CHAPTER 236
They watched as Chthon's Darkhold burned away and his aura skyrocketed, engulfing everything in his omniscience.
How had they been keeping up with a multiversal entity of mad destruction?
By having an unlimited and unimpeded access to the powers of Six Infinity Stones.
That wad the failsafe Draul had kept so that when it truly mattered, they'd be able to at least keep the fight going.
Draul had forcefully push influence into the alternate and neighboring universes of the ones he had control over during his fight with Knull and Nyarlatothep. Though the number was nothing in front of the never ending infinity, stacking such untold number of nigh-omniscience, -omnipotence and -omnipresence to his true self, and not to mention his constant usage of his Null to erase the limitations he was supposed to face, elevated his being to a whole new level… and they all had access to it, for however much they could take.
Though they had access to Draul's energy, the only boost it gave them was to their own abilities, increasing and removing the potential and lock on their abilities.
Even with such a scaling, in terms of ability power-up, individually they all woefully fell short of Chthon, a no-brainer as he was the most powerful Elder God still alive.
Even if whatever space they were in was currently fighting and trying to suppress Chthon, he was still not an easy foe.
… More so when they destroyed the Darkhold.
The Darkhold was but a tool Chthon used in channeling the unending energy of the Flickering Realms… and now he was destroying them both and absorbing them, finally consolidating all his abilities to one reality, absorbing all of his scattered essences across infinite planes of existence.
"Shit! I think we finally pissed him off to the point of madness." Natasha remarked as she saw realms falling into chaos and disappearing. Out of all of them, she was the one who experienced the most changes apart from the outright unbelievable scale of destruction they could all cause.
Hell, her abilities were the most destructive out of all of them, with reality manipulation being her current default. Her words were akin to universal law, and every gesture she made could shake realities.
The others were just talking, breathing, realities-destroying nukes.
"Well, it was bound to happen to one of us, but I guess he hit his fuse pretty quickly." Ororo snarked.
The red haze covering Chthon and the Darkhold increased in intensity, but none of their expressions showed the severity of the situation, settling between calmness with a tint of amusement. But under that façade….
"Too bright." Steve muttered as his material form slowly fizzled out.
The others watched as Chthon's power gained in intensity before everything abruptly disappeared – Chthon, his Darkhold, and his energy buildup. Everything.
"Well that was anticlimactic." Natasha lightly commented, gaining a round of nodding heads from the others.
"Way." A door-like rift opened in space in response to Natasha's words and sucked all of them in, bringing them to the scene of Steve punching a much bigger Chthon through a rift, before the dimension abruptly changed, preventing them from taking another step as Chthon crashed into it through a breach.
"Huh. Never thought I'd see those 'punching-through-dimension' punches Draul always spoke about from Steve." Yelena said before disappearing with a loud bang, but there was not a single updraft of air as she left, racing towards Chthon who had gotten up only to receive a punch on the back of his head, firing him back into the ground.
An angry and irritated growl left his throat as he fucking LOST the location of the Flickering Realms!
That was impossible in all possibilities. The Flickering Realms was similar to another of his limbs, losing it wasn't even a conceivable option.
"Funny thing about space, though you should already know this, is that it is very fickle. All it needs is a little nudge, maybe add a little old reality manipulation, and it'll cheat on you like an old lover." Steve said lightly, not minding Chthon's rage that was destabilizing the plane they currently stood on.
What happened to Chthon's realm?
Steve might or might not have accessed that realm with his omnipresence, inadvertently linking it up to numerous planes that had fallen to Draul's hunger.
He didn't need to be there for him to know the spatial coordinates to the Flickering Realms.
Steve had to admit that Draul was one clever bastard in the way he linked them up to the tap of their abilities, removing almost every conceivable limit they had.
Steve to the Space Stone.
Bucky to the Power Stone.
Yelena to the Time Stone.
Natasha to the Reality Stone and more.
Ororo to the Soul and Mind Stone.
Adding his own assimilating and augmenting abilities to his nigh-omnipotent spatial abilities and he was dominating any space he could sense. As long as the space existed around him, even multiple universal distances away, his dominion was assured.
Even God Realms were not exempt from this, and Chthon bringing the Flickering Realms in the sensing distance of Steve was just… dumb.
"Gaea! Oshtur! You better come out before I slaughter these sickening children-"
"They can't hear you." Bucky's voice cut his shouts off, absolute power rolling off him with every move he made. "I seem to remember that the deal is either you die or we do. You're not backing out now, are you?"
Bucky looked completely human with no sign of anything extraordinary about him visible, but his momentum was the greatest.
The perfect evolution. Something not even Draul accomplished in the past.
"You!!" Chthon didn't care any more. He rushed at the most pretentious human among the group before him. Since they wouldn't allow him to escape anyway, he'll just have to kill them one by one and leave.
"Yes, me." Bucky nodded at the incoming Chthon who was blindsided by Yelena, which was an inevitability at this point.
Seriously, nobody could sense the little imp when she moved. Not even Steve.
The others immediately sprung into action with Yelena's opening and struck at Chthon. Even if they were exceptionally powerful, that didn't mean that they could all suddenly face off against Chthon. The reason why they caused him so much trouble was because of the root of their abilities, which was none other than Draul.
In essence, they were all stained with his peculiarities. Steve's spatial manipulation was a very good example. He basically ate Chthon's dimension, but the stomach of that ability of his was Draul's since they were just borrowing his abilities.
Ororo's lighting-cladded fists hit Chthon's magic barrier, instantly chattering it, to the surprise of Chthon.
Why was he surprised? Was it because she's surpassed an Elder God in might? Was it truly that surprising? That this was the result of her beloved's sleepless nights. That this was the result of pushing him to his edge, sending him almost tethering into insanity? How truly conceited.
"What will it take for you to end? To be gone and never threaten reality again?" She asked, not at all fazed as hers and Yelena's location changed, an action of the latter, giving her the perfect opportunity to deliver an unobstructed attack on Chthon.
Bucky watched as they rest ganged up on Chthon, tanking and dropping attacks on the malevolent God.
Faint sparks of red lighting streaked across his body as his eyes colored a blood red, a property they all knew who it belonged to.
His fists turned black, devoid of light, as the sparks intensified. "I really am tired of all this. You ought to owe me for a lifetime, quack." He softly muttered… and took a step.
Everything shuddered.
Whether it was Chthon, the others, the endless sky or land, they all quaked with his step.
Strength uncontested.
…
Reversal One.
FIYUSSSSSSSSSSSHHH!
It all simmered down in the form of a spiral as Bucky's fist impacted Chthon, bypassing every defense he could put up.
He didn't just hit Chthon, instead he hit everything that was 'Chthon'. His punch connected with everything that associated with the words and intent of Chthon. As they currently were, time meant nothing to them – past, present and future – he hit them all.
Not one for much fanfare, amidst Chthon's stunned form, he layered punch after punch on his form, joined by the others who attacked Chthon out of his stun and into another.
The Dark God bled through a geyser as Ororo slashed through his chest. He threw his head back to shout only for his eyes to lose their vision; he felt two limbs burst through them before the feeling of two black holes colliding at their nuclei went off inside his skull.
And then it came…
A very small fist punched his left cheek and unlike the feeling one would feel when punch by a girl of Yelena's stature, Chthon felt universal dimensions shattering with an ever increasing force that should have at leaf thrown him out of the damn space, unfortunately Steve held him in place, or simply reversed his path.
"Shatter, collide, and explode." The sensation he felt with the advent of those words bore no resemblance to the feminine beauty that uttered them.
Reality vs reality.
He would have trumped her at this… if not for the war that was wrecking his body from the inside.
Everything he had felt from them, every pain he had suffered, shattered – along with his sanity(whatever he had to call that).
… Collided against each other.
And like the beautiful light of fireworks in a star-lit night sky, it all exploded.
'If only he wasn't suppressed.' He would continue to tell himself even as the light of his eyes faded away.
He struggled until the very end of the damn restrictions were just too brutal in their effectiveness…
…
No one knew how long the two spent, each trying to rip the other apart, diminishing and assimilating the other's nothingness into their own.
It was an impossible battle between Null and End, both varying concepts and yet so similar to each other.
Draul's Dreamspark and Nyarlatothep's clashed against one another. Nightmare and hellish darkness intertwining, woven into a cord inseparable. They were never meant to be.
Darkness and nightmares were never meant to be eternal… and so he acted.
For once in his being, the First One stirred awake, and all authorities ceased.
Draul's form paused, like a sickening motion of an 80's movie while Nyarlatothep stilled like water on a cold winter night.
Everything around them ceased to be as the Dream stopped.
Their forms disappeared, more like it was forcefully removed, without them being able to put up the slightest resistance and then next action their thought process could comprehend was them, in their hellish and nightmarish forms, at the center of All.
Besides them, in courts of their own, were the grotesque forms of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath, in the very middle was something no one dared look directly upon, not even Draul.
Its existence was absolute. Something Draul immediately understood as he comprehended where they were.
The being there was unsurpassable, naively so. That was not buts, ifs or maybes to it. What couldn't be could never be unless it wanted so.
The Archetype, Azathoth. The One Who Dreams.
None of them were anything before it, and there will never be because his dreams were the reason they lived, and as the peak of what existence could offer, they'd rather he kept dreaming.
"The two of you…will answer… why." Shub-Niggurath's voice filtered into their heads but none paid heed to it. The only one they had to fear was Yog-Sothoth, and until he spoke, nothing in existence could happen. He was the One Who Interprets the Dream.
"Nyarlatothep… Draul… what sayest thou?" Draul's anger had abated the moment he arrived so he could divert some of his raging, death-filled thoughts into something productive, like understanding why and how he was here.
"Is there any way I can kill Absolutes just like you?" The other Ultimate Gods were taken about at the casual way he spoke of seeking a death's sentence for them.