"Then let us discuss your wedding to Galacta."
When Galactus uttered those words with absolute, deadpan sincerity, Sean experienced a rare moment of perfect internal and external alignment. His calm facade shattered completely.
The genial smile crumbled. His eyes flooded with disbelief. His face was a mask of pure shock.
A moment ago, the attitude had been 'no questions asked, I'll smash your head in first'... Now, suddenly, they were supposed to sit down and discuss wedding dates?
'Is this how ancient cosmic entities operate? Just… leaping from one extreme to the other without any intermediate steps?' Sean slowly composed himself, all while silently cataloguing a fresh round of mental gripes.
He shot a sideways glance at Gali, who had said nothing throughout. The gluttonous girl seemed entirely untroubled by the proposition, or maybe she simply didn't understand what marriage meant in the first place.
Those big, luminous eyes just kept blinking at him. Sean couldn't shake the impression that she was staring at a particularly tempting dessert.
"This… isn't this a bit fast?" he said, choosing his words with surgical care.
"What? You don't intend to take responsibility?" Galactus's stare shifted with alarming speed. A violent, oppressive aura broke through that violet armor like a tidal surge.
A single glance was enough. The atmosphere thundered as though pounded by stormclouds. Space itself rippled outward in trembling waves, like a fragile mirror on the verge of shattering.
Sean held his breath and raised the Infinity Gauntlet, meeting Galactus's frigid gaze head-on.
The ancient being radiated a very clear 'my way, or the highway' kind of energy.
Had Gali not promptly stepped between them, Greenland might well have been blasted beneath the waves today.
'Still, five Infinity Stones should suffice against a starving Galactus...' Sean wasn't entirely defenseless.
It was just that a single clash between them had already wiped the Russell Glacier from existence. Who could say whether anything short of planetary annihilation would result if they kept going?
So Sean clung to his deeply held principle of peaceful resolution.
Besides, Galactus was one of the five primordial cosmic entities, ranked among the most supreme lifeforms in existence. Yielding a little ground wasn't exactly shameful.
"Peace, peace. I'm merely saying that discussing my wedding to Galacta so hastily feels rather… abrupt." Sean deployed his most earnest voice, the kind that made people instinctively believe him.
Galactus cut him off before he could finish. The giant waved a dismissive hand and demanded, "Do you have parents or elders at home?"
"No." After a long beat of silence, Sean forced the word out.
His circumstances did, in fact, make him the ideal marriage candidate by certain metrics.
"There. Problem solved," having assumed a more humanoid aspect, Galactus was now displaying more recognizable biological emotions. He no longer thought solely in the cold calculus of his hunger, "Among all the lifeforms I have encountered, you are one of the more robust specimens. You possess the potential to reach the Universal tier. You wield the Infinity Stones. And… most critically, Galacta carries your child."
Otherwise, the entity that devoured worlds and haunted the nightmares of every civilized species wouldn't be wasting words here at all. He'd have swallowed Earth whole and been done with it.
"Therefore, this matter is settled." Galactus declared, fixing his stare on Sean, awaiting the human's answer.
"I won't deceive you," Sean's tone turned solemn. Even his voice seemed to age a decade, "Before I met Galacta, I already had a number of women in my life–"
"That is of no consequence." Galactus delivered his response with a casual wave, "A robust human such as yourself bears the responsibility of propagating your species. Seeking multiple partners is only natural. I fully understand this!"
Once again, the Devourer had produced an answer that nearly sent Sean reeling.
He could now state with absolute certainty: ancient cosmic beings did not think the way humans did...
…
High above, tucked behind the thinning veil of clouds, Iron Man and the Human Torch were conducting their own hushed conversation.
"What do you think they're talking about?" Johnny asked, genuinely curious.
He had watched the unyielding glacial ice of Greenland be completely annihilated by nothing more than the spillover of those two beings' power.
Entire icebergs had flashed into steam, congealing into vast banks of white mist. Huge and dense raindrops were now pelting down from the clouds, only to deflect off an invisible barrier below.
That kind of overwhelming, world-shaking force had done something Johnny wasn't used to. It had made him afraid. He had quietly packed away his usual flippant attitude.
"Probably some weighty discussion about the fate of Earth and all of humanity," Tony replied from within his nanotech armor, thrusters spitting faint tongues of flame.
He didn't dare approach too closely. The armored, almost mechanical-looking alien in violet was clearly not to be trifled with.
In Johnny's eyes, though, the entity speaking with Sean looked entirely different. It was a towering giant wreathed in raging fire.
Galactus possessed no fixed physical form. His image shifted with the perceptions of those who beheld him. Every species saw something akin to their own shape reflected back.
"What if Sean can't convince him?" Johnny asked, the worry bleeding through.
He'd always deferred to the brains (Reed, Tony) when it came to solving problems. But this enemy wasn't a criminal or a supervillain. This was something that could shatter planets and extinguish civilizations on a whim.
If Sean hadn't stopped him, this world would have been devoured already.
"Who knows, but convincing people is kind of Sean's specialty, he always sees exactly where the weak spot is..." Tony said, the joke half-formed on his lips but his face dead serious. The anxiety he'd thought he'd buried was crawling back up his throat.
Against an enemy this far beyond him, even Stark's brain couldn't churn out a solution.
All they could do was place their hope in Sean. He was Earth's Sentinel, the Watcher and Guardian of humanity, after all.
Tony would never admit it aloud, not in a million years, but Sean was the one steering humanity toward a brighter future.
Even sitting in the shadows, the world orbited around Umbrella, around Sean himself the way planets orbited a sun.
"Stark! Give me a status report on Greenland!" Raven's voice cut sharply through the comm channel, "S.H.I.E.L.D. is picking up extreme energy fluctuations from that location."
Greenland was covered by over 1.7 million square kilometers of ice sheet. Roughly ten percent of the world's icebergs originated there. But according to Skynet's satellite network, the Russell Glacier, which had endured for millions of years, was simply gone.
As the vast banks of white mist finally began to thin, the satellite images revealed something that stopped the breath.
A massive, horrifying crater. As though some transcendent force had simply erased that patch of Earth from existence. The visual alone was a silent, gut-punch of awe.
"Sean is here on-site," Tony's calm voice transmitted back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, "He's currently engaged in a discussion regarding the fate and future of humanity with an ancient lifeform… the one the Nova Corps identified as Galactus."
...
In the Helicarrier's conference room, the senior leadership of the Unified Government sat assembled, listening.
If the situation slipped beyond control, if things veered toward the worst outcome, every one of them would be evacuated to the lunar space station.
The station was already equipped with fully functional life-support systems. The first wave of civilian colonists had already begun the migration, on the verge of starting their new lives among the stars...