"Hmmm. Sentry, but controlled by a mind-controlling device."
Luke appeared behind Sentry and looked at the device rotating around his head.
Sentry's zombie face split into a smile the moment he heard the voice and he turned and drove his fist straight into Luke's face without any buildup whatsoever.
Luke caught it with one hand.
The shockwave obliterated everything in the sky and ground within range. Clouds gone. Debris gone. The ruined structures below reduced to flat nothing, the air pushed out from the point of impact in a perfect expanding ring that had no interest in leaving anything standing.
Luke looked at his hand, then at Sentry.
"Quite the punch you are packing," he said. "But you can't injure me with just physical strength."
He held Sentry's fist for a moment then released it and reached further, past the hunger, past the virus, through the infected mind until he found the memory he was looking for.
The moment the device had been placed on Sentry's head. The hands that had done it. The face behind those hands.
Luke turned and looked at Tony with an expression that was somewhere between impressed and unsurprised.
"Tony," he said. "You really did surprise me. I didn't expect you to be the one behind this."
Superior Iron Man. A Tony Stark from across the multiverse who had never been anyone's hero.
"You—" Tony and Tony's variant both turned to look at each other at the exact same time, running the exact same calculation.
"No," Luke said. "Not you two. A different Tony. Evil version. Straight up narcissistic and selfish."
Both Tony's visibly relaxed.
Meanwhile in another universe, Superior Iron Man stood in his white armor, eyes fixed on a display showing Luke catching Sentry's fist with one hand while everything around them ceased to exist from the shockwave.
He watched it once. Then again.
"Well, might as well use the new toy I got," Superior Iron Man said, finger hovering over the control. "Let's see if he's sun proof."
He pressed the button.
The device on Sentry's head reacted instantly, space around them distorting, reality folding inward at a single point, and before Luke could read what was happening both he and Sentry vanished from the sky above the ruined city.
They reappeared near the sun.
The plasma walls of the solar interior stretched in every direction, temperatures that reduced matter to its base components pressing in from all sides, the roar of nuclear fusion a constant presence that went past sound into something felt in the bones.
Luke looked around.
"So this is your plan," he said. "Throw me into the sun."
"No," Sentry said, and the voice coming out wasn't quite the hungry zombie from before. Something older had surfaced behind the infected eyes, something that had been sitting underneath the virus this entire time. "It's something else entirely."
The Void.
Sentry's other half. The dark counterpart that had existed inside Robert Reynolds since the beginning, the entity that the power of a million exploding suns was only one side of — the Void was the other side, and it didn't have limits the way everything else did.
It took over completely.
The energy release was immediate and total, pouring outward from Sentry in waves that the sun itself couldn't contain, the stellar plasma around them reacting, destabilizing, the nuclear fusion at the solar core accelerating beyond its natural threshold as the Void fed into it.
The sun began to expand.
"No one can escape now," Superior Iron Man's voice came through Sentry, cold and satisfied. "A supernova will kill everyone within range. And for anyone who survives that, the radiation will finish the job."
Luke stood in the middle of a dying star and watched it come apart around him.
"You know there is a theory," Luke said, completely unbothered by the nuclear plasma pressing in from every direction, "that inside a black hole time, space, everything stops. No flow. No direction. Nothing escapes." He looked at Sentry. "Do you think a supernova can escape that?"
A singularity opened beside him.
Small at first. A single point of absolute nothing that had no interest in staying small. It grew steadily, silently, the way black holes always grew —without announcement, simply consuming.
The radiation pouring off the destabilizing sun hit the event horizon and vanished. The plasma walls of the solar interior began leaning inward, the nuclear fusion feeding the singularity rather than the explosion, the supernova's energy being redirected into the one thing in the universe that had no output.
The event horizon formed completely.
In his white armor in another universe entirely, Superior Iron Man watched his display and went still.
The supernova he had engineered, the kill radius he had calculated to eliminate everything within range, was feeding a black hole the size of a small planet and growing larger with every second.
His finger hovered over the controls and had nowhere useful to go.
He hadn't accounted for this.
A supernova was useless in front of something that simply ate everything pointed at it and asked for more.
"So," Luke said, his eyes shifting, the pupils dissolving into event horizons, twin points of absolute nothing looking across at the Void through the collapsing stellar interior, "do you want to fight? I want to see who the real Void is. You or me. Void Sovereign against whatever you are."
His white hair began to glow, energy threading through every strand, the same void energy that was currently eating a star spreading outward from him like a second skin, the black hole beside him pulsing in rhythm with his presence like it recognized its owner.
The Void inside Sentry looked back at him.
*****
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