-Hey, Dyna. Morlun showed.-

I was glassing a N-Zoner shipyard production facility with the unleashed point-blank omnidirectional photospheric fires of Sol while racing through it at a hundred miles per second, an erupting line of nuclear holocaust behind me. Any faster and I wouldn’t be doing enough damage to actually destroy the thing, and as it was an entire planetary ring, it wasn’t fast enough for my liking.

Ah well, size limits and everything. I couldn’t unload from the pocket at an infinite pace, after all.

-&^%)&()&!!!- I /replied to DiDi in multiple languages. Carol in her full newly-juiced Flare form was sweeping the other direction, scything fusion streams around her endlessly, coordinating with my Karnak-sense and her own Cosmic Awareness to hit all the structural vulnerabilities and things that liked to go boom.

-Yeah, the timing is absolutely shit,- DiDi /agreed with me. -I don’t know much about all of this, something about Inheritors?-

-Morlun is the eldest of a bunch of Totem-eating children, led by their father, from an alternate universe. Murders by variants of the family have been noted across over two hundred realities by the Alternities Watch.-

-So, there’s more than one family of them, alternates to the alternates. And now they’ve come here.- DiDi was not amused. -Man, Dyna, you should really come home and introduce the Inheritors to the Widow in the Web and disinherit them.-

-I would dearly love to, and it would be very appropriate, but I’m a tad busy working at the opposite end of the scale,- I /replied grimly. -Did they kill the bastard?-

-Deader than a doornail via True Death. Get this: sucking the Totem power back out of the jerk removed the Vatted status on their souls!-

-Oh, that is so AWESOME. Rewards from the multiverse from getting rid of cannibal planes-traveling mass murderers!- I mentally /clapped hard in approval. -What are they going to do about them?-

-When MJ found out that they’d killed at least nine alternates of her just in passing, and their kids, she went off. Red MJ is on the hunt, and make no mistake. She and Peter have already requested permission for the mission, and Sama signed off on it.-

I took a big, deep breath. The Inheritors were going to be getting some nasty, nasty surprises in the near future, and things were not going to be going to their liking at all. Red MJ had absolutely no compunctions about punching their vivic tickets. -And they had a key to the multiverse.-

-Finest personal alternity-traveling device Reed or Hank have ever seen. Even charges itself off dimensional friction.-

-Which is not to say Reed couldn’t improve it,- I /half-laughed knowingly.

-Well, he didn’t consider it an issue until I pointed it out, but the methodology of tearing open the hole between alternities was not very balanced and left an unhealthy weakness in the Veil until it could be repaired. I prevailed upon him to make something that was less intrusive and worked more in line with the Underweb. It required some further attunement and some odd Elements, but we have a prototype working, and miniaturization should follow forthwith.-

Gotta love a supersverse, where Science was Magic. -You going with them?- I /asked, rather doubting it.

-Fedora expressed some interest in chasing a bunch of mass murderers and their Alternates around the multiverse,- DiDi /replied easily.

And she’d ride herd and keep the Spiders on track. Dupe Henda loved her some tracking murderers down who thought they’d gotten away with stuff.

-Miles, Mattie?-

-It’s a weekend. Why would they not go gallivanting about other universes?- DiDi /asked, and I could hear her eyebrow lifting cynically.

I reflected that with the Underweb, Spider Totems were literally made to do so, and it was probably inevitable. Killing the Inheritors was literally the same thing as killing vampires, except it was vampires who preferred to eat THEM, and both of the kids had seen vampires during the Night of Hell years ago, even if they hadn’t been capes back then.

-Peter and MJ can go along on the first one, but if the Spiders are going to go after Alternates, both of them have other stuff to do. Miles and Mattie should not go along. That’s a big jump for high-schoolers.-

-Agreed. Ben, Jessica, and John are totally ready to keep at it, and that’ll leave three Spiders in New York to represent and keep their enemies and muggers of the city annoyed. Already got the okay from the Widows, as long as she keeps them updated.- Which was a big concession, but Jessica had been knocking it out of the park in training.

I reflected that it was probably best that way, and sighed despite myself. The multiverse was utterly uncaring on the macro scale, and Spider Totems were literally made to do that sort of thing. It might be why the Totem Pacts existed. -Make sure all the Spiders know how to make one of the things, so they can’t be truly stranded if something goes wrong.-

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

-Yeah, that makes sense,- DiDi /agreed. An indigo beam slashed past me, severing key parts of the orbital ring. Scott’s Core had grown strong enough that he could unleash it without end at basic power, and he was chopping this thing into chunks suitable for a ruinous planetfall.

I painted a few targets for his violet beams on the planet below, and there were pulses as the energy of explosions was torn away by his brother Vulcan, fed back into Cyclops, and went strobing precisely across the face of the factory-covered world below.

Lines of nuclear holocaust followed the streaking lines, and six major power cores and their primary conduits went up, starting chain reactions down on the surface of the planet. Slamming nuclear-level shockwaves combined with magnetic wrenching sent the remnants of the ring on its way, and the Summers’ custom shuttle, piloted by Belladonna with her Astral Sight full open, zipped past me as its passengers continued taking this forgeworld apart.

My eyes flickered. -Reinforcements arriving at Point Charlie. Starholder, they’re yours.-

-Copy that, Dynamo,- Richard Ryder /replied, the Xandaran ship currently celeste-black and cloaked nicely. -Full charges on lances. Deploying Corpsmen. Gwen, Cindy, you’re up.-

Centurion and Prime Centurion-level soldiers deployed, all of them holding Shields and armed with Ultraspecs. Silk and Webs confirmed as the reinforcement fleet came zipping out of a short hyperspace jump onto a fixed point, responding to the alarms, and the girls unloaded on them.

I reflected they’d probably love to go running off through the multiverse, but now a portion of my mind watched some of the most artistic gunnery in existence as the overpowered lances came out of nowhere to rake the thousands of incoming ships, perfect shots nailing two and three at a time more than once, and the capital ships began to explode.

Streaking Corpsman took on the smaller ships, being faster, more maneuverable, and perfectly capable of doing both the intelligent guided mass-driver job and act as dogfighters at the same time. Their shieldium Shields weren’t the true Virtuous Shields of the super-soldiers, but all of them were working on Naming and improving the things, and they pretty much all owed their lives and ability to charge in through almighty amounts of firepower to the things.

-Mission complete!- Natalya /whispered on a separate channel.

-Widows are done. Cyke, give me a Violet sweep and let’s pull out of here.-

With breathtaking precision, the entire force of Corpsman disengaged and poured back into the hangar of the Starholder as it passed by, unleashing final volleys as it rotated while crossing the front of the N-Zoner fleet. A second later there was a wink of light, and it was gone.

The violet cone of optical annihilation was miles wide, and didn’t linger on anything, but it didn’t have to. Where it passed, atomic binding forces were neutralized, the surface of matter became nuclear bombs, and thousands of miles of orbital ring blew apart in the same second.

That entire eruption was sucked into a glowing blue point of light, and came back out as a single shockwave hundreds of miles in diameter. It struck the shattered ring remnants across a broad arc and sent them spilling into the planet below.

The effluviant processing core being made for the new Worldship was on the other side of the planet and would survive the devastation, if the makers were quick... and they were desperately trying to get it out of there right now.

Some special modifications had been added to that Core. When it breached into our universe, there was going to be some violent feedback on a planetary level... which would swell to at least a solar level, given the power systems they were using.

Too bad, so sad.

The Summers crew and I zipped through a Portal and were gone, leaving the Negative Zoners to their emergency duties.

Behind us, that planet was going to be reduced to a radioactive wasteland, and all the production facilities on the planet and in orbit were going to be lost. It was only one among scores of such things in use, but it had a key role in making the computer cores for the Worldships being put together.

It didn’t mean that such things couldn’t be made, and wouldn’t continue to be made, but it would slow down, and be of a less optimal format.

Also, we’d just wiped out half the population of one of the invading races, and with loss of this planet, they’d also lost their influence, and political machinations would ensure they’d be preyed upon and reduced to cannon fodder by other races. Their technology was going to be lost, their work ethic collapse, and little ripple effects would join some of the other things we were doing out there.

It was a horrible, merciless business, requiring the slaughter of billions just to have the most minimal effect on what was going to happen.

It didn’t matter what we did, the date was already set and the forces were massing. We didn’t dare get anywhere near the core fleets assembling around the Worldships, the defenses there enough to give pause to cosmic beings, certainly capable of taking out Celestials.

They were certainly trying to tempt us that way, but the scale of what they were doing was immense, and not everything could be sheltered in the core.

They were going to pursue us. They were calling for reinforcements. They were going to chase us halfway across the galaxy, running into ambushes, traps, feints, and we’d even head back past them and hit a couple more locations while they were racing around trying to get to us. The level of our ability to attack, flee, and hit them hard where we wanted to would have seriously given any galactic empire serious cause to sue for peace.

It was being ignored by 99.99% of the Annihilation Wave as irrelevant. They had dying stars to tap for fuel, worlds to transform into ships and weapons, and more war preparations to undertake.

It was quite frustrating, and to the Shi’ar, Kree, Skrull, and Badoon observers along for this ride, it was terrifying. The localized overwhelming response coming for us was literally a blip to the rest of the efforts and the unbelievable numbers being assembled here.

I looped around and accelerated as the pursuing fleet came in through hyperspace on the Starholder’s teleport location. It had long departed, of course, but they didn’t have to know that.

I was near light speed as they came down out of hyperdrive, and I smashed into the line of ships, still blazing with the heat of Sol, only this time I was moving far faster than they could respond with light-speed-dependent tech. Their sensors registered the wave of light and fire, and before they could power up sufficient shields, I slammed into and through them.

The representatives the Skrulls had sent out were from the Comet Corps, a show of strength, and they and Comet paralleled me in a near-lightspeed mass drive right down the length of the N-Zoner ships, guided by interacting Cosmic Awareness and blowing the leading elements of the fleet away before they could possibly respond.

Then we were up into hyperspace on our own on a new course, leaving a long line of fireballs across millions of miles of space, and the incensed fleet prepped to chase after us.

Yeah, following us into hyperspace wasn’t going to work out so well for them...