Luke dropped through the clouds and met the green guy immediately, Hulk's roar hitting him like a physical wall a half second before the fist did, swinging straight for his face with the full weight of something that had leveled cities behind it.
"Wow," Luke said, and leaned sideways, the fist passing close enough to feel the displaced air.
He turned his body with the momentum and drove his foot straight into Hulk's face.
The shockwave that followed split the clouds apart in every direction, a perfect ring of clear sky opening up around the point of impact, and Hulk dropped, hitting the ground far below and carving a crater into it on arrival, the earth around him cracking outward in every direction from the impact point.
Then the green got darker.
Gamma energy began bleeding off Hulk's body in visible waves, his eyes going full green, the hunger and the rage feeding each other in a loop that had no ceiling, the crater around him glowing faintly from the radiation pouring out of him as he climbed back to his feet larger than he had been thirty seconds ago.
Luke floated above the crater and looked down at him.
"So this version," he said quietly to himself, "gets stronger the angrier he gets."
Hulk looked up at him and roared, the sound rolling across the ruined landscape like a thunderclap.
Luke snapped his fingers.
"Abyssal Dominion."
The void expanded outward from him instantly, consuming everything in every direction, and the next moment Earth was gone.
They were in space, the ruined city replaced by infinite black, debris floating silently around them, and at a respectful distance an event horizon rotated slowly, massive and patient, its edges glowing with the light of everything it had ever consumed.
Luke landed on a floating chunk of rock and looked across at Hulk.
"Come on," he said. "Out here we can go full without worrying about breaking anything that matters."
Hulk didn't need a second invitation. He lunged on all fours and brought his fist down with everything he had, the kind of punch that had cracked tectonic plates before the infection ever touched him.
Luke met it with his own fist.
'Void Consumption.'
Every ounce of force behind Hulk's punch reversed direction in an instant, absorbed completely and redirected back through Luke's knuckles straight into Hulk's face.
Hulk's head snapped back.
He spit out a tooth.
Then he looked at Luke.
And smiled.
What followed was something that couldn't be called a fight in any technical sense. Every time their punches met the shockwave shattered whatever debris was floating nearby, rocks and metal reduced to dust, the event horizon in the distance rippling slightly each time the force reached it.
Hulk got bigger with every exchange, gamma energy pouring off him in waves that lit up the surrounding void green, and Luke matched every escalation without changing his expression once.
'Hmm.'
Luke took a step back mentally while his body continued moving on instinct, and assessed the situation properly for the first time since they'd started.
Hulk wasn't tiring. The angrier he got the more fuel he had, and with Void Consumption converting every attack that landed into Luke's own energy, Luke wasn't tiring either. Which meant left alone this fight had no natural conclusion. Two engines feeding off each other indefinitely.
A drawn out fight was exactly what he shouldn't be having right now. Not with an Avatar of Virtuoso somewhere in the background, not with the others on the platform above him, not in a universe that was already trying to keep him here permanently.
He reached down and picked up a chunk of floating rock.
Felt the weight of it in his palm for a moment.
'Relativistic Railstrike.'
Electromagnetic force gathered around the rock instantly, coiling around it like something alive, building in layers, accelerating the mass in increments that compressed seconds into fractions, and then he threw it.
The rock left his hand at near light speed.
The space it passed through warped visibly, reality struggling to accommodate something moving that fast through it.
The rock hit Hulk dead center and took out half his left side clean, gamma flesh and bone simply ceasing to exist from the point of impact outward, the sheer kinetic force at near light speed not bothering to push through so much as erase.
Hulk floated in space looking down at the missing section of himself.
Then the regeneration started.
Or tried to.
The green flesh crept toward the wound from the edges, gamma energy pouring into the gap, the same regeneration that had closed every wound this body had ever taken since the infection began — and then it stopped. Halfway.
The tissue that had regrown halted mid process and went no further, the gamma energy circling the wound uselessly like water that had forgotten how to flow downhill.
Hulk stared at it.
For the first time since Luke had dropped through the clouds, something other than hunger and rage crossed his face. Something that in another life might have been Bruce Banner trying to understand a problem.
"Yeah," Luke said. "You can't regenerate. Did you think I would let you?"
Final State. One of the talents that came with his race. Any injury he inflicted was locked at the quantum level the moment it landed — no recovery, no regeneration, no matter what the body was capable of.
Gamma radiation or not, the wound simply wasn't permitted to close.
Hulk stared at the missing section of himself, then back at Luke, hunger and confusion producing something that came out as a roar with no clear direction.
Luke looked at him calmly.
"Shall we finish this."
*****
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