Baldr had been raiding the demotion facilities.

We emerged into a failing attempt at containment. Its backdrop was a stretch of grey desert strewn with blood and bodies, boundary demarcated by a splintering hole. It was set in the side of a stony outcrop, dusty and dry, with pieces of shattered dimension floating along the breadth of the wall, worlds alternating as though someone had upended a chessboard and then torn it to shreds. Yggdrasil’s roots poured out of it from both sides, crawling along the ground and reaching for the sky.

“Facility Q,” Apollo announced. It was all the introduction we got.

Angels were everywhere, antagonising anything that moved and being mowed down like flies. One of the many gods in the area – a beautiful man in ancient-styled armour – spotted us mid-sprint, made a double-take, and exploded into pieces. Half a second afterwards, a dozen angels followed suit, along with several more divine figures, two of whom immediately reconstituted and vanished. One reappeared on top of a monstrous, inhuman neck extending out of one of the dimensional tears, and severed it halfway, sending the head rolling. A second head snaked out from another tear and bit them from behind, only to be severed from the inside. The bisected god reconstituted again, only to explode a second time along with a fresh batch of angels.

I glanced around for Baldr through the obscuring chaos, and didn’t find him.

The exploder wasn’t difficult to locate thanks to the ongoing stream of angels making a beeline towards a nook in the outcrop. It swerved as its target did, partly detonated in a fresh burst of flesh and feathers, and reconverged out of undamaged bodies on a new location.

A pillar of ice slammed down from the heavens and engulfed their target before it could transit again. The explosions stopped.

I watched Mayari peel off to spear a body crawling out of a rift over one of the mutilated hydra heads, and watched Apollo casually shoot the intruder who warped in to stab her in the back. Another god, an unfamiliar woman with a scorpion’s tail, appeared in a whirl of flashing claws and attempted to drive her blades down Apollo’s back. They bounced off in soft flashes of algiz orange; Regina’s efforts working as intended.

The demon lord, still with a queasy expression, had both hands raised and looked terrified.

I unlooped my halo as Mayari disposed of Scorpion Lady, and found myself blinded and frozen; not by time, but by ice. Frozen creaks filled my ears. I warped out, Regina’s ability making the hold ineffective, and found the whole landscape had been blanketed, turning the desert into an ice sheet well out of its latitude range, with a further layer of human-sized iceblocks smashing out of the sky. The ice grabbed me again, before the whole thing broke into flooding water the dust rapidly turned opaque brown.

“Thanks,” I called over to Hel.

“Not mine.” She gestured towards Gia, whose palm glowed brightly red.

I peered through the halo, searching inside the facility. It had mostly been cleared out, with the pushback mopping up the stragglers. Still no sign of Baldr, though that didn’t mean he wasn’t here. The angels hadn’t reported him, either. What I did find was Yggdrasil, chewing up the enclosures and walkways. A curl of timber pushed its way through the circlet in my arms out into Earth, and I yanked the device back before it could lock into place. The tendril disappeared with it, though I expected not for long.

I slashed at the back end of the hydra god while I was at it, severing them below the shoulders while they fought the dimensional outbreak hooking their ankles. In front of me, the remaining heads collapsed. An angel fell injured at my feet, bleeding and crawling to stand, and I tried not to pay attention to it. It praised Yahweh as I turned away.

Nuja had held back with the group. Thick ropes of ink surrounded her, each whip-like frond tethered to a creature sent out in her stead. They chased across the battlefield after anything that looked threatening, hard to spot against the black of the night. Her remaining tattoos were looking a little thin on the ground. “Baldr?” I prompted.

We’d walked into chaos. As much as it made me feel better about our own rushed organisation, it wasn’t the assault I’d expected. Janus and a loyal crew on the other end meant we should have been walking into something more sophisticated. That we weren’t meant Baldr probably wasn’t here. Either a trap or a decoy to buy time. And this clearly wasn’t a trap.

“I told you, muddied signals,” Nuja replied testily, and glanced at the swarm in the air as they diverged to engage new targets. They seemed to be getting better at not picking fights with everything that moved. I wasn’t sure where the intel was coming from, but wasn’t about to argue with it. “He’s moved, but not far,” our wayfinder continued. “You said these angels were Hera’s? If so, I might be able to use them.”

I nodded, curious where this was going.

The Inuit goddess lifted a hand to her collarbone and pinched a thumb and forefinger above the markings there. The ink left her body and swirled around her fingers before coalescing into the shape of an eye. With no-nonsense strides, she approached the fallen angel still composing love letters to Yahweh and held the ink above its forehead, where it reformed into a dark stream and slithered from her grasp. The ink disappeared into the angel’s skin, absorbed.

I caught Nuja as she unceremoniously keeled head over feet, but not in time to stop her becoming drenched in the mud. When she glanced back up, it looked like she’d been socked in the face with the dark circles of the chronically sleepless.

“Ouch.” She clutched my forearm. “You didn’t tell me it was a hivemind.”

“Too much?”

Something like blue comets screamed overhead trailing flare-like tails, and the ground, stable here up until now, rumbled in accompaniment. I was starting to get the sense the latter was coinciding with Yggdrasil’s attempted incursions, though the way things were, there were probably multiple sources.

Above, an unidentifiable god wreathed in impenetrable shadow wrapped themselves around an airborne opponent only for both to meet the end of Mayari’s spear. On the ground, Apollo’s movements appeared comparatively deranged, dodging events his actions ensured wouldn’t happen.

Nuja blinked, as if it would clear the bags out from under her eyes. It didn’t. She attempted to lift a hand to her forehead, failed, and dropped it back down again. “No, I can use this. You’ll need to carry me while I do, though. I’ll try not to throw up.”

I waved down an angel and had it hold her in its arms. The tracker barely seemed to notice. In addition to the bags, her eyes had what looked like black ink welling up in their corners. When she blinked, it pathed down the outer edges of her cheeks.

I made myself useful consolidating the rifts in the universe into a single, Yggdrasil-funnelling hole. It bent back in on itself, rerouting into Facility Q as a self-contained unit. Each time I did this sort of thing, it became easier. And not just from the experience – I was still growing stronger.

Seeing the world tree here, too, surprised me. I wasn’t sure who was encouraging it or how or why, or if the act had been unintentional. The seal felt flimsy, in any case, the boundaries between worlds weakening. I was starting to feel the eerie shape of Facility Q from where I stood on Earth, and that shouldn’t have been possible.

“He’s out of eyesight, but I can sense him near,” Nuja said suddenly, her voice thick and queasy. She spelt out a set of coordinates. “I don’t know if it’s a side effect of using the angels, but signals are still muddied. Something’s off.”

“Off how?”

“Trickery, I expect. He knows we’re coming for him, right? What would you do in his place?”

“I am in his place, and we’re on the attack,” I answered. “We’re all running out of places to run.”

I nudged Apollo as he materialised next to us to tag Hel, who transformed into a half-terrifying, half-desiccated winged beast the size of a city and soared through the air, drawing everyone’s eyes her way. For a few moments, the battlefield quietened down.

“Well?” I asked the seer in the lull.

“It’s him. Only one bodyguard, Makaptan, but he’s good. Don’t let him see you coming.”

“I won’t. Weaknesses? Traps?”

Apollo shook his head a little helplessly. “It’s certainly suspicious.”

I appraised him, from the heightened alertness of his stance to the rigidity of his shoulders. It hardly conveyed the arrogant assurance he was known for. “That bad?”

“Just go. My helpfulness diminishes by the second.”

“You’re not coming? I need you on Janus watch.”

He sighed and gestured at the halo, ignoring the divine lightshow put on by too many gods losing their minds. “That’s a one-person device. I’m not coming with you that way, and if they see me, they’ll run. So hurry up.”

In answer, I flourished the circlet and slammed through dimensions, emerging in Yggdrasil’s serene light once more. Coming from the cacophony on the other side, the tranquillity hit with visceral impact. No one else had made it here. Yet.

Its roots had proliferated since I’d last looked, shooting in all directions from the nearby aggressive branch. More reached out in the distance from other branches everywhere I looked. Somehow I knew they were all reaching for Earth. For everything; a forest of wood and leaves piercing the aether. Like parasitic weeds, the dimensions had grown up from Yggdrasil’s base, and now the tree was mindlessly trying to take them back. That was bad news, but not because it threatened Earth. In doing so, the world tree made itself yet another target for the divine insanity raging beyond its safe borders.

Experience had taught me dimensional geography didn’t correspond on a one-to-one scale, no matter what current events were attempting to debunk. Nuja’s coordinates wouldn’t mean much over here – although here, too, I could feel hidden dimensional shapes lurking beyond my usual reach. On another day – not that those technically existed anymore – I would have fiddled around and experimented.

Today, I raised the halo and hurled myself to the one place where I couldn’t fail. It hadn’t changed.

From the void and its lack of spatial dynamics, I peered back at wherever the hell I chose.

Nuja’s coordinates showed the same grey desert as before, but a different patch of rocky outcrop. Swinging the view around, I persisted until it landed on movement within a deep alcove. Of course he’d chosen a cave.

I followed it in with some caution, past the alert form of Makaptan, a willowy, delicate employee fresh out of Helpdesk. He was still wearing his work attire. Being an underworld god, and considering I was trespassing in the void, there was a chance he might sense my presence.

But he didn’t budge a muscle, even as I stared at him dead on.

And then I was past him, looking at a man who had to die.

Baldr had his back to the cave entrance, leaning forward with his palms against the alcove wall. His hair and clothes were near-pristine, only a little windswept. Flickering blue flashes strobed across his back; lighting cast from activity beyond the cave’s entrance. I swung the view sideways to make sure it was him, and found him in a state of deep concentration.

There were times for analysis and thinking your way through problems. Arguably most of them.

Instead, I ripped Baldr’s head from his shoulders with the halo, tearing through bone and sinew as easily as water. Less than a second later, I ran the circlet through Makaptan next, and the bodyguard toppled bisected to his knees. Silent and unseen exactly as intended, with a whole dimension to mask my approach. The entire exercise had been swift and decisive, as the best attacks usually were.

Of Janus and his prophetic defences, there was no sign.

I swung the loop around some more, checking for warning signs, but other than the ongoing distant strobing and a large chunk of ceiling collapsing over the entrance, I found nothing suspicious.

Which was deeply suspicious.

I dropped back to Earth prepared for retaliation, and met nothing.

Another section of the ceiling crumbled ahead; I let it fall. Baldr’s decapitated body, as beautiful in death as in life, bled out on the floor. Above it, I felt the residual scar of the recent incision between worlds. Not entirely without traces, then, but there were few who would know how to check.

Rolling over the rest of the body, I did my best to block out the mental racket still battering at my head and checked for a soul.

I didn’t find one. The universe’s most poisonous little shit was dead.

Uneasiness persisting, I sloughed the skin from my hands, calmed the pulse riling my veins and pictured an immediate future reporting back with the others, no matter what got in my way. Sure enough, Mayari appeared in a golden glow before I’d even finished the thought.

“Don’t touch the blood,” I said, waving her back with fresh fingers. “It’s infected.”

I’d felt it the moment it had gotten on my fingers; wriggling at the pores in my skin. Blood adapted to invade and infect, potent due to the pantheon association. Trickery aimed at a killer, and clever at that. If I’d been a little slower, it might have passed through and worked its damage from within. I still had the open wounds from battling with Lucy, and was lucky my prosthetics had covered the gaps.

Makaptan’s work for certain, using Baldr’s blood as the weapon. Appropriate for a god of disease.

Mayari’s face twisted. “Not airborne, I hope.”

I shook my head. “I’d feel it the moment I breathed it in. And you’d be fine with a healer. This was aimed at me.”

“Well, that’s something.” She stepped back from both bodies anyway, edging towards the furthest wall. It cracked and fell away, exposing a sliver of flashing sky. “Does this mean it’s over? Hel will face difficult opposition keeping him down.”

The crack in the wall continued to widen, travelling into and across the ground, and I looked at it through the loop. Yggdrasil was approaching fast from the other side, drawn to the rift I’d created and still multiplying.

“It’s never over,” I explained through my unease. “Not until we unindoctrinate everyone on his side. Even then, just because the magic’s gone doesn’t make the impact of the brainwashing disappear. We still have to actually do the convincing. And I have to do it as Yahweh until we deal with the angels.”

“How many can there be?” Mayari asked wryly. “A few tens of thousands?”

“You missed a lot,” I said.

I collapsed into air at a shimmer in my peripheral vision, only to condense back out of it once I saw it was Hel. She hadn’t fully lost the beast aspect, with horns and claws sprouting in all directions. She had lost her leg brace, the withered limb accounted for with one-sided additions for balance. It made her even more asymmetrical than before, but it was Hel at her most capable.

She took in the fallen bodies and pushed towards Baldr.

“Don’t –” I began.

Mayari raised a hand and the blood streamed away into a contained corner. “Got it.”

Hel stopped before getting any closer. She stared at the carcass, then back at me.

“It’s not him,” she said. “Technically not even a him. You killed a decoy.”

The breath I released was disappointed, but not surprised. “You’re sure?”

“Completely. His soul isn’t in the void.”

“There’s no chance it could have been redirected somewhere else?”

“Of course there is. If it was him. This isn’t. So we’re back to searching. Nujalik’s passed out with the angels, but Shitface is waking her up. It’s taking longer than it should.” She shot me a meaningful glance.

I stepped forward and nudged at the loose head with a shoe until it rolled over and faced the ceiling. For a corpse, it looked stressed. “But I did kill them,” I observed. “So that means –”

Hel’s response was interrupted by Apollo arriving with the rest of the impromptu entourage and the spokesangel. A shower of sparks arrived with them, along with a shattering of rock above everyone’s heads. Mayari’s eyes flared gold, and the ceiling stopped short of flattening us all.

I eyed the angel with annoyance. “My children,” I said pointedly, in case anyone present had yet to get the message.

“As I was saying,” Hel continued, as pointedly, “it’s not Baldr. This was an exercise designed to lose us time.” The alcove shook as she finished the words, as if to remind us of the fact.

“What it is is infected,” Apollo surmised. He knelt to touch the parts of the corpse. “Was.”

Regina sidled after him in the manner of an awestruck disciple. Apparently his instruction earlier had made an impression. “Then who was it?”

Hel’s expression twisted a little. She focused on the demon lord, avoiding my eyes. “A goddess called Lofn.”

“What?” I exclaimed before I could help it.

“Why?” Mayari asked at the same time.

The grey stone shifted violently under our feet, sending everyone stumbling. Mayari’s eyes flared again, but it didn’t prevent the cracks from widening. Still reeling in shock, it took me a few seconds to remember I was holding the halo, and checked it again.

Yggdrasil was practically on top of us, descending from the roof and crawling up from beneath.

“It’s a pantheon thing,” Hel enunciated dimly in the background. “Same language skills, some crossover in abilities, and a more convincing death.” She flicked a clawed finger under her chin. “Unless you happen to work in the field. We were supposed to think we’d won.”

“And while we’re diverted, Baldr has time to complete his recruitment of the facilities,” Mayari surmised, her tone subdued. “I didn’t think Lofn was a shapeshifter.”

I moved the rift scar further from Yggdrasil’s reach, though its grasp was closing in. Out of the corner of my eye, Hel traced out a combination of runes on the now-sightless head, and Baldr’s fair countenance resolved itself into the kind, wispy-haired colleague I’d spent decades gently irritating and commiserating with over shared misfortune. Shock turned to uncomfortable numbness while my blood paradoxically boiled. All the supposed qualities Baldr was meant to possess, Lofn actually had, and went entirely unappreciated. She would make a good decoy. Or, for that matter, a permanent replacement.

Hel had also been right with her cited reasoning, but it wasn’t the full picture. I suspected she’d guessed at the rest, but omitted it for the current audience.

It wasn’t just a pantheon consideration, though that was part of it. Baldr would have scores of advisors and informants by now for any goal he set his focus on.

He’d set me up to destroy a friend.