BOOM.
The sound hit Abel's chest like a physical force, even from six stories up.
He stood on the rooftop of a tenement building in Harlem, hood up, wand at his side, watching two titans tear each other apart on the street below. The Hulk, a mountain of green muscle and primal fury, grappled with something that might have been human once but wasn't anymore. Abomination. Bigger, meaner, covered in bony protrusions that caught the streetlight and gleamed like wet teeth.
A taxi flew through the air. A lamppost bent in half. The street cracked open like an eggshell beneath their combined weight.
Abel watched for exactly three seconds. Long enough to confirm they were occupied. Long enough to verify that neither of them was going anywhere for the next several minutes.
Then he turned north and moved.
His body dissolved into black smoke.
Not Apparition. Not exactly. This was something adjacent, a variant application he'd been practicing since mastering the basic form. Instead of instantaneous point-to-point teleportation, the caster's body transformed into smoke, dark for most wizards, luminous for the particularly virtuous, and flew through open air at speed. Slower than true Apparition but vastly more flexible. You could change direction mid-flight. You could attack while moving. You could see your surroundings instead of blinking from one location to another blind.
In his previous life, he'd watched the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Eaters fight in this form. Black smoke and white light spiraling through the sky above London, spells flying between the two streams, the night air splitting with the sound of curses and counter-curses. It had been terrifying and beautiful in equal measure.
Now it was his turn.
The black smoke streaked across the Harlem skyline, invisible against the dark sky, silent except for the faint hiss of displaced air. Below, sirens wailed. Military helicopters circled the Hulk fight, searchlights carving white columns through the dust. Nobody looked up. Nobody saw a ribbon of darkness cutting through the night above their heads.
Abel followed the trail.
The soldiers had left an obvious path. Overturned barricades, abandoned vehicles, scattered equipment. The route led to a building three blocks from the main fight, a converted industrial space that had been repurposed as a laboratory. The front door was gone, ripped off its hinges by something large and angry.
Abel's smoke form spiraled through a broken window on the third floor and reconstituted inside the lab.
He solidified in silence. Wand up. Eyes scanning.
The laboratory was wrecked. Overturned equipment, shattered glass, puddles of unidentifiable liquid on the floor. But the important things were still here. Along the far wall, a rack of blood bags, each one labeled with a serial number and a biohazard sticker. In the center of the room, a broken containment vessel, its contents dripping steadily onto the floor. Bruce Banner's cloned blood, replicated and stored by the man who'd been operating under the alias "Mr. Blue." Samuel Sterns.
Sterns himself was gone. A broken jar lay on the floor beneath the containment vessel, blood pooling around it in a shape that looked vaguely like a head had been resting there. Whoever had been lying in that puddle had absorbed something, felt it change them, and left.
Sterns. He got exposed to the Bruce's blood. That's how the Leader is born in the comics at least.
Not Abel's problem. Not today.
Abel pointed his wand at the security cameras.
"Reducto."
Four quiet pops. Four cameras became four piles of plastic shards and sparking wiring. No footage of what happened next.
Then he went to work.
The wand danced. Blood bags lifted from their racks and floated toward him in a silent procession. Containment vials followed. File folders from the desk. A stack of hard drives from the computer terminal. Research notes, experimental logs, chemical analysis printouts, everything Sterns had accumulated in his study of Banner's unique biology.
All of it flew into the silk bag.
The Undetectable Extension Charm swallowed everything without complaint. Dozens of blood bags, half a shelf of documents, three hard drives, and assorted equipment disappeared into a pouch the size of his palm. The bag didn't bulge. Didn't change weight. Didn't do anything except hold more than physics said it should.
Gamma-irradiated blood with unique mutagenic properties. Research data on the Hulk's cellular structure. Sterns's experimental notes on replication and synthesis. This is years of research, sitting in my pocket.
Footsteps in the corridor below. Heavy. Military boots.
Time to go.
Abel dissolved back into smoke and flowed out through the same broken window he'd entered. The black ribbon climbed into the sky and banked south, leaving behind an empty laboratory that would confuse three separate intelligence agencies for months.
The smoke descended toward Queens.
Abel was already thinking about next steps when he felt it.
An energy. Massive. Overwhelming. Arriving from somewhere to the north with the suddenness of a lightning strike, except this wasn't electricity. This was something older, something that resonated at a frequency Abel's magical senses recognized but couldn't classify. The sheer scale of it made his skin prickle. The hairs on his arms stood upright. His wand, still in his hand, vibrated like a tuning fork.
What the hell was that?
He reformed on his apartment rooftop and turned north. The New York skyline glittered under a hazy summer sky. Nothing visible. No explosion, no light, no disturbance. The people on the streets below walked and talked and lived without any awareness that something had just arrived on Earth with enough magical force to register from two thousand miles away.
Only I can feel it. Which means it's on the magical spectrum. Not technological. Something dimensional or cosmic it is then, but what?
A memory surfaced. Asgard. The Bifrost. A rainbow bridge that could transport beings across the Nine Realms, delivering them to Earth with a surge of energy that would look like nothing to human instruments but would blaze like a bonfire to anyone with magical sensitivity.
Odin. He's banished Thor. Mjolnir just hit Earth.It's earlier then in the mcu.
The timeline clicked into place. Thor's hammer arrived first, thrown down separately, embedding itself in the New Mexico desert. Thor himself would follow shortly, stripped of his power, mortal and furious. And the Ancient One had gone to Mexico, which was close enough to New Mexico to not be a coincidence.
She already knew. Of course she knew.
Abel didn't go home. He opened a portal to Kamar-Taj.
Kamar-Taj
The courtyard was quiet. Too quiet. No students training. No sorcerers crossing between buildings. The usual ambient hum of activity was absent, replaced by a stillness that felt deliberate.
Wong stood guard at the entrance to the eastern wing, arms folded, his broad face set in the particular expression of a man who'd been told to hold the fort and intended to hold it with his bare hands if necessary.
"Wong. Where is the Ancient One?"
"Mexico. She said something needed investigating."
Mexico. Mjolnir. I was right then
"And the others? Where's Kaecilius? Mordo?"
"Gone. Both of them." Wong's jaw tightened. "Blackheart. Mephisto's son. He crossed into our dimension three days ago. The demons felt it and started moving. Kaecilius and Mordo took a team to contain the situation before it spreads."
Mephisto. The King of Hell. And his son is on Earth.
Abel filed that away. It was significant, potentially very significant, but it wasn't his immediate concern.
"When did the Ancient One leave?"
"This morning. She didn't say when she'd return."
Abel nodded slowly. The Ancient One was in Mexico, watching the arrival of an Asgardian artifact. Kaecilius and Mordo were hunting demons across the globe. And Abel was standing in an empty Kamar-Taj with a bag full of stolen gamma blood and a growing suspicion that the next few months were going to be considerably more complicated than the last five.
Mjolnir is on Earth. Which means Thor is coming. Which means Loki isn't far behind. Which means Asgard is about to become very relevant to everything I'm trying to do.
He thought about his new wand materials list. About the ingredients that could only be found in realms beyond Earth. About the doors that a friendship with the God of Thunder might open.
First Tony, now Thor. My social calendar is getting very mythological.
Abel thanked Wong, opened a portal home, and spent the rest of the night planning.
END CHAPTER 48