The Serpent Crown began to melt. The power of the Elder God behind it was broken, and as such so was the power of the artifact. Its power to enhance mental powers to godly levels was technically gone with it, unless some other entity linked to it to replace Set and again try to wield influence in the realm of mortals.

Set was a cautious bastard, but Ghaur had actually Summoned him in, desperate for the power to restore his people, especially in the face of the slaughter going on as the heroes of the surface cut through his cultists. The Crown had given him enough power to stave off the power of the telepaths coming for his mind, but that had done nothing for the physical combatants tearing through his people and protected from Set’s influence by magnapsium. Seeking true mystical power, Ghaur had tried to use the would-be kidnapped brides to bring in the Elder Demon... and succeeded, albeit only just in time for Thor, Hercules, Perrun, and Tchernoborg to immediately light into him, preventing the Demon from impregnating the women or seizing their souls.

Then Sama had cut off Set’s retreat, shattered the magical Wards upon the Lemurian holding, and with Fury channeling the power of angels, slaughtered Set and fed the bastard to Gaia, finally letting Him know what it was like to be the meal.

Looking over everything, it was plain to me that Briggs had long been withholding his hand, and simply waited for the Lemurians to dig their own grave. Pulling Set out of his pocket dimension was not something he could have done readily, so he had simply arranged matters for the Lemurian Deviants to do so themselves, killing two birds with one stone.

The cultists of Set had died under the magic of dozens of enraged Shamans, Witches, and Sorcerers, with the Black Scythes well-represented among them.

Briggs borrowed my Cosmic Awareness to locate every single surviving Deviant Enclave, now cowering in the dark of ocean depths or deep underground, praying for deliverance from the wrath of the Great Bear, and the humans and their dread gods from coming upon them.

There was no such mercy. Briggs’ grim Voice came to them all, devoid of both hate and sympathy, and told them all that they would come to the surface, they would be Opened to their Cores, and they would take their place among humanity as the Deviant gene was removed from them and made extinct.

If they did not, they would be exterminated wherever they hid, as humanity was not going to suffer them lying in the dark and waiting to rise up again. Ghaur had failed, and the Deviants who had followed him had all perished. Their long genetic war was over, and they had lost!

It had to be done. The Deviants had a genetic imperative to test themselves against and overwhelm core humanity, and with the Eternals as a counterforce gone, they had to be wiped or they would simply grind humanity down one way or another, bedeviling it throughout history.

---

All around the world, thousands of Deviants in hiding came to the surface, trembling in fear and waiting for annihilation. The Great Bear’s people were there, waiting for them, and they were taken away, their Cores Opened, mind blades manifested, and their wildly varying genetic heritage de-empowered, reverting them all back to base human forms.

The genetic treatment to wipe away their Deviant geneline followed, turning them back to true base humans, without any of the Powered potential of the baseline Primos. However, they could have children by Primos, and their children could gain that heritage... or they could become Forsaken, in time.

As for the Deviants who feared and hated too much, and stayed hidden in the darkness, hoping... well, Briggs had a Cosmic Cube. He gave them time and a chance, and when they did not take it, the earth opened and took them all, and there were no survivors to come back from the dark.

--------

So ended a great struggle for existence and evolution on Terra, a struggle homo sapiens would have lost without the intervention of the Celestials and Eternals... but which would never have happened without the Celestials creating the Deviants from base humanity in the first place.

It seemed that on most other worlds, the Deviants won. Their faster start and power helped them rise before the slow process of evolution could match them, and the base race never managed to catch up in time before being eliminated, unless the Celestials actually lent them a hand.

Thus the extinction of the true Kree and Skrulls had come about, among others, and even their Eternals had not been able to save them. The Deviants remaining had no ability to evolve themselves, and so had stagnated for millennia, having to resort to gene-modding to perhaps take a step forwards... and the non-modded instinctively treated them like evolved members, and opposed them violently if they had to.

Pretty damn ironically amusing, really. The Supreme Intelligence of the Kree probably had its tentacles all in a knot because of it.

The Skrulls just played with a new form and got over it. Shapechanging eased a lot of problems, as it were.

My problem was what were MY goals going to be. Did I even really have any?

All the stuff I wanted to do... my Dupes were doing. Enthusiastically. All I had to do was synch up with them and I would enjoy lives of doing funner, less cosmically dire stuff, enjoying friends and family and lovers, new experiences... and not just this crushing Awareness of all this shit out there that was so dangerous, and too much of which might come this way.

And then, then I would have to do something about it.

I was, in effect, protecting all the other lives I was living by being a badass out here. I was the Prime and the center, and yes, because of the things that had happened to me, I was also the protector.

Did I really want or need anything else to do? I literally had enough to do for, like, forever.

I had enough of the mindset inherited from Amora and Karnilla, a Divine capability to ignore the weight of years, that actually this was perfectly fine. A purpose and a job that could endure forever, at a scale most people could only dream of: important, vital, exciting, and involved.

The only unfortunate side of it was that it generally involved killing not individuals, but vast, vast numbers of things... which, having enhanced awareness, was difficult to take, even with some Divine mental fortitude to back things up.

My Ultra Core was 93% complete, and then I’d advance to a Core 10. Practically a Superwoman, definitely at the highest tier of Paramounts, once I rebuilt my Core once again.

I wasn’t getting in much downtime magic item construction. My Dupes did it for me, in return for me borrowing Atom’s ability and sundiving for them. Chef Julia, for instance, had little to no opportunity to upgrade her Core, so I did it for her. She just linked to the Pocket and drew out the heat and fire for her Fire Core.

It was a good tradeoff, and sundiving was good meditation, if nothing else. Listening to the fire of smashing atoms was a unique tune all its own.

Ho, what day was it? Really? Well, why not...

--------

Titan...

When the two of them entered the cemetery together, they both stopped to see me there. Neither of them had been expecting me, and although both of them recognized me, their reactions were very different.

I just looked at the handsome redhead, and said nothing. He was suddenly very pale after seeing me there, and turned hastily to his brother. “Brother, it seems I suddenly have urgent business elsewhere.” He handed over a long scroll tube to the much-larger purple-skinned fellow in blue next to him, and received a carefully wrapped box in return from his bemused sibling.

With not-haste that didn’t look at all unseemly, Eros the Starfox turned on his heel and marched out of the place, being careful not to look back at me.

Thanos watched his brother go, handling the tube with a deft and light touch, especially given his build and power. He turned his attention back to me, glanced around once, and strolled forwards, curious as to what I was doing here.

“Dynamo, of the High Guard,” he rumbled, showing he was at least up on my status. “It took some inventiveness to assemble a dossier on you,” he grumbled as he stopped in front of me. “I do not take intrusions on my time here lightly. Why are you here?” he asked me, eyes like shards of the Abyss gleaming darkly.

“There are several reasons. If it pleases you, Master Thanos,” I replied, tilting my head at the tube.

He paused only a moment before starting on the wrapping with surprising delicacy and appreciation for the time and precision that went into it. I rather doubted Starfox had done it himself, but who knew? When you had enough time, proper origami technique was just one more fad to learn, and at least he could put it to use once a year.

The contents were a painting. He drew it forth, hanging it in midair for both of us to examine.

“Salvador Dali, from his later period,” I mused, looking it over. “It seems your Mistress graced him with something. This isn’t on his register of paintings, so it must have been spirited away or concealed. Your brother is resourceful, if nothing else.”

The mind-blowing surrealism was replete with reaching souls, skulls, swathes of coiling darkness, and the things that looked out of them, hungry for the spirits of mortals. There were definitely profound implications to the thing, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Dali had lost all memory of having painted this.

“If not transcendent, still a masterpiece in its own right,” Thanos smiled in grim satisfaction. “I note he did not attempt to draw Her...”

I pointed to a single skull down in the corner. His gaze turned upon it, and froze there for a moment. “That is a single brushstroke. He did not paint Her. She painted Herself.”

His breath hissed out once, and after a long moment, he tore his eyes away. The painting rolled itself back up, and he re-inserted it with great care into its carry tube. “It will have a place of honor,” he promised Someone who wasn’t me.

His mood had improved greatly. “Perhaps the seed of the Sunlife flower will provide him the fertility he needs to actually sire a child.” His amusement was heavy with irony.

“He does not strike me as the type to fertilize it with his semen for a year or ten for it to work, although if he does, he then has to actually choose a mother.” Given his attitude towards relationships with women, that would be highly suspicious.

“This is true.” The irony that his brother would likely not have the patience nor discipline to guarantee himself a child had not been lost on him. “Why have you come here, Dynamo of the High Guard? Some motivation to capture me for my misdeeds, perhaps?”

“You do know that Sama Rantha knows you come here, and if misdeeds punishment was coming, you would now physically be in several pieces burning to nothing, and spiritually at the side of your Mistress, right?” I met his gaze squarely. “Unless, you know, you think it’s harder to cut you in two with a casual drawcut than it is a Celestial.”

He considered that, his naturally grim expression getting grimmer. “The Golden Hag,” he finally admitted. “She had been below my attention before I beheld that video you gave me. She is a dangerous being. I went looking for more word on her and who she is in many places...”

“You either Summoned a lot of spirits or did a LOT of traveling,” I mused. “She didn’t have that big a showing here in the Milky Way, and most of the places she went, they didn’t know her name.” I turned and started walking, and he naturally paced me as we went for a stroll through the calm and beautiful memorial garden.

“Mistress Death knows of her. The Hag could not hide such deeds from Her,” he rumbled.

I half-laughed softly. “Mistress Death brought Sama into Her Court. Of course She knows the Golden Hag!”

He turned his head to me slightly. “What does that mean, ‘brought into Her Court?’” he demanded. “You say it with undue weight.”