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Nova Prime Irani Rael watched the Worldbreaker's beam sputter out against the enemy's counterfire, dread pooling in her gut.
"Where are our reinforcements?" she snapped.
"Ma'am sub-space lanes are scrambled across the frontier," her adjutant stammered. "Wormhole beacons report hostile interference. Fleet groups can't make the jump. Best estimate to return by conventional drive is… centuries."
So this wasn't a raid. It was an execution planned weeks in advance.
Outside, the balance flipped. With Thanos's core armada entering the fray, Xandar's superior tech meant less and less.
What the Corps did to the Chitauri, Thanos's dreadnoughts did to the Corps only worse. Leviathans split cities' skies; fighter swarms bled atmosphere into fire.
Thanos didn't just conquer worlds. He halved them.
"Ground incursion confirmed!" ops cried. "Multiple cities breached!"
"Deploy planetary brigades," Irani ordered. "All zones. Civilian corridors first!"
Xandar's streets erupted. Chitauri drop-pods slammed into plazas, disgorging ranks of soldiers with energy rifles set to reap. Screams cut through sirens as civilians ran and fell light carved people into ash and red smears on shattered glass.
The Corps met them better trained, better armed but hopelessly outnumbered. Every Xandarian trooper felled ten pirates; a hundred pirates took their place.
Irani clenched her jaw. If only the Nova Initiative were online…
Worldmind had found a power leak from a distant dimension and converted it into wearable force Nova energy. The plan was elegant: scale it, standardize it, build a Corps of living warheads.
But they lacked a battery large enough to punch the dimensional gate fully open.
Until the Orb.
The Power Stone was everything Worldmind needed and too volatile to tame in time.
"Launch the Nova strike teams," Irani said. "All enhanced assets to the line."
Gold-helmed figures knifed into the sky, bodies wrapped in blazing gravimetric halos. They cut through Chitauri lines like meteors, punched leviathans from the air with single blows, cratered streets with shockwave landings. For one breathless minute, the slaughter slowed.
Then Worldmind's voice chilled the room.
"Alert: Nova strike teams are encountering hostile Primes. Casualties escalating."
"Primes?" Irani repeated.
The feed switched to helmet-cams.
A thin, gray figure drifted above a boulevard, fingers poised like a conductor. The air around a Nova soldier crystallized, bone popped, the helm imploded, and the body fell like a gutted doll. Ebony Maw smiled faintly.
"Charming toys," he murmured, curling a finger. Another Nova's neck snapped cleanly.
A bestial titan plowed through a squad, armored shoulders bulldozing grav-fields aside. Cull Obsidian swung a chain-hammer; two Novas went pinwheeling into a high-rise, detonating on impact.
On a rooftop, a lithe shadow danced, a crescent glaive whispering through the air. Armor rated "unbreakable" split like silk. Proxima Midnight never slowed.
Street-level, a bull-shouldered brute barked laughter as he hurled a car, then a Nova, through a mag-rail.
Corvus Glaive stalked behind him, spear leaving threads of black light in its wake; wherever it touched, Nova fields died and hearts followed.
High above, a radiant beam scythed across the skyline, shearing a flight of Novas from the air in a single, perfect line.
Supergiant turned her head, eyes like pale moons, and three more fell from the sky like extinguished stars.
Irani's hands tightened on the console until her knuckles went white. "Black Order," she whispered. "All five."
Helmet feeds spiraled into static.
On the enemy command bridge, Ebony Maw regarded a floating Nova operative he'd pinned mid-air. "A clever lattice… dimensional resonance braided into neural control," he mused.
With a lazy twist, the Nova's head ruptured. Memories, diagrams, and designs flowed into him like smoke. "Worldmind. A god dreaming of soldiers. And the Stone in your vault."
A holoprojection flickered to life before him Thanos, seated, impassive.
"The Power Stone is confirmed," Maw reported. "Xandar will fall."
"Then don't linger," Thanos said. "Finish it."
The order rolled through the fleet. The ring-dreadnought rotated; batteries cycled. The sky went from blue to bruise-purple as city-shields began to boil.
Irani swallowed bitterness and regret in equal measure. We should have given him the Stone…
"Prime!" Ops shouted. "Multiple signatures unknown. High energy."
Purple light flowered in the command hall like a sunrise. Space folded, and a figure stepped through, cloak rippling, eyes bright as twin singularities.
Nolan smiled. "Need a hand?"
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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
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