Raiden threw Reptile's battered carcass to the floor, the scaled flesh still smoldering, and scanned the chamber for any sign of its master. Instead, the god of thunder beheld a haunting sight that clutched at his heart. He approached the stone altar, thoughts a roiling tumult as he noted the woman's completely still form, and not even the whisper of breath upon her lips.
Y/N's lifeless body beckoned Raiden inexorably forward. Fujin's warnings, his own bickering, and the guilt of desire weighed terribly as he looked upon this frail, cold, mortal woman before him.
Consumed by grief, he finally averted his eyes. Rage, sorrow, and regret blinding him to the sorcerer's sudden attack. Raiden felt his collar jerked back, and in a flash he was hurled in an arc through the air, landing upon countless sharpened spikes of bone that pulsed with hellish power, impaling him throughout. Raiden choked in shock, his blood suffused with divine essence spattering the ground as he struggled in vain to free himself. A volley of flaming, chittering skulls assailed the god of thunder as he attempted to rally, and a smirking Shang Tsung revealed himself with dissipating wreathes of flame. He bid the hellish spikes to rise, forcing the incapacitated Raiden to suffer a clearer view of the lovely liability he had so foolishly come to embrace.
The slab transformed into a serpent of stone, eyes and mouth burning with flame. It coiled and slithered to present the limp body of Y/N to Raiden and Shang Tsung.
"Truly I did not think it possible at first… The God of Thunder, protector of an entire realm, forsaking everything for something so insignificant." Shang Tsung taunted, savoring everything about this moment, still not quite believing it was reality.
Whether out of shame, or the sheer force of the fatal blows rained upon his body, Raiden did not speak. He could only struggle, coughing up blood infused with the light of his divinity as the shapeshifter stepped between he and the body of Y/N, held captive within the stone serpent's coils.
"How sad for Earthrealm that its greatest protector was too busy salivating with licentious desire to notice a trap barely worthy of a parlor magician. I hadn't even the time to properly prepare after your brother so bullishly interrupted our moment of… intimacy."
This caused Raiden to tense with anger, and with a crackle of lightning, he once again attempted to free himself, only to be met with another devastating volley of brimstone and demonic blasts from Shang Tsung.
"Calm yourself, Lord Raiden…" Shang Tsung smirked, "this is truly unbecoming of the lord of the skies. I haven't even claimed her soul…yet. That is something I wanted you to see, personally…"
"NO…!" Raiden was finally able to force out a single, desperate statement as he watched Shang Tsung conjure threads of green energy that sought out Y/N's soul. The emerald tendrils slipped through her eyes and mouth, shaking her from the death-like state that the sorcerer had forced upon her. With a shuddering gasp, she writhed defiantly within the stone coils, and for the barest moment, the cock-sure smile on Shang Tsung's face faltered.
Before further scrutiny could be given, Shang Tsung was thrown bodily back by an incredible gale, striking the serpent with a wet crunch that fractured the stone prison. It crumbled behind him, allowing Y/N to collapse to the ground, freed of her captivity yet still bewildered and blinded in her slow return to consciousness.
"You mock my brother, and yet mirror his shortcomings to a fault, Shang Tsung." Fujin coalesced from the very air, brushing a bit of lingering soot from his body, his clothes clearly singed from his brief time in the Netherrealm's pits.
With a sneer, and not a moment's hesitation, Shang Tsung disappeared in a welt of flames. Soon after his departure, the bone and brimstone spikes that had skewered Raiden through, retracted with horrific shlucking sounds. Fujin ran to his brother, noting the acid burns about his neck and the countless nether blades that had pierced his body. He offered a hand as he helped Raiden to his feet. Both the lords of wind and lightning then looked to the stirring mortal as she groaned and placed a shaking hand to her forehead.
"Why do you hesitate, brother?" Fujin inquired in low tones, noting the utter paralysis that seemed to claim Raiden in that moment.
"I am a fool, Fujin… Though I abhor the very being of that duplicitous serpent, his assertions were not inaccurate… I cannot continue in this manner. For the good of Earthrealm, I must abandon this lunacy of the heart."
"Why speak you so, brother? Surely you-"
"Do not question me, Fujin. This is painful enough…"
Fujin looked on in wordless astonishment as Raiden, clearly pining for this woman he had just risked everything to save, disappeared in a flash of light.
Incensed at his brother's uncharacteristic impulsiveness, Fujin stepped over to Y/N and gathered her up in his arms carefully. She keened and cried out, a number of injuries sustained during her ordeal becoming obvious as the wind god cradled her body. As he held the swooning woman, something about her piqued Fujin's senses in a way he couldn't articulate, but the sensation gave him pause as his glowing eyes took in the mortal that had captured his brother's heart.
Fujin and Y/N disappeared in a swirling gale, leaving the damp of the chamber, and ushering in silence once again… Until a swirling vortex of green peeled open within the empty space.
An imposing figure clad in bladed, black leather, and carrying the air of death stepped through, surveying the smoking corpse of Reptile and crumbling serpent altar with an inscrutable expression. His pale white face, and the black and red markings around his eyes and forehead suggested dark magics of the most revolting kind, and he sniffed with a disinterested sort of passivity as he spake into the darkness. "I wouldn't have believed it had I not seen it. The sanctimonious lord of lightning has truly been felled by a mortal woman's heart."
"You think me dishonest, Quan Chi?" Shang Tsung remarked, stepping out from the shadows.
"Perish the thought," he smiled wryly. "Though I see you have failed to acquire her soul as planned, and after I went through all that trouble to distract the wind god."
"A minor oversight," Shang Tsung lied, "I thought it beneficial that she remain whole for what comes next."
Quan Chi was not convinced, though his expression revealed nothing of his internal thoughts. "Very well. She has ingested the tincture, then?"
"Oh yes," smiled the soul stealer, "that much, I ensured…" his tongue deftly traced the interior of his lower lip.
"Then let us not waste any more time, Shang Tsung."
As the two sorcerers commiserated, far in the frozen heights of the Himmaleh, before an imposing circular stone door wreathed with countless vedic carvings, a chill mountain wind delivered two figures.
