dressed and the way the signs were written. No clue where the hell I was on the third try, the fourth took me to Atlantic City for some reason, but on the fifth jump... On the fifth jump, I made it.

...Kinda. I'd actually appeared on the Rainbow Bridge but I could see a city off in the distance.

Side note... The Rainbow Bridge was just so fucking pretty. I spent a few minutes just taking it in. Then I looked off to the city in the distance, tried to judge it, and...

"Ah, fuck it. When am I ever gonna get this chance again?" With that, I positioned myself for a sprint and started naruto-running in the direction of Asgard, humming the Rainbow Road theme to myself in the process.

I was halfway through my fifth repetition when I finally reached the end. I slowed to a mild jog as I came to the edge of the landmass that I presumed to be the realm of Asgard. The city I'd seen before was within walking distance now and, from where I was now, it looked absolutely beautiful.

But I wasn't here on a sightseeing tour, I was here for a reason. I wanted that Hammer, that... Hellnir. Created by a creature called Bedlam's Child from its own Living Abyss and the Promethium within the body of a poor, broken mindbroken cyborg named Drakoth. Promethium was a magical element from, well, Limbo ironically enough. Really durable, up there with adamantium and vibranium, and full of dark power. Hellnir was, supposedly, created to imitate Thor and his hammer, but with the power over thunder and lighting replaced with power over Hellfire. And based on Thor's codex memories, Bedlam's child overshot its mark a little bit.

Meridus, a King in Black who had impersonated Venom and helped Thor defeat Darkoth, called Promethium an element of darkness that would combine with and enhance the powers of Living Abyss and sought to claim Hellnir for himself... Technically, Hellnir was destroyed, but it and the Living Abyss that had made up both the bodies of Bedlam's child's and Meridus's forms had comingled and leaked into a crack in the ground. I just needed to figure out where to dig.

I stopped just at the edge of the landmass. An armored woman with raven hair stood guard, an impressive greatsword held in her tented hands so that the tip balanced on the ground, her figure framed by the red cape that matched her breastplate.

"Uh... Hail and well-met?" I greeted. "I am—"

"I know who you are," the warrior woman declared.

"Then you have me at a disadvantage, M'lady," I replied back. I could have just consulted Thor's codex memories but knowing too much might be a bad idea when dealing with gods.

"I am Lady Sif the All-Seeing, guardian of the Bifrost."

I looked her over again, taking in her dark hair and well-muscled figure. "...I am going to need to update Wikipedia when I get back to Earth. So, how do you know of me exactly?"

"My King ordered me to keep track of you, Maria Marshall of Midgard—"

"Call me Massacre," I insisted.

"Massacre," the goddess obliged. "My King and his mortal friends are... Quite concerned about your actions and—"

"Blah blah blah," I interrupted, "the big-name heroes are taking umbrage with what I'm doing even though I'm an anti-hero at worst. God damn, it's not like I'm the fucking Punisher or anything." I rolled my eyes. "Can I come in or not? There's something here that I want that no one else seems to be using."

"My King would probably prefer you be where you can be monitored," Lady Sif admitted, "but if your goal is plunder it is my job to stop your entry."

"Fair enough," I replied. Then I tried to sucker punch her.

Tried being the keyword. It wasn't so much that she was faster than me as much as she just... Saw it coming and reacted as I was doing it. Instead of her face, my fist met the flat of her blade.

"I warn you, child," Lady Sif declared, "in all the history of Asgard only Brunhilde of the Valkrior was my superior in the warrior's arts. Are you sure that this is the path that you wish to take?"

A chill ran down my spine and I smiled. "Don't threaten me with a good time."

What followed was hard to describe. It was readily apparent to me that I was stronger than Lady Sif and faster than Lady Sif, and yet her sheer skill with her sword kept me on the back foot. In practice, most of the fight consisted of me dancing backward, my arms shifted into blades which I used to parry the warrior goddess's sword strikes. And if we're being honest, I'm pretty sure that if it wasn't for my ability to mimic the properties of vibranium weapons I'd know what it feels like to lose an arm firsthand.

"You're surprisingly skilled," Lady Sif declared mid-swing.

I blocked, of course, but the impact sent vibrations through my whole body. "Thank you kindly."

I probably could have dispatched her with an energy blast or by Hulking out, grabbing her by the ankles, and smashing her into the ground a few times. or something like that but... I didn't want to disrespect the beautiful warrior like that. Besides, I was having fun.

However, all good things come to an end. Lady Sif was a better fighter than I'd ever be, but she could get tired whereas I, honestly, couldn't. After several minutes straight on the offensive, she began to show just the slightest hints of fatigue. Not much, I only noticed it because of my superhuman senses, but it was enough. On her final strike, I was able to pin her blade between my arms and then grew one of my extras to grab it. I was stronger, so once I turned my blades back into hands I was able to use that leverage to break her grip.

I jumped back for a moment and then, on a whim, decided to inspect the blade. You know, admire the craftsmanship, inspect the temper, that sort of thing, but when I firmly grasped it by the hilt suddenly... suddenly.

I have no words... I literally can't describe what it was like. To see everything. To hear everything, to smell everything, touch everything, taste everything. I was everywhere. I stood over a woman ranting and raving from her prison cell at the same time I stood below a blue man organizing the rebuilding of a devastated underwater city and beside a green woman and a rocky orange man punching the hell out of each other for fun before an audience that was eagerly awaiting their own turn. I saw the Juggernaut charging into and destroying a Sentinel factory, and a man wandering through a decaying rural southern town, a teen girl following behind him as they fled from their demons.

I also saw a blue crystal sitting in a drawer in the home of someone who definitely shouldn't have had it, and... The most beautiful young woman I'd ever seen. Skin-tanned dark, long black hair pulled back in a tail, dressed in a tunic and working dutifully at a forge, surrounded by drawings of various devices both simple and complex as sweat glistened on her brow and the rippling muscles of her powerful arms.

Each vision lasted only moments, it was almost too much... But then I realized what I wasn't seeing. I could feel a powerful bit of Living Abyss somewhere in Asgard, not far from the end of the rainbow bridge, on the outskirts of the city of Asgard proper. Where Thor and Meridus had fought Darkoth, where Hellnir vanished into the ground. And wouldn't you know it, there was a major blindspot in this... All-Sight, not too far below that.

I dropped the sword and was back on the rainbow bridge. No time for fun anymore, I knew where what I wanted was and I needed to get it now. As Lady Sif dove to reclaim her weapon, I jumped over her and then teleported in a crimson flash, reappearing in the field beyond the Bifrost and outside the city. Once there, I generated a sonic blade and slashed through the sod and topsoil, revealing a crack. Then I liquified and slithered my way down.

After about a minute of gravity-assisted climbing, I found myself clinging to the body of a large snake in open air. From there, I leaped to the ground and reformed myself.

Looking around I was in a small chamber made of stone bricks. The snake that was just... buried up to its mid-section in the ceiling, was dripping venom from its fangs down into...

"...What the fuck is that?"

Chained to a stone slab below the snake was... Imagine your standard symbiote face. Big solid eyespots, a too-wide mouth full of curved dagger-lie teeth, overly long, overly muscular tongue that tapers to a point... Now imagine that instead of the smooth, organic, slightly wet look you'd expect, ti's was like... Flesh-colored snake scales.

Like, take a white guy's skin, change the texture so it's like scales without changing the color at all, then past that on a bust of Venom and you have a vague idea of what I was looking at. Blonde hair, of all things, crowed the creature and from the neck down it just looked like an ordinary man.

The venom of the snake was dripping into the poor thing's open eyes.

It was struggling against its restraints, but it seemed to become aware of me and struggled harder, tearing free while I was still too stunned by the sheer wrongness of his appearance. It fell to the floor but pushed itself up and stood to face me.

"Uh... Hi?" I muttered awkwardly. I had the sudden feeling that I was in terrible danger but I couldn't bring myself to react until after it grabbed me by the throat.

I started to struggle but froze as it spoke. "I'll save you," it said in a voice like a thousand whispers.

I opened my mouth to ask what the hell that meant before I felt a draining sensation.

The next thing I knew I was flat on my back looking up at the hole in the ceiling. My horns were gone, my wings were gone, I felt smaller, I felt empty, I was cold, I was soaking wet, and a figure I recognized as Loki was standing above me holding a bucket.

"Well, someone really screwed the pooch, now didn't they?" he said in a condescending tone.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Well this vaguely entertaining teenager who totally sucker punched my brother the other day broke into Asgard and accidentally released one of the most dangerous people to ever be imprisoned in the history of the realm," Loki began. "He sucked out some sparks of divinity that she took from my Brother and Dr. Foster, a whole Hel of a lot of dark elf magic, the lingering residue from Hofund's enchantments, and apparently a good chunk of the dark magic of Limbo, then burst through the roof of his secret prison, stronger than ever. Right now I think Lady Sif and Beta Ray Bill are trying desperately to stop him from getting to the Yggdrasil, and we could really use Thor right now but he went off to Limbo after Lady Sif told him that the girl he asked her to monitor vanished there so who in Hel knows when he'll be back."

Well, fuck me then. "Is... Is there a way to take back the magic he took? I kind of need that."

"Well, in theory, if you took his symbiote and assimilated it into your own that should get you at least some of it back," Loki admitted, "but we both know that you're not going to do that don't we?"

"What makes you say that?"

"Because you've been sandbagging," Loki said. "The entire time, really. It's almost like you don't understand the full implications of what that symbiote you're fused to is or what you've done to it by absorbing what you have." He looked me dead in the eye. "The power you have now, the power you had when you fought the Avengers... They should have been like toys to you. The second that Svartalf magic got into your system you started regenerating to match the power of the dragon that your anti-life half is an offshoot from. Then you ate the leavings of another dragon, this one fused with some particularly advanced technology, and that's not counting everything else that was in your system. You should be an interplanetary threat, a god-killing apex predator..." He paused, presumably for effect, "but instead you only won against my brother and his mortal friends because they came at you with kid gloves. Because they didn't want to fight you, because they were concerned about the idiot child who was messing with things she didn't understand and wanted to help her before she messed up and did something like, well," he gestured to the ruined prison, "this."

I swallowed. "You... You seem to know a lot about me," I said.

"I'm the God of Stories, child," he explained with a bored tone, "And like it or not, this is your story." Loki tossed the bucket back over his shoulders. "Too bad it's such a boring one."

"Well fuck you then."

"I don't think you comprehend the gravity of the mess you've made," Loki said quite seriously. "If the Serpent reaches the World Tree and fells it, the Ten Realms and countless worlds beside will be thrown into chaos and countless people will die. You don't want that, now do you?"

I looked away. "No."

"So right now, the best chance we have for that to not happen is if you grit your teeth, pull up your big girl britches, fly out of here, stop holding back, and clean up your mess. Capcihe?"

"Yeah..." Stop holding back... How do I stop holding back, do I just... what? Let go?

I was halfway up the tunnel that had been carved out by the Serpent's escape when something clicked. I reached deep into my codex memories and forced myself to think of them as my memories, not just an archive sitting in the back of my head.

I'm not sure what, exactly, the defenders of Asgard would have thought when a blood-red wyvern burst from the ground on the outskirts of their city. Nor when it flew toward the fight between the Serpent on one side and Lady Sif and the skull-faced Horse-Man wielding a big-ass flaming sword on the other.

The variety of curses and exclamations uttered when I swallowed the Serpent whole, however, told me what they thought about that.

I didn't... Actually eat the Serpent, mind you. A moment later my dragon-form melted and it was just a humanoid scale me holding the Serpent by the neck.

"I think you took something that belongs to me," I said as I dug the very tips of my claws into the living Abyss that formed the outer layer of his skin, "and something else that I both want and need."

Then I pulled, absorbing the symbiote and... I got back everything he took from me, sprouted the horns and wings and everything. Then I got even more. Not just the raw power of Hellnir and the increased symbiotic abilities you'd expect but... Power, lots of power. Unfathomable power. The codex memories of the symbiote added context. A fragment of the cosmic power of the Odinforce, most of the magic and life force of Jormangand, the enchantments on the hammer Stormbreaker, the power of a man-turned-god named Red Norvil and his enchanted Warhammer, the wild magic of the Yggdrasil staff, and even traces of the undiluted lifeblood of the World Tree itself... It was almost too much to handle all at once.

Then the rest of the codex memories hit me. The good, and the bad, and... By Thor's glorious gold hair was there a lot of bad. It wasn't worse than what had happened to Ben, per se, but it was... a lot of what had happened to Donald Blake had been pointless. Pointless cruelty on the part of Odin in order to maintain his manipulations, pointless cruelty by others, pointless suffering while trapped in a waking dream... Blake had gone mad, he'd killed people who didn't deserve death and he'd killed them horribly but I couldn't find it in my heart to blame him. Then Loki trapped him in a tiny cell with serpent venom dripping in his eyes for all of eternity. I swore then and there to kick Loki right in the crotch with Promethium-toed boots.

I was shaken from my thoughts by the sound of Blake's bones hitting the ground.

I blinked as I watched them dissolve into the white cosmic power of the Odinforce and fade out as the energy was blown off by the wind. I hadn't meant to do that. I only wanted to take the symbiote, not drain all of Blake's power, not consume his biomass...

I fell to my knees and started heaving but nothing came up. There was nothing to come up. I hadn't eaten anything since Knull's invasion.

"I didn't mean to," I insisted to whoever was listening. "I didn't, I just wanted to, I just wanted the symbiote. I... I didn't mean to!"

Soon, a tear in space formed, and the King of Asgard stormed through, his hammer at the ready only to find no battle. He looked down at me. "What has happened?"

The only thing I could bring myself to say was "I didn't mean to."

Thor looked to his gatekeeper. "Lady Sif?"

"It was Blake. He returned, transformed, and the child you wished for me to... It may be best to simply show you." Thor walked to Lady Sif who extended her sword. Thor laid a hand on the blade and went quiet for a moment.

Soon after he approached me again and kneeled down to my level. "Maria Marshal of Midgard, are you alright?"

"I didn't mean to!"

"I know, child," he said sadly. "I know."

The last thing I expected, as my vision started to blur, was a hug from the King of Asgard.