Even if she had agreed to help Alex, her annoyance was clear on her face as Alex brought her to the exosphere of Hydra Earth. It only grew when she noticed a blonde woman on the opposite side of the thing in between who was radiating Alex's presence from her.
"Why is she here?"
[Leave it to you to ask about the other woman instead of the glowing mini-planet in front of you.]
"That's not an answer."
[We will need her help. This is Tiamat, a living, albeit incubating Celestial. Susan is here to help me anchor it to Gaia and manipulate the positions of all other planets. We need to set up a formation to suppress the presence of this Celestial. And it has to be modular so that I can fit more planets into it in the future.]
Hearing his explanation, whatever possessiveness was radiating from Wanda receded as she realized that she was indeed not sufficient for this. Not only did she have to connect the planets with the core, but she had to set up a complex magical formation to contain the aura of the Celestial. She couldn't maintain the barriers and move the planets around while thinking of the solution.
She first focused on the current barrier to sense its state and understood that its current situation was one of deep conjunction with the Infinity Stones. But even that wasn't enough. The actual barrier was the one surrounding the sun-like mass in the center of the cluster, and it was more than a hundred times more potent.
She needed to tap into the deepest recesses of Cthon's limited omniscience to create a customized barrier for this purpose, as even the Dimensional Ruler's knowledge had nothing related to suppressing actual Celestials. Even if it was there, it wasn't included in the inheritance that she received from the Source of Chaos.
She immediately got to work as Alex poured a steady amount of Soul Energy into Wanda to rejuvenate and even slightly enhance her soul. While he could achieve the rejuvenation aspect himself, he was already stretched thin maintaining the complex barriers around Tiamat and Gaia. Soul Energy was a more convenient method with its immediate rejuvenation and enhancement aspect, considering Wanda would need to completely push the limits of her limited Omnicience to solve his issue.
In preparation, he'd already paused almost every major action that was being taken, acting in a defensive state to maintain everything as is without consuming too much of his attention.
As Wanda got to work on coming up with a spell to set up an absolute barrier for Gaia, Alex manually took control of Susan to manipulate her powers. She wasn't nearly proficient enough with them to do what Alex was about to do. While he was also far from being considered proficient with Susan's powers, the sheer weight of his soul allowed him to process far more data and activate her force fields with far greater effect, despite the lower efficiency.
Activating Susan's powers, he used the authorities of the Infinity Stones to amplify the force fields, infusing them with the combined authority of all six stones. Alex started with the Celestial, using the force fields to replace his makeshift barrier with a stable one that had a significantly lower requirement for the Authority of the stones.
With that done, he moved on to the next step and slowly enveloped the individual planets with her force fields, temporarily powering down the innate planetary shields to entirely replace them. As the five planets were all handled and barricaded on an individual level, the final hurdle was the outermost layer of Gaia that enveloped all of the shielded planets in a second sphere.
At this point, even with Susan's far-enhanced physical abilities and the multiplicative enhancement provided by her bond with Alex, he had pushed her body to its limits, with blood flowing out of her orifices as her internals endured the immense strain that was placed upon her body by her powers. For now, without deepening their bond further, Alex could only continuously heal her with his ‹Biological Manipulation› that had been enhanced by Laura's Cosmic-grade healing factor. After all, ultimately, the true ability was Susan's. He couldn't channel its full potential by himself just yet.
Eventually, Alex successfully formed a stable barrier outside Gaia using Susan's abilities amplified by the Infinity Stones. Forming a nigh-impenetrable planetary barrier that was impossible to breach, at least not without Alex noticing.
Now, all that was left was for Wanda to come up with a solution based on Alex's requirements while he maintained the barriers through Susan. Even though he wasn't expanding the barriers, even just maintaining them was exacting enough of a toll on her body to crush her ten times over every second.
'Any second now…' Alex wanted to hurry Wanda, but knew that disturbing her right now would be counterintuitive. Still, he couldn't help but feel a little anxious as he saw his Bioenergy reserves approach the one-third mark. He'd already exhausted over five hundred thousand units out of the approximately eight hundred thousand units that he'd started with. If he ended up reaching zero, he would be left with no other choice but to handle the brunt of the backlash of using the stones all by himself.
Every second that passed felt like a mini-eternity of grueling wait while literally holding up multiple planets for Alex. It went so far that he'd even deactivated Gaia's Time Dilation since that consumed quite a bit of his focus and Bioenergy after deactivating the planetary barriers.
After all, the originals made by Gwen had the effect of a lower Bioenergy requirement to maintain the Time Dilation effect as opposed to the ones Alex made with Susam's powers, which had an entirely different purpose.
Soon, as Alex's Bioenergy reserves dipped below a hundred thousand units, Wanda's eyes opened with a bright red luster. Immediately, the sheer quantity of magic energy that she released was enough to dwarf even the pressure that was radiating from the Celestial. Even if Alex stopped maintaining the barriers and allowed Tiamat's presence to radiate out into the Universe, it would be completely unnoticeable under the beacon of Chaos energy that Wanda had suddenly become.
At the same time, every single practitioner of Chaos energy, from the magicals from Apex City to the different variants of Wanda across the Earths and potentially the universe, completely lost the ability to access Chaos energy. Wanda had completely focused her Source of Chaos on supporting her creation.
Alex silently observed from the side as Wanda formed a complex multi-dimensional magic structure that likely breached into the fourth Dimension. Likely because he felt that it was similar to the five-simplex formed by the six Infinity Stones, but unlike the stones, he couldn't perceive the structure completely due to his innate limitation as a three-dimensional entity.
Once completed, Wanda immediately spread her hands, and the structure floating between her palms quickly expanded from less than a quarter of a meter to almost five hundred thousand kilometers, enveloping the entirety of the Gaia cluster and bathing it in a crimson glow. Alex had no time to deal with the sudden panic that erupted in the multiple planets under his command due to the sky literally turning bloody crimson. He left it all in Gaia's hands, not giving her any directives to deal with the sudden situation.
His focus was entirely on maintaining the barriers and syncing with Wanda, achieving a semi-True Merge state as they instantly communicated what needed to be done. Further consuming his Bioenergy, Alex started manipulating Susan's force fields to work with and support Wanda's spell, as it, in turn, slowly replaced the effects of the Infinity Stones, reducing the burden on Alex's rapidly dwindling Bioenergy.
The outermost barrier was the first to be converted to Wanda's system, entirely replacing the Infinity Stones as it achieved a similar, albeit somewhat weaker defensive effect. They were followed by the internal planetary barriers that all grew far stronger under Wanda's spell compared to their older states, and even the versions that Alex made with Susan's force fields since he didn't use the Infinity Stones to enhance those specific barriers.
Finally came the barrier around the Celestial. This one, Wanda didn't simply enhance to replace the effects of the Infinity Stones. She directly replaced the barrier with one made entirely using Chaos Magic, instantly freeing Alex from the constant use of the Infinity Stones. Yet, their work wasn't completely done.
Once Wanda replaced the barrier, it immediately resonated with the other barriers, forming a sense of resonance as she guided Alex to specifically move the planets around to place them around the Celestial in a formation that seemed quite similar to the Solar System, with each planet being placed at a specific distance from the core.
The next step involved the emergence of a crimson corridor that shot from the Celestial to Research Earth, with the highly scientific designation of Earth-A. It was also the Earth closest to the Celestial. The corridor shot into the Pacific Ocean and directly connected to the core of the planet, anchoring itself to the planet completely. The same thing happened with the other five planets—Farm Earth, Fantastic Four Earth, Hydra Earth, and MCU Earth—all received the same treatment, getting anchored to the Celestial through a corridor that led to the core of the respective planet.
Finally, the Infinity Stones came back into play as Alex directly altered reality to replace Susan's force fields with the original planetary shields that Gwen had helped him build. Under Wanda's guidance, he pulled back Susan's powers and activated the planetary shields again, modifying reality to make them compatible with Wanda's spell.
Ultimately, the planets all formed a cyclical energy system that fed their energy into the Celestial, which served as a sort of central hub for every planet's energy, operating as a complex battery while also empowering Wanda's spell model that blocked all outward means of investigation for Gaia.
Once everything was done, both Susan and Wanda fainted, having overexerted themselves to their limits and then some as Alex used the scraps of Bioenergy he had to once again dilate the time inside Gaia. With Wanda's upgrades, it was even more efficient than before and had an even lower requirement for Time Authority, hence reducing Alex's Bioenergy consumption even more than before.
***
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