Squelch. The Balrog glanced down in surprise. The gray-robed old man was indeed an illusion—but something had been left exactly where the illusion stood.
It felt as though it had stepped into a puddle of viscous liquid. A bit of pressure, and the mass burst apart, sticking to its skin. The Balrog looked down, frowning.
A sharp, acrid smell rose from the thick liquid. The creature bristled with irritation—that human sorceress was resorting to cheap tricks! Without bothering to identify what the substance was, it coiled sheets of flame around its calves and feet, burning every trace of the liquid to vapor.
From a distance, Bella exhaled softly. The Balrog was a formidable opponent, as she'd feared. Laser fire barely scratched it, and it was nearly immune to toxins. Its overall power fell short of Smaug, but unlike Smaug it had no obvious fatal weakness. Strength, speed, endurance, resistance, flight, spatial teleportation—the Balrog excelled across the board, with almost no exploitable gap. No wonder it had driven the Dwarves into a rout single-handedly.
"Get it! Kill it!" At her mental command, a dozen Orcs she'd seized control of let out battle cries and charged. The Balrog didn't know—or care—what damage these weaklings could do to it. It swung its fiery whip and burned them to ash, one by one.
That was its mistake.
In the grip of pure, desperate terror, those dozen Orcs released the psychic poison Bella had planted inside each of their minds to its full potency.
Her earlier preparations had been paying dividends all along. The portrait of Odin alone—that single masterstroke—had blown one of the Balrog's hearts apart and shredded its mental resistance into negative territory.
The psychic poison hit even harder. Courage was never this creature's defining trait, and now, unbidden, the memory of its long-ago flight surged to the surface.
"Hold your ground! You coward—where do you think you're running?!"
"I am ordering you back! Return to your post!"
"You dare betray your entire kind? I will tear your flesh from your core with my bare hands! I will nail your head to a spike!"
The roars of Fire Giant commanders and Fire Elemental lords echoed in its skull, and beneath them all, the unmistakable thunder of Surtur, King of the Fire Elementals, filled the Balrog with cold dread.
The message was simple: Just you wait—the moment we find you, we will flay you alive. The Balrog knew Surtur wasn't here. It knew that rationally. And yet the fear was absolute—the kind of terror carved into a being over a thousand years, ten thousand years—a mark that would never fade.
"Fear is your greatest enemy!" Every debuff had been stacked to its limit. Now came the killing blow, and Bella had to deliver it herself.
Metal chains erupted from both walls simultaneously. She'd brought Adamantium from Earth; here in Vanaheim, it had a more evocative fantasy name—adamantine. That old bastard Yashida in Japan had stockpiled a considerable supply of the alloy and never lived to use it; after his death, the major conglomerates carved up his estate, and Yutani Corporation had claimed a portion of the Adamantium in the settlement.
The alloy had been forged into chains—originally intended for dragon hunting. They'd serve just as well here.
Triggered by Brotherhood-engineered mechanisms, five chains fired clockwise in sequence and wound tight around the Balrog, binding its wings and arms in one sweep.
"Die, monster!" Bella swept her right hand through the air and produced a matte-black Denel NTW-20 anti-materiel rifle. She'd already tested energy weapons. Time to try something conventional.
20mm caliber. 29,000 joules of muzzle energy. She didn't bother with distance—she'd be firing from under a kilometer.
During all her earlier probing with the laser, she'd noticed the Balrog's eyes looked more vulnerable than the rest of it. She didn't know what other weak points it might have, but shooting the eyes was a solid opening.
Crack. The 20×80mm armor-piercing round didn't land dead center—the Balrog tilted its head just in time, and the slug caught the bridge between both eyes instead, leaving a bloody crater. Bella worked the bolt with practiced ease, not even looking, and fired again.
This one connected. The Balrog's right eye detonated under the armor-piercing round, releasing a turbid stream of fluid.
"Its defenses really are impressive." The sniper rifle clearly wasn't going to deal enough damage for a clean kill. Bella condensed an ice lance in her free hand and hurled it—fast as a falling star.
The Balrog was losing its mind. Fighting while taking hits and not being able to hit back was pure agony. Its arms and wings were locked in the Adamantium chains; no matter how it strained, it couldn't break free. It fell back on the most brute-force solution available.
It drove its feet down and stamped.
The floor of the Mines of Moria had been hollowed out by Dwarven digging long ago. The ice, snow, and stone bridge inside the Mirror Dimension hadn't actually gone anywhere—none of it had left the underground mine. They were simulations, reconstructions Bella had woven from psionics. All of it was fake. With every illusion stripped away, only the floor beneath its feet was real.
The Balrog threw its full weight into the stomp. The floor gave way, and under gravity's pull, the creature plunged into the level below.
"Hmm?"
This, Bella hadn't anticipated. Her divinations, her handful of temporal-observation spells—none of them had flagged this. Time was omnipotent; those who merely observed and attempted to manipulate it were not. The Balrog had gone off-script, and as a result her ice lance missed cleanly, along with several other staged traps that were now useless.
"Damn it." Without flight, Bella was far slower than a creature with massive wings. By the time she rode her flying carpet down to the lower level, she found only a scatter of burned-through Adamantium chain links, rubble that had fallen from above—and no Balrog.
With the Balrog gone, the dimensional anchor dissolved too. She could pull out now, or she could call for reinforcements.
After a fight this brutal, a handshake and a truce? Bella didn't buy that for a second.
It had to end today. If the Balrog survived and came back for an ambush later, she was finished.
For all that she'd had it completely on the defensive just now—looking terrifyingly powerful—that was entirely because the battlefield had been her design, stocked in advance with her full arsenal of enchanted items and firearms. A prepared mage and an unprepared mage were two very different things.
If she got ambushed, she wouldn't survive a single exchange.
Time was short, and she couldn't afford to burn more psionic reserves. For the sake of speed and stealth, she summoned O'Rin directly.
Her employee rep, Comrade 006, had complained twice about O'Rin's music being unbearably mournful. Bella had made a point of observing her closely a few times after that.
She had to admit: this was a talent that Mibu Village had absolutely wasted.
If O'Rin had lived, with that sword technique of hers paired with her musical gift, she could have made a career as a bard without breaking a sweat.