Energy surged through Ikaris, golden light blazing across every line of his body.

"I am the strongest warrior of the Eternals! It should have been me leading everyone to complete the mission!"

"Not soft-hearted Ajak!"

"Kill you, and everything gets back on track!"

The words weren't even out before he turned into a streak of golden light and launched himself straight at Hermione.

The shockwave hit like a wall. His speed was astonishing.

The lasers in his eyes condensed to a razor point, ready to burn this insolent Witch to nothing.

Hermione glanced at him and pressed her palm down gently.

"Crush him."

"Chibaku Tensei."

RUMBLE!

The sky went dark again.

That massive stone sphere, still hanging in midair from before, began to spin. Wildly. Instantly.

The gravitational field locked onto Ikaris.

His flight stuttered and slowed, like he'd hit an invisible wall of quicksand.

"What?!"

Ikaris's eyes went wide.

He threw everything into breaking free, energy detonating through his body in wave after wave, but against a Seventh-Level Force Magic gravitational field, every bit of it was meaningless.

The stone sphere dropped.

He didn't even have time to react. The asteroid slammed straight into his face.

Tens of millions of tons of compressed rock, carrying enough force to level a continent, hit him dead-on.

Every Eternal's face went white.

Only now did it hit them, they'd been so stunned by the truth that they'd completely forgotten what this Witch had been doing when they arrived. She'd only paused. The spell hadn't stopped.

Now the sphere was moving again, and the pressure rolling off it made every single one of them feel it in their scalp.

"Scatter!"

Gilgamesh roared it and threw himself backward first.

The others broke in every direction.

RUMBLE. RUMBLE. RUMBLE.

The sphere took Ikaris with it and drove straight into the ocean.

The impact punched a massive hole in the surface. Tens of millions of tons of seawater blasted skyward and hung there, a perfect ring of water, a hundred meters tall.

Then the tsunami came. Radiating outward from the strike point in every direction. Walls of water surging up, crashing over everything.

The Eternals used whatever they had. They barely held their ground.

Seconds passed.

The waves died down. The ocean flattened out, leaving only slow, widening rings of ripples.

Everyone stared at the water.

BLUB. BLUB. BLUB.

Bubbles rose from the deep.

Then a streak of golden light punched up from the surface and came down hard onto the nearby mass of Tiamut's body.

Ikaris hit his knees. One arm dragging. Suit in shreds. The golden light around him flickering and dim.

His left arm was bent the wrong way. Broken clean.

A section of his chest had caved inward. Ribs, impossible to say how many.

Blood ran steadily from the corners of his mouth.

"Cough, cough, cough—"

Every heave sprayed a fresh mist of red.

Hermione watched him, mildly surprised.

"Tougher than expected. That should have turned him to paste."

Celestial-made body with physical enhancement on top of it. She revised her estimate. Not as weak as she'd assumed.

"Ikaris!"

A little girl, she looked about ten, shrieked and ran to him, throwing her arms around him to hold him up.

Then she spun around, eyes locked onto Hermione in midair, her face twisted with hate.

"How dare you hurt him!"

"I'll kill you!"

Hermione gave a short, cold laugh and didn't bother responding. She looked past the rageful little figure to the rest of the Eternals instead.

She took stock. Asian, white, Black, Indian. One who'd never grown up. One who was deaf-mute. One who was gay.

A lineup that practically wrote its own diversity report.

The powers were even better.

A muscle-bound bruiser whose entire combat strategy was punching things. A knockoff Homelander. Someone who could channel cosmic energy and chose to spend it summoning hand-to-hand melee weapons like some kind of idiot. And a man who pointed finger-guns and went pew-pew.

The mind controller, though. That was the real masterpiece.

Assigned to a combat unit built to purge Deviants. Mind control that worked only on ordinary humans. Completely, utterly useless against the very thing they were deployed to fight.

You couldn't make this up.

There was no way any of this was accidental. These misfits had Celestial-caliber weird design choices written all over them. Some twisted cosmic joke, deliberate down to the last detail.

Hermione pulled her attention back and spread her fingers toward the half-dead figure on the ground below.

The force field dropped like a fist.

"Aah,!"

Ikaris's body lurched upward against his will. His limbs snapped outward, seized by an invisible crushing grip, stretched spread-eagle in midair.

"Let go of me!"

He fought it with everything he had.

His strength, the thing he'd always been proudest of, was nothing. Against this Witch, it was the flailing of a newborn.

CRACK!

The sound of bone breaking. Sharp and clear.

"AAAGH,!"

Pain detonated through him. His face twisted and he screamed.

He regretted it. All of it.

He had never imagined that a native Witch, a creature of this backwater planet, could reach this level. This was something else entirely.

The shadow of death settled over him, cold and absolute, and he felt fear for the first time in his existence.

"Wait, wait!"

He wanted to beg. His pride clamped shut around the words, especially here, in front of all of them.

He couldn't get it out.

The force field tightened.

CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.

"No, no, I was wr, "

He broke. The plea was right there on his lips.

"Tongue-Tying Curse."

Hermione's voice was flat.

The words died in his throat. Completely. No matter how desperately he tried to force them out, nothing came.

He could only watch as his own body was compressed, piece by piece. Nearly every bone in his body splintering apart. The pain was so total it kept dragging him toward the edge of unconsciousness.

"Lady Witch, please, stop!"

Ajak surged forward a step.

"Lady Witch, spare his life!" Sersi was right behind her, voice tight. "He was only confused for a moment. We'll watch over him ourselves. He won't cause any more trouble, we swear it."

Hermione turned her head and looked at them both. Cool. Unhurried.

"He's a loyal dog who belongs to the Celestials. Body and soul." Her voice didn't waver. "He has to die."

"If the Celestials arrive and he's still breathing — if he reports back — that's a death sentence for Earth. For everyone on it."

Silence.

Ajak opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She closed it again.

Sersi looked down, her eyes full of something raw and helpless.

But they knew. They both knew she was right.

"I'm sorry."

Ajak shut her eyes.

BANG!

A dull, heavy crack.

The invisible force compressed inward and Ikaris exploded.

A mist of blood burst open in the air, hung there for a moment, and drifted away on the sea wind.

The Eternals stood frozen.

Their strongest warrior. Gone. Crushed like a bug, without any particular effort, by this Witch.

"Ikaris!"

The little girl screamed.

Her eyes flooded red. She spun toward Hermione.

"I'll kill you!"

Her hands flew up. Dozens of vivid illusions tore themselves out of thin air, phantom shapes hurling themselves toward Hermione.

➤ Next: The Secret of the Celestials

Chapter 384 - The Secret of the Celestials

Hermione shook her head.

"Thousands of years old and still a lovesick fool. Hopeless."

"If you can't bear to be parted from him, go join him."

She raised her hand and closed her fist.

An invisible force locked on instantly.

Snap.

The crisp crack of a breaking neck rang out.

The scream cut off mid-breath. Sprite's head lolled at a grotesque angle, and she crumpled limply to the ground.

Two dead in a matter of minutes.

Clean. Decisive. Not a moment's hesitation.

Ajak, Sersi, and the others stared up at the beautiful girl hovering in the air and felt a chill crawl up their spines.

This was how the Witch worked.

Hermione's gaze swept across the remaining Eternals.

Not one of them dared meet her eyes. Even Gilgamesh, the most hot-tempered among them, dropped his head.

She didn't move to strike again.

These people were on the side of protecting Earth, after all. She had plans for them — she'd still need their cooperation when the Celestials came.

Ajak stepped forward, breaking the heavy silence.

"Your Ladyship, if you intend to stop the Emergence — what comes after?"

"The moment Tiamut dies, the Celestials will sense it immediately. When they descend, Earth still won't survive."

"How do you plan to fool them?"

Hermione was just about to lay out the details of her plan when her expression froze.

She snapped her head toward the corpses of Ikaris and Sprite.

Something was wrong.

Where was her Soul Energy?!

Her heart dropped. She cast her perception outward and felt the anomaly immediately.

Under Dark Harvest's mechanics, the moment a target died, their soul was automatically pulled to her side, shattered into pure Soul Energy, and absorbed. That was how it had always worked.

But the souls of Ikaris and Sprite were not flying toward her.

They were being dragged away by something else.

The direction was...

Underground.

She'd never encountered this before. Without hesitation, she flickered and reappeared directly above the two bodies.

Perception: full open.

Two translucent soul-shapes were peeling free from the corpses, slowly sinking, drifting downward toward Tiamut's enormous form.

"Trying to run?"

Her eyes went cold. Dark Harvest surged back to life.

Ikaris's soul was wrenched back by force, shattering in midair into pure Soul Energy that flooded into her body.

She turned her attention to Sprite immediately.

Too late.

Sprite's soul had moved faster. While Hermione was pulling Ikaris back, it had already made contact with Tiamut's body.

Hermione's pupils shrank.

The next moment, she watched something that stopped her cold.

The instant Sprite's soul touched Tiamut, it shattered, collapsing into a mass of Soul Energy.

Tiamut absorbed it. Gone without a trace.

The entire sequence was a perfect mirror of her own Dark Harvest.

Strip the soul.

Shatter the soul.

Absorb the energy.

Identical.

Hermione hung motionless in the air.

In all the years since her transmigration, she had never once seen another being that could absorb Soul Energy. Not one. Until now.

Thoughts cascaded through her mind at a breakneck pace.

A sharp unease took hold. She looked toward that colossal form in the distance.

Could it be...

A terrifying hypothesis surfaced.

Were the Celestials fundamentally soul harvesters, just like her? Did they grow stronger the same way, by feeding on Soul Energy?

Countless threads snapped together at once.

Why did the Celestials scatter the seeds of life across the entire cosmos?

Why did the birth of a new Celestial require a living planet as its cradle?

Why was the prerequisite for an Emergence that a planet's intelligent population reach its absolute peak?

The answer was right there.

Souls.

Only that way could enough Soul Energy be harvested to sustain an infant Celestial bursting free of its shell in a single surge, evolving into its complete form in one stroke.

And then there was the Celestials' so-called Judgment.

Throughout the Marvel universe, Celestials descended on planets to judge whether a species deserved to keep existing. Hermione had always assumed that was cosmic arrogance. The hauteur of gods who answered to no one.

She saw it clearly now. That was the wrong answer entirely.

The Judgment was a front.

What they were actually doing was inspecting the crop. Assessing whether the species' total Soul Energy had hit the quota.

Fall short, and they were declared "worthy of continued existence," spared for now, left to fatten up for a later harvest.

Hit the mark, and the Celestials manufactured a pretext, wiped the species out, and absorbed the Soul Energy.

A flawless harvesting system. Cosmic-scale leek farming, running since the beginning of time.

The more she turned it over, the colder she felt.

She had stumbled onto the Celestials' real secret. The kind of secret that almost no one in the entire universe knew.

And the moment that landed, Hermione's expression turned genuinely ugly.

Her plan to deceive the Celestials had been straightforward: use the Imperius Curse to control the Eternals, alter their memories, and make the Celestials believe Sersi and the others had banded together to kill Ikaris and Tiamut in order to protect Earth. Clean story. No loose ends.

That way, even if the Celestials investigated, the blame would land entirely on the Eternals. Her existence would never surface.

But if the Celestials were also soul harvesters...

Then their understanding of souls, their mastery over them, had reached an absolute apex.

Which meant a simple memory modification carried far too much risk. She couldn't guarantee they wouldn't see through the tampering and find her.

And the moment the Celestials learned there was another soul harvester operating on Earth...

Hermione harbored no illusions about how that would go. If their positions were reversed, she wouldn't tolerate a competitor either.

This was a conflict over survival resources at the most fundamental level. There was no sharing. No coexistence.

She floated in the air, her expression dark as Snape's on a bad day.

The original plan was dead.

But she couldn't let the Emergence happen either.

If she didn't kill Tiamut and he emerged, Earth would be destroyed, and she would go down with it.

If she did kill Tiamut, following the original plot and letting Sersi and the others team up to freeze him, the outcome wouldn't change much. Arishem would still abduct Sersi and the others afterward, crack open their real memories, and scrutinize everything inside.

Everything she had done here today would be exposed, laid out right in front of it.

Strike or retreat, the blade was waiting either way.

She was backed into a corner on both sides. The arrow was already notched; there was no putting it back.

"...Shit."

Hermione swore. Rare enough that it almost sounded strange coming out of her mouth.

The Eternals watched her expression collapse without warning, then go utterly still and silent. None of them had any idea what was going on inside this Witch's head. None of them dared ask.

Ajak opened her mouth.

Hermione moved.

She flickered, reappearing directly above Tiamut's body. Her wand snapped up. A blinding bolt of green light tore through the air.

It struck.

A hairline fracture appeared on the surface of Tiamut's body.

And then nothing. Tiamut didn't stir.

Hermione watched this without any change in expression.

The Killing Curse failing to touch Tiamut was well within her expectations.

Soul harvesters of that magnitude would inevitably carry top-tier soul defenses. Factor in that Tiamut's raw divine power already outstripped her own, and a Level 6 Killing Curse bouncing off was completely normal.

➤ Next: Advancing to Level Seven