"There's no way I can win!"
The moment Gilgamesh took Jovian's first huge slap straight across the face, he knew he had no chance. That power—that force carried through a single slap—told Gilgamesh exactly how terrifyingly strong Jovian was.
As an expert in the art of slapping people silly, Gilgamesh was willing to acknowledge Jovian as the strongest.
Boom!
Jovian kept hold of Gilgamesh by the collar with one hand and flew for more than a dozen miles before finally crashing down onto a hill.
Boom!
The two of them slammed into the hill like meteors, instantly reducing it to rubble.
Inside the crater left by the enormous impact, Jovian kept swinging his hand, stacking buff after buff onto Gilgamesh's cheeks...
"Brother, wait!"
After taking more than three thousand consecutive slaps, Gilgamesh finally couldn't endure it anymore. He raised a hand and called for a timeout.
"Hm?"
Jovian's raised palm stopped in midair.
"I know I'm not your match. I know Thena isn't your match either. So can you grant me one request?"
Gilgamesh looked at Jovian and pleaded.
"Say it."
Jovian didn't say whether he would agree or not. He simply asked what the request was. He would think about it first, then decide.
"Please spare Thena! Please take her power away, then let her live."
Gilgamesh looked at Jovian and made his request.
"Heh..."
"Granted."
As Jovian spoke, he drove his hand straight into Gilgamesh's chest...
Golden light burst everywhere...
Then Gilgamesh collapsed onto the ground.
Hum.
Jovian looked at Gilgamesh's corpse and clenched his fist.
In an instant, golden light wrapped around his arm.
Boom!
Jovian lifted a hand while looking at Gilgamesh's body.
Immediately, rubble buried it beneath the ruins.
Tap.
Jovian returned to the warm little home Gilgamesh and Thena had shared. After pushing open the door, he walked over to Thena, who was still battling a spoonful of carrots like they were her mortal enemy.
"Hm?!"
Thena froze when she saw Jovian.
"Gilgamesh..."
She seemed to realize something, and her brows tightened.
In the next second, a golden spear and a brilliant shield formed around her arms.
"You're a little too violent, Thena."
Jovian looked at the agitated Thena and raised one hand toward her, curling his fingers slightly.
Instantly, Thena felt an enormous invisible force appear out of nowhere.
The next second, it locked around her throat.
A crushing sense of helplessness flooded her whole body. It felt like drowning. Then, endless power started pouring out of her body and streaming into Jovian's.
The light flickered on and off, on and off, pulsing rhythmically like a drumbeat.
With every pulse, Thena felt herself getting farther and farther away from what made her an Eternal, moving steadily toward zero until it was all gone.
When the light flashed one last time, her mind suddenly went blank.
She discovered that she was no longer a mighty Eternal, but an utterly ordinary human being.
And as her power vanished, the problem that had plagued her for so long disappeared too.
Her memories became... clean.
"You should go."
Jovian picked Thena up and flew into the sky, only stopping when he dropped her off at the doorstep of a certain good Samaritan. Then he disappeared.
"..."
Thena stood there without moving.
She seemed to be trying to think, but her thoughts kept breaking apart, as if something was interrupting them.
Click.
Just as she stood there in a daze, unable to figure out where she'd been brought, the front door behind her suddenly opened. A man in a red cloak stepped out. He was wearing pajamas, holding a toothbrush in one hand and a mug in the other, looking absolutely bizarre.
"Excuse me... do you know where this is?"
Still thoroughly confused, Thena looked at the strangely dressed man and asked.
"..."
The man stared at her for quite a while before finally realizing who she was.
"WTF?!"
"You're not supposed to be here!"
He raised a brow as he looked at Thena. If he remembered correctly, Thena absolutely should not have been standing in front of him. And if she was standing in front of him, that meant someone had thrown the timeline into chaos. Everything he'd previously seen with the Eye of Agamotto was worthless now.
"Who messed with my timeline, then dumped you right in front of me? Is this a declaration of war?"
"A declaration of war against the Sorcerer Supreme!!"
The man in the red cloak clenched his fists, clearly furious.
"Sorry, I have to correct you, Stephen. You're not the Sorcerer Supreme anymore. I am."
Just as the cloaked man was working himself up over the insult, another voice sounded behind him. From inside the building—which looked more like an inn than anything mystical—walked out a strongly built middle-aged man with a remarkably kind face.
"Hello, I'm Wong. I'm the current Sorcerer Supreme. I believe you must be Ms. Thena of the Eternals. Is there anything I can help you with? For now, why don't you come inside and we can talk?"
Before Stephen Strange could say anything, Wong had already ushered Ms. Thena into the building.
"..."
Because he had vanished for a while due to Thanos's snap, Stephen Strange had returned to the main universe only to discover, awkwardly, that he was no longer the Sorcerer Supreme. During the years he was gone, the Sanctums and Earth's entire mystical side had been managed by Wong.
In other words, Wong had taken the title.
Now Wong was the Sorcerer Supreme.
"This is really getting weird..."
Stephen muttered to himself, then followed Wong into the building that looked suspiciously like a hotel.
Iraq...
In the middle of a desert.
After dumping Thena on the doorstep of the person who should actually be handling this mess—the real Sorcerer Supreme of this world, not the guy who played along with a kid and botched a spell badly enough to crack open the multiverse—Jovian turned his attention to a ship buried beneath the sands of Iraq.
Countless archaeologists worked there day and night, studying the site.
From their findings, they believed they had discovered an entirely new civilization, one that dated back roughly five thousand years before the Common Era. A civilization of astonishing prosperity. Or rather, they had finally found evidence that aliens had once been on Earth.
The discovery was enough to drive the archaeologists wild with excitement, because it was so advanced, so far beyond humanity's limits of exploration, that it could overturn every scientific law they had ever believed in...
"All right, everyone. Time for a nap."
Jovian looked down at the dozens of archaeology experts brushing away dirt with their little tools. He waved both hands, and the superhuman power within him spilled out with a thought.
In the next second, every single archaeologist dropped unconscious.
"So this is the place..."
"All right. Come on out."
After knocking out the scientists, Jovian stood in the air and made an upward pulling motion at the desert below.
Immediately, the sands shifted, and a glowing geometric spacecraft rose into view.
Hum—
Floating before the ship, Jovian swept one hand toward it. As the Eternal energy inside him flowed into the vessel, the hatch opened at once.
Jovian drifted into the open doorway.
Inside the ship were countless treasures of gold and silver, relics spanning eras.
Jovian ignored all of it.
His gaze moved over the hoard until it finally settled on a two-handed sword.
"Excalibur?"
"Now that's a nice prize..."
Jovian reached toward it.
And the instant he did—
Time seemed to stop.
A dark-skinned little girl suddenly burst out from among the treasure and ran straight at Jovian. She was unbelievably fast. Compared to her speed, time itself might as well have frozen.
But just as the golden-light-wrapped girl was about to reach him, something happened that shocked her completely.
Jovian, who had looked totally motionless, as if he couldn't react at all, suddenly lifted his head.
His eyes locked directly onto her.
"Hm?!"
The girl was stunned. It was the first time she had ever seen someone who could keep up with her speed.
Smack.
Right at that moment of shock, Jovian grabbed Excalibur with one hand and, with the other, slammed the speeding girl into the floor.
"..."
Pinned to the ground, the little girl kept struggling, clearly unwilling to just accept her fate.
"Hey. Calm down."
As she struggled, a voice suddenly entered her mind.
"?!"
"Is this telepathy?"
The little girl asked in her thoughts, curious.
"That's right..."
"Relax. By the time you wake up, it'll all be over. The danger will be gone too."
Jovian's voice kept echoing in her mind like a lullaby. Her eyes grew heavier and heavier until she finally fell asleep.
This was one of the ways he had learned to use the powers he'd absorbed from one of the Eternals he had already drained—Druig's mental abilities. Specifically, hypnosis.
"Good."
Looking at the unconscious girl, Jovian gave a sweep of his hand.
Golden energy was drawn out of her body, then slowly fused into his own.
"Well done, weak little Eternal."
After absorbing all the power from the small Eternal girl, Jovian flew back into the air.
This time, he didn't kill her.
He still remembered the warning the system had given him: if he killed too many important plot characters, the entire timeline might collapse, and then certain higher beings would start paying attention to him...
That was not something Jovian wanted.
Not long afterward...
At one of the doors of the New York Sanctum—
Knock, knock, knock.
The Sanctum, which had only just regained some peace, was disturbed yet again by someone knocking at the door.
"WTF?!"
When the former Sorcerer Supreme, Stephen Strange, saw that yet another member of the Eternals had appeared outside the Sanctum, he felt like he was going insane...
They had barely settled one of them, and now there was another one.
He was dying to know what exactly had happened. Why were members of the Eternals losing their original powers one after another? And what had caused these powerless Eternals to show up on his doorstep?
Stephen Strange knew that under circumstances this abnormal, someone had to be doing it deliberately.
So this was...
Someone intentionally using the pettiest method imaginable to dump more work onto the Sanctum.
How rude.
Stephen Strange sighed helplessly, picked up the little Eternal girl in front of him, and carried her inside.
Meanwhile, in London...
Britain had always been a place filled with elegance, refinement, and a faint smell of rot...
No one knew which of the gentlemen casually seen everywhere were gay, and which weren't.
On the street, Sersi, stylish and graceful, walked happily with the two people beside her, chatting and laughing.
"So you're a wizard, right?"
The only man in the trio—the one who looked uncannily like Jon Snow—looked at the woman beside him and asked softly.
"Of course not..."
Sersi shook her head, denying it.
"So you're some kind of superpowered person who can fly?"
The man continued pressing the beautiful woman beside him, whose looks carried a kind of classical elegance.
"No, I can't fly..."
Sersi looked like she wanted to laugh, but she still shook her head.
"But I heard that hundreds of years ago you dated a boyfriend who could fly and shoot lasers out of his eyes."
The man sounded a little jealous as he pressed her for the truth.
"Hehehe..."
"My ex-boyfriend was a pilot, so of course he could fly in the sky. And as for his eyes glowing? That's because the lights on his plane were really good. The moment they turned on, everything lit up at once. It looked almost like lasers were shooting from his eyes. Very magical."
Sersi kept explaining, and somehow she did a remarkably good job of it.
"I really don't think we need to keep having these pointless conversations. I'm just trying to get a little closer to you, not keep feeling like there's always some distance between us, like there's an invisible wall standing there..."
At least her current boyfriend, the man who looked almost exactly like Jon Snow, shook his head after hearing her explanation, clearly unconvinced.
"Please, just trust me..."
Just as Sersi was about to keep talking, movement suddenly erupted in the small river beside them.
A huge monster clawed its way out of the water...
At the same time, high above them, a man in battle armor watched the whole scene unfold from the sky.
He seemed to be waiting for something, carefully calculating the best possible moment to make his entrance.
But above that suited man's head, another man in a black-and-white battle suit watched everything in silence.
The mantis stalked the cicada.
The oriole waited behind it.
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