Primus loved his Ultraspecs.

It took some adjustments for the sapient Goggles to process the power of his Primal Blast, but the upgraded focus was invaluable.

For all his incredible strength, speed, and invulnerability, Primus didn’t really have a lot of utility powers. His senses, for instance, were not much beyond the most developed of Terran creatures, and he often had to rely on artificial aids to peer over long distances, scan alternate wavelengths of matter, and similar things. Much of his Core Discipline training and Soul Tats were used for utility purposes like that, as his gear had a bad habit of getting destroyed when he entered a fight.

The Specs’ abilities to finely control his Primal Blast and its expanded visual range were massive blessings to him. Upgrading the latter to be fully functional in hyperspace definitely wasn’t beyond him.

He came up on the rearmost of the hundred-some ships of the Black Disciples, and tore his way into it, heading right for the ship’s core.

Durasteel crumpled like paper between his fists and Primal Blast clearing the way. He didn’t give them any warning or mercy, ripping through the ship directly for Engineering. Even at a mile a second difference in relative speed, he basically reached it instantly, breached it violently, destroyed its suppression and control systems, and the vessel grew a fusion fireball or six within it, depending on how big its core was, or if it had multiples of them.

His Specs located the spatial trail of the next vessel, and they combined efforts to zip after the ship, sliding through the reality-warping of higher space to his next target.

Zhuli was coming down into the middle of the pirates’ formation, his own Specs hooked into the quantum flow of his Lantern and also gaining enhanced benefits as it did so. The Lantern’s quantum power was totally unperturbed by hyperspace, and the Korliguan had the greatest ranged power of the entire High Guard. He was about to demonstrate why certain powers were right to fear the Lanterns.

Ahead of them, Dynamo slammed into the lead ship, and for a moment a sun flared in hyperspace, distorted into a mottling smear of wavelengths scattered and looping in all directions. Then she swooped right for the next one on an optimal course, having by far the best awareness of where everything was.

Mystical or technorganic sensors blared the alarms as she did, as all three of the High Guard came in and began to wreak havoc.

The commander of this fleet promptly ordered an emergency fall into normal space, wrenching the ships off their courses and back into normal reality, where their weapons and shields could come into play.

He was utterly horrified when hyperspace seemed to explode in chaos, ripping and tearing apart the exit gates of the ships right in front of them, leaving them stranded in hyperspace with only warp shields to protect themselves from annihilation.

The invulnerable human missile, the intelligent exploding sun, and the cleaving blades, axes, saws, and rings of quantum Light took all of ten minutes to reduce the entire side fleet of the Dark Disciples to scrap dissolving into hyperspace.

Before the ships had a chance to be completely dissolved in the hyperspatial tides, a pod of Acanti swooped in and snapped them up for recycling. The pirates might have been disturbed to think they were only junk worthy for a solar furnace, but none of them were alive to protest their final lot in life.

Hyperdiction, when boosted by the Underweb, covered a totally massive area, and was designed to work just like Interdiction on the other side of the Veil...

-------

Nebula’s fleet, encompassing over half of the Dark Disciples, moved on Xandar with Thanos’ blessing. Perhaps he wanted to observe and see if the humans from Terra would come out and intervene in this matter as they had the Skrull invasion. They had interfered in his matters before, aiding Mar-Vell in stopping one of his plans, and he believed one was behind the death of the Magus.

It did not matter to Nebula, who was looking for the chance to finally avenge her father. The Luphomites had tried to conquer Xandar many times, among other places, and vengeance had finally come to them a generation ago, when Galactus had shattered the Luphomite homeworld and driven them into space. The remnants of the race of conquerors had attacked Xandar and tried to take it for their own, and only succeeded in nearly annihilating themselves while breaking the planet apart into the arcologies the Xandarans inhabited today. The battle had scattered what few Luphomite survivors there were throughout space, their numbers dying every day as their aggressive tendencies and dispositions got them shot by parties uninterested in kneeling to them.

But there were no alien gods here defending them, nor space whales mewling around ready to be sacrificed. There were Xandarans, and their vaunted Nova Corps and its ships, outnumbered hundreds to one in their precious arcologies, and that was all.

And to the horror of the pirates, it was quite enough.

Hyperspace mines were taking ships out along their egress points before they even broke into normal space, then teleporting atomics came in with pinpoint precision before their Interdictions were up, blowing the first waves out of the sky. The second wave to arrive ran into literally thousands of the most highly advanced missiles they had ever come across, and learned what a Macross Missile Massacre to the chin was.

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Totally unfazed, nihilist worshippers of Death to the core, the Dark Disciples pressed in, destroying everything they could as they did, a juggernaut of ships from a hundred races and traditions, their technology upgraded by the reach and genius of Thanos of Titan. They were fully able to confront the best of Xandar and overwhelm it with sheer numbers.

Massively armed and armored androids piloted by connections to ex-Nova Centurions in the Xandaran Worldmind, not so much.

There were mines that slipped through the best of shields. There were railguns firing shieldbreakers moving at near-light speed, teleported right on top of targets millions of miles away. Inertial dampening bubbles brought ships hurtling at thousands of miles per second down to coasting at one second at one gravity max, and pre-sighted artillery pounded them apart before they could possibly escape.

The main guns of the Nova ships were some of the most feared direct-fire energy weapons in the galaxy, and they ravaged the pirates who came within range of them. In contrast, only the swiftest of the pirates had a chance of catching the Nova ships in real space, and none if they got out of Interdiction and teleported away.

The Skrulls had found out long ago that a hunt for a Nova ship was tedious and required multiple ships with Interdictions around to catch them, each equipped with truly powerful defenses to hold the Nova ship in place until reinforcements could arrive. The pirates weren’t equipped to do the same, and so had little choice but to chase fruitlessly and suffer the pummeling in return.

But in the end, it didn’t matter much, as the entire fleet bore down on the arcologies, powering through an unprecedented defensive fusillade and unending streams of violent boarding actions from some of the most sophisticated war-bots any of them had ever seen, all of them armed with anti-matter self-destructs which would take out an entire ship if they were killed.

Even the zealots of Death Herself had never faced such a determined mauling, and couldn’t remember anything in their records that indicated that Xandar was even capable of putting up this level of a defense. Their total expected losses were a past number before they were even halfway to the arcologies, and by the time their first missiles and cannons were raining unceasing fire down on the famed shields of the Xandaran arcologies, half the fleet was already burning hulks tumbling through space.

Those Xandarans who had not wanted to run had swallowed their words and worked feverishly to prepare for what was coming. There was no way to flee now, with mass Interdictions all around their Shards, and they knew the fate that awaited them.

If Death was coming, then give them death!

The buildings and cities of the arcologies fell and were remade... into ever more cannons, missile racks, and field projectors. The sophisticated architecture and soaring glory of the arcologies dropped down, and what was left behind were landscapes bristling with rank on rank of cannons, wrought with some of the greatest technology in the galaxy. They were working in a sophisticated dance of volley and overkill that was methodically obliterating ship after ship as the main shields took on the incoming fire in howling storms of energy that completely hid the remnants of a shattered world from visible sight.

Enraged at the losses, Nebula unleashed some of the most dangerous weapons in the galaxy in an attempt to get through those shields and finally slaughter the Xandarans once and for all. Singularity bombs, mass quantum disruptors, temporal sliders, dimensional breachers, Hellwheel mawbombs, Demonfire soul-consuming explosives; all those weapons were meant to destroy entire worlds, and were being mass-dropped upon those Xandaran shields and the endless rain of energies and explosive kinetics pouring down upon them.

The shields around Argenta went down first. It was only a momentary breach, overwhelmed by a particularly concentrated array of fire at opposing vertex points, but it was enough. The assaulting fire poured in, and turned miles of the arcology into free-floating atoms, despite the personal shields that popped up.

Despite the breach, the first arcology held on for another hour, eliminating another forty Disciple ships during that time, before the surface of the place was left a burning hell of atomic and worse energies ravaging the final remnants of the Xandaran homeworld it was built upon.

The pirates could now concentrate their fire further, and they did so. Over the course of the next six hours, the other two outer Shards were breached and blasted, and finally, only the Orienta Shard was left.

With grim eyes, Nebula ordered a ground assault, which the bloodthirsty infantry who’d had nothing to do went with grimly.

The lines of troopships fed end-to-end as the killers of a thousand worlds boiled out of them onto the surface of Orienta Shard, and immediately drove themselves into a savage hellhole of murderous frenzy and some of the deadliest automated defenses they’d ever seen. Kamikaze bombs were going off left and right as the Xandaran forces died, and support artillery reduced the Shard’s living area every bit as much as the incoming cannon fire from the ships was trying to.

It took twelve hours to finally reach a field emitter and open up Orienta Shard’s field to external assault. The epiphany of the assault team that completed the task died as they went up in flames along with the surface of the Shard, and the cannons that kept attacking and killing right until the end were buried under shattering quarks and cracked dimensional tides.

Xandar had fallen.

-------

“What do you mean, they aren’t here?” Nebula howled, staring down at the canyon-like abyss below her, which was dark and silent... and empty.

Below her was where the famous Living Computers of Xandar were supposed to be, the devices that empowered and defined the Worldmind and Nova Force of Xandar. If she was able to enslave them, even the losses of this battle would be nothing, as she would be able to grant power to any who dared to follow her, and plunder the technology of Xandar as she wished!

If she had to, she could merely destroy it all, and such should be worth a boon from Thanos, if nothing else.

But the vaults of Xandar were empty, scoured clean, and not a speck of their legendary devices were present!

There were no known surviving Xandarans here; they had all died in the infantry assault or the hellish bombardment that had followed, nearly cracking the Orienta Shard in two before it was called off.

Infuriated at not reaping any gains, Nebula could only stalk out of the buried vaults. The looting was going full on, what survived of the Xandaran technology certain to be of great value, although most of their incredible power systems had been destroyed in the final volleys that had overwhelmed them-

The sky went dark.

Nebula whirled around, staring at the Trantan Sun, which had suddenly and ominously gone completely black. Her mind spun, trying to consider what was going on, and only coming up with a final weapon that must be getting deployed.

But what did it do?...

There was the faintest spark of light in the blackness, and then that light swallowed all.