The news pulled Ernst up short.
The Black Shadow Mercenary Group boasted five Omega-level mutants, each clad in highly advanced, adaptive Mystique-armor.
For a vanguard of that caliber to be struggling, the enemy had to be something entirely unnatural.
Yet, the encrypted reports were blunt.
The Black Shadows were hunted, beaten, and on the run.
It was a reality Ernst found difficult to accept.
He threw his usual energy conservation aside.
He burned through over twenty irreplaceable space-energy crystals, tearing a massive, wormhole directly through the void.
He stepped out onto the sterile docking bay of the Space Walker.
A speed mutant was waiting anxiously by the airlock.
"Boss," the mutant breathed, his shoulders slumping.
"You're finally here. Mr. Shaw and the commanders are in the briefing room. This way, please."
The raw, visible relief on the battle-hardened mercenary's face was a chilling metric of how bad the situation had truly become.
It was critical.
Ernst simply nodded, bypassing the escort and walking straight for the command deck.
He pushed the heavy blast doors open.
Apocalypse, Shaw, Stakar, and Borgin were clustered around the circular holotable, locked in a grim discussion.
The sudden entrance startled them. All four commanders rose instantly to greet him.
Ernst dispensed with the formalities with a sharp wave of his hand. They all sat down.
"Explain," Ernst demanded, his voice dropping the temperature in the room.
"What exactly is going on? What did you provoke that an army of mutants cannot handle?"
The four men traded dark, hesitant looks.
Finally, Stakar, his face pale and drawn with pain, spoke the name.
"Thanos."
Ernst's mouth twitched. A profound, heavy weariness settled over his shoulders.
A heavyweight. Right out of the gate.
"I explicitly forbade you from engaging him," Ernst stated coldly.
"He is one of the apex warlords in the known universe."
Shaw rolled his eyes, rubbing a dark bruise on his jaw.
"Do you honestly think we wanted this fight?" Shaw countered.
"We know exactly what the Mad Titan represents. We did not go looking for a suicide mission. This was a catastrophic accident."
"An accident," Ernst repeated flatly.
Shaw offered a bitter, wry smile. "An accident."
"We took a standard mercenary contract. We were hunting an entrenched interstellar pirate syndicate."
"The plan was flawless. We intended to lie low, eliminate the targets, and pull out."
"Then Thanos's armada dropped into orbit."
Shaw sighed. "He decided to execute his usual culling. Wiping out exactly half the planetary population."
"Our mutants... they couldn't just stand in the shadows and watch millions be slaughtered. They broke protocol. They moved first."
"We had no choice but to engage an overlord-class force to protect our own."
"We lost, son. Badly. Stakar took critical wounds."
Ernst shifted his gaze to the former Ravager King, verifying the unnatural pallor of his skin.
Stakar offered a reluctant, grimacing smile in return.
Fine. The geopolitical disaster had already escalated. Berating them would not unspool the timeline.
Ernst shifted entirely into his clinical, analytical mindset.
"Give me the data," Ernst ordered.
"What exactly did you face? Define his strength. Map his abilities."
Shaw tapped the holotable.
A massive, three-dimensional projection bloomed in the center of the room. Battleships, drop pods, and thousands of alien life-forms flickered in blue light.
"Thanos fields a highly diverse, disposable army," Shaw reported.
"The vanguard is composed of Centauri. They are half-flesh, half-machine cyborgs. Absolute cannon fodder."
"Our mutants mowed them down by the thousands. But that is the problem. They do not process fear."
"You can slaughter them endlessly, and it changes nothing. They simply keep charging over the corpses of their own kind."
"A few of our younger mutants suffered failure. They were dragged under by sheer, suffocating mass."
Shaw swiped the projection. A massive, four-armed, dog-faced beast appeared.
"Then there are the Outriders. Genetically engineered bio-soldiers. They possess enormous physical strength and absolute loyalty."
"Their muscle density is four or five times tougher than any biological equivalent from Earth."
"Are the casualty numbers unacceptable?" Ernst asked quietly.
"We lost close to a hundred mutants," Shaw said, his voice tightening.
"But it wasn't the cyborgs or the beasts that broke our lines. The devastation came exclusively from his elite guard."
"The Children of Thanos."
The holotable shifted, running decrypted combat logs and visual feeds.
At first, Thanos had kept his own hands clean.
He watched from his flagship, dispatching his generals to dismantle the Black Shadows.
The feed showed Corvus Glaive engaging Stakar.
The old version of Stakar would have been butchered in seconds.
But after joining Ernst, his powers had been radically enhanced. Stakar actually held the tactical edge.
Manifesting wings of solid light, Stakar hovered high above the battlefield, picking his moments for devastating, ranged thermal strikes.
He controlled the rhythm of the duel perfectly, keeping the lethal general at a distance.
Victory was mathematically certain.
Then, Corvus played a brilliant, deceptive hand.
Unable to close the physical distance, the alien general deliberately exposed a fatal opening in his guard.
He allowed Stakar to drive a spear of light directly through his chest.
Corvus collapsed to the dirt, feigning death.
But Corvus Glaive possessed a dark, biological secret. His true life force was not bound to his flesh.
His soul was sealed entirely within his alien glaive.
As long as the blade remained intact, he could not be killed.
When Stakar descended to confirm the kill, Corvus resurrected instantly.
With a brutal backhand swing, Corvus drove the bladed staff entirely through Stakar's shoulder.
Only a blinding, timely intervention from Apocalypse prevented the strike from severing Stakar's spine.
The feed shifted to Borgin.
The dark wizard had drawn Ebony Maw, a master of telekinetic and strange, esoteric magic.
Their duel was a chaotic, shifting nightmare of transfiguration and flying debris.
The fight remained a violent stalemate, neither sorcerer able to permanently break the other's mystical defenses.
Next, Shaw faced Supergiant.
Her power revolved around parasitic mental control and psychic absorption.
When she attempted to violently hijack Shaw's mind, she hit an impenetrable wall.
The black hole within Shaw's mutant consciousness swallowed her mental invasion whole.
Shaw crippled her psychic output in seconds.
Cornered and desperate, Supergiant redirected her power.
She seized the minds of dozens of nearby mutant mercenaries.
Her parasitic ability could normally enslave thousands, but the Black Shadow combat suits were heavily shielded against telepathic intrusion.
She was pushed to her absolute limit just to control fifty.
On her psychic command, the enslaved mutants turned their weapons directly on Shaw.
Reluctant to butcher his own people, Shaw absorbed their fire, taking heavy kinetic damage.
Frustration overwhelmed his restraint. Shaw cut loose.
He became a walking singularity, annihilating anything in his path, including his own mind-controlled soldiers.
Supergiant suffered catastrophic psychic feedback and barely managed to flee the slaughter.
Finally, the tactical feed focused on Apocalypse.
The ancient god had engaged what appeared to be the combined, overwhelming force of Black Dwarf and Proxima Midnight.
It was a lethal feint.
Black Dwarf, a towering monster of raw, unadulterated physical strength, swelled to over ten meters tall.
His flesh metallized, becoming denser and more muscled than a dreadnought.
Apocalypse simply sidestepped his charge and delivered a single, devastating punch.
The kinetic impact shattered Black Dwarf's armored chest, leaving the beast critically wounded in the dirt.
Realizing the physical gap was too vast, Black Dwarf retreated, keeping his distance.
Proxima Midnight was the true, lethal problem.
Knowing she could not engage Apocalypse in hand-to-hand combat, she hurled her three-pronged spear.
The weapon split mid-flight into three streaks of absolute, black energy.
They punched cleanly through Apocalypse's shifting, hard-light barriers, burying themselves deep into his torso.
The spear was a direct gift from Thanos. Its power was cosmically exceptional.
An ordinary immortal would have died on contact.
Apocalypse felt the terrifying, destructive force radiating from the black rays. It continuously eroded his cellular structure and violently choked off his mutant healing factor.
It cost the god massive, agonizing effort to violently expel the energy and physically force his wounds closed.
For a tense moment, Proxima Midnight held the tactical advantage.
Then, Apocalypse released a massive, omnidirectional energy shockwave, knocking the alien general clear and buying himself breathing room.
The pursuit would have continued. Black Dwarf stepped back in, only to be brutally beaten down again.
If Stakar hadn't fallen for Corvus Glaive's trick, breaking the Vanguard's formation, the chase would have concluded in the Black Shadows' favor.
The Children of Thanos would have fallen.
But Thanos had not anticipated his elite generals coming up short against mercenaries.
The Mad Titan decided to handle the purge himself.
His first, unlucky target was Shaw.
The feed showed Thanos crossing the battlefield in a blur of purple and gold.
He delivered a single, devastating punch.
The sheer kinetic output was so terrifyingly absolute, the fabric of localized space physically shattered around his fist like glass.
Shaw threw his hands up, attempting to absorb the raw power with his mutant ability.
It failed.
The destructive nature of the blow completely overwhelmed Shaw's absorption limit.
He was launched backward at supersonic speed, smashing directly into the face of a nearby mountain.
If it hadn't been for Ernst's brutal, foundational strengthening methods, Shaw would have been atomized. His enhanced body barely survived the impact.
Thanos pivoted immediately, targeting Borgin, who was still locked in a magical stalemate with Ebony Maw.
Always cautious, and a dark wizard to the bone, Borgin recognized death when he saw it.
He chose to run.
Borgin threw up massive walls of transfigured earth and heavy, kinetic hexes to slow the titan's advance.
It was completely useless.
Thanos ignored the magic entirely, tearing through the obstacles as if they were wet paper.
Borgin was forced to Apparate blindly out of the sector to avoid being crushed.
With absolute chaos spreading across the lines, the heavily wounded Stakar had no choice but to sound the retreat.
Apocalypse, the strongest entity on the field, stepped forward to cover the escape.
He engaged Thanos in brutal, one-on-one combat.
Despite his ancient mastery, his thousands of assimilated mutant abilities, and his shifting tactical styles, Apocalypse lost.
Apocalypse relayed the combat data directly.
Thanos possessed a formidable, virtually indestructible physical body.
But more terrifyingly, he possessed an advanced command of the Rule of Destruction.
It was a cosmic ruling power of the absolute highest order, mathematically designed for absolute slaughter.
For all of Apocalypse's varied, elemental rule-powers, they fundamentally fell short against Thanos's pure, advanced grip on cosmic annihilation.
Thanos's interest in the Black Shadows had not faded. He wanted them eradicated.
Apocalypse was forced into a desperate retreat.
He spun off dozens of highly dense, physical clones to confuse the titan's targeting systems, buying the fleet enough precious seconds to slip into warp space.
But Thanos did not let them go.
He pursued them relentlessly across the cosmic void.
He ran the Black Shadows through a grueling gauntlet of hit-and-run battles across multiple sectors.
Both sides bled. But against the sheer, overwhelming logistics of Thanos's massive armada, the Black Shadows were being methodically ground into dust.
With all the tactical data laid out on the glowing table, Ernst fell silent.
He processed the variables. He calculated the physics.
He thought for a long, quiet moment.
Then, his decision was finalized.
He resolved to personally face the overlord.
Standing in the dim light of the conference room, Ernst raised his hand.
He summoned a large, ornate mirror from his dimensional pocket.
It floated gently in the air before him.
The reflection inside the glass was deeply, fundamentally wrong.
The eyes staring back at him were completely empty, devoid of a soul.
The reflection's micro-movements were running exactly a half-beat out of step with the real world.
Ernst stared at the mirror, a cold, terrifying smile touching his lips.
"Years of meticulous, agonizing work, and the trump card is finally complete," Ernst whispered to the glass.
"It is time for you to take the stage."
He reached out, his fingers brushing the cool surface of the mirror.
"Let me see exactly what you can do. Do not disappoint me."
Ernst set the mirror aside.
He turned and walked out of the conference room without a single look backward.
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