Chapter 31: Judgment Day
Earth - One Week After Tiamut's Emergence
Lin Chen sat cross-legged on a hill on an abandoned island in the Pacific Ocean, his eyes closed in meditation. He had returned to Earth just in time to witness the final moments of the Eternals' battle against the emerging Celestial.
He had watched from a distance as the planet itself groaned in agony—not a sound heard by human ears, but a deep, tectonic tremor that vibrated through every fault line and ocean trench.
In the Indian Ocean, a massive vortex of boiling water and steam had erupted, a tempest of impossible scale.
First came the hand—a colossal golden gauntlet tearing through the ocean's surface like tissue paper. Water cascaded from fingers the size of mountain ranges. The Earth's crust fractured under the strain, sending tsunamis racing toward distant shores.
Then the head emerged—marble-white and pristine, tilting back from the volcanic epicenter that had served as its womb for millions of years. Four enormous eyes blazed with nascent cosmic energy, filled with the raw, terrifying power of creation itself.
Tiamut the Communicator was waking, a godling stretching after an eon of slumber. Its birth pangs threatened to be the death of an entire world.
The air crackled with energy. The sky turned a bruised purple. Gravity warped slightly around the sheer mass of the emerging Celestial. For a heartbeat of cosmic time, the entire planet held its breath.
Then Sersi, the Eternal who had unexpectedly inherited leadership of her team, focused her will with desperate determination. She forged a connection—a Uni-Mind amplified by the very Celestial they sought to stop. Her power to transmute matter surged with the force of thousands of minds united.
The golden hand reaching for the sky began to dull. The brilliant living metal faded to pale, cold marble. Tiamut let out a silent, pained cry as the transformation swept over its entire form.
The cosmic light in its four eyes extinguished, leaving behind lifeless, milky stone. The planet was saved, but at a terrible cost—a massive petrified Celestial now jutted from the Indian Ocean, a permanent silent monument to an averted apocalypse.
Lin Chen had observed all of this with interest. He knew this wouldn't be the end. The Celestials would respond to the death of one of their own.
But he wasn't afraid of whoever was coming. He was curious to test his current power level against a cosmic entity.
So he had decided to wait and meditate, deepening his understanding of his abilities while preparing for the inevitable confrontation.
---
One Week Later
Lin Chen's eyes suddenly snapped open. His enhanced perception had detected something enormous approaching Earth.
Arishem the Judge did not arrive so much as he simply existed where he chose to be.
The sky above Earth—across the entire globe simultaneously—seemed to shift and warp. A swirling, angry red singularity opened without warning, a wound in the fabric of space itself.
Through it stepped Arishem, the Prime Celestial, architect of life and death across countless galaxies.
He was a being of unimaginable scale, his red-armored form a harbinger of absolute judgment. His mere presence altered the atmosphere itself, drawing an immediate heavy silence over the entire planet.
He did not land on Earth. He simply hovered in space just outside the atmosphere, a towering crimson god whose shadow covered entire earth. Birds fell from the sky. The oceans stilled. Even the wind seemed to pause.
His voice was not sound but pure thought—telepathic and overwhelming, echoing directly into the minds of the remaining Eternals on Earth: Sersi, Phastos, and Kingo.
"YOU HAVE CHOSEN TO SACRIFICE A CELESTIAL FOR THE PEOPLE OF THIS PLANET," Arishem's voice boomed across the world, a force that could extinguish suns. His displeasure was palpable, making the air thin and bitter. "YOU WILL BE JUDGED. HUMANITY WILL BE JUDGED."
The Eternals below trembled, knowing they had defied their creators.
But Lin Chen simply smiled.
He altered his spatial coordinates instantly and appeared in space, hovering calmly before the colossal red-armored Judge. From Earth's perspective, the planet was a small marble far below. Arishem was a towering monument to cosmic authority stretching hundred thousand kilometers high.
And Lin Chen appeared as just a tiny speck before him.
His system immediately analyzed the threat.
[DETECTED: Celestial "Arishem the Judge"]
Name: Arishem the Judge (Prime Celestial)
Origin: Celestial
Age: Dozen ofbillions of years
Physical Attributes:
- Strength: Variable (planet-destroying minimum)
- Physique: Variable (nearly indestructible)
- Speed: Variable (faster-than-light travel)
- Mental Power: 7,987.5 (High Multiversal Scale)
Power Scale: Multiversal+ Threat Level
Primary Abilities:
- Reality Manipulation (can alter laws of physics)
- Space Manipulation (instantaneous travel)
- Cosmic Energy Manipulation (can destroy or create stars)
- Self Size Manipulation (can grow from human-sized to multi-galaxy scale)
- Gravity Manipulation (can create or collapse black holes)
- Creation/Destruction (can create living beings, planets, stars, entire ecosystems—or destroy them)
- Genetic Manipulation (can alter evolution of entire species)
- Inter-Universal Travel (can cross between different universes)
"A powerful construct," Lin Chen mused to himself quietly, his own presence containing near-infinite energies. "Multiversal-plus scale. Impressive, for a singular aspect of a greater collective consciousness."
Arishem's telepathic voice, a force of nature itself, boomed directly into Lin Chen's mind with crushing pressure:
"MORTAL. YOU INTRUDE UPON JUDGMENT. BEGONE, OR BE ERASED FROM EXISTENCE."
[Mental Power +962.5]
[New Mental Power: 20,001.4]
Lin Chen merely smiled, his mental shields deflecting the psionic assault with no more effort than brushing aside a gentle breeze. His system absorbed and analyzed Arishem's mental attack patterns instantly.
"Mortal?" Lin Chen said with telepathic voice, his voice calm and conversational. "You assume much, Celestial. But your assumptions are... outdated."
Arishem's four glowing eyes narrowed with what might have been anger or curiosity.
"YOU DARE MOCK A CELESTIAL? YOU, WHO ARE LESS THAN DUST TO US?"
When Arishem, his patience clearly tested, unleashed a world-ending torrent of crimson cosmic energy—a focused beam designed to sterilize an entire hemisphere—Lin Chen didn't even bother moving.
He simply shifted his existence slightly out of phase with normal space-time, existing in a parallel spatial layer for a fraction of a second.
[Mental Power +783.2]
[New Mental Power: 20,784.6]
The massive beam of destructive cosmic energy—a river of searing divine wrath—passed completely through the space where Lin Chen had been, harmlessly dissipating into the void beyond the Moon.
To the Eternals watching from Earth's surface thousands of miles below, Lin Chen had simply blinked out of existence for an instant, then reappeared utterly untouched and unconcerned.
"Is that your best?" Lin Chen asked with genuine curiosity.
"IMPOSSIBLE!" Arishem's mental voice thundered across space. "NO MORTAL SHOULD POSSESS SUCH POWER!"
The Celestial launched a different attack—pure telepathic assault designed to shatter Lin Chen's mind, consciousness, and very sense of self simultaneously.
Lin Chen countered effortlessly using his vastly superior mental power. He didn't just block the attack—he bent it back onto itself, creating a feedback loop.
Arishem felt a momentary spike of his own telepathic power ricochet back into his consciousness—a jarring, painful feedback that briefly staggered even the colossal Judge.
"You are... not just mortal," Arishem realized, his mental voice showing the first hint of uncertainty.
"Correct," Lin Chen replied simply. "I transcend such simple categories."
Arishem's patience finally shattered completely.
The Prime Celestial raised both immense gauntleted hands, gathering power to unmake Lin Chen by deleting him from the current reality stream entirely—a technique that had destroyed entire civilizations.
But Lin Chen had already analyzed this ability.
"Interesting," Lin Chen noted calmly. "Reality deletion. Unfortunately for you, I exist beyond such limitations now."
Then Arishem began to grow.
His already massive form expanded rapidly, becoming larger and larger—surpassing stellar scale, then galactic scale. Within seconds, Arishem had grown to the size of multiple galaxies, a titan of truly cosmic proportions.
[DETECTED: Self Size Manipulation (Galactic Scale)]
[ANALYZING...]
[ABILITY ACQUIRED: Self Size Manipulation]
[Previous Body Size Alteration merged with new ability]
[New Ability: Size Manipulation (Universal Scale)]
[Can now alter body size from subatomic to universal scale]
"DO YOU SEE NOW, MORTAL?" Arishem's voice echoed across millions of light-years. "I AM BEYOND YOUR COMPREHENSION! YOU ARE AN ANT BEFORE ME! NOTHING BUT A SPECK OF DUST IN THE VASTNESS OF THE UNIVERSE!"
Lin Chen looked up at the galaxy-sized Celestial towering impossibly above him.
And he smiled.
"If I'm just a speck of dust," Lin Chen said calmly, "then let me show you what dust can become."
He activated his newly enhanced Size Manipulation.
Lin Chen began to grow.
His form expanded rapidly—first matching Arishem's original size, then surpassing it, continuing to grow exponentially. Within seconds, Lin Chen had grown to match the Celestial's galaxy-spanning height.
Then he kept growing.
Soon Lin Chen towered over Arishem like an adult standing over a small child. His form was composed of pure golden cosmic energy and focused willpower, a titan who made galaxies look like toys beneath him.
Arishem stared up in what might have been shock—the first time in eons anyone had surpassed a Celestial in scale.
"Your existence is predicated on universal laws," Lin Chen declared, his voice now a calm omnipresent hum that resonated across all frequencies, bypassing space itself entirely. "My existence transcends those laws. I AM the law now."
Lin Chen didn't need to fight conventionally. He was operating on a level beyond simple conflict.
He activated his space-time manipulation, compressing the local reality field around Arishem. Time around the Celestial slowed to an absolute crawl. The cosmic being found his movements becoming impossibly slow, seconds stretching into subjective eternities.
Arishem tried to focus his cosmic energy for a counterattack, but Lin Chen simultaneously manipulated the entire electromagnetic spectrum that Arishem relied upon, disrupting the Celestial's power at its most fundamental level.
"WHAT... ARE... YOU...?" Arishem managed to force out, his mental voice distorted by the temporal effects.
"I am what comes after gods," Lin Chen replied simply.
He reached out with galaxy-spanning hand toward Arishem, who now looked like a child's toy in comparison.
Lin Chen synthesized his entire portfolio of abilities—reality warping, space-time mastery, energy spectrum control, chaos manipulation, existence erasure—into a single, absolute command.
He spoke directly to the fundamental framework of reality itself:
"This entity no longer exists."
The power wasn't a blast or a destructive wave. It was a simple, definitive executive command issued to the universal reality itself: Remove this entity from the ledger of existence.
Arishem the Judge didn't explode or fade away in a dramatic burst of light.
He simply ceased.
The red armor, the immense power readings, the multiversal consciousness—all of it was removed from existence utterly and completely, without even a whisper of residual energy remaining.
There was no statue, no marble monument, no trace that the Prime Celestial had ever existed in universe.
The space returned to normal.
Lin Chen, still towering at galaxy size for a moment, looked down at the small spiral galaxy where Earth existed—still clearly visible under his hyperversal consciousness.
Then he began to shrink, his form condensing back down through stellar scale, planetary scale, mountain scale, human scale finally returning to his normal appearance floating in space near Earth.
He feeling the weight of what he'd just done.
He had killed a Celestial—not just any Celestial, but Arishem the Judge himself, and he had done it almost effortlessly.
"I've truly transcended this universe's limitations," Lin Chen said quietly to himself. "There are still many beings who could challenge me."
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