Ernst held the blade, his palms vibrating with the absorbed kinetic energy.
"You fight with emotion," Ernst noted, his voice strained but calm.
"Inefficient. A true warrior fights with his mind."
He didn't wait for a retort.
He released the stored energy in a concentrated burst.
BOOM.
A shockwave of pure force erupted from his hands.
Wonder Woman was blasted backward, her boots carving deep trenches in the mud before she tumbled, rolling to a stop ten meters away.
She stood up instantly.
Her tiara was crooked, her armor mud-stained, but she was unhurt.
If anything, she looked energized.
"You absorb impact," Diana realized, her eyes narrowing.
"You feed on strength."
"Correct," Ernst smiled, though sweat was beading on his forehead.
"You cannot hurt me, Princess."
"Then I won't use strength," Diana said.
"I will use speed."
She vanished.
To a normal eye, she was a blur.
To Ernst's enhanced brain, she was a streak of red and gold moving at Mach speed.
She didn't swing hard; she swung fast.
A flurry of strikes, left, right, high, low.
She wasn't trying to crush him; she was trying to overwhelm his absorption capacity.
Ernst retreated, his mind racing.
She's overloading the input buffers.
He switched tactics. He stopped relying on reaction and switched to prediction.
His brain calculated her muscle tension, her weight distribution, the angle of her gaze.
Duck. Pivot. Block.
He moved millimeters out of the way of her blade, dancing on the edge of a razor.
It was a mental chess match played at supersonic speed.
While Ernst fought for his life, the ritual reached its crescendo.
High above the altar, the portal groaned.
Something fell out of the void, a small, red creature with oversized stone hand.
Hellboy.
The Key of Destruction, currently the size of a toddler.
Rasputin, seeing his master's vessel, laughed in triumph.
But the portal wasn't stable.
The Tesseract batteries Ernst had installed were too powerful; they were destabilizing the rift.
"No!" Rasputin screamed as the gravity reversed.
The Mad Monk was lifted off his feet.
His skin stretched, his eyes bulging as the vacuum of the Abyss claimed him.
"Master!" Ilsa Haupstein screamed.
With a wet crunch, Rasputin was sucked into the singularity.
CRACK.
The machine, unable to sustain the load without a conductor, detonated.
Shrapnel flew everywhere.
Kroenen, who had been fighting Allied soldiers near the altar, was riddled with metal shards.
Sand, his dried blood, poured from his suit.
"Retreat!" Ilsa shouted, dragging the broken Kroenen into the shadows.
The Nazis fled. The battle was lost.
Ernst saw the explosion. Rasputin is gone.
The timeline is secure.
"Azazel!" Ernst shouted.
"We are leaving!"
But before Azazel could reach him, Diana changed tactics again.
She sheathed her sword and unhooked the glowing golden rope from her hip.
The Lasso of Hestia.
She flicked her wrist.
The Lasso moved with a will of its own, snaking through the air and wrapping tight around Ernst's torso, pinning his arms to his sides.
"Got you," Diana grunted, yanking him off balance.
Ernst tried to absorb the kinetic energy of the pull, but the Lasso wasn't just physical.
It was magical. It burned with a divine heat that bypassed his mutant defenses.
He fell to his knees.
"Who are you?" Diana demanded, standing over him.
"What are you?"
"I am Ernst Shaw," Ernst gasped.
"Chief Scientist of the Schmidt Division."
He clamped his mouth shut. He hadn't meant to say that.
The Lasso was pulling the truth out of his throat like a fishhook.
This is dangerous, Ernst realized, panic flaring.
She can ask about the Future. About the Phalanx. About everything.
"Tell me your plan," Diana ordered, tightening the rope.
"What were you building here?"
Ernst felt the compulsion.
It was an absolute mandate from the Gods.
Speak the Truth.
But Ernst had something the Gods didn't account for: A brain operating at 27.6% capacity, fortified by the Reality Stone.
Mental Defense: Partition.
Ernst fractured his own mind.
He created a sandbox, a virtual persona within his consciousness.
He filled this persona with nonsense, with data noise, with lies so complex they formed a new, chaotic reality.
Then, he shoved that persona to the front, shielding his true self behind a wall of madness.
"The water flows up the mountain!" Ernst shouted, his eyes rolling back.
"The fire is cold! The stars are bleeding ink! The equation is purple!"
Diana frowned, loosening the rope slightly.
"What?"
"The truth is a circle!" Ernst babbled, his mind racing to maintain the firewall.
"I am the Walrus! The time is green!"
He wasn't lying.
In the virtual reality he had constructed in his head, these things were true.
He was technically obeying the Lasso by describing the "truth" of his current mental state.
Diana looked at him with pity.
"The magic... it broke his mind."
She thought he was insane.
Perfect, Ernst thought from behind the wall.
-------------
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