Karrok moved.
He was fast. He was far faster than something his size had any right to be. He crossed the hangar floor in two massive strides and swung a fist that would have cratered a solid mountainside.
Carol caught it on her crossed forearms.
The impact sent a shockwave through the hangar that blew cargo containers off the floor and cracked the walls from end to end.
She held her ground. Her boots carved furrows in the metal deck, but she did not move backward. Not an inch.
She looked up at Karrok over their locked arms. He was straining, pushing with everything he had. She was holding him with her forearms alone.
She smiled.
"My turn."
A photon-enhanced uppercut caught Karrok under the jaw. His head snapped back. His feet left the ground. He flew upward, struck the ceiling hard enough to buckle the reinforced plating, and crashed back down. The floor dented beneath his impact.
Carol floated upward, watching.
Karrok pushed himself out of the crater. Slowly. His jaw was dislocated. He reached up with one hand and snapped it back into place with a wet crunch, then spat blood onto the deck.
"Is that all the Mad Titan's generals have to offer?" Carol called from above. "I was promised a fight."
Karrok roared and launched himself upward, both fists raised.
Carol casually sidestepped in midair. She caught his thick wrist as he flew past and used his own upward momentum to slam him face-first into the nearest bulkhead. She did not let go. She dragged him violently along the surface at supersonic speed, carving a deep, shrieking trench through the metal with his body. Then she released him into a towering stack of cargo containers.
The crates exploded outward in a spectacular shower of shredded debris.
Karrok burst from the wreckage swinging wildly. A desperate backhand caught Carol across the shoulder and sent her spinning through the air. The blow would have killed anything human instantly.
Carol steadied herself, rotated her shoulder once, and flew back in.
The battle accelerated.
She became a golden streak ricocheting through the hangar, each pass delivering impacts that cracked armour plating and bent the ship's internal structure. She hit him from the left and was on the right before he finished turning. She hit him from above and was below before his arms came up. She was faster. She was vastly stronger.
Karrok fought back with everything he had. He ripped a structural support beam from the ceiling and swung it like a massive club. The twenty-meter length of reinforced metal whistled shrilly through the air and connected with Carol mid-flight.
Carol caught the beam on the backswing, wrenched it from his hands, and cracked it across his chest. He went through a wall. Then through the corridor behind it. Then through another wall.
Carol followed him lazily through the jagged holes.
"Stay down, Karrok," she called out, floating through the second breach. "You are embarrassing yourself."
A fist the size of a boulder came through the dust and caught her in the ribs. Carol grunted. She was driven backward into a bulkhead that cratered around her body. Karrok pressed his advantage, both hands locked around a section of hull plating he'd torn free, and brought it down on her like a hammer.
Carol caught the makeshift weapon with one hand. The deck beneath her cracked from the force.
"Okay," she said. "That one I actually felt."
She crushed the hull plate in her fist, seized Karrok by the throat, and threw him upward through three decks. The ceilings shattered one after another in a cacophony of screaming metal. The entire warship lurched sideways from the force.
Carol flew up through the holes after him. She found him on the upper deck, flat on his back, armour cracked in a dozen places, bleeding from his mouth and a deep gash across his brow.
He was laughing.
"What is funny?" she asked, landing softly beside him.
"You." Karrok pulled himself upright. His movements were heavy now, laboured. One arm hung at an angle that suggested something fundamental had broken inside it. "You are everything they said. More, perhaps. I see now why the Kree fell."
"The Kree fell because they built a corrupt empire on stolen lives. I just helped the process along."
"And what exactly are you building, Annihilator? What grand empire do you serve?"
"None. I don't do empires."
Karrok studied her with those furnace eyes. Blood ran freely down his face. His breathing was ragged. He was beaten, and they both knew it.
"Then you fight for absolutely nothing," he said mockingly.
"I fight for the people who can't fight things like you." Carol's fists blazed with renewed golden fire. "Now do yourself a favor. Tell me exactly what the Mad Titan plans to do with the Chitauri fleet, and I will give you a quick end."
Karrok laughed. A harsh, rattling sound. "I had heard rumours that the Annihilator hailed from some pathetic backwater planet. I did not believe it. Now it all makes perfect sense."
Carol's eyes narrowed dangerously. "I am losing my patience for your amusement. Is the fleet headed for Earth?"
"Your home and its fragile people will be brought to their knees." His burning gaze held hers. "The Asgardian will see to that."
Carol's expression sharpened. "What does that mean?"
"You'll find out soon enough." He grinned through a mouthful of blood.
Carol's patience finally snapped. She drove a crushing, photon-charged blow directly into his chest that sent him skidding helplessly across the metal deck.
—
Arthur stepped through a portal into the hangar and surveyed the devastation. The collapsed walls. The deeply cratered floor. The sparking electrical conduits hanging from the ceiling like severed tendons. Karrok was down on one knee amidst the wreckage, bleeding heavily.
Arthur didn't recognise him from anything he knew of the canon. But the ruined armour and the rank insignia marked him as one of Thanos's generals, perhaps one expendable enough to sacrifice before the endgame.
"Done?" Arthur asked Carol, who looked like she had barely broken a sweat.
She glanced over at him. "Nearly. He has given me a few pieces of information, but I want to be absolutely sure we have everything before we finish this."
Karrok's furnace eyes found Arthur. A second enemy. He didn't recognise this one. Smaller. No visible armour. No cosmic glow. But Karrok had survived long enough in the Titan's service to know that the quiet ones were often the most dangerous.
It didn't matter. He was dying anyway. He had known that the moment Danvers caught his first punch without yielding a single inch. The question had never been whether he would survive. The question was whether his death would mean something.
His hand drifted to his chest. His fingers found the implant beneath the cracked armour. It was warm. Waiting. It had always been waiting for a moment like this.
He pressed it.
Arthur sensed it through Death Sight before he understood what he was seeing.
Karrok's life thread blazed. Not brighter but faster. The thread was being consumed, pulled forward, years of remaining life compressing into seconds.
A dark energy Arthur recognised flooded Karrok's body. His muscles swelled. The broken arm straightened with a wet crack that echoed across the deck. His cracked armour burst apart and fell away in fragments. The skin beneath turned black, veined with lines of burning orange that pulsed like magma beneath volcanic rock.
Arthur had long suspected Thanos had some connection with Death Energy. Seeing one of his generals directly power up with it absolutely confirmed those quiet suspicions.
Karrok looked at his hands. Felt the power flooding through him. Felt his own life burning away to fuel it. He raised his head and fixed Carol with eyes that were no longer furnace orange but blinding white.
"Now," he said, his voice reverberating with unnatural resonance. "You die for the Lord."
"What did he just do?" Carol asked, raising her glowing fists in a defensive stance.
"Suicide protocol," Arthur said sharply. "He has just burned his entire remaining lifespan for a temporary, massive power surge. He has minutes left to live, maybe much less. But right now—"
Karrok lunged. He did not aim for Carol. He aimed straight for Arthur. The closer target. The one without the intimidating cosmic glow.
His enhanced fist crossed the distance at three times his previous speed.
Arthur, unflinching, raised his hands. The world shattered like glass.
The three of them tumbled through the kaleidoscope of the Mirror Dimension. The ruined hangar was replaced by shifting, impossible geometries of refracted metal and folded space.
Karrok staggered, his blazing eyes sweeping the fractured landscape. "What sorcery is this?"
Carol, who had trained in the Mirror Dimension with Arthur before, didn't bother answering. She simply drove a photon-enhanced fist directly into the general's face while he was still gaping at the folding walls.
He crashed hard into a fractured surface of crystalline glass, but the dark energy boiling inside him flared violently in response to the impact. He roared in fury and swatted Carol away with a vicious backhand.
The strike carried a terrifying, palpable necrotic force. She skidded backward across the dimension's impossible floor. Her brilliant cosmic aura actually flickered and dimmed for a second as it fought off the sudden surge of absolute decay.
The fight resumed immediately. And everything about it had changed.