LIGHTNOVELONLINE Issue 480 – Rupturing Reality
Doom’s pet cult of necromancers and brainwashed priestesses, aided by Dr. Strange and backed by the power of 616’s Molecule Man, continued their own efforts to speed up multiversal destruction.
Their primary tactic for doing so was trying to make sure both worlds were destroyed during an Incursion, so they would fight to ‘save’ a world in danger of being destroyed by the other, therefore dooming both of them.
This was at odds with our goals of destroying Earths to gain some amount of time and allow us to Uni-mind more worlds before the inevitable End.
Happily, our numbers were expanding with more Epsilon-class heroes, which made our foes’ job progressively harder and harder when we ran across them. They had women who largely specialized in magic and psionics, along with some necromancers, but lined up against them were Superman and his peers dressed in anti-magical Nova uniforms and magnapsium helms... along with some Amazon-trained Titanias fully ready to whoop the asses of the ink-skinned fanatical bitches in white under the leadership of a dozen Wonder Women, Comets, and their alternates!
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The Builder fleet, a monstrously powerful fleet of AI’s, the like of which hadn’t been assembled since the Annihilation War, breached into our timeline, bristling with lots of guns and the total willingness to use all their firepower.
They just might have entered at a location a galaxy or three away from where they intended to, however, perhaps because certain someones had experience at redirecting trans-dimensional invasions and whatnot.
The Hr’g’t of the Annihilation Wave promptly went apeshit all over them, hyper-territorial cyborgs that they were. The two forces mauled one another mercilessly, the one intending to conquer and crush anything on their way to Terra, the other defending their two stolen systems with fanatical determination from this hostile invader.
The Hr’g’t hurriedly re-fortified their stolen worlds against other opportunists, who promptly began to infiltrate in from the surrounding systems, sensing weakness and totally willing to take advantage of it. Complex political games and much shooting soon began taking place.
The Acanti swam by and swept up the remnants of everyone after they were done blowing one another to shit, cleaning up space politely and doing something with the trash that they didn’t bother to explain to outsiders.
Barb the Builder had made a reasonable request of Galactus during the Annihilation War. Taa II’s starforges could purify other-dimensional materials without much problem, so dumping remnants of the Negative Zoners and their vessels into them was a net positive for the universe. Since the Acanti were doing the gathering and the dumping, using the purified materials to make biomes and equipment for them was a reasonable use of the purified stuff, and Galactus had waved it all off.
Although the Xandarans were the primary inhabitants of those biomes, the fact He was effectively aiding in their diaspora was of no concern to Him. The scale the machines of Taa II could operate at were naturally far beyond what Venus could achieve, and much more out of the spotlight, too. Acanti from across the universe were gathering up scrap, bringing it to Taa II, and getting themselves outfitted with shields, artillery, Periapts, and their own collection of biomes if they were large enough to support them. The reborn Xandarans joined them in their voyages across the stars.
One thing the Xandarans gave the Acanti was extremely formidable sensors and computational power. The wonders and resources they were categorizing and soon able to deftly exploit were quietly making the Acanti Damn Rich across the universe, with interesting ramifications on societies and economies that spanned whole universes, but that was a different matter...
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The Great Bear was in position as the final timelines collapsed. We watched the desperate attempts to make Arks largely fail, shaking our heads at what they were doing, but a couple did manage to get away.
616’s Doom, Reece, and Strange began their endgame, and succeeded in pulling most of the Beyonders out of their Realm, trying to stop the trio from doing the rebuild. The Molecule Man bomb went out and detonated.
Hundreds of Molecule Men meant force enough to destroy hundreds of universes, all of it aimed at the Beyonders. They were cosmic glass cannons, with physical bodies that were not the equal of their ability to wield energies, and they were shattered by the universe-rending blast, while the entire multiverse collapsed around them into a chaos void.
Eternity, Infinity, and Death, along with the other cosmic powers, looked on as the multiverse shattered and was no more, only one reality remaining behind. All else was a void of pure chaos, where not even another Big Bang could form successfully without outside aid.
This was not Death, this was simply Destruction. Perhaps out there, Oblivion was laughing, but this was not darkness, still and silent and cold. It was energy, but it was Chaos, alive and full of potential, just... formless, unguided, and defiant, the power of spent universes seething without form.
We watched Strange turn down accepting the power to rebuild reality, and just shook our heads. Doom didn’t hesitate at all.
I was Singing, and bringing up the Underweb from the other side of that Chaos Void. As Doom, Strange, and Reece harvested what was coming their way, I encapsulated the rest and redirected it through my Pocketspace, which condensed it with all my experience from making a Ten Ultra Core and manipulating all kinds of energies, and then sent it on out the White Hole into the inner chambers and heart of the Great Bear.
The inner heart, where hundreds of Cosmic Cubes waited to be filled with the energies of the Beyonders, and Ben and May Parker were waiting to guide the entire process.
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Sama Rantha stepped through the door.
One reality remained behind, one universe, and the Power Gem from it gleamed on the end of Tremble, still fully functional.
The Gem was so-named because it could supply infinite power to anything its wielder could do. It did not grant control, or new powers, but it could amplify existing ones to an infinite extent.
As such, it was the core and heart of the other five Gems, which granted infinite control over various aspects of existence, but did not have infinite power. Someone with enough talents and versatility with the Power Gem could theoretically imitate and stymie all of the other Gems.
That was especially true for a Null.
Sama exhaled, and drew Tremble, cutting as she did so.
Her tremblesense, infinitely amplified, extended out as the Sharding swept forth. This stroke was infinitely long, infinitely sharp, could cut time and space... and most importantly, it brought along her Null, and the Laws of the Prime Material Plane, imposing them wherever it passed.
This was a space constructed by the Beyonders four entire universal cycles ago. It was filled with their influence and power, and stood outside the universe entire.
It now faced the stroke of a Sword that could cut through all of that, imposing a new reality upon those left behind.
Ding!
The handful of Beyonders who had not joined the invasion of the lower realms were currently distracted by the abrupt destruction of the rest of their kind. They were completely unprepared as the swordstroke swept through the very foundation of their unbounded universe and collapsed it entirely, spontaneously imposing Laws upon it which they could not resist as if folded down into a lower Reality irresistibly.
Ting!
Tremble slid back home, one second after it had been drawn.
Eruptions of hypercosmic energy arose in the distance as the disintegrating realm fractured and fell. Kubik reached out from his Cube and opened a funnel into the Heart of the Great Bear, drawing the released energy of the last Beyonders down and into it in a gushing torrent, even as Sama Rantha’s Null was juiced up to infinity, rewriting the laws of this space with inexorable power.
Instead of collapsing, the extra space fell fully into the reach and hands of Eternity and Infinity, ready to be used to help recreate the multiverse.
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Out in the void of empty space, just elevated enough from the Prime to be able to see the chaos void where so many alternities had once shone and thrived, Briggs lifted the Cube of Eternity, five Infinity Gems governing time, space, reality, the soul, and the mind gleaming on the Amulet at his throat.
“All right, children, it’s time to put it all back,” he told them gravely, and the Stones all lit up in reply. The Will of Eternity, the space of the Realm Beyond, and the power of the Beyonders echoed forth, starting with this one remaining timeline, reaching down to the ravaged Underweb that existed only here, and began to Weave a Song that stretched back to the beginning of the Seventh Cosmos, replicating, changing, rebuilding what had been lost, and returning whole what had been destroyed.
As for Doom and the oversized, yet patchwork magical world he was building where he would be god and king, it was isolated in a section of the chaos void where he could indulge himself to his heart’s delight, while the true reality left him behind.
It didn’t mean we weren’t going to monitor what was going on there, but the Owen Reece there commanded the power of several Beyonders at least, which he was giving to Doom, and we didn’t want to risk a conflict which was going to shatter more universes just after they had been rebuilt.
The multiverse was woven back into existence by the Song of the Cube, Eternity and Infinity expanding back to their former levels and multiversal status around the solid and unbroken core of 1832.
As their universes were spun back into reality, the watching Uni-minds in the Pocketspace exited their refuge and dispersed themselves back across their worlds. Unlike the rest of the universe, their peoples would retain full knowledge of what had happened, how they had survived, and what it had been like to come together as one being in order to save everyone.
The implications of that would echo across the worlds, some frightened by the whole experience, others exulting in it, and others inspired by it, for good or ill.
The contacts made among the heroic communities of each of those worlds certainly weren’t going to die, even if some of them might have preferred there be no contact with other worlds from a paranoia standpoint previously. They had been forcibly enlightened after watching infinite worlds die that trying to ignore everything else that was out there and isolating themselves wouldn’t save them at all.
And thus, the one absolute request from every world and Uni-mind was to have someone there who could initiate a Uni-mind again, if such a thing were ever required... or requested.
Guess who was stuck with that request, as there certainly weren’t Celestial Eternals on every world and, well, after due exchanges of information, they weren’t trusted all that much, even if there were.