The pain was unbearable.

Each step sent a fresh wave of agony ripping through me, like shards of glass grinding under my skin. My right arm hung uselessly by my side, throbbing with every heartbeat. Every inch of my body felt like it was on fire—burns, bruises, fractures, maybe worse—but I had to keep going. Yinsen needed me, and I wasn't about to let him die here. Not after everything.

The ground under my feet felt uneven, as if the earth itself wanted to give way. My vision blurred, and I had to fight just to keep my eyes open, the light dimming at the edges of my sight. Each breath came out ragged, as though I was sucking in shards of air. A strange buzzing noise filled my ears, blocking out every other sound, even the distant shouts of the remaining terrorists and the crackling of flames.

I focused on one thought: *get to Yinsen*.

My body moved on autopilot, driven purely by stubbornness. One foot in front of the other. Step. Then another. My suit clanked awkwardly, like I was dragging a mountain of metal with me. The weight wasn't just on my body, it was on my soul.

The shack where we'd been held captive loomed closer, the dark shape distorted by my failing vision. I could barely make out the doorway, but in the haze, I saw a figure standing there—Yinsen. His face blurred, but I could tell he was calling out to me, his mouth moving rapidly, his eyes wide with concern.

But I couldn't hear him anymore.

My knees buckled beneath me as if the ground had been pulled out from under my feet. I collapsed forward, the impact sending a fresh jolt of pain through my chest. The world tilted, and everything around me seemed to stretch, then contract. My breath hitched, shallow and quick, like I was sinking underwater. Yinsen reached out—his hand stretching toward me, desperate—but I was already too far gone.

The last thing I saw was his outstretched hand.

Then, darkness.

Then I woke up.

No.

I wasn't awake.

I wasn't asleep either.

I floated in an endless dark void, suspended in nothingness. No sound. No light. No sense of time. Just...emptiness. My body wasn't my own, as if I was barely holding onto my physical form, a wisp of existence in the abyss. I felt weightless, powerless.

Then, I saw it.

First, there was only a faint glow in the distance, but even from afar, it exuded a terrifying presence. The glow became larger, brighter, filling the void. And then, it took shape—a shape so vast, so incomprehensibly massive, it defied the limits of the human mind. My eyes struggled to make sense of it, but the more I focused, the less it resembled anything I could understand.

A shadow against the stars. No...it *was* the death of stars. The death of everything.

Galactus.

I had seen his face once, in comics and cartoons, but this wasn't a fictional villain. This was something primal, something unstoppable. A force of nature—no, beyond nature. He was a walking apocalypse, the end of worlds. His presence was the final answer to the question no one wanted to ask. *Are we alone in the universe?*

The Fermi Paradox. The Great Filter. The reason we don't hear other civilizations is because they've all faced *him*.

I tried to scream, but the void swallowed my voice. Tried to move, but I was locked in place. My body, my mind—they weren't mine anymore. I was just a speck of dust, insignificant against the cosmic terror that stood before me. Galactus gazed down, and though I couldn't see his eyes, I knew they were upon me, as if my entire existence was nothing more than a fleeting moment in his endless cycle of consumption.

Worlds trembled and crumbled in his wake, their light snuffed out as easily as a candle blown by the wind. I could feel it—the weight of all those lost lives, entire civilizations wiped out in the blink of an eye. The despair, the futility. This...this was the end of everything. There was no fighting it, no clever inventions, no grand heroic acts. This was the force that devoured worlds.

And I was next.

The fear gripped me like a vice, squeezing until I thought I'd implode under its pressure. My heart pounded in my ears, though I wasn't sure if I even had a heart anymore in this place. His silhouette loomed larger, and as he moved, I could feel the very fabric of the universe bending around him, warping under the weight of his presence.

He raised a hand, slow and deliberate, his immense fingers reaching out to crush my world—and me along with it.

"No," I whispered, barely a breath in the void. "Please..."

I felt the world around me begin to disintegrate, and just as his hand came closer, closer—

I jolted awake with a gasp, the blinding white light of the room snapping me back to reality. My chest heaved, and sweat coated my skin. My hands clenched into fists, the phantom sensation of the void still clinging to me. For a second, I couldn't breathe. My mind raced with fragmented images: the blackness, the towering figure, the death of stars.

Galactus.

I forced myself to look around, grounding myself in the sterile reality of the room. The light was too bright, too clean, too *normal*—but the fear lingered, lurking just beneath the surface. I could still feel him. The end. The Great Filter. Waiting out there in the cosmos, somewhere.

It wasn't just a dream. It couldn't be.

"Tony." A voice pulled me back. I turned sharply, almost forgetting where I was for a second. Yinsen was sitting beside me, looking concerned. "Relax," he said softly. "We're safe now."

Safe? I wasn't sure I'd ever feel safe again after what I'd seen.

I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down, but it was hard to shake the image of Galactus. The fear gnawed at the back of my mind. I wasn't just worried about survival anymore. No, it was something much bigger, much worse.

"I...had a nightmare," I mumbled, though the word didn't quite fit. Yinsen nodded, his expression patient.

"They say the mind does strange things after trauma," he said, offering a small smile. "But we're at a S.H.I.E.L.D. base now. They rescued us after you passed out. The explosion you caused...well, it brought them to us."

I barely heard him. The room still felt too small, too bright, too fragile compared to the vast, terrifying nothingness of the void. I wasn't sure what was real anymore. That thing, that force...was it just a figment of my imagination, or was it something more?

As Yinsen spoke, I kept seeing it, the dark silhouette, the destruction. And I realized: the fight we'd just survived, the men I'd killed, the tech I'd built—all of it felt meaningless now, like I was just delaying the inevitable.

How could I focus on anything else, knowing *he* was out there?