Sama laid the god down on the floating Disks, the same ones that Mr. Hill and Mr. Grimm had laid on, and said, “Go ahead.”

I nodded, my fists sparking with lightning, and set off the Vigorous Heal and Heal in turn after chasing off the cosmic residue in Hercules’ wounds.

The Heal actually wouldn’t restore all his Soak, which was completely gone, but it would do most of it, and the rest he could regain at the speed of a god.

That much Health damage also wasn’t something I could fix with one spell, but 350 points of Healing would get him a whole huge way up from the -77 he was currently at.

Sweet Amana, his brain was crushed in a full inch. Ferocity and Really Don’t Die really did work wonders. Without them, he literally would have been dead.

Healing magic wrapped in lightning glowed all over him, but mostly on his head and upper body, which had taken the vast majority of the hammering. His Soak was rewoven and restored to 350 in mere seconds, and I belatedly remembered the Mercy made all the damage temporary and so Healing was doubled in effect.

Okay, yeah, this would definitely do the job.

At 16 points per tick, doubled by Mercy, Vigorous Heal drove energy into him, galvanizing his own 5-10 points of Fast Healing, which looked like it had been juiced with Blood and Soul. The energy began to rebuild his face and skull, and his trembling stopped and was soothed despite the electrical nature of the healing.

“Alchemical healing, eh?” Sama smirked knowingly.

“Alchemy covers a lot of different kinds of energies, not just Elements. What do mad scientists do without electricity? Mix it with positive energy, add a few Feats to enhance elemental and healing energy...” I responded calmly, focusing on the effects and controlling the lightning gently.

She said nothing. All she had to do was count the time and she’d know I had an effective Caster Level of at least 25 here. That wasn’t damning by itself, but it was definitely enough to pique any world-class adventurer’s interest.

Whatever. Hercules deserved it. He’d put all the effort in.

The big blue alien dude hadn’t made it to Primus. Anybody who wanted to dare Terra was going to have to consider that Primus was out there... and the two people who stood above him. Let’s see what they did with that!

We still weren’t going to tell them about the Molecule Man. Ben and May had recently come into contact with Eon’s Avatar on Terra, and were getting some gentle assistance with Cosmic Awareness.

I needed to get myself some of that.

There was a beep on my phone. I TK’d it up, and frowned. Felicia was PM’ing me? I didn’t glance at Sama standing there as I opened it up, and there was a cha-ching saying I needed to deposit a thousand credits to open this wonderful piece of news!

I lifted an eyebrow, paid the credits, and opened the message.

My eyes narrowed. I tilted it so Sama could see.

“Erik the Red has met with the Shi’ar Imperial Guard?” she repeated after a glance, her blue eyes narrowing to slits. “For the love of... when did that asshole get here?”

“He has some history with Xavier?” I mentioned from something him and some of the mutant students had run into a year, two ago? Mind-control was part of it, as I recalled...

“He’s the freaking head spy for the Shi’ar on Terra!” Sama snarled, having absolutely no liking for secret alien infiltrators running around, of which there only seemed to be more every day. She put a hand to her temple, “Someone tell me where the Starjammers and the Shi’ar Imperial Guards are right now!”

I could feel the psychic buzz of telepathy, not the best thing to be using here for fear of eavesdropping... which was why I wasn’t using it. Telepathy was a lot harder to put coding algorithms into than technology.

“Fuck, they are outside and moving to their shuttle!” She glanced at me, at Hercules, and visibly calmed herself by closing her eyes. Stuff was buzzing back and forth as she waited for Hercules to wake up. Technically he should have been awake already, but that was a huge hit to the brain, and he was getting the equivalent of pleasant electrotherapy now, likely enjoying his snooze.

My phone beeped. -Aliens attacking outside!- Quicksilver Messaged everyone, and even included a pic. Vaguely diamond-shaped with insectile legs, a short tail, a single red eye, and black as ink, flying through the air and shooting some kind of rays from their eyes.

“Sidrian Hunters outside!” Sama snarled, staring at nothing as the psychic buzz around her picked up, and suddenly views on the screens that had been showing the last of the Underlist competitions split to show the attack going on outside.

There were a lot of the things, and they were all over the place, shooting cars, blasting shuttles and parked planes, and generally causing immense amounts of havoc as they did so. However, they weren’t getting within fifty yards of the Colosseum itself, and its defenses seemed to be ignoring them. Patrons who fled towards the arena-ship were let go with almost mechanical precision at that range, while the others outside were being pursued mercilessly.

The heroes of Earth had already been on the way, alerted by Sama that something might happen, and a stream of brightly-clad men and women came out the ship’s doors, some of whom had been fighting one another moments before, and others who would normally be fighting one another.

With very impressive speed, they split up, the faster ones with ranged attacks going up against the alien raiders, and the rest swarming to help the Starjammers, whose shuttle was now wrecked and who were ducking and dodging through the starship parking area from their attackers. The Sidrians seemed to be remarkably tough for their size and shape...

“The Sidrians are a diversion to bleed off our strength,” Sama muttered, ignoring the vids up above since she was looking through the eyes of Tribals in multiple locations.

“Someone else... needs the Gift of Combat?” a rough voice spoke up under my fingers.

Sama stepped forward to put her hand on the head he tried to raise for her, pressing him firmly back down. “You count to one hundred before you get up, you big lunkhead,” she said quietly, not looking at him. “Then you Summon your Mace and go join the fight, if there’s anything left to do by then.”

I watched the surveillance vids as Hercules was forced back down, the Olympian sighing, “Yes, Teacher,” in defeat and a gleam of relief as her hand stayed on his forehead longer than was strictly necessary. She gave his cheek a motherly pat, kinda funny with him being over a dozen times older than she was, and waited with him and me as he continued to heal up, the focus finally moving away from his head.

Eh? “Sama, the Imp Guards are heading for a ship there.” Her head snapped around to the screen I was looking at. “I can see the princess is still with the Starjammers...”

“Cassandra! Tally up everyone! Who is not in position?” she snarled into nothing, now looking at all the screens. “The Imperial Guard has someone in green and gold!” she noticed sharply, and answered her own question even as the buzzing got pretty bad. “Fuck, they are after the Phoenix Avatar! Don’t let that ship get off the ground!” she swore.

Primus was actually not in the building. He would have come down if Hercules lost, but not before. Someone strong had to stay up in space with the Lantern.

That said, there was a lot of super-strong muscle and Paramounts who could get there awful quick, including both Comet and Fury... except the Sidrians converged and merged together with hivemind efficiency to get in their way and stop them.

Still, its engines were warming up, but there was no freaking way it was going to take off successfully. Cyclops by himself could snipe it, let alone-

With a boom and explosion that sent every ship around it tumbling off their landing fins, the non-descript shuttle blew right up, completely destroying itself.

As if that was the cue, the Sidrians who remained and hadn’t been torn into kibbles, sliced open, or burned down once someone deduced their armor was useless against plasma-level heat, all went berserk, destroying everything around them very indiscriminately as they began merging, merging more...

Johnny Storm, Sunfire the Japanese fire-tosser, and Havok and Cyclops went totally apeshit on them. Burning orange optic beams on constant stream cut across the sky, while fireballs, firestreams, and basically plasma bombs exploded in all directions and tore the merged aliens apart.

Sama slapped Hercules lightly and nodded at me. I let go, and without another word headed outside, Sama catching right up to me as Hercules hitched a ride on my Disks. We bolted through the inside of the arena as everyone got out of our way, responding to the murderous aura of Sama and the vestigial pressure of a god Willing them to shoo.

“Get Strange over to the ruins of that ship, tell him to do a scan for dimension-bending. There’s no way those assholes killed themselves. We’re looking for signs of a Stargate or similar long-distance Portal. Yes, fine, Richards can help, I don’t care,” Sama muttered from next to me as we blew out the arena, into the outer walkway, and headed right for the doors. “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” she snarled, and it was like freaking magic how everyone melted out of our path.

Both of us burst outside and skated left. Sama just pointed at a black blot in the sky, and there was a crack as Hercules launched himself into the air, his feet already misting to make sure he hit what he was aiming for among the bright flashes and lines of energy cutting through the sky.

“That Cyclops kid is doing good work,” Sama commented, half an eye on the sky as we hit the fifty-meter boundary and didn’t have to worry about running into gawkers, only corpses and burning vehicles. “So’s his little brother.”

“They’ve got energy to burn,” I agreed. The numbers of Sidrians was dropping precipitously. I noted the big one Herc was aiming for was abruptly pounded down out of the sky, heading for the ground with the momentum of something that had just been slugged by an angry Olympian. The fastest fliers were zooming around up there, and if unable to take down the bigger Sidrians, simply drove them further up into the air. Once they were high enough to be seen from a certain location, a line of flaming orange light swept by and cut them apart like butter, burning alien cluster-forms shattering as they fell out of the sky.

The exploded shuttle was located over three miles out, and that’s the direction we headed at speed. Both of us could have got there faster, but the Colosseum’s Interdiction was still in effect, although the Stillflight seemed to have been shut off or sabotaged.

“Was there an Interdiction pulse just as the ship blew up?” I asked sharply. “The interior is on a different system, we wouldn’t have felt it. That shuttle’s still inside the range, otherwise.”

Sama’s eyes flickered. “Shit, now they are gonna be hyperdefensive about letting it fall, and we need it down. One sec while I get a message sent.”

I had nothing to do but run, watching Johnny, Sunfire, and Iceman working to put out all the fires as fast as possible once the Sidrians were dealt with. Comet and Nova were helping by absorbing the flames in the more distant locations, too, and Sandman’s huge form was smothering whole lots of them at a time. You had to be alert to see it, but Susan was using force fields and pulling out the air inside to snuff flames, too.

It took the two of us less than two minutes to make it to the Shi’ar ship, although I was certain Sama could have outrun me if she wanted to.

There were a bunch of Powered in the area of the ship, which was basically in multiple pieces all over the place. Stark was there in his armor, probably pulled out of a suitcase or something; Reed Richards was studying something he’d probably pulled out of Compressed storage and modified on the fly; and Dr. Strange was there levitating, the Eye of Agamotto fixed on a certain spot in midair.