"This is all your fault!" Peter Parker roared, his voice nearly lost in the gale.
A terrifying cyclone of raw power erupted from Ronan the Accuser. Purple energy, thick and tangible as a physical storm, slammed into everything around them. Under the influence of the Power Stone, the four fundamental forces of the universe were unraveling. A chaotic gravitational field had taken hold, pinning Peter and Star-Lord to a broken chunk of the temple wall, trapping them in mid-air and rendering them utterly helpless.
Dozens of minutes earlier…
The plan had been simple. After his spider-sense warned him that Ronan's power was far more dangerous than Star-Lord's bumbling, Peter chose not to engage directly. He would be the spider on the wall, hiding in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
And it had worked perfectly. He shadowed Ronan's soldiers as they advanced, using their march to navigate the temple's depths. He reached the central chamber and watched as an Accuser presented the Cosmic Spirit Orb to his fanatical leader. The moment the orb was in Ronan's sight, a strand of black webbing shot out, snatched it from the soldier's grasp, and yanked it into the darkness where Peter was hiding.
Phase one was a success. Ronan, predictably, flew into a rage, swinging his Universal Weapon and unleashing blasts of concussive energy. But Peter's spider-sense was a symphony of warning bells, a high-pitched alarm that, while nearly numbing his brain, allowed him to perceive the trajectory of every attack and evade them with fluid grace. A weapon, no matter how powerful, is useless if it can't hit its target.
The next step was to escape and rendezvous with Ben. Among their group, only Ben could safely handle the true power locked within the orb.
But that's when Star-Lord, the galaxy's foremost idiot, decided to intervene.
Terrified that the four-billion-unit bounty was about to slip through his fingers, Quill opened fire—not at Ronan, but at Peter. Caught off guard, with his spider-sense already screaming from Ronan's assault, Peter was momentarily overwhelmed. It was all the opening Star-Lord needed. He swooped in, grabbed the Orb, and took off running.
He didn't get far. Ronan and a vengeful Peter were on him in seconds. A chaotic three-way struggle ensued, during which Peter and Venom, no longer holding back, tore through the remaining Accuser soldiers. In the mayhem, the Orb was dropped, cracking open on the stone floor. The Power Stone, a gem of pure, pulsating violet energy, was revealed.
Peter lunged for it. The instant his fingers brushed against its surface, a cataclysmic surge of power flooded his body. Searing, unimaginable pain erupted in his arm as purple, crackling fissures spread up his limb, charring it like burnt charcoal.
He would have been vaporized in an instant if not for Venom. Drawing on a memory from its time with a certain regenerative degenerate, the symbiote acted decisively. It split its own mass, severing the connection to Peter's arm and sacrificing a part of itself to save the whole.
Even so, Peter's right arm was a dead, ruined thing. The potent healing factor he'd developed was useless against this level of cellular destruction. He had been spared from becoming a one-armed spider only by the symbiote's quick thinking and its residual knowledge of Deadpool's extreme regenerative abilities.
But in that single, agonizing moment, the gem had been lost. Ronan, the impossibly powerful Kree, strode forward and snatched it from the floor with his bare hand.
Peter saw the Accuser's body convulse in agony, but the raw energy of the Infinity Stone did not instantly destroy him. The Kree's physiology was strong enough to withstand the initial onslaught. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Ronan slammed the gem into the head of his Universal Weapon. With the warhammer now acting as a conduit, he could unleash a portion of the stone's true power.
With a mere thought, Ronan rewrote the laws of physics around them. The gravity of the immediate area inverted, and the entire temple was ripped from the seabed, surging upward through kilometers of ocean. Chunks of the ancient ruin floated in the air like islands in a stormy sky, and Peter and Star-Lord found themselves helplessly pinned to one of them.
Which brought them to the present.
"I'm going to eat his brain!" Venom screeched inside Peter's head, its rage a palpable force. "That idiot doesn't even have one! A zombie would open his skull and leave in disappointment!"
Peter couldn't have agreed more. "We were so close!"
Now the stone was in Ronan's hands. Forgetting Ben's inevitable punishment for this failure was easy; surviving Ronan was the immediate problem.
The Accuser took a moment to revel in the cosmic power coursing through him before turning his cold gaze upon them. "You pathetic space pirates. You dare make an enemy of the Kree Empire?"
He raised the glowing warhammer, aiming it at the two trapped men. The sheer energy radiating from it was a physical force, a hot wind that promised annihilation.
"Really? Now's the time for a monologue?" Star-Lord, knowing full well he'd doomed them, still couldn't help but be a smart-ass in the face of death. He wasn't about to apologize. Instead, he strained against the gravitational force, managing to press the trigger on his element gun. A searing plasma bolt shot out, not at Ronan, but at the wall behind Peter.
BOOM!
The blast shattered the section of debris holding Peter captive. The shockwave was so intense it caused the Venom symbiote to painfully retract from Peter's skin for a moment.
"I'm definitely killing him later," Venom hissed.
But Peter seized the opportunity. Freed from the gravity trap, he launched himself at Ronan, simultaneously tossing a web-bomb at the wall holding Star-Lord, freeing him as well.
In the space of a heartbeat, Peter was on Ronan. His arm, now fully regenerated and enhanced by the symbiote, swelled with black muscle and smashed into Ronan's face.
BOOOM!
The impact sounded like a battering ram hitting a cathedral bell. Even an enemy as powerful as the Black Order's Cull Obsidian would have been staggered by a blow of that magnitude—a strike backed by the combined strength of two Spider-Men, capable of pulverizing solid rock.
Ronan didn't even move. He simply raised his free hand and caught the punch. His feet didn't shift a single millimeter.
"Impossible…" Peter breathed, his eyes wide with disbelief. He had never felt so utterly powerless.
"Ignorance is not impossibility," Ronan said, his voice calm and laced with contempt. He was immensely satisfied with this new strength. With the Power Stone, he could defy Thanos himself. This was the power of a god. "You will be the first to die beneath my divine might. But do not worry. Many more will follow."
His goal had always been the destruction of Xandar and the supremacy of the Kree. And once Xandar was ash, he would return to Hala, destroy the Supreme Intelligence, and take his rightful place as the one true ruler of the Kree Empire. He would destroy the Nova, the Skrulls, and any who stood in his way. But first, he had to crush the insect in front of him.
With a wave of his hand, he seized Peter in another gravity field.
"Why does everyone call me a bug?" Peter grumbled, even as Ronan raised the hammer for the killing blow. "Spiders are arachnids…"
Ronan didn't know or care. He was a god, and he was about to pass judgment.
The Power Stone flared. Peter braced for the end. But at the last second, Star-Lord came through. Instead of running, he had overloaded his element gun, unleashing a chaotic storm of all four elements at once. A terrifying bolt of multi-hued lightning shot toward Ronan.
The attack forced Ronan to abort his execution of Peter, turning to block the blast with his Universal Weapon. Seeing his chance, Star-Lord flipped Ronan a very human, very unfriendly gesture and turned to run.
Ronan didn't understand the specific insult, but Quill's expression made the intent clear. He snarled and turned to obliterate Star-Lord, but Peter, free once more, was already attacking.
This time, Peter knew better. Brute force was useless. He needed to outthink him. His eyes darted across the floating debris field, and a plan—a desperate, brilliant plan—formed in his mind.
"I've always liked math," Peter quipped, dodging another energy blast. "Especially geometry."
He began firing strands of webbing in every direction, anchoring them to the largest pieces of floating debris. None of the strands touched Ronan.
"Spider-Man, what the hell are you doing?!" Star-Lord yelled from behind a floating rock.
"Finding a fulcrum!" Peter shot back. He cast another dozen lines, creating a complex, three-dimensional web that connected all the major fragments of the temple. "Archimedes said if you give him a fulcrum, he can move the Earth. I can't move a planet, but I can definitely pull this temple down."
Ronan scoffed, finding himself at the center of a vast, black web. "Whatever you are attempting, it is futile."
The next moment, the entire debris field shuddered.
Peter planted his feet on a stable asteroid-sized chunk of floor, brought his hands together, and pulled. The countless web-strands went taut. Using the principles of leverage, he was putting the entire mass of the ruined temple into motion. All at once, every floating rock, wall, and pillar was yanked from its position and sent hurtling toward the center of the web.
It was as if Ronan had suddenly become a supermassive black hole, pulling countless meteorites into a collision course with himself.
BOOM! CRUNCH! SMASH!
In an instant, Ronan was buried under thousands of tons of rock and steel.
Star-Lord stared, completely dumbfounded. "How did you do that?"
"Physics," Peter panted, his muscles screaming from the exertion. "Okay, that won't hold him for long. We need to run."
"What about the Orb? The four billion!"
"It's a lost cause!" Peter snapped. He glanced at his wrist-communicator, calculating the time since the stone's activation. Ben should be on his way. He just didn't know if XLR8 was fast enough to cross a third of the planet in time.
A deep rumble shook the newly formed mountain of rock. Countless beams of purple energy pierced through the stone like holy light through clouds. With a final, violent explosion, the entire pile of debris was vaporized, turning to fine powder.
Floating in the light, his robes billowing around him like a divine shroud, was Ronan. And now, he was truly furious.
He raised his hammer, and the Power Stone unleashed its fury. A rain of destructive violet energy bolts streaked toward Peter and Star-Lord, an attack so dense and widespread that not even Peter's spider-sense could find a path through it.
"We're dead!" Star-Lord screamed, shutting his eyes.
But Peter noticed something strange. His spider-sense wasn't screaming.
The next moment, a brilliant crimson streak of light tore across the dark, alien sky. It slammed head-on into Ronan's energy barrage, creating a spectacular explosion of red and purple.
Everyone looked up. A sleek, red, manta-ray-like creature was now hovering in the sky, its yellow eyes glowing with defiant power.
A wave of relief washed over Peter. "Ben!"