Time passes as deeds great and small take place...
I was idly sunbathing when my eyes snapped open, just as a lightning bolt hundreds of feet wide rumbled down inside me to the Pocket, the Thunder of it and the endlessly roaring nuclear fires below me following the light and stuff down.
Kept most of the EM spectrum for myself.
Someone with Cosmic Awareness had just ghosted over the system, and then fixated on it for a moment. Rumblings were immediately occurring in probability streams around that.
The Magus had found the location of the temporal stability preventing him from mucking around in time. He wanted to act to forestall it, not realizing the instant he touched the Forsaken timeline here, he was locked in, and it was now his destiny against Briggs’, and the whole human race.
-Dyna, was that something I should be worried about?- Ben Parker’s /voice asked in my ear.
“Yes. That was the Magus. Tell Sama I am on it, and not going to be available for High Guard operations any time soon.”
I peeled up out of the sun, pinging Dealer and telling her what had just happened. It was best I take action now, before the Magus decided to do something more direct. I doubt he’d give a damn that Earth was where he’d been originally created, when everything came down to it.
What great timing. I should have finished up on le Fey in a couple of days, but nooooo, now I had to honk off to the far side of the galaxy to deal with a crazed ‘Avatar of Life’ who wanted to take over the universe in the name of Universal Truth... or maybe just to oppose Death, or smack Thanos around, or whatever.
---
Kymellia was located near the expansion area of the Church of Universal Truth, which had exploded onto the scene in the last couple of years, expanding with literally unholy speed under the auspices of its prophet and leader. I was going to be facing the Magus at the height of his power... except really, I wasn’t.
He didn’t have any cross-temporal vision here. In addition, I had an Astral Ward, so he definitely wasn’t going to see or sense me coming. I was going to be a complete surprise when I popped in on him and his bunch of Sovereign fanatics... and I was pretty damn sure I didn’t have an alternity counterpart.
He would be looking for opposition from Thanos and his Black Apostles... and maybe our Adam Warlock and whatever ragtag team he had assembled. Did Warlock even have the Soul Stone in this universe? I had to doubt it, which made me wonder what he was going to use as a power source and information source. The countless souls inside the Stone had been the source of the knowledge and skills that had made him what he was...
Warlock was adept enough to mask himself from Cosmic Awareness if he wasn’t making any moves, but I had to wonder how he was getting around. Maybe he had his hands on a Cosmic Cube, or some other major artifact. Given how unstable he was mentally, Golden Child of Creation or no, who knew where that was going to lead...
Whatever, it was not my problem, unless he popped in to interfere.
------
I Worldjumped in outside Kymellia’s gravity well, eyed the Sovereign fleet and attachments powering in from outside the system at a good chunk of light speed, and decided that the equinoid and peaceable Kymellians needed a hand.
I Rode the Light up behind the advancing craft, turned around and accelerated while completely ignoring inertia, and caught up to the ships at the rear.
Argent Savancy to pop a hole in their deflector shields, and some really juiced-up invulnerability at great speed to fly right through their ships far faster than they could avoid me. The ships were many miles apart for safety, but at my velocity, that was literally an eyeblink, and soon enough, every six seconds a shielded ship was exploding at their flanks, and the unshielded ships at better than one a second.
The ether was instantly alive with challenges and exclamations as to what was going on, but their machines still couldn’t read me. All they knew was that their ships were exploding. If they had actual eyeballs looking out actual windows instead of LED representations, they’d see what looked like a lightning bolt bouncing from one exploding ship to the next, but nobody sane put actual windows on warships. It was all projected images on screens, i.e., video, and I couldn’t be seen by those.
The Skrulls might have realized what was happening, but only by word of mouth. After all, I didn’t give anyone permission to write down my contributions at Xandar, and the Xandarans only learned about it because the Worldmind was actually a living thing, and their Mentors extensions of it.
The Sovereigns started firing wildly, filling the void with drones and missiles and cones of laser fire sweeping in all directions... but those were still just machines, and they couldn’t see me without technorganic components.
Ten ships per minute, a hundred-ship fleet. I let them deploy everything they liked while they looked around fruitlessly for a cloaked ship, but they were unwilling to actually send out real fighters, being much too efficient and protective of their own lives for that.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Up one side of the fleet, around and then up the other, driving them together as they sought to cover one another, predict where I was going, and shield one another. I only needed time to pop a hole in their shields, and they were dead.
I knew Kymellia was watching, but they had no idea who I was, either.
I had also sealed the area to hyperwave transmissions, so the Magus had no idea precisely what was happening. He’d just see his precious invasion fleet getting mulched, and have no idea how or why, unable to contact them.
The Kymellian smartships, on the other hand, were technorganic, and used living pilots. They could totally see me as a bolt of lightning bouncing from ship to ship and demolishing them as fireballs from ruptured power cores filled the void.
Ten minutes, and the last supercarrier blew apart as the Sovereigns’ escape pods and shuttles tried to escape in all directions. Alas for them, Cosmic Awareness told me which ones were important, and I sent them off to the Kymellians who had swooped in from all directions, and the equinoids converged on them with eager speed.
A hundred-ship fleet was a conquering wave, and with the Mimic Buffs, I’d just taken it out solo. Ships a couple dozen miles long were tumbling through the void behind me, shattered and broken, crews dying as I blew through them at impossible speeds and vented the heat of a photosphere, reducing everything around me to wild atoms.
It was carnage and massacre, and it was going to continue.
I reached down, and pulled up power from the Underweb. With a flash of light, I Worldjumped away to the nearest system conquered by the Church of Universal Truth, there to continue a rampage the likes of which the galaxy had never seen.
This was why I didn’t want to play at this level: because I was too damn good at playing here!
Cosmic Awareness let me know where to go and what to do to hurt the Church the most, which people were key to their expansion and fanaticism, and whose deaths would cripple the Church and cause crises of faith and disbelief.
It was a religion, a Crusade, driven by the Magus. Fighting a religion was a pain, but you don’t beat the people; you beat the belief and you break it, letting the religion die.
That religion was emboldening the Sovereigns to bring their idealized dream of genetic control and domination to the rest of the galaxy, a useful tool for the Magus, and fanaticism buried any questions of control and morality behind unswerving obedience and belief in the greater Cause of evolved perfection.
Well, the Magus had made himself a threat, and now I was coming to deliver on it and show him just how short a time a would-be empire could be torn down in.
The Magus had forcibly taken over ten different species and a hundred systems in a short time, drafting all of them into his forces under the threat of their homeworlds being glassed and the Creed of the Church, along with not a little psionic compulsion at the world-spanning level.
The problem with psionic compulsions is that they can be broken. When such brainwashing is shattered, the rage that is turned upon those having done the brainwashing usually did the job for me. I was Aware of which of the races joined willingly and which were under the Magus’ influence. The former died in fire or were simply released from oversight, finding themselves willing to flee the Church as eagerly as they’d joined. Moreover, I was secreting words as they went.
“The Church of Universal Lies is headed by a time-lost madman kicked out of his own dimension and come to ours to enslave us all. He is telepathically brainwashing whole planets into blind obedience to him. To follow him is to betray the Land you were born from and Eternity Itself in acknowledging this abomination and his creed of lies.”
Enchantment/Charm Underweb magic can be pretty damn powerful, too. Attach that to an Earworm spell, and it would spread like wildfire across the galaxy... and it did.
-----------
Ten hours, ten core systems. I destroyed the Church’s power and influence in the core worlds it had conquered, wiping away the psionic compulsions with purging waves drawn from the Underweb.
I was using Underweb Casting, but astonishingly enough to the few who might recognize it, only to purge brainwashing so far. I definitely hadn’t employed it in my conventional assaults.
I didn’t need to. A full Nova Core, half of the power of Kismet, a Flaring Comet, Primus, and Flux, Specs’ Boosts, and even my Wrecker Buff: was there even a need?
Of course, galactic powers were going to see the action for what it was: a willingness and devastating power that could be applied consecutively and with speed that was very hard to defend against. They would be watching, analyzing, and taking actions as they devised defenses against it and me.
The Xandarans witnessed it all, of course. I was wearing a stripped-down helm attached to Specs that let my Flaring hair burn free during all of this, with a Mentor attachment to the Worldmind. It was technopsionic, and had no problem recording my actions and relaying them to the Worldmind for further analysis.
Also, Dealer and the others could watch my sensory feed through their Marks on a thoughtstream or two, paying attention to different things than I did. Ursula was particularly good at noting who and what had to be removed to destroy faith and belief, and severely crump the power of the Church of Universal Truth.
With the freeing of their core worlds, the races conquered by the Church naturally rebelled in force. With so many of their fleets and forces annihilated, the Church could only flee back to the core systems of the Sovereigns, and that meant the Magus went with them.
I, I just Worldjumped back to LaGrange, renewed my Mimic Buffs with a sigh, then headed back out again. Mimi asked me once if I wanted her to go out there and help me, and I told her that we probably didn’t want this tracked back to Terra, so no.
The Xandarans had been utterly shocked to find I had an actual level Nine Ultra Core. Furthermore, I had informed them that a Ten was only a matter of time, probably a year or two. They had conferred and decided that giving me a Star Centurion Supreme uniform was not inappropriate.
Well, actually, they didn’t give me the uniform, they gave me the schematics. I Energized the very complex Isotopic Alloys for it myself, and made it from their plans, while they provided the Mentor download and Worldmind connection.
A Nova Ten Uniform was the apex of Xandaran technology. The stuff it could do was unknown to most of the Xandaran peoples and even their scientists, and I had to start delving deep into the potential of the thing, the technology within it, and how to mix, match, and empower it to bring out its potential.
Pointedly, I also had to make sure it had a variable energy signature so it couldn’t be readily traced back to me, and happily they all had variable colors/patterns, including stealth black.
My rampage across stars and systems was going to continue, and mere city-sized starships were not going to stop me.