A riot of dazzling colors... an apt description.
The brilliantly luminous starry sky had become a clamorous purgatory.
Piercing down through the weak points of the void shield array, elongated fireballs roared toward the crater-ridden surface below, dragging thick trails of smoke and disintegrating metal fragments behind them.
So it has finally begun.
The Imperial Inquisition Demon Inquisitor Chapter 117th Strike Cruiser Fleet—flagship. Master Chief John slowly rose to his feet. His towering living-metal body, over three hundred meters tall, unfurled with deliberate ease. He looked at his right hand, where the crimson Command Seal still shone brightly.
General Esdeath had withdrawn from the field. Of the hundreds of Servants she had summoned, aside from Caster-class and Karna—who bore special duties and remained stationed on Earth—almost all had been annihilated.
Now even Gorgon's Spirit Origin had begun to destabilize. Even the supply chain of magical energy flickered on and off.
She, too, was about to leave the stage.
"Thanos." Master Chief repeated the name, as though it were a source of endless mana.
For Her Majesty the Divine Empress to value him so highly—a mad Titan who killed his mother, slew his father, and destroyed his own homeworld. She had even gone so far as to send her generals to play their roles, building a stage and forcefully elevating him.
"In that case, Cortana, order the fleet to engage the Skrull fleet hiding beyond the star system. Remember to control the pace—fight while retreating. Our losses are catastrophic. We have been defeated."
"Understood."
...
On the surface of the system's primary planet, now transformed into a hive-fortress.
Apocalyptic spectra of violently shifting light took turns illuminating the celestial fortress cluster chosen by the 'Anti-Black Order Covenant Alliance' as the site of their decisive battle. It was a sight rarely seen on Earth, but Tony Stark had grown accustomed to it. With adrenaline surging, he had more pressing matters to handle.
"Roar—!"
A beastly howl. Their teeth were like two rows of sharpened blades, glistening with a thick, murky sheen.
"Whoa! Buddy, you seriously need a full dental cleaning."
Metal shrieked against metal. Stark's armored arm locked the gaping jaws of the robust, half-metal, half-flesh humanoid bio-weapon before him. Splurt! Nanoparticles shifted and combined, forming a thermal blade that effortlessly sliced off the creature's flat, coarse, grotesque head.
"Outriders. According to the public database released by the Divine Empress Order, they were created by Thanos, the master of the Black Order, in his pursuit of the perfect scout and soldier. After experimenting on numerous species, he combined various genomes and ultimately produced this biological weapon known as an 'Outrider.'"
The AI installed in the armor—Friday—provided her explanation at the appropriate moment.
Besides their gaping fanged maws and dark yellow-striped skin, the Outriders' most distinctive trait was their arms—some had four, others six.
Each time they opened their mouths, nauseating, rancid saliva dripped down like squeezed pus. Even through his visor, Stark felt as though he could smell it. "Getting bitten by this thing would be worse than a Komodo dragon," he muttered. The saliva struck the surface of his armor, producing a faint acidic pfft pfft corrosion.
"Yes, according to analysis—"
"No! Friday, I don't need to know the chemical composition of their spit. Switch to unrestricted multi-target combat mode."
Hearing Stark's usual focus-enhancing banter, Friday took him literally. Lines of data refreshed rapidly across his visor, bursting before his eyes. The artificial intelligence diligently analyzed Outrider saliva composition while Stark charged headlong into the swarm, swinging left and right. Claws scraped and clawed across his body, armor groaning with grrk sounds. He panicked.
Hey, hey—I'm in the middle of fighting monsters here!
"Confirmed."
Immediately recalculating, Friday used the nanite vision of the full-body armor to lock onto the Outriders' movements, providing optimized dismemberment solutions and identified weak points.
In less than a second, Stark—who had previously looked amateurish and flashy, dodging left and right—completely reversed the situation. Plasma thrusters roared from his feet. Precise and ruthless, his morphing hands struck in rapid succession—cannon, blade, whip, hammer—switching seamlessly. Amid the spine-chilling crunch of bones, flesh, and cleaved metal, dozens of Outriders clambering up the half-finished city walls were reduced to shredded chunks of meat.
"Transform. Heavy firepower module."
Stark extended both arms. The arc pulse cannons in his palms and chest lit up in response. Click-click—whoosh whoosh whoosh! The armor plating on his back unfolded, forming a wide golden-red metallic wing of floating cannons.
A blazing torrent blasted toward the grotesque heads that had just climbed onto the bastion's battlements. They burst like overripe fruit. Not just one or two shots—from multiple angles, dozens struck simultaneously.
Rumble—
At the same time, micro armor-piercing rounds and guided rockets rained down like bloody foam, exploding in waves of fire. In the scorched ruins below the wall in this sector, the incoming tide of Outriders was visibly gouged away in a massive swath.
"Hah!" Beneath his visor, Stark grinned in exhilaration. He retracted the deployed nanite cannons and patted the blood-edged armor he had named Mark 50 with satisfaction.
Relying on the mysterious technology of the Divine Empress Order and the research direction he had long planned for nanotech armor, he had begun tinkering with a new generation of Iron Man suits in the workshops provided by the Order after struggling against the Skrull warlord. Materials were abundant—no reason not to use them.
It was just... recalling the evaluation from a few martial brutes of the Divine Empress Order who had shown interest and watched him, Stark's face darkened.
Flashy but impractical. An expensive toy. Neither here nor there. No clear deployment role. Not scalable for mass production. Already has substitutes.
Just wait. So what if the firepower isn't heavy enough yet? Once I store more nanite modules and push the output higher—thicker, heavier, bigger—you'll be the ones begging me.
He could accept the lack of mass deployment scalability. But saying his Iron Man suit lacked high-end positioning? That, he could not tolerate.
Filled with ambition for his new nanotech armor project, Stark casually fired a pulse blast to finish off an Outrider feigning death by the wall corner and prepared to continue his duties—
"Tony! Help me!"
Turning toward the voice, Stark saw that near a collapsed section—where a temporary city wall had been breached by an Outrider tombstone-like landing craft—Dr. Banner, clad in the massive Mark 48 Hulkbuster 2.0 armor, had been flipped onto his back by a swarm of Outriders. Even the thrusters at his feet had been shredded by their claws capable of crushing metal and stone.
That combat technique... really lousy.
"Dr. Banner, lie flat. Don't move."
With that, Stark crossed his arms. Nanoparticles molded over the backs of his hands, forming two crimson cutting beams that grazed Banner's helmet visor by mere millimeters.
Zzz!
The Outriders gnawing and roaring atop Banner instantly fell silent. The next moment, they were dismembered and scattered, splashing rust-scented, rancid fluid all over Banner's armor.
Scrambling upright in a hurry, Banner took advantage of the moment Stark cleared the surrounding Outriders. Controlling the Hulkbuster armor, he smashed the creature still sprawled across his chest—half its body already severed—into a paste like meat flattened for dipping sauce. Still holding a grudge, he ground his foot down hard on another Outrider nearby that had not quite died.
Half hopping, half stumbling, he came to Stark's side. Gazing at the nanotech armor displaying such overwhelming power, Banner looked at Stark with tender eyes. "Tony."
"Don't." Stark shook his head repeatedly. "No. And don't even think about it for now."
"Oh..."
"Alright, stop looking so disappointed. Instead of relying on the suit, Banner, maybe you should think about how to bring Hulk out."
"But he just won't come out." Banner spread his hands helplessly. "Hulk is scared. He's afraid..."
"Yeah. Can't really blame him."
Following Banner's gaze upward, Stark looked toward the sky. Stellar flares screeched as they churned through space. Ferocious shipboard firepower and the system's planetary defenses intertwined and collided. From the far side of the galaxy, colossal flashes erupted. Stark nodded grimly.
Asking Hulk to fight these creatures that seemed to have stepped straight out of myth—no, not seemed. They truly had—gods and demons filling the heavens... it was asking too much.
"Enough of that. Your armor plating is severely damaged. You need to swap to a backup module." Stark pointed at the claw marks covering Banner's suit.
Although Stark's original Veronica system had been destroyed in Earth's orbit, and the backup units were at Stark Industries, that was hardly an obstacle. At worst, it meant modifying multipurpose support modules. The Divine Empress Order had plenty of those. With proper authorization, a few tweaks were all he needed.
"Dr. Banner, remember—replace it with a firepower module, not a close-combat module." Stark emphasized this while lifting off into the air, preparing to clear the Outriders in this defensive sector.
"Hey, Iron Man, big-shot billionaire. Aren't you supposed to be the tech guy? Since when did you start doing grunt Marine work?"
A hearty shout rang out, accompanied by chaotic clattering. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
"Wolverine. X-Men."
From a shuttle weaving through the hastily constructed fortifications, an unexpected group disembarked. The tall Wolverine, Logan, and Phoenix host Jean Grey, her entire body wreathed in orange-red, flame-feathered energy.
Despite his robust build, Logan moved with surprising lightness. His arms handled a boltgun far too massive and heavy for ordinary humans. The deep thunder of its firing echoed through the air. A fraction of a second later, explosive bolts punched through the remaining Outriders surging from the wreckage of a landing craft.
"Hell yeah! This big gun's got kick!"
With his wild, overgrown hair making him look like a savage, Logan grinned broadly.
Thud—thud—thud!
The rhythmic roar of boltguns could not be drowned out or ignored on the battlefield. The former X-Men formation accompanying Wolverine was loose rather than rigid. But their coordination, their seasoned mastery of mutant abilities, combined with Imperial military equipment, gave them absolute confidence in suppressing the remaining Chitauri and Outrider forces of the Black Order.
On a battlefield of this tier, Jean Grey was practically omnipotent. Although a portion of the Phoenix Force had been secretly siphoned away by Selene, the benefits of being a Phoenix host were immeasurable—telepathy, flight, telekinesis, empathic sensing, energy projection in the form of flame, and more.
Ironically, misfortune had brought fortune. After being weakened—and with Selene's dilution diverting the Phoenix's attention—Jean herself felt mentally lighter than before.
Fwoosh!
With the slightest motion of her hand, the all-purpose Phoenix power surged forth. Blazing bright-yellow feathered flames engulfed a landed Outrider craft. Hundreds, thousands of enemy troops were instantly incinerated. More were hurled skyward by the explosion, only to crash onto the burning ground and shatter to pieces.
Stark let out a whistle. "The busiest rapid-response unit actually came to back me up? So the battle's going well?"
Among the Earth conscript forces that had passed evaluation, the former X-Men's teamwork and elite status had naturally earned the Empire's attention. They had been reorganized as a field rapid-response unit, plugging gaps wherever needed. They were one of the Earth conscripts' signature forces.
"On the contrary. The situation is terrible."
It wasn't Logan who answered.
Jean Grey lowered her hand, looking at the sea of flames beneath the city wall before turning around. Her expression was grave.
"Commander Diarmuid Ua Duibhne has fallen."
Jean didn't know about others, but she had fought alongside Diarmuid for a time. The handsome knight, worthy of the title "Knight of the Radiant Face," had used his spear that dispelled magic to help her overcome the instability brought on by using the Phoenix Force.
He was one of the reasons she could now wield a portion of the Phoenix power with relative ease.
Stark froze for a moment. "That's... bad," he said, nodding.
"We don't know how the main front is going. If the Divine Empress Order and the allied forces lose—and Thanos gathers all six Infinity Stones..."
Banner interjected in a muffled voice.
For some reason—perhaps influenced by Hulk's pessimism within him—contrary to the fervent expectations of his fellow Earth conscripts, Banner sounded deeply pessimistic.
"..."
Stark said nothing.
He stared toward the brightest region beyond the void shields in the sky.
The dark curtain of deep space now trembled with swaying stars and blazing suns, accompanied by blinding lightning and rumbling thunder.
At times, a vivid and frigid blue stretched across frost-laden void and flickering stars. At others, scorching crimson fireballs wrapped in dust expanded outward, painting multicolored nebulae red. Sometimes it was as though a velvet-like deep green carpet had been laid across a corner of the universe, stretching all the way into the abyss of deep space.
The terrifying divine battle unfolding there made even Stark's heart tighten.
If the upper echelon of the Divine Empress Order lost... would that mean certain death for all of them?
"No," he said heavily.
Even if the Order's top combatants were defeated, Stark could not retreat.
Where would he even run? The news was public. Thanos intended to murder half of all living beings in the known and unknown universe to please Death—completely at random, without distinction between noble and lowly.
That meant there was a fifty percent chance that the person he cared about back on Earth—Pepper Potts—would die.
For her. For Earth. He had to stop Thanos from gathering the Infinity Stones.
This was not a personal grudge.
"The last Infinity artifact..." Stark murmured, turning to glance back at the central tower behind him, where gunfire and artillery raged freely.
"Tony, they're climbing up again!" Bruce Banner shouted. "The fleet—our flagship is moving."
At that very moment, the sun dimmed.
As shadows spread rapidly across the ash-covered earth, everyone's mouths slowly fell open.
"Alert. The Skrull main fleet has arrived. The Skrull Empire has declared war on our alliance and commenced hostilities... Repeat..."
Inside the Bleeding Edge armor, the inorganic synthesized voice echoed repeatedly across the communication channels of the Divine Empress Order and the Anti-Black Order Covenant Alliance.
Stark's expression tightened instantly.
Just what we needed.
Are we really going to lose?
—
—
38 Advanced Chapters Available on Patreon:
Patreon.com/DaoOfHeaven