Chapter 265: 264. Devouring Stars
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In the dead silence of deep space, Nolan hovered between two shrunken suns each one a blazing furnace compressed to the size of a sphere barely larger than his fists.
With a deliberate motion, he formed dimensional apertures in both palms and swallowed them whole.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then detonation.
A torrent of fusion energy ripped through his body, not tearing him apart, but feeding him. Golden threads, molten and alive, spread from his hands through his veins like liquid sunlight.
"Aaaah—!" Nolan roared, his voice reverberating across the void.
He'd imagined this before Pym-shrinking a star and binding it to his entropy-powered form but in the Solar System, consuming our sun would've brought Odin and the Ancient One down on him instantly.
But here, far beyond Earth's home system, there was no such restraint. Now, he could finally test it.
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Knull froze mid-strike, realization dawning.
"You're insane."
He knew instantly why Nolan had tanked that earlier blow just to line up this gambit.
Destroying a star was child's play for a Skyfather. But swallowing two into your own body? That was lunacy.
Stars carried not just mass and heat, but their own rules of purification, pressure, and nuclear fury. Holding one inside you was like voluntarily detonating an apocalypse in your chest.
And Nolan was still fighting him.
"Not insane," Nolan said, grinning. "Just getting started."
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Power exploded from him in a surge that made even Knull's abyssal form recoil. Using his twin-bound dimensions to regulate the stellar fury, Nolan fed the energy into his entropy field.
The result: a constant flood of power, like twin suns fueling his every strike.
Knull attacked furiously, forming massive fists from black filament, but each clash only proved the gap widening between them. Every blow from Nolan hit harder, moved faster.
For the first time, Knull fought like he meant it.
Deep space lit with their collisions' bursts of annihilation so dense they crushed light itself. If unleashed unchecked, a single exchange could shatter entire worlds.
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Then Nolan felt it.
The local rules here… denser, more stable than in the Solar System. The twin suns' energy was concentrated, not diffusing into the void. It made every moment of his control sharper.
Knull sensed the shift too, and his stance changed to a more measured, cautious one. The god of symbiotes now fought Nolan as an equal, not as prey.
But their compressed battlefield was becoming a pressure cooker. Energy spiraled tighter and tighter until—
BOOM.
A flash eclipsed the twin stars. The detonation bloomed like a flower of light across the void, petal after petal of destruction radiating outward. Planets caught in its wake cracked, disintegrated, vanished.
Half the system was gone in seconds.
Even the combatants weren't spared. Nolan was hurled back, his armor glowing white-hot as stellar plasma gnawed at his flesh only for his cells to greedily absorb what they could.
The rest burned away and regenerated instantly, fed by the two captive suns still pulsing in his core.
Knull fared worse. Chunks of his black symbiote mass were stripped away by the blast, his form collapsing before rebuilding itself with an effort that looked almost desperate.
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"Impossible," Knull hissed. "You're growing stronger even now… even my rule bends to you."
"Not bending," Nolan replied. "Breaking."
A pulse of gravity rippled outward, stronger than anything he'd unleashed before. His connection to the twin suns resonated, and gravity became his weapon. Not artificial manipulation of stellar gravity, pure and unfiltered.
Knull staggered, forced to condense his form to withstand the crushing force.
Nolan's eyes locked on him. In a blink, he was there teleport-fast, moving in a way Knull's god-sense couldn't predict.
The abyssal god's instincts screamed. He brought both arms up to block.
Too slow.
Nolan's fist tore through Knull's guard, shattering his defensive rule constructs. The blow hit like the collapse of a neutron star, driving Knull into the largest planet in the system.
The impact didn't just crater it ripped the world apart, molten fragments spiraling into space.
Nolan didn't stop. His arms blurred, striking so fast that the afterimages merged into a solid wall of fists.
Each hit detonated black ichor from Knull's body, and when fragments splattered onto Nolan, his flesh absorbed them, refining and repurposing the power instantly.
"Break!"
The final punch cracked through Knull's torso, the force tunneling through his body and into the shattered planet behind him, blowing it into incandescent dust.
Far away, unseen eyes turned toward the battle cosmic entities, watching. Both warriors felt the attention but ignored it.
Right now, the only thing that mattered was ending this.
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