Smith followed Gamora back toward the residence wing. Going through Quill hadn't produced anything useful, and finding Ego's core on foot wasn't a realistic option — the planet was too large, the underground architecture unknown. The better move was consolidating the group and working from there.
They found Mantis in the corridor, speaking quietly to Drax. Whatever she was telling him, Drax was actually listening which was unusual enough to notice.
Gamora moved before Smith could say a word.
She closed the distance in two steps, grabbed Mantis by the throat, and drove her back into the wall hard enough to crack the surface behind her head. Her feet left the floor.
"Who are you?" Gamora's voice was flat and precise. "What is this place?"
"Gamora." Drax stepped forward. "Let her go."
She didn't.
"The bones in the cave." Her grip tightened. "Who are they?"
Mantis's antennae brightened — a faint, instinctive pulse — and she said, breathlessly: "You're afraid."
Gamora went still. Just for a second. Then she released her, stepped back, and turned her face slightly away, as if she needed a moment to reorganize.
Smith watched without comment. Whatever secrets Gamora was carrying — and she was carrying several — Mantis had just grazed the surface of one, and Gamora's reaction told him more than anything Mantis had actually said.
"What exactly is going on here?" Gamora said, her voice controlled again.
"She's told me everything," Drax said. His expression had none of its usual bluster. Whatever Mantis had told him, he'd taken it seriously.
Smith glanced past them toward the main hall. The light of divine power was still visible through the open arch — warm, steady, not hostile. Whatever was happening between Quill and Ego in there, it hadn't turned yet.
Mantis straightened and touched her throat. "Those bones belong to his children," she said. "The ones who came before Quill. The ones who didn't inherit the divine bloodline."
Gamora's expression didn't change, but her jaw set.
"We need to get Star-Lord out of there right now," she said, turning to Smith.
"By now Ego has almost certainly activated his bloodline," Mantis said quietly. "He'll have shown him the plan. They may not be willing to leave with you."
Smith shook his head. "Not necessarily. Quill and Ego have no real history together. No loyalty built over years. That kind of relationship shatters fast when the wrong thing gets said." He looked at the main hall. "And Ego doesn't know when to stop talking."
Mantis looked at him. "Why are you so certain?"
Inside the hall.
Ego stepped back from the projection — a slowly rotating model of the galaxy, dozens of planets pulsing with faint blue light, each one marked by one of his seeds — and let the image do its work on Quill for a moment before speaking.
"I call it the Expansion." His voice carried the particular weight of something rehearsed over millions of years and only now said aloud. "It is my purpose. And now, Peter — it is yours as well."
Quill stared at the display. The scale of it was genuinely staggering. Planet after planet, seeds planted across millennia, all of them waiting for this moment. "It's... something," he managed.
"For thousands of years I have seeded thousands of worlds," Ego continued, pacing slowly. "I need to achieve the only true goal I have ever had: to live forever. To spread and expand across all existence until everything is me." He turned. "For eons, I encountered a single obstacle. One Celestial does not have sufficient power to trigger the Expansion simultaneously across every seeded world. It requires two." He paused. "I have tried many methods. My preferred method was to find a species with compatible biology and let them carry my bloodline forward — a child who could stand beside me as a true god."
Quill was still watching the projection.
"For this, I employed Yondu. He was not comfortable with the commission, but I compensated him generously. To ease his conscience, I told him the children I brought here would not suffer." Ego's expression didn't shift. "That was true. They felt nothing at all." He let a beat pass. "But they all failed me. None of them carried the divine bloodline." He stopped in front of Quill. "Until you, Peter. Of all my children across all those centuries, you are the only one who has inherited the gift. You are the first. The only."
He let his voice drop to something quieter, something that sounded almost sincere. "I am no longer alone."
Quill absorbed that. And then — slowly, with the particular half-formed guilt of someone who'd spent his whole life wanting exactly this — he felt himself beginning to accept it.
"If everything expands," he said, "my friends—"
"That is your human side speaking," Ego said gently. "The part of you that is still small."
"Yeah." Quill looked down. "I know."
"We have moved beyond those limitations."
"I know."
Ego turned back toward the hall's far end, satisfied. "Now then, let's—"
"My mother."
Ego stopped.
Quill's voice was quieter now. "You said you loved her."
Ego turned around. The expression on his constructed face was one he'd had millions of years to perfect: sorrow, carefully proportioned, never quite spilling over.
"I loved her very much," he said. "She was extraordinary. She could sing every song that came on the radio, every one, without missing a word. I went back to Earth for her three times." He allowed a pause. "I knew that if I went a fourth time, I would never leave. And that has never happened to me with anyone else, in all my long existence."
He sighed. "But my mission could not be abandoned. So I did what I had to do." The words came out smoothly, the way a confession does when the speaker has rehearsed it long enough that they no longer feel it. "It broke my heart to make sure the tumor reached her."
The hall went silent.
Quill looked up slowly.
Ego registered the silence and caught himself. "I understand that sounds—"
Both blasters were already out.
Quill emptied them into Ego's torso. The bolts punched through the constructed body one after another — not killing shots, because there was nothing to kill, but he pulled the triggers until both weapons were dry and his arms were shaking and there was still not enough.
He stopped. His chest heaved.
The holes in Ego's body sealed over, the divine energy weaving itself back together with an almost contemptuous ease. Ego looked at him with something that hadn't been there before: assessment, cold and clinical, the face beneath the performed warmth.
"Who do you think you are?"
"You killed her." Quill's voice had dropped to something very flat. "You killed my mother."
"I went to so much trouble to build a form you could relate to," Ego said. The warmth was entirely gone now. "I shaped this body specifically to connect with you. Is this how you respond to that my effort?" He tilted his head slightly, and something in his posture shifted — a parent revising their expectations of a disappointing child. "You've grown up. I'll grant you that."
He extended one hand.
A tendril of divine power drove through Quill from behind, lifting him off the ground and pinning him in place. Quill gasped — not dead, not immediately, but suspended and helpless.
"I had hoped we would do this together," Ego said. "But it seems you'll serve a different purpose. A thousand years as a battery, growing slowly." He turned away. "That will be sufficient."
Gamora's communicator crackled.
She grabbed it. "Rocket. Finally."
"Seven hundred jumps." Rocket Raccoon's voice came through with the particular exhaustion of someone who had done seven hundred space jumps in sequence and deeply regretted every single one. "Keep that communicator on you so I can lock the signal. We need to leave this rock and get back to Earth. Figure out how to win that tournament. Whatever danger Yondu was talking about—"
"Ego is insane," Gamora said.
"Doesn't matter right now. Get Star-Lord and everyone else and find somewhere I can set down. Let's go."
The Milano's approach vector was already visible on the far side of the palace grounds.
Outside in Missouri, the seeds Ego had planted years ago split the earth open. Blue light poured out of the rupture, thick and spreading, pooling against the gas station on the corner and then swallowing it. The expansion crept outward in every direction, patient and unstoppable, a living slime of divine energy converting whatever it touched into an extension of Ego's body. People ran.
Smith kicked the door open.
One look at the hall was enough. Quill pinned in mid-air. Ego's construct standing with its back to them, perfectly composed.
"Didn't take long," Smith said.
He raised his palm and fired a ki blast.
The ki blast hit Ego's constructed body and dissolved it completely — not pushed back, not staggered, simply unmade. Every particle of the divine-power construct deconstructed and dispersed before it had time to react. The hall was empty.
The tendril holding Quill winked out. He dropped, and Gamora crossed the floor and caught him before his knees fully gave.
Outside, the blue expansion pulsing in Missouri stuttered. The light dimmed. The creeping mass stalled where it was, no longer spreading, and then began slowly retreating.
"You were right," Star-Lord said, steadying himself against Gamora's shoulder. He was already trying to smile. "I needed to hear that."
"I said I knew something was wrong," Gamora said. "That is not the same thing as being glad about it."
"It's still nice to hear."
"Can we focus?"
Drax had already moved to the hall's outer wall and was looking through the damaged opening. "Rocket is almost here."
The Milano settled just outside the entrance, engines cycling down to idle. Through the open ramp, Rocket's voice carried clearly. "Will everyone please get on the ship. I did not do seven hundred jumps to watch people have conversations."
"Smith handled it," Drax said, with what was clearly meant to be reassuring confidence. "The situation is under control."
Smith didn't correct him.
He was watching the walls.
Mantis had gone very still beside the entrance. "What was just destroyed," she said carefully, "was a clone body. An extension of his true form." She paused. "He will return. Very soon."
The floor split.
Divine tendrils erupted from every surface simultaneously — from the floor, the walls, the ceiling — each one wider around than the one that had impaled Quill, dozens of them, moving with the blind and deliberate force of something that had dispensed with pretense entirely.
Drax drew both blades. "How do you kill a god?"
Smith looked at Quill. "Where is his true form? Gamora and I found the burial cave, not the core."
"The planet's center," Quill said. "There's a protective shell around it. His brain is inside."
Mantis stepped forward. "There is a passage in the surface cave that leads directly down to it."
"Understood." Smith turned. "Gamora — take Quill and get everyone on the ship. I'll handle this."
He exhaled once.
Then he let the lid off.
Six hundred million combat power came up all at once — not staged, not gradual, just there, flooding the space in every direction. The ki aura hit the hall like a pressure wave. The tentacles caught in it didn't retract; they simply ceased, divine energy shredding apart on contact before it could reach him.
The hall was clear.
Nobody moved for a moment.
Rocket's voice came through the communicator, slightly awed: "...everyone still alive in there?"
"Move," Smith said.
They moved.
The group crossed the grounds at a run and boarded the Milano. Quill went straight to the pilot's seat, Rocket dropping into the co-pilot's position beside him, and the ship lifted before the ramp had fully sealed.
Somewhere beneath the planet's surface, Ego recalculated. The output he'd just felt from Smith was significantly beyond his working estimate. He'd invited this man to his planet with the private expectation that home-ground advantage and full planetary access would swing the math decisively in his favor. That calculation now required revision.
Quill had the ship airborne but wasn't heading for orbit. He was circling, scanning the terrain below.
"He's not going with us?" Rocket asked, watching Smith's position on the sensor grid.
"He said he'd handle Ego and hold the planet," Quill said. "We help him find the core."
Rocket looked at the sensor grid, then at Quill, then back at the grid. "With his abilities he can survive in open space on his own. We, on the other hand, cannot. You understand the math there."
"We're not leaving him alone down there." Quill banked the ship. "Mantis said there's a cave entrance. Help me find it."
Then the Nappa technique detonated.
Smith had both fingers raised on the surface below. A column of energy erupted outward from his position, centered on him, and the terrain simply stopped existing. Rock, soil, vegetation — all of it converted to a deep, perfect crater in the span of a second. The planet's Celestial energy matrix groaned against it, Ego pouring power into the surface to keep the planet from cracking open entirely, and even so the shockwave reached the Milano at altitude and knocked the ship sideways hard enough that everyone not strapped in grabbed whatever was closest.
The turbulence passed. The ship stabilized.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Then Quill looked at the crater on the sensor grid where the cave entrance had been.
"...the cave is gone," he said.
Rocket looked at his instruments. Then at Quill. Then back at his instruments. "Yeah. The cave is gone." He sat back. "Should we land?"
"There's nothing to land on." Quill pulled the ship up to a stable hover and let out a long breath. "We hold position and watch."
Gamora was staring at the viewport. "No wonder he killed Ronan."
At the edge of the crater, the ground was already beginning to churn — Ego reconstituting, reforming, his real power not the construct they'd already destroyed twice but the planet itself, the inexhaustible reservoir of Celestial energy miles below the surface, in the core, where no explosion from above would reach it.
Mantis watched the churning earth from the viewport, her antennae still.
"That attack," she said quietly, "will have no effect on his true form at all."