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Ronan watched the figure materialize out of thin air, and his whole body locked up.
"Why are you here?!"
Shock bled through the fury in his voice.
Hadn't she already made a deal with him? Why had she followed him all the way to Xandar?
Hermione floated in midair and tilted her head.
"Hmm. I thought it over, and I decided something as dangerous as the Power Stone really can't be left in the hands of a madman like you."
"You tricked me?!" Ronan erupted, the humiliation of being played stripping his reason clean away. "Then you can die along with this accursed planet!"
He roared and raised the warhammer high. This time every scrap of its energy aimed at Hermione, alone in the sky above him.
A violet beam tore through the air, thicker, wilder than anything he'd unleashed before, carrying enough destructive force to punch a hole clean through a planet. It screamed toward her.
Hermione raised one pale hand.
A faint red light bloomed before her, moving like living liquid, coalescing into a barrier that looked almost fragile.
The Aether.
BOOM!
The violet beam of destruction slammed into the red barrier.
No earth-shaking explosion. No deadlocked clash of energies pushing back against each other.
Something stranger.
The moment that violent violet energy touched the red barrier, it seemed to meet its natural predator. It was eroded. Converted. The purple drained out of it, and in its place spread an eerie, luminous red.
In the space of a single blink, the annihilation beam had become a harmless, flowing stream of red particles.
Ronan's face went rigid. His pupils snapped shut.
"This... this is impossible!"
He could feel the Power Stone's boundless might. Power enough to destroy stars. He held absolute power, an Infinity Stone in his own hand, and she'd neutralized it like it was nothing?
Unlike at Knowhere, this time he'd gone all out. He'd pushed to the absolute ceiling of what he could release.
Hermione smiled faintly.
He'd only just gotten the Stone. He'd never actually studied it.
She had. She'd been studying four Infinity Stones for a very long time now.
There was no fixed hierarchy among the Stones. No one Stone was inherently stronger than another. What mattered was how much of a Stone's power you could draw out, and that came down to the user: their own strength, their precision, their control.
When two Infinity Stones met head-on, the contest wasn't between the Stones. It was between the people holding them.
In magical mastery, in fine-grained control, Hermione stood in an entirely different league from Ronan, who had just gotten the Power Stone and knew nothing beyond brute-force discharge.
The red particle stream didn't stop after neutralizing his blast. It reversed course. Like something alive and hungry, it surged back along the energy trail and in an instant crawled up onto the arm gripping the warhammer. The dark red particles ate into Ronan's flesh with a ZZZZT, trying to break him down, assimilate him.
"Ugh!" Ronan choked out a sound of raw pain. He could feel his arm slipping out of his control.
A vicious light flashed in his eyes.
He grabbed his own shoulder with his free hand and wrenched.
CRACK!
Bone snapped. He tore off his own arm, the corroded one, with brute force.
Blue blood sprayed. The agony turned his face pale blue. But the particles stopped spreading.
The massive warhammer plummeted toward the ground along with the severed limb.
It never landed.
Hermione raised her hand.
"Come."
The warhammer curved through the air as if caught by invisible gravity and dropped into her grip.
She felt the power inside it, savage, completely unlike the Aether. The corner of her mouth pulled up.
She glanced over the Kree soldiers below. The Necrocraft fighters. The whole battlefield.
Then she swung. BOOM, a violet wave rolled outward, more condensed than anything Ronan had managed, cleaner, more pure, sweeping the entire battlefield in a single pass. Every soldier Ronan had brought, every fighter, had no time to scream. They were vaporized. Gone.
Ronan stood motionless, staring.
He watched the army he had built with such painstaking effort turn to ash in seconds. He watched that small, slight figure swing his warhammer like it weighed nothing.
The gap between them settled into him, cold and final.
He closed his eyes. His face said everything.
Hermione didn't bother with words.
She raised the warhammer. Violet energy poured into Ronan like a tide.
"NO——!"
He screamed. His body split apart under the Power Stone's force, cracking along every seam.
Then, like a balloon pushed past its limit, he exploded. Ash scattered across the sky. Ronan ceased to exist.
Silence.
The entire battlefield went quiet.
Nobody could speak. That terrifying being who had wielded the Power Stone, who had nearly destroyed Xandar, he was just... dead?
"LONG LIVE THE WITCH!" Yondu's eyes swept the scene, and he immediately led the charge.
The Ravagers, never ones to miss an opportunity, joined him in an instant, voices thundering.
"Long live the Witch! Long live the Witch!"
The Nova Corps soldiers and the people of Xandar caught the wave of it and began to add their voices, one after another, until the chant swelled into something enormous.
They didn't know who this girl was. They knew what she'd done. She had saved Xandar. She had defeated an enemy the entire Nova Corps couldn't stop.
She was their savior.
Hermione looked down at the crowd, jubilant, roaring, arms raised, and the corner of her mouth lifted.
Step one of the plan. Perfect.
She tightened her grip, and the warhammer crumbled in her hand, inch by inch, like a toy past its breaking point, reduced to a heap of scrap. Only one thing remained: the violet gem, radiating its eerie glow, suspended quietly in the air.
Hermione produced the Orb and sealed the Power Stone inside with careful hands.
The magic book in her mind stirred again. Same as the Space Stone. Same format. The only difference: the carried effect read Power Magic Level +1.
A cluster of figures was moving toward her quickly.
At the front: Nova Prime.
She stopped in front of Hermione. Her expression was complicated as she looked at her.
"Lady Witch." Her voice was genuine. "Thank you for saving Xandar."
Hermione gave a slight nod.
Nova Prime hesitated. Her gaze dropped to the Orb in Hermione's hand, stayed there for a moment, and then she spoke carefully.
"The Power Stone is a matter of grave importance. I hope you will keep it safe, Lady Witch — and ensure it never falls into the wrong hands."
➤ Next: Thanos Arrives
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