The Saga of Ashley The God-Butcher
I learned two things today. One, having the logical extreme of Thor's DNA and Storm's DNA with a few other powers bosting them did not even begin to mean that you were the equal of the Weather Control powers of Thor+The Odinforce+a Herald's Worth of Power Cosmic+Mjolnir. Not even close.
And Two: If you're not better at something than Thor, don't try to beat him by doing it.
After pulling my head out of the sand on an island somewhere in Polynesia and shaking the cobwebs out of my brain... It suddenly occurred to me that Thor had conjured a wind powerful enough to literally send me halfway around the world in just a few seconds.
"How did that not make a boom strong enough to wipe out all life on Earth?" I said while blinking away the concussion.
"Because I am a God," Thor said as he landed behind me. He literally hadn't been anywhere near here a few seconds ago. "Now, will you relinquish the blade?"
"Why are you a Herald of Galactus?" I slurred out. "You're the All-Father of Asgard now... Isn't that a conflict of interests?"
"T'is a tale that I could not do justice if I tried," Thor admitted. "And nay. No more conflict than suffered by Sir Castle as both Herald and Spirit of Vengence."
"The Punisher's a Ghost Rider!? And a Herald...!? Well, might as well write the universe off as a loss. It won't be here much longer." I knew Mephisto was an idiot loser, but... And the hell was Galactus thinking? Castle was like, the most prolific serial killer in modern history. Even someone amoral or actively malicious would have to know that giving someone like that so much power was a recipe for disaster.
"Ah. T'is a different Sir Castle, from a future that shall never come to pass. To great surprise, being driven even more mad than he once was does seem to have made him less murderous. Now, answer: Will you relinquish All-Black," Thor asked with dead seriousness. "Yea or Nay?"
"I'm sorry, but I need it!" I shouted while using my techno-organic properties to form something akin to one of Iron Man's R-T Nodes on my back and then I fired a focused beam of repulsor energy not-unlike the Unibeam back at Thor. I didn't want to fight Thor, but he wasn't giving me a choice.
...Mjolnir could absorb energy and send it back a lot stronger. I did not know that. Which was bad because repulsor energy was fast and being taken by surprise meant less time to dodge. The returned blast winged my hand and...
I turned around while looking at the stump from where my hand used to be. "Ow. That was... Ow." Honestly, it hurt a lot less than you'd think something like that would hurt. It grew back pretty quickly and a couple of chunks of goo that used to be my hand swiftly pulled over and merged into my body via my feet. "I mean, ow, but... Optic Blasts!"
I went from talking to attacking without missing a beat, shooting a big red beam of light from my eyes. Without waiting for a response I followed it up with a cone of hellfire from my mouth and two big blasts of cosmic fire from my wings, before finishing by conjuring a hell of a lot of multi-colored plasmids and throwing them all forward where they made a big boom.
When the smoke cleared, a good chunk of the beach was gone. And so was Thor...
It was just as I was starting to think that maybe I'd overdone it that my Spider-Sense went off and Thor, moving so fast that even with my enhanced vision he looked like a blur came up from behind me and—
With a loud Crack-thoom! I went flying up into the... Okay, off the top of my head I didn't know which sphere it was but I could clearly see stars against the inky black void.
I was pushed back by the shockwave of Thor appearing next to me in a burst of great speed before he came to a sudden stop and brought the crackling Uru hammer down upon me and sent me rocketing back down to the earth.
Thinking quickly, I started bamfing. I couldn't stop from crashing into the earth, this kind of teleportation preserved momentum, but I could slow it down some and choose where I crashed.
After a few jumps, I tore through the stone roof of an old church in a small mountain town in Colorado, burst through the wooden door, and tore an ugly scar through the earth for a good thirty or forty feet.
And then I lied there and let the horrible concussion I'd gotten from doing that head first heal. My sense of self came back just in time to catch myself singing " Gory, gory what a Hell of a way to die and she ain't gonna fly no more! "
Why did I sing when I had head injuries? This was the third time.
I sat up and took stock of my situation. I didn't know how long it would take Thor to figure out where I was. but... Oh, judging from how surrounded I was I wouldn't need much time at all.
Around me were a few dozen figures in dark robes, most of them with traces of the Living Abyss in their bodies. And behind them was every man, woman, and child who lived in Doverton, Colorado. 1,146 people who'd each been infected with Carnage a while back and another, older and more powerful symbiote more recently. Their black eyes with red, spiraled pupils and zombie-like gaits showing that they were being controlled through this medium.
And the crowd parted and a giant of a man came through. Thirteen feet tall, bloody read and skeletal. With a sharp, jagged grin, Carnage leaned down and spoke to me.
"Why hello there? Imagine my surprise when a giant woman falls from the sky, ruins the old church that my followers and I painstakingly converted into a Temple to our faith, interrupting our sacrifice, and I find that she's been doing my job for me?" He wasn't normally this eloquent. And faith? Sacrifice? ...Oh, hell he was running a cult. Yeah, I could see a beaten up man being held down... Wait, was that John Jonah Jameson III? "Would you so kindly tell me where it was that you managed to find my Other?"
Instead of answering, I used my telekinesis to hold him perfectly still and ran him through with All-Black. "You know... I got my ass kicked by a clone of you and your 'other' a while back. A friend of mine killed it dead. I was really looking forward to taking out my rage from your copy out on the original, but now I've got bigger and more important things to deal with."
As All-Black drained from him the life-force and some kind of chaotic, dark older magic that was empowering him, I reached out to the symbiote he was wearing and pulled it into myself and with it four symbiote codices: one from this ancient symbiote, one from Carnage, and one each from two other symbiotes that he'd worn temporarily but that had eventually be consumed alive by the original Carnage.
As I absorbed these Codices, I got Cletus Kassady's life again, yes, but also the ancient history of a Godlike Dragon made of symbiotes that had come to the Earth, a Vessel of the will of Knull, centuries ago until it had been defeated by Thor, and an image of Knull riding such a dragon and flying to the Earth.
...Oh. That's why Mister Snuggles brought up Grendle when I'd been talking about Dragons with Missy.
With the symbiotes, life-force, and Cthonic magic drained from him and from the maggots infesting his corpse, Cletus's cared flesh disintegrated and his bones collapsed to the ground.
That wasn't the end of him, however. With my enhanced sight and other sense I could make out an aura, and astral figure... Cletus's soul looked more like Carnage than his true human form. That probably said something about his warped, insane psyche.
"Whatever," he dismissed as he started fading away. "I'll be back. I always come back from the Abyss."
"Yeah, not this time," I said and then I grabbed him. He seemed genuinely surprised that I could see, hear, and touch him. "See, I'm not just a symbiote host." I made my eyes and Hell-Mark ignite nice and bright. "I need as much power as I can get, and the thought just occurred to me that demonic powers get stronger from feeding on sin and souls..."
I ravaged the soul of Cletus Kassady, a soul-soaked in more blood and sin than Jack Slash and Alexandria combined and maliciously proud of his inability to feel remorse, feeding all of it to my Hell-Mark and the collection of Demonic powers brewing and feeding it in. For what I expected was the first and only time ever in his life or Afterlife, Cletus Kassady found himself suffering abject agony and not enjoying the pain one bit, screaming out a bone-chilling wail of pain until Cletus Kassady was no more and the broken fragments of what was left of his soul were consumed to feed the growing Hell-Fire within me.
I smiled big and wide, suddenly feeling all kinds of stress melting away. That'd been nice and cathartic after all.
Two of the robed figures didn't like what I'd just done, however, and jumped for me, their robes falling away to reveal the monstrous, six-armed Spider-Man knockoff Doppelganger and Carnage's pale, pasty white mutant girlfriend Shriek. Doppelganger came in for Melee while Shriek chose to take to the air and shoot down at me with a focused blast of sonic waves.
Neither of them was strong enough to do anything, and regardless between the piece of Carnage I'd absorbed a bit ago and the Cthonic magic I'd taken from Carnage both protected me from sonics. I grabbed Doppelganger by the throat and just as he let out a fearful gasp of "mother!" I twisted and broke his neck.
He'd revive. Eventually. He always did. Besides, he was basically just an abstract concept brought to life and was at best an intelligent trained animal.
That wasn't much comfort to Shriek though, who... well, shrieked in anger. It was quite annoying so I grabbed her with telekinesis and pulled her to me so that I was holding her by the mouth. "You're lucky that you have diplomatic immunity," I said while psychicing out the codex she had from... Scorn. The second Carnage offspring, the one that was a nanotech cyborg that had been born from a prosthetic arm made of equal parts stolen chunks of Carnage and bootleg knock-off Starktech. "Now sleep!"
A psychic mutant with no psychic resistance. It was hilariously ironic. She passed out in my hand and I dropped her.
Honestly, while the sonic blasts were cool I didn't really need more telekinesis, and Shriek's telepathy seemed limited to bringing out the worst in people while suppressing their goodness and when was that ever gonna be useful? The tech in the Scorn Codex wasn't much better, either... Cool, I can make more weapons. Whatever.
But still, a codex from a relatively powerful symbiote hosted in a relatively powerful mutant was still a decently strong codex.
Speaking of which: I reached out with my psychic senses and grabbed onto every codex in town. 2,292 Carnage and Grendel codices from the enslaved civilians who even now were just milling about, 1,146 offshoots of Grendel being used to control them, a dozen Grendel codices more from the cultists serving under Carnage in Worship of Knull, fragments of Living Abyss that had bled off of Grendel centuries ago and been passed down among the Chruch of the New Darkness ever since within those dozen cultists, and one last Carnage codex from John Jonah Jameson Junior Junior. (I was calling him that now. The extra alliteration made it better.)
All in all, it was a very, very good haul but... Honestly, it felt empty. I could feel all the codices making me stronger now than I was before... A lot stronger, but... where was the good feeling? Where were the tingles? I'd taken in so many and it faded so fast...
Whatever. There were still so many more codices to collect. I'd find something that made me feel good.
I used my telepathy to force the cultists to sleep while the people of Doverton woke up from a daze they'd been in for a while. The handful that had been holding down Jameson let him up.
Jameson immediately rushed forward, muscles growing, face elongating, and body hair growing longer and thicker while a red crystal embedded in his chest began to glow as his shirt tore and before long the Manwolf was standing between me and the civilian population of Doverton. Or was he Stargod now? According to his codex, the crystal was responsible for both transformations and they were both magical alien werewolves.
"Look, I've got what I came for and I've gotta get going," I said before he could say anything. I could see Thor speeding in this direction and he was gonna be here soon. "Talk to Thor if you need details but I just saved your butt and everyone else in this town so take what he says with a grain of salt bye!" and bamfed away just as Thor landed.