A World Where No One Was Hurt

The air grew ever colder. Beneath the dark clouds, the mountains were gloomy and lightless. Thousands of niches had been carved into the scarred, rough stone walls, displaying incomplete skeletons clad in dust-covered Asgardian armor. These suits had belonged to warriors who had fought desperately on grand battlefields spanning the Milky Way. The terrible scars on every piece of armor showed that their owners had suffered fatal injuries, while countless honors and medals proved they had once served in the most dangerous, bloodiest places. Even the finest Dwarven craftsmen could barely repair steel, but flesh and blood could only perish after such wounds—most of the skeletons inside the armor were far from whole, and she could not even raise them to fight. Yet Hela had preserved them, using black swords to replace their missing arms, leg bones, spines, and ribs, displaying them upon the black stone mountains of the land of the dead alongside their old armor and trophies she had once won.

The terrible black sword screeched across the shield. The instant shield and sword collided, Salomon used the Goddess of Death's force to spin with the momentum, sweeping the Sacred Sword in his hand at a speed ordinary people could scarcely see. Hela leaned back, evading the blade that sliced past her face, her soft, slender waist allowing her to escape the attack. Though she had encountered this sort of counterattack more than once—indeed, she had foreseen it the moment Salomon began to turn—her response was anything but easy. She could even feel the unbearable heat radiating from the Sacred Sword baking her skin dry and tightening the flesh on her face.

Hela grew irritated once more, unable to suppress her fury toward Odin for stripping away her power. Before the next heartbeat, she launched her counterattack with