Marvel: Raising — Chapter 131 - The Celestials, the Ancient One, Eternity
The Celestials, who once granted this planet life, civilization, and technology, arrived as interstellar giants.
Even the smallest auxiliary Celestial stood over a thousand meters tall.
And the tallest among them, the combat Celestial built for killing, was called the Exterminator.
This one stretched beyond sight in every direction. The thinnest armor at his most vulnerable point was five hundred meters thick.
The Celestials crossed the universe, passed through the atmosphere, and the energy that rolled off their descent had been recorded as miracles in the legends of countless civilizations.
Winds screamed. Tsunamis swallowed the sky. Thunder split the air. Continental plates lurched and groaned, and entire nations were torn from the ground and hurled into the heavens.
"This civilization — failure."
"This species — failure."
"...Failed products require eradication."
The gods spoke in lightning. Their rage was mountains. Their rebuke was the earth itself.
In this moment.
The voice of all things reached a boil, and the Judge among the Celestials issued his divine decree.
Across the war-ravaged planet, countless intelligent beings stood frozen. Blank. Staring up at the gods with hollow, uncomprehending eyes.
Then they saw it. They saw the Exterminator bring his fist down.
BOOM!
As the Celestials' dedicated combat unit, the Exterminator's power was the absolute ceiling for any single-universe-level being.
His fist crashed down like a falling world.
The geography and climate of an entire region changed in an instant. The earth was shredded paper thrown into an open flame, collapsing, evaporating. Smoke and haze swallowed the sky. Countless intelligent beings dropped into fissures, were buried under rubble, torn apart by hurricanes, scorched black by lightning.
Vast cosmic energy erupted from a single point and swept outward in every direction, consuming the planet in a breath.
One strike.
That was all it took.
No resistance. No suspense. No desperate struggle of ants against gods. There was nothing here except a cleansing.
Simple. Effortless.
A civilization was extinguished. A species ceased to exist.
The slaughter complete, the Exterminator unclenched his fist and straightened.
Behind him, Celestials descended one after another. They would heal this war-ravaged world, then seed it again, running the experiment once more, creating an entirely new species and granting them the chance to grow.
This was how they searched for the universe's path to permanent existence.
This had been their only mission across billions of years.
But without warning, every Celestial stopped.
A stillness passed through the hive at once. They had all sensed it: the death of one of their own. Every gaze turned to the Judge.
"A Celestial has fallen," the Exterminator said, his voice a low, resonant rumble.
"So it seems."
The Judge gave a single nod.
The Celestials were called a race, but they functioned more like a hive-mind. Between them existed something like Ultraman's cross-dimensional awareness, each one connected to every other across space and time.
Which was why, in the comics, killing one Celestial was rarely the end.
It was the beginning.
They would call in reinforcements the way Ultraman called in his brothers, and what followed would be a merciless, crushing gang-beating.
"Let me see what we're dealing with."
The Judge held the highest authority among them. He stirred spacetime, bent time backward, and pulled up the footage.
In it was Azu, finishing a juvenile Celestial with a single punch.
Their sizes were completely different. But the Celestial essence radiating off Azu was unmistakable: the realm, the aura, the conceptual weight of a true god. It stood out with total clarity.
And unlike the Elders of the Universe, who possessed the Celestial realm in name only while doing nothing but amusing themselves, a motley and third-rate collection with no real standing —
Azu was genuinely overseeing a planet. Managing an entire civilization.
Under his watch, the Blue Planet's superheroes and superpowered beings had found purpose, direction, something to belong to. Everyone had settled into something resembling normal.
Only external crises arrived. There was no local chaos, no homegrown madness. The Blue Planet was a scene of thriving vitality, every living thing racing toward its potential.
This was right.
This was exactly what a Celestial was supposed to do.
"That direction. The god of the Blue Planet killed a Celestial."
"And then he became one himself."
"In that case, he is not guilty."
"Issue him an establishment credential."
The Judge said.
Yes.
As he saw it, a regular Celestial had died, and another had stepped into the vacancy. The balance of the universe remained intact.
Therefore, Azu was not guilty.
In fact, because Azu's conduct so perfectly matched what the Celestials expected of one of their own, they would grant him a formal establishment credential.
To any normal person, this sounded insane. Completely incomprehensible.
To the Celestials, it was perfectly reasonable.
Blood vengeance for brothers and sisters? That concept simply did not exist.
The reason taking down one Celestial immediately brought a whole swarm of them descending on you was purely, mechanically, about maintaining cosmic balance. Any existence capable of killing a Celestial was almost certainly a pest, a heretic, a tumor in the body of the universe. It had to be crushed before the damage spread.
But Azu was also a Celestial. Also registered within the cosmic system.
So there was no issue.
He had eliminated one Celestial, then filled that vacancy himself. One subtracted, one added. The total number of active Celestials in the universe had not changed. Balance remained balanced.
The Celestials had no reason to pursue a current colleague over a former one who had simply been optimized out of existence.
And there was more.
As the records continued to load, the Judge saw Azu's history: the complete annihilation of the Council of Elders of the Universe. And then, Galacta.
Wiping out the Elders of the Universe? What was that?
Unambiguous, meritorious bandit-suppression. Full credit.
And he knew Galacta. All Celestials were, in the end, workers under the creator deity Eternity. Galacta was the daughter of Galactus, a creator deity in his own right.
The two sides were like different departments under the same authority. Calling Galactus a superior was not an exaggeration by any stretch.
Didn't that make Azu's background completely clean and unimpeachable?
"Issue him an establishment credential."
The Judge repeated himself, submitted the application to Eternity, and the Celestials returned to their respective tasks.
The establishment credential was not a position. It was not a role. There was no salary attached.
It was authorization.
Unlike Wanda or Godzilla, Azu had become a Celestial through the most orthodox path available.
The moment he became a deity of the Marvel Universe, the Marvel Universe had already accepted him.
Like someone who stumbles into becoming an Ultraman through sheer luck, fights a small monster, and from that moment on is an Ultraman. All the Land of Light can really offer is an official Ultra Signature: buddy, if things go sideways, call for backup. We'll show up.
This establishment credential was the Celestial version of that signature.
...
Deep within the universe, no, within the universe and the multiverse itself.
Upon receiving the Celestials' message.
It opened its eyes.
What followed was a sight both staggering and achingly beautiful.
In the vast, profound darkness of the starry sky, auroras pulsed and breathed at specific, measured frequencies. Then countless radiant threads of light traced the outline of an immensely abstract face, something vaguely resembling a human visage, with one purple eye and one red, and a mouth that glowed gold.
This was the foremost of Marvel's Five Great Creator Deities.
Eternity.
"A Celestial who ascended to the position through his own efforts, with a supreme deity from another world standing behind him, one who may hold the power to influence the future of the entire universe."
"Interesting."
"So this is the Blue Planet you spoke of?"
Eternity's voice landed like a great bell struck at the center of everything.
Then, in the solemn depths of space, something quietly comic happened.
The Ancient One's smooth, boiled-egg bald head rose into frame.
"Yes, Lord Eternity."
The Ancient One's voice was serene, unhurried. "Countless multiverses. Countless internal wars, countless destructions, an endless, ceaseless procession of chaos. I imagine Your Lordship has long grown weary of this fate."
"But the Blue Planet, that man, carries the possibility to change all of it."
Eternity laughed. "Hahahaha. Interesting, interesting. Then let us wait and see."
He approved the Celestials' application.
...
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