Mexico military base in 1947, when his adoptive father Trevor Bruttenholm assured him that he was not, as he feared even in youth, a monster. The barkeep turns off her TV as Alice calls Hellboy to the window, to witness, dismayed, his undead army of knights who have arrived and silently ring the pub awaiting him. Sitting with Alice by the window, Hellboy explains he cannot lead the undead army out of distrust towards Morgan despite trusting Mab's intentions. He also refuses to take Excalibur and asks Alice to get rid of it for him, intending to rejoin the BPRD in America once he defeated Nimue before leaving to face her. Along was way, Hellboy shortly finds Gruagach attempting to hang himself and obliges the remorseful changeling's plea to be killed. Hellboy immediately comes upon the bell-ringing homeless man, who he seems to recognize and greets with a disgusted "Oh, it's you." Unperturbed, the man shows Hellboy a vision of the vast army surrounding and defending Nimue's tower and urges Hellboy to defeat it at the head of an army led out of Hell - at which Hellboy breaks the man's walking stick over his head so that he reveals himself as Astaroth, Hellboy's tempter from the Box Full of Evil and The Wild Hunt storylines, who departs (the two broken pieces of his staff-like snake companion having rejoined). As Hellboy relights his cigar, Baba Yaga appears leaning on the giant wooden pestle of her flying mortar, and offers to fly Hellboy over the vast army so he may confront Nimue alone in her tower, begging him humbly in return for what she had previously always demanded: one of his eyes. Hellboy plucks it out and she brandishes it, rejoicing. Elsewhere, Morgan reviews her chessboard, the red piece of which is now bleeding, and in the top chamber of Nimue's tower, Nimue prays to the Ogdru Jahad until Ganeida, her mangled witch courtier from The Wild Hunt, interrupts her to announce that the Ogdru Jahad are using Nimue's body as vessel to incarnate themselves. As a horrified Nimue tosses Ganeida's body around the room with a suddenly mutating and gigantic arm, and as her army outside chants for war, we see the stones of the Ogdru Jahad's prison superimposed in the sky around the tower. The three witches from Darkness Calls, having fled the unfolding scene in Nimue's chamber, stand