If the Annihilation Wave had truly focused all its power on fighting the defenders, it likely could have won without a whole lot of effort, and then spread placidly across the universe, its opposition gone.

However, there was no such game plan and overarching control in place. The species involved had worked out their targets and goals amongst themselves, not looking out for their rivals and downright enemies in many cases, and so upon emergence, the Wave fractured and flowed in all directions, each race heading for their own targets.

Indeed, the annihilation of many species at the hands of the Warworlds opened up several convenient targeted worlds for their rivals, instantly setting off a competition for who could get there, subjugate them, and settle them first, then fortify them to hold off any opportunistic late-comers. As such, there was little overall coordination against defenders, as failure against them just opened up their targets against someone else.

It was an insane military doctrine if you cared at all about losses and long-term fighting, but given their size and numbers, all you could call it was what it was: a wave of annihilation spreading across the galaxies, and any native species caught in its path were exterminated, their worlds seized and settled with rabid ferocity, and the wave flowed on, and on, and on, washing over the galaxies with death.

Just as we’d known it would, and that it would be unstoppable.

Sanctuary ships evacuated planetary populations to the hidden ringworlds. Massive efforts were being made to slaughter as many ships of N-Zoner settlers and civilians as possible at all times, as doing so restrained their capital ships, and reduced the need for more living space. A species wouldn’t seize multiple worlds if it only truly needed one, as its rivals would immediately realize that and take them away.

Ceding worlds and killing the population ships was like ocean waves battering up against rings and rings of coral banks, soaking up the force and leaving impromptu obstructions for those coming behind them. It only took a couple days for the first internal conflicts to break out in the Wave, cross-currents if you liked, where different species fought over the rights to worlds.

Then the Waves hit the first Ringworld Traps, or, as Uncle Ben put them, his Anvils of Generosity.

We called them Traps because that was exactly what they were, despite being so empty. The neutronium rings were divided into hundred-million-square-mile zones, each section optimized for one of the major races coming in.

That was nearly thirty thousand planet surfaces worth of living space, albeit with no natural resources other than land, sky, and water, all just begging for customized ecologies to be put in place.

There they were, the ultimate prizes, the ultimate distractions. There was little attempt made to defend the places, but word of the twenty ringworlds, one for each galaxy under direct assault, escaped and spread through the Waves rapidly. Whole currents of the attacks converged on them.

It was actually enough land area to fit ALL of all of the Waves. The only question was... were they willing to live that close together with rivals, enemies, or unknown races to do so?

The answer was naturally of course not, especially since there were no mining resources around.

Some races, despite the temptation of instant living area with no inhabitants to fight for, turned away or ignored the siren call of settling there.

Others did not, and so the fighting began. There being enough room for all of them did not mean that they would allow others to claim such virgin territory, after all!

And so Ben Parker’s generous labors became the greatest and most merciless Traps for the Annihilation Waves, as the species of the Waves seized sections of the Rings best suited for themselves, and fought off others trying to do the same who were too close to them in deadly internecine conflict.

Perhaps we could have nova’d those suns and really taken a bunch of them out, but there was no need, as the violence and desperation, and often mutual abhorrence for any number of reasons, spurred rapid shooting wars that soon embroiled hundreds of billions of Zoners in apocalyptic conflicts.

-------

His name was Konus the Claimer, and he was a Celestial. According to Galactus’ records, he was believed to be the one who followed up on Tefral the Surveyor’s explorations, deeming if a world was fit to bear a Celestial Seed. Following his temporal track had revealed that fully half of the worlds with Seeds had been visited by him prior, and as finding Ngieae the Bearer was virtually impossible, subtly tracking Konus was actually a decent way to locate new Seeds.

He’d been found in the Crite system at the edge of Andromeda by the Hunting Warworld, which had blanketed the whole system in cosmic-neutralizing power and was now opening up its primary cannon to take aim on the emerald-and-orange armored being now floating in space. The Celestial could not flee nor summon its kin, and was merely facing the entire planet with its staff... but the ancient forces it could call on were not coming to its command now.

The Hunting World fired a bolt of anathemic energies, designed to kill cosmic beings and rip them apart so their energies could be harvested. The massive fleet gathered behind it was ready to begin that task as soon as the Celestial was destroyed.

The beam fired, and reality convulsed.

I hit the edge of it at near-light, my Shield Three Virtues out to take the ravaging energies as I skimmed along the edge of it, deflecting aside a flow of power that could annihilate space and time, but could not, in the end, destroy Concepts.

Konus raised its gauntleted hand to resist the blast. I had no doubt it saw me, but I was not here to save it. The Hunting World was one of those worlds that we’d not been able to infiltrate, and Konus was the bait we had designated for its destruction, depending on which Crack this Warworld had come through.

That was because when the Entropic Cannon fired, the Warworld’s shields had to come down to allow the energy to pass, which meant we had an opening.

The beam went one way, to Konus’ doom, and I went the other, to this Warworld’s.

Matter couldn’t contain the energies being unleashed here, so everything was about power fields and the planetary machinery which empowered, leashed, controlled, and guided them. Those were very material, and very susceptible to plain ol’ Queen Physics and her admonishments about nigh-infinite mass and inertia as one approached light speed.

Superspeed already defied all sorts of physics when you started getting into how much energy it actually took to go that fast. Normally, you have tricks to get around it, like spatial bending, kinetic shearing, temporal acceleration, and other fun stuff.

None of them get around the fact that when you hit material things while traveling near light-speed and dump some velocity into them, they go straight to plasma unless they are unbelievably obdurate.

When you are unbelievably obdurate and invulnerable yourself, holding a shieldium Shield in front of you empowered by three Virtues, not one, by dint of the Words of Creation and Craft Legendary Arms and Armor, it doesn’t have a prayer.

I went right down the containment muzzle of this gun, shearing through all that very, very important field-generating technology as annihilation slewed harmlessly off my Shield and nipped in outrage at my heels, ripping right down the side of the ‘muzzle’, down to the bottom where siphons tapping the decay of the universe were pulling up entropy from the wells of infinity and throwing it out there to kill non-finite beings.

Blew right through those, too, and as I did, welp, those energies found all sorts of new outlets.

The Hunting Warworld kinda blew apart in a fan of about 270 degrees, which nicely encompassed about eighty percent of the Hunter Fleet as it was torn to shreds by the unleashed energies. It didn’t save the Celestial, which was ripped apart by the anti-cosmic forces into tumbling shards of armor leaking strange energies, but the fleet there didn’t have any time to gloat as it was largely annihilated by the death of the Warworld.

I naturally veered off and re-accelerated as I emerged from the other side of the Warworld, avoiding the destruction raging out at my heels, and shot for the ships that would survive its destruction. They’d be desperately dodging the death of the Warworld in any event, and the additional havoc I’d be causing would likely be lost in the pure chaos of the event.

When the massive shape descended from hyperspace and swallowed the remnants of the Celestial Konus whole, the Hunter Fleet might have noticed it, but the world-destroying firepower that descended upon them meant they didn’t really have a chance to pass it on. Those who avoided the wave of destruction were directly in my line of attack, and I didn’t let them go, either.

------

Warworld Noxus was ravaging its way through Andromeda, giving the Skrulls all sorts of problems.

Once they fully committed to war, the Skrulls had by far the largest star fleet of the three empires we were working with, on account of having the most resources and the highest population. They used that to their advantage, taking the advice of the Shielders’ strategic acumen and keeping their forces largely together, falling upon arm after arm of the invaders and destroying them while managing to keep their military losses to a minimum. The losses still added up, but by maintaining numerical superiority in their engagements, the attrition was greatly slowed and the tolls they took greater.

Warworld Noxus was not something they or the Galactus Fleet could do anything about, the moss-green world’s bio-weapons simply too powerful and its shields too strong without deploying weapons capable of taking out suns and destroying everything in the vicinity. In general terms, one arm of the Skrull fleet led it on a merry chase, while the rest of the Skrull fleet grimly reaped all the numbers they could.

The defenses of system after system fell, but Andromeda was a big place, and there were a lot of systems. Even with a Warworld helping, the advance of the Annihilation Wave was neither simple nor free, as the Skrulls were particularly uninhibited about going after the vulnerable transport ships and forcing their enemies to stick close to their civilian populations.

------

“The Warworld is here!” I heard over coms from one of the Skrull Comet Corps, the Skrulls still completely clueless that their great project’s successes actually worked for us. The thing didn’t pop up on Cosmic Awareness save by laying eyeballs on it, but it couldn’t hide the gravimetric surge as six sextillion tons of mass came down out of hyperdrive and inserted itself into a battle taking place over there.

The Skrulls weren’t idiots, and promptly broke formation, scattering in all directions. A squadron of heavy cruisers zipping away caught the planet’s eye, and it moved after them, particle bolts from orifices the size of skyscrapers or small cities sizzling through space and shredding reality as it tried to hit the fleeing ships, which were rapidly outdistancing it.

Well, what they were really doing was drawing it out of range of its support, when another planet came down out of hyperdrive on a well-coordinated collision course.

The whole thing was carved into the head of a great white bear, except the eyes were glowing like feral suns, and jaws the size of continents were actually moving. The main firing arcs of the Warworld were all aimed at the Skrulls, and even if it had defenses large enough to hurt the rogue bear-head world, they could not be deployed in time or power fast enough to save it from what was about to happen.

Warworld Noxus had strong shields, but they were not enough to defy another entire planet. The living world slammed into the Warworld, great jaws spread wide, and bit into it with cataclysmic force. Nuclear and worse flames erupted around those jaws, but instead of billowing out, seemed to be sucked into the vast maw of the attacking planet.

Warworld Noxus shuddered and went still, cracks erupting through it, but the great fires of leashed suns at its heart, instead of exploding and being unleashed, seemed to dim and die as that maw opened again, and again, and great masses of the Warworld were devoured.

And as they were, the living world was growing...