She turned and looked at Ajak.

"I need a favor from all of you."

Ajak blinked. "What kind of favor?"

Hermione raised her hand and pointed at Druig, the mind-controller who had stayed silent and apart from the rest.

"I need you to work together to channel energy into Druig and amplify his abilities."

The Eternals exchanged glances.

Hermione didn't acknowledge their confusion.

"Doubao."

The moment she said it.

Doubao stepped out of invisibility. The Mind Stone on her forehead cast a faint golden glow.

The Eternals startled as one, each falling back half a step.

They hadn't even noticed. Someone had been crouching beside the Witch the entire time.

"That's..."

Sersi stared at Doubao's forehead, eyes wide. "An Infinity Stone?"

"The Mind Stone."

Hermione's voice was even. "I'm having Doubao use the Mind Stone to assist you in breaking down Tiamut's soul defenses."

She ran through the original storyline in her head.

In canon, the Eternals' combined power had been enough for Druig to push Tiamut into a deeper sleep. That meant their energy — as creations of the Celestials, shared the same origin as the Celestials themselves. It could touch Tiamut's soul. Nothing else explained it.

With the Mind Stone added on top, dismantling Tiamut's soul defenses was more than possible.

She didn't elaborate. "Let's move. I'm short on time."

The Eternals looked at each other.

They were already on the ship. There was no getting off. "Do what she says."

If Tiamut didn't die today, the Emergence would begin and Earth would be destroyed.

If Tiamut died, the Celestials would come calling.

Either way, it was a dead end.

They had their doubts, deep ones, but all they could do now was trust that the Witch actually had a way to fool the Celestials.

Ajak drew a breath and stepped up to Druig's side first.

The others stopped hesitating. Sersi, Gilgamesh, Thena, and the rest moved forward.

The remaining Eternals closed into a circle, pressing their palms against Druig's shoulders and back.

Golden cosmic energy ignited across their skin. It ran down their arms and poured into Druig in a torrent.

Doubao raised her head at the same moment.

The Mind Stone blazed. A yellow beam drove straight into the center of Druig's brow.

"Ah!"

Druig's eyes snapped open. He roared, and his gaze flooded gold.

The power hit him like a wall. Energy unlike anything he had ever felt surged through his body. He crashed to his knees and drove both palms into the ground.

"Go!"

Golden patterns erupted from his hands and spread outward like a spiderweb, racing up Tiamut's body.

BOOM!

The entire island lurched into a violent shudder.

Tiamut felt it. Identical golden patterns rose across its surface, pushing back against the intrusion.

Two energies, same source, collided across the Celestial's body in a furious contest.

But Tiamut was still an infant. Not a fully grown Celestial. Slumbering, it couldn't come close to its full strength.

Under that pressure, and with the Mind Stone bearing down on top of it, the golden patterns across its body began to dim.

Hermione pushed her senses wide open.

She felt it clearly, Tiamut's soul defenses were crumbling, exactly as she'd predicted. "It's working!"

She raised her hand. A sickly green flame bloomed in her palm.

Hela's hellfire.

She'd copied it into her magic book before coming here. She had discovered, somewhat unexpectedly, that beyond corroding the divine origin of Asgard's realm, it also had the effect of weakening soul power. Which made it perfect for this.

"Go."

She flicked her finger.

The hellfire left her hand and landed on Tiamut's body.

Green flames spread across it instantly.

A silent, bloodcurdling shriek rang out, not in the air, but somewhere deeper. Every person present felt it echo through their soul.

The golden patterns on Tiamut's body flickered wildly, fighting to push the hellfire out. But it was already weakened on too many fronts. It had nothing left to fight with.

Hermione felt it clearly. Tiamut's soul presence was guttering out.

Now.

Right now.

She raised her wand.

"Avada Kedavra!"

A beam of green light tore through the air, carrying nothing but killing intent and the absolute certainty of death.

This time, nothing stopped it.

It punched straight through the surface and hit Tiamut's soul dead on.

BOOM!

A long, faint sigh drifted across the sky and the earth.

The last cry of an infant Celestial dying.

Tiamut's soul was extinguished in an instant.

Then.

Soul Energy crashed into Hermione like a tidal wave.

Enormous.

Incomprehensibly enormous.

She felt her magic book kick into full gear, devouring and converting the flood of energy as fast as it could.

This was more Soul Energy than she had absorbed at any point since transmigrating. By a staggering margin.

A dozen or so seconds later, it was done.

Hermione opened her eyes. A flash of elation crossed her face.

She pulled up the magic book's panel immediately.

[Hermione Jean Granger]

[Magic Level: Lv6 (148,459 / 5,000,000)]

[Current Soul Energy: 50,327,641]

Fifty million.

50 million Soul Energy points.

Hermione inhaled sharply.

A Celestial was something else entirely.

Just an infant, and its soul energy clocked in at fifty million. Ego, that fraud who called himself a Celestial, wasn't even in the same conversation.

She couldn't begin to imagine what a fully grown one would be worth.

She didn't hesitate. She allocated the points.

Something detonated deep inside her.

Every inch of her body felt like it was being scoured clean. Her magic surged like a flood breaking through a dam, and something that had been holding it back simply ceased to exist.

Level Seven.

She had broken through to Level 7 magic.

Power rolled through her in waves. She felt the difference immediately, she and her former self were no longer operating in the same tier.

She raised her hand and closed it into a fist.

CRACK!

Ripples spread through the space around her, visible to the naked eye, as though the air itself might shatter under her grip.

That was Level 7 magic.

Still riding the rush, Hermione glanced at what the next level would cost.

[Hermione Jean Granger]

[Magic Level: Lv7 (0 / 500,000,000)]

[Current Soul Energy: 45,476,100]

She stopped.

After the 5... one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Eight zeroes.

Hermione:...

Five hundred million?

She must have read it wrong.

She shook her head, closed the panel, and opened it again.

Five hundred million.

Level 7 to Level 8 required 500 million Soul Energy points.

That was 100 times the cost of Level 6 to Level 7.

Do I look like I'm grinding a Hong Kong crime saga here?

Levels 1 through 7, she could at least trace the logic of the scaling. But this, Level 7 to Level 8, was something else entirely. There was no logic to trace.

The gap was absurd.

What, was she supposed to kill ten more Tiamuts?

This couldn't be right.

Unless...

Level 8 was the real threshold.

A cold thought settled in.

If Level 8 was a genuine qualitative leap, then adult Celestials were probably starting there at minimum.

Hermione felt her scalp prickle.

No wonder the Celestials ran rampant across the universe. This wasn't competition. It was a dimensional gap.

She took a slow breath and pushed the shock back down.

Not now. There was still business to finish.

Hermione turned and looked at Ajak.

Ajak could feel it too, Tiamut's presence was gone. That deep connection running through her soul had snapped, cleanly and completely. It could only mean one thing.

The infant Celestial was dead.

She had actually killed a Celestial.

"Your Ladyship."

Ajak took a breath. Her expression was complicated. "What do we do now?"

"The Celestials will notice something is wrong before long. We need to have a story ready, or else—"

A crimson light shot from Hermione's fingertip.

It hit Ajak square in the chest.

"What—"

Ajak stared down at herself, eyes wide with disbelief.

The next second, the red light moved like something alive. It leaped from her body and ricocheted between the Eternals in a blur.

WHOOSH. WHOOSH. WHOOSH.

Nobody had time to react.

In under a second, every single Eternal had been hit.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Head after head exploded. Blood and matter sprayed across the ground.

Bodies dropped.

Silence fell over the entire scene.

Not one of them had imagined it. Not for a moment.

The Witch who had stood beside them, worked with them, fought alongside them, had killed them all without a word.

➤ Next: Deceiving the Heavens

Chapter 386 - Deceiving the Heavens

Hermione's face stayed blank. Dark Harvest activated on its own.

Clusters of translucent souls tore free from the corpses and drifted toward her, pulled by an invisible current.

Just before they shattered, a single thought halted the process.

She flicked her hand. Several alchemical vessels materialized in the air.

Each soul was drawn into its container and fused with it.

The Horcruxes were complete.

She closed her eyes. The magic grimoire analyzed, and a connection to each Horcrux snapped into place.

A moment later, she opened them.

Control established.

Without hesitation, Hermione pressed deep into their souls and began excising memories.

Everything relating to her, gone.

Then she began laying down new ones.

The work was finished quickly. All the souls were returned to their bodies.

She raised her hand. A Healing Charm released without sound.

White light washed over the corpses. Shattered skulls began to knit themselves back together.

A few minutes later, every one of them was restored. Unconscious, but whole.

Hermione looked at the Eternals scattered across the ground and felt only a tired resignation.

She hadn't wanted to do this.

But conventional memory modification was too fragile, it sealed the original memories and plastered false ones on top. Sometimes it couldn't even fool ordinary wizards. A subject with enough willpower and conviction could break through on their own.

And these were Celestials. Among the most formidable souls in existence.

The risk was unacceptable.

She'd had to find another way.

Kill them, make them into Horcruxes, seize full control through the grimoire, and then go in and surgically remove those memories, not bury them, but erase them entirely and replace them with something new.

That was the difference. Their souls remained intact. The memories weren't a false layer plastered over the truth. As far as their minds were concerned, those memories had simply always been that way.

Even if a Celestial examined them directly, the memories would hold. Factory original. No signs of interference. Their souls untouched.

If she hadn't done this, it wouldn't have mattered. Even if she'd let them walk away, the moment the Celestials discovered the truth of what had happened here, every one of them was already dead.

This way, they got to live. It looked like she had killed them. In reality, she had saved them.

The price was that they'd spend the rest of their lives as Horcruxes, never knowing it.

Hermione put the Horcruxes away, gave the unconscious group one last look, and left.

......

A few minutes later.

Ajak was the first to open her eyes.

"Cough — cough, cough!"

She went still for a moment, then snapped upright and looked around.

Memory flooded back in.

The others came around one by one, each of them dazed.

"What happened?"

Sersi pressed a hand to her head, her thoughts thick and sluggish.

"Tiamut..."

Ajak's face went white. She spun toward that massive, half-emerged form.

The grayish surface was threaded with cracks. Every trace of life had left it.

"Dead."

Tiamut was dead.

The Emergence had failed.

"We have to move!"

Ajak's gaze snapped to the sky. "The Celestials, we need to contact the Celestials right now and tell them what happened!"

Tiamut was gone. Their mission had failed. What came next for them, none of them could know.

They had to report immediately. Buy back whatever chance at survival they had left.

Ajak closed her eyes and steadied her breathing, reaching inward, trying to activate the core that linked her to the Celestials.

She never got the message out.

The world went quiet.

Not gradually. All at once, without any transition, every sound simply ceased.

Then the sky dimmed.

Not nightfall.

Something had blotted out the sun.

Every head turned upward.

Then everyone inhaled sharply, at exactly the same moment.

Beyond Earth, in the deep and silent void of space.

A vortex of black and red tore into existence from nothing, splitting open the fabric of space like a wound. It expanded at terrifying speed, warping the light around it, swallowing everything it touched.

Then, without warning, it vanished.

In its place: a humanoid silhouette.

Colossal.

There were no words for it. None that would hold.

Its head alone was larger than the entire Earth.

The figure was dark red throughout, made of some unknown material threaded with energy, radiating a pressure so immense it made breathing feel like an act of will.

Where a face should have been, there were no features, only six hollow voids, arranged like the six dots of a die, dark and bottomless and utterly without expression.

The Prime Celestial.

Arishem the Judge.

The moment those six empty eyes turned their gaze downward toward Earth,

The world went silent.

Time seemed to congeal. The planet itself stopped turning. Every person on Earth froze in place, locked into whatever position they had been in the second before. The clouds stopped moving. Ocean waves hung suspended in the air. Birds hung motionless against the sky.

The entire world, paused.

Only the Eternals were unaffected.

"Th — this is..."

Sersi's voice shook. Her legs gave out beneath her. The others could barely stay on their feet.

That weight, that crushing, absolute presence, was beyond anything they could endure.

Ajak's expression was no different. She'd stood before him before, more than once. But every time, it was the same. His mere existence hit like a physical force, like standing in front of something that wasn't a living being at all but the incarnation of the laws of the universe itself.

A voice descended.

Low. Vast. Utterly without feeling.

"Tiamut."

It rang through the entire solar system. It resonated somewhere deeper than hearing, as though the sound was originating from inside each of them, vibrating through their souls.

"Why has he perished?"

Simple words. Absolute authority.

Ajak moved before she'd finished thinking.

She dropped to one knee, head bowed, her voice steady and reverent:

"Honored Prime Celestial — Lord Arishem the Judge!"

"Moments ago, Hela, the Goddess of Death from Asgard, appeared here without warning!"

"She killed Lord Tiamut on the spot!"

"We fought with everything we had. Her power was beyond all of us combined!"

Ajak's jaw tightened. Grief edged into her voice, sharp and real.

"Ikaris and Sprite gave their lives trying to protect Lord Tiamut. Hela struck them down during the resistance."

"We were... powerless."

The other Eternals knelt one by one, heads lowered, not one of them willing to meet those six hollow voids.

Arishem did not respond.

Then an invisible force closed around all of them.

Ajak felt it seize her body, an irresistible pull, and she was lifted off the ground, rising without any control over it, straight up into the sky.

The others rose with her. Together, they were drawn out beyond the atmosphere and held suspended in the black of space, floating before Arishem's face.

Looking at what loomed before them, every one of them stopped breathing.

In that moment, they finally understood, truly, in their bones, what it meant to be small.

The six hollow eyes glimmered with a dark red light.

A sensation unlike anything else washed over them. Formless. Impossible to name.

Something was moving through their souls, examining them.

Time lost all meaning.

Then the six hollow eyes went still. The flickering stopped.

The invisible force released them.

The Eternals descended and landed back on the ground.

Arishem's gaze moved away from them and settled on Tiamut's body.

A thin wisp of pale green flame peeled free from Tiamut's remains. It drifted upward, slow and weightless, rising through the void until it came to rest in Arishem's outstretched palm.

➤ Next: Shifting the Blame to Hela