Drex watched the shattered planet rewind before his eyes.
Continents stitched themselves back together.
Molten cracks sealed shut.
The planet's collapsing core stabilized as time reversed the destruction layer by layer. In only a few moments, the dead world had completely returned to its original state.
"Thank you for your help, Ancient One," Drex said with a faint smile.
The Sorcerer Supreme shook her head.
"I need to return immediately."
Without wasting time, Drex opened a wormhole for her.
He truly had no interest in the Time Stone itself. Even if Thanos managed to gather every Infinity Stone, it still wouldn't be enough to threaten him anymore.
The restored planet, meanwhile, retained its memories.
Its people remembered the sky breaking apart.
They remembered the planet dying.
And they remembered who had restored it.
The surrender came quickly and without resistance.
"What do you mean an Ultraman squad disappeared?"
Drex had barely returned to the Kryptonian Empire before receiving the report.
Before deploying Ultraman units, the empire always performed extensive scans to confirm whether a planet possessed meaningful resistance. Captain Marvel had been an unexpected anomaly.
More importantly, Galatea had been monitoring the operation personally.
An incident like this should have been nearly impossible.
"I was watching the area the entire time," Galatea said uneasily. "Then suddenly... they were gone."
Drex didn't blame her.
Very few civilizations even knew the Kryptonian Empire possessed someone like Galatea. Her sensory range covered enormous portions of the universe itself.
Still, against sufficiently powerful enemies, slipping past her awareness wasn't impossible.
Drex leaned back slightly.
"Interesting."
It wasn't surprising someone had targeted the Ultramen.
The Ultramen Drex created were absurdly effective war machines.
One hundred meters tall.
Strength measured in tens of thousands of tons.
Capable of unleashing nuclear-level beam attacks barehanded.
Most importantly...
One Ultraman could fight an entire fleet alone.
Before their appearance, there were certainly powerful individuals across the galaxy capable of similar feats, but those beings were rare exceptions.
Then the Kryptonian Empire started mass-producing Ultramen.
Thousands became tens of thousands.
And production still hadn't stopped.
The rest of the galaxy looked at the growing numbers and collectively realized something horrifying:
If all of those Ultramen deployed together, who could possibly stop them?
Eventually, curiosity and greed won out.
Someone wanted the technology behind them.
So they captured an Ultraman squad.
Unfortunately for their captors, the interrogation results only made things worse.
First: the Ultramen themselves knew nothing about the transformation process. Subjects lost consciousness during modification and awakened afterward with their powers already integrated.
Second: Ultramen were not Celestials, nor were they based on Celestial technology.
Third: the total number of Ultramen had likely surpassed one million. They were steadily replacing the Kryptonian Empire's standard military forces, meaning both the Burning Legion and the Space Knight Corps were becoming obsolete.
Fourth: Ultramen varied significantly between individuals. Not all of them stood one hundred meters tall. Under certain conditions, some could enlarge themselves to nearly a thousand meters.
Fifth: their physical power differed drastically as well. Tens of thousands of tons was merely the baseline. Some possessed strength reaching hundreds of thousands of tons. Many also had specialized abilities including spatial movement, time reversal, telepathy, mind control, and telekinesis.
Sixth: describing their beam attacks as merely "nuclear-level" was laughably incomplete. Some weaker variants fit that description, but stronger Ultramen possessed attacks capable of destroying planets outright. The highest-tier units were likely even more dangerous.
The civilizations analyzing the information felt their blood run cold.
A million living superweapons.
At that point, resisting the Kryptonian Empire sounded less like bravery and more like collective suicide.
Even the Skrull Empire's elite Super Skrulls couldn't replicate Ultraman abilities. In theory, Super Skrulls could perfectly duplicate a target's powers and memories.
Ultramen somehow existed outside those rules.
The more Drex used them, the more satisfied he became with the design.
His Ultramen could freely alter their size anyway, so their giant forms posed no disadvantage against smaller opponents.
Eventually, Drex located the missing squad himself.
He also found the ones responsible.
Then he exterminated all of them.
Afterward, he quietly left.
But by then, the secret was already spreading throughout the galaxy.
The Kryptonian Empire was mass-producing superweapons.
And the universe was beginning to panic.
If this continued, no civilization would be capable of resisting Kryptonian expansion.
Unfortunately, the galaxy's major powers were in no condition to unite against him.
The Skrull Empire and the Kree Empire were still locked in a brutal war.
The Shi'ar Empire was struggling to survive simultaneous invasions from Thanos's Black Order and multiple hostile civilizations.
No one had the spare resources to confront Krypton.
In the past, the Kryptonian Empire's biggest weakness had been manpower. Conquering worlds was easy.
Holding them was the difficult part.
Now that problem no longer existed.
A handful of Ultramen stationed on a planet could suppress virtually any resistance.
Several civilizations attempted to intercept Kryptonian fleets before things escalated further.
They failed catastrophically.
The Kryptonian Empire had already strengthened security across its territories. Ultramen equipped with planet-killing beam attacks obliterated most enemy fleets before conventional combat even began.
The surviving ships didn't last much longer.
Fortunately for the rest of the galaxy, Drex had no immediate plans for further expansion.
Managing territory was exhausting enough already.
He'd seen what happened to the head of the Assassinorum from the Warhammer universe after taking responsibility for a million planets. The man had practically driven himself insane from overwork.
Drex still had the Black Queen handling most administrative duties, but even she wasn't comparable to the Kree Supreme Intelligence.
Eventually, she would fall behind too.
For now, the empire was large enough.
"What's happening across the galaxy lately?"
Drex sat casually inside the imperial palace.
Hexi rested at his left.
Morgana sat at his right.
Angel Yan stood behind him, slowly kneading his shoulders.
Esdeath had already disappeared again after briefly returning earlier. No one knew where she had gone this time.
The Black Queen appeared before him and began her report.
"The Shi'ar Empire is close to losing its homeworld to the Black Order," she said. "But they managed to land a devastating counterattack first."
Drex raised an eyebrow.
"What did they do?"
"They used a gravitational collapse bomb as bait."
The Black Queen paused.
"The resulting supernova destroyed most of the Black Order."
That explosion had nearly killed Thanos himself.
Only a rapid retreat saved him.
But detonating a supernova within their own territory came with catastrophic consequences for the Shi'ar Empire.
Thousands of planets vanished.
Gamma radiation spread across more than half their territory.
Countless newborns either died from radiation exposure or developed severe mutations.
At least they hadn't accidentally created another Hulk.
"The M'Kraan region must've been affected too," Drex said thoughtfully.
A supernova on that scale would have impacted the Shi'ar core systems no matter how distant they were.