What energies I was drawing under my own power and enhancement were currently and directly attuned to the energies Sersi wielded. I was pulling cosmic energies out of the background of smashing atoms the sun was throwing off, while the more conventional energies were being plowed into my Core and refined down, with others being dumped into the Pocket for my Dupes to draw back out for their more specialized Cores. A half-strength Comet Flare-hole contributed a constant stream of white-hot quark stuff to the mix, and the M’Krann juice was still flowing in steadily from the Pocket, easier to break down and refine than anything else.

When Sersi opted to step out as a Duplicate, all the energies she brought in with her were naturally going to leave with her soul, affirming her independent status and forming her Eternal Core. She would have to spend some time in the power cores of Olympia to first recover her original power, then keep building on it as she strove to get a Core Ten of her own... or at least the power to fill it, if she didn’t do a pop-in/out if I got it first.

If I wanted to maintain access to her powers without using a Mimic Slot, I had to replace the equivalent of a Nine-Core (or a full Eight Core) with cosmic energies, too, so that’s what I was doing as my personal project.

Okay, I liked being able to manipulate matter directly. It was just too damn useful, even if I was nowhere near Ben Parker’s scale.

I was totally likely to reach a Ten Core first, as despite the potential, none of my Dupes were bothering to come up here and do the whole Copy/Mimic thing to borrow the enhanced energy absorption from Comet. It was unnecessary for what they were doing, and so a waste of time. The fact they COULD was always there, and yeah, wouldn’t that shock the Hell out of those who ran into a full line of Dupes with a High Guard Mimic configuration...

In the end, my Cosmic Awareness had been the only thing that was really important.

I wasn’t the only person in the network of Marks and small Allegiances with Cosmic Awareness. Sama had it, but hers was completely restricted to her Null lock on history. She was instantly aware of something trying to change the past if it ran into hers, who and what they were, and she could act on that knowledge. She could also sense where anyone in her Markspace had been exactly at any time in the past, which was strange but useful, and allowed her to flit around on Lived-Lines as she pleased.

Briggs was the exact opposite, able to sense things coming down from the line of the future and running into human destiny. It gave him literally years to plan for non-linear stuff that thought striking at their past or into the future was a good idea. Coming in from the 25th century to assassinate someone in the past? It gave Briggs literally hundreds of years to swat you in mid-transit, or to prepare to hit you anywhere along the way.

He picked the moment, so he had whatever time he needed to prepare for you. Brutal!

I reflected that was how the Shadowknife Void Brothers had to work. Enlightenment!

Briggs’ boys weren’t much different from their father, although the White Bear was much more sensitive to intrusions upon Mother Russia of unhealthy sorts, and to a smaller degree the planet.

The others who had been helped along by Eon had similar restrictions. Cassandra was sensitive to the human mindscape and those things that relied on it, be they Fey spirits, Entities of dream and nightmare, or psychic parasites. Hercules was defined by his godhood and very sensitive to the need or existence of strength. Various Shamans expanded their effective Awareness of their gods’ portfolios to some extent or another.

Carol had some intrinsically, but she didn’t have the mental chops to really make it work, and the precognitive nature of her Awareness was messed up bad with Briggs around, so I didn’t blame her.

I was the only one with Cosmic Awareness of the present, and enough mystical skill to send it up and down the timestream to verify stuff. It wasn’t very different from using Divination magic, and I was very good at Divination magic. Even Eon said I was better than him at long-distance Awareness and the detail I could discern. He had me on the sheer volume of what he could sense, but he was bigger than a solar system in mass, so no news there.

I could monitor one thing a long distance away incredibly well, and he could monitor bunches of things all over the place pretty well. Scale, Dyna, scale...

Directing traffic and calling shots with my basically unlimited clairvoyance had been the most important thing I could do.

Could I have punched through the Beyonder’s Interdiction? If I used Underweb Casting, probably. But what good would that have done? The end fight was cosmic in level, beyond me, and the lower-level fights were staged plays. The big power contribution there was Dealer helping the Mick get there and leading the caravan out of there with Shields, Blasting, and Healing magic. I literally would have been just one more shooter, making the Ride more dangerous for everyone else by having me along.

Dealer had to perform way above her Level to justify her place in the caravan, or she made it so dangerous by coming that it was better if she didn’t. That wasn’t that much of a problem, although she’d blown through a lot of Valences on those Rides as a result.

I was in a weird spot where I could Buff up to be really damn strong, but not at the point I could play with cosmic Entities, at least not without Underweb Casting. Yet it was my Awareness of those forces which was most important.

I could only sigh. Well, it was my only truly Cosmic power. Sersi’s powers used cosmic energy, and matter manipulation was cool, but I couldn’t do it on the level to really wreak havoc.

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It pretty much came down to the Underweb Casting, and what I was going to do with it.

I had literally hundreds of spells ready to go for it, me and my Dupes Paragon Surging for knowledge of them, Writing down the Underweb versions of them to our Rings... but never really testing them out, as the powers behind them were indeed really, really powerful.

Proper Underweb Casting not only took energy out of the Underweb, it had to put it back in so as not to cause an imbalance. Thus, all the spells were loops, not just invocations. Most beings who accessed it treated it like a pool to draw off from, and completely ignored the size and implications of the sheer amount of energy running through the thing in balance. Mess stuff up, and Bad Things Happened, so the Weavers in the Web arranged for bad stuff to happen to you.

It was generally a bad idea to get on the wrong side of Fate-spinners...

My thoughts drifted to other things that were going on.

Nebula was gathering forces and organizing things among the Black Disciples. They had tweaked to the fact that Xandar was expecting them, so force elevation and refits were in progress. They’d also tumbled to the fact that the same person who’d taken out the Magus was the same person who’d bodyslammed the Skrull invasion of Xandar, and were taking appropriate steps, including planning to send an arm to attack Terra and LaGrange to keep me occupied.

Or, you know, to wipe out Terra in passing if we weren’t here, and maybe if we were.

While it was very comforting to know the Molecule Man could literally wrap all of them up, nobody had yet kenned to the fact that an active Cosmic Entity was truly protecting the planet. The Phoenix Force was seen as a non-issue, even with an Avatar here. The reason you have Avatars is so you don’t fight yourself, after all.

Discovering the Molecule Man was here would shake the galaxy, at the very least, and be impossible to miss. He would instantly make Terra a galactic power nobody would want to mess with... at least, until they figured out a way to deal with him, and galaxy-spanning empires actually had the potential to do just that.

Frank Castle was heading Down. DiDi had offered to take him, but no. She was running billions of dollars worth of businesses, and scheming, plotting, and manipulating as she did. The moves and countermoves were too constant and too subtle, and the fact she was in charge of production of our tech and all the verifications that could be tossed at her on top of running Baxter, Ferrus, and Rand-Meachum meant her time was always busy-busy full, and she loved it.

I could be going on the trip, but dragging Sersi/Flux along on top of everything else would just blow the Chase curves, and that was a bad idea, too.

I could help babysit Wanda’s twins as she and Johnny headed Down. This was a true mission of vengeance; the Ghost Rider couldn’t sit it out, and she wasn’t letting him go into Hell without her. We expected all kinds of shenanigans from powers in Hell, but the only true heavy-hitters in the Punishment Team would be Mr. Hill and Dealer. The rest were going to be among the most competent mortals in the world, so I didn’t have any real fears.

I wanted to go, Castle knew I wanted to go, but if I went, the chance for failure went UP, not down. Suck...

That Grigori bastard was still going to get everything coming to him, and then it was going to be the End of his Eternity.

After all, Dealer shared my Titles, and that meant she was totally a Courtier of Death, and could help take out a true Fallen Angel.

The fun time would be coming OUT of Hell, not going in...

Six more months tops, and the Guardians of the Galaxy would be finishing up their training and returning to their future alternity. I’d offered to go with them and use my Cosmic Awareness on their behalf to locate the missing members of their peoples. That would take like no time for me here.

Was something else supposed to happen in the meantime?...

Ah, yes, the Grandmaster was going to get out of Death’s Domain, seemingly making the Elders truly immortal. Briggs was already withdrawing his people from the Collector’s worlds in anticipation, but I’d been told that he was readying to negotiate ongoing access to the Collector’s collection. After all, the Elder Collection basically amounted to the universe’s most magnificent museum, and what was a museum without those who could appreciate it?

While he had inspected everything he could and analyzed a bunch of other things, Briggs hadn’t actually taken anything which couldn’t be put back. There was room to deal there.

Then the Collector would find out Elders of the Universe could still die, as oblivion had nothing to do with Death’s realm, and Briggs was one of those who could make it so. His negotiation room would broaden considerably.

Shit was still happening in the Negative Zone. Annihilus had been encountered, idiots in the States, Asia, and Europe, and even Africa, had made their own Portals there, hoping to keep them secret and raid a parallel universe for goodies.

Most of them had come to a bad end, even with Sama or her Crystal Vaccine-assigned people taking care of them quickly, and there’d been four different incursions from the Negative Zone as a result.

Helping open up our universe to invasion from another one, that was humanity, yessir.

The Negative Zone...

Captain Mar-vell had perished of The Wasting some time ago, the Kree equivalent of cancer, an affliction rising from their inability to evolve genetically. He had a half-Titan son and daughter being raised on Titan, and his Nega-bands were being held in trust for them there.

But... those weren’t the only set of Nega-bands out there. They were the height of Kree techno-sorcery, basically taking a planet’s worth of resources to make. Focusing on them and following them back through time to Kree-lar, I could see where they had been made, and then simply follow the incredible expenditures of time and resources involved to locate when others had been crafted, and where they were now.

There was only one pair still in the control of the Kree, locked down in a vault on Kree-lar, probably only the Supreme Intelligence aware they were there. Captain Mar-Vell’s set was on Titan. Four others had been lost across the many millennia since they’d been made.

So, Cosmic Awareness and Divination Valences being good for something, I went looking for them across a hundred thousand years of galactic history, and found them.

A shattered research station drifting in the deep void, destroyed during some celestial accident fifty-nine thousand years ago, long presumed lost forever.

A Kree ship, crashed into a Kuiper object outside a system of no worth or value, lost in a deadly ambush thirty-one thousand years past.

Buried on a skeleton in the rubble of a free-floating space station, mostly destroyed over eight thousand years ago in one of the interminable skirmishes with the Skrulls, just one more loss in their age-old struggle.

Literally floating in interstellar space, their owner vaporized long ago, literally light years apart at this time, two motes in the infinite darkness. Seventy-four thousand years lost.

There were literally no probability lines bending to include them for basically any purpose I could discern. Even the Kree believed them all to be lost and destroyed.

I was sort of impressed. Even the Collector hadn’t managed to grab a pair, and they’d make great prizes for him.

Kree tech wasn’t equal to Xandaran tech overall, but in specific cases their technosorcery was its equal. The Nega-bands could make their wearer the equal of a Core 7 or more, easily. Their key function was turning willpower into might, after all.

And... they allowed you to instantly transit to the Negative Zone...