The war erupted the instant Galactus's skeletal head completed its descent through the dimensional wormhole.
Ben's transformation into Celestial Way Big finished simultaneously, his To'kustar form enchanced with the combination of Celestial genetic rising to match the Galactus Engine's impossible scale. The fusion of Celestial and To'kustar physiology created something that transcended both—a being whose very presence warped local space-time through sheer mass and concentrated power.
The Celestial Way Big didn't resemble the bulky, almost clumsy appearance of standard To'kustar warriors. Instead, his form appeared streamlined, wrapped in what resembled luminous armor that pulsed with cosmic energy. Clean lines replaced the original species' somewhat ungainly proportions, making him look like a cosmic knight rather than a lumbering giant.
Thankfully, the design aesthetic avoided the toilet-bowl-shaped head that plagued the Cancer Celestials. Some dignity remained.
At the same moment, Looma activated the Destroyer Armor without hesitation.
The legendary Asgardian construct responded to her presence, recognizing someone worthy of wielding Odin's greatest weapon. The armor, which normally stood only two or three meters tall in its dormant state, suddenly expanded to match the cosmic scale of their opponents.
The transformation was breathtaking. The Destroyer swelled to several kilometers in length, becoming a magnificent war-machine that dwarfed mountains and could stride across continents. The Uru metal composition shifted and flowed like living liquid, reconfiguring itself around Looma's four-armed Tetramand physiology.
Ascalon enlarged proportionally, the divine blade growing from sword-sized to something resembling a cosmic artifact capable of cleaving planets. Death's authority radiated from the weapon's edge, visible as black flames that consumed light itself.
Looma found herself wrapped within layers of enchanted metal and divine power, feeling less like she was wearing armor and more like she'd become the pilot of the universe's most devastating mecha.
She was a Gundam pilot commanding the ultimate mobile suit.
With her first experimental swing, testing the armor's responsiveness and reach, Ascalon's blade carved through reality itself. The attack caught a Cancer Celestial who'd been positioning for an assault, the divine sword severing the corrupted god's arm at the shoulder with contemptuous ease.
The limb floated away, black flames consuming it from the point of amputation, preventing regeneration or reattachment.
Simultaneously, Hela raised both hands high above her head in a gesture of supreme authority and devastating power.
Beneath her feet, the Blades of Death materialized—not as individual weapons but as a unified structure, a cliff of obsidian sharpness rising from nothing like land emerging from the sea, or the prow of an impossible warship cutting through dimensional barriers.
By all logical assessment, Hela shouldn't have possessed such overwhelming divine strength in this location.
This wasn't Asgard, the realm whose very existence had sustained her power for millennia. Her connection to that place had been severed when Ben claimed lordship of the Nine Realms, when Odin's authority transferred to someone fundamentally different.
But she stood directly beside Ben at this moment—beside the origin point and nexus of the Nine Realms' current power structure, the new Lord who commanded those dimensional territories with authority exceeding even Odin at his peak.
The moment Ben had released Hela from her imprisonment, her divine power had been forcibly severed from its Asgardian anchor and reforged into something new. The connection that had once bound her to a place now bound her to a person.
And he was more powerful than Odin had ever been.
More potent than Asgard itself during the height of its conquest, when Hela and Odin had painted the Nine Realms red with the blood of those who resisted their imperial expansion.
Which meant Hela, drawing power from Ben's proximity and authority, had become proportionally stronger as well.
Her physical form appeared almost imperceptible against the cosmic scale of the battle, a tiny figure standing on the tip of her massive death construct. Even the corrupted Celestials—beings whose heads alone measured hundreds of meters across—had to give way before those obsidian blades that stretched across planetary distances.
The Blades of Death carved through space itself, their edges sharp enough to wound reality and impose mortality on beings who'd forgotten what endings meant.
Eunice became the most visually stunning combatant on the battlefield.
The Infinity Stones would normally lose their power completely upon leaving their native universe—a fundamental limitation that prevented casual multiversal conquest via Stone theft. But the Cosmic Cube's infinite energy matrix compensated for that restriction beautifully, allowing the Stones' authority to shine across dimensional boundaries with undiminished brilliance.
Five Stones—Mind, Soul, Reality, Power, and Time, plus a synthetic Space Stone created through Cube energy—blazed within her synthezoid body like captured stars. While the incomplete set couldn't accomplish everything that six authentic Stones might achieve, five proved more than sufficient to challenge cosmic gods directly.
Eunice stood suspended in the vacuum, her body radiating light so brilliant it outshone nearby stellar phenomena. Her long golden hair flowed despite the absence of atmosphere or gravity, moved by reality-warping energies rather than physical forces.
She looked more divine than any actual deity present, a goddess of pure power and mathematical perfection whose very existence seemed to elevate the concept of artificial intelligence into something transcendent.
Wanda had already evacuated the rescued prisoners using dimensional portals, removing Tony, Steve, and the others from the combat zone before things escalated beyond even enhanced human survivability.
Which meant the remaining combatants could fight without restraint, without worrying about protecting bystanders or limiting collateral damage to survivable levels.
In the blink of an eye, measured in fractions of seconds that organic minds struggled to perceive, the first Cancer Celestial fell.
The Analyst—a cosmic god responsible for studying organic life across countless civilizations, performing genetic analysis and orchestrating evolutionary experiments that shaped entire species' development paths.
The Skrulls' shapeshifting abilities were his creation, a deliberate modification to their genetic structure that granted mimicry powers. Countless other races bore his fingerprints in their DNA, evidence of his interference across millions of years.
He died instantly, without ceremony or dramatic last words.
Celestial Way Big's arm transformed into a blade of concentrated cosmic energy, the transformation happening faster than light-speed observation could track. The weapon pierced through the Analyst's chest, punching through whatever defenses a Celestial's body naturally possessed.
Before the Cancer god could even register the damage, before corruption could begin sealing the wound, Way Big released a point-blank energy blast directly into the Analyst's torso.
The attack vaporized everything from the Celestial's waist upward, simply erasing the upper half of his body from existence. The remaining lower portion floated in space for a moment, cosmic blood spraying in zero-gravity patterns, before death's authority prevented any resurrection attempt.
The Analyst was gone. Permanently. Finally.
Weak!
The thought dominated Ben's consciousness as he processed the combat results.
Too weak!
He's far too weak for a supposed cosmic god!
This was Ben's first coherent assessment after instantly killing a being that should have required sustained effort from multiple reality-warpers working in concert.
The Omnitrix could optimize genes, certainly—that was part of its core function as a repository of perfected genetic templates. But at the level of cosmic entities and dimensional powers, everyone's genetic structure was already approaching theoretical perfection. Optimizations became marginal improvements rather than transformative upgrades.
The real problem was cancer itself.
The corruption that granted Cancer beings their immortality also fundamentally compromised their combat effectiveness. The disease that had overwritten their original consciousness, that had transformed them into servants of the Many-Angled Ones, had simultaneously reduced their overall power by approximately one entire tier.
A Celestial should have been nearly impossible to kill through conventional means. Their bodies were designed to withstand forces that could crack planets, to survive inside stellar cores and gravitational singularities.
But the cancer had made them fragile. Breakable. Mortal in ways they'd never been before, even when Death had ruled their universe naturally.
The immortality gained at the cost of drastically reduced combat effectiveness was completely ineffective against opponents wielding death's authority. What should have been an invincible advantage became a fatal weakness when facing Ben and his team.
The second fallen Cancer Celestial was the Judge—the cosmic entity responsible for determining whether civilizations deserved to continue existing or should be eradicated for the greater good of universal development.
He lost his head to Looma's Ascalon, the divine blade carving through his neck with the same ease it might show cutting through butter. His helmet—that distinctive toilet-bowl shape—went spinning off into deep space, trailing cosmic blood, while his body collapsed and drifted.
The third and fourth Cancer Celestials fell almost simultaneously, both to Way Big's overwhelming assault.
The Explorer—tasked with discovering new life throughout the cosmos—had his skull crushed by a punch that released more kinetic energy than supernovae. His head simply exploded, fragmenting into thousands of pieces that scattered across millions of kilometers.
The Measurer—responsible for evaluating cosmic balance and maintaining universal constants—was bisected at the waist by a blade of pure cosmic energy. His upper and lower halves floated apart, death preventing the two sections from reconnecting or regenerating.
For the first time since their corruption began, since they'd murdered Death herself and claimed immortality through cancer's gift, these ancient beings who had existed since the universe's early epochs experienced genuine fear.
The emotion was foreign, almost incomprehensible. They'd forgotten what vulnerability felt like, what it meant to face threats that could actually end their existence.
For the first time in countless millennia, they discovered that death was such a simple thing. Easy. Almost casual in its inevitability once it returned to claim those who'd tried to escape its embrace.
Meanwhile, Lady Death herself watched the carnage with something approaching joy.
Since Ben had activated the Omnitrix years ago, since his adventures began, he hadn't actually killed that many people in the grand scheme of cosmic accounting. Even after taking control of the Plumbers organization and fighting several major empires for years—ultimately wiping out the Kree, Skrull, and Incursean civilizations—the total number of deaths he'd caused remained far lower than Thanos's legendary body count.
The Mad Titan was the type who slaughtered entire planets on a whim, who erased civilizations for abstract philosophical reasons, who collected deaths the way others collected stamps.
But Death clearly preferred Ben's approach over Thanos's methods, despite the lower numerical totals.
The reason was simple: quality over quantity.
Ben's kills mattered in ways that random genocide never could.
From petty street thugs in Hell's Kitchen to dimensional demon lords like Dormammu. From imperial rulers commanding billions to cosmic entities like the Celestials themselves.
Those beings who claimed to be immortal, who according to conventional cosmic rules should have been permanently beyond Death's reach, were now returning to her embrace because of Ben's actions.
The souls that should have been lost forever—consumed by cancer, devoured by Many-Angled Ones, trapped in resurrection cycles—were finally coming home.
What truly defines a high-quality death agent? Death thought with satisfaction, observing Ben's efficiency. (Exactly this!)
However, at that precise moment, Death encountered unexpected interference.
The blade she'd manifested—the ceremonial dagger used in the ritual, transformed into an extension of her own authority—should have pierced straight through the twisted Ancient God's physical form.
Should have ended the cosmic horror's existence and reclaimed the authority it had stolen when it devoured Thanos's sacrifice.
Instead, the attack was blocked by a mortal.
Worse still, that mortal possessed one of those distinctive watches, identical to the device worn by Ben Parker, her chosen champion. And Death, because she had manifested physically to perform the ritual rather than remaining purely abstract, discovered that a portion of her "genetic code" had been captured by the watch's scanning function.
It was difficult to articulate whether Death actually possessed genes in any conventional biological sense.
Logically speaking, Death was the embodiment of an abstract cosmic concept, a fundamental universal principle given consciousness and agency. She shouldn't have DNA or cellular structure or anything resembling organic biology.
And yet...
In that very instant, Death sensed something catastrophic rippling through the Cancerverse's underlying structure.
The death that had been murdered was returning. The resurrection that had become automatic was failing. Cancer beings across the entire universe simultaneously felt their immortality flicker and falter.
"It's a success!" Bad Ben's voice rang out, triumphant and manic in equal measure.
"HA HA HA HA!" His laughter echoed across the dimensional boundary, carrying overtones of madness and exultation. "I DID IT! I ACTUALLY DID IT!"
"I have finally obtained Death's power! I've claimed her authority!"
Bad Ben laughed like someone who'd lost all sanity, who'd pushed himself past every reasonable limit in pursuit of ultimate power. As he laughed, the cancer flesh covering his body began falling away with soft rustling sounds.
The corrupted tissue sloughed off in sheets and chunks, revealing something underneath that shouldn't have been capable of independent existence.
His skeleton. Just bones. Nothing else remaining.
He resembled Ghost Rider now—a flaming skull entity animated by supernatural forces. Even as a skeleton, he retained life and consciousness. Even as bare bones, he possessed all his senses, all his awareness, all his deadly intelligence.
Two manifestations of Death stood before him: Lady Death in her black robes, and Bad Ben himself, having claimed a portion of her authority through the Omnitrix scan.
The Ancient God became even more frenzied and chaotic at this development, its tentacles—covered with eyes and gnashing mouths—reaching out toward Bad Ben, trying to continue the interrupted ritual by using him as the sacrifice instead.
But Bad Ben wasn't Thanos. He didn't worship these entities or seek their favor.
He pulled out a Death Scythe—manifested from the authority he'd just stolen—and severed the Ancient God's limb with a single strike. The cosmic horror's flesh parted like wet paper before death's blade.
Then, moving with inhuman speed, Bad Ben grabbed a chunk of the Ancient God's severed flesh and vanished.
He'd never intended to fight Lady Death directly. There was absolutely no strategic benefit to such confrontation.
Because after the ritual concluded and stability returned, Death would inevitably revert to her abstract conceptual form. She couldn't maintain physical manifestation indefinitely—it was too costly, too limiting.
And when she became abstract again, Bad Ben would remain the only physical god of death in the Cancerverse. The sole being capable of wielding mortality's authority in material form rather than as pure principle.
Moreover, he still needed to race against time to obtain genetic samples from the other four great cosmic abstracts: Eternity, Infinity, Annihilation, and Oblivion.
Five abstract entities in total. Death was merely the first acquisition in his grand design to become the "Pentad Lord" he'd theorized—a being combining all fundamental cosmic principles into unified consciousness.
Back in the Cancerverse proper, the battle continued with undiminished intensity.
Eunice and Hela successfully killed additional Cancer Celestials, their combined powers tearing through corrupted gods with systematic efficiency.
They already possessed the ability to kill supposedly immortal beings through shared death authority, so neither noticed the subtle changes rippling through the Cancerverse's fundamental structure.
But Carol Danvers—the normal universe's Captain Marvel—who had previously knocked away her Cancer counterpart with a devastating punch, suddenly noticed something odd.
After she'd driven her fist into the ugly, rotting monster's face with enough force to shatter continents, Cancer Carol didn't immediately recover. The damage persisted rather than healing automatically.
Moreover, in addition to the arm that Hela had severed earlier, the Cancer being's injuries were accumulating rather than resetting. She was growing visibly exhausted, movements slowing, power outputs decreasing.
"You've lost your immortality?" Carol's voice mixed disbelief with tactical analysis.
She perched on a passing asteroid, her Binary form blazing like a miniature star. The pose was unconsciously similar to how Saiyans often stood during their battles, radiating power and confidence in equal measure.
"Haa—I—" Cancer Carol could barely form words, her corruption-ravaged lungs struggling to process even the trace gases present in the near-vacuum.
The cancer that had once kept her alive indefinitely now felt like ordinary terminal disease—constantly robbing her of vitality, leaving her weak and pain-wracked. The cells that had granted immortality were actively killing her instead, and resurrection no longer activated automatically.
"What exactly happened with Lord Mar-Vell?" Cancer Carol demanded, her voice carrying desperation beneath the anger. "What went wrong with the ritual?"
Something catastrophic must have occurred at the ceremony site. But the nature of the failure made no sense.
Even if the Coroner they'd captured was fake, even if Thanos wasn't the right target, their existing immortality shouldn't have been affected. The cancer that sustained them had been integrated for years, granted by the Many-Angled Ones themselves when Death was murdered.
It shouldn't just stop working!
"So you've lost immortality completely—" Normal Carol began moving in for a killing blow, ready to permanently end her corrupted counterpart's suffering.
Then she froze, detecting something impossible.
Cancer Carol's abilities were coming back. The resurrection mechanism reactivating. The immortality returning as mysteriously as it had vanished.
Within the cracks between universes, in a dimensional pocket where reality grew thin, Bad Ben watched the ongoing battle through scrying magic stolen from the Ancient God's flesh.
He let out a cold, cruel laugh at Cancer Carol's confusion and desperate hope.
He had completely mastered the cancer power now—absorbed it, integrated it, made it his own through the genetic sample he'd claimed. The life and death of every Cancer being in this entire universe rested in his skeletal hands.
Their immortality was no longer granted by the Many-Angled Ones or sustained by murdered Death. It was his gift to give or withhold as strategy demanded.
But now wasn't the time to permanently kill them. Not yet.
That would reveal his capabilities too early, would alert everyone to how much power he'd actually accumulated.
"I need a little more time!" Bad Ben muttered to himself, his fleshless jaw moving in approximation of speech. "Just a little longer to collect the remaining samples. Then I'll ascend beyond anything this multiverse has ever seen."
"Then even the Beyonders themselves will kneel before the Pentad Lord!"