"Hope, what are you doing here?" Ben's mental projection stared in complete bewilderment at the figure standing beside him in Alien X's infinite consciousness space.
It was unmistakably Charmcaster, her adult form fully manifested despite the complications that should have prevented such dimensional access.
But this was inside Alien X's body—a completely independent mental realm that existed outside conventional reality, accessible only to the three consciousnesses that governed the Celestialsapien transformation: Ben himself, plus Enara and Ouyana when they were present.
No one else should be able to enter this space. The very concept violated fundamental rules about how Alien X's divided consciousness operated.
"How would I know?!" Charmcaster immediately huffed with indignation, her tone mixing confusion with accusation. "Who pulled me into his body without asking permission first? You can't just absorb people into your transformations like they're accessories!"
She crossed her arms, glaring at him with the full force of her considerable ego. "One moment I'm fighting Cancer beings, the next I'm trapped inside some cosmic void with no explanation! Do you have any idea how disorienting that is?"
"Wait..." Ben's mental processes caught up with the timeline, reconstructing events. "Oh. Right."
He suddenly remembered the sequence from earlier. To avoid the Cancer Celestials' devastating bombardment, he'd directly merged Charmcaster into Eclipsian Swampfire's plant-matter body, using his transformation's natural absorption abilities to protect her by surrounding her with layers of organic material.
And then, when he'd transformed from Eclipsian Swampfire into Ultimate Way Big and subsequently into Alien X, he'd never actually released her. She'd been carried through multiple transformations, integrated into his form at some fundamental level.
That must be when it happened, Ben realized. When I transformed into Alien X, she got pulled into the consciousness space because she was technically part of my body at that moment.
"Compared to figuring out how I got here," Charmcaster said, her attention shifting to something far more immediately relevant, "isn't that the real Ben Tennyson?" She raised her head, looking outward into the darkness of the consciousness space.
Everything happening in the Cancerverse became visible before them like images projected on a cosmic movie screen—reality itself rendered as observable phenomenon, displayed across the infinite void for their examination.
Charmcaster recognized Bad Ben instantly despite never having met this particular variant.
After obtaining power from the five cosmic abstracts, Bad Ben's appearance had transformed yet again. His skeletal form had been replaced by something that resembled his original human body—though older, more weathered, carrying the weight of countless decisions and moral compromises.
"He's a little older than I remember from my universe," Charmcaster observed, her brow furowing with concern. "Maybe late twenties or early thirties? But why does his entire demeanor seem so... corrupted? What happened to make Ben Tennyson become this?"
Her voice carried genuine distress. Although she and Ben Tennyson from her home universe had been enemies—had fought countless battles, had opposed each other's goals repeatedly—their relationship had never been characterized by true malice or evil intent.
Charmcaster didn't commit much genuine evil, all things considered. Her actions were typically motivated by understandable goals: restoring her homeland, resurrecting her father, reclaiming what had been stolen from her people. Morally gray rather than purely villainous.
Similarly, it was difficult for Charmcaster to imagine a Ben Tennyson genuinely full of evil, someone who'd embraced darkness and cruelty as fundamental character traits rather than as corrupting influences.
"Has he been possessed by some kind of malevolent entity?" Charmcaster asked, searching for explanations that might preserve her understanding of who Ben Tennyson fundamentally was. "Like Ghostfreak's consciousness taking control? That would explain the personality shift."
"No," Ben replied flatly, his tone carrying grim certainty. "He's just naturally a bad person. Born that way, or shaped by his timeline's circumstances into someone fundamentally different from most Ben variants."
He paused, considering the implications. "Though now that you mention it, there probably is a Ben Tennyson somewhere in the multiverse who got possessed by Zs'Skayr and never broke free. That variant would be interesting to encounter."
His words proved oddly prophetic, though neither of them knew it yet.
"Anyway," Ben continued, forcing his attention back to immediate tactical concerns, "you're safe here inside the consciousness space. Protected by Alien X's inherent reality-warping nature. I need to figure out how to actually defeat Bad Ben Variant before he destroys this entire universe."
He turned away, his mental focus already shifting toward combat analysis and strategic planning.
Fortunately, Charmcaster wasn't one of the three primary consciousnesses that governed Alien X's decision-making. Even with her presence in the consciousness space, Ben retained unilateral control over the transformation's actions. He could make decisions and implement them without requiring her approval or negotiating with her perspective.
However, Alien X's omnipotence had been reduced by approximately one-third due to Enara and Ouyana's absence. Their portions of Celestialsapien power were simply missing, leaving Ben operating with incomplete authority over reality manipulation.
He probably wasn't truly omnipotent anymore in any meaningful sense. Vastly powerful, certainly. Capable of threatening multiversal structures. But not genuinely unlimited in the way that complete Alien X should be.
"Wait—" Charmcaster's voice carried urgency, her hand reaching toward Ben's retreating mental projection.
But before she could finish her sentence, Ben's consciousness had already fully immersed itself in combat preparations, his awareness expanding to fill Alien X's cosmic perspective.
Through the enormous viewing screen that displayed external reality, Charmcaster could see the unfolding battle with perfect clarity, every detail rendered in high definition despite the cosmic scales involved.
"Damn it!" she muttered, stamping her foot in frustration—a gesture that produced no sound in the void but expressed her emotional state clearly. "They've left me alone again! Completely sidelined!"
What's the point of keeping a girl inside your body all the time?! her thoughts spiraled into uncomfortable territory. Isn't this basically intimate contact at negative distance? We're literally occupying the same physical space!
The implications made her face flush with embarrassment and indignation.
But she quickly snapped back to focus, because the situation in the external battle was rapidly deteriorating.
During the brief moment when Alien X had stood motionless—while Ben's consciousness adjusted to the transformation and dealt with discovering Charmcaster's presence—Looma, Eunice, and Hela had already engaged Bad Ben directly.
And they were being absolutely overwhelmed.
The massive Destroyer Armor—legendary Asgardian construct that had battled Celestials in the ancient past—was shattered in an instant. Uru metal that should have been virtually indestructible simply came apart like cheap tin foil under Bad Ben's assault.
Even Ascalon, the divine god-killing blade that Looma had been swinging toward Bad Ben's center mass, somehow ended up deflected and embedded firmly in the Destroyer Armor's own chest instead. The weapon's death authority, which should have been absolutely lethal, proved completely ineffective against someone wielding cosmic abstracts' combined power.
"They're getting completely beaten," Charmcaster whispered, her eyes wide with horror as she watched the one-sided carnage. "This isn't even a fight. It's an execution."
Eunice, wielding five Infinity Stones and the Cosmic Cube's power, lasted slightly longer than Looma. But even her reality-warping capabilities proved insufficient. Bad Ben scattered the Stones with a single contemptuous gesture, his mastery over fundamental cosmic forces allowing him to simply override their authority.
Only the Cosmic Cube itself—a possession of the Beyonders, operating on principles that transcended even the Infinity Stones—preserved Eunice's synthezoid body and prevented her complete destruction.
Hela was the weakest among the three defenders, lacking both Looma's physical might and Eunice's cosmic-scale power. She was almost completely annihilated, her body torn apart by forces she couldn't even perceive properly, let alone defend against.
Fortunately, Ben's consciousness finally took full control of Alien X at that precise moment, allowing the Celestialsapien form to intercept Bad Ben's killing blow just before it could finish Hela permanently.
Looking at the transformed body before her—simultaneously black as a collapsed star's event horizon and white as newborn stellar ignition, patterns of void and light shifting across cosmic scales—Hela couldn't help but breathe a profound sigh of relief.
She'd been seconds from true death, the kind that even her connection to Ben's authority couldn't reverse.
But at the same time, witnessing Alien X's manifestation made Hela reconsider her entire understanding of power hierarchies and her place within them.
She'd originally believed that stealing death's omnipotence for herself would allow her to "rise from serfdom and sing her own song," as the saying went. That becoming the primary death goddess would elevate her to the highest tier of cosmic importance.
Now she realized that even Death herself—the abstract cosmic entity whose authority Hela wielded only as a borrowed fragment—was merely one player among many at these scales. Powerful, certainly, but not supreme. Not ultimate.
What does my ambition matter, Hela thought with dark humor, when beings exist who can simply override fundamental universal principles through sheer force of will?
Bad Ben's skeletal face—now restored to flesh through reality manipulation—showed genuine surprise as Alien X manifested.
"Alien X?" he said, his voice carrying both mockery and calculation. "Did you reach consensus with the consciousnesses inside your body that quickly? I expected negotiations to take hours at minimum."
His tone shifted to something more pointed. "Or should I say, Evil X?"
Ben immediately grasped the significance of that particular phrasing.
"Evil X " was the distinctive nickname that certain Ben variants used for the Celestialsapien species—specifically variants from timelines where Alien X was viewed with suspicion and fear rather than as a tool to be mastered.
"So besides Mad Ben and yourself," Ben said slowly, his cosmic voice resonating across dimensional boundaries, "there are other Ben Tennyson variants you've recruited? An entire coalition working with Maltruant?"
His analytical mind raced through implications. "The nickname 'Mad Ben' is quite appropriate for that particular variant. You have good taste in categorization—descriptive and accurate."
Bad Ben didn't answer directly, but his smirk suggested Ben's deduction was correct.
The truth was, Bad Ben no longer particularly cared about Maltruant's organization or whatever grand plans the TVA's rogue leadership had been pursuing.
He already possessed power that transcended multiversal limitations. Why would someone who could manipulate the fundamental forces of death, time, space, consumption, and annihilation concern themselves with petty temporal manipulation or timeline maintenance?
Maltruant, you fool, Bad Ben thought with contempt. I have ascended to godhood! Your schemes and plans are irrelevant to someone operating at my level!
He launched his attack without further warning or dramatic buildup, abandoning conversation in favor of direct action.
Bad Ben charged straight at Alien X with speed that exceeded light, that bypassed causality entirely, giving Ben no time to react defensively or prepare countermeasures.
The impact sent Alien X hurtling backward across half the observable universe, cosmic body tumbling through space-time like a ragdoll thrown by a giant.
Along their trajectory, stars were simply destroyed—not exploded dramatically, but unmade, erased from existence as if they'd never formed in the first place.
Thousands of galaxies vanished like waves shattered against rocks, their billions of stars and countless planets simply ceasing to be as the combatants' passage disrupted fundamental forces that maintained stellar formation.
Ben immediately retaliated, recovering his orientation and throwing a devastating counterpunch that sent Bad Ben crashing directly into a supergiant star.
The stellar body's fusion reaction destabilized catastrophically under the impact, beginning a premature collapse that would eventually become a supernova or black hole depending on which fundamental forces reasserted themselves first.
These were two extraordinarily powerful beings whose casual movements could destroy universes, whose full-power exchanges threatened entire multiversal structures.
But their fighting style was surprisingly crude and direct—almost primitive in its simplicity.
There weren't elaborate displays of reality-warping magic, no dazzling light shows or complex spellwork weaving new universal laws. No elegant manipulation of probability or causality or temporal mechanics.
Just brutal, straightforward hand-to-hand combat. Punches and kicks delivered with enough force to crack dimensional boundaries.
Because both combatants understood instinctively that anything more sophisticated would be ineffective against an opponent of equivalent power. Reality manipulation couldn't work when your enemy could simply manipulate reality right back. Probability couldn't be altered when both fighters existed outside probability's normal constraints.
It was like a battle between two reality-warping dragons—you couldn't defeat your opponent using verbal commands or conceptual attacks when they possessed identical authority over those same concepts.
In the end, victory would come down to who could hit harder, who could endure more damage, who possessed greater reserves of fundamental power to draw upon.
Even so, despite the simplicity of their combat style, this battle was already impacting the entire multiverse.
At the Time Variance Authority headquarters, in their monitoring center that observed infinite timelines simultaneously, Albedo and Vilgax were frantically tracking developments in the Cancerverse.
"The energy readings are completely off baseline!" Albedo's voice carried panic as he stared at instruments that should have been impossible to overload. "Weren't they supposed to be eliminating another Ben Tennyson variant? A cleanup operation against someone who'd gone rogue?"
He gestured at displays showing energy levels climbing to theoretically impossible heights. "How could a simple elimination mission generate energy fluctuations massive enough to disrupt the TVA's Sacred Timeline itself?! Even our temporal anchors are shaking!"
"This feeling..." Nega Ben slightly raised his eyes from the phone he'd been scrolling through with apparent disinterest.
He could sense something through his unique connection to cosmic forces, something that felt distinctly like the energy signature of true Celestialsapiens rather than incomplete manifestations.
But he didn't vocalize his observations, just kept his head down and continued scrolling through social media feeds as if nothing particularly interesting was happening.
Let them panic, Nega Ben thought with dark amusement. They'll figure out soon enough what Bad Ben has become.
Meanwhile, in the Multiverse Spider Alliance headquarters—the interdimensional base where Spider-heroes from countless realities coordinated their response to multiversal threats—the situation had descended into complete chaos.
Alarms were blaring across every monitoring station simultaneously. Energy readings were spiking beyond anything in their historical databases.
"The massive energy surge is originating from Ben Parker's home universe!" one Spider-hero shouted, trying to be heard over the cacophony. "What kind of crisis could he have encountered that would generate readings like this?"
The British Spider-Man—who'd been resurrected after dying during the Inheritor Wars—stared in absolute astonishment at the instrument displays before him.
Years of experience analyzing multiversal threats and cosmic-scale phenomena had prepared him for identifying most energy signatures. But this was something entirely new, something that shouldn't theoretically be possible.
"This energy level registers as approximately omniversal in scope," he said slowly, his accent thickening with stress. "As if we're observing the true manifestations of the Five Great Cosmic Abstracts merged into a single unified entity."
He checked his readings again, hoping he'd made an error. "Have the actual gods—Death, Eternity, Infinity, Annihilation, and Galactus—somehow combined their fundamental authorities? Merged into one super-entity?"
All beings throughout the multiverse capable of observing cosmic events were now watching this battle with rapt attention and mounting concern.
Because the power of the Five Great Gods—representing countless cornerstones of universal existence, the fundamental forces that maintained reality's basic structure—had somehow been consolidated into a single wielder.
And these weren't the weakened clones that existed in individual parallel universes, localized manifestations with limited scope and authority.
This was the complete power, the unified whole drawing on every instance simultaneously.
Everyone was speculating frantically about what could have caused such an impossible development.
Had something gone catastrophically wrong with the Five Gods themselves? Were they planning to reshape the entire multiverse into new configurations? Was this the beginning of some cosmic event that would rewrite existence at its most fundamental levels?
The answers, whatever they might be, would determine the fate of infinite realities.
And in the Cancerverse, two beings who shouldn't have been able to exist continued their devastating battle, each blow threatening to unravel the very fabric of the multiverse itself.