This strike carried not only Supergiant's power but the Mind Stone's as well.
Luckily the White Queen was nearby and blocked it for her, brow furrowed, eyes shut; you could tell she barely managed to hold it off.
The Mind Stone's might could fairly be called terrifying.
Just as Supergiant readied a second strike, Professor Xavier's attack arrived.
Shielding the minds of every human on the battlefield was too much trouble; striking directly at the source was the right call. The target was just an alien, so Professor Xavier felt little moral burden about it.
An invisible ripple of energy crossed half of New York and struck at Supergiant from afar.
The Kree-blooded general of Thanos was caught completely off guard, her white hood blasted apart to reveal the crisscrossing scars on her blue scalp.
Huh? At the back of Supergiant's head, Daisy could see a great deal of what looked like precision instrumentation. So the reason her psychic power was so immense was that machines were forcibly driving it out of her.
"What is it?" The White Queen had taken that hit hard; her psychic power churned in agonizing turmoil, forcing her to switch to diamond form to steady it. She had no super-vision, and rubbed her forehead as she asked.
Daisy pointed at the distant Supergiant and explained: "She's got a bunch of tech rigged to the back of her head. She might have some psychic talent, but most of it's coming from the machines and the scepter in her hand. I used to think she was on your level. Now it's clear she's nowhere close."
The White Queen tipped up her chin haughtily. "Naturally. Not just any random nobody gets mentioned in the same breath as the White Queen!"
Daisy fell silent. In terms of fame across the universe, she suspected the White Queen was the real nobody here.
Arrogant she might be, but the White Queen did have the credentials to back it up.
Compared to the Supergiant before them, jacked up on a mountain of high-tech gear; compared to Charles, whose potential Apocalypse had unlocked while grooming him as a new host body; and compared to Jean Grey, backed by the ultimate cheat that was the Phoenix, the White Queen could count as an all-natural psychic. And she wasn't paralyzed, wasn't balding, was this beautiful, and had her diamond power on top of it all. You had to admit, the White Queen fully deserved the word "gifted."
If they all stood on the same footing, the White Queen might not be inferior to Charles.
"Yeah, you really are the strongest!" someone praised, not meaning a word of it.
While the two of them hid off to the side shooting the breeze, Professor Xavier's psychic power, amplified a hundredfold by Cerebro like a surging tide, crashed down on the enemy.
Caught underprepared, Supergiant gave ground again and again, and many of her innermost secrets were laid bare to Xavier.
She'd never imagined Earth could hold psychic power this strong. At first she thought the planet's own will was attacking her, but then it didn't seem right. This power wasn't pure, was even something of a hollow shell. The purest part was at its core; the outside was all for show.
Who, or what, was attacking her?
Supergiant quickly composed herself. With the Scepter in hand, she feared nothing, not even a planet's will.
Once more she drew power from the Scepter, pulling forth energy equal to twice, three times, then ten times her own psychic strength. When she'd extracted energy equal to fifty times her original power, she barely managed to hold off Professor Xavier's incursion and reclaim some of the lost ground.
The old man saw a great many things in Supergiant's memories, first and foremost Thanos. Her memories of Thanos were the most numerous and the deepest, followed by the Black Order, the five powerful aliens that included Supergiant herself, and the vast cosmic army under Thanos's command.
Many of the memories were fragmentary, and before Xavier could examine them closely, Supergiant forcibly drove him out. The two settled into a grinding tug-of-war.
"Agent Johnson, I'm afraid I can't hold out very long. You need to deal with the enemy within ten minutes." That advanced tech was surely no match for the Mind Stone, and a man had his limits besides. By his own willpower, Professor Xavier reckoned he could last seven or eight minutes on Cerebro at most before losing himself, and since he currently held a slight edge, he'd padded the figure by a couple of minutes.
Deal with the enemy? Deal how? Physically, of course! The old man looked all kindly and benevolent, but toward life from beyond Earth he was quite ruthless underneath.
Daisy gave the order at once: all forces press forward and kill Supergiant physically!
Supergiant was no fool. She gave the very same order: kill Professor Xavier at Xavier's School, then use the Scepter to seize control of the whole planet. She even pulled over the troops excavating the Tesseract. Forget the cube! No more digging!
Under her command and Thanos's terrifying reputation, the Chitauri, well aware of their staggering losses, had no choice but to obey. Lose, and it was all over anyway; win, and Thanos would likely hand them some reward. So, all-out assault!
The remaining fifteen Chitauri Leviathans all landed, and with their thick armor they ringed Supergiant layer upon layer, in moments raising a metal fortress of steel around her.
The fresh Chitauri troops inside the Leviathans all took up defensive positions where they stood, while the chariots and soldiers scattered across New York quickly fell into formation, gathering in twos and threes and finally surging toward Xavier's School like a flood of metal.
Daisy split her forces at once.
"Captain Rogers, I'm appointing you overall front-line commander. All the Avengers and the military are yours to deploy. My order is just one thing: kill Supergiant!"
"All remaining S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, fall back with me to defend Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters."
It was a choice she couldn't avoid. The military, swayed by public opinion, held more reservations about mutants, while the agents were pragmatists with fewer objections.
Captain America nodded in agreement at once and quickly issued his orders.
Compared to Daisy, a colonel nobody had heard of, the military actually accepted Captain America, a mere captain, more readily.
It was rather like a city-level official in an Eastern nation meeting an old Red Army veteran of the Long March: the rank truly wasn't high, but the seniority ran deep.
Captain America, along with the just-thawed Thor, Iron Man, War Machine, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and the Hulk, who had come back to hand over Loki and report the job done, clustered together as the spearhead, leading the charge against the metal fortress.
On the other side, Daisy had Hill and Ward organize the agent ranks while she grabbed Spider-Woman and the White Queen and teleported ahead to Xavier's School to help with the defense.
Mutants were a mixed bag. Some had garbage powers, others were monstrously strong, and a powerful individual could take on ten, even twenty, without a problem.
As the oldest students, Colossus, Iceman, and Pyro joined the fight as well.
Colossus was incredibly tough. Just as the White Queen's diamond body wasn't really diamond, his body wasn't really steel either, only something like it, in truth far harder than steel.