Chapter 88: Christmas in Doomstadt

Blue energy swirled as Jay materialized just outside Kamar-Taj's weathered gates. The Himalayan wind bit at his face, carrying the scent of snow and ancient incense. He paused, breathing deeply as the familiar sights grounded him.

After everything, this place felt like a sanctuary. But tonight wasn't about finding peace. Tonight was about settling a debt that had been poisoning his thoughts since Doom's broadcast made the world see him as a villain, costing him his friend and, most importantly, Domino.

The guardian monk at the gate nodded as Jay showed his passage token. Better to walk through the front door than face the Ancient One's rolled newspaper again.

Jay navigated the familiar corridors blindfolded if needed, past students whose whispered conversations followed him like ghosts.

Wong was exactly where Jay expected, hunched over an ancient tome in his domain of organized mess. Without ceremony, Jay set a pizza box on the reading table, interrupting a passage about dimensional anchor points.

Wong looked up with the expression of a man disturbed during delicate work. His gaze dropped to the box, then back to Jay's face.

"So this is the legendary New York pizza?"

"Max made it himself. Took me three attempts to convince him it was for a worthy cause."

Wong lifted the lid with careful reverence. Steam rose, carrying the aroma of herbs that were rare outside Italy and cheese that had been aged to perfection. He took a deliberate bite, chewed thoughtfully, and Jay watched his expression transform from scholarly skepticism to something approaching religious experience.

"The deal?" Jay asked quietly.

Wong was already reaching for a thick folder with his free hand. "Everything we've compiled on the Latverian situation."

Jay opened the file, and his kinetic memory absorbed every detail instantly. Dimensional veil breaches concentrated around Castle Doom. Nether demon energy signatures bleeding through reality's fabric like infection. Three separate scouting missions sent over the past month. None had returned.

The pattern was unmistakable to anyone who'd studied dark rituals.

"Victor's been busy," Jay murmured.

Wong noticed the way Jay's jaw tightened. "Perhaps Master Mordo would be better suited for this assignment. Or Master Kaecilius has considerable experience with demon hunting."

"No." Jay's voice carried finality. "This is mine to handle."

Wong began weaving golden sparks into a perfect circle. "Then you'll need passage to Doomstadt. I can mask the portal's signature, but only to a point. If Doom has truly been trafficking with nether demons..." He left the warning unfinished.

Through the shimmering gateway, cobblestone streets and Gothic architecture waited under a gray December sky.

"Be careful, Jay. Revenge has a way of consuming those who pursue it too eagerly."

Jay stepped through without responding. Some debts required payment, regardless of the cost.

The moment Jay's feet touched Doomstadt's ancient stones, his newly acquired extra senses screamed. The fusion of light and dark force within him had awakened something unprecedented. Emotions crashed over him in overwhelming waves, but these weren't his own. They belonged to an entire nation.

Thanks to his Mental Shield perk and enhanced mental faculties, he could process the psychic deluge without breaking.

The surface layer was heartbreaking in its purity. Love for their ruler radiated from every citizen Jay passed. These people genuinely believed Victor Von Doom had saved them. From their perspective, he'd overthrown a brutal dictator, established merit over corruption, and granted freedoms their grandparents had died dreaming of.

But underneath that golden devotion, something rotten festered.

Fear. Growing stronger each day. Doubt that ate at faith like acid.

Jay's duality powers responded to the emotional turbulence, pulling fragments of memory from the collective unconscious. He witnessed Doom's return after the worldwide broadcast that had branded Jay as a villain—but the man who emerged from that victory was fundamentally changed. Scarred, broken, refusing all public appearances while his nation slowly began to suffer.

Economic sanctions led by Stark Industries had strangled Latveria's prosperity. Then came the accidents. Diseases without cause. Weather patterns that defied meteorology destroyed crops the small nation depended on for survival.

All while their beloved leader remained locked away in his castle, silent as his people suffered.

Jay forced his enhanced mental processing to filter the psychic overflow into manageable streams. The pattern was clear to anyone who'd spent months studying the darkest corners of Kamar Taj's library.

Doom was feeding his people's suffering to something that fed on misery itself.

A businessman in an expensive coat hurried past, muttering prayers under his breath. An elderly woman crossed herself as she looked toward the castle, tears streaming down her weathered cheeks. Children played in the streets, but their laughter carried an edge of hysteria.

"Your leader has been busy," Jay whispered to the wind.

He spent hours moving through Doomstadt like a phantom, cataloging every place where pain gathered thickest. The hospital was overflowing, patients filling hallways on improvised stretchers. Dr. Mariana Volkov, the chief physician, had dark circles under her eyes from weeks of sleepless nights.

"Is impossible," she was telling a colleague in accented English as Jay passed the doorway unseen. "These symptoms they make no medical sense. The blood work shows nothing, but people are dying anyway."

In the psychiatric ward, nurses spoke in hushed tones about patients who'd been perfectly healthy until a month ago. Now they sat catatonic, staring at nothing, occasionally whispering about "the laughing demons".

The slums painted their own grim picture. Families huddled together for warmth in buildings that seemed to leech heat from the air itself. Old Dimitri, who'd lived through Soviet oppression, sat on his stoop muttering that something worse than any human tyrant had come to Latveria.

At each location, Jay discreetly placed a light dagger to act as an anchor point. Crystallized lightforce energy that would serve as conduits when the time came.

Seventy markers throughout the city. Each one carefully positioned where suffering concentrated most heavily, hidden in shadows where desperate people gathered to pray for salvation that seemed increasingly impossible.

As winter darkness claimed the sky, Jay felt the weight of what he was planning.

Monster versus Monster. With an entire nation caught between them.

Castle Doom rose against the night sky like an accusation against heaven itself. Gothic spires twisted toward stars that seemed dimmer than they should be, as if the building's very presence drained light from the world.

Jay approached through the castle's extensive gardens, now withered and dead despite being tended by an army of groundskeepers. Even the stone gargoyles seemed more malevolent than usual, their carved faces twisted into expressions of hunger.

He merged with the shadows using his darkforce abilities, becoming one with the pools of darkness that seemed deeper and more substantial than natural night. The sensation was different here. Wrong. As if the shadows themselves were tainted by whatever Doom had been summoning.

The outer walls posed no challenge. Jay flowed through solid stone like liquid. But as he moved deeper into the castle's heart, his danger sense began whispering warnings that made his nervous system feel like it was on fire.

Guards patrolled the upper levels, but they moved with mechanical precision that immediately identified them as Doombots despite their human appearance. Their sensor arrays swept methodically, but Jay's shadow-merged form remained undetectable.

The human staff moved through their duties with the efficiency of people trying desperately not to think about what their employer might be doing in the depths below. Maids cleaned rooms that resisted staying clean. Cooks prepared meals that spoiled within hours. Groundskeepers tended gardens that died faster than they could replant them.

All of them carried the same haunted expression Jay had seen throughout the city. They loved their master, but love was being slowly poisoned by a terror they couldn't name.

As Jay descended deeper into the castle's foundations, the wrongness intensified. The very air felt thick and oily. Space itself was beginning to buckle under pressure from something that desperately wanted to break through.

Finally, he reached the source.

The laboratory stretched as wide as the castle above. Broken machinery lay scattered across the floor like technological bones, while the few devices that remained intact hummed with barely contained energy, their displays flickering ominously.

But it was what lay at the chamber's center that made Jay recoil in instinctive horror.

Ritual diagrams covered the floor in mystic patterns that hurt to look at directly. The lines seemed to writhe when observed peripherally, and the symbols burned themselves into his enhanced memory with uncomfortable permanence. This was the vilest of Dark magic.

At the ritual's heart lay a simple bed, completely at odds with the technological sophistication surrounding it. And there, holding hands with a woman in her early thirties, was Victor Von Doom.

But not the armored tyrant the world knew. This version wore elegant civilian clothes, expensive but understated. A metallic theatre mask covered the scarred ruin of his face, but his posture spoke of vulnerability Jay had never witnessed before.

The woman possessed beauty that spoke of a life lived simply and well. Dark hair, kind eyes, laugh lines around her mouth that suggested someone who found joy easily. Jay's comic knowledge provided the context that made this scene infinitely more tragic.

Valeria. The village girl who'd loved Victor Von Doom before he became Doctor Doom. Before Reed Richards, before the accident, before accumulated hatred had poisoned everything pure in his life. The one person who'd ever accepted him for what he was rather than what he could provide.

"My dearest Valeria," Doom was saying, his voice carrying an intimacy Jay could never imagine, "you understand what I'm offering? To leave your husband, your simple life, and become queen of Latveria?"

Tears streamed down Valeria's face as duty warred with feelings she'd thought buried. "Victor, I... we're not children anymore. So much has changed."

"Nothing that matters," Doom insisted, squeezing her hands. "I see the same woman who used to tend my mother's garden. Who never flinched from me, even when others would turn away. Who told me I could be anything I chose to become."

The irony was devastating. She'd told him he could be anything, and he'd chosen to become a monster.

"If I say yes," Valeria whispered, "what happens to the person I am now? The life I've built?"

"You become something greater. A queen. A goddess. The woman who stands beside the most powerful man on Earth."

Jay watched her internal struggle with growing dread, seeing the exact moment when the woman who'd built a simple, honest life was overwhelmed by the girl who'd once loved Victor unconditionally.

"Yes," she whispered. "I... I accept."

The response was immediate and horrifying.

Emerald flames burst from the ritual circles, writhing upward in spirals, their cold burn making the air itself recoil. The ritual diagrams carved into the floor blazed to life, pulsing with light that made space bend and warp around them.

Red symbols appeared on Valeria's skin, spreading like living tattoos across her arms and face. Each mark burned itself into existence with a soft hiss.

"Victor!" Terror replaced love in her voice as paralysis crept through her body. "What's happening to me?"

Doom began his explanation with theatrical flair, but Jay caught genuine regret that Victor couldn't quite suppress. A performance for an audience of demons, Jay realized, showing his supernatural partners that he could deliver what he'd promised.

"My beloved, my life has reached its moment of ultimate transformation. When I was young, I made a choice that has defined every day since. I chose science over sorcery, despite my mother's teachings. Despite the legacy she died to preserve." His voice hardened. "That choice cost me everything. But now I can choose differently."

The brands on Valeria's skin began to glow with infernal heat, and her silent scream of agony echoed through the chamber.

"After I returned from battle, scarred and defeated, I made a pact with the cabal of nether demons who claimed they would grant me the magical mastery I'd rejected in my youth. But demons always extract their price." His voice broke slightly. "I had to sacrifice something of indescribable value. Something irreplaceable. Something only you could give me."

Understanding dawned in Valeria's eyes, and the betrayal there cut deeper than any physical wound.

"You're going to kill me," she whispered.

"I'm going to transform your love into power. Your faith into force. Your trust into the energy needed to remake reality itself." Doom's mask couldn't hide the tears streaming down his cheeks.

"Farewell, my love. Dear, dear Valeria. I will miss you more than any will ever imagine."

That was when the nether demons materialized.

They rose from the ritual circles like smoke given malevolent form, shapes that hurt to perceive directly, shifting between dimensions. Their eyes burned with the hunger of creatures that had been waiting eons for this moment.

"Tell us, would-be sorcerer," they hissed in unison, voices like grinding metal, "what manner of mystical master are you destined to become if you cannot even sense the intruder who has been observing from your own shadows?"

Jay dropped from the ceiling like an avenging angel.

Light daggers formed in both hands as he crashed into the ritual circle, but these weren't weapons meant to kill. They passed through the demons' projected forms, disrupting their manifestation while leaving the accumulated energy intact. Months of studying ritual mechanics had prepared him for exactly this.

"Magnificent!" Doom's laughter filled the chamber with genuine delight. "My second most despised enemy, arriving to witness the moment I transcend every limitation that has held me back. Fate itself delivers you as the perfect witness to my apotheosis!"

But Jay was already in motion. Murasama cleared its sheath faster than the eye could follow. The cursed blade cut through the mystical energy, as Jay's strikes were redirecting flows of power with cuts calculated to the millimeter rather than destroying the ritual outright.

"Clever," Doom acknowledged, his own blade materializing in a flash of emerald light. The weapon pulsed with energy drawn from multiple dimensions, its edge crackling with forces Jay's danger sense couldn't detect. "Though I lacked mystical talent in my youth, my mother's teachings were thorough. The cosmic radiation that scarred my face also restructured my very DNA. I can now channel ambient magical energy in ways that would have been impossible before."

The blade hummed with otherworldly power. "When this ritual completes, I will command forces that dwarf the cosmic rays that created your precious Fantastic Four. Reed Richards will kneel before me, not as the brilliant scientist he believes himself to be, but as the jealous child he has always remained."

The duel that erupted transcended mere swordplay.

Doom's mystically enhanced blade, specifically prepared to counter Jay's abilities, remained invisible to his danger sense. Every parry became a calculated gamble based on reading muscle tension, breathing patterns, the minute shifts in Doom's stance that telegraphed his intentions.

But this was exactly what Jay had trained for. His enhanced reflexes turned anticipation into art, each movement flowing into the next like water finding its path.

Doom fought with supreme confidence, clearly savoring what he believed would be his final duel as a mortal being. His blade work was elegant, precise, and enhanced by mystical energy, but still fundamentally bound by human limitations.

Jay wasn't trying to win quickly. He was buying time, one eye on his watch while the negative demons watched with malicious anticipation, and poor                                                                                                                        Valeria struggled in her paralyzed state.

Sparks flew as their blades met in a symphony of steel. Doom's strikes came in calculated sequences of overhead cleaves that split the air with emerald fire, horizontal slashes that left glowing trails in their wake, and thrusts that sought gaps in Jay's defense.

Jay answered each attack with movements that seemed choreographed and practiced before. He flowed around Doom's blade like smoke, countering with strikes that carved through the mystical energy without touching the man wielding it. When Doom pressed forward with a combination of slashes, Jay backflipped over the emerald energy, landing in a crouch before springing forward with an upward cut that forced Doom to parry desperately.

"You should feel honored," Doom said between exchanges, not even breathing hard. "When I become a sorcerer on par with gods, you will be remembered as the last enemy I defeated while still bound by the weakness of flesh."

Jay spun away from a particularly vicious strike, his blade tracing a perfect arc that severed one of the ritual's connecting lines. The chamber pulsed as energy was momentarily disrupted before rerouting itself.

Time crawled. Each second felt like an hour as Jay maintained the delicate balance of engaging Doom fully while performing precise strikes on the ritual itself. The accumulated nether energy built toward the threshold he needed, contained within the geometric patterns but not yet bonded to Doom's physiology.

At exactly 11:50 PM, Jay saw his moment.

In one explosive movement, he performed a strike at the ritual's precise center, not to destroy it, but to sever the demons' connection to this dimensional plane while trapping their energy within the geometric patterns.

"No!" Doom screamed, abandoning the duel to frantically attempt repairs to the ritual diagrams. " My sacrifices! Months of planning!"

Jay was already moving to the next phase. Light daggers immobilized Doom against the laboratory wall while Jay teleported with the paralyzed Valeria to the hospital in a flash of blue energy. He materialized in the emergency ward, gently placing her on a stretcher.

"Help her," he told the startled medical staff before vanishing again.

When he returned seconds later, Doom had freed himself and was desperately trying to reestablish the dimensional connection, his fingers bleeding as he redrew symbols with his own blood.

Jay activated his technomorphing ability, his smartwatch interfacing with every communication system within range. Hidden cameras throughout the laboratory came online, and within moments, the signal was bouncing off satellites to reach every screen capable of receiving it countrywide.

The time for subtlety had ended. Now came the reckoning.

Jay's voice cut through the chamber like a blade forged from pure malice.

"People of Latveria," Jay's voice carried the weight of months of accumulated rage as millions of viewers found their screens hijacked. "Behold Victor Von Doom, your beloved ruler."

The camera focused on Doom kneeling beside the ruined ritual, his elegant clothes torn and stained, his mask askew to reveal burned flesh beneath. He looked exactly like what he was: a broken man desperately clawing at mystical symbols drawn in his own blood.

The hatred he'd been choking down finally broke free, raw and burning.

"Look closely at your would-be god. The mighty Doctor Doom, ruler of a nation, reduced to crawling on his hands and knees like a child drawing with chalk."

Jay's laughter was surgical in its cruelty, designed to cut through Doom's pride with the precision of Murasama itself.

"Victor Von Doom, who broadcast to the world that I was a villain manipulating innocents. Victor Von Doom, who exposed the 'Power Broker' as a fraud preying on the desperate." Jay's words became venom itself. "Here is your noble leader, attempting to sacrifice his childhood sweetheart to demons for the chance at godlike power."

The revelation tore through Latveria like wildfire. Even through the castle walls, Jay could hear the collective gasp of an entire nation.

"Tell them, Victor. Tell them about the month-long ritual that's been feeding on your people's suffering. Tell them how their mysterious illnesses, their impossible accidents, their crops failing and their weather turning hostile, all of it has been fuel for your summoning."

Doom's composure cracked like ice under pressure. "You don't understand! I was going to save them! Rule them properly! Guide them to greatness!"

"By murdering the woman who loved you?" Jay's hatred turned to verbal assault, each word precisely targeted. "Let me guess, Victor. When you were a child, did Valeria tell you that you could be anything you wanted to be? That you were special? That you deserved better than the hand life dealt you?"

The accuracy of the guess was visible in Doom's flinch.

"And look what we have here instead," Jay's voice dripped with venom as he addressed the cameras. "The ruler of Latveria, reduced to kneeling and drawing scribbles while betraying the only girl who'd ever accept his hideous face. First Valeria, then Sue Storm. You really have bad luck with the ladies, huh? Or do you only pine after married women because you have a kink?" Jay's laughter turned hysterical.

"Oh no, don't tell me Doctor Doom, ruler of Latveria, is a 'cuck'?"

Doom's entire body went rigid. For a moment, the laboratory fell into absolute silence except for the hum of dying wards. Then, slowly, Victor Von Doom rose to his feet with the terrible dignity of a monarch whose kingdom was burning around him.

"You..." His voice was barely a whisper, but it carried the weight of mountains. "You DARE speak that word to DOOM?"

The mask that had been askew slowly straightened as Doom's hands moved. When he spoke again, his voice had shed all pretense of humanity, becoming something cold and terrible.

"DOOM is eternal. DOOM is inevitable. And you, miserable wretch, have just committed the gravest sin possible—you have made DOOM's humiliation PUBLIC." His voice rose to a roar that shook the castle foundations. "For this transgression, there will be no mercy. No quick death. No peace in any realm!"

The air around Doom began to shimmer with barely contained power, the focused hatred of a man whose pride had been shattered so completely that only total annihilation could restore it.

The final mystical blast Doom summoned was pure desperation made manifest—a howling torrent of power drawn from every dimensional fracture around them, every scrap of demonic energy he could tear from the ritual itself. The concentrated fury could have leveled city blocks.

Jay cut it in half with contemptuous ease, his cursed blade parting the energy like Moses splitting the Red Sea.

"And this is where your story ends," Jay said, his Murasama form now radiating anti-mystical energy so intense that the laboratory's wards began to malfunction. "Not with your ascension to power. Not even with a dramatic last stand worthy of your ego. Just pathetic, whimpering failure."

Using his duality powers, Jay began the most ambitious feat he'd ever attempted. The overwhelming dark energy trapped within the ritual circle flowed into him like a river of liquid night, but instead of corrupting him, he channeled it through his unique abilities and converted the darkness into pure light.

The transformation was visible as streams of shadow entering his body and emerging as radiance that made the camera feeds flicker and distort.

"Citizens of Latveria," Jay addressed the audience, now glowing with converted energy that made him appear angelic despite the violence of the moment, his hair shifting to brilliant white. "Your leader spent weeks feeding your suffering to demons. He turned your trust into fuel for his personal ambitions. He branded me a master planner while planning to become something infinitely worse."

The great clock in Doomstadt's central square began to chime midnight. Christmas Day was beginning.

"But I want to show you something Victor Von Doom never understood. I’ve learned that Power isn't about what you can take. It's about what you can give."

Jay raised his hands, and the converted energy responded to his will with breathtaking beauty.

"This Christmas morning, I gift you healing. I gift you hope. I gift you the future your leader tried to steal."

The feat defied every natural law.

Light erupted from Castle Doom like a second sun, but this wasn't the harsh glare of fusion or electricity. This was healing given physical form, restoration made manifest, hope transformed into something that could touch the world.

The energy flowed through the seventy markers Jay had placed throughout Doomstadt, each anchor point becoming a beacon. The miracle didn't stop at the city's borders.

Streams of healing light raced across Latveria like aurora given purpose. In hospitals throughout the nation, patients who'd been dying found their bodies suddenly whole, restored to perfect health as if their illnesses had been nothing more than bad dreams.

Dr. Volkov stared at her instruments in shock as terminal diagnoses simply vanished from her screens. Patients who'd been catatonic for weeks sat up in their beds, lucid and whole. Children born with genetic defects watched their DNA rewrite itself in real-time.

But the miracle extended beyond human healing.

In the agricultural districts, destroyed crops ripened instantly. Spoiled grain stores became pure and nutritious again. Livestock found their strength returning.

Even the weather responded. The vicious storms that had been battering Latveria for weeks simply dissolved, replaced by the gentle snowfall of a Christmas night.

The effect was visible from orbit as satellite feeds showing Latveria glowing like a star, tendrils of pure light spreading across the nation's territory.

But it was the human reactions that made the miracle real.

In hospitals, families wept as loved ones were restored to them. Doctors fell to their knees, overwhelmed. Nurses who'd worked themselves to exhaustion suddenly found their patients laughing, crying, embracing life with the desperate intensity of those granted reprieve from death itself.

Farmers rushed into fields that had been barren wasteland hours before, falling among crops that continued growing even as they watched. The elderly danced in nursing homes, their bodies restored to vitality they'd forgotten they'd ever possessed.

Throughout Doomstadt, people poured into the streets despite the late hour. Strangers embraced. Children played in snow that no longer felt hauntingly cold. Church bells rang spontaneously.

News anchors countrywide abandoned prepared scripts, reduced to stammering attempts to describe the indescribable. Religious leaders fell to their knees in spontaneous prayer. Scientists ran calculations that their instruments insisted were impossible.

Social media exploded with footage that spread faster than any network had ever carried information. The hashtag #ChristmasGift trended within minutes.

Some people fainted from overwhelming emotion. Others laughed until they cried. Most simply stood transfixed, watching something that redefined their understanding of what was possible.

When the light finally faded, Jay swayed on his feet, drained by the transformation and expenditure of energy that nearly emptied his reserves. Only his enhanced physiology kept him conscious.

The cameras still broadcasting countrywide showed him standing over Doom's broken form. Victor Von Doom now lay bleeding and defeated in the ruins of his own ambition.

But Jay wasn't finished.

With tremendous effort, he placed Murasama's tip against Doom's chest. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of everything that had passed between them.

"Why?" The question held months of accumulated pain. "You had everything, Victor. A nation that loved you. People who trusted you with their lives before you threw it away for petty revenge."

Jay's voice cracked with exhaustion and emotion. "Why betray all of that? Why come after me? Why ruin my life? Why blame me for an accident when we both know the cosmic rays were nobody's fault? Why sacrifice innocent people who saw you as their savior? Why try to murder the one person who loved you before the world taught you to hate?"

Doom's laughter was broken, bloody, echoing through the laboratory and into millions of homes.

"Because I am DOOM!" he screamed through ruined vocal cords. "I alone deserve to stand supreme! Anyone who threatens that supremacy must be crushed, whether they are insects beneath my notice, false heroes playing at righteousness, or a woman who dared represent the innocence I chose to abandon!"

His eyes blazed with unrepentant hatred that chilled his subjects. "I regret nothing! Every choice was correct! Every sacrifice was justified! If ruling requires me to stand atop a mountain of corpses, then I will build that mountain myself and smile while I do it!"

Jay looked into those hate-filled eyes and saw the most terrifying revelation of all.

Victor Von Doom genuinely believed he was the hero of his own story.

There would be no redemption. No moment of recognition. No understanding of the evil he'd committed.

Doom was exactly what he appeared to be: a narcissist so consumed by his own ego that he would sacrifice literally anyone and anything for the chance at more power.

Including the woman who'd loved him unconditionally.

Jay raised Murasama with hands that shook from exhaustion. When he spoke, his voice carried the finality of judgment.

"Then may God have mercy on your soul, Victor Von Doom. Because I won't."

The bells outside rang in joy, but in the throne room, the only music was the hiss of blood spreading across marble.

Jay didn't linger to savor victory. He teleported away in the same instant, leaving behind a dying tyrant, a nation struggling to process their salvation, and a world forever changed by witnessing the impossible.

In the silence that followed, Doomstadt's church bells continued to ring Christmas morning across a land finally free of the supernatural poison that had been slowly killing it.

Victor Von Doom's final gift to his people was his own defeat.

And across the globe, humanity went to sleep on Christmas Eve having missed proof that miracles, while rare, were still possible in this world.

Author’s Note: How was this chapter? Did the revenge land, was it satisfying, and did the payoff feel worth it? Been building to this moment for a while, so I’m curious if it hit the way you expected.