Zombie Universe, Earth
The trouble didn't end when Ben departed with Benzarro.
If anything, it got worse.
The undead army that had erupted from beneath the dead earth continued their relentless advance, thousands of shuffling corpses converging on the small cluster of survivors. Rotting hands reached toward living flesh. Dead eyes tracked movement with predatory focus. The air filled with the wet, gurgling sounds of damaged throats attempting speech.
"Protect Wanda and Gwen!" Eunice's voice cut through the chaos with crystal clarity. Her synthesized voice processor gave her words an eerie calm despite the dire circumstances. "They're the key to the evacuation! Nothing gets through!"
She was right. The two magic users were currently channeling enough Mana to relocate an entire planet's worth of survivors. If they lost concentration now, millions would die when the antimatter bomb detonated.
"Gravattack!"
Peter's transformation was instantaneous, XLR8's sleek form dissolving into the massive, planetary body of a Galilean. He raised both hands, and reality bent around them, gravity becoming a plaything in his grasp. The space surrounding their position warped, twisted, inverted.
Most of the ordinary zombies lifted off the ground immediately, caught in the gravitational anomaly like leaves in a tornado. They flailed helplessly in midair, unable to gain purchase on anything solid, their decaying bodies spinning slowly as they drifted upward.
But the superhero zombies were different.
Enhanced physiology, powers that defied conventional physics, bodies that had been designed to withstand cosmic forces. They pushed through the gravitational distortion like swimmers fighting a strong current. Slow, labored, but inexorable.
Peter could increase the field strength, crush them under gravitational pressure equivalent to a neutron star's surface. But that would also kill the ordinary zombies, and despite everything, despite the infection and the horror, those had been people once.
"I'll create a secondary barrier!" Pietro's voice was already dopplering as he accelerated.
The speedster became a silver blur, circling the group at velocities that should have torn his body apart. The displaced air formed a whirlwind, a howling vortex that created a second line of defense. Weaker zombies were caught in the windstorm, tumbling end over end.
But the strongest still came through.
"HULK SMASH!"
The zombie Hulk didn't bother with strategy or finesse. He simply lowered his shoulder and charged, green muscles rippling beneath mottled, necrotic skin. The force field meant nothing to him. The hurricane was an inconvenience at best.
His momentum was a freight train, unstoppable and terrible.
"My babies, attack!" Dr. Animo's command was almost gleeful despite the circumstances.
His mutated dinosaurs, the prehistoric creatures he'd engineered and enhanced over decades of research, threw themselves at the zombie Hulk with fearless abandon. A massive Tyrannosaurus rex, its hide reinforced with armor plating, met the Hulk's charge head-on.
The collision should have been epic.
Instead, the zombie Hulk's elbow caught the dinosaur mid-charge, and the massive creature went flying like a kicked puppy. It crashed into the ruins of a building several hundred meters away, the impact creating a dust cloud that momentarily obscured the battlefield.
Tony and Eunice reacted as one, both raising their palms to fire repulsor beams at the approaching Hulk. Twin lances of energy carved through the dead air, slamming into the zombie's chest with enough force to vaporize steel.
Hulk paused. Just for a moment.
Then he backhanded Tony Stark into the stratosphere.
The armored figure became a red-and-gold comet, disappearing into the distance. Eunice's beam continued to fire, her vibranium-Extremis hybrid body channeling enough energy to melt tank armor.
Hulk tanked it. Literally walked through the beam like it was a summer rain.
"Tony... Stark..." The zombie Hulk's voice was a wet, bubbling mockery of speech. "Stupid... metal... man..."
From several kilometers away, Tony's voice crackled over the comm system. "Did that big green bastard just call me stupid? ME?!"
"HULK WANT FRESH MEAT!" The zombie's roar shook the air. "NOT... FAKE... METAL... FOOD!"
"I'm an old man, buddy!" Tony's voice was strained, probably because he was currently embedded in the side of a mountain. "Trust me, I'm tough and stringy. You want the fresh stuff? Harry and Pietro are right there. Young, tender, probably taste like chicken!"
"OLD MEAT... CHEWY!" Hulk's grin was a nightmare of exposed teeth and rotting gums. "HULK... LIKE... CHEWY!"
Massive green hands grabbed Tony's armor, fingers finding purchase in the joints and seams. He began to peel, stripping away layers of nanotech like someone removing the skin from an orange.
Fortunately, Tony had upgraded to the bleeding-edge nanotech armor. As fast as Hulk peeled away layers, the nanomachines recombined, flowing like liquid metal to restore the protective shell. It was like peeling an onion that regenerated instantly, an exercise in frustration.
The zombie Hulk's expression shifted from hunger to annoyance to genuine anger as he realized he couldn't get through to the soft, delicious human inside.
Tony watched that massive face press close to his faceplate, dead eyes boring into his, drool seeping through gaps in rotted lips. Even through the armor's filtration systems, he could smell the decay.
But his mind was already racing ahead, solving problems even while staring death in the face.
"The cure works." His voice was tight but excited. "Benzarro's virus is unique, different from the others. But the rest of them... they only have the standard zombie virus!"
Understanding flooded through him like electricity. His eyes widened behind the helmet.
He could save the Hulk. Right now. Save the most powerful Avenger first, create a protector for the team instead of a threat.
"Wait, Hulk." Tony's hands moved carefully, reaching for the storage compartment in his forearm. "How about a drink before dinner? Something to... wet your appetite?"
"HULK... NO NEED... DRINK!" Saliva sprayed across Tony's faceplate. "HULK... ONLY... WANT... FLESH!"
Too bad, big guy. This is for your own good.
Tony's forearm compartment snapped open with a pneumatic hiss.
Empty.
Completely, utterly empty.
The vial of purple cure that should have been secured in its protective housing had simply... vanished.
"What." Tony's brain refused to process what his eyes were seeing. "No. No, that's impossible. It was RIGHT HERE."
"Sir," Friday's voice carried an edge of electronic confusion, "I have no explanation for the disappearance. The storage compartment remained sealed. No breach was detected. The vial simply ceased to exist at timestamp—"
But Tony already knew.
Only one person could have pulled off that trick.
"BEN!" His roar of frustration was cut off by the zombie Hulk's fist connecting with his chestplate, sending him careening into another mountain range.
The Center of the Universe
Simultaneously
The person who'd stolen Tony's cure serum was indeed Ben Parker.
After transforming into pure Alien X, abandoning the Heatblast fusion, his power had increased exponentially. The difference between the fused form and the true Celestialsapien was like comparing a candle to a supernova.
Alien X's power was simple, absolute, and terrifying: he could do anything.
He was the universe itself, given consciousness and will.
But there were limitations. Critical ones.
The Alien X that Ben had become was incomplete. Enara and Ouyana had gained physical bodies, had left the consciousness space to experience reality directly. They were probably somewhere in New York right now, enjoying their outing time.
With two-thirds of the triumvirate absent, Ben's omnipotence was diminished. Constrained by rules he couldn't entirely bypass.
Which was why he'd needed to bring Benzarro to the literal center of the universe. Here, at the point equidistant from all matter, his power could extend to cover every corner of reality simultaneously.
More critically, he needed knowledge before he could exercise power.
To cure all the zombies, he couldn't simply will them healed with a thought. He needed to know HOW to cure them, needed to understand the mechanism, the formula, the precise process that would reverse the infection.
He could go from one to infinity, could replicate a solution across an entire universe once he understood it.
But he couldn't create something from nothing. Couldn't make the cure appear ex nihilo through pure will alone.
Alien X wasn't God saying "let there be light" and having light spring into existence.
It was more like having infinite resources and infinite speed to implement any solution he could comprehend.
Benzarro knew none of this.
His body was completely frozen, held in a grip that transcended physical force. Ben simply reached out one hand, and the Omnitrix on his counterpart's wrist deactivated against its programming, forced into compliance by reality itself demanding it comply.
Then Ben made a pulling motion with both hands.
"AAHHH!" The scream tore from Benzarro's throat, raw and animal.
Something was being extracted from his body. Not blood, not organs, but something else. Something that existed on a level between matter and energy, visible only because Ben was making it visible.
It looked like tar. Black, viscous, wrong in ways that made the eye want to look away. The genocide virus, the torment plague, the second infection that had transformed a tragic victim into an efficient killer.
Ben couldn't cure it. Didn't know the antidote, didn't have the medical knowledge to reverse its effects at the cellular level.
But removing it? Deleting it from reality?
That was trivially simple.
He pulled, and the genocide virus separated from Benzarro's body like a rotted tooth being extracted. It came free with a wet, tearing sound that existed more in the mind than in the air.
Within seconds, Benzarro no… Ben had become like a corpse.
"You're a problem too." Ben studied the extracted genocide virus, watching it writhe and pulse in the grip of his power. "But you're an easier problem to solve."
He closed his fist.
The virus ceased to exist. Not killed, not neutralized. Simply erased from reality at the atomic level, every molecule scattered into component quarks and dispersed across infinite space.
Then Ben and Ben Tennyson body vanished, reality folding to transport them across impossible distances in zero time.
Sakaar, Zombie Universe
Simultaneously
This universe's version of Sakaar was worse than even the version ruled by the Red King had been. Every piece of refuse from Earth's collapse had been dumped here, creating mountains of garbage and corpses that stretched to the horizon.
The zombie population here exceeded any other location in the universe. Millions of infected, trapped on a junkyard world, slowly going mad from eternal hunger with nothing left to consume.
The planet's current ruler called himself the Grandmaster.
Unlike the Red King's brutal dictatorship, the Grandmaster ruled through cunning and charisma. He was infected like all the others, but his cosmic-level intellect remained intact, allowing him to maintain some semblance of civilization among the undead.
When Ben appeared in the sky above his throne, the Grandmaster didn't even try to fight.
"Oh, wow! A Celestialsapien!" His enthusiasm seemed genuine despite the circumstances. "You know, I've lived for billions of years, and I've only met maybe three of your kind? You guys are SUPER rare!"
He spread his arms in a gesture of surrender and welcome. "Sakaar is yours if you want it. Honestly, I was getting bored anyway. The planet itself doesn't matter to me. It's the wormholes I care about, the dimensional shortcuts. Trade you straight across?"
Ben studied the ancient being, reading his sincerity through layers of reality. The Grandmaster genuinely didn't care about territorial control. He was, at heart, an entertainer and a traveler. The planet was just a stage he'd been using.
"Deal."
Ben reached into space-time, plucked an uninhabited planet from a distant spiral arm, and transported it along with its local cluster of wormholes to the Grandmaster's preferred coordinates.
The ancient being vanished with a cheerful wave, leaving Sakaar to its new master.
Only the native Sakaarians remained, the original inhabitants who'd been enslaved and brutalized for generations.
The moment Ben's presence fully manifested on the world, everything changed.
Sakaar itself responded. The planet, long dead and barren, recognized something in Ben's power. The Old Power, that ancient energy that flowed through the Shadow People's bloodline, resonated with the Mana he carried.
Thunder roared across a world that hadn't seen storms in decades. Not the dry thunder of colliding dust clouds, but real, life-giving thunder that heralded transformation.
Rain began to fall.
Not acid rain, not the toxic precipitation that had poisoned what little remained of Sakaar's ecosystem. This was clean water, pure and crystalline, each drop carrying a spark of Ben's Mana.
The rain spread beyond Sakaar. Through the wormholes, through dimensional rifts, across quantum-entangled connections, the life-giving storm expanded.
Within minutes, it was raining across the entire universe.
Earth
Simultaneously
Tony Stark was still trying to explain to the zombie Hulk why eating him would be a terrible dining experience when the sky opened up.
The first drops hit his armor with soft plinks, so gentle he almost didn't notice. Then the deluge began, a torrential downpour that drenched the entire battlefield in seconds.
"What the..." Tony's sensors went crazy, trying to analyze the water. "This isn't possible. The atmospheric conditions don't support—"
The zombie Hulk's grip on his armor suddenly relaxed.
Tony watched, stunned, as intelligence returned to those dead eyes. The mindless hunger faded, replaced by confusion, then dawning horror as Dr. Bruce Banner realized what he'd been doing.
The massive green form began to shrink, muscles deflating, body returning to human proportions. Within seconds, Bruce Banner stood there in nothing but tattered underwear, soaking wet, staring at his own hands like he'd never seen them before.
"What... what happened?" His voice was hoarse from disuse. "Tony? Is that... where am I?"
Tony Stark, genius billionaire, took a moment to process what he was witnessing.
Then he started to laugh.
"The sun's gone down, Bruce." His voice was thick with emotion, relief and wonder mixing together. "The sun has finally set."
All across the Earth, the same scene repeated itself. Zombies stopped mid-attack, consciousness returning like light flooding into long-dark rooms. The infection was being washed away, purged by water that carried the cure in every molecule.
Tony looked up at the storm, rain streaming down his faceplate, and knew exactly whose work this was.
"You magnificent bastard," he whispered. "You actually did it."