Chapter 20 – The Hunt

【Loki PoV】

The problem with Void entities is that they have no sense of presentation.

I stepped through the smoking wreckage of what used to be seventeen blast doors. The metal was still glowing orange where I’d carved through it. The air smelled like burnt ozone and shattered wards. Security alarms screamed in the background but I ignored them. They were BORING.

Thalia’s cell gaped open ahead of me like a wound in reality.

Empty.

Obviously empty because the bitch had kidnapped MY Kai and dragged him to some pocket dimension love nest. The AUDACITY. The absolute nerve of this tacky void creature thinking she could just steal him during MY week.

I walked into her cell and immediately wanted to vomit.

The air was thick with lingering void energy. It clung to everything like syrup. Roses and ozone, that’s what it smelled like. Romantic residue. She’d been perfuming her domain like some desperate teenager getting ready for prom.

Pathetic.

I kicked one of her stupid velvet cushions across the room.

It hit the wall and exploded into feathers. The furniture in here was ridiculous. All curves and dark fabrics and “mysterious atmosphere.” She probably had mood lighting enchantments too. I could feel the trace magic in the walls, designed to make everything look sultry and dangerous.

“Trying so hard and for what?”

My voice echoed in the empty space. No answer. Just the lingering presence of her void aura, cold and cloying.

I crouched down and pressed my palm to the floor.

Reality rippled under my touch. I could feel the threads of dimensional travel, the tears she’d ripped open to escape. But there were too many. Way too many. At least a dozen different portals had been opened here in the last hour.

Decoys.

She’d scattered false trails like breadcrumbs, hoping to slow down anyone who came after her. As if I was some amateur who’d fall for the first shiny portal I saw. As if I hadn’t been playing dimensional chess since before her species evolved consciousness.

“You really think you’re clever, don’t you?”

I stood up and examined the room more carefully. Three of the portal signatures pulsed stronger than the others. Those would be the main decoys, the ones designed to be JUST convincing enough to waste my time.

Fine.

I’d play her stupid game. But I’d play it on fast-forward.

The first portal shimmered into visibility when I touched the eastern wall. A tear in space about the size of a doorway, crackling with unstable energy. Through the gap I could see boiling magma and rivers of fire.

“A fire dimension? Really? How original.”

I stepped through.

Heat slammed into me immediately. The air was liquid flames. The ground was molten rock that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Fire demons the size of buildings rose from the lava pools, their eyes glowing like miniature suns.

They roared at me.

One of them charged, its massive clawed hand reaching to crush me into paste.

I yawned and snapped my fingers.

The entire dimension froze. Not metaphorically. Literally froze. The magma solidified into black glass. The fire demons became ice sculptures mid-roar. The air itself crystallized into glittering snowflakes that fell in absolute silence.

“Boring.”

I turned around and stepped back through the portal. The tear sealed itself behind me with a wet sound like tearing flesh.

Two down. Eleven to go.

The second portal was hidden inside her bookshelf, disguised as a particularly old tome. Clever. Not clever enough. I yanked the book off the shelf and it dissolved into a swirling vortex of colors that hurt to look at.

Non-euclidean space.

I stepped through into nightmare geometry.

The dimension on the other side didn’t follow normal rules. Up was sideways. Walls bent in directions that shouldn’t exist. And tentacles. SO many tentacles. They sprouted from every surface, writhing and reaching and making wet slithering sounds.

Tentacle monsters filled the impossible angles of this place. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe. All teeth and suckers and cosmic horror nonsense.

They surged toward me in a wave of flesh.

I sighed and gestured lazily.

The tentacles twisted into knots. No, not knots. BALLOON ANIMALS. I turned every single tentacle monster into balloon animal versions of themselves. A giraffe here. A poodle there. One particularly ambitious horror became a balloon sword.

“There. Much better. You’re welcome for the upgrade.”

The balloon monsters squeaked sadly as I left.

The third portal was in the bathroom. Hidden in the mirror. Because of course it was. Thalia probably thought that was poetic or something.

I shattered the mirror with my elbow.

The glass reformed into a doorway mid-fall. This one led to pure vacuum. A dimension of absolute nothing. No light. No sound. No matter. Just infinite empty silence pressing in from all sides.

The void would crush a normal person’s consciousness instantly. The absence of stimulus would drive them insane within seconds.

I lasted about five seconds before I got BORED.

I filled the entire dimension with screaming.

Not just any screaming. I manifested a trillion voices all screaming different things at maximum volume. Opera arias. Death metal. Infomercials. The sounds clashed and overlapped until the void itself started vibrating.

“How’s THAT for stimulation?”

I stepped back out and sealed the portal.

Three decoys down. The rest would be variations on the same theme. Trap dimensions designed to waste time. Thalia was hoping I’d spend hours checking each one carefully.

But I’m not careful.

I’m EFFICIENT.

I raised both hands and channeled raw chaos magic into the room. Reality screamed as I forced every single remaining portal to manifest simultaneously. They bloomed like flowers made of broken space, each one showing a different flavor of death trap.

A dimension of infinite falling.

A world where time ran backwards.

A pocket realm filled with mind-eating parasites.

A space where physics was inverted.

On and on and on.

All fake. All distractions. All INSULTING.

“Is this really the best you could do?”

I clenched my fists and the false portals collapsed. They imploded one by one, sucking themselves into nothingness with wet popping sounds.

The room shuddered.

Now. Where was the REAL trail?

I closed my eyes and focused. Filtered out the residue from the decoys. Ignored the obvious signatures Thalia had left scattered everywhere. Looked deeper. Felt for the thing that was MISSING rather than present.

There.

A tiny absence in the corner of the ceiling. A spot where reality was just slightly LESS than it should be. Not a tear. Not a portal. Just a thread. A connection point so subtle that most people would never notice it.

But I’m not most people.

I’m LOKI.

I jumped up and grabbed the invisible thread. It felt like touching static electricity and frozen silk at the same time. The signature was unmistakable now that I’d found it. Kai’s specific absence. The shape of him pressed into dimensional fabric.

“Gotcha.”

I pulled on the thread and reality unraveled like a torn sweater. The portal opened slowly at first, then faster, then all at once. It yawned wide enough to walk through, edges crackling with purple-black energy.

Through the gap I could see another space.

A bedroom.

Not just any bedroom. A cosmic bedroom. The walls were made of stars. The ceiling showed nebulas drifting in slow motion. The floor looked like polished obsidian but reflected galaxies instead of light. Furniture that seemed carved from solidified night sat arranged around a massive bed.

And in the center of it all, I could feel him.

Kai.

MY Kai.

Trapped in there with HER.

My blood sang with fury. My fingers crackled with green lightning. The smile on my face probably looked terrifying but I didn’t care. I was DONE playing nice. I was DONE respecting boundaries. Thalia had crossed the line.

She’d kidnapped him during MY scheduled time.

That meant war.

I stood at the edge of the portal, staring into Thalia’s romantic fantasy dimension. The Starlight Bedroom. How nauseatingly poetic. She probably had slow music playing and everything.

Well.

Time to crash the party.

I took a deep breath and stepped forward, my boots touching the threshold between dimensions. The portal’s energy wrapped around me like cold fire. On the other side I could hear voices. Thalia’s honeyed tones. Kai’s exhausted responses.

My smile widened.

“Ready or not, here I come.”