35 Price

A beam of blue light, pulsing with volatile power, shot forth from the tallest skyscraper bearing the 'A' symbol.

It tore apart the fabric of space like a thin piece of paper, opening an enormous portal that extended to the entire sky of city in a fraction of a second.

This is Manhattan. Apollo realised. This is the New York Invasion. However, this seems different.

He raised his head. Behind the portal was a dark world, reeking of death and darkness, much like the underworld.

That is....

"Daughter…" A malevolent voice cackled. "Come froth!"

"Scorch Midgard in honour of my brother, Odin, the All Father!"

In the dark world, a dark-haired woman appeared, riding a dark pegasus. She was dressed in dark armour with a green cape, and her eyes were as dark as a swirling abyss.

Helheim, one of the nine realms ruled by Hela, the Goddess of Death.

Apollo concentrated his focus on the malevolent voice. He turned to face the tallest skyscraper, where a middle-aged man stood holding a yellow spectre. He was dressed in dark green armour and wore a double horn helmet over his head.

Apollo couldn't be wrong. That was Loki.

'This isn't my universe,' he reasoned. 'I am in the multiverse….'

In his home universe, Asgard mostly resembles the MCU, unlike the mythology and comics where Hela is the daughter of Loki.

Reining his thoughts, Apollo entered the state of absolute calmness, using his order authority. Then he looked around the battlefield. He had a feeling that whatever was happening in this universe was closely related to him. And he could hear stirring beneath everything.

Loki was looking down from the edge of the skyscraper, where many were flying towards him. Their weapons and powers were raised and charged at him, and their eyes were filled with determination and resolve. They were like a bright beacon of hope for mankind, shielding and protecting them from the universe's terrifying dangers.

They were the Avengers.

Loki merely pointed his spectre at the Avengers with his ever-present evil smile and sent out a charge of yellow energy that knocked out everybody except for a blonde guy with a hammer, Thor, and a red-haired woman, Jean Grey.

And they attacked Loki with everything they got. A colossal bolt of lightning and a surge of cosmic flames shoot towards Loki.

However, it was too late. A neigh of pegasus resounded. And Hela, the Goddess of Death, descended on Midgard, accompanied by millions of the dead. They poured out of the portal like a black waterfall onto the world.

The Goddess of Death raised her hand and a sword materialized, as dark as midnight.

She swung it at Manhattan. It shattered the skyscrapers in its path as it whizzed through the air.

Many familiar faces tried to stop it. However, when their powers touched the sword, it literally disintegrated into ashes. It dragged them down too with it into the cold embrace of death.

The moment the tip of the dark sword graced the ground, it exploded in green flames of death, like the loudest thunder of Zeus. It swept through New York in a split second, submerging everything.

The skyscrapers crumbled. The Heroes fell. The Manhattan sank. The Dead roared.

Everything was lost in the green embers of death, disintegrating into ashes. The scene abruptly changed.

Apollo found himself in the midst of the white columns, looking at the ivory statue of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln Memorial.

He turned around and looked back at the city. It was Washington, D.C., but the buildings were old and retro, in the style of the 1940s and 1960s.

He immediately narrowed his eyes at the sky, a dot to the mortal eye, but in his divine eyes it was a plane carrying a red-black swastika emblem. It belonged to the Nazis.

The plane flew undetected and unnoticed over Washington, DC. And then, it dropped a nuclear bomb on the city.

Boom!

A blinding and scorching flash of light erupted, followed by a mushroom cloud. The capital of the United States of America was reduced to ashes.

In the embers of nuclear fire, liberty and justice died on that day, forever more.

The Nazis won the war. The world was divided between Germany and Japan. And a fascist utopia graced the world.

Then the scene suddenly shifted. Apollo was now in a classroom with a slew of other peculiar teenagers, staring at the blonde teacher, Emma Frost.

Everything was serene, but he knew it was only the calm before the storm.

Emma Frost froze, her face pale, and reached her hand toward her head, as if to confirm that.

"No…" she muttered as she scampered to the window and opened it.

There it was, the prosperous mutant nation of Genosha. The safe haven for all meta-humans, protected and guarded by the strongest mutants on the planet.

But now, a massive wild sentinel towered over Genosha. All form of resistance from the mutants meant naught in front of it.

The wild sentinel finally fired on Genosha. However, it wasn't any lasers or energy weapons, but something more.

A blazing light erupted, consuming the Genosha. It was reduced to ashes. A mushroom cloud rose into the sky, signifying the terrifying dark nature of humanity.

The Genosha Genocide. On that day, 17 million mutants died. What followed was not peace, as one might expect, but war, a war of vengeance and carnage.

It was a war between humans and mutants.

Standing in the San Francisco ruins, Apollo looked ahead. A mother swaddled her child, desperately attempting to avoid the impending doom. However, there was no escaping death.

A missile landed in San Francisco, as it has in many other major cities around the world. Then, a nuclear fire razed the world.

The war resulted in the extinction of both humans and mutants.

It wasn't over yet. The scenes were constantly changing.

Apollo witnessed the destruction of numerous earths as well as alien civilizations.

A massive structure covering a star emitted a beam of condensed plasma that destroyed the planets with civilization.

In the star system, an antimatter bomb exploded, annihilating everything..

It went on and on.

Trillions of lives were extinguished in an inferno of death and despair. Their terrified and anguished screams seemed to shake the entire cosmos, reverberating through the timelines, dimensions, and universes.

Apollo sensed something similar in all of it. It was reverberating throughout the substratum of reality, corrupting and infecting everything. And it was all too familiar to him.

It was Chaos.

With that realisation, the scene in front of him changed to show Wanda Maximoff kneeling on a peak, holding a dead Pietro Maximoff in her arms. The Avengers and X-Men surrounded her, trying to calm her down while also preparing for the worst.

Pietro wasn't the only one who was dead. There were several bodies near Wanda. Erik Lensherr, her father, was also among them.

At the side of all of them was a sign that read : Yellowstone National Park.

Wanda smiled ruefully, caressing her brother's cheeks. Crystal tears streamed down his cheeks.

She spoke quietly, ignoring everyone. "Wait for me, brother. I'll be there as well. But first, allow me to give you a grand funeral."

"Stop her!"

"She's going to make Yellow Stone explode!" Charles Xavier exclaimed in horror, his fingers on his temple.

Wanda unleashed a wave of red chaos, repelling all of their attacks and spreading into Yellowstone.

The valleys and mountains of Yellowstone bulged toward the sky visibly, as deep cracks streaked across their expanse.

Wanda stood in the midst of the exploding red chaos, carrying her brother and turning towards Yellowstone.

But, she suddenly froze and her eyes snapped right at Apollo, as if seeing him through infinite time and space.

"It's you. It's you…" she said, rage filling her eyes in the form of red chaos. "You were the source of the chaos!"

"You took everything from me!" Wanda bellowed at Apollo and shot towards him in a crimson fury.

Apollo blinked silently at her.

BOOM!

The Yellow Stone exploded, launching a volcanic cloud into the sky filled with scorching magma, rocks, dust, and smoke. It reached from the ground to the sky, consuming everything in its pits of infernal hell.

And it swallowed Wanda. She tried to protect herself with chaos magic, but a blot of lightning erupted from within the scorching clouds, splitting it apart and hitting her. It shattered her chaos magic.

Then, the super volcano cloud completely incinerated her. She left only one unwilling word before collapsing into ashes.

"No…."

With her death, everything sank into darkness. However, within this darkness swirled trillions of dead souls, turning the darkness into a churning abyss.

They all bore their eyes on Apollo, yelling in unison.

"Phoebus Apollo, it's you. It is because of you that we are dead; because of your choice, because of your honour and pride."

Trillions of voices, disorderly and chaotic, wreaked havoc in his mind. Apollo's face twisted in pain, but he quickly closed his eyes and asserted his authority. Light crossed his mind, purifying the voices.

After the voices were silenced, Apollo took a deep breath. Then he looked around at the trillions of souls swirling and yelling around him, unrelenting in their hatred and madness.

He was already aware that their words were true. The information came to him naturally. By breaking Prometheus' fate, he undid a fixed point in time in the multiverse.

He unleashed chaos on the cosmos. And it had an impact on universes, timelines, and dimensions. It corrupted and altered everything, from mighty concepts to the minds of frail mortals.

It wrought anarchy in the multiverse.

And these resentful souls. He was responsible for all of their deaths. His hands were strained with the blood of trillions. He may not have personally caused their deaths, but it happened as a result of his choices and actions. This is a cold, hard fact that cannot be denied.

Apollo raised his hand and pressed it against his heart.

When confronted with the truth, he felt nothing; only indifference shrouded his heart. There was no sense of guilt or pain. His heart was as cold and hard as the nether ice within the deepest layer of infinite hell.

'The price for my power…' He thought. 'I understand now....'

In this life, he was mostly indifferent to everything and everyone other than his family. He may have looked gentle, kind, and caring, but most of the time it was just a façade. Even in his previous life, he didn't care about anything but his family.

As a result, he assumed that his apathy and indifference in this life were completely normal. And it is, but only partially, and the remainder was because...

"I lost my humanity…" Apollo smiled ruefully, clutching his heavy chest, as realisation hit him like a sleeve hammer. His breathing became harsh, and his vision became hazy.

Nothing comes without a price.

His humanity was a price for his power. He had completely lost his humanity.

"Do you regret it?" The mystical voice resounded from the darkness, and the hollering souls faded into the darkness, returning everything to silence and stillness.

Apollo looked at the darkness and called out with a strained voice. "Morpheus."

The darkness immediately shattered like glass, revealing a throne room with three arched windows.

On the high platform sat a man with bone-white skin, black hair, and two distant stars gazing out from the shadows where his eyes ought to have been.

Apollo stood in the middle of the throne room, looking at Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, one of the most powerful beings in the infinite multiverse.

"Do you regret it?" Morpheus asked, his starry eyes fixed on Apollo.

Apollo inhaled deeply, suppressing his feelings. "No. I don't. I am not a human anymore. But a God. I have already come to terms with it. A price is a price, isn't it? Even though I didn't get a voice in this. But still, I don't regret this."

His shoulders sagged immediately, and his heavy heart finally calmed. A sigh escaped from his lips.

He was not just telling that words to Morpheus, but also to himself.

Morpheus looked at Apollo for a moment, his starry eyes twinkling, before saying quietly. "You may leave, Phoebus Apollo."

"Wait..." Apollo inquired. "Why did you show me all of this? Why did you make me realise the price?"

Morpheus, however, ignored him. "Leave."

Everything immediately spun and collapsed on itself. And Apollo woke up in his personal room under his love's embrace and was sitting up in his bed, looking at the moon in a daze.

Hecate also woke up, disturbed by him. "Nightmare?" she asked drowsily.

Apollo turned and said lowly. "In a way."

Hecate raised her hand and pointed at him. Magic materialised and shrouded him.

"I cast a spell. It will make all the nightmares avoid you like a plague." Hecate said, before calling him into her arms. "Come on, nothing but sweet dreams for you the rest of the night."

Apollo finally smiled at her actions and snuggled with her under the sheen of moonlight.

But, as one could expect, he didn't sleep for the rest of the night.