It was a good thing we were in the Negative Zone and she wasn’t connected to the Phoenix. Jean’s fury ignited a rolling fireball a couple miles across when it flared up, which I let stream right past me as she vented her fury in interstellar dead space.

It was also good she didn’t have a direct connection to the Phoenix Force right now, or it might well have flitted off to Chandilar and blown the sun right then and there.

I let her sob and scream and beat on me and blow up the void, and then I let her know what we were going to do back to them for this.

She half-listened at first, and then I started going into details, cold and clear and obviously knowing what I was doing.

Also, I spread what had happened to the crew. None of the Starholder’s people had the stomach to keep working on stuff which would help the Shi’ar after that, but the job still had to be done. Vulcan himself was particularly ashen on learning what had happened, and suddenly had an intimate understanding of just how merciless the Shi’ar Empire could be about its own laws, even to its allies and heroes.

Nor had Majestrix Lilandra been involved, or even found out about the matter until I informed her through the services of Xavier’s Shielder. The fact they’d moved in such secrecy meant the Council of Elders knew she would have stopped it or warned us of the attack.

The Talons of the Night strike cruiser never made it out of hyperspace back to its home galaxy. Zhuli tracked it down in a rage and smeared it across higher levels of infinity with his Lantern.

Perhaps the Elder Council thought that would be an end to it.

I also informed Kallark of what they had done, and noted to him that the Shi’ar did indeed treat their allies well. He looked away towards the space where the sun that used to glow over the horizon of his homeworld had once existed, and did not even bother to reply.

Charles Xavier listened intently to what I wanted him to do, and voiced no objections, either.

--------

Stars died, and energies poured into the Crunch, splitting apart space in specific manners and formations. Not only did this passageway have to tear open the Veil between opposed universes, it had to reverse the polarity of matter of those traversing it, so they didn’t come into our universe as anti-matter and literally blow themselves up as they did so.

I was on the N-Zone side of things, watching the whole process. They couldn’t hide it, as the energies involved were too immense, but there was nothing I could do about it, anyway. There was a whole lot of spatial lockdown and causality webs around the place. Trying to rush in and sabotage it would have been suicide, and I wasn’t dumb.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t picking off stuff at their flanks, ever-industrious busybody that I was, but they didn’t care.

Now, that special battlegroup over there, that was something else. They were homing in on a beacon of Brood manufacture, and holes that had appeared in the spatial defenses of a certain solar system wherein was located the capital of one of the empires they were seeking to invade. The thought that they might be able to just cut the head off their enemy in one fell swoop was impossible to pass up, and they’d allocated their newest Warworld and the species manning it to the task, which they took up with zeal and enthusiasm.

The Crunch was blown apart, inverted, opened up, and space was rent aside, and shattered.

With howls from hundreds of trillions of vocal organs, the Negative Zone poured its forces through the gaps of their darkening realm, streaming forth into one pulsing with new light and life.

Totally unaware their navigation systems had been completely bolloxed, four Warworlds and their associated fleets poured through, and came out directly into the hearts of several stars, with rather predictable results. The explosions literally tore apart the star and the Crack, and the following races had to detour urgently to the other breaches.

Three more Warworlds breached the gates, advanced half an AU, and destabilized, the star-fueled power cores in them erupting in novas that wiped out every ship around them suddenly and completely in areas the size of a solar system.

Two other Warworlds breached, instructions activated in the systems of one, and it pounced on the other in a fusillade of attacks and full-speed ramming that obliterated both mobile battle-planets from existence.

Only four of the allotted Warworlds survived actual entry into our universe, one per Empire. The fourth one immediately went hunting for cosmic entities.

Trillions had died in the explosions and sabotaging of the Warworlds, but they were all of the weaker races, save those manning the Warworlds themselves. Those following behind shrugged and kept right on coming, and across multiple galaxies, the greatest fleets ever assembled moved to engage.

That included the fleets of Galactus, whose sudden appearances threw all the predictions of the N-Zoners out the window. Complacent confidence in their overwhelming numbers suddenly became pitched fights against a terrifyingly numerous and powerful foe whose ships were present at every single one of the theaters of conflict.

All, save one.

-------

The breach into the throneworld system of the Shi’ar was unanticipated. They had closed down the hyperlanes, and the invasion, along with most of their defensive fleets, was literally half the galaxy away, far over there, with innumerable defenses and traps laid in between.

The sabotage of the interdiction defenses and the discovery of the homing beacon both came too late to do anything about it. Likewise, there was no recalling the Shi’ar battlefleets to save the Throneworld, as they were committed now, and any deviation from the plan was going to sacrifice far more than just the galaxy... and it wouldn’t save them, anyway.

A Sanctuary Ship from the Galactus Fleet was dispatched and in place before the Negative Zone ships could punch through, but their entry totally threw the entire system in chaos, warping the Interdiction defenses, while sabotage teams inserted by the Negative Zone hit the shipyards and especially the evacuation ships for the wealthy and important.

The Elder Council, who had vowed not to leave until they had to, and the civilians who were not evacuated, found everything going horribly wrong. The teleportation effects and Stargates were either Interdicted or destroyed, as were the emergency ships they might have taken, and there were no military assets available to divert to them and save them, as they were instantly engaged in pitched combat against a Zoner fleet that outnumbered them massively.

-----

My Nega-Bands slammed together, and I instantly popped across the Crunch to my universe, and into the middle of a pitched fight.

The sky was filled with Rethagg, Normgorl, and Prisval ships. Their primary fleets and armies were here, the former swarming over the few Shi’ar dreadnoughts in system and rapidly overwhelming them, while their armies had crashed through the holes in the Interdiction systems that had been sabotaged by their infiltrators, and were rampaging across Chandilar.

I immediately moved into the fight, knowing it was mostly useless for all involved. I did notice the Starjammer disengaging and making full thrust out of the system, the dreadnoughts making their final efforts to stop any pursuit of it.

I also saw a red-headed woman with eyes of cosmic fire look up from inside Chandilar’s sun, and something ominous and burning raise its head and spread its wings with a searing cry of rage as I took off after the Starjammer, bouncing from ship to ship of the hundreds in pursuit of it and blowing them out of the stars as I swirled through them faster than they could block me.

They called me the Wrath of Heaven in the Negative Zone. They knew my energy signature, and they knew as soon as they sensed it that they weren’t going to survive.

All the same, all visual organs turned around in disbelief as the psychic wave of murderous rage washed over them, and they could watch right through the hulls of their ships, far faster than mere light, as that cosmic firebird spread its blazing wings, the entire sun of this system clutched between its talons like an egg.

The burning eyes of the Phoenix Force stared across the millions of miles into the eyes of the Elder Council, and they knew who was responsible for this disastrous turn of events. They had proclaimed their infallible judgement on how to deal with the Phoenix Force, and now the Phoenix Force, in turn, was proclaiming judgement on dealing with them.

The talons clutched at the burning orb, and the blazing beak came down.

The nova was instantaneous, the star popping like an egg before the cosmic fury of the Phoenix Force.

------

Ahead of me, I could see Cyclops standing out on the hull of the Starjammer as it headed out of the system. At the instant of the nova, all of local space had fractured, and there was no going to hyperdrive, or back to the Negative Zone, or anything. There was only running, or dying... and spatial disruptions were playing havoc with standard and exotic stardrives alike.

There would be no outrunning this explosion.

Viz opened up wide, and the eyes of Cyclops flared with the red light of an eternal dawn.

I zipped out of the way as a cone of ruby starlight slammed past me and leveled everything in its path. Space went completely flat, time got out of the way, and the incoming light, radiation, and mass of the star met it head-on... and stopped.

Today, there was no limit to what Scott Summers and Jean Grey could do.

His brothers were pouring energy into him as I blew through the closest Zoner ships madly trying to flee, arcing in a wide spiral around that beam, while behind us the heavens filled with the eruption of a slaughtered star.

Of course, it took time for all that to happen, or would have normally. But the Phoenix Force was here, and time and space weren’t all they normally were as the nova blew by, the sky filled with annihilation, and swept on and out in an ending to the Shi’ar Empire.

Chandilar lasted only seconds. Masses of starfire weighing more than the planet smashed into it at significant fractions of light speed and obliterated it and all upon it, sweeping it away in the funeral pangs of its sun.

That wave of force smashed into Cyclops unrelenting stare, who drove it back, and back, and back as the main force of the wave hurtled past and around us. Magnetic streams pulled down the energy, the strongest ergakinetic born of humanity warped the energy flows, the strongest kineticist robbed kinetic energy to feed to his half-brother, and a young man with the potential to eat unlimited amounts of energy and send them back out as cosmic shockwaves all poured their power into one Scott Summers, Cyclops. His One Eye filled the sky behind them with ruby light, holding off the wave that wanted to catch the Starjammer, overwhelm it, and swallow them whole.

He glared at the explosion of the star as it swept past on all sides of the ship, and he held it at bay, the Starjammer powering on frantically, surrounded by a plasma sea of celestial fury whose radiant energies were stripped to shield the fleeing ship and fed back to keep the nova at bay.

I didn’t need to contribute anything, as there was basically an unlimited amount of energy on all sides for the Summers to work with. I zipped past them into the lead, using Cosmic Awareness to divine the best course and make sure that nothing in front of them existed to slow down the fleeing ship. We were at an angle well off the solar elliptical plane, so that shouldn’t have been an issue, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

The Galactus Sanctuary Ship had ‘ported away the remaining civilian populace who could be reached, but it hadn’t been able to escape the nova itself, the disruptions and cosmic energy interference of the Zoners making sure it stayed there as the sun erupted. It still managed to send the crew off before being destroyed.

What distant Shi’ar settlements and colonies managed to mobilize themselves in time was a different story, but at least evacuation plans were in place, and light speed in space is slow. Once past the inner ring of planets, more and more time was available to flee the vast tide of radiation and light coming, and there was at least a chance they could make it out of the spatial disruption, go to hyperspeed, and flee the death of the star.

It wasn’t like they had a mutant who could stare down a sun going nova to protect them.

I did let everyone know in Markspace that the Majestrix was still alive, and just how she was being saved by everyone, which made interesting morale flipflops for the members of the Shi’ar. Their grim resolve to fight to the end became horror upon hearing that the Zoners had managed to invade Chandilar, and an incandescent fury when they learned the Phoenix Force itself had intervened to slaughter the invaders by making their sun go nova.

The Annihilation War was off to a rousing and explosive start. We and the Phoenix Force had our revenge upon the Shi’ar, and they could only thank us for it...