The golden energy didn't announce itself. It arrived.
It came up from Smith's feet and swept outward across the planet's surface in every direction simultaneously, flattening the ground under its own pressure and climbing into the atmosphere above. The sky over Ego's planet filled with static — actual lightning, drawn by the electromagnetic signature of the power output, crackling between clouds that hadn't existed thirty seconds ago. Three billion combat power, uncontained, sitting on the surface of a planet that belonged to someone else.
The ground itself registered it. A tremor moved through Ego's landmass — not tectonic, not structural, just the planet's energy architecture acknowledging something it wasn't designed to accommodate.
Smith looked at Ego across the charged air. "Round two," he said. "Try to make it interesting."
Ego had gone still when the transformation hit. He was running calculations he'd never had to run before — reassessing everything, rebuilding his threat model from scratch — and the numbers weren't landing where he wanted them. He could feel the death threat in it. Not metaphorically. He was a Celestial who had existed for millions of years and he had never felt that specific pressure from a mortal being, and feeling it now, from this one, in this form, was — clarifying.
He raised the divine sword and cut.
The sword energy came out in a torrent, multiple arcs layered on each other, covering the approach and both flanks. Against anything that moved at normal speed, there would have been no clean exit.
Smith stepped right.
The arcs hit the ground in a ragged line ten meters behind where he'd been standing, cutting a shallow ditch that immediately began to collapse in on itself. He hadn't rushed. He hadn't needed to.
Ego absorbed the sword back into his body and moved — genuinely fast, the compact form converting power to speed with an efficiency the giant construct had never managed. He was in front of Smith in the same instant, one leg already swinging toward the head.
Smith dropped into a crouch. The kick passed above him. He was back upright before Ego's foot touched the ground, and he came up into a full overhead axe kick that caught Ego's raised right arm.
The arm cracked. Ego's body tilted under the force and hit the ground hard.
He caught himself on one hand, legs already sweeping upward — a ground-level counter aimed at Smith's chest. It connected. Smith's body rocked back maybe two degrees, both feet staying exactly where they were, the impact absorbed completely.
Smith grabbed the ankle before Ego could retract it.
What followed was brief and comprehensive. Smith swung him up, slammed him left, swung him back, slammed him right. The ground on either side of them acquired two new craters. On the third swing he threw Ego clear and fired a focused beam into him before he landed.
The explosion flattened a square kilometer of terrain. The smoke was still rising when Ego walked out of it, divine power already knitting the wounds shut, the repair cycle running.
The Milano had found a clear stretch of ground well outside the active battle radius and set down hard, still rocking from the turbulence of being this close to a fight at this scale.
The crew spilled out onto the planet's surface and stood looking at the distant impact columns and the golden light source somewhere in their center.
Drax stared at the skyline with something that looked like professional regret. "We're missing it," he said.
"We're helping from this end," Quill said. "Which means we're part of it. Adjust your perspective."
He didn't wait for the conversation to continue. He closed his eyes, reached downward through his feet into the planet's energy substrate, and pulled.
The divine power came up immediately — easier than before, more responsive, as if the bloodline connection had been reinforced by the earlier use. Blue light pooled around his feet and climbed his legs, spreading across his body as he drew the energy inward and compressed it, packing as much as he could hold.
Ego felt it.
He was already running a deficit — the fight with Smith had cost him significantly more than expected, and the tentacles he'd had distributed across the planet's surface had been recalled back into the body to compensate. The additional outflow from Quill registered as a pinprick irritant against everything else he was managing, but it registered.
The moment of distraction lasted less than a second.
Smith used all of it. Three knee strikes in sequence, each one driving into Ego from a different angle before he could stabilize from the last, then a full roundhouse that put Ego horizontal and moving fast toward the ground.
Ego hit, bounced, and came back up angrier and more focused. He wouldn't make the same mistake again.
Which meant he stopped paying attention to Quill, which meant Quill pressed harder.
The blue light across his body intensified. His body hadn't touched this power in over thirty years — the biological memory of it was there, the bloodline inheritance carrying the template, and the reservoir beneath his feet was effectively unlimited for his current rate of draw. He widened the aperture and pulled more.
On Ego's side of the exchange, a name slipped out at the worst possible moment.
He was mid-exchange with Smith, divine sword held in reverse grip to open a counter, and the outflow from Peter Quill spiked — a significant jump, more than anything before — and without meaning to, he turned his focus toward it and said the name.
Smith blinked, lowered his guard for a fraction of a second, and then looked at Ego with an expression of pure bafflement.
"Having a breakdown, are we? I'm Smith Doyle. We've been fighting for a while now."
He brought both hands together and pushed them forward. "Kamehameha."
The beam was already traveling when Ego pixelated.
The construct body deconstructed into discrete fragments — divine energy particles dispersing faster than the beam could track — and the Kamehameha wave punched straight through the gap where Ego had been and kept going. Up through the atmosphere. Out of the planet's gravity well. Into open space.
Where it hit a newly arrived raider vessel square in the hull.
The ship detonated cleanly and disappeared.
Ego reassembled directly behind Smith's extended arms. The particles converged back into a solid form in under a second and he drove both fists into Smith's back.
Smith went forward, tumbling through the air before converting the momentum into a controlled roll and landing upright. He turned and looked at Ego, and his expression had shifted — not angry, not alarmed. Interested.
He hadn't expected the pixel disperse. The divine power he'd known about — the reformation, the regeneration, the giant constructs. The ability to disassemble and reassemble the entire form in a fraction of a second was different. More flexible. It meant the conventional read on Ego's fighting pattern needed updating.
He filed it away. The slight upward pull at the corner of his mouth was involuntary.
This was still interesting.
Ego divided his attention.
He had enough divine power remaining for one combat front at full capacity, and Star-Lord's drain was now large enough to matter. He sent tentacles into the ground near the Milano's landing site — thick ones, moving fast, aimed at disrupting the source before it became a real problem.
Gamora was already moving when they broke the surface. She had her sword out and closed the distance before anyone else reacted, driving the blade into the nearest tendril.
The tendril flexed and knocked her off her feet before she could establish leverage.
"Mantis." Drax turned to her with complete, unironic confidence. "Now."
"He's too powerful." Mantis's antennae were vibrating visibly. "I can only affect him if he isn't resisting. He has to cooperate, even a little—"
"You can do it." Drax reversed his grip on both daggers and charged the tentacles without any further discussion.
The nearest tentacle wrapped around his torso and dragged him underground.
For two seconds there was just the sound of the ground closing over him and the remaining tentacles advancing on Star-Lord's position.
Mantis dropped to her knees and pressed both palms flat against the earth. She could feel Ego's divine power moving through the planet beneath her — vast, ancient, the current of something that had been running for millions of years. Her antennae blazed with light.
She pushed.
The tentacles stopped. Then they went slack. Then they dissolved at the edges, particles drifting apart, the divine power driving them suddenly absent.
Somewhere in the planet's depths, Ego went to sleep.
The last tendril dissipated before it finished collapsing. Mantis sat back on her heels and stared at her own hands.
The ground cracked open nearby and Drax climbed out, covered in displaced soil and entirely unruffled. He crossed to Gamora and helped her up.
"I expected her to succeed," he said.
Mantis looked up at him with an expression she couldn't entirely compose. "You couldn't have known that."
"I believed it," he said, as if that were a meaningful distinction, "which is the same thing."
Quill hadn't moved through any of this. The blue light surrounding him had grown beyond what he could comfortably contain, and he'd made a tactical decision — rather than lose the surplus, he redirected the excess outward, letting the divine energy start forming a construct around him instead of trying to hold it internally. The construct that emerged was enormous and spherical, a giant rounded Pac-Man pulsing with blue light, the raw divine power shaping itself into the most basic form available: vast, dense, and expanding.
On the battlefield.
The moment Smith felt Ego's presence go dormant, he knew.
He didn't need to look toward the Milano's position or work through the possibilities. Mantis had done it, and she'd done it while Ego was already running below capacity — the conditions had been right, barely, and she'd pushed through them anyway.
He had maybe seconds before the core consciousness reasserted.
He didn't aim. He didn't need to. Both hands came together and the Kamehameha fired at full output into Ego's sleeping form.
The body came apart completely — not disassembled the way the pixel disperse had done it, but destroyed, the divine energy structure overloaded past the point where it could maintain coherence. When the light cleared, there was nothing left to regenerate from.
Deep in the planet's core, Ego woke up.
He assessed his situation in the same instant: body gone, no reserve to rebuild at that level immediately, Mantis having apparently chosen a side. Star-Lord draining the reserves from the other direction — but that was a slow leak, manageable later. The drain from the battle and from his failed attempt to accelerate the planetary seeds simultaneously, all of it stacking.
He set Star-Lord aside. That situation he could handle whenever he chose. A child with thirty years of accumulated deprivation trying to absorb power through a cup-sized opening — it wasn't a real threat.
Smith Doyle was a real threat.
He focused everything remaining into one more body. The finest construct he'd built yet — drawing on the deep reserve at the core, the energy that had never left the center of the planet, pulling it up through miles of rock and condensing it into a form that was qualitatively different from what he'd assembled on the surface. This one cost more than everything before it combined.
It had to be enough, because it was everything he had.
Smith was sitting on a boulder when the new body fully materialized in front of him. He looked at it with the evaluating attention he'd been giving Ego's constructs all fight. Then he looked at the planet's surface around them — the depleted ground, the withdrawn tentacle network, the reserves he could feel running lower than they'd been at any point in this engagement.
"That took a while to put together," he said. "I'm curious whether you have enough left for a second one."
Ego looked at him. His face on this construct was different from the previous ones — harder, stripped of the performed warmth entirely. This was the expression of something that had spent millions of years alone and was now calculating a kill.
"This time," he said, "you die."
The aura that came off the new body was thirty percent stronger than anything he'd fielded in this fight. He could feel the difference in it himself — the clarity of full commitment, nothing held back. He was certain it would be enough.
Smith stood up.
The roar of ki came up with him — a sound that traveled through the ground as much as the air, the golden aura erupting from every surface of his body at once and sweeping outward in a sphere of heat and pressure that cracked the ground in rings around his feet. Three billion, held back for the entire fight, now fully present.
Ego went still.
"I used about fifty percent in that last exchange," Smith said. He held out one open palm, conversational. "You kept up with it reasonably well. I'll give you that."
"I won't lose." The words came out flat. Ego's hands were already moving, the divine power of the new construct gathering for the first strike.
Smith moved before Ego finished the sentence.
At the speed he was operating, Ego's reaction time wasn't a meaningful factor. Smith was already inside Ego's guard, already throwing, and the next several seconds were a single continuous sequence of impact without recovery. Dozens of strikes. Each one landing in a different location, the armor on Ego's new construct shattering across its entire surface under the cumulative force. No pattern to counter, no rhythm to read, just overwhelming speed applied with mechanical precision.
Blood ran from the corner of Ego's mouth.
Smith appeared in front of him — not beside, not behind, directly in front, hovering at head height — and drove three consecutive knee strikes into the back of Ego's skull before Ego's neck had time to straighten from the first hit.
Ego staggered. His head had deformed slightly at the impact points, divine energy scrambling to restore the structure.
He turned.
Smith was already spinning. The 360-degree roundhouse connected with Ego's chin and put him airborne and moving fast in the wrong direction. He came down hard, slid across the destroyed terrain, and found his feet.
He stood with his mouth full of blood and his body burning through divine power at a rate he couldn't sustain, looking at Smith Doyle.
Smith's hands had dropped to his waist. The white energy gathered between them quietly, both palms cupped together, building.
Ego's eyes registered what was coming. He moved — not to dodge, that wouldn't work, but forward, trying to close the distance and disrupt the stance before the charge completed.
He didn't make it.
"Kamehameha."
The beam hit at full power and Ego's body came apart in it — not pixel disperse, not regeneration, not divine power reforming itself into a new configuration. Just gone. Particles of spent divine energy drifting in the aftermath, dissipating into the planet's atmosphere.
Smith waited.
One minute. Two. Three.
The ground stayed quiet. No surge of power from below. No new construct forming on the surface.
He closed his eyes.
His perception extended outward through the planet in every direction — through rock, through the deep substrate, through the energy channels Ego had built over millions of years. The planet was enormous even by his standards, the scale of it requiring real effort to map.
He found Quill immediately. Hard to miss — the boy had pulled so much divine power into himself that he'd stopped trying to contain it and was now wearing it, a vast rounded shape of blue light expanding slowly outward, the raw Celestial energy expressing itself in the only form it could manage at his current level of control. Enormous. Pulsing. Entirely impractical and completely Quill.
And there, at the planet's center. Deep under miles of stone and compressed matter. A point of concentrated consciousness and ancient power, running low but still burning.
Smith opened his eyes.
"Found you."