-You want me to head off there right now?- I /asked Sama deliberately.

-Sure. Let me make a diversion for you.-

There was a hissing of space shredding, and in a million-mile arc a thousand miles wide, every single Zoner ship was instantly sliced in half from stem to stern.

-You aimed that with my Cosmic Awareness!- I /complained cheerfully, as everything around me basically lit up from ruptured power cores going off at the same time. I could feel the stunned astonishment of Zoners outside watching a whole section of space light up visually even as their friendlies indicators went black.

-Shoo while their spatial flux sensors are fritzing out,- Sama /told me unapologetically.

-Yeah, yeah.- My Core pulsed, my suit hummed, the individual Portal opened, and I was out of there.

---

I arrived between the binary suns of Krimregai, right where energetic reactions were the highest and sensors the least likely to be able to sense a damn thing. The energy levels didn’t bother me; I just turned on my Absorption and deposited it in the Pocket with the rest.

I Wove a lot of stealth Buffs to foil exotic sensor sweeps even as I zipped on out of there. I didn’t need them finding me by conductivity of energized particles in my wake, gravimetric distortions, causality ripples, or anything similar, and naturally I was invisible to the base EM spectrum and non-living technology, anyway.

Specs gave me a view of what they’d done as I flew out of the flux area, and I immediately stopped and turned around.

Well, damn, the big guy was less than a million miles away, sitting right at the LaGrange Point between the two suns!

I admitted to being incredibly impressed. The Zoners had already built conductivity rings all the way around both of the stars, hundreds of billions of workers providing plenty of labor, and they’d cannibalized all of the easily available materials in the system to do so.

Massive amounts of power were pouring into that ring, being conducted into Galactus, and then promptly drained from Him, the altered cosmic energy pouring into the waiting starships there thirsting for some real energies and power over their rivals and peers. The improved firepower of the ships would be nigh-unstoppable, each of them equal to a Galactus Fleet Cruiser at the least.

Massive vortices of energy were plunging into both suns, draining them and pumping all that energy around the arcs of their grand construction into Galactus, who could either devour it or be physically destroyed for who knew how long. His pain was making reality itself throb here, even as I scanned the entire array, coolly acknowledged the design and the core technology of it, and located the control center.

There were a lot of ships in the way, but they weren’t prepared for an outsider inserting so closely and so invisibly. Sure, I could have blasted my way in, but they were already enduring the hellstorm between the two suns, so I didn’t feel like playing with them and testing the limits of their technology.

After all, I didn’t need to.

I zipped invisibly between them, planet-killing brute that I was, moving all fast and stealthy, acknowledging the countless sensor arrays looking for me and ghosting past them.

------

“Well, at least you got to build it.”

Thanos paused in his contemplations of Galactus bound helplessly below him, slowly turning to find me at his elbow. His eyes rose slowly to the Spear I had out, and the crystalline Baneskull disgorging the gold-rimed black point above it.

His black eyes narrowed at the sight of it. “You have come to release Him.” It wasn’t a question.

“Well, of course. You knew we’d be coming. Planned on it. This whole event has ‘look at what I’ve done, me, Thanos!’ all over it. You got to capture and imprison Galactus, then torture Him, something no other being has done; you got to build a stellar-sized Great Work to drain Him of energy, fueling a destructive power like none other; when Galactus gets free, you ensured the annihilation of those who thought they were controlling you and enslaving you to their will and purpose; and you will get a temporary vacation to the side of the being you love the most, before She sends you back to do something else appropriately grandiose and insane.

“You can be smug now.”

He didn’t say any more, because he didn’t need to. His elated smile was grim and terrifying, knowing there was at least someone out there who understood exactly why he’d done all of this, and how a whole section of the Annihilation Wave had danced to the palm of his hand... and was now going to be offered up to Mistress Death through the power of the Devourer of Worlds.

That smile was frozen on his face when I took off his head. The Zoner security personnel watching him were quite powerful, but they were already dead before he even noticed I was there.

There were too many safeguards to just turn off the grid here, and the field effects were what were important, not the material shackles on their prisoner.

On the other hand, that pair of Stellar Rings they’d constructed was made to a certain set of tolerances, and while it could exceed them, it could only do so to an extent. Furthermore, the cosmic power suppressors were in the delicate position of having to allow that power to be drained from Him and couldn’t suppress it entirely, or this whole thing was useless.

I exploded through the viewing screen into the vacuum seething with cosmic and anti-cosmic energies, Sending out calmly, “Open up, Elder. I’m going to feed You a Supernova and get You out of there.”

There was no reaction from the many, many eyes monitoring Galactus, as their sensors still couldn’t see me. His infinitely deep gaze, boiling with pain and a hunger that was growing boundlessly even as it was fed unceasingly, fixed on me, and the grimace on His face became an opening to an abyss deeper than space.

I unloaded that whole star from my Pocket into Him.

I couldn’t actually DO that, of course. Waaay too much energy for me. But the initial stream was something very easy for Him to lock onto, follow back, grab the entire bundle of compressed energy, and bring it forward for Him to devour.

There was no goddamn way this array suppressing Him could deal with the instant thousands-fold surge of cosmic energy that exploded forth from Him. The energy drainers blew apart as their tolerances failed, the suppressors were overwhelmed as His will targeted them specifically for attention, and the physical materials and projectors were removed from His presence as space and time turned at angles and simply eliminated them from existence.

And then, for that awful, horrible moment, He was standing there, glowing with the power of a blue supergiant star inside Him. The Negative Zoners, and everyone they were beaming to in a panic, realized that the name of the Devourer of Worlds was actually an understatement as He reached out with His hands, and in the space of six seconds, sucked in and Devoured the binary stars of the Krimregai star system.

Fwoosh, gone. Just like that. There was a lot of temporal compression involved, and He was actually Eating Reality to do that... and He did it now, today, because He could.

And then He turned, slowly and grandly. It didn’t matter how big He actually was, in their minds He filled the skies as He looked down on those who had dared to capture and torture Him, and He swept out His arms.

There were no words, because He needed no words.

I was astutely floating right next to His head, as I didn’t want any part of what He was sending out.

It wasn’t a supernova, because a supernova would have crawled into the corner and cried at the show of power He put on. The blast of energy He sent out rippled through time and space, and where it was meant to go, it arrived at instantly, just like the image of looming doom that had just hit hundreds of trillions of Negative Zoners throughout this galaxy.

There was no going to lightspeed or hyperspace and avoiding it. It didn’t matter how far away the targets were, how spread-out they were, or how powerful their shields were. It was an explosion of power worthy of a supernova, straight-up, and wherever they were, they took it right on the chin.

I watched it expand in a sphere of Cosmic Awareness, and laughed grimly despite myself. Thanos had chosen this location precisely so as many Negative Zoners would be within the range of Galactus’ wrath as possible when He was freed, and so it was. The trillions of them coming in from behind, and those who had all swept past here, could only look up to the Doom filling the sky before them as Galactus punished them all for their effrontery.

It didn’t clean out the whole Shi’ar galaxy, but it did clean out a sphere over ten thousand light years across. The Negative Zoners inside that sphere were simply annihilated by an explosion of light and power crossing time and space instantly to get to its targets. If they had claimed worlds, fire fell from the sky, and those worlds died mercilessly, too.

Fully half the Annihilation Wave’s pressure on the Shi’ar Galaxy was abruptly gone. The fight was still unwinnable, but we could definitely hold them inside this galaxy easily now, and the Shi’ar Sanctuary Ringworld would be safe.

I held out Function before His blazing, burning eyes, and felt His focus shift. “If You could Ignite the worlds who just died, Mighty Galactus?” I proposed to Him.

The wrath boiling off Him bubbled and cooled. The Hunger in Him simmered and died, momentarily kept at bay by the death of stars, a cruel step towards The End of the universe, and not something He cared to do if at all possible. Every single star eaten meant an increase in His Hunger, an acceleration of The End, and a raging guilt that He was hastening the End of Eternity.

Function’s Vivic flame flared like a gentle moon in the now-empty space around us, and across the galaxy, worlds set aflame sputtered and cooled, and vivic energy rose to feed on the ash of those who had stolen them. World-spirits devoured the energy, and life flowed back across them, repairing flaming atmospheres as ashen soil and vaporized waters swelled with ecosystems once again, and healing rains fell from the sky to start the process of filling oceans and rivers once more.

There were still Negative Zoners coming from behind who could take those worlds, which would once again sap at the numbers of the Wave’s advance. But the terror of Galactus was now going to spread through the Wave. If they tried anything like this again, well, Galactus might just go ahead and devour a black hole or something, and just erase them ALL.

“Mighty Galactus, I don’t know how much of a sense of humor or spite You might have, but I believe we have located four Celestial Seeds in areas of the Shi’ar Galaxy the Annihilation Wave has already taken.”

The square-pupiled eyes, roiling with the need to consume all of Creation in the end, glanced at me for a moment, unfathomable emotions stirring deep within them.

“GIVE ME THEIR LOCATIONS.”

I watched space swirl, time turn back, matter was brought forward, and the great Worldship the size of a small moon that He traveled in from world to world materialized in the otherwise completely empty stellar space around us, completely whole and undamaged.

Uncle Ben had adroitly moved all the raw salvage materials from this system and all of the many others into Taa II’s forges during the chaos of Galactus’ Wrath. No reason not to make use of the moment, right? There was no sign that the Krimregai system had ever existed at all now, not even sunless planets soaring into empty space. The only thing left was the light sent streaming into the stars long ago, which would one day fade as time caught up to it. In those systems the Devouring Wrath had swept through, there were few to no signs that the Zoners had ever been there at all, save for burning worlds slowly turning green and blue and white and other hues of life...

And if the Negative Zoner’s star-harvesting rings were floating around in the depths of space somewhere until we could put them to use, well, Barb wanted a look at the tech. There were many things we could harness the output of a star for...