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Chapter 110 - Power!

Jean didn't speak. She didn't need to. The call from the Majestor's Talon echoed through space like a dagger of ice dragged down the spine of the cosmos, an invitation wrapped in arrogance, sent not just to her mind, but to the fire inside her.

D'ken knew what he was doing. He wanted her to come to him. Thought he could tame her, bend her, break her and defeat her. He had everything planned out, and he was confident to defeat Jean.

He had never seen the real power of the Phoenix after all, as no-one had ever had the level of compatibility with the Phoenix as Jean, and now D'ken would learn his lesson the brutal way.

Jean Grey vanished in a flare of white-hot fire.

The raptor burst forward, its wings stretching across kilometers of vacuum as Jean shot through the black, straight toward the looming dreadnought that housed the throne of the Shi'ar empire.

All the while this was happening, Maxim didn't follow. He knew Jean could handle business herself, the power she wielded now was far beyond what D'ken and the others could handle.

He turned instead toward the chaos below, where the remnants of the fleet were scrambling. Desperation had begun to taint their movements as the formations were broken.

Command relays pulsed erratically. Some ships were even turning away, trying to escape and regroup with each-other after seeing the massive devastation.

However, Maxim wouldn't let them run, not in a million years. With a slow inhale, he raised Yamato, the blade shimmering with a silent menace as space bent subtly around its edge.

With a single unsheathing motion, Maxim sliced downward, and the void split.

A ripple tore through the battlefield like a scythe of moonlight, displacing gravity and warping time. Three cruisers buckled in an instant. Their hulls tore open like paper, their engines dying before their captains even knew they'd been hit.

It was like Maxim had simply removed them from existence, the slash was so unbelievably powerful, and then he kept moving.

Teleportation, but not like before. This was astral slipstreaming, Dante's raw spatial tearing fused with Astra's cosmic threading.

One moment he stood above the wreckage. The next, he was within a battleship's reactor core, surrounded by stunned engineers and terrified guards.

They barely had time to scream before he moved. Maxim let his incorporeal form flicker to life, his body shadowy and untouchable as their bullets passed through him.

His glowing eyes scanned the systems, and with a flex of his fingers, he reached through the all the wires, through the steel and code, and right into the minds of all of the attackers.

The Mind Stone glowed as he manipulated their memories, and suddenly every crewman forgot why they were there. What they were fighting for. Their oaths. Their orders. Their empire.

They dropped their weapons and fell to their knees, hollow and broken.

Maxim phased upward, floating through the ceiling of the bridge like a wraith, and then rose out into open space again. Dozens more ships remained. Enough to call it a fleet still. Enough to make Earth bleed if left unchecked.

So he stopped holding back.

The demonic aura from the Sparda bloodline erupted off him in jagged waves. Horns coiled faintly into existence around his head. Shadows twisted under his boots, becoming claws, serpents, wings. Black holes formed lazily at his back and drifted forward like seeds of death.

He snapped his fingers.

And the meteors came.

A field of them, conjured from rifts torn in space, forged in hellfire and dripping with cosmic frost.

They rained across the battlefield, carving through Shi'ar shields like razors through silk. Ships exploded in silence, their death throes visible only as fire blooming in the cold.

And all the while, Maxim walked calmly through the void. Untouchable. Unyielding. Weapons fired at him but bent in mid-air, caught in gravitational spirals that turned them back toward their senders.

Even the Commando survivors who still lurked in stealth were slowly revealed, forced into light by the creeping spread of Maxim's extrasensory field, their minds lit up like dying stars.

He didn't stop.

His power was evolving in real time. The more damage he took, the stronger he became. Every adaptation from every attack he survived layered into him, becoming permanent, until the very laws of the universe seemed to hesitate around him.

Maxim Novikov had become something between man and force of nature.

And inside the Majestor's Talon, Jean had begun her ascent to godhood.

The throne room trembled as she entered, fire licking at the walls, vaporizing metals that dared to reach for her. Shi'ar guards lined the perimeter, weapons drawn, but they didn't fire. They couldn't.

Their minds had already unraveled.

Jean stood in the center of the chamber, surrounded by marble and glass and stars, and across from her, on the throne of the empire, D'ken rose.

He wore no armor. He wielded no weapon. His hands were bare, his crown burning with latent cosmic power. And in his eyes burned madness. Ambition. A belief that he could control her.

"You've come," he said, his voice a low vibration of smug certainty. "As I knew you would."

"I didn't come for you," Jean said, her voice like the center of a storm. "I came to end this."

The flames around her shimmered white now, the raptor's wings pulsing with the light of a thousand suns. She wasn't just drawing on the Phoenix Force.

She was the Phoenix.

D'ken raised his hand and the room surged with energy. Force fields, psionic traps, gravity loops, all pre-installed, all activated. Designed for her. Designed for the day she would come.

But Jean didn't resist them.

She walked through them.

The fields shattered on contact, reduced to vapor by the fire of creation and death coiled inside her.

"You think you're fire," D'ken snarled, stepping down toward her, "You think you're above life and death."

"I am both," Jean whispered. "And I've seen what comes after you."

D'ken attacked.

The throne room exploded into chaos as pure cosmic energy lanced from his palms, crashing into Jean like bolts of condensed suns.

But she didn't fall.

She caught the beams in her hands, and with a roar, flung them back at him, multiplied tenfold. The blast tore through the throne, through the ship, through reality itself.

Outside, Maxim saw the core of the Talon light up like a second star.

He smiled.

Jean was done holding back.

The battle wasn't over. But the empire had just lost its future.

And neither of them would be merciful again.

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