The Zoners watched in stunned amazement as the Great Bear devoured Warworld Noxus entirely, the process taking less than ten minutes despite the size of the two things involved in it. When the Great Bear sucked in the last of the burning remnants of the Warworld and turned eyes blazing like stars upon the Zoners, those not wise enough to flee ahead of time instantly regretted it.

The firepower that came ranging out was incredible, as if every hair on the Great Bear was a separate cannon. The planet moved through space far more quickly than it had before, as if twelve sextillion tons of mass was even faster and more nimble than it was when half the size.

The Comets and I busied ourselves ripping through the flanks of the Zoner fleet, while the Great Bear smashed right through the center of it and annihilated anything not smart enough to flee.

Flee they would, and they would spread word that we had a Warworld of our own... and there was no other Warworld currently active in the three empires, as we’d destroyed them all.

The Skrulls cheered, as the Great Bear was surely going to be a great help in the slaughter that was happening, even as it turned aloofly away from the battlefield, space fragmented around it, and it shot into hyperspace with frankly scary agility for something so large.

Nobody recognized it, of course. It was simply too big, too bizarre, and the addition of a Celestial’s energies and those of the Warworld truly gave it a mighty weird energy signature that wouldn’t pop up on any databanks.

I wondered what Ego the Living Planet had done to piss off Briggs and get itself killed and turned into his own mobile battle fortress. People were wondering what Briggs was doing to prep for all this? He was running the biggest ship in the whole damn fight!

Now that the cat was out of the bag, the Great Bear could now be figured into strategic and tactical planning. Its ability to deliver supplies, people, and ships from point to point would be of incredible value, above and beyond its firepower.

It wasn’t invincible. The major powers of the Zone, if they massed their firepower and were willing to pay the price, could still destroy it, and indeed, its very existence meant that they could not now ignore the defenders and to a degree would have to cooperate with one another to forestall such a terrible weapon in our hands.

That meant slowing down, pulling fleets from the advance to chase after a terrifying world-ship, and paying the price for doing so, as we were going to exploit the Hell out of that.

As much as the Skrulls might like it, Briggs wasn’t going to limit himself to helping just them. The Great Bear had unbelievably fast hyperspace travel, as befitted something being run by the owner of the Time and Space Stones, and popping between galaxies could be done as quickly as the best of the Xandaran ships. If its realspace maneuvering didn’t match up, that was absolutely fine.

“Where is he off to?” Comet H’krill asked me, staring in the direction Briggs had gone. They couldn’t be Marked or Swear Allegiance to us, of course. The Skrulls had telepaths and ways to detect such.

“The Acanti scouts near the Crunch just spoke up. The Brood are starting to come through the Shi’ar Cracks.”

“Go get ’em!” she said simply, and moved away in a burning flight towards the remnants of the Zoners still alive.

I found a location outside the spatial turbulence of the Cracks in the Crunch, and formed a Portal to it via my Core. Briggs would reach the area in another hour, but that didn’t mean I had to wait that long... nor the Acanti who had been quietly digesting the third bio-organic species of invaders who had ‘stumbled upon them’ and attempted to eat/enslave/assimilate them.

The space whales didn’t attack any race who didn’t attack them, and if the attitude was foreign to the Zoners, they were also able to recognize the generally ambivalent nature of the Acanti just from their songs.

Then, of course, the Acanti tore into the biotech-users like ravenous sharks, devouring them and their living ships, be they flesh, plant, or fungi, with terrifying skill and completely unexpected power.

Also, being a thousand miles long was impressive to most Zoners, especially for one living creature. When said creature could Sing a Song that made the firmament bow and shine and burn through a whole starflock of void sharks, welp, they had worlds to settle, not space whales to shoot, and said races using biotech were basically left to their own devices and the fates they’d earned for themselves.

But the Brood, ah, the Brood...

The Acanti pods had spread themselves across all the galaxies, making themselves targets for the biotech fleets and then happily munching them down in return. But all that had mostly been done to make sure we instantly knew wherever the Brood decided to enter at, so that the Acanti in their tens of millions could converge there.

The Acanti, ALL of the Acanti, were on their way, for a feast most glorious.

My gauntlets shimmered, and constructs of hard light came up around them.

While it was possible to ram bioships made from star-roving lifeforms, they often had transpsionic resistance to impact damage, an effect which allowed them to ignore micrometeor impacts when traveling and similar effects. Likewise, they were often hugely resistant to radiation, cold, heat, and particle beam weapons, unless you were way at the top of the scale.

Saber beams were actually the best weapons against them, slicing them open and going for killshots against their brains and key organs. Not incidentally, it also left more of them behind for the Acanti to vivify and consume.

I could put a lot of power into my saber beams now, and even Specs could contribute, given the amount of energy I could output now.

Their living ships’ senses could track me, but not any pure tech hooked into their nervous systems. A simple Casting, and their bioships’ expanded senses wouldn’t sense me, either.

The Cracks in the Crunch extended up and down for millions of miles, and endless numbers of Zoners were pouring through them in constant streams, as they had been for days now.

There was no combat around the Cracks, as that would have been a death sentence. The closest we had come to it was when the Warworlds blew up in or near them, and the forces meant to go through the Cracks that had collapsed had simply been redirected to others nearby.

I wasn’t coming in to stop them. I was coming in to track them through the obfuscation their Great Queen was throwing off and let everyone know exactly where they were headed. They would want a swathe of the galaxy with lots of life, not caring about how developed it was or how easily it could be settled. Bodies to make more Brood was what they wanted, and they’d literally locust swarm over everything in their path, harvesting everything large enough to make more of them before continuing on to the next world.

But, on the off-chance they got clever and wanted to depart from the plan and, oh, start on the Milky Way Galaxy ahead of schedule and those pesky humans who had cost them so much, we had to be ready.

I looked at the vector of the departing Broodships, gathering up in massive swarms around the larger void-beasts capable of hyperspace travel, and nodded to nobody.

“The Brood are vectoring to the heart of the Badoon Empire,” I Sent out, sidestepping any sensitivity to telepathy and transmissions deftly.

The Badoon homeworld was less than fifty light-years from Earth. Two birds with one stone.

Some of the creatures coming through the crack were as big as Elder Acanti, seething with organic energies of truly incredible power. The Elder Acanti were going to enjoy those meals.

The Brood had deduced that the Badoon had sent out their fleets to engage the Zoners in other galaxies, and their home territory would be less-defended. The Badoon might have been able to hold off the Brood if they massed all their fleets, but certainly would not be able to do so now.

That was fine. The Brood didn’t know the Milky Way had seriously upgraded the number and power of its defenders.

-Moving to intercept and redirect,- Briggs’ grimly unimpressed /voice came back. The wielder of the Time, Space, and Reality Stones naturally had no problems speaking with anyone anywhere if he so chose.

Briggs was going to Hyperdict the lot of them, and drop the Brood out of hyperspace right into the most crushing fight for their existence. Portals of massive size were already going up, and the Acanti were gathering from all over the universe as they Sang the Rifts open and prepared a momentous welcome for the trillion-plus Brood who thought they were going to have an entire galaxy to devour and assimilate.

I flowed into their formation and hooked into the hive-mind smoothly. It was a bit disjointed given the Crack’s interference and the new space, but humming with hunger and anticipation... and was that an undercurrent of both hatred and fear down there when the hivemind reached out and found absolutely no other Brood waiting out there?

The Brood also had tools against Cosmic powers, not the least of them the psychic force of a trillion minds in utter thrall to their Great Queen, united in purpose, hunger, and power. Anything trying to interfere with them at that level was risking its existence to do so, and they were absolutely certain no such non-finite existences would dare to interfere with them.

That was probably true enough, but it was the finite existences that they had to worry about here.

--------

The horns sang out all over the planet at the same time. The Mountain turned and looked up at the nearest tower, just as millions of other soldiers were doing all over the planet.

The smooth voice of the Goddess Cleo came to all their ears at the same time, “The Brood are en route, and the first waves will be hyperdicted within thirty minutes. Battle stations, warriors, it begins.”

Coms lit up with instant commands and last-minute orders. Hill turned away, straightened his Sergeant’s Helm automatically as it displayed some irrelevant stuff for the Schmot Guys to take advantage of, and looked back to the others. “Awright, stop gawking! Ain’t doin’ shit until the enemy gets here, so get those columns in place! Move your asses!”

“Up yours, Sarge!” the nearest Brute called back cheerfully, but nonetheless the crew of massive bruisers started picking up the fifty-ton hexagon pillars of duracrete and began to hand them off to one another with real energy and speed now. They loved showing off how strong they were at any time, and that only got better in the half-gravity of his Weight field. They set the columns into place with a speed and precision no machine could match, rapidly building up the last walls of these outer defenses.

Captain Harold, the Finnish Shielder assigned to his crew, stepped up next to him, watching the hundreds of massive figures at work moving thousands of tons of materials every second with skill and care. “Any last words, Top?” he asked Mr. Hill, who replied by taking out a cigar, breaking it in half, and offering one to the fresh new Shielder, who didn’t refuse it.

This time Hill lit them with a red-hot thumb, not a match. “Planet’s jumpy. Knows it might die soon.” He looked up at the night sky, and the stars starting to get twitchy as a whole lot of solar rads started to seethe and boil about the planet in a sunstorm that was going to be damn lethal, extending for tens of millions of miles as the Goddess up on top of the Scarlet Tower did her thing. “You feel that, Cap’n?”

He did, glancing down at the ground. “When the Singing starts is when things get serious,” he said, puffing on the cigar slowly. His blue-and-white Shield Rohkeus began to audibly hum as the subsonics through the ground began to rise, and beat in time to some of the pulses in the sky.