Galactus.
Ever since his birth, the Devourer of Worlds had been tormented by an endless hunger.
To sustain his own existence, he had no choice but to consume planets without end.
Ordinary worlds, however, did nothing to satisfy his appetite.
Only planets rich with the energy of life could temporarily ease his insatiable hunger.
In other words, only worlds capable of nurturing life qualified as food.
Searching the endless multiverse for suitable planets was a tedious and repetitive task.
As a supreme cosmic deity, Galactus naturally did not handle such errands personally.
Instead, he would bestow a portion of the Power Cosmic upon a lesser being, transforming them into one of his Heralds, whose purpose was to locate his next meal.
For any planet destined to become prey, the herald always arrived first.
Galactus himself followed afterward.
Among all of his heralds, none was more renowned than the Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd.
---
Breaking free from Earth's gravity, Joey flew straight toward the incoming Silver Surfer.
Empowered by the Power Cosmic, the Surfer moved at a speed rivaling even the greatest users of the Speed Force.
Fortunately, to Kryptonian senses, even that level of speed remained within the realm of reaction.
Still, against an opponent this fast, strategy mattered more than raw strength.
The Silver Surfer studied Joey carefully.
This humanoid being was clearly not from Earth.
His combat stance and the immense energy field surrounding him granted him power great enough to rival the Surfer's own.
His speed, however...
Was lacking.
Thinking exactly that, the Silver Surfer calmly adjusted his course as the distance between them shrank to only a few thousand meters.
Confidently, he intended to glide right past Joey and continue directly toward Earth.
He never expected Joey to suddenly explode forward.
Within that final stretch of space, Joey accelerated several times faster than before, instantly appearing directly in front of him.
His arm shot out and locked around the Surfer's neck.
"Got you."
Joey had no idea what the Silver Surfer's true top speed was.
If the Surfer proved faster, the battle could easily devolve into an endless cosmic game of chase across the universe.
Determined to finish things quickly, Joey had deliberately suppressed his acceleration from the very beginning, approaching at a pace just slow enough to convince the Surfer that this was his maximum speed.
The trap had worked.
The instant he seized the Silver Surfer, Joey accelerated again.
In the blink of an eye, he drove both of them completely out of the Solar System before slamming the Surfer onto a lonely asteroid drifting beyond its edge.
Planting one foot firmly on the Surfer's cosmic surfboard, Joey drew back his fist with the other hand.
His plan was simple.
Separate the Surfer from his board through sheer brute force.
The Silver Surfer's metallic body rippled like liquid mercury.
His form became intangible.
He slipped free from Joey's grasp and narrowly avoided the earth-shattering punch.
Unable to stop his swing in time, Joey's fist pierced straight through the fading afterimage.
The asteroid beneath them—which had drifted through space for hundreds of millions of years—exploded into countless fragments from the impact alone.
"I have no hostile intentions."
No sooner had he escaped than the Silver Surfer barely evaded a blast of blazing heat vision.
Rather than retaliate, he simply left Joey with two brief sentences before stepping back onto his board and accelerating toward Earth once more.
"Time is running out."
This time he ignored the limitations of the physical universe itself.
Traveling faster than the cosmic speed limit, he streaked toward Earth.
The glowing wake behind his surfboard carved through the Sun's gravitational well, vaporizing nearly half the Kuiper Belt along the way.
---
When he reached Earth's outer orbit, the Silver Surfer finally came to a stop.
Using the Power Cosmic, he carefully scanned the entire planet.
From his perspective...
Earth's energy readings were perfectly calm.
Completely normal.
"Where is it?"
The Silver Surfer muttered to himself.
Because everything appearing normal...
Was precisely what made it abnormal.
Joey arrived moments later, floating silently behind the motionless herald.
"So..."
"If you're not here to mark Earth for Galactus..."
"Then what exactly are you looking for?"
At that moment, Joey realized he might have attacked the wrong person.
"I've done that before," the Silver Surfer said quietly. "It was a sin."
After centuries of loyal service to Galactus, his memories and personality erased by the Power Cosmic, Norrin Radd had finally reclaimed who he once was.
During those hundreds of years, he had guided Galactus to countless habitable worlds.
Many of them, like Earth, were home to intelligent life.
Once he was able to think again from the perspective of a person rather than a herald, the Silver Surfer immediately turned against his former master.
For one reason alone.
He wanted to atone for his past.
And he wanted to stop Galactus from continuing his endless cycle of destruction.
"I can feel him coming."
The Silver Surfer continued scanning every corner of Earth without pause, just as Joey had done moments earlier.
The result was exactly the same.
Nothing.
"But where?"
Even from the Silver Surfer's cosmic perspective, he couldn't determine where Galactus's arrival would begin.
If the Surfer couldn't find it, Joey's Kryptonian vision was even less likely to.
For Joey, knowing that disaster was approaching without knowing where it would strike was even more frustrating.
Rather than continue searching blindly, he decided to pursue another lead.
"The Silver Surfer."
"You're not the herald this time."
"So who's helping Galactus?"
Zarab was dead.
The Silver Surfer had betrayed Galactus.
So who exactly was serving as Galactus's herald now?
---
"Yes, It's me."
"Nick Fury."
"Open the door."
Nick Fury strode through layer after layer of security.
After passing the final facial-recognition checkpoint, the last blast door opened, granting him access to one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s highest-security underground laboratories.
This facility housed one of Phase Two's most important projects:
The weaponization of the Tesseract.
A faint green magical breeze drifted silently from behind him.
It curled through the minds of every human present.
The sleeping spell took effect.
One after another, the Midgardian mortals succumbed to overwhelming drowsiness before collapsing unconscious onto the floor.
Just like the real Nick Fury...
And his loyal subordinate, Phil Coulson.
With the laboratory cleared, there was no longer any need to maintain the illusion.
The magical disguise dissolved.
The towering, one-eyed Black man transformed into a slender, elegant young man with raven-black hair.
Pulling back the hood of his emerald-green cloak trimmed with gold, Loki Laufeyson lifted the Tesseract into his hands.
Silver light gleamed in his eyes as a sly smile spread across his face.
"Foolish Midgardians."
After his attempt to seize the throne had failed, the God of Lies and Mischief had been banished from Asgard by his own brother, Thor.
Now...
He had found new employment.
He served a being far greater than even Odin, the King of the Gods.
As the Power Cosmic seeped into it, the Tesseract's outer shell suddenly shattered apart.
Hidden within was its true core.
The Space Stone.
With the Stone in his possession, Loki—now Galactus's newest Herald—could effortlessly tear open space itself, creating portals between any two points in the universe.
All he had to do was unleash the Space Stone's power as a beacon.
His master would immediately answer the call.
Arriving to feast upon the magnificent banquet Loki had prepared.
As Loki gradually awakened the Space Stone's full power...
Far beyond normal space...
A colossal cloud of cosmic energy, driven by an endless hunger that sought to consume all existence, leapt through the cracks between dimensions.
Drawn by the beacon emitted from the Space Stone...
It descended into the Solar System.
---
Still floating in space, Joey suddenly froze.
Then he and the Silver Surfer watched together as an unimaginably vast figure emerged before them.
Its body was nearly the size of Earth itself.
A supreme cosmic god.
Galactus.
The Devourer of Worlds.