"The Lord teaches that a scrambled mind is harder to possess. Trust me, ours is blessed."
"Enough talk," Thena snarled, golden weapons materializing in her hands as her Mahd Wy'ry threatened to break through completely. The stress of the situation, the revelation about their true purpose, and the sight of Tiamut in chains had pushed her right to the edge. "We end this now."
She charged.
Meanwhile, high above in the mantle, Ikaris was already extracting himself from his crater. His healing factor repaired the damage quickly enough, but the humiliation stung worse than any physical injury. He'd been swatted aside like an insect. Him. The strongest of the Eternals. By a joker with a hammer.
He shot back down toward the core, rage now tempered just enough with caution to keep him from doing something equally stupid.
When he landed back on the chain platform, the battle had already begun in earnest.
Gilgamesh found himself facing Machine Man, the android's body flowing like liquid metal as he dodged the Eternal's devastating punches.
"Impressive force output," Machine Man observed clinically, his arm extending to impossible lengths to deliver a counterpunch that caught Gilgamesh in the ribs. "Approximately 47 tons per square inch. However, your fighting style relies heavily on overwhelming physical superiority."
Testing his upgrades from Stark, Machine Man's torso literally flowed around Gilgamesh's next punch, the metal parting like water before reforming and launching a dozen smaller fists simultaneously from his body.
Gilgamesh grunted as the impacts hit him from multiple angles, his enhanced durability keeping him standing but the sheer creativity of the assault forcing him onto the defensive. "You fight like you're pissing on every martial art ever created. At least have the spirit to come at me like a warrior, you damn robot."
"Pot calling the kettle black." Machine Man's head rotated 360 degrees in a whipping headbutt while his body remained stationary. "The only difference between you and me is our manufacturing company. Get off your high horse, Clanker."
Druig, frustrated by his mind control's failure, tried a different approach with Hit-Monkey, attempting to engage the creature directly since mental domination had proven useless.
"Listen, monkey," Druig began, his accent thickening with stress. "I don't want to hurt you. Just tell us who hired you and..."
Hit-Monkey responded by shooting him in the face.
The bullet didn't penetrate Druig's enhanced physiology, but it stung like hell and sent him stumbling backwards. Before he could recover, Hit-Monkey was already moving, a small blur of fur and fury that landed on his shoulders and unloaded both clips directly into his temple.
The neurological disruption worked exactly as intended, temporarily scattering the concentration Druig needed to maintain mind control. For three seconds, he experienced what felt like trying to control every mind in a fifty-mile radius simultaneously. The feedback nearly knocked him unconscious.
Hit-Monkey then lowered his tiny pants and relieved himself on Druig's prone body, apparently attempting to short-circuit him the way he'd once done with Machine Man.
"This is so fucking humiliating," Druig groaned, face-first in the spreading puddle.
Hit-Monkey chittered agreement and pulled his pants back up.
Thena's fight with Deadpool was somehow both deadly serious and completely absurd.
Her golden weapons moved with precision born from millennia of combat, every strike meant to kill outright. Her spear snapped forward toward Deadpool's heart, fast enough that any normal human would've been dead before their brain caught up.
Deadpool brought his katana up, but the energy construct flowed around the blade like liquid light and punched straight through his chest.
Thena watched him stumble back, drop to one knee, clutching his side like he was actually hurt for once. She let her cosmic blades fade and allowed herself a small, satisfied smile.
"Stay down, fool," she said. "You've bled enough."
Deadpool stayed down for about half a second.
Then he popped straight up in her face. "Boo."
She flinched. Full-body twitch, eyes wide.
Before she could react, both pistols were out and barking, magazines emptied straight into her open mouth. Bullets tore through cheeks, tongue and teeth in a wet spray of gold. She gagged, staggered, but the wounds were already sealing, skin knitting like it was nothing.
Thena spat a glob of glowing blood onto the ground and snarled. One flick of her wrist and a fresh blade snapped into existence. She swung hard and clean, straight through his neck.
His head came off easy, rolling across the ground, mask still grinning.
The problem was, those bullets had rattled something deep in her skull.
Mahd Wy'ry hit like a sledgehammer.
Old wars flared behind her eyes with visceral intensity. Planets burning, their atmospheres peeling away in strips of flame. Allies turning on each other, cosmic weapons tearing through flesh that had seemed invulnerable. Her own hands, slick with immortal blood that glowed like molten gold, ending lives that had lasted millennia.
The weight of false memories crashed down, and every trace of grace and poise vanished instantly.
She went feral.
Screaming, she hurled everything her mind could form. Spears. Axes. Whips of light. Hacking at his headless body, at the head when it tried to crawl back, at anything that moved.
Deadpool's body groped blindly until it found the severed head and slapped it back on with a wet, sucking sound. He rolled his neck like he was loosening up after a nap.
"Oh yeah," he said. "Manic pixie apocalypse mode. This is my kind of foreplay, Thena. Keep swinging, baby. I thrive on crazy."
She lunged again, wilder now, no technique left, just raw rage.
Deadpool danced around her, katanas flashing, deliberately taking hits just to watch the wounds close. "You know," he added between dodges, "you'd be the perfect woman for me if I wasn't already engaged."
The words cut through the chaos of battle like a bell.
Every merc heard it loud and clear.
Masacre paused mid-machete swing, blood dripping from the blade. "May the Lord bless this unholy union." He laughed. "Don't screw it up before the honeymoon."
Hit-Monkey, perched on a nearby crate, dropped two rounds into Druig's back and gave Deadpool a quick salute with his pistol.
Gorilla-Man, in the middle of slamming Makkari into the ground, barked out a laugh. "Engaged? Damn, Wade. Good for you. I want an open bar and banana cake."
Machine Man sidestepped Gilgamesh's punch, metal flowing smoothly. "Even you got engaged? I should blackmail Stark into building me a partner unit. I could customise her looks to my taste, even adjust her personality. This is sounding better and better by the second."
Deadpool grinned wider, parrying another sloppy swing as he produced a blue Pym disc from his belt. "Love you guys. Truly."
Thena barely registered any of it.
She saw him flick a pebble toward her.
Through the haze of Mahd Wy'ry she smirked and reached out, cocky enough to snatch it mid-air.
A blue disc tagged it first.
Whoosh.
The rock ballooned into a ten-meter boulder and dropped straight down on top of her.
She went down hard, buried beneath it, her glow snuffing out as consciousness left and Mahd Wy'ry lost its grip entirely.
Deadpool wandered over and gave the boulder a light kick. "And that, kids, is why you never catch random shit from strangers. Specially from a guy named Deadpool."
Makkari discovered the hard way that fighting Gorilla-Man was nothing like fighting normal opponents.
Her speed was absolute, allowing her to move faster than sound, faster than most people could track. She'd run circles around countless enemies, delivered devastating strikes before they could blink, and generally treated physics as a mild suggestion rather than a hard rule.
Gorilla-Man just smiled and opened a portal to the Mirror Dimension.
Makkari's momentum carried her straight through before she could change direction. She found herself in a twisted reflection of the core chamber where physics worked differently, and speed proved actively disadvantageous.
Gorilla-Man stepped through after her, his yellow robes flowing around his massive simian frame. "I studied at Kamar-Taj for six months. The Masters there taught me how to deal with speed demons. Would you like to see what I learned?"
Makkari's response was to sign something extremely rude and charge at him anyway.
The Mirror Dimension twisted around her as Gorilla-Man reshaped it with gestures that carried surprising grace. Walls appeared from nowhere, floors became ceilings and direction lost meaning as space folded in on itself. Running in circles didn't help when the circle kept changing size.
This is cheating, she signed furiously.
"All warfare is based on deception," Gorilla-Man replied without missing a beat. "Also, I learned that move from Wong, and he's never lost a sparring match. Well, except to Jay. I'm just following best practices."
Kingo, meanwhile, found himself facing both Ant-Man and Wasp simultaneously, which would have been manageable if they'd stayed human-sized.
They didn't.
Hope shrank to wasp size and flew at his face, her suit's energy weapons firing blasts that stung like hornets despite their small scale. Scott went giant, growing to fifteen feet tall and delivering a punch that sent Kingo tumbling backward.
"This is so unfair!" Kingo shouted, firing his finger guns at targets that kept changing size. "Pick a scale and stick with it!"
"Where's the fun in that?" Hope's voice came from everywhere and nowhere as she flew around Kingo's head in dizzying patterns. Her blasts weren't powerful enough to seriously hurt him, but they were maddening, each hit disrupting his concentration just enough to throw off his aim.
Scott shrank to ant size, hitched a ride across the ground on one of his ants, then grew back to giant while delivering an uppercut that caught Kingo completely off-guard.
"You know what the really great thing about Pym Particles is?" Scott asked conversationally. "Conservation of momentum still applies. So when I'm tiny and moving fast, then suddenly get big? All that velocity gets transferred to my larger mass. It's like getting hit by a train that used to be the size of a baseball."
Kingo's response was to blast Scott in the face with concentrated cosmic energy.
Scott shrank, the blast passing through where he'd been, then grew back to punch Kingo in the kidney.
"I hate insect-themed heroes so much right now," Kingo groaned.
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