Godhood: for Dummies - Chapter 25

She flinched. Bodily. As in she felt a violent shiver shockwave down her spine, and had to hold back her knee-jerk reaction of vaporizing the dumb idiot in front of her. 

Genderbent Galactus, he says? What kind of messed up doggy doodoo was his brain made of? And such a potty mouth, too. 

She specifically didn’t look at her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows. She totally wasn’t in denial. No sir. Her purple, horned helmet was an entirely original design, and she did not steal it directly from her daddy’s pocket of collected information in their Cosmic Awareness. 

Absolutely not. She looked nothing like him at all. 

“Excuse you,” she pouted at the baby celestial - and wasn’t that a concept! She didn’t know celestials had babies! Her sensors were picking up that weird, nebulous energy that was packed into his form. She was confident that if she tapped into her Cosmic Awareness, it would feel like staring into the depths of a rainbow-colored blackhole. She had never met one before, but according to her daddy’s records, they all felt like that. 

Regardless; “I’m not Galactus,” she settled on - instead of atomizing the alien godling. 

The baby celest- hold on, why was he wearing monk robes and a sombrero? She powered down the calorie counter that covered her vision. She knew Celestials were a bit eccentric, but this was just weird. 

The guy managed to remove himself from the rubble during her musings, and frowned at her. “Then I have to say your cosplay is fantastic,” he brushed some dust off of his robes. 

“My name is Galacta,” she grumbled.

He blinked at her. “My initial impression remains unchanged.”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Well you did just kinda attack me out of nowhere,” he pointed out blithely. “And you’re breaking and entering, so you’re gonna have to explain something, or we’re going to have a problem.” 

She frowned at him. While she might - technically - be here uninvited, it wasn’t his house. The guy who owned the place was right there, and he wasn’t saying anything. 

The weird thing though, was that she didn’t attack him. It was his own defenses that flung him back when she tried to take the apple that hung from a vine around his hip. Now sure, that could be seen as stealing from… most points of view - but it was either eat the apple, or eat the person. 

She didn’t want to eat the person. 

She had just reached forward, the world frozen around her under her accelerated movement, when her hand was stopped by a shimmering blue barrier. She wasn’t sure if it was the speed of her movement - coming into contact with something she didn’t know was there, or an effect of the sorcery, but the uniquely dressed space god was immediately launched into the wall. 

The surprise of which knocked her out of the hunger-induced trance she was in. 

She had only arrived in New York a week prior. Her new flat- sorry, apartment (she was in America now) - was still mostly just cardboard boxes. She was in the middle of trying to justify a second lunch when her sensors picked up the presence of a particularly tiny Celestial. That had to be the source of the existential quake that she picked up before her move. 

But even then, this guy was a lot weirder than she was expecting - and that’s not even counting his choice of clothing. He was reading as a human to all of her sensors. Base human, and nothing else. However he was putting off more energy than pretty much anything she had ever encountered outside of her own father. The type of energy was distinctive, though. Only seen in Celestial kind.

That meant he was either native to the planet (likely a Celestial experiment in having children), or he was a Celestial that was infiltrating humanity for some reason. Where if that was the case, she didn’t want to fight a full freaking Celestial. 

Then a ping drew her attention to her helmet’s display. 

According to her calorie counter, the apple that hung from the godling’s hip was fluctuating between a hundred calories, and forty-three petacalories. 

Her counter had never been so confused before, and she had no idea what to think of it. If the higher reading was accurate, one, singular bite would be enough to satisfy her for an hour or so. Satisfy her. As in, she would be full. Stuffed. Like a cartoon character with a plump, round belly after a feast. 

She had felt that way exactly six times in the entirety of her life. Twice had been during her stay on Earth, after a couple particularly dense meals, but the others were when she was a small child. When her father was in charge of her diet, and fed her planets - like a psychopathic, mass murdering, butthole. 

“Hello?” 

Galacta blinked, and looked up to see the weirdly dressed godling waving a hand in front of her face. She wiped a spot of drool from her lips. “I’m not Galactus,” she asserted again, narrowing her eyes. “I’m his daughter.” 

If anything, that seemed to just confuse the guy further. His face seemed like it was trying to implode on itself - given the way it was twisting in fantastically exaggerated befuddlement. 

“Wha-” he coughed. “How does- no wait. More important question. Who the hell is your mom?” 

She felt her lips start to turn into a sneer. “How is that more important?” 

“I’m going to second that question.” The owner of the building seemed to have gathered himself enough to pitch in, and turned to the godling. “Is the purple horny lady here also a wizard? You all need to stop breaking into my property.” 

Oh for goodness sake, she didn’t break anything! Also, “Did you just call me horny?” She glared at the man, feeling a bit self-conscious. She only just made the rest of her current suit - having only recently accumulated enough calories to risk creating a new toolset with the Power Cosmic. It wasn’t her fault that her daddy’s helmet design had sensor arrays built into the sides!

This was the first time she had actually worn it, and she didn’t want to be seen as the horny lady! Geez!

Stark waved in the direction of her helmet. “I call’em like I see’em.” 

“I think Purple People Eater, works better.” The godling deadpanned.

Galacta flinched.

“She’s a cannibal?” Stark looked her up and down slowly.

What? Where was this conversation going?

“She might look human-”

“Well, her eyes are square, so...”

“-but she’s actually a space goddess with-” The godling continued, holding up a finger, “and I’m assuming here; an eating disorder?” 

Galacta’s self-consciousness was turning into annoyance, and her eyes drifted back towards the apple on man’s hip. 

“Since when was cannibalism an eating disorder?” Stark’s comment dragged her eyes back. 

“I’m not a cannibal!” She growled, glaring at both of them. This was really getting away from her. She had just wanted to check out the super weird source of biomass, not get insulted by a comedy duo!

The baby Celestial nodded. “Yeah, eating people doesn’t make her a cannibal. She’s technically a higher life form. If she eats you, it would be the equivalent of you eating beef.” 

“Cows are tasty, though.” Stark argued ineffectually. 

“So’s bacon. And do you know what cannibals call human meat?” He crossed his arms.

“Should I?” Stark probably looked disturbed under his helmet.

“Long Pork,” was his answer. “We apparently taste a lot like pigs.” 

“Gross.” 

“I’m not a cannibal!” Galacta reiterated, ripping her eyes from the apple- wait, when did she turn to look at it again?

“We established that.” The baby Celestial waved her off.

“No we didn’t, Quill.” Stark shot back, crossing his arms. “You just claimed she was a goddess, and that’s obviously a hot load of garbage. I’m barely convinced you’re a wizard, and now you’re hitting me with biblical BS?” 

The apparently named ‘Quill’ crossed his arms back at Stark. “It’s hardly biblical-”

Galacta found herself moving, and the world slowed down. The Power Cosmic drifted through her fingertips before she could really think about it, before she could consciously command it, and everything ground to a halt. 

It had been a while since she had been this hungry. It had been a while since she had seen that many calories in one place, just sitting right in front of her - taunting her. Let alone in such a small package. Eating was a chore most of the time, seeing as she had to disassemble it into edible biomass most of the time

But this…

This was an apple. It would just take a few bites. It looked so crisp! A beautiful, haunting red, hanging only a few feet from her. 

Her stomach felt like it was imploding in on itself. Like it found her ability to feed it lacking, and decided that it might as well consume the rest of her instead. This was why she avoided using the Power Cosmic in general. Without enough fuel, she… she could only really…

She couldn’t… think… good. 

Her hand moved through a frozen universe, reaching towards one of the largest potential sources of food she had ever seen. 

She was… Hungry. Oh, so hungry. 

Even the godling in front of her was frozen. The owner of the food that she had to- that she needed, that she was so hungry- her hand was almost there, so many calories-

Quill’s eyes moved. 

Orbs of blue fire locked onto her own, but the realization didn’t stop her. Didn’t break her trance. There was a moment of idle, primitive curiosity - wondering at the frankly new experience of something being able to react to her. 

But that shred of reason was immediately absorbed back into the perpetual, inescapable craving for sustenance.

Then the rest of him moved, and the apple was suddenly much further away.

That-… that made her angry.

__________

Nathan was ready for when - the apparent daughter of Galactus - decided she was tired of his back-and-forth with Tony. He still wasn’t entirely sure what his protections reacted to when she first showed up, but he was only half confident that she had actually attacked him. 

For one thing, she wasn’t radiating any negative concepts that he could parse. To be frank, though, most of her being was shrouded in a looming mass of all-consuming hunger. He could pick up the makings of an actual personality within the obscuring cloud of need, but it had been getting more and more difficult to read as the conversation progressed. 

It was as if the hunger was getting deeper, stronger, more fucking hungry. Nathan had absolutely no idea how she was retaining any brain function past the primal urge to consume. 

But even still, he could see the point when it snapped. When the hunger took control. 

Nathan had enough experience with the Time Stone to notice fluctuations in that domain. His new divinity was also apparently sponsored by freaking Eternity, which seemed to have expanded his senses in the fields of time and space manipulation. 

The Time Stone was not the only thing in the universe that could manipulate the continual progress of existence throughout the past, present, and future. 

It was just the most pervasive. 

So, between the mystical sorceries that he studied from the book of Cagliostro, and his new divine presence, he found he had the ability to react. 

Nathan felt a coil of continuity twist around his being, and moved his eyes to the approaching threat. 

Her expression had twisted so far she might as well have been an entirely different person. Her eyes were wide - square irises burning with an intense, purple glow. Her lips were pulled back in an anticipatory, open-mouth smile. To anyone but Nathan, it would be like her entire being changed in the blink of an eye, but he could see the primordial hunger at the center of her being. He could see that the objectively pretty - but stupendously purple - girl was barely holding together her own sanity.

He twisted the coil into a spell and shoved his Celestial energy into it - focusing on himself and Galacta (The daughter of Galactus, by the way - the absolute fuck was that about? He really couldn’t get over it).

Reality shuddered when two gods simply blinked out of existence, only to appear thousands of lightyears away in a neighboring solar system - floating in orbit around a large yellow star. Both forms ragdolled away from each other, as if blown back, and Nathan could tell by the sudden clarity of anger through the haze of hunger, that the daughter of Galactus did not appreciate it. 

He looked up to see her floating in the light of the star, with two massive, purple, cylindrical- those are space lasers- Holy fuck!

He blinked away again just as she fired, appearing to her side while two titanic currents of purple light blasted off into the distance. 

“None of that, now,” he said, forcing the concept of speech to work in the vacuum of space. 

His divinity was being weird and throwing out all of the rules. 

He was breathing, but there was no air. He was speaking, but there was no air. He had never been to this solar system, but somehow his makeshift spell knew exactly where he wanted to go. A flash of knowing, reminiscent of when he sat on his throne, and he knew that this would be the best field for a confrontation. He knew that this would be-

He blasted himself backwards to avoid a purple, bladed construct, and flung a hand forward in response. Pure blue flames erupted from his palm, and coalesced into his own beam of plasma, which was promptly slapped aside by a purple - Okay! Everything’s fucking purple, goddamn. 

Another construct swung towards his torso, which he brought up a Tao Mandala to block. It was not as effective as he expected, however. As he was readying a counter, the girl’s construct cleaved straight through his shield.

He would have said he watched what followed in slow motion, but if he was honest, he was barely keeping up as it was. Both of them were moving at speeds that utilized time dilation as lubricant, and if she went one gear higher, he might not be able to keep up. 

All that is to say that his arm would have been cut clean off, if Galacta’s blade construct hadn’t gotten stopped by the vibranium bone within his forearm. 

Pain was a bit too… unemphatic a word for what happened at the contact. Through the senses his Celestial energy granted him on a subatomic scale, suffused through his body, he felt his skin destruct. Molecule by molecule in a straight line where the construct sliced. Every cell unraveled, and funnelled in a systematic congealing of the composite energy. 

In short, he felt himself being eaten. 

It wasn’t an energy sword that Galacta was waving at him. 

It was her version of a fork. 

Revulsed, insulted, and slightly fearful, Nathan twisted his arm to the side, parrying the construct even through the pain of it sliding further through his skin, and planted a glowing blue fist in her sternum.

Nathan watched as Galacta’s eyes narrowed at the hit, barely buckling under the pressure. She pushed down harder, and Nathan twisted away to put some distance between them.

He barely had time to start putting his skin back together before she was on him again. 

A moment of panic - the need to block - was all it took for Starsplitter to appear in his hand. In most cases, he would have flinched, or spent at least a modicum of brain power trying to understand his freaky new weapon, but in this case?

His wrist turned, and the two blades struck each other.

Then again.

And again, seemingly without pause or thought from either combattant. Everything was instinct at this speed, and Nathan would not have been able to keep up, if he wasn’t reading the concepts of Galacta’s attacks - of empty space, filling up with consumption, and assimilation before she swung. 

A second Starsplitter appeared in his free hand - the arm attached not yet healed, but well enough to move - and swung towards his opponents opposite flank.

It was met with a second blade construct, appearing with contemptuous ease, compared to his own effort. 

Their weapons/utensils met again. Clashed in three-dimensional space as one or the other was pushed back, ducked down, flew up. Neither were gaining much ground against the other. He managed to nick a couple scratches on her armor, and she managed to cut into him a few times - but overall, with her armor, and his ability to heal?

It was like two rocks throwing scissors at each other. 

Nathan would have called it a slug-fest, if it were any more animalistic. There was no footing in the Zero-G vacuum of space, so there wasn’t all that much room for any of the fighting styles he had learned. He was used to fighting from a distance. Hardly ever had he been forced to punch something.

Also, it was becoming clear that ‘animalistic’ would be a poor choice of descriptor if this continued. Galacta was getting faster. Her movements more practiced, more precise.

Her irises were steadily glowing brighter, dying everything around her - which was pretty much just Nathan - in a deep purple. Her concepts were unchanging in their intensity, so Nathan wasn’t entirely sure why she was adapting to the fight faster than he was. He would have thought that the hunger-induced insanity would have hampered that.

If he had to guess, it would probably be Galacta’s utilization of the Power Cosmic. Of the cosmic awareness, and its database of all living knowledge. 

Or maybe it was the fact that she kept slicing into him with her laserware (get it? Silverware, but made of las- whatever, you get it). She was technically slowly eating him, and thereby appeasing her hunger, allowing her more access to the Power Cosmic, or something.

So what could he do about this? He didn’t think he could actually kill, or even permanently injure a being like her. At least not until he figured out Starsplitter’s destruction thing. He had no idea how Ahsonnutli got it to delete a whole section of that forest, but he had been trying to replicate it during the fight - and it wasn’t fucking working.

This freaky, magical, bullshit piece of-

His internal rant was cut off by another attempt to behead him, and his retaliatory attempt to shunt her into the mirror dimension.

She broke out of it. Just… shattered the polygonal gate by screaming at it.

Was he going to be forced into letting her eat him? Letting her get in enough hits, chipping Nathan away at a pace he could heal through? How long would he be able to keep up this pace? (On that note, did he really look that tasty to her? Should he be flattered, or creeped out?)

Or maybe if he hit her enough, she’d get knocked out of it? She seemed mostly okay when they were talking. Not particularly violent outside of the first attack - but even then she seemed just as surprised about that as he was. 

She was in his face again. The concept of purple leaking out into the nothing around them, somehow infecting the lack of color, with color. 

That part wasn’t dangerous - just weird. No, the dangerous part was the constructs, and the lasers that appeared out of nowhere. All pointed at his face.

He dismissed the pair of Starsplitters, and crashed his fist into his palm. Eldritch, Celestial, and Divine energies all clashed in a disruptive, omnidirectional wave. Galacta’s constructs, and all the purple was simultaneously forced backwards and shifted. The lasers diverted, the immediate threat delayed.

But not for long, as she was again charging him. This time with a glowing fist. He was ready, though. Ready to pick an option. Ready to try and punch his problems until they stopped being problems. 

He brought up an arm, ready to block the punch, and formed a thick layer of vibranium around it - like a localized exoskeleton. Then braced.

On contact, Nathan tapped into one of the tools he was so hesitant to use. One of the most terrifying forces of nature in all of Marvel. One of the few things he was scared to practice with. 

“I’ve got something purple, too.” The locket around his neck clicked open, and his fist crashed into Galacta’s gut.

He felt her armor crack under the pressure of his blow - augmented with two different forms of divinity, channeled into the basic structure of an unarmed mystic-arts strike, and supercharged with the Power Stone. He found that he could punch pretty damn hard. 

-As seen by the fact that his aim was true, and she had crashed onto the surface of the closest planet - which was objectively pretty far away. It sat about three light-minutes from his current position, which he gauged through whatever divine sense had been giving him random bits of information lately. It was barely visible at that distance, so he had to rely on those new divine senses to aim.

Three light-minutes. And it took less than a second for her to hit it. 

That meant. That he. Punched her, and she flew faster than light.

The planet Galacta crashed into didn’t have an atmosphere, but it still managed to catch fire. Her landing put a literal dent in the massive space rock, and Nathan saw its orbit shift in response. 

The ground turned orange as the compacted soil went molten almost instantly. Dust and debris burst out in a corona around the surface, and the fabric of space seemed like it was resisting a tear.

From the depths of the dust cloud a purple light sparked, and he barely had the time to blink out of the way of a moon-sized, purple laser that burst through the obscuring cloud. He was fully unable to get out of the way of the following kick, nor the moon that she slammed him into - after teleporting both herself and the moon back over to him.

Nathan grimaced, and found himself completely submerged into the moon’s surface. A complete role reversal from the past second. The rock around him, superheated and burning at his skin. Skin that was bruised and broken against the force of a lunar collision.  

He blinked the dust and dirt out of his eyes, and felt the feral buildup of anger and primordial hunger that heralded a followup attack. 

Instead of just taking it, the Power Stone thrummed around his neck, and he thrust his arms outward.

The moon shattered around him, and he could tell that the move caught her off-guard with the burst of surprise that rippled through her base concepts. Even through her haze.

He didn’t wait for her to recover. 

No, he took the remains of the moon, the Power Stone making it almost easy, and pulled them full force back towards himself. And, at the same time, cast a simple switching spell.

Galacta found herself at the center of a newly formed, compacted moon, and Nathan found himself in Galacta’s previous position. 

He reached one hand out, bursting with the purple light of the Power Stone, and clenched his fist towards the reformed moon. He watched, for a fraction of a moment, as the moon grew smaller by half, before grabbing the vine at his waist with his other hand, and whipping it forward. 

Under his direction, the vine of the Pupillam Vitae speared the condensed rock, and roots burst out around the surface. He pulled back, and twisted the vine, still holding the rock in a Power Stone-infused grasp, and wrapped the moon in a tight cage of silver wood.

Wait. Silver wood? 

Nathan felt the universe shake, and then the moon was gone. Rock, roots, everything. 

Gone, save for a floating, purple girl holding an apple, and the remains of the vine in his own hand. 

Did she just… eat the moon? And the roots? The overwhelming hunger seemed less overwhelming. She was also no longer bum-rushing him like a crazed, purple dinosaur. 

Nathan looked at the apple in her hand, and a lightbulb went off in his head. 

She wasn’t attacking him because he was the most tasty morsel around. She just wanted his infinite food glitch.

He felt kind of stupid as he watched her eat the apple whole. Watched the monstrous, infinite hunger be reduced by half. Watched the purple of Galacta’s eyes dull, and the concepts that denoted reason slowly return. 

In an effort to prevent another rampage, he dumped even more energy into the vine in his hands. He twisted the vine back around his waist, and watched as a new, golden apple grew in his palm.

Nathan never wished to have been colorblind more in his life. If he was colorblind, he wouldn’t have noticed the silver sheen of the vine, nor the golden glow of the apple. If he were colorblind, he would have been paying more attention to the half-crazed (plausibly purple) goddess. 

Instead, he had been so shocked by the change in the Pupillam Vitae - so confused in how it was reacting to his combined energies - that he stopped altering his perception of time.

This immediately resulted in the new apple disappearing from his grasp… As well as the grasp itself.

His arm was gone. Vibranium and all, up to the elbow.

“Fucking Shit- Goddamn- Fuck!”

__________

A/N

This one was a bit tough to get out. I don't write action all that often. Let me know if it needs fixing up? There's going to be a good bit more action now, with the plot picking up, so I've got to make sure I'm up to par.