There was no sweeping arc of force, no targeted attack. What happened was the golden Celestial on the end suddenly froze, and then slowly, grandly, a line of light from within bisected it vertically, its halves began to slide past one another, and with patient dignity, it began to fall.

I smirked despite myself. One-hitting a Celestial! No wonder Sama terrified everyone. If she wanted to, she could probably cut Galactus in two, too. It wouldn’t kill Him, but He’d certainly not want to stick around and experience more of it.

It also gave me a pretty good idea about how she was doing that. Still, watching Gammenon the Gatherer crumple, kicking up a cloud of blasted ice and dust, and feel that impact through the ground from a mile away, was impressive.

The Surfer tore open the helm of the one in green, and Galactus’ attack destroyed the Celestial’s head, sending another one crashing down. The Devourer of Worlds swept his arm across, and the scything attack tore the three remaining Celestials off their feet, rending their armor and sending strange energies boiling out from inside them.

There was a swirl of power. The three surviving Celestials reached out to their fallen brethren and took them away. They all shimmered and faded away into the air, gone and doubtless not coming back.

I noted a bunch of the Skyfathers were looking at Sama, too. If what I remembered was correct, three of them had attacked a Celestial before, and failed to do anything to it, yet Sama had taken one out with a single sword-stroke...

Pretty sure she was now an Honored Guest in ANY of their courts.

Galactus turned away as if the matter was of no importance, and directed His attention to the machine that was now descending from His ship.

“Erik,” The Great Bear rumbled, and the Master of Magnetism quickly flew forth to aid in what was to come. He was probably powerful enough to earn Galactus’ acknowledgement, too.

There were murmurs all around as the landscape, stripped and ravaged by the fusillade of force bolts, rippled around us and was suddenly restored to the exact same condition it had been in before the fight. What had done it was very much not obvious, but it could have been any of a number of parties.

Galactus did turn and look around for a moment as it happened, just a pause, but significant on its own. What He was thinking as He felt the power of the Molecule Man at work was His own business. The Skyfathers probably assumed Galactus had done it...

“Thor, your brother is attempting to gather up the leaked Celestial energies over there. I suggest you and the others go dissuade him.”

The four gods straightened and looked that way sharply at Dr. Strange’s words. Without hesitation, they started off in that direction, Thor leading the way by throwing his Hammer, Perrun following with his Axe, Tchernoborg racing over the ice as black winds, and Hercules bounding forwards with ever-increasing speed, his golden Mace in hand.

“Mystics, there’s a half-dozen Dragon-mages and their apprentices looking to set up Rituals to tap into what Galactus is doing. We need to interrupt them.”

The Russian Witches, Tribal Shamans, and Wakandan Priests straightened up, reaching out with their senses and turning in the same direction Dr. Strange was looking. A moment later all of the spellcasters were airborne and sweeping out in that direction, Dealer among them.

“You.” I jumped, finding myself looking into a pair of heavens-blue eyes that were staring at me very intently. “You’re associated with that Dealer. What was she trying to pull with that barricade of squajib cards?” Sama Rantha demanded to know.

She was taller than me, leaner, with Nothing To See Here as usual, all lethal muscle and deadly grace. The blue-black lines of her Curse were smeared over the left side of her face, quite disfiguring it, but if you ignored it and focused on the rest, you would realize that she was actually breathtakingly attractive, with thick dark hair and a heart-shaped face, and some absolutely incredible lips.

Despite myself, I smiled, which earned me an eyebrow raise. “Well, her barricade consisted of Summoning in all the remaining squajib decks on Earth, which she reinforced and set in place. The energy striking the whole was shared with the nearest complete squajib decks via resonant sympathy, approximately 1,266 of them in total, one deck per card. Of course, if the other deck was destroyed, the effect then moved on to the next nearest squajib deck.”

Both of Sama’s eyebrows rose. “Five different pulses. You are saying she ‘shared’ those blasts with six thousand other decks of squajib cards?” she asked for clarity.

“That was the intention, ma’am.” And they diluted the force blasts by a factor of a thousand to those behind them in doing so, too.

She stared at me in some disbelief, and then her perfect lips split in a ferocious eight-canine smile. “VERY nice. I have a feeling a lot of hidden bases in the system just got compromised, and a whole lot of Skrull barracks just blew up for no reason whatsoever!” She clapped her hands in appreciation. “I understand she also makes magic Cards?”

No, no, she wasn’t aware of what had happened in Otherworld. I drew out a Deck and handed it over to her. She popped it open and dumped out the Cards, feathering them out every bit as easily as I could.

“Nice!” she complimented, looking them over once before riffling them back, stowing them, closing them, and handing them back to me.

“Otherworld wants to buy some off her,” I muttered as I stashed them.

“The Convergence Portal to their little imperial dimension has been severed,” Sama stated in no uncertain terms. “If they try to re-establish it, I may have to pay them a visit.”

I couldn’t imagine that going well. “She’ll be happy to hear that. Slaving away for her Omniversal Awesomeness was strangely unappealing.”

“Is there any problem with registering the design and getting paid on it?” Sama asked me directly.

“Uh, I doubt it. Where do you register it?” I asked intelligently. There was a magical patent office?

“The Tribal Repository of Magical Knowledge.”

“Huh! So noted. I will pass it on.” Left unspoken was that because it was Silver Magic, nobody was going to take the design and NOT pay her, given the spiritual requirements to make the Cards...

You learn something new every day.

She had also noticed that I was monitoring and modulating all the crazy instruments around me at the same time, and smiled slightly, definitely testing me. The simple fact I was one of the main six scientists working this stuff spoke volumes all by itself.

She glanced over at Doc Bronze, holding down the center with Reed Richards, and stalked over that way, all graceful death afoot. Doc Richards had an expression somewhere between terror and fanboidom as he saw her coming closer.

This was, after all, the woman who had literally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of American settlers during the last century, driven them back across the Mississippi, and turned the Tribes into the psionic, technological, and magical powerhouse that it was today. Even if she was vilified in the States, there was no doubt whatsoever that she was a Very Important Person.

He’d probably also done some of the math on that swordstroke, the fact that none of it had registered on anything of ours, and how she and The Great Bear had tanked the fallout force blasts from the Celestials like they were nothing.

Probably made him feel small.

I glanced at Doctor Doom off to the side, but he was raptly watching Galactus at work, and the plays of energy from the magical and divine combats taking place in the distance. His wife was talking with Natasha and some of the Shielder-women in attendance.

Hawkeye, on the other hand, was gaping at Galactus, his eyes very wide open, swirling with golden light, and golden tears were trickling down his skin before they froze, then dissolved.

“Hey, Sarge, make sure no one bugs your Corporal, okay? He’s having a moment of enlightenment.”

Mr. Hill glanced down at Hawkeye’s face, and just grunted in acknowledgement. “Kid always did have strange timing,” he remarked knowingly.

“No comment!”

Only about a quarter of the odd sensor arrays we’d come up with were proving to be either useless or simply not high-end enough to tell what was going on. Galactus was putting together his extractor, and with no interference, it was coming along well. The Surfer and Lensherr were doing the geomagnetic modulations, narrowing down the search parameters for the Celestial Seed.

Everything seemed to be going swimmingly.

----------

“Yield, Loki! Thou art beaten!”

Mjolnir was resting on the chest of Thor’s brother, drawing off the last of the Celestial energies in dances of heavy cosmic particles, aided by the Axe, Spear, and Mace of the other three gods. Vivic energy danced around the siphoned energies, purifying them and dealing with them appropriately.

Quite battered after his initial romp through them had run out of gas, and he simply hadn’t been able to overcome Hercules’ strength, Loki coughed up blood at his brother. “You would have had no chance without your pets, brother!” he called out mockingly, and the fact it was true probably stung hard.

Oddly enough, it was Hercules who burst out laughing first, and a second later the two Slavic gods joined in, one cheerfully, one with dark undertones.

“He does not realize how his life was spared?” Hercules wondered blatantly, crossing his mighty arms and looking down at the Trickster God. “One cut from the Golden Hag, and you would have fed the land forever, even if she had to sit here under the eyes of the Skyfathers and watch you burn down to nothing to do it.

“One blow from the Great Bear,” Tchernoborg’s raspy, hollow voice chimed in knowingly. “The Sorcerer Supreme was merciful in telling us to deal with you... or perhaps seeing a Celestial fall today was enough, and he didn’t want to add the permanent death of a god to the show.”

“Aye,” Perrun’s bluff and cheerful voice added in as Loki’s face twisted. “Remember this, little Trickster. The Great Bear and the Golden Hag have no tolerance for gods who abuse their statuses. They care not for your destiny or your doom; they will simply end you forever, and that will be all. I suggest in the future that you keep a good safe distance from the pair of them, or the delightfully entertaining tales of Loki the Trickster God are going to come to an abrupt and permanent ending, and not even a Skyfather is going to dissuade them.”

“I could have BEEN a skyfather!” Loki spat, twisting under the Hammer he could not budge in the slightest.

“With such stolen power? Art thy mystic senses so dull? Think you that you could flee this place?” Hercules grinned broadly. “Thy Rainbow Bridge itself cannot materialize in these lands right now, and you think you would have had any opportunity to flee with thy stolen gains?” He laughed again and waved to Thor. “He is your family, so we will leave him to you. I imagine if we brought him back, he would quietly disappear forever.”

Perrun and Tchernoborg nodded in agreement, also turning away. The three gods strolled away without concern, chatting with one another about the fight, boasting about their contributions, and not forgetting to laud one another’s cleverness or mock their mistakes, either.

Thor watched them go, an odd look in his eyes. It was all well and good to associate with valiant mortals, but to enjoy the good company of fellow gods in battle and the feast thereafter was always something special. The Warriors Three had not accompanied him to Midgard yet, and truly, they were more followers than equals.

“Rest, Loki, until Bifrost can descend to carry us away. Thou hast a fine, front-row seat to the true wielding of power,” Thor told him, and ignored the curses that arose thereafter.

The words had no bite to them. Loki Odinson had escaped death by a fine hair today, and if he had been beaten to a pulp while doing so, it was still much, much better than death...