Nimue, Morgan, Dealer, and Ursula flashed in as a great sphere of golden light encompassing the area appeared, embedded with a lot of Runes and Sigils. It shrank in size rapidly at their advance, until it just barely encompassed the writhing, twisting form of Onslaught, compressing down and increasing the rejection of the living world against the thaumind construct a thousandfold.

“MJ, Necklace going on you! Impale the bastard and keep lighting it up! LJ, hold on; Ben, Rhodey, Simon, get off!”

There was a boom and crash, and the right hand of Onslaught blew away under the focused and very boosted repulsor fire of War Machine, just before he took flight.

My hair snaked out as I went down to all fours on Onslaught. It wrapped around Thor, LJ, and MJ’s waists, and pulsed with power. “Your Highness, take us to the Sun!”

Mjolnir ROARED in a tight spiral, magic surged around all of us, and with a BOOM, we were heading out of the atmosphere.

I was Attracted and locked to the bastard, scribing new Runes onto its scarlet armor, golden things that extended into the fake white cracks empowering Onslaught and gave them a new life it didn’t want.

Empathy, understanding, wisdom, and the wrongness of its deeds and purpose began to run through it, creating more psychic tumult inside it and rather hampering its thought processes. You wanna touch the White, we’ll empower it with some proper Gold...

Yeah, the g-forces should have pulped everyone, let alone the friction. Anyone who brought that up obviously wasn’t considering hitching a ride with the God of Thunder anytime soon.

We only accelerated as we kept moving, which was hardly surprising. Thor traveled by Hammer all the time, and you don’t reach light speed anywhere near planets, so obviously his Hammer could move faster the further it went.

Red was leaning into the emptiness of boiling energies inside the sucker’s head, harsh and unforgiving golden energies lashing through the morass with Null power and absolute immunity to its defenses. It got to experience the cutting edge of her soul, and realize that being a Good person didn’t mean having to be foolishly nice.

“Wow!” Red grinned, looking around at the brilliance of the stars in vacuum even as she continued punishing the twitching thing’s lack of a face. “My first time in space without a ship or a suit!” she mentioned, my hair conveying her words to me.

“Primus is coming in to escort us. He’ll pull you off before we get close enough to the sun to overwhelm the Necklace.” She looked up and around, and a blur of white in motion, glowing enough to attract attention, swooped down out of the stars and settled in just outside the edge of the Stillflight Field.

Thor was focused on the sun ahead of us, his arms rippling as pure physical power pushed his Hammer ahead at ever-increasing speeds. We were accelerating at literally hundreds of gravities, already up to a good fraction of light speed. The Stillflight Field couldn’t prevent him from physically pushing Mjolnir ever faster, after all...

LJ was energetically slicing into the armor of that other elbow as it tried to heal, unable to flail around for the moment, looking like a cosmic-class arc welder as she chewed through its armor.

The golden sphere around us was popping and pulsing, but the Interdiction wasn’t going to fail any time soon, and the Runes I was scribing over the bastard were helping keep the Sealing intact. The difficulty of Onslaught using any of its powers had increased massively, and if that wouldn’t last overlong, it didn’t have to.

We’d be at the sun in under another ten minutes.

-----

I flung MJ out and away two light-seconds from the sun, and Primus wrapped her up smoothly in his cape and zipped away with her.

Thor didn’t pull away until I released my hair, and I plunged right into the sun with the struggling twat and LJ as the God of Thunder veered sharply off.

LJ did exactly what she was supposed to, bringing in the entire power of the sun in her Quantum flame form. All the fire and power of shattering atoms descended on Onslaught with no respect for any other energy but their own.

The fire of smashing atoms, hot enough that no other energy existed but itself, converged on Onslaught, guided by the most powerful Fire Elemental on Terra, and I heard Invocations to Balthakk, the Faltine, Clea, Satannish, Koshus, Engrisor, Surtur, the Seraphim, and other Entities to bring their disdain and power to add to the effort to destroy this thing that was meant to destroy gods.

A Fire Core erupted with cosmic might, and power filled those spells with all the strength of the firmament.

The purest of Flames erupted, and wiped all away at their heart.

------

“Ughhh...” LJ muttered as we tumbled through space, courtesy of the solar flare that had obliterated Onslaught and wiped any trace of it from existence, save the brief unwhite flash of the vivus that had risen up to consume the last remnant of those souls and feed them to the Sun, and incidentally propel us uncontrollably away from it.

I’d Mimicked her Fire Elemental Quantum state so as to be unharmed by the Sun and the resulting explosion entirely. I probably could have tanked it all, being immune to fire and my Invulnerability being what it was, but I had absolutely no incentive to do so.

I let the burning state go as my hair, still wrapped around LJ, pulled her in closer. “Well done. How long have you two wanted to just let everything go like that?” I asked her, focusing just a sec to find Primus and Thor over those ways.

She shook her flaming head, her rippling firehair a good six feet long now, while I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and headed up and out in the proper direction. Thor was about two million miles off that way, having met up with Primus and MJ and waiting for us. “A damn long time!” she grinned happily.

“That torus configuration was gorgeous.”

“It took us twenty-three years to get that right after Reed figured out the pattern.” She looked behind us, and her eyes widened somewhat as she saw the solar flare reaching out into space behind us. “Did we do that?!” she asked faintly.

“Yep. If you’d set that off on Terra, you would have flamed out the Western Hemisphere. Goodbye, planet.”

“Did it get the bastard?” she naturally followed up on that observation, only a little bit deterred by the counter-example.

“I set the vivus on it with Function. Function says it’s more than dead. Apologies to Lady Death, but souls in rebellion against Her get what’s coming to them.”

A shadow in the void somehow passed over us, despite the fact that half the damn sky was a burning ball of nuclear fire right behind us. LJ’s burning eyes widened as she felt it.

“That is very freaky!” she whispered in a low voice.

“Yeah, don’t piss off Death, and make sure there’s a Death God around to vouch for your soul,” I agreed as we zipped in on the other three. A quick Portal would get us all home faster than we’d come.

The Crux had killed off a lot of their most fanatical members and older foundation, taking the heart out of their zealotry. If Onslaught could have survived and kept coming back, it would have been totally worth it.

It wasn’t. It should be quite a blow to those that had survived, and, I was sure, given them something to focus their hatred on. Not that they didn’t despise Thor enough already, or the High Guard.

Mmm. I didn’t have to worry about telepathic eavesdropping, so I immediately /sent out a notice to Morgan to make sure nobody remembered seeing MJ doing this stuff, and she /replied she’d take care of it...

----------

Time Passes, things happen above and below...

I was sending a card to congratulate Sue on her second pregnancy when Thanos vanished from my Cosmic Awareness.

Well, not really. What happened was that his interference with my Cosmic Awareness vanished, which was close to the same thing. One moment he was blocking my Awareness of him, the next moment he was gone.

I didn’t particularly look to track him all over the place, because it was fruitless and not my job to do so. Adam Warlock had been harrying him pretty well, but the golden guy seemed to have recently had another one of his breakdowns and so left off the heroic stuff. I wondered how much not having the Soul Gem had helped or hindered him, but at least he wasn’t going to use it to split off the Magus and allow him back... although it hardly meant we couldn’t get another Magus visit from another alternity again.

As a matter of fact, I was kind of expecting one.

A moment later there was a surge that had me narrowing my eyes, as two centers of distortion followed, one psionic, one magical in nature... and felt a LOT like Thanos’, but were obviously not the same.

I wasn’t mistaken, however.

I flitted my Awareness over the Guardians, and lifted an eyebrow.

What was Pip the Troll doing in a Thanos base? More to the point, one where the interference was radiating from?

-Got an Orb hit, Dyna.- I turned my attention to Morgan’s /voice. -Someone is messing with something cosmic. It just pinged the Orb of Agamotto hard.-

The Underweb rippled. Eight eyes looked up and around in a particular direction. -Whoa!- -Hey!- -Whatthehell!- /erupted from the three Spiders at the same moment, as their Spider-senses all went off.

-You three, with Morgan. Figure out where to go and what to do.- I finished up my card and dropped it off to be mailed. Completely unnecessary, of course, but it was the thought that counted. I could literally make it with a thought, or send her Congrats via Mark, but the fact I was mailing it said I did it all the old-fashioned way, and Sue would appreciate it. -I’m heading out on a related matter.-

---

The telepathic attack was massive and extremely powerful. However, I sensed a hollowness to it, and it definitely was not Thanos’ style. It was extremely strong, however.

More pointedly, it was a distraction.

I slammed back down on my back as the blur of purple slammed through the air above me, missing me and going crashing through the durasteel wall like it was paper mâché. At the same time, the Thanos-image in front of me screamed as 43d6 of feedback to the brain blew into him, and rather interrupted his conversation.

I spared only a tithe of view in Specs’ 360 vision as I oriented to face whatever bruiser was coming for me, watching the fake Thanos shrink down to a much smaller, but swollen-headed version of him, obviously giving up physical power for mental power.

I flicked the Assay at him while he was disoriented, reading the information as the Divination played over him.

A Thanosi, some form of genetic android/doppelganger/clone altered from the base creature in a specific direction: in this case, Thanos.

This fellow was emulating the additional psychic power of Charles Xavier. It even called itself Thanosi X.

I put up the Stillflight as he started to refocus from the massive shock to his system, and the other one was raging back for me. “Warrior, get her!” shrieked the mentalist midget Thanos clone.