Multiple purple streaks flashed past me, loaded with kinetic energy that turned them all into mini-nukes. Streaks of cardstock hit the fighter-class ships zipping around the massive arcology that was named the Orienta Shard, the largest and most central of the four great arcologies that were the remnants of Xandar.

I flew through the explosions as spaceships hit playing cards, and spaceships lost the fight in ruptures of kinetic force from atoms giving up the ghost.

Rings of sapphire cosmic energy waves smashed through a troop carrier and its escorts, shields crumbling and hulls crumping as they were crushed and hurled aside.

Most ominously, a dark, yet horrifyingly visible thread of deep blue-purple light reached out into the void, and in its first one-second sweep, sliced through one of the biggest Skrull ships in range. There was a massive, eye-searing feedback from the ship’s shields as they failed to contain the blast, and it sliced through the ship’s stern, right where hastily-downloaded info on its systems said its engineering core was located, and went all the way through and out the other side.

It took a few seconds for the ruptured power core to blow, but it did take out the back end of the super-carrier as it did.

I just smiled as I arced around the four arcologies of Xandar, and began my own somewhat slower reaping.

Being used as a self-propelled missile was only possible with Specs combining with the Ultra Core 6 to give me a level of invulnerability sufficient to punch through a ship’s hull and superstructure at miles-per-second speeds.

With the Beaubier Core effects, the speed I could move at out here was basically unrivaled by anything present. The Skrull systems couldn’t track or follow me due to Vampire’s Veil, so for all intents and purposes, I was just a faint trail of lightning moving through the sky, and I was ramming everything I could.

The faster I went, the faster my reflexes were, and the greater my invulnerability. Specs was working with the Worldmind’s info dump, the Red Eyes, and my Visual File to plot me a course, avoiding any accidental friendly fire, and I was now officially motoring it.

Organic bodies, by and large, didn’t have the reflexes to respond to my speed or presence, and the artificial ones couldn’t see me. So, I was going to reap, and reap I did.

The Skrulls, as a race, tended towards Lawful Neutrality. They didn’t evolve, they just endured, clinging to their beliefs and dreams. There were Good individuals among them, but they were rare, as the Skrulls were wholly caught up in the idea that they would subsume all other races in the universe eventually, and so everyone would be Skrulls, and wouldn’t that be just wonderful and perfect for everyone?

Their military tended towards Lawful Evil. They considered slay-and-replace solidly useful infiltration skills, memory-duping SOP, and the genocidal replacement of sapient races was their military mission, expanding the Skrull species across the universe.

I had no sympathies for them. They had picked this fight, and they were picking fights with Terra. Their racial mission made them, in the end, enemies with all other intelligent races. Their history of galactic conquest was literally tens of thousands of years old or older, proven and repeated over and over again, until the vast majority of the Andromeda galaxy had basically been conquered by and was ruled by the Skrulls.

It was why they were here on Xandar, after all, as Xandar was defying their racial mandate, and they really wanted the secrets and understanding of the Worldmind, Nova Force, and Xandaran technology.

My tactical speed was far higher than the Skrulls’, and could vary with inertia-defying speed, even as I changed direction with equal inertialessness and picked out my targets.

I also had no problem whatsoever with forcefields, although I did have to touch them. Argent Savancy reached out and shattered them open, allowing me to enter within, and seconds later, I was plowing into and out of a capital ship, using enough Ultra Force to start explosions all around me as I did... and Skrull ship designs changed with glacial speeds that growing mountains might envy. I could plow right through a power core at my speeds and out the other side without any harm, immune to heat and rads as I was.

And so that’s what I did.

Other Centurions, Centurion Primes, and the like were out here, although they were spread through the system as they dueled with the Skrull hunter-killer groups tracking them and trying to deal with them, generally with hunter missiles and long-range massed fire.

Unlike them, I could not be seen, and so all the fine sensors and computerized coordinated fire didn’t mean anything to me.

There was a massive blast from behind me, and I knew Cyke had gotten off a violet beam. It would have been visible as a line of explosions around the violet of the optical component, random gas atoms flying apart in its path, and then it would drive into the bow of a ship and turn the ship into one massive nuke blowing itself apart all around the beam as his shot powered forwards.

The blast rocked the Skrull fleet. The amount that made it to the brothers was just more fuel for their built-in guns.

“Cheri, you got more cards?” Gambit asked through coms, earning him a look from me through Cyke’s feed. He was spending his cards freely on incoming missiles, as well as sending them at fighter craft spitting particle beams and plasma at the brothers. Solid matter was the only threat to them, but Remy’s hypersensitivity to kinetics meant he could sense anything material coming their way, and deal with it with perfect accuracy and control, either diverting it slightly away if needed, or meeting it with a card.

It did, however, use up a lot of cards quickly. His form of energy projection was extremely potent, but also extremely localized and dependent on something material.

“I have a nice can of ball bearings?” I responded after a few seconds of thought.

“That’ll work, too!” he agreed with a grin.

Stone Shape at VII could affect metal. I grabbed a chunk of average steel tumbling through the void, shorn from some ruined ship, and promptly began to reform it into ammunition for him. In consideration of his liking flat throwing objects, I made them all into basically shuriken-sized discs for him to toss with impunity.

It took me another six seconds to deliver the stack of ammunition down next to him, and then flit away in a crackle of lightning. Gambit sort of blinked at the massive stack of tens of thousands of disks there for him to use, the purple in his eyes spewing particle effects as so much power continued dumping into him. Then he put one hand on the stack, seized it all, began to charge everything up, and extended his other hand to aim.

Non-stop purple tracer fire of energized disks of steel shot out at his will, seething with the kinetic energy of cannons fired per disc. I realized he was probably going to run out of ammunition again, and I’d need to make more.

That was fine, there were plenty of ruined Skrull ships around ready to supply him, and the spell would last for several minutes. Easy enough to do, as Vulcan moved his brothers along the arcology towards areas of bombardment, drawing fire and fuel for the Skrulls to kill themselves with. Shockwave rings smashed through formations, and eerily lethal threads of optical psychokinesis reached out and sliced through anything in their path.

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The main landing area into Orienta was not going well for the Skrulls. Thor had come down, and his lightning had basically blown the landing platforms off the arcology, before taking the fight right into the ship and really wrecking the shit out of it.

Behind him, Hercules was hitting tanks with other tanks, infantry with artillery barrels, and generally destroying all the most powerful guns that could threaten the Nova Corps and Xandaran positions. Energy blasts didn’t mean much to him, and the Skrulls weren’t using kinetic projectile weapons, so he had almost nothing to be afraid of here, especially shapechangers who couldn’t emulate the superhuman strength needed to be a threat to him. A flex of his foot turned him into a hurtling projectile that could cover fifty yards in a charging step, and if not as smoothly as a speedster, it bounced him from target to target with great speed and brutal, flesh-crushing force as he blew through anything in his path.

Nova was taking care of fire support outside, dealing with the lighter craft and the guns of the support vessels before taking out their power cores, filling the area around the breach with the rubble and ruin of flaming Skrull vessels.

By the time the Skrull forces realized the breach was lost and decided to retarget the area with their main guns, the Summers Brothers had moved over, and the resulting cannonade and return fire became a murderous fireworks show plowing back into the heart of the Skrull offensive.

I was looping around the three other arcologies by now, which had their own breaches and dire street combat going on. I blew through the landing arrays at all three other entry points, and filled the area with burning spaceships and dying Skrulls. Without reinforcements, the ground forces inside were definitely doomed, and the clustered support fleets out there made ideal targets for me.

Being a human missile sucked, and my arms were getting really sore from bashing through durasteel at that speed, but the stacked Invulnerability held up, and the Skrulls paid for it as I looped and charged and dove and swooped. Uncorked fusion cores blossomed like flowers in the void in my wake.

Realizing things were going very south, the Skrull commanders finally pulled off the assault, probably swearing really, really hard as they did so. The troops inside the arcologies were basically sacrificed, and they knew it, fighting to the bitter end to distract the Corpsmen there from going out in pursuit of the ships.

The cheers across the Battlenet as the Skrulls pulled out were unfeigned. Unfortunately, the rest of the system was still full of Skrulls hunting the Nova Corps, and the few Xandaran ships with them.

That was fine, because the Starholder was coming.

Getting around the information blockade, the whole fleet of Acanti dropped out of hyperspace right around the outsystem rallying point of the Skrulls. The furrow-chinned shapeshifters basically had enough time to bleet as a million biovessels were suddenly around and on top of them, and Sublime Whalesong thundered through their minds and the void.

The carnage was pretty much absolute. The acanti had no problems ramming right through the Skrull fleet there, and the fight was over in literally seconds.

The youngsters were left behind to gather up the materials for salvage, while the hundreds of thousands of tumbling Skrull corpses might add up to a snack for them once vivisized.

The Starholder surged into the system, leading a bow wave of Acanti who suddenly and deftly dispersed in all directions. Suddenly, the hunting was going on in the opposite direction. There was no way the Skrulls could outrun or outmaneuver the space whales, and they were outsized, outgunned, and severely outnumbered. Crushed, shattered, and sometimes exploded Skrull ships were soon tumbling through the void... and getting towed away to be recycled.

This action of the Skrull-Xandaran war was effectively over, with only mop-up actions that would be soon helped by some heavy Asgardian forces remaining, and the hunt for Skrulls trying to shapechange and evade their pursuers would wind down over the next week.

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“That looks like ouch!” Gwen muttered, as I held up my black-and-blue forearms.

“This is what ramming through solid steel at miles per second with triple-invulnerability does to you,” I muttered, lightning crackling over the injuries as they slowly receded. Just temporary damage, but it was enough to get through my impressive Damage Reduction, so it didn’t want to go away.

“Their system tracked all the tonnage you got rid of,” Cindy murmured to me. “I think only Cyclops beat you, and that’s because he was taking out the biggest ships!”

“Scott has a vastly better ability to reach out and touch someone,” I agreed calmly. It wasn’t a competition, after all. We’d all been racing to push the Skrulls to the end of the line, as it were.