Then they fought.
Pure physical. No skills, no abilities, just two beings throwing everything they had at each other beside a dying star while the black hole consumed it behind them.
Sentry's first punch hit Luke across the jaw and sent him skipping across space. Luke dragging his hand through nothing to kill the momentum before launching himself straight back.
He hit Sentry in the gut hard enough that the shockwave reached the sun's surface and disturbed it, solar flares erupting from the point closest to impact.
Sentry grabbed him by the collar and drove his knee up, then hurled him sideways toward Mercury. Luke hit the planet face first, the entire surface cratering inward on one side before he pushed off it and came back faster than he left.
They traded six punches in open space, each exchange producing shockwaves that rolled outward in every direction.
Venus losing chunks of its atmosphere each time the force reached it.
Sentry wrapped both hands around Luke's head and drove him downward through Mars, the red planet splitting along its equator from the impact, the crust folding open like something had decided it no longer needed to exist.
Luke came up from the crater with one hand around Sentry's throat and hit him once, clean, sending him skipping across the asteroid belt, rocks the size of cities reduced to gravel in his path.
Then they landed on what remained of Mars together.
Neither done.
The surface beneath them lasted approximately three seconds before it stopped being a surface.
Luke drove Sentry into the ground and the crust folded, cracked, separated, chunks of Mars the size of continents breaking off and drifting into space as the planet's structural integrity gave up entirely.
Sentry tried to push back. Luke didn't let him.
He grabbed Sentry mid swing, redirected the momentum downward, and drove him through the planet's core, molten rock spraying outward in every direction as Mars began coming apart around the hole Luke had just made through it.
Sentry came back up swinging.
Luke slipped the first punch, took the second on his forearm without moving, and returned it directly into Sentry's jaw, the force sending him through a continent-sized chunk that had already broken free, the rock detonating around him as he passed through it.
He came back.
Luke hit him again. Harder. The largest remaining piece of Mars cracked in half under Sentry's impact, then into quarters, then into rubble that joined the expanding debris field as Luke followed up with a third strike that left Sentry tumbling through what had been a planet thirty seconds ago.
The red planet was gone.
A ring of gravel and molten rock stretched across a thousand kilometers of space, still glowing from the broken core, pieces drifting outward with nowhere left to go.
Luke floated in the middle of it, watching Sentry stabilize himself in the debris field.
"You really are strong," Luke said, looking at him with genuine acknowledgment. "Even after all that, no signs of stopping. You deserve that title. Strongest superhero."
Sentry said nothing, just looked back at him with those infected eyes that still carried something recognizable underneath everything the virus had taken.
"But this will pierce your defense," Luke said.
He raised his hand, index finger extended, and crimson lightning gathered at the tip. It wasn't wild or scattered. It pulled inward, condensing into a single form—a lance of concentrated plasma, crimson and white, with heat so intense it warped the air at its edges.
Plasma Lance.
"Off you go," Luke said, and released it.
The lance crossed the distance instantly.
Sentry threw himself sideways and the lance followed, tracking him through the debris field, detonating three asteroid chunks that had the misfortune of being in its adjusted path.
The molten spray they left behind evaporating immediately in the heat of the lance's passing.
Sentry couldn't shake it.
It hit.
"That," Luke said, watching the impact, "was a homing lance made of concentrated lightning that melts the hardest substances in the universe on contact. Your skin would be gone entirely unless it happens to be made of antimatter."
He paused.
"Is it?"
Luke disappeared.
Reappeared directly in Sentry's path, one hand shooting up and catching Sentry's incoming punch by the wrist, stopping it dead, and before Sentry could process that Luke's other hand was already around his skull pulling him forward into the grip.
Fingers dug in.
Cracks spread across Sentry's face instantly, Final State locking every fracture as it formed, the skin splitting under the pressure as Sentry's free hand came around fast trying to break the hold.
The lance took it off at the wrist before it arrived, crimson lightning cauterizing the stump clean, the severed hand spinning away into the debris field.
The lance came back around and took the other arm at the elbow.
Luke held Sentry's head with both hands now, nothing between them, his fingers pressing in from both sides as the cracks deepened and spread.
Blood began to seep from Sentry's eyes as the pressure rose past what even his body could quietly absorb, the skin splitting further with every increase in Luke's grip.
Sentry's mouth opened.
No words came out.
Luke kept squeezing.
*****
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