How was this possible!
Gladiator refused to believe it. He was absolutely certain that this single punch of his—maybe not enough to shatter a star outright—would at the very least reduce a planet to rubble.
Then Zod-His caught him on the jaw with an uppercut. A violent concussion scrambled his brain, and consciousness slipped away as his body punched clean through the hull of the ship.
Zod-His followed him out, casually manipulating electromagnetic forces to patch the battered vessel back together—just enough to keep the superheroes inside from suffocating.
Their spacesuits had all been shredded by Gladiator's assault.
Gladiator recovered quickly, battle-hunger blazing in his eyes. The confidence boost swelled his power once more.
"Now this is good. You know, he and the Mind Stone really are a perfect match."
Zod-His stood motionless in the void, arms loose at his sides, practically inviting Gladiator to come at him.
Gladiator didn't need to be told twice. He knew he was weaker than Zod-His. Even stronger than before, that fact hadn't changed.
He threw a punch.
Zod-His's eyes flared crimson. Gladiator slammed on the brakes mid-swing, his own eyes igniting in kind.
Two beams of heat vision—each capable of slicing through anything, of parting metal like paper—collided head-on.
By the principle that opposing energy beams don't simply cancel out but instead produce an exponentially greater detonation, the clash between Zod-His and Gladiator's heat vision triggered a cataclysmic explosion of staggering magnitude!
Yet both men, swallowed whole by the blast, couldn't have cared less. They tore into each other with such ferocity that the shockwave was literally beaten apart by the force of their exchange.
Gladiator felt it with every passing second—no matter how much he pushed his strength higher, the man across from him matched it. Surpassed it, even. Always staying just one step ahead.
How? How could Earth produce a monster like this?
It was nothing but a backwater corner of the galaxy, sheltered under Asgard's wing, and yet this was what crawled out of it?
Zod-His, for his part, grew more fascinated with every exchange. What the hell had this guy been eating to keep scaling his strength and durability like this?
Consider: Zod-His's current grip strength exceeded that of an eighty-thousand-ton hydraulic press. By his own estimate, he was well past the million-ton mark.
His arm strength was even greater.
And more importantly—Zod-His was a Doomsday Superman.
Gladiator's confidence cheat could scale as high as it liked. Could it outscale Doomsday?
Zod-His had been碾压—dominating—him from the start. The fact that Gladiator was still standing spoke volumes about the man's mental fortitude.
Gladiator's vast array of superpowers stemmed from his unique alien physiology: superhuman strength, stamina, durability, regeneration, heat vision, freeze breath, and flight at near-light speed.
He was one of the strongest beings in the Marvel universe. He could shatter asteroids, hoist entire skyscrapers, and his upper limit was essentially immeasurable—so long as his confidence held. He could tank impacts equivalent to a supernova. His heat vision burned hotter than stellar cores.
His abilities fluctuated with his self-belief. He was not immune to low-level radiation.
And crucially—he had no defense against psychic attacks.
When Gladiator was confident, only a handful of beings in existence could match him in raw power. But the moment that confidence wavered, his strength plummeted.
His body could withstand most forms of damage. He could survive in the vacuum of space, even at the core of a sun. He could go toe-to-toe with the Hulk, with Thor, and walk away unscathed. The more confident he felt, the less he registered pain.
He could traverse interstellar space unaided, possessed microscopic vision down to the molecular level, and was a devastatingly skilled hand-to-hand combatant—trained extensively as Captain of the Imperial Guard of the Shi'ar Empire.
Reed Richards had once given him a device that allowed him to lift massive objects without crushing them. Gladiator had once hoisted a thirty-five-story building without so much as cracking a window.
In other words, compared to a Kryptonian, Gladiator lacked one game-breaking advantage: the bio-electric aura.
And Zod-His, even in his base state, outclassed him across the board. Quark-level microscopic vision and absolute mastery over matter meant that Zod-His could dismantle Gladiator's kinetic energy at the most fundamental level, effortlessly.
That was why Gladiator's devastating punch had done nothing—to him, to the ship, hadn't even produced a shockwave.
Because Zod-His had unraveled it, dispersed it, bled it away at the subatomic level before it could manifest.
This kind of showing off—this flexing through technique—lasted only until Zod-His realized Gladiator hadn't noticed a thing. At that point, he abandoned the theatrics and simply used his energy absorption to drink in Gladiator's kinetic force and raw power.
Gladiator as a living battery was far more potent than the Hulk-brand version!
At first, Gladiator had been all fire and fury, confidence overflowing, battle-lust singing in his veins.
But two hours into the fight, Zod-His hadn't just kept pace—he was still suppressing him. Gladiator started to wonder if he'd actually gotten stronger at all.
And yet the asteroid field around them—reduced to gravel and dust by their exchange—told a different story. His power had skyrocketed, to levels he'd never imagined reaching.
It was only because Zod-His existed as a benchmark that he'd been able to chase this far. He had never in his life felt this powerful.
And even so, the Dark Knight across from him remained an abyss. Bottomless. As if he had no ceiling at all…
Gladiator's greatest strength was also his greatest weakness: that confidence-dependent power. It was the source of everything—and the crack in everything.
Zod-His had expected a longer warm-up. Then, without warning, he noticed Gladiator weakening.
As doubt crept in, Gladiator's strength began to ebb like a retreating tide.
"What's wrong? Are you conceding?"
Zod-His was genuinely puzzled. He couldn't fathom how someone with a cheat that broken could lose confidence this quickly.
"I can't possibly beat you…"
Gladiator's voice came out hollow. Defeated. Like a man who'd already lost.
Zod-His sighed, almost exasperated, and knocked him unconscious with a casual flick. Then he hauled the unconscious warrior back to the ship.
When the Shi'ar crew saw Gladiator being dragged in by the enemy, none of them could believe their eyes.
Gladiator had lost.
The superheroes, meanwhile, exhaled in collective relief. Of course. Zod-His was still Zod-His.
"Head back to Earth. I have something to discuss with them."
Zod-His addressed Stark and the others.
"Alright."
Stark and his team had no intention of lingering. Perhaps it was simply that they trusted Zod-His that much.
Gladiator, blessed with a body of steel, regained consciousness quickly. The first thing he saw was Zod-His resting his chin on one hand, lost in thought.
"Submit to me, Kallark."
Behind Zod-His, fundamental particles assembled themselves, weaving into the shape of a throne. He settled onto it, then turned his gaze back to Gladiator.
"Who are you?"
By now, Gladiator had realized that this man's identity was far more than it seemed.
"Emperor of the Kryptonian Empire. Zod-His."
The declaration left Gladiator—and every Shi'ar present—stunned into silence.
The words hit like a thunderclap.
The Kryptonian Empire? That Kryptonian Empire? The one that had existed for barely a blink of cosmic time, yet was already universally recognized as the Fourth Great Empire—on par with the three that had ruled the galaxy for eons?