Marvel: Raising — Chapter 128 - Their Respective Battles and Ascensions

Farm Crowd vs. Elders of the Universe.

Setting Guan Fuyun aside, it was four against seven. Outnumbered.

But...

Cosmic energy + Trait: Let There Be Light + built-in-sun Superman Azu.

Darkhold + chaos magic unleashed Wanda.

Phoenix Force unfurled Godzilla.

And a not-hungry Galacta.

Every single one of them was a monster.

Galacta alone, standing at the peak of the single-universe tier, brushing the ceiling of combat power, was enough to make the Elders of the Universe relive the terror of getting absolutely demolished by an invincible Galactus.

And on top of that, losing meant execution?

They'd watched the Collector get choked out by Guan Fuyun. Watched even the rule governing a Creator-God's death get nullified into nothing.

The Elders of the Universe mentally broke.

Which, ironically, made them reach back for fighting skills they hadn't used in ages.

"Not fun," the Gardener muttered. "This time it's not fun at all."

She raised a hand. Colossal vines erupted from the ground, tangling across the entirety of Sakaar in an instant. Twisted branches and wooden tendrils burst from the soil like countless wooden dragons, a scale so vast it swallowed the horizon.

"ROAR!"

Thankfully, Godzilla could shrink and grow at will. It pulled an Ant-Man, emergency-miniaturizing itself.

Otherwise, getting caught in that strike would've meant heavy damage. An early exit.

Through a pair of eyes brimming with ancient wisdom, Godzilla saw it, saw the cosmic energy flooding every vine.

The all-purpose cosmic energy flowed through roots, stems, and leaves like blood, granting each plant its terrible strangeness.

To Godzilla, cosmic energy was prickly food. Even as the Blue Planet's guardian, digesting someone else's cosmic energy was nearly impossible. But purely absorbing it, assimilating it, feeding it into the Phoenix Force?

It could see hope.

"SKREEEONK—"

In an earthshaking roar, Godzilla swelled back to full size.

Phoenix Force saturated its body from snout to tail, a hyper-powered version of flame Golza, the true King of the Monsters.

SWISH! SWISH! SWISH!

Descent of the Tree World. More vines surged in, some cascading down from space itself. They coiled around the Gardener's enormous Celestial form, mimicking the Celestials' divine alloy, locking together like armor.

But at the same time, a low VRRRM VRRRM charging hum rose from Godzilla's body. Its dorsal fins lit up one by one. It swung its massive tail, Phoenix Force coating the surface, and fired up its minor abilities: molecular control, matter recombination.

Its tail became a colossal axe.

Timber.

It sliced through the plant matter clean.

Then Godzilla bit down with a thunderous GAO. The Gardener's Celestial body shattered. Blood dyed a swath of sky red. The impact sent energy into chaos, triggering a nuclear detonation.

A proper Celestial was either an energy-state lifeform like Galacta, near-perfect, like light-particle-form Ultraman, or flesh-and-blood fused with machinery, aggregated by rules.

The improvised kind, like the Elders of the Universe, were just flesh-and-blood plus cosmic energy bolted on top.

This strike broke through. The Gardener couldn't swap parts and instantly recover like a true Celestial. She toppled with a shriek, blood and cosmic energy intertwining as they gushed wildly into the air.

The chaotic energy transformed into the most primordial things there were: light, heat, explosion. Temperatures terrifying enough to melt the planet.

Even a Skyfather couldn't endure this energy tide for long. They'd burn to death.

But Godzilla could.

Even stripped of everything else, it routinely snacked on nukes and fed on radiation. Now, armed with a Trait and the Phoenix Force, its appetite had grown into something genuinely horrifying.

It gulped down the Gardener's cosmic energy in great mouthfuls, accelerating the conversion all the while, swinging its tail, raking with its claws, hammering down again and again with the Phoenix Force.

The whole sequence was basically Energy Drain plus Cosmic Shift. The stronger the enemy, the weaker the enemy became.

It stunned the Gardener completely.

...

"WHOOSH!"

The one who engaged Wanda was the Runner.

Speed.

Ultimate speed. The extreme velocity that cosmic energy granted him shattered Wanda's magic arrays before she could finish weaving them, interrupting each one in turn.

In a daze, she nearly hallucinated, her unawakened self, sparring with Pietro.

Extreme speed was inherently one of the most powerful abilities in existence.

Catching up to the Runner? Even catching a glimpse of his exhaust trail? That was something Wanda could never do in this lifetime.

But she never needed to win through speed.

FLAP-FLAP-FLAP!

The Darkhold flipped its own pages. Countless spells shook loose like rain.

Scarlet spread. Reality twisted.

In the zone where Wanda and the Runner fought — soil, mountains, plants, buildings — everything began transforming. Everything became Wanda.

Countless Wandas, occupying countless points in space.

One Wanda after another clashed with the same Runner, upholding the mage's tradition: close-quarters combat, hacking at him with magic arrays.

At a glance, it was chaos. Countless afterimages flickered and died. It looked more like two speedsters locked in slaughter than a mage facing a Runner. The sky was full of projections. Shockwaves erupted everywhere. Fireballs burst. Buildings kept collapsing.

It seemed like the Runner held the upper hand.

But every time he hit Wanda in close quarters, every single time he touched a magic array,

A trace of chaos magic marked him.

Like a moth crashing into a spiderweb.

The harder it struggled, the closer it came to helplessness and death.

And Wanda wasn't even in a hurry to finish him. Her eyes glowing scarlet, she kept rewriting reality, twisting rules, seemingly working toward something specific, crafting a Celestial puppet.

This was the terror of Phoenix Force and chaos magic.

Godzilla and Wanda didn't need to understand the rules. With enough raw power, they could simply shatter them outright.

Just like the comics, Phoenix hosts and the Scarlet Witch casually reshaping the entire universe. Something even true Celestials couldn't pull off.

...

But Azu couldn't do that.

His Superman powers were absurdly broken, yes. But in Marvel, even if the original Superman himself crossed over, he'd still have to follow the fundamental laws.

So after taking down the Grandmaster,

Azu was the only one who got sent flying.

He had 2 opponents. One was the Champion. As the name implied, this one had poured every drop of cosmic energy into raw strength and brawling, nothing else.

In some translations, the Champion was also called the "Cosmic Champion." The champion of power.

An exaggerated title, sure.

But having the credentials to claim such a title was itself a symbol.

"BOOM!"

One hand gripping Pym Particles and an artificial sun, the other gripping a blade set with the Power Stone.

Azu, fully juiced, threw a punch. His fist felt like a singularity, sunlight wrapping around it as it drove forward.

The Champion answered with an equally brutal strike. One Celestial body, one bio-force field. Two heavyweights colliding in the purest way possible. Sunlight warped. Energy went haywire. Multicolored shards of reality sprayed outward toward the cosmos.

Azu let out a muffled grunt. His body shot backward, punched clean through Sakaar.

Then through the energy star-body the Astronomer had summoned.

But under Guan Fuyun's gaze, Azu smiled.

Not bravado. Not a child's stubborn pride flaring up.

In that moment, he suddenly understood some of what Guan Fuyun had told him. He remembered the stories his dad used to tell.

Like in Ultraman's world: once humans grasped how Ultraman's energy actually worked, they didn't just replicate various star-shattering beams with fighter jets. They could convert those beams into pure light energy and use them to recharge Ultraman directly.

Why?

Because Celestials and Ultramen shared too many similarities. By that same logic, what humans could do for Ultraman, Azu could replicate for Celestials.

He just needed to find the key.

And that key, that realm, in Azu's mind, was formulas.

The formulas of cosmic energy. The formulas of rules.

Just as knowing 1+1=2 let people calculate further. Just as learning thermal and kinetic formulas let people build trains and cars.

Celestials were Celestials because they had become the formulas themselves.

Every Celestial was, in a sense, an independent world. They could make 1+1 not equal 2. They could turn a thermal formula into a freezing formula, alter themselves, and through that alteration, alter reality.

Flight. Energy beams. Psychic abilities. Matter recombination. Time and space jumps. The Grandmaster's whole suite of powers, this was where they came from.

The moment he understood it, something cracked open.

Like a sudden enlightenment.

Azu felt his power surge continuously, climbing toward something vast. He became stronger than he'd ever been, and not just in raw strength. As he reached toward the idea of becoming a formula, of rewriting formulas,

He felt his perspective shift. The dimension he inhabited seemed to rise.

"So this is what it means to reach the realm of Celestials?"

...

"So this is the Anti-Life Equation?"

At the same time.

DC world.

Countless Parademons dropped like flies. Apokolips shattered.

Ghost-Wanda's face had gone deathly pale. Black Strange was spiritually hollowed out.

And John, his face nearly cracked apart, walked toward Darkseid's corpse. Excited. Obsessed. Laughing.

He had won.

If he wanted to be worthy of calling Guan-dad his father, he couldn't afford to disgrace himself. Couldn't be a waste. Couldn't be a burden.

He had to conquer this world. Concentrate every scrap of its power.

Only then would he have the right to stand before Guan-dad.

Now.

He had taken another step forward.

➤ Next: The Homelander of the Anti-Life Equation