Then Esdeath and the others hit back.
Heat vision lanced through the air, and Sanctuary II was carved open in an instant.
Caught off guard, Thanos had only enough ti to retreat to Venus with his most important subordinates.
Venus.
The planet was a furnace wrapped in poison.
Its atmosphere was thick with violent turbulence, and it was utterly unfit for human life. Surface temperatures reached nearly 450 degrees Celsius. The air near the ground contained heavy concentrations of sulfuric compounds, and there was no oxygen to breathe. Daylight roasted anything weak enough to remain exposed, while the night brought lethal cold. Even the pressure alone was enough to crush the unprepared, equivalent to diving nine hundred ters beneath the sea on Earth.
Its skies were harsh, its surface barren, and sulfuric rain fell without warning.
Human civilization had never seriously considered Venus as a colonization target.
Most scientists and governnts barely looked at it at all.
Only a handful of astronors ever bothered to care.
From the ground, the planet looked desolate beyond asure. No water. Vast plains covering most of the surface. A place where the eye could travel for miles without ever finding anything alive.
At least, that had been true until today.
Now it had visitors.
Thanos arrived with the Black Order.
So did Esdeath, Tifa, Lyra Yan, and Clare.
Thanos's expression darkened the mont he saw them.
He had no idea why his ho turf had suddenly been invaded by four absurdly dangerous won.
Every one of them was monstrously strong.
And that was before the sea of Ultron machines descended into the conflict.
Black Queen had used data from the original universe to locate Wakanda in this parallel reality, strip-mine its Vibranium reserves, and forge a massive Ultron army made of Vibranium alloy.
The mont Thanos entered the solar system, the Ultron network detected him.
Black Queen passed the information to Esdeath's group.
And Esdeath, naturally, ca running.
Tifa and the others followed because leaving Esdeath alone around a fight was a recipe for disaster.
Thanos stared at the four won in front of him.
As a mber of the Eternals' Titan branch, he possessed extraordinary innate gifts that put him far above ordinary lifeforms.
Near-immortality.
Strength.
Intelligence.
Stamina.
Recovery.
Agility.
His skin was nearly impossible to destroy, and he could endure cold, heat, electricity, radiation, poison, aging, and disease without issue. Vacuum and the harshness of space ant nothing to him.
That made sense.
If a cosmic overlord could be killed by lack of oxygen or a stray collision in space, the whole idea of him being an overlord would be ridiculous.
Black Dwarf roared and charged first.
He tore the giant axe from his back and rushed Esdeath with brute force, swinging it down toward her neck.
Esdeath did not move.
She let him strike.
The axe, forged from an ultra-hard alloy, hit her neck and shattered like cheap plastic.
Then Esdeath reached out with one hand, seized the giant alien as easily as a chicken, and tightened her grip.
Black Dwarf's eyes rolled back.
His struggling arms went limp.
A miserable howl escaped him.
Esdeath casually drew back her other fist, then drove it into his stomach with the kind of relaxed force friends might use during a joke.
Black Dwarf exploded.
at and blood sprayed everywhere.
The rest of the Black Order stiffened.
Even Thanos frowned.
Black Dwarf had been handpicked from millions of species.
Thanos himself would not have dealt with him so casually.
The remaining mbers of the Black Order were split up among Tifa, Lyra Yan, and Clare.
Split up was generous.
They were simply erased.
The infamous Black Order, feared across the cosmos, was no more threatening than brittle toys in front of them.
Then it was Thanos's turn to be played with.
He had already lost the Mind Stone, and the Power Stone still hadn't been recovered.
Against these won, he had no chance.
They overwheld him in monts.
Then ca the humiliation.
A punishnt by rotation.
A relentless beatdown.
Drex Valen watched from a distance and let them enjoy themselves.
If they were having fun, there was no need for him to interfere.
As for himself, he had ti to think.
He rubbed his forehead.
"Traveling outside the Multiverse is not sustainable. One trip cost five years."
That realization had only just settled in after he returned.
From Black Queen's perspective, he had been gone for five years.
To him, it had felt like a brief absence.
That was the strange thing about the place beyond the Multiverse.
Ti there did not move in sync with the Multiverse itself.
And Drex had partially escaped the influence of ti entirely.
Unfortunately, that did not make the search any easier.
He was under pressure now.
Nobody knew where Abraxas had gone.
The whole situation felt like a ga of hide-and-seek in the dark.
The difference was that if Drex got found first, he was dead.
Abraxas would not be.
That was not a ga.
That was a rigged execution.
He had no choice but to grow stronger.
The gulf between a single universe and the Multiverse was so imnse it was almost absurd.
If he wanted a real shot at Abraxas, he would need to find an unclaid multiversal dinsion.
And not just any dinsion.
A multiversal one.
Only then could he step over that threshold and stand on equal footing.
Drex rembered Abraxas's two punches.
Even now, after everything Doomsday Superman had evolved into, he wasn't convinced that form could survive them.
The dinsional lords existed outside the Multiverse, which ant Abraxas couldn't simply locate them.
And he would never dare invade the domain of a true multiversal lord unless he had sohow evolved even further.
The scale was simple enough:
Omniversal > Super-Omniversal > Multiversal > Universal > Skyfather > Planetary or Surface Level.
"From here on out, I'm going to look for unclaid dinsions beyond the Multiverse."
He glanced at the others.
"Stay alert."
Though frankly, he did not think anything below universal level could do much to his girls.
A Kryptonian.
A Saiyan.
A Daxamite.
A Hyperion-class hybrid.
Even without a proper divine rank, they were absurdly overbuilt.
If this were the DC universe, so of them would probably already count as universal-level beings outright.
Marvel was different.
Marvel cared about godhood as a concept.
Sentinel, as ridiculously strong as he was, still only counted as Skyfather level by their standards.
Once Drex had said his piece, he watched the girls amuse themselves and sighed.
Then he tore open a black hole and opened the gate beyond the Multiverse.
If he had been weaker than universal level, he could have opened as many black holes as he wanted and still only circle around the sa universe.
But once a being crossed into universal territory, the door to the outer void beca accessible.
Dormammu did not count.
That fool had simply gotten lucky and stumbled into an unclaid Dark Dinsion, which made him perhaps the weakest dinsional lord in recorded history.
A so-called universal dinsional lord who got beaten down by Doctor Strange in every universe and even borrowed money without paying it back.
History had a special place reserved for embarrassnts like that.
So what did beyond the Multiverse look like?
Nothing.
Pure void.
Not darkness.
Not emptiness.
Sothing more absolute than either.
It felt like returning to the mont before heaven and earth existed, before "sothing" and "nothing" had even beco concepts.
From nothing to sothing was a long road.
Fortunately, Drex was not so rookie fool who thought he could wander the outer void with only Earth-tier strength.
At his level, roaming here was possible.
Even if he ran into a dinsional lord by accident, he could still fight.
The first ti he searched, he spent a long ti roaming the void before having no choice but to turn back.
Nothing.
No result.
No wonder dinsional lords wanted to invade reality.
Outside the Multiverse, finding even one dinsion was difficult.
Finding an unclaid one was nearly impossible.
"Hm?"
When he returned, Earth had changed again.
Ultron robots were flying everywhere.
Tifa and Esdeath had already gone to Venus, and it looked like they were fighting soone.
How outrageous.
He had barely been gone a mont, and soone was already attacking his girls.
Drex was about to snap.
Then he saw who it was.
Oh.
It was Thanos.
That was fine.
Elsewhere, in the infinite black between stars, countless suns shimred from billions of light-years away, their light gathering into a vast cosmic river flowing through the silence.
Near Venus, a colossal warship turned its main and secondary cannons toward a transport vessel.
Its targeting systems locked in.
No negotiation.
No surrender.
Blue light blood inside the muzzles as the weapons charged.
The glow intensified, brighter and brighter, until it was painful to look at.
Sanctuary II.
Thanos's flagship.
The energy discharge completed.
A beam of ionized destruction tore across the void in an instant.
For cosmic distances, it was nothing.
For the people in its path, it might as well have been the end of the world.
Of course, Esdeath had spent enough ti fighting in space that she did not think much of a battleship.
A cannon was still just a cannon.
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