“Please let me kill him!” Medea pleaded woefully. “Do you know how many years I spent breaking up his branch of the Askari?! He’s an External and he’s not going away, he’ll just wait a thousand years and try again!

“I can bring in some Dora Milaje! They’ll do it without batting an eye!”

And the Wakandans totally would, based on what the Askari had been doing for two generations and more now.

I eyed the chopped-up, blasted-apart body of En Sabah Nur, struggling fitfully to pull himself back together as Blooding Cursed his injuries and didn’t allow him to heal up. He was glaring up at the two of us defiantly, but we could both see the fear in his eyes.

He knew he couldn’t best me physically, and Medea had blasted him all over the place, staying quite true to her profile and making a total mess of everything in classic adventurer-style. The Askari AND the Crux really hated her, and so did a lot of governments in the Middle East and Africa.

If he wanted to try energy-blasting someone with Comet’s Energy Absorption active, well, that was on him.

“En Sabah Nur,” I stated to him in ancient Egyptian, startling him with my fluency. “Your whole life you have been manipulated, either by the Celestials, by the Sphinx, or by Rama-Tut.

“Your masters are gone. Their servants, the Eternals, are gone. Their other creations, the Deviants, are no more. The mutants you believe you were given leave to dominate have come under other thrones, and do not seek the bloody banner you wish to raise of mutant superiority. The Askari are being ground away by revulsion and the slow uplifting which is taking time to take effect, and which your efforts are trying to hamper, not bring about.

“In this day and age, you do not belong. You think your age gives you the right to rule, and all it gives you is a primitive mindset and lack of understanding as to the heights humanity can achieve.

“There is no place for you on this world, En Sabah Nur. You are too powerful to empathize with the common people you were once a part of. You are too old to dream of a better future. You are too set to think of a path without blood and violence, and you are too egotistical to bow to a power not as great as those who turned you from a man into what you are now.

“This is the moment, En Sabah Nur, when you finally choose your own fate, because the fates chosen for you by others have now come to an end.”

His morphable face had fallen as I spoke, his cybermorphing weirdly expressive. Despair, frustration, resignation, anger, defiance; they all rippled across his changeable features, and even his scattered limbs shifted uncomfortably.

“What are you asking of me?” he growled.

“I ask nothing of you. Do you think we need anything of yours?” I waved my hand around at his shattered laboratory and machinery. “This Celestial technology, we have access to it and more, all left behind by the Eternals. It has no value to us, we can atomize it with you and never miss it at all.

“Your age is nothing. We also have access to the histories of the Eternals, who are literally thousands of centuries older than you.” His face fell again. “Your knowledge and your wisdom are so caught up with your mortal years that they merely date you as irrelevant to the current age.

“The only way you are relevant, En Sabah Nur, is if the entire planet goes backwards... and then, by your mindset, you will keep it there, instead of rebuilding it, because that way you get to stay on top.”

He glared, but did not refute it, his words failing to clear his lips under my stare. He finally understood he could not lie to me successfully.

“You have something in mind, or you would have simply slain me,” he growled softly. “Out with it, woman! If you think I will bend a knee to you like a dog, you are mistaken!”

“My dogs are faithful servants and beloved companions of mine, En Sabah Nur. You do not qualify to be one of them.” His face fell again at the rejoined insult. I turned to Medea. “Let him reincorporate, then get about freeing this ship and getting it off the planet. It’s a Celestial Weapon, and we don’t want it here any more than we want them here.”

Medea rolled her eyes and tossed her white braids theatrically, glaring at the disassembled cybermorpher. “Fine. But he better leave the planet as well!”

“He’s either going, or staying forever. It’ll be his choice,” I assured her, and didn’t see him wince, nopers.

Medea waved her hand, and the Blooding subsided. Nur’s scattered parts began to slide and crawl together, linking up quickly, flowing into one another as they were allowed to mesh again. They reassembled into functional limbs, reformed his torso, and drew his head back into contact with the rest of him.

Slowly, warily, he got back to his feet. He knew better than to make a move on me. I’d manhandled him during Champion’s Contest, and I was far more powerful now, something he could clearly sense.

Medea had literally blown him apart, and could do so again. She was just itching to try, but left him to me as Seals, Runes, Patterns, Formations, and other profound stuff beyond Nur’s understanding began to swirl about her in complex forms.

He did sense that the very first thing to happen was his link to the Celestial Ship’s systems was completely severed and wiped away, and he could only endure it.

“You may stay and die, En Sabah Nur, or you may come with me.” I whipped up a Portal, and stepped on through.

He turned slightly, glancing back at Medea, who turned her head to meet him with one glowing blue eye, and dangerous fractal patterns suddenly crackled on the swirls and shining magic around her.

The ire in that eye, and the complete willingness to end him forever, prodded his decision, and he stepped through the Portal, stepping away from Terra forever.

------

“You’re a slave, En Sabah Nur,” I informed him as we sat there in the void atop one of the solar furnaces, and I let him look out upon Venus.

Nur wasn’t necessarily shocked, but he was startled as he beheld the orbital factory shapers there, the amount of starship traffic, the space stations, and the planet below with green and blue and white blossoming over the yellow-brown stone, the signs of cities and farms of great technological design obvious when he focused on them with magnifying eyes.

He turned around to look at the sun, and yes, indeed, spectra confirmed it was indeed Sol, or the Throne of Ra, from this time. There was a moon there, too, also being built up with some architecture not readily possible on Terra, and there were several arcologies intact about it.

Around it all, dozens of Acanti were either gliding along, eating sunlight, or being worked on at several places by crews of multiple races.

“This...” he glanced around at the stars and the planets, Celestial tech informing him of our location. “This is merely on the other side of the sun...” he whispered.

“Yes. That is Venus, and the moon is Mercury. We moved them out of their orbits over here.”

I let him digest that for a long moment, while he looked at the technology far beyond Terra’s at work in silence. It wasn’t Celestial tech, true enough... but we had moved TWO planets into place...

“How am I a slave?” he growled.

I reached over and tinged his arm. “Celestial technology is THEIR technology. They can reach clear across the universe and take control of it. You, your Ship, the Eternals’ cities... the technology is theirs.

“You are made of their technology. You are theirs. The Eternals were made by their technology. It is extremely difficult for them to defy their masters, and that is with them being entirely organic.

“They gave you a mission, and you’ve been upholding it, so they’ve been hands-off. But you are theirs, and make no mistake of it. You literally cannot defy them.”

He was silent for long minutes, ruminating on that fact. It had probably occurred to him multiple times over the millennia he’d been around, but someone else tossing it into his face was probably new.

It meant others saw him as a slave to his Space God masters, not a servant, emissary, or representative. It was a blow to his pride and his ego, not helped by the fact so many of those people also eclipsed him in power.

“I don’t know if you’ve contemplated the power and awareness of your masters, but picking you was neither random nor planned. They established a set of mental, spiritual, and physical filters, you fit them, and of all of those who qualified, you ended up being picked.

“If you look at those filters, they obviously emphasized a tenacious will, a desire to dominate, a willingness to fight, and the ability to endure and survive. If you consider the time and age you came from, you can probably calculate the statistics of how many others would also have qualified with those traits.

“You were not special, En Sabah Nur, and you were not unique. You qualified, and then they made you something.

“That something is not human anymore. I am speaking to you in Egyptian because it is your natural language, and even if your systems allow you to interpret almost any language, it is still the language that is the foundation of your mental processes.

“You are having difficulty learning the Human Tongue, for example.” His mouth opened and closed. “It is humanity’s genetic language, En Sabah Nur. Anyone with Human DNA can learn it quickly and completely.

“You are not human, En Sabah Nur, not anymore. You are a Celestial-made cybermorpher. The only thing human about you is where you came from.” Now I turned to look at him, and he stiffened. “You have no more right to rule over humanity than any other alien, android, demon, or elemental, En Sabah Nur. If you believe that being endowed by the Celestials gives you that right, then I’ll Summon up Thor and Hercules and have them bless me with the right from some gods, as well.

“Or maybe Sama. After all, she cut down one of your little Patrons.”

His expression was interesting to read. Perhaps he had only heard of Sama, and just never faced her, but the wary respect on his face was definitely there. I wondered what his face had been like when she had chastised one of his masters off-handedly.

“You are here at HER command...” he murmured into the vacuum, but I heard him fine. Quasi-telepathic Voice and everything, Celestial tech.

“And she’s not going to allow Terra to be put under the aegis of a Celestial or their slaves. It’s why she kicked them off, helped Galactus eat the Seed they’d put here to feed on our homeworld, and pushed the Eternals off, too.

“We can’t even use, wield, or emulate Celestial technology, because that just leaves us open to them taking it over. We can only see what it can do, and devise our own.”

He was going to say something scoffing about possibly emulating his masters, and just fell silent. We could move planets and cut a Celestial in twain. Obviously, we had something backing us.

“Are you asking me to do something out here?” His voice was heavy with irony. “Am I not a mere puppet of my masters?”

“Well, if you go back to Terra, Sama’s gonna off you.” He grimaced despite himself. She could cut down one of his masters, and give orders to me. She’d have no problem taking him out. “Your problem is that mentally you are frozen in the mindset of that man from four thousand years ago, from a primitive society dominated by a caste system, cruel warfare, and blatant discrimination and superstition.

“You are still that man, En Sabah Nur, despite four thousand years having passed, and the world moving on and becoming a different place. You fit in that old world, you do not fit here in this one, and that is by your masters’ design. They wanted a tool and a pawn, not an evolving servant.

“And that is why you are a slave, not a servant. The Eternals were at least allowed to evolve and improve themselves. You were not.”

==========

Author’s Note: I’m not using the heavily retconned origin of Apocalypse here, with his noble savage/savage noble backstory. He was a normal guy back in Egypt, randomly selected by the Celestials, who both activated his mutant genes AND made him a cybermorpher. His External status is his mutant power, along with control of his body, but it was all keyed by Celestial tech and stuff going through him.