From distant regions of the Warp, the devastation was impossible to miss.
The Seraphim's attacks burned through everything.
Mass.
Energy.
Atoms.
Atomic nuclei.
All of it evaporated.
Entire sections of space boiled away under the onslaught. Ordered spatial structures collapsed, dissolving into primordial chaos.
Matter vanished.
Energy vanished.
Information itself vanished.
Nothing remained except a completely chaotic state that consumed everything it touched.
Meanwhile, the Avatar of Havoc continued holding back Khorne and the other Chaos Gods.
The battle had reached a stalemate.
A stalemate that existed only because Havoc was fighting four opponents at once.
Above the battlefield hung the black sun formed from a colossal black hole, radiating a terrifying presence over the Warp.
His power was beyond imagination.
Yet Khorne and the others showed no panic.
After all, they had each ruled the Warp alone at various points in history.
This wasn't the first time they had faced a rival capable of challenging them.
At worst, they had temporarily lost ground.
To truly destroy them?
That was another matter entirely.
Drex Valen understood that perfectly.
The entire conflict served two purposes.
First, it relieved boredom.
Second, and more importantly, it allowed him to collect data.
Every battle was research.
Every enemy was a problem waiting to be solved.
The Chaos Gods.
The multiversal demon gods of Marvel.
All of them represented equations.
And Drex intended to find more efficient solutions.
The next time he faced beings of that caliber, he wanted answers before the battle even began.
Unfortunately, his recent stellar harvesting operation had drawn unwanted attention.
The Cosmic Abstracts.
The Living Tribunal.
They were watching now.
Which meant raiding universes for resources had become significantly more difficult.
Since further acquisitions were inconvenient, Drex turned his attention toward another project.
The Hell Dimension once ruled by the Eyed Fiend.
The Eyed Fiend had been one of the strongest contenders for Satan's Throne.
In the original history of Marvel, Mephisto had secured the position through manipulation and political maneuvering.
Of course, he hadn't kept it for very long before being removed.
The title of Satan carried immense authority.
Its primary domain was fear.
The ruler of Hell could draw upon fear throughout the entire Marvel Multiverse.
To Drex, the concept remained bizarre.
Marvel wasn't a creationist cosmology.
Yet somehow fear itself could become a force powerful enough to elevate beings beyond ordinary multiversal limits.
Still...
After the Chaos Dimension devoured the Eyed Fiend's Hell Dimension and inherited part of its authority, Drex began receiving a steady influx of power from fear across the Marvel Multiverse.
The results were remarkable.
Even the power he had obtained from the God Quarry seemed insignificant by comparison.
"The power of a Sin."
Drex sat in contemplation.
"I wonder what would happen if I collected all seven."
Fear.
Greed.
Wrath.
Gluttony.
Pride.
Lust.
Envy.
If he acquired every Sin Authority...
Would that be enough to transcend the Multiverse itself?
To ascend into a true Omniversal Demon God?
The question intrigued him.
For a long time, Drex had modeled countless possibilities for breaking through the multiversal barrier.
Most of those models followed a familiar principle.
Creation emerging from chaos.
Infinite disorder generating infinite potential.
A process repeated through immeasurable ages until something greater was born.
His thinking had been heavily rooted in scientific cosmology.
Quantum cosmology.
The idea that the universe emerged from a quantum transition between different spacetime states.
A reality born from apparent nothingness.
The transition from Euclidean structures into expanding spacetime.
Inflation.
Expansion.
The Big Bang.
The gradual development of existence itself.
But after witnessing the power associated with Satan's authority, Drex realized something.
His approach might have been incomplete.
He had been walking only one path.
And perhaps not the most efficient one.
The problem was simple.
Even if a purely scientific route eventually worked...
How long would it take?
Millions of years?
Billions?
Longer?
Drex wasn't interested in waiting through cosmic epochs if there was a faster answer.
"Science alone isn't enough."
His eyes narrowed.
"I need the other side of the equation too."
Mysticism.
Concepts.
Metaphysics.
The irrational structures hidden beneath reality.
To solve the problem of the Chaos Gods.
To solve the problem of Marvel's multiversal entities.
To solve the problem of transcendence itself.
He would need both.
While Drex conducted his research, his Seraphim remained active.
Across an empty stretch of cosmic void, endless ruins drifted silently through darkness.
Broken worlds.
Dead fleets.
The remnants of entire civilizations.
Far away, the spiral arms of a galaxy rotated slowly through the night.
The Milky Way shone brighter than ever before.
Within that radiance floated countless angels.
Some bore two wings.
Others only one.
Their forms were composed entirely of concentrated light.
Their features remained indistinct.
Their bodies seemed carved from living stars.
Behind them hung the burned-out remnants of suns they had already consumed.
And they were slaughtering everything in their path.
Living worlds vanished.
Planetary surfaces were erased.
The Seraphim battled colossal starships so vast that entire civilizations had once called them home.
And this was only a minor battlefield.
One insignificant conflict within the Milky Way.
The Milky Way itself was merely one insignificant galaxy among countless others.
Beyond it, the devastation continued.
Galaxies winked out one after another.
Some were extinguished.
Others burned beneath impossible cosmic heat.
Others froze into silent tombs drifting through the darkness.
Across millions upon millions of galaxies, only a handful still contained thriving life and light.
The Seraphim were hunting.
For their creator.
For the supreme ruler of the Chaos Dimension.
For Drex Valen.
Drex himself could not openly enter the Marvel Multiverse.
His creations, however, could.
So they became his hands.
His harvesters.
His armies.
Worlds died.
Species vanished.
Galaxies collapsed.
The darkness between universes filled with debris.
Everywhere the Seraphim passed, destruction followed.
The consequences began generating strange phenomena.
Massive consciousnesses formed from aggregated quantum information.
Death-concepts emerged from the distorted psychic remnants of extinct civilizations.
Ideas became entities.
Entire regions of space became haunted by the accumulated awareness of the dead.
Yet resistance remained.
Even among the ashes of doomed civilizations, heroes continued fighting.
Some refused to surrender.
Some chose to die standing.
Among those defenders were legends.
Sunspot.
Hyperion.
Black Bolt.
Galancta.
The remnants of countless civilizations rallied around such figures as the war spread across the stars.
It was a conflict on an unimaginable scale.
A plague of destruction sweeping through the cosmos.
Death spread everywhere.
Starvation followed in its wake.
Civilizations collapsed one after another, leaving only corpses and ruins behind.
And it wasn't limited to a single universe.
The invasion had spread throughout the Multiverse.
Hundreds of millions of Seraphim crossed dimensional boundaries.
Entire realities found themselves under attack.
The reason was simple.
The Seraphim were absurdly powerful.
From the perspective of conventional science, they were almost unbeatable.
Only the greatest superheroes and supervillains possessed any realistic chance of stopping them.
And before such opponents could gather...
The Seraphim would already have harvested enormous quantities of matter and energy, transporting it back to the Chaos Dimension.
It was one of the most common methods dimensional entities used to grow stronger.
Consume.
Expand.
Repeat.
Most dimensional gods followed some variation of the same process.
Drex had simply industrialized it.
In effect, he had unleashed something comparable to a Dark Multiverse Crisis.
Across countless realities, panic spread.
"Where the hell are these monsters coming from?!"
Heroes struggled to protect even their own families.
The enemies they faced were simply too powerful.
Survival alone had become difficult.
Even Earth-616 eventually came under attack.
Fortunately, the invading Seraphim met an unexpected end.
They were devoured.
Specifically, they were eaten by the daughter of Galactus.
The reason was simple.
In that universe, Galactus was already dead.
His daughter had inherited part of his legacy.
Though she had not yet reached her father's level, consuming a few invading Seraphim was still well within her capabilities.
...
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