But no.
I couldn't let myself get used to relying on the Infinity Stones for everything—not when I wouldn't have them forever. And definitely not here, not now, when losing control for even an instant could crack the planet beneath our feet.
So I grit my teeth, held the line, and prepared to escalate—carefully.
I tried to split my focus, manifesting a second, smaller orb of destruction in front of me.
The effect was immediate and brutal.
The moment my attention wavered, even slightly, Abomination's Gamma Lance surged forward. The green beam intensified, its pressure increasing enough that my main sphere began to slide back toward me at a visibly faster rate. The air between us screamed as opposing forces tore at reality itself, and I could feel the strain ripple through my control like a pulled muscle.
I had no illusions about how this would end if I tried to tank it head-on.
I couldn't.
Not without taking serious injuries—injuries I wasn't confident I could walk away from.
Luckily for me, I didn't need to.
Instead of reinforcing the second sphere, I moved it.
With an act of will, I guided the smaller orb sideways, letting it drift out of the direct line of fire. The blinding collision between my main attack and his Gamma Lance created a violent, chaotic lightshow—black lightning and green radiance clashing in a roiling storm that drowned out everything else. It was the perfect curtain.
Controlling two manifestations of the Power of Destruction at once pushed me to my limits. My mind burned with the effort, thoughts threatening to fragment as I juggled precision and raw output simultaneously. I could feel Soul Talent straining, actively compensating, smoothing the edges of the mental load and keeping me from losing control entirely.
Even so, sweat beaded at my brow.
The main sphere was almost back to me now, the Gamma Lance steadily winning ground. My arms trembled as I continued to pour power into it, fighting a losing contest purely to buy time.
Behind the chaos, the second orb slipped around the clash, silent and unseen.
Blonsky didn't notice.
His entire focus was locked on overpowering me, on crushing my resistance and finishing the fight in a single overwhelming blast. That tunnel vision left him exposed.
With a thought, I sent the second orb forward.
It struck his back like a silent execution.
For a fraction of a second, his skin resisted. Gamma flared violently as his supernatural resilience pushed back, flesh boiling and regenerating even as the Power of Destruction chewed into him. The two forces clashed inside his body, green light and black-red annihilation fighting for dominance.
Then the resistance broke.
The orb punched through his back and into his chest, carving a hole straight through him. Before he could even react, before his regeneration could compensate, the sphere began to expand.
What followed was catastrophic.
The orb detonated from within, and the Gamma energy Blonsky had been unleashing toward me destabilized instantly. With his body ruptured and his control shattered, the power he had been channeling erupted outward in an uncontrolled release. The main sphere, no longer contested, surged forward and erased what remained of his upper torso.
The overlapping forces fed into each other.
The result was a massive, nuclear-like explosion that lit up the Siberian night brighter than day.
I reacted on instinct, snapping a bubble of Power of Destruction into existence around myself. The barrier flared as it erased incoming energy, shockwaves, and debris, but even so I was driven backward through the air, battered by the sheer magnitude of what Blonsky had unleashed in his death throes.
Ice vaporized. The ground below cratered and collapsed. The shockwave rolled outward across the frozen plains, a roaring wall of force that flattened everything in its path.
I could only hope that we'd taken the fight far enough away—that Steve, Tony, and Clint were outside the blast radius.
Because even with my shield holding, I could feel just how close that explosion had come to being something far worse.
Once I felt the pressure against my barrier finally subside, I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding and carefully lowered it. The Power of Destruction peeled away layer by layer, revealing the aftermath.
Devastation didn't quite cover it.
The peaceful winter landscape that had surrounded us only minutes ago was gone, erased as thoroughly as if it had never existed. The ice and snow had flash-evaporated, leaving behind exposed ground that glowed a dull, angry red—molten bedrock slowly cooling in the open air. Where frost-covered plains had stretched to the horizon, there was now scorched earth and fractured stone. Any trees that had once stood here were simply… absent. No trunks, no ash, no splinters. They hadn't burned. They'd ceased.
The air itself felt wrong.
Radiation prickled against my skin, a sharp, biting sensation that crawled along my senses. It wasn't enough to hurt me, not really, but it was unmistakable—Gamma residue hanging heavy in the atmosphere, mixed with the lingering echoes of Extremis and my own demonic power. Heat shimmered faintly above the ground, warping the air and making the horizon ripple.
At the center of it all was a crater a dozen feet deep.
Its edges glowed dark green, veins of Gamma energy still pulsing sluggishly through cracked stone. The superheated air inside it rose in slow waves, carrying with it the metallic tang of ozone and scorched earth.
And at the very epicenter—
He was still alive.
I stared for a moment, genuinely disbelieving.
Blonsky's body was in the process of reforming, regeneration working overtime to undo damage that should have been fatal ten times over. But even Gamma and Extremis together were struggling. What remained of him was wrong. Twisted. Uneven.
His upper body was half-formed, muscle and bone knitting together in grotesque asymmetry. One arm was noticeably shorter than the other, ending in a malformed stump from which three bony fingers jutted at unnatural angles. His chest was misshapen, ribs visible beneath partially regenerated flesh. His jaw had fused shut entirely, skin grown over his lips in a smooth, horrifying seal, and one eye bulged from its socket while the other hadn't regenerated at all, leaving an empty, ruined cavity.
That single remaining eye locked onto me.
The hatred in it was unmistakable.
"Fucking… kill you," he growled, the sound tearing its way through flesh as he ripped open the skin over his sealed mouth. The wound immediately began to close again, flesh crawling back into place even as he snarled.
For a brief moment, I actually considered it.
Offering him a place in my peerage.
Reincarnation would almost certainly restore him, and the opportunity was… tempting. A devil enhanced by Extremis and Gamma would be an invaluable test case. Best-case scenario, it worked perfectly, and I could pay Aldrich Killian a visit afterward—with myself and Natasha in mind. With his raw strength, absurd durability, and regenerative capabilities, Blonsky would make an exceptional Rook.
But no.
Even setting aside the risk, this wasn't someone I wanted bound to me. Whether he'd joined HYDRA willingly or been manipulated didn't really matter. Even before all of this, he wasn't the kind of person I could tolerate long-term. More importantly, he wouldn't accept—not now, not willingly—and I wasn't about to gamble on letting him live.
He'd been getting stronger as the fight dragged on.
If it had gone on any longer, he would have killed me.
So I made my choice.
I reached out and briefly tapped into the Power Stone, letting its vast energy flood through me just long enough to refill my depleted reserves. The sensation was intoxicating and dangerous all at once, and I severed the connection almost immediately.
Then I formed another sphere.
Soul Talent proved its worth yet again. Where controlling the Power of Destruction had been a struggle earlier, now it felt… smoother. Easier. Not effortless, but manageable in a way it hadn't been before.
I expanded the sphere slowly, deliberately, until it was large enough to engulf what remained of Blonsky's body.
Then I pressed down.
To his credit, even knowing what was coming, he didn't beg. He didn't try to flee. He didn't scream.
He just stared at me with that single eye, pure hatred burning in it, until the sphere closed over him and erased him entirely.
I held it there, maintaining the pressure, until I felt the last traces of resistance fade—the Gamma radiation finally gone, its supernatural presence snuffed out completely.
Only then did I let the sphere vanish.
Silence reclaimed the battlefield, broken only by the faint hiss of cooling stone beneath my feet.
With one last glance at the crater, I took flight, heading towards the bunker in the distance.
Chapter 10 – Plans for the Future
After dealing with the Abomination, cleaning up the rest of the HYDRA bunker was almost anticlimactic.
By the time I reached the interior, Tony, Steve, and Clint had already done most of the heavy lifting. The narrow corridors were littered with unconscious agents, shattered equipment, and the occasional scorch mark where Iron Man's repulsors or Clint's explosive arrows had done their work. Compared to what I'd just faced outside, it barely qualified as a fight.
Even HYDRA's pet projects—soldiers enhanced with unstable Extremis knockoffs—didn't amount to much. They were fast, aggressive, and frightening to anyone without superhuman reflexes, but against us they folded quickly. Regeneration only mattered if you lived long enough to use it, and after watching their supposed trump card get erased from existence, whatever morale they had left evaporated.
Later, once the adrenaline wore off and Tony had time to dig through their systems, we pieced together the bigger picture.
HYDRA had known about Aldrich Killian's work for years.
They'd buried the information before it could ever reach SHIELD, quietly diverting attention and suppressing reports, all while infiltrating AIM itself. Killian had thought he was being clever, playing dangerous games with power and secrecy, never realizing he was already surrounded. HYDRA's original plan had been to steal Extremis once the research was complete and stable.
Then I showed up.
With me in the picture, patience went out the window. Whatever version of Extremis they had access to was suddenly "good enough," and a few hundred dead test subjects became an acceptable price for a single regenerating super soldier they could point at me.
That soldier was Blonsky.
An experimental prototype. Not even meant to leave the lab. They'd been preparing to test whether Extremis could be combined with their own Super Soldier Serum variant when the bunker came under attack. Tony jamming their communications and internal systems forced their hand. Unable to call for backup and staring down the Avengers, they released Blonsky early, hoping desperation would make up for incomplete data.
It hadn't.
Between the four of us, what resistance remained collapsed fast. HYDRA agents tried to retreat, tried to destroy data, tried to trigger failsafes—but Clint was already cutting off escape routes, Steve was dismantling squads with ruthless efficiency, and Tony was inside their network faster than they could react. We cleared the bunker before they could wipe their local servers.
And once Tony cracked those open, he found the video.
Even knowing exactly what had happened didn't make it easier to watch.
Security camera footage. Grainy. Silent. Howard and Maria Stark, ambushed in the dark. The Winter Soldier stepping into frame, methodical and unhesitating. Two lives ended in seconds.
Tony didn't say anything at first. He just stood there, staring at the screen, jaw tight, fists clenched hard enough that the servos in his gauntlets whined softly.
Steve wasn't untouched either.
Watching his best friend murder two innocent people—one of them a man they both respected—left its mark. I could see it in the way his shoulders stiffened, in how his eyes lingered on the frozen frame long after Tony shut the feed down.
No one spoke.
There were no words that would have helped.
The Winter Soldier himself wasn't in the bunker.
According to the files Tony pulled, he'd been deployed on a mission just a few days before the attack—some black-ops assignment in Europe, buried under layers of compartmentalization even by HYDRA standards. His absence felt almost deliberate, like fate was making sure this confrontation didn't happen yet.
I offered to fix that.
I told them I could teleport to France, grab him, and be back before anyone even realized he was gone. I even went a step further and suggested using the Mind Stone to undo his mental programming on the spot—clean, precise, no drawn-out deprogramming or psychological minefields.
Clint visibly tensed at that suggestion, his hand tightening around his bow like he expected the Stone to turn on him next.
Tony and Steve refused immediately.
Not angrily. Not emotionally. Just… firmly.
Steve was adamant that Bucky deserved to be brought in by someone he recognized, by someone who remembered who he used to be. Tony, for his part, wanted to look the man responsible for his parents' deaths in the eye—after everything was done, after the truth was laid bare. Whatever came next, they wanted it to be personal.
I didn't argue. This was their burden to carry.
So I left them to it and returned to the Triskellion.
That was where Fury was waiting for me, and he did not look pleased.
Apparently, Blonsky's final detonation had lit up global sensors like a flare. A nuclear-level Gamma spike, sudden and violent, right in the middle of Siberia. Governments all over the world had noticed. Scientists, generals, intelligence agencies—people with far too much power and far too little patience—were already demanding answers.
And Fury was the unfortunate bastard stuck holding the phone.
He didn't like hearing what the Abomination had become. Didn't like hearing that HYDRA had managed to turn a known enhanced into something that could punch out a small country if left unchecked. And he was even less comforted by the fact that I'd beaten someone that powerful.
I could practically see the gears turning behind his eye patch as he recalculated.
Threat assessments. Contingency plans. Worst-case scenarios.
Whatever SHIELD had on file about me before Siberia was already obsolete, and he knew it.
It also didn't help that he clearly expected retaliation.
Even if I hadn't made a big deal out of it—even if I'd stayed calm, cooperative, and professional—he knew what he'd done. He'd signed off on keeping Blonsky around as a potential countermeasure. He'd planned to use him against me if things went south.
And now that countermeasure was gone.
Fury didn't say anything outright, but the tension was there, thick and unspoken. He was waiting to see if I'd demand recompense. Or make a threat. Or decide that today was the day I reminded him just how little he could actually do if I stopped playing along.
I didn't.
But that didn't mean the balance between us hadn't shifted.
After that, it was just a matter of cleaning up.
HYDRA couldn't oppose us. Not really. Even without me, even if it had just been Natasha and Steve moving openly instead of from the shadows, it would have taken a small army to slow them down—and that was assuming Natasha hadn't brought anything new to the table. Which, as it turned out, she had.
Her privacy bubble spell was proof of that.
I still hadn't fully wrapped my head around it. Her magic training had been bare bones at best—rudimentary control, simple applications, nothing that should have allowed for something that elegant. And yet she'd done it anyway, weaving demonic energy with instinct and experience until she produced a spell that was subtle, efficient, and perfectly suited to her needs. It wasn't flashy. It wasn't destructive. But it was clever, and that made it far more dangerous than brute force.
And that was just one example.
If Natasha ever decided to lean fully into magic, to really explore what she could do now, she would be terrifying.
Once I stepped in, though, it stopped being a contest entirely.
There was no mundane force on Earth that could stand against me. Armies, intelligence agencies, black-ops teams—none of it mattered. Weapons that could level cities meant nothing if they never got the chance to fire, and even if they did, I could erase them mid-flight without breaking stride. Power, at a certain level, stopped being about numbers.
Even Wakanda, for all its vibranium and centuries of technological advancement, wouldn't survive a direct confrontation. Not unless Bast herself stepped in, and even then I wasn't sure how that fight would end. Gods were tricky like that.
I had briefly considered going there.
Not to conquer it—just to talk. Maybe barter for some of their non-vibranium technology so I could sell it elsewhere. Maybe warn them about Killmonger before he ever set foot on their soil. A small nudge, a quiet intervention.
In the end, I dismissed the idea.
I didn't like their isolationist tendencies. Not just because of all the good they could have done if they'd stopped hiding—though that was certainly part of it—but because no shield they could build, no secrecy they could maintain, would save them from what was coming. Earth was going to face threats that didn't care about borders or traditions or how well-hidden a nation thought it was.
And while I would have been a hypocrite for criticizing anyone for not helping when they could—considering how self-interested I was—I still didn't feel like indulging them.
Besides, it wasn't like I needed the money.
Once I figured out I could transmute vibranium, things escalated quickly. Tony practically tripped over himself trying to negotiate exclusivity, and SHIELD wasn't far behind. Contracts were drafted, revised, redrafted again. Entire budgets were reallocated. By the time it was done, I'd provided them with a few hundred tons of the material and received more money than I knew what to do with in return.
At that point, Wakanda's resources stopped being tempting.
Time passed quickly, as it tended to do when the world wasn't actively ending.
Killian never got the chance to enact his plan. Fury came down on him like a ton of bricks the moment AIM was fully exposed, unwilling to let something as volatile as Extremis remain unaccounted for. Facilities were seized, assets frozen, researchers detained or quietly absorbed into black-budget programs. Killian himself went from visionary CEO to federal prisoner in the span of days, his grand ambitions strangled before they could ever leave the lab.
I had no illusions about what would happen next. SHIELD would continue the research—sanitized, controlled, buried under layers of oversight and classification. Fury wasn't naïve enough to destroy something like Extremis outright, not with the kinds of threats Earth was likely to face in the future. And honestly, that didn't bother me. Them gaining a reliable way to create super soldiers was the least of my worries. Compared to alien invasions, rogue gods, and cosmic entities with apocalyptic hobbies, a few regenerating soldiers barely registered.
I had, however, been very explicit about one thing.
I told Fury not to pursue any more Gamma-enhanced projects. No new experiments. No attempts to replicate Banner. No clever workarounds or renamed initiatives. Gamma was off-limits.
That conversation did not go well for him.
Explaining Gamma radiation meant explaining where it came from. Which meant explaining the One Below All. Which meant explaining that there were evil, nigh-omnipotent entities lurking at the foundation of reality whose sole purpose was the destruction of the multiverse—and that humanity had already brushed up against that power once and was, through sheer stubborn brilliance, trying to do it again.
Watching Fury process that was… something.
He didn't panic. Fury didn't panic. But I could see the weight settle in his shoulders, the way his jaw tightened as he mentally added cosmic existential horror to an already overflowing list of things that kept him up at night. Another invisible war. Another threat no army could shoot. Another reminder that humanity was poking at forces it had no business touching.
Still, to his credit, he listened.
On the more immediate, tangible side of things, General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross was no longer a problem. Between Harlem, the Abomination, and a trail of classified disasters that suddenly weren't as buried as he thought, Ross found himself far too busy facing a military tribunal to continue his vendetta against Doctor Banner.
I didn't know what strings Fury and Tony pulled to make that happen. Probably a combination of buried reports, leaked evidence, and the quiet implication that things could get much worse for him if he didn't cooperate. Whatever it was, it worked.
Ross was sidelined. Hard.
And in the unlikely event that the Sokovia Accords ever happened in this world, I was fairly confident it wouldn't be Ross standing at the podium as Secretary of State, demanding control over enhanced individuals he barely understood. Some problems, at least, had been neatly excised before they could metastasize.
That had me thinking of the future.
With Killian out of the picture, the next major event on the horizon would have been the Convergence. That, at least, was still a year out. A looming deadline, but not an immediate one. There wasn't much I could do to prepare for it beyond continuing to train the way I already had been—pushing my control, refining my powers, stress-testing the limits of what I could safely do without tearing something fundamental in the process. The Convergence was a cosmic alignment problem, not something brute force could solve ahead of time, and until it actually began there were very few levers to pull.
In the meantime, the timeline had already begun to drift.
I had prevented the events of the second Captain America movie almost incidentally by dealing with HYDRA early. Without their hidden hand inside SHIELD, there was no Project Insight waiting in the wings, no algorithmic precrime fantasy backed by helicarriers and mass surveillance. And even if someone had floated the idea, I doubted Fury would have gone for it without HYDRA's influence whispering in his ear and stacking the deck in its favor. Fury was paranoid, yes—but he was paranoid for a reason, and he knew better than to hand absolute power to a machine without knowing exactly who built it.
That single change rippled outward more than most people would ever realize.
Without the Power Stone to collect—or even a planet Morag to collect it from—Peter Quill's life would likely continue much as it already had. A rogue Ravager, drifting from job to job, half pirate and half found family, blissfully unaware of how close he'd come to being the linchpin of something far larger. At least for the moment. Ego, on the other hand, was still very much a problem. Somewhere in Missouri, a seed lay buried beneath the soil, quietly waiting.
But that was a problem for later.
I had time.
And options.
Worst-case scenario, I could simply use the Space Stone to teleport directly to Ego's core and erase it with the Power of Destruction before he ever had the chance to act. No speeches. No manipulation. No celestial revelations. Just an ending. Or, if I was feeling particularly thorough, I could amplify that power with the Power Stone and wipe out his entire planetoid body in one decisive strike, leaving nothing behind for him to regenerate from. Overkill, perhaps—but effective.
Ultron, at least, would never come to be. With the Mind Stone firmly in my possession, there was no catalyst for that particular disaster. Tony might still choose to create an AI to help the Avengers—something to coordinate, to predict, to protect—but without the alien influence of the stone warping its development, I doubted it would turn out quite as genocidal as Ultron would have been.
Especially since Tony never went through the portal.
He never saw Thanos's forces waiting on the other side. Never felt that crushing certainty that Earth was hopelessly outmatched and that something—anything—had to be built to stand against what was coming. Without that trauma driving him, Tony Stark was still reckless, still brilliant, still prone to overengineering solutions… but he wasn't desperate.
And desperation, more than intelligence, was what had doomed Ultron in the first place.
There were also the events surrounding Ant-Man. Scott Lang breaking into Hank Pym's house, stealing the suit, stumbling headfirst into a conflict he barely understood, and eventually helping stop Darren Cross from turning Pym's life's work into a weapon. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have spared it much thought. The struggles of one small-time criminal trying to be a better man didn't really register on my threat radar, not with gods, aliens, and cosmic artifacts in play.
But I remembered something.
I'd checked out of the MCU after Endgame, but I'd absorbed enough through cultural osmosis to know where things were supposed to go. Kang the Conqueror. A time traveler. In the comics, a descendant of Reed Richards. Supposedly the next big existential threat after Thanos, at least until the real world intervened and the actor playing him got wrapped up in controversy, derailing that entire narrative thread after his appearance in the third Ant-Man movie.
I didn't know what this version of Kang was capable of.
And I didn't care to find out.
Time travelers were a special kind of problem—messy, recursive, and far more annoying to deal with than they had any right to be. Letting something like that come into existence when it could be prevented with a few well-placed nudges would have been negligent. Giving Fury a quiet push to have Darren Cross investigated early, and Hank Pym kept under observation, would be trivial. From there, the situation would stop being my problem entirely.
Especially since I wouldn't even be in the MCU by the time it might have blown up—assuming it ever did.
I had also butterflied away the events of Civil War, at least to a significant extent. I wasn't naïve enough to think governments would be content forever letting enhanced individuals operate independently and take the law into their own hands. That kind of power imbalance always invited regulation, oversight, and eventually control. But without Ultron, there was no spark. No catastrophic failure to point to. No global trauma fresh enough to justify something as sweeping and divisive as the Sokovia Accords.
They might still push for something eventually. Some framework. Some attempt to rein the Avengers in.
But it would be harder. Slower. More contested.
And, crucially, with Bucky handled in a way that didn't shatter Steve and Tony's relationship beyond repair, the Avengers themselves wouldn't be split down the middle. No ideological civil war. No lines drawn in blood and guilt. No fractured team limping into the future divided against itself.
Besides, it wasn't my problem. I had no intention of placing myself under the authority of any government, council, or shadow organization, and at my current level of power there was nothing they could realistically do to compel me. Laws only mattered when they could be enforced, and there simply wasn't a structure on Earth capable of doing that to me without my consent. If they wanted to posture and draft legislation, that was their prerogative. I would continue operating on my own terms.
The next event that actually mattered to me was Doctor Strange—and only for very specific reasons. I was counting on the chaos of Stephen Strange's awakening to leave the Time Stone briefly exposed, vulnerable enough for me to take it without having to deal directly with the Ancient One. She was powerful, perceptive, and far too likely to complicate matters in ways I didn't feel like untangling. Ideally, events would play out so that Dormammu was never summoned in the first place, without things going so far off the rails that I'd have to personally step in and deal with a dimension-devouring cosmic entity.
That was a line I'd rather not cross unless absolutely necessary.
In the meantime, I indulged in something far more personal. I paid a quiet visit to Queens, checking in on a young Peter Parker from a distance. Part of it was simple inevitability—I couldn't come to a version of Marvel and not meet my favorite hero, even if only indirectly. Another part of it was… less noble. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been hoping to meet Aunt May under more favorable circumstances.
As it turned out, Uncle Ben was still alive.
I wasn't sure whether I'd prevented his death somewhere along the way through sheer butterfly effect, or if it simply hadn't happened yet. Either way, the result was the same: May was unavailable, firmly and happily married, and my plans there evaporated on the spot.
So instead, I watched Peter from afar. I saw a smart, awkward kid juggling school, friends, and a life that hadn't yet collapsed under the weight of responsibility. No spider bite. No powers. No tragedy shaping him into something greater.
When I eventually mentioned this to Natasha, she pointed out—quite correctly—that the way I described it sounded more than a little creepy.
She wasn't wrong.
Still, I told myself I'd come back later. When he actually got his powers. When the world finally decided to break him the way it always did. Until then, it was better to leave him alone, untouched by gods, stones, and people who knew too much about the future.
I wasn't sure what was going to happen with Ragnarok. Fate was finicky at the best of times, more suggestion than law, and I had already interfered with things enough that relying on prophecy felt foolish. Hela probably wasn't going to be released—Odin was still alive, Asgard hadn't fallen into the same pattern of neglect and decay, and several of the dominoes that led to her freedom simply weren't there anymore. And even if she was released, I was fairly confident that with the Stones I already possessed—and the ones I intended to acquire—I could beat her.
What worried me wasn't whether I could win. It was whether "Ragnarok" would simply… reroute.
Prophecies had a nasty habit of doing that. If they couldn't happen the way they were meant to, they found another way. Another trigger. Another sacrifice. Another apocalypse wearing a different mask. The idea that I might avert one disaster only to enable a worse one sat poorly with me, and there was no clean way to test it without letting things spiral out of control.
Thinking about Asgard inevitably reminded me of Valkyrie.
For a brief moment, I seriously considered recruiting her into my peerage. On paper, she was an excellent candidate: centuries of combat experience, elite training, instincts honed by war, and the kind of raw toughness that made her hard to put down even by Asgardian standards. As a Knight, she would have been formidable.
But then I thought about who she actually was when I'd last seen her.
A traumatized drunk, drowning herself in alcohol and self-loathing, barely holding herself together. Whatever strength she had left was buried under guilt and avoidance, and I had no interest in dragging that kind of unresolved mess into my inner circle. I wasn't running a rehabilitation program, and I didn't want to spend years dealing with someone who hadn't even begun to heal.
So I dismissed the idea.
Another name crossed my mind after that—Carol Danvers—and I almost laughed when I realized I was actually considering it. The thought was ridiculous. She would never accept an offer from me, no matter how it was framed. If anything, she'd probably try to fight me on sight, convinced I was some subversive cosmic evil that needed to be put down before I destabilized the universe any further.
And honestly? If she was anything like the version I remembered from the movies, she was the last kind of personality I wanted bound to me. Power without introspection, certainty without restraint—it was a recipe for constant friction at best, disaster at worst.
Which meant that, in terms of long-term planning, that really only left Thanos.
Specifically, my plan to trick him into getting the Soul Stone for me.
Strictly speaking, there was no reason I couldn't pursue that plan the moment I had the other Stones in hand. I was powerful enough to survive the encounter, clever enough to manipulate him, and ruthless enough to let him damn himself in pursuit of his goal. But I hesitated. Not out of fear—out of pragmatism.
I suspected that once my mission here was finished, I wouldn't be allowed to rest. There would be another world. Another long-term assignment. Another set of problems waiting for someone powerful enough to handle them.
And if that was the case, then I wanted this universe clean before I left it. Or as clean as it could be, considering how disasters and threats were a constant.
That left me with plenty of free time, and I already knew exactly how I intended to spend it.
I kept up with my magical training, refusing to let myself coast forever on Millicas's absurd natural talent and the crutch that was Soul Talent. Those were advantages—massive ones—but they were still borrowed strength in a way. If something ever interfered with them, suppressed them, or simply outpaced them, I needed to be able to stand on my own. I wanted my foundations solid, not just impressive.
More than anything, I wanted to push the limits of my demonic power itself. And at the center of that obsession was the Power of Destruction.
Sirzechs Lucifer had done something that still felt almost mythological to me: he had somehow turned his entire body into the Power of Destruction. Not coated in it. Not channeling it. Become it. Any attack that came close enough to harm him simply ceased to exist, erased before it could even register as a threat. Defense through annihilation. Absolute negation.
If I could replicate even a fraction of that, it would give me one hell of a defensive option. More than that, Sirzechs's power was supposed to increase while in that state, as if the destruction itself fed back into him. A form that was both shield and amplifier. The idea was intoxicating.
And that was only the beginning.
While I couldn't afford any yet, being a Contractor gave me access to something no one else in either DxD or Marvel had: templates—complete packages of power, potential, and growth that could be layered onto my existence.
I still wasn't sure who I would choose, but I knew exactly what I wanted.
First and foremost, regeneration.
I was done being vulnerable to anything that could slip past my durability or catch me off guard. No matter how powerful I became, there would always be something weird, conceptual, or unexpected that could bypass raw toughness. My destruction shields could, in theory, block almost anything—but theory didn't mean much when all it took was one mistake.
I wanted the kind of regeneration that made those mistakes survivable.
Second, power.
Ideally, I wanted a Tier 10 template—something truly monstrous—but I wasn't married to the idea. I'd accept someone weaker if they had a clear, reliable path to growth. I wasn't a battle junkie or some cultivation-obsessed lunatic chasing power for its own sake. But I was also painfully aware of reality: eternal youth meant nothing when you eventually ran into someone strong enough to kill you anyway.
If I wanted to live comfortably, if I wanted to protect my peerage and not constantly look over my shoulder, I needed to stay ahead of the curve. Strength wasn't a luxury. It was insurance.
Third, skill.
Raw power without skill was just wasted potential. I wanted the instincts, experience, and technical mastery of a genuine combat veteran—someone who had fought stronger opponents, survived hopeless situations, and learned from every near-death experience. That kind of skill bled into everything else: positioning, timing, awareness, restraint.
It would also make sure I wasn't helpless if I ever found myself unable to use the Power of Destruction. No magic. No conceptual erasure. Just me, my body, and whatever training I'd internalized.
And finally—while not strictly a requirement—I wanted a transformation.
I'd grown up on Dragon Ball. The idea of unlocking a deeper state, of unleashing a dormant power and becoming something more, was baked into my soul. Sure, I could already shapeshift with magic, change my form however I wanted—but it wasn't the same. There was no weight to it. No escalation. No sense of crossing a threshold.
A real transformation meant commitment. Consequences. Power that had to be earned and mastered.
As I'd told Natasha more than once, devils were creatures of desire.
And mine was simple, persistent, and impossible to ignore: a sealed power sleeping inside me, waiting for the day I could unleash it and rise to something greater.
I also needed to train Natasha more extensively.
I had been incredibly lucky that she was both fiercely independent and frighteningly adaptable, because I had done a terrible job easing her into being a devil. I'd given her a crash course—just enough theory and practical instruction to keep her from accidentally killing herself or someone else—and then I'd mostly left her to figure the rest out on her own. For anyone else that would have been negligent. For Natasha, it had merely been… suboptimal.
Sure, we'd trained together more than a few times after that first session. We'd sparred repeatedly, partly so she could acclimate to fighting someone who could actually withstand what she could now dish out, and partly so Martial Talent could quietly patch over my own weaknesses by absorbing her experience and technique. I'd given her some basic advice on spellcasting—how to shape intent, how to avoid overcommitting mana, how not to blow herself up when emotions ran high.
But that was it.
No structured curriculum. No real theory of demonic magic. No deep dive into what her piece actually did, how to push it, how to recover from backlash, or how to fight opponents who didn't play by human rules. I'd treated her like she'd simply… catch up on her own.
And she probably would have. That was the scary part.
She had potential. Real potential. Not just as a fighter, but as a devil. And it was long past time I stopped coasting on her competence and actually did my job as her King.
Then there was Wanda. And Pietro.
I'd been putting off approaching them with my offer for far too long, and I'd wrapped that hesitation in a lot of reasonable-sounding excuses. I told myself I wanted to give them a calm, measured introduction to devilhood. That I'd been too busy putting out fires to give them the attention they would need. That I didn't want to repeat my mistake with Natasha—that I wanted my Queen to be properly prepared before I recruited anyone else.
All of that was true.
But none of it was the real reason.
The real reason was simpler, and harder to face.
If I wanted my peerage to be more than a collection of powerful assets bound to me by perks and the binding, I had to be honest with them. If I wanted us to be something closer to a family than a hierarchy, I couldn't keep hiding things just because they were inconvenient or uncomfortable.
And that meant telling Natasha the truth.
"You called?" Natasha said, stepping into the luxurious hotel room I'd been staying in.
She looked relaxed, at ease in the space, as if it already belonged to her. Tomorrow we'd be moving into the penthouse apartment I'd purchased for us—something permanent, something shared. But the thought of doing that while this secret still sat between us made my chest feel tight.
It felt wrong to move forward without clearing this first.
"Please," I said, gesturing toward the couch. "Sit down."
She did, instantly alert despite her casual posture. Years of conditioning didn't just go away.
"We need to talk."