She lay on the soft mattress, darkness shrouding the entire room. Only the faint glow of a nightlight in the hallway squeezed through the crack beneath the door. The villa was quiet. Salomon had not stayed the night here. He never stayed overnight at this villa, and Natasha did not know where he went. After every bout of lovemaking, he would leave, and Dinah would come in to clean up the damp sheets and bedding.
Her entire body ached, and she was drowsy. The mattress supporting her seemed almost ready to swallow her whole.
She closed her eyes hazily and fell downward.
The fall seemed endless. Her consciousness churned through infinite fragments of memory, and the sunlight of her youth once again pierced through leaves and fell into her eyes. Natasha fell through the darkness, unable to comprehend what she was seeing, until familiar gunfire pulled her consciousness back.
Gunfire. Natasha heard gunfire.
She instinctively sprang up, only to find herself standing barefoot on scorching gravel. Gunfire came from afar, as though she were on a battlefield. The scene before her was distorted as if by heat rising from a summer road, and she could only see a golden figure charging across a crimson desert. Beside that enormous golden armored Demigod, a heavily armored giant wreathed in flames charged with him toward a mountain-sized object at the end of the horizon.
Strange forms densely filled her vision, attempting to block the golden armored Demigod's path, but every one of them was knocked down, sliced apart, or crushed flat. She tried to make out what those strange forms looked like, but some warning from deep within her soul made her turn away. Natasha discovered there was no sun here, yet vicious heat still seeped into her through her skin. In contrast,