The initial impact made no sound. It created a vacuum. A moment of absolute silence, as the air was sucked away by the collision of the three deities, before reality exploded in an apocalyptic thunderclap.
The Forgotten Strait began to disintegrate.
Hel was no longer a woman; she had become a living blizzard. With each movement she made, waves of cold at -273°C (absolute zero) crashed down on her opponents, transforming the organic walls of the strait into brittle glass that exploded into a thousand deadly shards. She did not fight with a weapon, she fought with the very idea of the end of all life.
"FALL INTO OBLIVION!" she screamed, her voice tearing through space-time.
Opposite her, Hades and Pluto formed a rampart of darkness and gold.
Hades released the Shadows of Erebus. These were not mere ghosts, but filaments of pure darkness that devoured light and heat. Wherever these shadows touched Hel's frost, the ice turned to black vapor. Hades' power was like that of a black hole: heavy, crushing, a gravity that forced Jormund and his allies to press themselves to the ground to avoid having their bones crushed.
Pluto, for his part, invoked the riches of the earth. With a wave of his spear, he caused pillars of solid gold and rough diamonds to spring from the ground, not for decoration, but for impaling. These precious structures served as conduits for devastating telluric energy. The ground rose like a raging sea, hurling tons of rock at supersonic speeds.
"THIS KINGDOM IS MINE, DEADBORN!" thundered Pluto.
In the center, the Pack was going through hell.
Fenrir howled, his wolf senses saturated with the smell of sulfur, ozone, and frozen flesh. Siegfried, despite his legendary armor, spat blood; the mere vibration of the air breaking his ribs. Jormund remained standing, his eyes injected with gold. He saw the currents of time twisting and tearing around the Gods.
It was a spectacle of pure violence:
Hel's frost petrified Pluto's golden pillars.
The shadows of Hades stifled the cries of the northern queen.
The strait, once a narrow tunnel, was now nothing more than a cathedral of rubble with its roof blown off, revealing an underground sky streaked with purple lightning.
The power of the trinity created a storm of "dead matter." Rocks the size of houses levitated, caught in the magnetic whirlwinds of their battle, before being reduced to dust by a single glance from Hel. The pressure was so great that even Jormund's blood began to boil in his veins.
The strait was no longer a road. It was a divine meat grinder. And in the midst of this chaos, time itself began to scream.
"They're going to destroy everything," Jormund growled, his voice drowned out by an explosion of diamond and ice. "They won't stop until there's nothing left but emptiness."
It was at that moment, as Hel prepared to unleash a wave of frost capable of freezing the entire Underworld, that a different vibration was felt. A vibration that came not from the sky, nor from the ground, but from every atom of air.
The darkness grew darker. Silence, a tomb-like silence, began to devour the cries of the Gods.