A few months later...
A cracked and broken world was spinning wildly out of control. If there was any indigenous life left on the surface, the chaotic and frenzied motion as it careened through the depths of space would be practically imperceptible... but the lone figure walking along this desert of powdered bone was able to sense it instantly. She felt it just as easily as one would feel a breeze of wind on their face.
Something has just knocked this world out of orbit, she thought to herself. But right now... that is the least of this planet's problems.
Something on the edge of the horizon was blotting out the red sky. It was even starting to eclipse the dim magenta light from the dying brown dwarf above her head. But while it was obvious Something was happening, the woman walking towards It was having difficulty describing what, exactly, It was.
A shifting miasma of lights and colors were stretched thin across the effervescent membranes packed tightly between universes and dimensions. Thoughts and emotions were made flesh as holes of unreality winked in and out of existence billions of times a second. Rivers of crystalline time itself solidified and cracked, exploding into ribbons of folded space before disappearing again. Sounds from all across the universe screamed in a torrent of liquid noise crashing through the nothing of broken reality; it was both impossibly loud and barely above a whisper.
And of all the many impossible things happening in front of her eyes, consuming the landscape like some violent beast with an unquenchable hunger, there was one sight above all that gave her pause: a shadowy, vaguely humanoid, figure was standing in the middle of It. She couldn't tell if he was wreathed in flame, or if he was simply being distorted by the indecipherable madness of It transpiring all around him... or, perhaps, an even more terrifying prospect: that It was merely an extension of Him.
The figure turned, and fixed a pair of burning eyes on the woman.
She stopped dead in her tracks. It was like an entire ocean of molten metal had been suddenly upended on her head. Everything in and around her body shuddered under the strain. Reality under her feet started to momentarily crack under His gaze... but then the cracks filled and began to retreat. Waves of force pushed back against the unrelenting pressure closing in all around her.
"Tuera..."
The word emerged from within the chaos. Thousands upon millions of voices spoke in perfect unison, vocalizing the word in a growling baritone murmur from every direction.
"Hello, father..." Tuera said, balling her shaking hands into fists. She summoned every last ounce of her strength and reasserted her will around her, keeping her feet stubbornly clinging to the fragile skin of this dead world that hadn't yet realized it was deceased.
At that moment, in orbit above the planet...
Sheason Fisher sat at the controls of his spaceship, watching the planet spinning below him on the other side of the transparent steel view screen. Warning klaxons were bellowing at him, trying to encourage him to go literally anywhere else in the universe. He couldn't help but chuckle.
"Son of a bitch. Even my ship knows this planet is fucked..." he grumbled, scratching at his grey beard.
He didn't like just sitting here. For one thing, he was just sitting here. It made him feel incredibly useless, and he didn't like feeling useless. And for another... he was sitting here, because he was waiting for Tuera; waiting for her to either return to the ship, or for the timer to run out. Only then could he break orbit and warp away from this rapidly imploding star system.
Sheason did not like working with Tuera. While he was able to admit that he didn't, strictly speaking, "hate" her – at least, not anymore – there was far too much bad blood and ugly history between the two of them. Both of them knew that they needed each other at this particular juncture, which meant that working with her was a necessary evil... but Sheason didn't, even for a single second, consider actually trusting her. Not even during their occasional sessions of "stress relief."
As soon as he was no longer needed, Sheason thought to himself, she would slide in the knife and try to dispose of him. That's the one thing he was absolutely sure of.
A new alert appeared on the console of his ship, flashing with a blinking red light; he didn't even wait for the noise before he started leaning on both of the control sticks. The ship groaned and shuddered as the engines ignited and the ship began to move.
"Fisher!" Tuera's voice cracked over the tinny speakers of the in-ship communicator. "I'm on board! We've got to leave! NOW!"
The nose of his ship swung around, and Sheason aligned the massive starship with the escape vector out of the planet's gravity well. The vaguely feminine robot voice of the ship computer counted down calmly as the warp engines spun up; as soon it reached zero, the starship lurched forward and was flung into a tunnel through space.
A few minutes later, the door to the bridge slid open, and Tuera stepped inside. The view outside of the windows on the bridge was pitch black, although a trio of holographic screens in front of the pilot seat showed an array of swiftly-moving blue-shifted stars to compensate.
Tuera looked a complete mess. Her outfit was shredded and burned; she was bleeding heavily from several deep wounds, including a nasty gash on her forehead; smoke and steam seemed to be billowing away from her body in dirty clouds with every movement; every single one of her hairs seemed to be completely frayed or burnt. Before Tuera could get more than five feet into the bridge, the pilot seat swiveled around to reveal an annoyed looking Sheason, drumming his fingers on the armrest.
"Alright, spill," he said, completely undisturbed by her appearance. "What in the fuck happened down there?"
"Eh-heh..." Tuera chuckled, running a hand across the gash in her face, to keep any more blood from leaking into her eye. "Well, I've got bad news, and I've got worse news." She stumbled forward and collapsed into one of the nearby co-pilot chairs. Unlike the deck plating beneath her feet, the chair had not been made chemically neutral, and started to sizzle from her highly acidic blood.
"You're paying for that," Sheason grumbled. "Alright, so what's the bad news?"
"I found Venthrax," Tuera said, unable to keep herself from sighing and slouching in the chair. For as much as she was trying to resist the inevitable, exhaustion from the fight had started to set in. "And I'm pretty sure I know what his plan is, now." Sheason cocked an eyebrow.
"What, destroying planets isn't enough?" he asked. Tuera shook her head.
"He's not destroying them. He's consuming them. He's consuming all available matter and energy from every star system he visits, across multiple layers of reality. He's adding them to his own power, and it's..." Tuera hesitated, gulping loudly. "Honestly? It's terrifying."
Sheason knew he should be worried by that. Tuera wasn't afraid of anything. That was one of her defining traits. But there was something else she said that he was trying to focus on.
"Why does this plan sound familiar?" he asked. "Did you try this at one point?"
"No," Tuera said flatly. "But I told you about it. It was something I found out about in my trips across the various different alternate multiverses. Remember the Crisis on Infinite Earths? This is basically the Anti-Monitor's plan." Tuera shrugged. "Not surprising, really. Once you go beyond a certain power threshold, the only options are 'consume everything,' 'destroy everything,' or 'enslave everything'."
"Well then, I'm guessing that's the worse news," Sheason said, with a surprising air of calm. "Because unless you've got Superman from Earth-2 on speed-dial, ready and willing to punch your father into a supernova, I think we're fucked. Especially since, as far as I'm aware, the Superman from Earth-2 is still dead."
"Oh, it's even worse than you think," Tuera said, rubbing her tired eyes. "I'm not sure he even has a physical form anymore. As far as I can tell, he's currently existing coterminously across several dimensions, with his..." she paused, waving her hands in the air; she was having trouble thinking of descriptions simple enough for a layman like Sheason to simply understand. "... his mind, essence, and soul all threaded through several realities at once. I gave him everything I had, and it was... it was like I was... throwing rocks..."
"Oh, fer fuck sake..." Sheason buried his face in his hand and started to slowly rub his temples. How did he always get mixed up in this shit? Right now, he was really longing for the days when the craziest thing he had to worry about was a bunch of orcs invading Azeroth. "Alright, so how do we kill him?" He paused. "Hell, is it possible?"
No response.
"Tuera?" Sheason looked up. Tuera was slumped in the chair completely now, having passed out from either blood loss or exhaustion. Probably a bit of both. "Fuck sake..." Sheason turned away, flicking a switch on the console to summon a trio of medical bots to come collect her and carry her to the infirmary.
Sheason returned to the controls in silence, preparing himself for when they returned to Realspace and his input would affect the ship again. He had plenty of time to prepare, the hyperspace conduit would keep them on course for at least another half an hour or so. So he just started thinking about everything she had said, trying to make sense of it.
"Maybe we really are fucked," he muttered under his breath grimly. "Because I don't think we're gonna find a big enough rock..."