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The blue light around Quill's form rippled faintly. His energy-body seemed to solidify a fraction more as he attempted to project an air of authority.
He tried to deepen his voice, reaching for something suitably godlike. "Hermione, I think—"
"Are you deliberately making your voice gruff?"
He hadn't even finished the sentence.
"No, not at all." Quill puffed out his chest and gave a light cough.
"That's not how you sounded before."
"No, this has always been my voice."
Hermione calmly raised her wand.
At the tip, a cold pulse of eerie green light blinked into existence.
"..." Quill's voice died instantly.
Ego had been silently put down right in front of that same green light. Quill had inherited Ego's power, had even seized control of this entire planet, but he was still nowhere close to Ego's level.
If Ego couldn't stop it, what exactly was he going to stop it with?
That small, fragile idea of turning the tables and becoming the boss evaporated from his mind without a trace.
The blue light scattered. Quill snapped back to human form and dropped straight to his knees in front of Hermione, face stretched into a wide, fawning grin. "Boss! Your orders! Your loyal subordinate is ready to die a thousand deaths on your behalf!"
The speed of that reversal was genuinely impressive.
The corner of Hermione's mouth ticked up, barely perceptible. She tilted her chin toward Mantis, unconscious not far away. "Bring her. Back to the ship."
"Right away! Just a moment, Boss!" Quill scrambled to his feet like a man pardoned from execution and carefully scooped Mantis into his arms.
Hermione turned. Space warped around her, and she was gone.
Cradling Mantis, Quill followed right behind, using his newly acquired power to shield her as he launched himself into the void, not wasting a single second.
...
The Dark Aster. Bridge.
When Hermione and Quill reappeared, silence greeted them.
Yondu, Rocket, Groot, Drax, every Ravager on the bridge stood frozen, eyes wide, mouths open, as if someone had hit the off switch on them.
They had watched everything that happened on Ego's planet. Every second of it, live.
They had thought Ronan was strong. They had thought Thanos was legend.
But today, seeing Hermione put down a living Celestial with their own eyes, they finally understood exactly what kind of person their new boss actually was.
Ego's energy tendrils had blanketed the sky. A single one could have shredded an interstellar warship like paper. In front of Hermione, they had been nothing.
"Boss is mighty! Boss is unrivaled!" Yondu's expression shifted to something aggressively sycophantic. Rocket scrambled to follow. "Boss is incredible! That old bastard had it coming!"
The rest of the Ravagers snapped out of it one by one. When they looked at Hermione now, there was no defiance in their eyes. Only awe, deep and absolute, with a current of fervent admiration running underneath it.
With a boss like this, forget roaming the galaxy. They felt like they could take on entire empires.
Quill handed Mantis off to someone else and cleared his throat. Time to recover some of what he'd just embarrassed himself out of.
He strolled over to Rocket and Groot, held out his palm, and summoned a sphere of blue energy that shifted and churned in the air above it. He said, smug as anything, "Hey, Rocket. Check this out. Cool, right? I'm now—"
"Yeah, yeah, we get it, you lucked into something huge." Rocket dug a finger in his ear, thoroughly unimpressed. "Stop waving it around, you're giving me a headache. Try shooting some green light and then we'll talk."
Groot tilted his head. "I am Groot?" (Can you shoot green light?)
The smug smile froze on Quill's face. "..."
Hermione was leaning back in the commander's seat with her eyes closed, calculating her gains and her next moves.
Killing Ego had earned her 200,000 Soul Energy, pushing her to Level 6 magic power. A massive leap. It meant she now stood at the genuine pinnacle of magical strength in the Harry Potter world, at least as things currently stood.
As for Quill...
She had briefly considered killing him and harvesting his Soul Energy.
She'd dismissed it quickly.
Not out of sentiment. Out of logic.
Over time, she'd developed a rough hypothesis: Soul Energy didn't correlate cleanly with raw power. It wasn't a one-to-one relationship.
The Soul Energy Ronan had yielded wasn't meaningfully greater than that of an ordinary Kree soldier, despite the enormous gap in strength. Ego and Dormammu had provided staggering amounts not because they were powerful in the conventional sense, but because they were ancient, their souls shaped by millions of years of existence.
Quill had Ego's power now, but his soul was still fundamentally that of a half-mortal kid. Celestial energy or not, a soul didn't deepen overnight.
Killing him would net almost nothing. Not worth the cost.
The pattern she was seeing: high Soul Energy meant strong, almost always. But the reverse wasn't true. Strong didn't mean rich in Soul Energy. Thanos was physically overwhelming, but at the soul level, he was probably unremarkable.
A guy Mantis could lock down with a touch for a full minute wasn't exactly soaring on the spiritual plane.
The real, consistent source of massive Soul Energy was still the ancient cosmic beings.
Like, for instance, the Celestials.
The thought stirred something in her.
Level 6 magic power. An Infinity Stone in her pocket. Maybe she could start hunting Celestials?
The idea lasted about three seconds before she shut it down.
Too risky. Not yet.
Ego was almost certainly at the low end of the Celestial hierarchy. The truly ancient ones, the ones that had been around since before most civilizations existed, had strength beyond measuring. Going after someone like Ego was one thing. Running into a Celestial of Arishem's tier was a different conversation entirely. That was a conversation that ended with her being crushed flat.
Farm safe. Don't overextend.
The most efficient approach, the one with the best odds, was still to wait for Thanos to collect all six Stones and snap his fingers. Half the life in the universe, snuffed out in an instant. The Soul Energy released in that single moment would be beyond astronomical. She just needed to be ready in advance and catch it on the way through.
She was still turning the "Snap Harvest Plan" over in her mind when a blinding light erupted at the far end of the bridge without any warning.
It coalesced into a humanoid shape, hovering in the void, blazing, radiant, impossible to look at directly, like a compressed star.
Then a voice came through. Clear, female, carrying the particular weight of someone used to being obeyed.
"Ronan. What are you doing here?"
Hermione's eyes opened.
She studied the glowing figure.
Her?
And she was addressing Ronan — which meant she'd mistaken this ship for Ronan's.
Reasonable enough. The Dark Aster was Ronan's flagship. She'd recognize it. She must have been nearby, felt the unusual energy discharge from this sector, come to investigate, and found the ship waiting for her.
Hermione considered for a moment.
Then she said to Yondu, "Open the hatch."
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