When Smith had first arrived on Ego's planet and reached out with his perception, the planet had given him nothing useful. Every tentacle in that distributed network had been live, divine power running through the entire landmass simultaneously, and the whole planet had read as one undifferentiated mass of combat potential — no center, no focal point, just signal everywhere.
Now the tentacles were gone. The reservoir that had powered them was running on fumes.
Smith closed his eyes and found the core immediately.
The Infinity Gauntlet formed on his left hand. The Space Stone pulsed blue.
He opened his eyes inside the planet's deep interior, in the dark, surrounded by compressed rock and metal ore that had been accumulating for millions of years. The pressure at this depth would have been relevant to anyone it could affect. He looked at the metallic shell in front of him.
He hit it once.
The casing fractured along every seam simultaneously, the compressed ore crumbling away in sections until the interior was exposed. The brain Ego had built his entire existence around was enormous — the scale of it took a moment to process even for someone expecting it — and it pulsed faintly with what remained of his divine power, still running its repair cycles, still alive.
A shimmer in the air. A weak construct materialized between Smith and the core — thin, barely holding its shape, the outline of Ego's humanoid form held together by whatever dregs of divine power he had left. He was standing between Smith and the brain on nothing but refusal.
Smith looked at him. "Impressive. Still have something left."
He raised one finger.
The laser beam that came off it was minimal — a flick, almost lazy. It passed through the construct and dissolved it, continued through to the core, and left a hole the width of a finger in Ego's true form.
The construct was gone before it hit the ground.
The core didn't scream. It just pulsed harder, divine power rushing into the wound from every direction, trying to close it, the repair mechanism working against a deficit it couldn't recover from in any reasonable timeframe.
Smith watched the repair cycle run and thought through his options.
Piccolo had some demonic techniques, but nothing that would hold a Celestial. The Space Stone and Reality Stone in the Gauntlet were tools of transformation and transit — neither of them had a sealing application he could reach for. Odin could seal — he'd done exactly that with Hela — but Odin was aging at a rate that made any seal he placed a countdown timer. When Odin died, whatever he'd sealed walked free.
That left Kamar-Taj.
The Ancient One could do it. He had no doubt about that. But there was someone closer to him, currently in residence, who'd been spending months inside the most comprehensive magical library in this dimension and whose native ability had never actually needed a library to begin with.
He opened a wormhole.
Kamar-Taj's training courtyard was in the middle of a lesson. Mordo stood at the center with four junior students arranged around him, demonstrating a containment technique, his movements precise in the way they'd always been — Mordo was many things, but he was never imprecise.
He stopped mid-demonstration when the wormhole opened. He'd learned to recognize the signature.
"Mr. Smith." He stepped forward and inclined his head. "Welcome."
Smith looked at him. Mordo had been different for a while now — the edged quality that had always sat just below the surface, that sense of someone constantly running a private audit of what the world owed him and finding the balance unsatisfactory, had settled into something steadier. Not gone. But managed.
His personal therapy toward Mordo had done something to his perspective.
"I need to speak with Wanda," Smith said. "Is she available?"
Mordo turned immediately and addressed one of the junior students. "Find Wanda. Tell her Mr. Smith is here." The student moved. Mordo looked back. "She'll be along shortly"
"Mr. Smith." He paused, visibly composing something. "I owe you an apology. My thinking was too rigid when we last spoke. I was reasoning from reason that didn't fit what the Dragon Balls actually represent." He met Smith's eyes directly. "That was a failure of perspective on my part."
Smith absorbed this.
In the majority of series he know of, this man went precisely the other direction — turned against sorcery itself, declared the use of magic a theft from the natural order, began hunting down practitioners. In a small number of timelines he became Sorcerer Supreme, but only after Strange was gone and there was no alternative. What he was looking at now was something that hadn't taken either path.
My universe is genuinely strange.
"That's behind us," Smith said.
Mordo nodded once. "Yes. It is."
Footsteps on stone. Fast ones.
Wanda came around the corner at something close to a run, red sorceress robes catching the light, and closed the remaining distance in three steps and wrapped both arms around Smith before he'd fully turned toward her.
Smith returned it briefly, one hand between her shoulder blades. Behind him, he heard Mordo's footsteps moving tactfully in the other direction.
"You haven't visited once," Wanda said into his shoulder.
"I've been off-planet." He stepped back enough to look at her. "You look like you've been working."
"Every day." She let him go but stayed close. "You came here and you have something you need. I can tell."
"I always need something."
"And you always come with something, so it's fair." Her expression brightened. "What is it?"
"Sealing magic," Smith said. "I have a target — a god, no body left, just a brain, and his divine power is nearly exhausted. I need him contained in place. Permanently, or close enough to it. Do you have anything that fits?"
Wanda's eyes went distant for a second — running through her catalog, he could almost see it. "Three or four options," she said. "I can layer them. And I've been working on rune sequences that restrict power use in a defined space, which sounds like it would be useful here." She was already moving toward him. "Take me."
Smith opened the wormhole.
The depth of Ego's core was not a comfortable place to arrive in. The weight of the planet above, the dark, the scale of the brain itself — Wanda took it in without stepping back.
"That's a god," she said.
"What's left of one."
"He's still running repairs." She studied the wound in the core, the divine power cycling through it. Then she looked at the larger structure. "Alright."
She brought her hands together, palms flat. The red energy that came off her was visually similar to Kamar-Taj magic but categorically different at its core — Kamar-Taj techniques borrowed from dimensional reservoirs and shaped the result; this came from her, generated rather than drawn, chaotic rather than structured, and in Smith's perception it carried a density that borrowed magic simply didn't have.
The sphere that formed between her palms was dense and dark red, layered with runes that had written themselves into it as it formed. She pushed it outward.
Ego extended a tentacle — one of his last, running on almost nothing — and struck at the sphere. The sphere didn't deflect. The tentacle slid off the surface and dissipated.
The sphere expanded on contact with the core and folded around it completely, sealing every surface. Ego hit it from the inside with what he had left. The seal didn't register the impact.
Wanda was already working on the second layer, and the third. The rune sequences she inscribed into the walls around the core were extensive — she didn't rush them, taking the time to set each one correctly, building a restriction lattice that would suppress divine power generation in this space regardless of what the core's regeneration cycle eventually produced.
Smith watched her work and noted, not for the first time, that the gap between what she was doing and what Kamar-Taj's most senior practitioners could do was not as large as the training gap would suggest. She was twenty-something years old and self-taught in a magical tradition that wasn't even her primary ability. The chaos energy was native. Everything else was acceleration.
The Darkhold is with Agatha Harkness. I wonder if she's found the Book of Vishanti yet.
"Done." Wanda stepped back from the last rune. "Three seal layers and a divine power suppression field. He can repair himself as much as he likes — within the seal, it won't matter."
Smith looked at the contained core. The tentacle that had struck at Wanda's sphere was gone, absorbed back, and the core sat quiet inside its new boundaries, pulsing faintly, alive and entirely unable to do anything about it.
"Your growth rate continues to surprise me," Smith said.
Wanda smiled and didn't deflect it. "You gave me the head start. If you hadn't sent me here, I'd still be working through this on my own." She looked around the deep space of the core chamber. "Are the magic books in this place as good as the ones at Kamar-Taj?"
"This planet doesn't have magic books. It has a god's brain in a box." He gestured toward the wormhole he'd left open. "Come on. There are people waiting outside."
On the surface, the conversation had stalled.
Star-Lord had been in mid-sentence when the divine power he'd been drawing from suddenly cut off completely — not tapered, not weakened, just gone, as if a tap had been turned off at the source. He was still enormous, still radiating the stored energy, but the external flow had stopped.
"It's gone," he said, and then caught Rocket's expression and lowered his voice to something that could be called a whisper relative to his current scale. "The divine power outside my body. I can't sense it anymore. He's not dead — I can tell the difference — but something's changed."
"Could you stop broadcasting?" Rocket said from somewhere below and to his left. "You're vibrating the ship."
Smith and Wanda stepped out of the wormhole onto the surface.
They both stopped.
Quill had not, it turned out, found an efficient way to discharge the divine power he'd absorbed. He had instead let it fully express itself, and the result was a Pac Man with blue divine energy roughly four stories tall, pulsing in a slow rhythm, with his face somewhere in the middle of it wearing an expression of mild sheepishness.
Wanda looked at it for a moment. "Smith," she said carefully, "is that a person?"
"Peter Quill," Smith said. He sounded slightly at a loss. "Yes."
Rocket's laughter echoed across the flattened terrain.
"Can you pull that back in?" Smith asked the sphere.
"Probably," the sphere said, in Quill's voice. "It'll take a few minutes. There's a lot of it."
"Take your time."
Wanda turned and surveyed the rest of the group — Rocket leaning against a piece of wreckage, still grinning; Groot sitting cross-legged on a rock; Gamora standing with her arms crossed; Mantis hovering slightly back from everyone; Drax, who was looking at the giant Quill-sphere with what appeared to be admiration.
"Introductions," Smith said. "Rocket, Groot, Gamora, Mantis, Drax — collectively the Guardians of the Galaxy. Wanda is a mage and a member of the Fraternity."
Gamora looked at the wormhole they'd come through. "You said Ego was sealed. Why not kill him?"
"I have plans for this planet," Smith said. "Ego sealed and powerless is more useful than a dead god and a collapsing planet."
"Sealing a Celestial is considerably more difficult than killing one," Mantis said. She seemed impressed, which for Mantis was a specific and readable expression. "The woman must be extraordinary."
The Quill-sphere was slowly deflating, the divine energy drawing back inward with the visible effort of someone trying to fold a very large piece of fabric into a very small space. After three minutes it was down to Quill's actual dimensions, and then Quill was standing on the surface looking slightly overfull, the blue light of stored divine power flickering under his skin at irregular intervals.
"I feel like I ate an entire planet," he said. He flexed one hand and watched the light move through it. "That's concerning and also kind of incredible."
"Did you actually learn how develop your own power?" Smith asked.
"Ego walked me through the framework before things went sideways, and then I had a long time standing there absorbing to work through the implications." He grinned. "I pulled a significant amount of his reserve power into myself while he was distracted. Enough to seed my own development. He's going to be furious about that when he eventually realizes it."
"He has a great deal of time to be furious about things now," Smith said. He looked around at the group. "Ego is contained, the planet is stable. I have other plans for this location. No structural damage, no unauthorized extraction — normal visits are acceptable, forced entry is not." He paused. "That also applies to whoever Yondu brought with him to watch the fight."
Rocket's expression shifted slightly. He had clearly already identified this as a point of negotiation and was filing it away.
"Are you coming back to Earth?" Smith asked.
Rocket answered. "Yondu's fleet is outside the planet. We'll stay and sort that out. There's still time before the next tournament — might as well use it productively." He looked at Drax, Gamora, and the rest of them in turn. "Agreed?"
General agreement.
Wanda's hand went up, which Smith had been watching for. "I am signing up for the next tournament. That's not a question."
"It wasn't going to be," Smith said. "Anyone who wants to enter can enter."
He opened the wormhole.