Being this powerful probably sounded like a lot of fun to a lot of people, but it just made me aware of my own limitations.

It was like facing Superman. If you didn’t know his weaknesses, he was impossible to beat. If you did, it was merely very hard, especially if he was on his toes and Not Stupid.

Now, I was on my toes, Cosmically Aware, the Red Eyes were always watching, I had super-senses, and I had multiple thoughtstreams possessed of terrifying ability to focus looking out for threats. I also was very aware of my own strengths and weaknesses, and had a reasonable idea of what could be done to really slow me down.

First of all, layer their deflector shields. I actually was not capable of punching through the force fields of a larger capital ship, having basically the same energy as a rail gun load when it came down to it, maybe layered with a nuclear-level blast of impact. So, I generally opened a hole in their shields with Argent Savancy, feeding back into and damaging the emitters as I did so.

Once I was inside the shield, they were dead.

A layered shield meant I would have to pierce multiple shields, and if they regenerated quickly enough and multiple emitters were able to cover the hole, I would be slowed right down in my destructive spree of key installations and ships.

I would and could endure all kinds of firepower. Half the Mimicked invulnerability levels, plus a Nova Nine + Specs, could see me through everything they had thrown at me so far. ANYTHING they could throw at me? That was a different level of power, although it would have to be truly world-crushing to hurt me at this point, and capable of hitting someone capable of moving at light speed.

It didn’t mean I could be everywhere. If they started glassing civilians somewhere while I was doing something else, I couldn’t stop it. The Magus was fully capable of deciding to wipe out worlds before they could fall out from under his influence, and I knew he would do so without a second thought.

That was the reason I’d been shattering the faith of those free-believers and disrupting his hold on the others. The Magus was capable of manipulating and using the energies of Faith and Belief, a true Ur-Priest... but then, so was I, and I could see, feel, and sense what he was doing, and I was taking severe pains to disrupt his power supply.

Better yet, if he tried to use it against me, he’d basically show me right where it was, and I could steal his stolen power and use it on him!

My Earworm spread across the planets under his Thrall, and shook them out from their brainwashing rapidly, even starting riots on the Sovereign worlds as those forced to obey broke out of their conditioning and realized what had been done to them. Asgardian witch experience in Enchantment and Charm magic for the win!

I could not be everywhere at once, and giving the Magus time to react and scheme would only give him time to do more things. But that didn’t mean I was going to let him slaughter planets full of brainwashed fanatics for their bound souls and false faith.

A Ten Nova Suit’s mastery of gravity was extreme, capable of producing nearly black hole levels of gravimetric control. Combine with energy manipulation and hyperspace travel, and if you interwove them successfully, you were capable of forming Portals across literally intergalactic distances.

Normally this required a Ten Core. 12d6 of Wrath, 6d6 of Soul Lightning, and 9d6 of Reserves supplementing a Nine Core proved perfectly capable of supporting this effect, even without the Mimic boosts of half a Flared Comet or Kismet.

I could now make a Portal, or I could simply Worldjump from one system to the next, bending space in a personal wormhole from one star to another.

In-system, I could do the same thing, only it was much faster. After all, light speed was pretty slow when you’re talking about space. A personal wormhole might take me thirty seconds to spin up, but distances in space started at light-minutes between planets, so it was always faster than just shooting through space.

The technique was being broadcast through the Worldmind, tantalizing both the Nova and Ultra Corps with the possibilities that it entailed. Even Zhuli the Lantern was impressed with the technique, and started working on such a thing for use with his Lantern.

After all, if a Nova Ten could do that, it meant that any Xandaran colony was literally a minute away from one another. The security, trade, and information implications were impressive, even if the Xandarans couldn’t already Teleport across the galaxy with sufficient energy output... and they usually had the energy output. But a burst Teleport wasn’t the same as an open Portal anyone could stroll through... and being able to go from anywhere TO anywhere on demand was much, much better than needing to be near a powered-up teleportation device.

What it did do was make my in-system maneuverability even more damning to any defenders, since I could move all the way across the system without spending Valences, or leaving a visible Ride the Light trail from Linejumping. If I shut down their tachyon or hyperwave transmissions, I would outrun lightspeed alarms, and literally I’d hit the whole system in a wave of surprise attacks, one after another, as I worked my way in-system, outrunning any alarms.

My Cosmic Awareness was centered on taking out the people who could destroy the planets, and the machinery that would do it. True believers or not, I wasn’t going to allow the Magus to pop them off for a sacrificial power-up, so I tore through the outlier subjugated systems in a blur of attacks to neutralize those options as a ‘random consequence of my rampages’, before exiting to another system to rinse and repeat.

You are in the big leagues when you consider light speed too slow...

---------

The sky was full of fire and light.

The purple-skinned, white-haired man snarled as he watched the slender streak of fire and light bounce from one explosion to the next. Some of the displays were power cores rupturing, some of them were munitions going off, and some of them were holocausts of nuclear flames wielded like living things as they rose inside starships, temples, space stations, storehouses, and even barracks, consuming everything in waves of million-degree heat that reduced the strongest materials within to free-floating atoms.

Oh, they were trying to defend themselves, with point-defenses shooting madly, cannons blazing, missiles streaking to and fro, drones firing crazily in all directions, ships wildly trying to evade... and naturally none of that was working in the slightest.

It was maddening to see, because it was all in the past. His Cosmic Awareness was clearly informing him that the explosions he was seeing had happened minutes, seconds, or fractions of seconds in the past, and the source of them was already gone, long before any retaliation could potentially arrive.

He had tried to predict their path, using his Awareness to detonate a couple ships just as the being arrived and catch them fully in such an inferno. But he hadn’t even been able to see if they were resistant to such a thing, as they chose different targets, and he had merely accelerated what they were doing with his own contributions!

The computer-guided point defenses were utterly incapable of tracking the attacker. By the time the sensors could read the trail of burning electrons being left behind, their target was already at their next destination, and something was dying in atomic fire.

His locuses of Belief were guttering and nearly powerless. The magic underlying that broadcast “Church of Universal Lies” Declaration was maddeningly efficient, repeating itself across multiple media faster than such things could be shut down. It unwound the psychic compulsions he’d placed on whole planetary populations if passed on in voice, writing, video, audio, or text displays. Nearly as rapidly as he’d taken over whole worlds, he’d lost them and the power of their faith for his use.

He’d only managed to sacrifice three colony worlds of lesser species before something had started interfering with his commands. Follow-up investigations revealed that this being had burned a path through system after system with terrifying precision and savagery, destroying key Church personnel and equipment in passing. Waves of mind-freeing magic were thrown out and displayed to the populations, inciting them into immediate revolt against outnumbered Church troops whose strongest defenses had been reduced to craters already.

He couldn’t see them in his Cosmic Awareness, only the effects of their actions. The maddening temporal fog wouldn’t even let him predict the consequences of the attacker’s actions, although simple logic and calculations assured him that they were devastating to his plans.

This... could not be the work of Thanos. A being this powerful would not be working for the Mad Titan, his opposite in the Great Work.

The artistry and clinical skill on display showed a superior mind at work, both pre-planned strategy and on-the-moment revision of tactics. Whoever they were, they knew what they were doing, and had the power to do it.

The Sovereigns had been ideal for his purposes. With his origins from genetic engineering dovetailing perfectly into their own beliefs, he was basically the perfection of their creed, an achievement in genetic planning their entire society basically stood behind and hoped they could replicate.

He’d had to do almost nothing to take command of their entire species and turn them into extensions of his will. They were going to bring genetically-designed enlightenment to the galaxy, replacing the wild and inefficient systems of nature with the power and glory of scientific balance and perfection of the genome, uniting the galaxy, and then the universe, behind the all-encompassing wonder of advancing science.

That did not seem like it was going to work now.

He had sent his Will out there, trying to contact the mind at work, possibly suborn it, subdue it, and bring it to serve him.

It got him nowhere at all. There was not a flicker of indication that there was even a mind active out there at all, although the movements were too organic to be an AI.

He would have to retreat elsewhere, he could see, and start anew. It was a minor matter. The Sovereigns were tailor-made for his purposes, but taking command of an entire planet again would be... simple...

Space... was sealed?

He reached out with his will, clearing a path to Teleport off his personal vessel, and nothing happened. His attempt to reach out there was blocked, as space did not bend or open like it should have.

Instantly his Awareness drove out, vying against what could possibly reinforce reality to such a degree as to deny him passage off this vessel to elsewhere.

Runes, painted in the sky in all directions. Drawn by crisscrossing motion, powered by the fire of newborn stars and the souls of the burning dead. The laws and rules of space were reinforced to such a degree that his attempt to tear them open was like flicking toothpicks at a steel door.

He knew this was an extremely dangerous moment. He reached out with his power and will, tearing at the essence of the firmament with all his power, grabbing it, willing it open with all the might of his genetics and experience, his inhuman Awareness, and his instilled comprehension of reality.

It barely wobbled in the slightest under his power. Like the difference between feeling oak and steel to a child.

His eyes turned to the dance of fire and destruction taking place outside.

That had all been done just to find out where he was...

There was a poof, more of effect than sound, as something entered the chamber through the hull, moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. In slow motion, his mind automatically attaining a higher state, he saw matter flaring into plasma as molecules were blown apart under the impact of that much kinetic energy.

In the midst of the brilliance of the fusion fire forming, he saw a dark figure, definitely a humanoid female taller than he was, with actually flaming red hair, enter the great chamber in which he stood. Her head turned, and for that fraction of a microsecond, their eyes met.

And then a sun blew up in his face.