Bella looked left and right. Nothing she could use as a marker. Her right hand came up and started tracing a teleportation array in the air.
She had no intention of complicating things further. She just wanted out.
Boom. The teleportation array was barely a third drawn before a violent surge of fire elements tore through it. She tried three times in a row. Each attempt collapsed under the elemental turbulence.
Some force was anchoring the spatial coordinates here. The failure rate on her teleportation magic was off the charts.
Bella turned her gaze toward the far end of the corridor.
A scorching glow was rising from the deep end of the iron-grey passage. The temperature around her was creeping up at a slow, steady pace. Plenty of Orcs were screaming in panic, like they'd run into something terrifying. Even from this far back Bella could hear it.
She fixed her eyes on the distance. Eagle Vision, sixth sense, plus the Clairvoyance she'd absorbed from the Eye of Agamotto—every spell and sense she had stacked together. With enough focus, her line of sight could acquire something close to a piercing quality.
Watching the Balrog haul itself out of the magma at the bottom of Moria, her expression held neither joy nor sorrow.
She glanced at the Ring of Fire on her hand. A quick mind-read gave her the truth. The thing was here for the ring.
"The ring. Human. Yield it. To me." The Balrog's words reached her ears through some kind of pulse in the air.
"Don't even think about it! This is my ring. Step back, monster!" Bella shouted back. There was nothing soft in her voice.
Whether it was a fundamental incompatibility or just naked greed, her warning had no effect. The Balrog's pace doubled out of nowhere. It seemed to have lost what little patience it had.
"Hah. Want the Ring of Fire? Decided it belongs to you, did you? Well, ugly, I've changed my mind too. Using your core to power up the Ring of Fire actually sounds like a pretty good idea!" The fighting intent in Bella's eyes was rising fast.
She followed the magical pathways the Ancient One used when wielding the Eye of Agamotto. Her hands moved like butterflies through flowers, working continuous primal vibrations of mana. She used her own power to mimic the inner structure of the Eye of Agamotto's core—the Time Stone.
With enough preparation, she could briefly control the flow of time, accelerating or decelerating it. The window was roughly one to three seconds. With full prep, she could yank an enemy's time forward or backward like the second hand of a clock—up to three times.
The Sorcerer Supremes of Kamar-Taj had always guarded the Time Stone, because they believed Time was the most slippery of the six. But it could just as easily be argued the other way. Time was the easiest power for a mage to grasp.
Power, Space, Reality, Soul, and the Mind power that Bella drew her own magic from—each had hard limits.
Time was the only one that played fair. It refused contact with no living mind, no thing. Time was the easiest to step into and the hardest to control. Even Thanos's grandfather, Kronos—the Time God who'd been blasted to the literal end of time—wouldn't claim he'd mastered it.
Right now, with the Balrog anchoring her spatial movement somehow, Bella couldn't teleport out and couldn't summon Jason and the others to back her up. She had to rely on her own psionic power and her wits.
Charging in with ice spikes and ice spears was the wrong play. Setting the field up first, factoring in every step of the engagement—that was the right play.
She started laying out the battlefield fast. The Balrog was underestimating her. There would be a price for that.
She pulled out every dragon-killing tool she'd stockpiled and arranged them across the field.
Gandalf got chased around by a Balrog because he had a string of liabilities to protect. Bella didn't have that problem. She was alone.
Her hand brushed the wall. With psionic energy she modeled Kamar-Taj's Mirror Dimension on the spot. The grey marble floor flipped backward at speed. The walls and the boxy pillars stretched outward, pushed deeper. The already-vast dwarven hall expanded another tenfold in an instant.
Then her psionics flooded into the temporary Mirror Dimension. Snow swept down. The ground vanished under solid ice. Through the howling wind, an entire winter world solidified inside the Mirror Dimension.
Boom. Boom. Heavy footfalls. A figure wreathed in flame was striding into her winter world.
"Human. Die." Bella's eyes had no patience for him. The Balrog's read on her was just as ugly.
The Balrog's voice was thick with what sounded like bottomless rage.
Bella's voice came from every direction at once. "A deserter from a battlefield, that's all you are! Where do you get the nerve to put on this swagger in front of me? Looks like the lesson the Asgardians gave you wasn't enough!"
The words had barely landed when a small detachment of soldiers in Asgardian armor stepped out of empty air. Their faces were a little blurry, but the armor on them and the weapons in their hands made an impression on the Balrog.
He really was a deserter from that battlefield. Bella had that part right.
The Asgardians had, under Odin's leadership, conquered all Nine Realms one by one.
Asgardian soldiers were strong. How strong? An Asgardian stonemason who'd fled to Earth could hand S.H.I.E.L.D.'s entire roster their own backsides. Was that stonemason strong? On Earth, very. On Asgard, he was just a working stiff.
If the working stiffs were like that, you didn't need imagination for what the regular army looked like.
Jotunheim, the Frost Giants' world, had been beaten flat. Muspelheim, the Fire Giants' world, hadn't escaped either.
The king of the Fire Giants, Surtur, had even his Eternal Flame turned into a piece of Odin's collection. From there, the outcome of that war of conquest wasn't hard to imagine.
The Balrog now stepping into Bella's winter world had been a deserter from that battlefield.
Endless Fire Lords and Fire Giant generals had been cut down by the Asgardians. He had turned tail and run for it.
He couldn't go back to Muspelheim. So he'd hidden in the deep underground of Vanaheim, scraping out an existence.
Now Bella had ripped that scab open. The rage in the Balrog flared white-hot. But the after-image of the Asgardian soldiers behind her made him hesitate.
He walked the long straight passage. His shape slowly took form before Bella's eyes.
This flame creature was ten meters tall. From the burning fire only a pair of yellow eyes shone with unsettling light. He had a demon's twin goat horns. His muscles were knotted ropes. Wings stretched from his back.
As the Balrog entered the winter world, the heat rose fast around him. Hard ice melted into running water. Inside ten meters of him the ice flashed straight to vapor.
"Keep walking. Don't stop now." Bella's tone carried a note of mockery.
A Balrog was extremely intelligent. As a species, they sat at roughly the same tier as dragons. Of course in any species, no two fingers grew evenly long. There were stronger ones and weaker ones. The Balrog in front of her was on the weaker end. Instead of pushing forward, he stopped, looked carefully left and right.