"What an imbecile. Can't you even feel the gap in power between us? I may not be able to beat Lucifer, but you think I can't beat you? Idiot!"
Bella swept her hand through the air, tracing a quick circle. A Kamar-Taj portal met the oncoming Hellfire; the flames poured into the portal and vanished, just like that.
"Hm?" Before the Antichrist could react, a portal snapped open behind him—and the raging fire came right back to burn him full-on.
"Aah! Ah, this is impossible—!" Even he couldn't withstand Hellfire; that fire was overwhelming, savage, impossible to fully control.
The Hellfire blazed, tongues of flame licking up and down, the near-unstoppable fire wrapping around Dr. Harmon's body. The Antichrist tried to flee the body—but a satisfied, almost gleeful smile touched the corner of Harmon's mouth, and he held the Antichrist fast. In under three seconds the two of them burned together into drifting ash.
"Get out! Get back to Hell!" A white bolt of lightning, like a streak of silk, flared to life in Bella's right hand.
The lightning struck Harmon's already-charred body and kept arcing back and forth—Chain Lightning.
The Antichrist couldn't bear that much damage, and in the end, on pure instinct, was drawn back by the will of Hell.
Bella clapped her hands, then stuck them in her pockets and looked around.
An enemy of this caliber was nothing to her now. Lucifer she couldn't beat, but dealing with one small Antichrist was no trouble at all.
"That's genuinely an evil power. Dr. Harmon's sacrifice is a tragedy—he didn't deserve an end like that."
Bella said it softly. Out of the air stepped Zachariah, the bald, six-winged angel she'd once threatened with the Time Stone.
He still wore that false smile, and glanced with a trace of distaste at the ground where Dr. Harmon had been burned to a cinder.
"This mortal died long ago," he said. "His fate was sealed the moment his wife gave birth to the Antichrist. You, he, I—none of us can stand against a fate already written."
Bella asked, grave now, "Have you considered what this farce would cause if it succeeded?"
Zachariah spread his hands with a touch of theater. "What consequences could there be? Nuclear war? Humanity wiped out entirely? Would it be any worse than that? I don't much understand your human technology, but I know one thing: we are beings of energy. Radiation can't touch us. Wouldn't an empty battlefield suit a thousand-year war all the better?"
Bella's eyes bored through Zachariah's human host to the being within. "Humans think of angels as the very picture of justice, kindness, and virtue. Is this how you repay your faithful?"
Zachariah looked genuinely surprised. "I'd have thought that when you humans locked me in that underground prison, you'd already made your peace with it."
"But I recall you saying that was God's will."
"It was a dual choice God gave to me and to humanity both. I obeyed His command; I did not resist, and you humans kept me locked in that underground prison for a hundred and fifty years. And humanity made the choice it judged most in its own interest."
Bella paused. "...The way you think grows more like a politician's by the day. Next to you, Castiel is naive as a newborn."
"May I take that as a compliment?"
No one else had any inkling of the exchange between Bella and the six-winged angel. On the attackers' side, they had no idea their inside man had been burned to death; they were caught in a pincer between Mike Banning and James Rhodes.
Mike Banning fought like a god of slaughter, one man against a dozen. On the other side, James Rhodes led his soldiers straight up from the underground passage into the White House bunker.
The lieutenant colonel was eager to distinguish himself, too, and he charged out front, an HK416 in his hands.
A future War Machine—James Rhodes's personal combat ability was not to be doubted. He ran fast, and even in the maze-like environment of the bunker he moved with astonishing speed.
"Bang bang bang!" He led the assault. It was meant to catch the enemy off guard to begin with, and his reflexes were a shade quicker than an ordinary man's besides.
In a gunfight, a fraction faster—even a tenth of a second—makes all the difference! The enemies on either flank he left entirely to the comrades at his side; his own muzzle stayed trained on the enemies within a thirty-degree arc straight ahead.
Gunfire cracked without pause. He killed five enemies in a row and strode into the White House bunker.
Only then did Kang Yeonsak and his men realize the enemy had gotten inside. With no time to wonder how the man had come, a whole crowd of them raised their guns and fired back.
The lieutenant colonel's marksmanship was uncanny—running, aiming, shooting, the whole sequence flowing in one smooth motion. By the time he reached Benjamin Asher's side, less than two minutes had passed since the assault began.
He'd taken a round in the chest and one in the arm. The body armor did its job; his chest went numb, but his arm was shot clean through.
He paid his wounds no mind, rushed to Benjamin Asher, and cut the ropes with two strokes of a blade. "Mr. President! Come with me, now!"
Benjamin Asher still wanted to save the female Secretary of Defense beside him. "Secretary McMillan too!"
James Rhodes used his own body to block the bullets flying at Benjamin Asher, forcibly shoving the President toward his own team.
If he could save them, of course he wanted to save more—but he understood trade-offs better still. Get the most important one out first; the rest could come after!
"Move! Team One! Go! Escort the President out!" A crowd of them, like men snatching a bride, ignored whatever the President was saying, grabbed him by the collar, and ran for the tunnel mouth.
James Rhodes had a sharp eye, and he quickly identified several of the terrorist leaders. He spotted Kang Yeonsak, the man the Pentagon had named for death—but the man was cunning, always hiding behind a few of his subordinates.
The lieutenant colonel's muzzle drifted away from Kang Yeonsak. A short burst, the bullets flying over thirty meters (a hundred-odd feet), dropped a round-faced Korean woman on the spot.
She was the only female attacker on the scene—at least the lieutenant colonel hadn't seen a second woman in the enemy's ranks—so by any reckoning she was an important figure.
The enemy was indeed shocked. Their one and only hacker had just been killed—how were they supposed to control the bunker's operating system now?
"Fall back! Fall back, fall back! Team One, move, take the target and go! Team Two, cover me!" Seeing his own soldiers carry Benjamin Asher into the tunnel, James Rhodes immediately began organizing a counterattack.
In the melee he also saved the Secretary of Defense—a middle-aged woman in her fifties. The Army Chief of Staff had been shot by someone or other, but it was a light wound, nothing serious.
The White House bunker had been built as a shelter, not a battlefield. There was next to no cover here, and so the firefight came down to both sides simply taking the gunfire with their bodies.