IM/DC Chapter 231 (Patreon)

I had to address the elephants in both quarters of the galaxy. I had been ignoring them because both hadn’t caused me problems yet, but sooner rather than later I’d run into them. I don’t think either side was strong enough to do anything about it though. Even if Thanos was injured or Darkseid was alive, I’d still win against them. Even if they grouped up I still think I’d beat them and their armies at this point.

I flipped a coin to decide who to take care of first. I could control which face it would land on so flipping with complete randomness required me to shut off most of my brain's functions for the second I flipped the coin. I could still determine what it would land on before it hit the ground but it was the only way to have it be random instead of my own decision.

Thanos first then. To be fair, Thanos is about as strong as a single one of Darkseid’s Fury’s. I was going to have to limit myself tremendously for me to have any fun fighting him. Did I weaken myself down to five percent? No, even then I’d only have trouble against an uninjured Thanos. Three percent it is.

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Thanos’s Point of View

One of my troops came rushing in to yell as alerts went off. “Lord, our forces are being annihilated. We’ve already lost three Chitauri motherships, and more than half our armies have been destroyed.” I couldn’t believe my luck as I asked. “How? Is it The grey one?” The only defeat I knew was against someone with monstrous strength who I didn’t find out until later was named Darkseid. Since then I haven’t allowed his name to be spoken in my presence.

“No, D-The grey one is still slain. At least all our spies have agreed that he isn’t around leading their depleted armies. The Justice League destroyed most of their empire when they kept pushing after Dar-The grey one was killed by the gods.” It pissed me off that two gods needed to team up to defeat him while I was making plans around a single one.

Disgruntled I asked Ebony Maw. “Then who is it?” Ebony Maw was using his telekinetic powers to float different screens around. “I don’t know father. I’ve only seen partial images of a massive ship before it fired off a beam targeting the motherships. This isn’t the MO of The grey one, I assume it’s a new player on the board.” Another few seconds later, the ship appeared again, except this time it didn’t immediately move to obliterate the mothership.

They most likely used up all the resources to teleport in and fire the few shots. It was a huge blow to our progress but every death of my troops was another death for Lady Death. As long as I survived then nothing else mattered. I could still kill to empower the new infinity stone I had created. As if he knew someone was watching, he stared at the monitor before smirking and giving a small wave. He pointed at the mothership and the next moment that cluster was destroyed as well.

That was the start of my bad day. Over the next fifteen minutes, the man slowly disabled all of my forces, starting with the bulk Chitauri troops, then he started to dismantle the volunteer corps, and then the soldiers I hand-picked, and then destroyed the last line of elites between me and my children. Our ship took heavy damage and it was only with the help of Ebony and Supergiant slowing our assent that my children weren’t killed by the fall.

We somehow made it out alive, which was clear that was what the man wanted. He looked, beyond average, not even that… Maybe slightly weak. He was small, smaller than most of my children, but that clearly wasn’t the case when it came to his power. He just kept smiling before cutting me off. “Who are y-.” “Well, this is boring. I thought limiting my power would make this more fun, it just made it take longer than a few seconds. I’m going to leave your death up to my newest girlfriends.”

A portal was opened up as five women came through. I couldn’t help but gulp as I felt power radiating off of them. My eyes widened as I recognized the energies that bled off them. They were personifications of the infinity stones! I had the power stone and death stone, but the other five stones stood before me. I couldn’t believe my luck it was unfortunate that I had begun the construction of a seventh infinity stone in the form of death and it had been created off the destruction of the billions of Chitauri soldiers.

The numbers didn’t add up for them, they had the five other gemstones, but I had the power of two. They would struggle to work together while I could focus on destroying and absorbing as many of them into my gauntlet as possible. Every one of their deaths would skew the battle in my favor. I knew my children didn’t stand a chance, but as long as they bought me time then it didn’t matter.

My stones were designed for war while theirs weren’t. The five women looked to be good fighters but-. As I thought of plans, the five of them combined into a giant forty-foot-tall woman. Two punches, one to wipe out my children and shatter my defenses, the next knocked me unconscious. I didn’t survive what happened while I was unconscious.

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I cut the gauntlet off Thanos’ hand before snapping his neck. The infinity stones weren’t even a large buff for me and the five that weren’t attached to Thanos were trivially easy to collect. Turning them into personifications of their power was harder and making sure they were all women was harder still. Soul and Time didn’t want to be women but I convinced them eventually.

The Death Stone was fairly new in the comics and the personification thing wasn’t. The infinity stones worked a lot more like Green Lantern rings than anything else, they selected their partner to use them. It meant that infinity stones could be created, but what was the point for me? The infinity stones were weaker in this universe. If you wanted to kill half the people in the universe you’d probably kill yourself before it even reached ten percent.

Making a different set of Lantern Corps off the stones might be an idea in the future though. The biggest problem with this much power was I couldn’t be in multiple places at once so delegating was extremely important. I knew how to make rings so… Why not? Why not make rings far better/stronger than the Lantern Corps? A Corps versus Corps could be interesting because I knew the second they saw my stronger rings they’d be butt-hurt about them.