The tentacles didn't scatter this time. They converged.
They poured together from every direction — dozens of them, hundreds, braiding and compressing until the mass of divine energy took on a recognizable shape. Legs. A torso. Arms like fallen towers. A head with Ego's face stretched across it at fifty meters of height, regarding Smith Doyle from above the way a man looks at something on the bottom of his boot.
"You will soon learn," Ego said, his voice resonating from every surface of the planet at once, "what it costs to anger a god."
Smith looked up at him. "Lot of words. I'd rather see something that makes me take this seriously."
Ego kicked.
The speed of it was genuinely impressive for something that size — the air displacement alone was a wall of force — and Smith caught it on crossed forearms rather than trying to dodge. The impact drove him back across the terrain in a long grinding arc, one continuous trench cut into the earth behind his heels until he stopped.
He shook out his arms and looked at the torn ground. "Some weight behind it. Better."
"Then more."
The divine power surging from below redoubled. Ego's frame grew denser, the energy compacting into the construct until its proportions shifted — less enormous, more solid, every surface carrying more concentrated force. He brought his foot down directly onto Smith's position, intending to end the conversation.
Smith drove a single fist upward into the descending sole.
His arm punched clean through the foot and came out the other side.
"You stepped on something," he said, looking up through the hole. "Might want to check the ground before you commit."
The divine power sealed the wound instantly as Ego pulled back. The foot was whole again in under a second, and Ego's expression had moved from contempt to something closer to focused attention.
"Pain is merely an energy cost for an immortal," Ego said. "You are mortal. This changes nothing."
Smith blinked out of sight.
He reappeared at head height, traveling at the kind of speed that made the move look less like teleportation and more like the gap between frames. He brought one leg around in a full rotating kick and connected with the side of Ego's skull.
The head caved and detonated. Divine matter sprayed in all directions.
Smith looked at his foot. "Hollow."
The head rebuilt itself before the echo of the impact had faded, and the divine energy didn't stop there — it kept flowing, coating the construct in a new layer that hardened as it set, dense and dark, armor that hadn't been there before. The silhouette changed. Ego's form now carried the proportions of something that had deliberately been built to fight.
Smith looked up at it with something that was close to eagerness.
He threw a kick. Ego got an arm across and blocked it. The shockwave from the contact traveled outward in a visible ring, flattening everything nearby.
Then Ego swung his arm down like a collapsing building.
Smith went into the ground.
He came to a stop somewhere inside a small hill that no longer existed. The smoke was still settling when he walked out of it, unmarked, brushing residual dust from his shoulder.
"Better," he said. "Keep going."
The white ki aura came up all at once, erupting from the ground around him and driving a column of heat and pressure into the air above. No staging, no gradual buildup — just there, at full output, crushing the surrounding terrain into gravel from the sheer proximity.
Six hundred million, no ceiling on it.
He was in front of Ego's armored chest before Ego could finish compensating for the power jump. One punch, straight in. The armor that had just formed shattered across its entire surface, and the force behind it carried through into the body underneath, sending Ego's construct crashing backward and down.
Smith spread both arms.
The purple energy gathered between his palms with a low, building tone, then hit Ego's fallen form in a sustained beam that didn't stop. When it did, the upper two-thirds of Ego's construct simply weren't there anymore. Only the legs remained, standing upright for a moment in the crater before the weight of absence toppled them.
In the stratosphere, the Milano's viewport had gone very quiet.
Rocket stared at his instruments for a moment, then at the viewport, then back at his instruments, as if he was hoping the numbers would say something different.
"He's the strongest man on Earth," he said eventually.
"Not just on Earth," Quill said. He'd seen a lot of planets. He'd been to most of them. "That power is number one on the vast majority of habited systems."
Drax nodded slowly. He wasn't prone to sentiment, but his expression had shifted into something that looked like genuine regret. "My planet produced no one like him. If it had, Ronan would never have reached my family."
Groot raised both arms.
Gamora hadn't moved from the viewport. She was watching the battlefield below with the careful, measuring focus of someone doing threat analysis — the same focus she used when thinking about Thanos. The comparison wasn't comfortable. Thanos used energy attacks with similar scale and similar contempt for whatever was in front of them. His combat output wasn't something she'd ever witnessed directly, only its results, and the results were planets.
She didn't know who was stronger. She wasn't sure the question had a clean answer.
Hold the Dragon Balls, Smith. Whatever happens next — hold them.
Mantis's antennae had been still for a while. She was the only one in the Milano not watching the battle with anything resembling hope. "Those attacks are depleting his divine power," she said. "But they cannot cause permanent damage. As long as the core is intact, Ego will not die."
Gamora turned from the viewport. "Even that didn't work?"
Below them, the answer arrived.
The lower half of Ego's construct finished rebuilding itself from the base up — bones, muscle, armor layering back over the surface in sequence — and when the form was whole again, it was visibly larger than it had been before. More divine power in the structure, not less. Ego's voice came from everywhere at once, resonating through the planet's surface.
"I am immortal. I am eternal. There is nothing you can do to kill me."
Smith's lips pulled into a slight, private smile.
The depletion was the point. Every time Ego rebuilt, he spent more than the previous cycle. The construct was bigger each time, more armored, drawing more heavily on the planet's reservoir to maintain itself. That was exactly what Smith needed — not to kill Ego's body, but to run down the bank of divine power until the gap between what the core could generate and what Ego was spending became large enough to work with.
He couldn't kill Ego. Kill the core and the planet's energy architecture collapses with it, and the Tree of Might project ends before it begins. What he needed was a seal, a containment, and that required Ego to be running on significantly less than full capacity.
So. More.
"Gods die when they're killed," Smith said. "We'll see how eternal you actually are."
He brought both hands together.
The wave that came out of them was larger than the last one by a significant margin, and it hit the rebuilt Ego dead center. The resulting blast column climbed into the sky above the cloud layer and kept going. The mushroom cloud at the top was visible from orbit.
The Milano shuddered. Then shuddered again. Then every alarm on Rocket's panel lit up simultaneously and he was already on the controls.
"Up! Up! We're going to the stratosphere!"
The ship punched through the cloud layer and kept climbing, and even at altitude the turbulence from the shockwave found them, rolling the hull hard enough that everything not bolted down became a projectile. Rocket wrestled the ship level and checked his instruments.
"Watching this fight is a life-threatening activity," he announced. "Just noting that for the record."
Below them, the smoke from the impact was still rising when Ego materialized out of it again. The armor was a shade darker. The muscle structure underneath it was denser. He'd poured more power into this reconstruction than the last one, and the increased investment showed.
He looked at Smith across the crater.
Smith was breathing audibly. Short, controlled breaths, hands on knees for a moment before straightening.
"Go on," Ego said. He was smiling now, a Celestial's patient smile. "I want to see how many more times you can do that."
Smith let him believe it.
The exhaustion was real in its details and fictional in its scale. He could sustain this output indefinitely — the technique's energy cost per attack was minimal relative to his reserves. What he was spending was trivial. What Ego was spending on each rebuild was not. Smith could feel the ratio shifting under his perception every time Ego reconstituted, the divine power flowing upward from the core in greater and greater quantities, like a pump working harder to maintain the same pressure.
The Kaioken multiplier doubled.
The red aura that replaced the white one was sharper — higher frequency, throwing light in a way the previous form hadn't. Smith let himself look slightly more ragged as it settled, let his shoulders carry a fraction more weight, let his breathing stay audible.
One point two billion.
Ego read the change and reached a conclusion. "Overdrawing potential," he said, with the confidence of someone who has watched enough fighters reach their limits to recognize the pattern. "Burning past your sustainable threshold." He settled into a wider stance. "Let's see how long that holds."
Smith nodded slightly, confirming nothing, and used the Kamehameha.
The beam took Ego apart again. And again Ego rebuilt. Bigger. Darker armor. More power in the frame, more divine energy drawn from the core with each cycle. The loop continued — Smith escalating Kaioken in small, hidden increments, Ego pouring more and more into the construct, neither of them showing the other the full picture.
On the Milano, Drax had been watching the pattern for a while.
"He is depleting him," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
"Every time Ego rebuilds, he uses more. The opponent's attacks are not getting weaker — they're escalating. But he is pretending otherwise." Drax crossed his arms. "He is running Ego's reserves down deliberately."
Rocket blinked. "Why?"
"I don't know. But that is what's happening."
Quill was already thinking ahead. "Then I can help." He turned from the pilot's seat. "Put me on the ground."
"What?" Rocket said.
"I carry Ego's bloodline. That means I can draw on his divine power directly — pull it out of the planet the same way I did before. On the ground the effect is stronger." He looked around the cabin. "Smith has Ego's full attention. He won't have anything left to deal with me pulling from the other side."
Rocket considered this for approximately two seconds. "Genuinely dangerous plan. I respect it. Changing course."
The Milano banked and dropped toward the far edge of the battlefield, away from the impact zones, looking for somewhere to set down.
Outside the planet, Yondu Udonta's fleet had arrived.
His ship sat at a stable observation distance, and on the main screen he was watching a man the size of a human being dismantle Ego's divine construct over and over in between bouts of apparently being crushed into various geological features, from which he kept standing up.
Yondu unclenched his fist slowly. He'd been holding it clenched for a while.
"Ego," he said quietly, watching the construct get demolished again. "You finally picked the wrong one."
His first mate leaned over. "Boss — do we go down?"
"Quill's ship is in the stratosphere. They're fine." He didn't take his eyes off the screen. "You don't insert yourself into a battle like that. You watch." He reached out and tapped one of the communication controls. "And you record. Someone tell the others — Ego's planet, now. This is a once-in-a-lifetime view."
"Boss, footage of a fight at this level—"
"Would make us rich, yes, I know." He smiled briefly, sharp and satisfied. "Quill's my lucky star and I've never appreciated it enough."
He leaned back in his chair and watched.
Ego's reconstruction was slower this time.
He noticed it himself — the flow from the core taking fractionally longer to reach the surface, the rebuild cycle drawing more heavily than the last. He checked the rate against his internal sense of the planet's reservoir, and the numbers didn't line up the way they should.
More than ten times the divine power, across five rebuild cycles.
His opponent's output was higher than the first exchange, not lower. The breathing, the apparent exhaustion — none of it corresponded to actual depletion.
He'd been had.
The construct collapsed inward in a single motion, divine power folding back in on itself and concentrating rather than expanding. The towering mass shrank. The excess fell away. What remained when the process finished was man-sized — compact and dense and burning with a cold blue light that none of the giant form had carried. In his right hand, a sword had formed from condensed divine energy, deep blue and edgeless in the way that things are edgeless when they cut by erasing rather than splitting.
"Treacherous Earthling," Ego said. His voice was quiet now. That was worse. "You want to see my real power. Here it is."
He swung.
The blade moved faster than the giant body had moved for its entire fight — a different category of speed entirely, the same shift that happens when mass gives way to precision. Smith moved the same instant and wasn't quite fast enough. The edge caught his left arm on the way past.
Blood.
The ground where the blade's arc completed its travel didn't just crack — it opened, a crevasse one meter across, hundreds of meters long, tens of meters deep, the stone beneath vaporized and the gap left behind having the clean, geometric look of something that was never meant to exist.
Smith looked at his arm. A clean cut, bleeding freely.
He looked at the crevasse.
He looked at Ego.
"There it is." The satisfaction in his voice was genuine. "That's what a god is supposed to look like."
Ego watched him. "You can't hold that form much longer. You know it. Surrender now and I'll make it clean."
Smith let the Kaioken drop.
The red aura went out. The white ki aura went with it. He stood in his base state, breathing, arm still bleeding, apparently spent.
Ego smiled.
Smith started laughing.
It was a short sound, not performed, just a reaction to something that struck him as genuinely funny — the gap between what Ego thought was happening and what was actually about to happen.
"I'm not done," Smith said. "I'm just more interested now."
The golden energy came up from the ground.