Chapter 16- All of Infinity in the Palm of my Hands (Complete)

If there was one thing the monster did well, it was fight. I thought to myself as I dodged out of the way of another attack, For perhaps the thousandth time, I thanked myself for having the foresight to integrate Zod’s skill and training into myself. If not, this idea of mine would have got me in some serious trouble. I doubted he could hurt me. I really did. But I also didn’t particularly want to test it with my body on the line. 

Oh, I knew for sure he couldn’t kill me. No matter how well he wielded the double bladed axe of his. The Chain hammer had been only for the first strike, it seemed. He’d tossed it right at me, and when I caught it with no trouble, the bastard let go of the other end and tried to use my surprise to his advantage to cut me with that axe of his. Being completely honest, I was making a choice here. A conscious choice to hold back and avoid using the full breadth of my power against him. 

Another swipe of the axe followed, and this time I leaned to the right to dodge before striking with a punishing blow to his midsection. He didn’t even flinch, and the next attack came quickly after. So not that level of strength then. I was trying to find how much strength it would take to put a creature like this down. He was recognised as the physically mightiest child of Thanos, so that meant that they had to be somewhere on the scale of Thanos himself. The Mad Titan wouldn’t tolerate weakness. Nothing about his personality in this universe gave me that impression. Sure, he appreciated different forms of strength. Gamora was more famed as an assassin than a warrior if we were being honest, and Nebula was much the same. They weren’t weak by any means, just blessed with a different form of strength. 

But not this Black Dwarf. No, he was known for his strength. That meant he had to be fucking good at it. He was slow, though. Slow to my perception, at least. On the other hand, he was also durable. I’d started with roughly 10% of my strength in each punch, and now I was up to 70%, and he was still yet to flinch. He could tell my attacks were getting stronger, but regardless of that, they were having no true effect on him. His rough, leathery skin hadn’t a single crack or gash. We were both unharmed after almost five minutes of combat. I would have expected for a creature like him to show some more irritation or even signs at how frustrated he must surely be feeling, but there was nothing. He was still just as calm and disciplined as he’d been from the beginning. I guess the Thanos in this universe had to be roughly similar to the one in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, even though he was much wider scale here. Much more universally relevant and feared, if I was being honest. The Kree database had a long list of atrocities to his name. 

And if the Kree were calling you out on your bullshit, then you just know you had a lot of bullshit going on. The point, however, has to be that there is no way a completely mad man could have trained the well-honed machine I was fighting right now. He was disciplined, careful and unmoving. It was difficult to call him anything but perfect. Even with his size and the seemingly simple weapon he wielded, his form was perfect. Zod could pick out a well-trained warrior from miles away. So could I. Only the fact that the Kryptonian General was a much more skilled fighter and the speed gulf between us allowed me to keep ahead and treat him so lightly. 

The next attack was where he switched things up a bit. One slash followed another until he suddenly stabbed at me with the blunt centre end of the weapon. The blade shot out too quickly for most people to react, but I took pleasure in catching it with my teeth from my seemingly off-guard position. He didn’t even blink, just going on to continue. His next swing wasn’t allowed to make contact, as I stepped into his guard instead of stepping backwards this time. He was quick to attempt to retreat on his own, but it was too little and too late. 

I took great pleasure in striking his solar plexus with 90% of my strength. For the first time all fight, he moved backwards. That one hurt. He looked at me with a different look in his eyes than before, but I didn’t care to interpret it. He stepped, and I stepped with him. He was good, I was better. He dropped the axe instantly once he realised there’d be no retreating from me. He attempted a punch at me with that wide arm of his. I sprung into action before he could complete the movement. 

Standing so close together, it was child’s play for me to step on his toes with a commanding stomp at full power. The ground underneath us down to the foundations of this building shook, with a massive chunk of it suffering damage as cracks spread. My opponent was no worse for wear, but he still hesitated for a second from the surprise attack. I did not have to reduce my height much to punch at the Nine feet behemoth’s knee. It did not give way to my strength, too sturdy for that, but I did still hear something creak. He certainly felt my full strength, even if he did not give way to it. Still, I was forced to reevaluate all my assumptions. He could take my full strength. 

“Do you know why they call him the black dwarf?” Tivan asked, still seated behind the desk. He was continuously testing my decision not to kill him yet. 

“A play on his height and colouring” I replied in deadpan as I blocked a punch with my arm, barely feeling the force of it before retaliating with a punch of my own. His strength was good, but not enough to overcome me. He grunted inaudibly from that punch. Finally, he was feeling something. 

“It’s because he survived the force of a dwarf star in his younger years. You stand no chance” Tivan bragged before bursting into laughter. Surely, he didn’t actually believe that. First of all, how would one even encounter a dwarf star to survive it. Like what would that interaction even have been, Tivan couldn’t be that much of an idiot could he?

I scoffed, and audibly so. The creature in front of me was not pleased, but he also did not allow it to affect how he fought. Every attack was precise. The Axe was problematic, so the next time it came at it, I lifted my hand to it and caught it mid-swing. Now, I could see emotion in its eyes for the first time. Shock. It was shocked at the fact that its blade had done nothing. I was also shocked because I could actually feel how sharp the weapon was. If he was stronger, he might have actually managed to cut my hand off with that swing and that swing alone. With his weapon in my grip, I pulled him forwards, disrupting his balance and dragging him right into my fist. Once more, he didn’t shift in the slightest discomfort, but one hit would not be enough for me this time. I let go of the axe for a second and then punched him right in the head. He felt it. No backwards movements, but the way his head snapped from left to right was satisfying. My right jaw hit his neck with enough force to shake a planet, making him stumble back, even more disoriented. Good, the standard weak points could work. He tried to back-peddle to reorient and come back swinging, but I followed him. A left strike was a feint that he fell for, and another blow slammed into his right ribs with force enough to kill any lesser man. Once again, his skin did not budge, but I knew he was feeling them. Left, then right, then right then left. I mentally announced to myself as I lashed out with strike after strike. 

He tried to swing the axe at me. It was sloppy, by our standards at least. It was enough for me to ignore the attack in its entirety, in favour of stomping on his ribs with a spartan kick. And then as he tried to grab on to my leg, I floated backwards for a second, catching him off-guard with the sudden use of flight. Very few beings across the galaxy could fly the way I could. I flew forwards with force and both hands outstretched. I speared him through wall after wall as we found ourselves covering much of the planet’s surface in our flight. Suddenly, his feet began to find their grip on the ground that we flew past, and then we stopped. Harshly and suddenly. 

He held me right as I tried to force him to budge and used my momentum against me to flip me and suplex me right into the ground. His body moved along with mine, and he was on top of me quicker than a beast of his side should have been able to manage. The axe was gone, lost in our scuffle, but that didn’t stop him from wailing down upon me with punch after punch. Each one snapped my head to the side. I wondered at how tings had changed and turned around so quickly. Pow! I considered Kelex. How was he dealing with things back on the ship, or even in Tivan’s mainframe? I hadn’t killed the man to make sure that Kelex could do all that he needed to do with his records. 

Pow! Another punch slammed me even deeper into the planet. At the rate things were going, we’d tear apart Knowhere before we were done with each other. Because even as he struggled to harm me as his planet shaking force did little more than sting, I couldn’t cause him much harm either. Pow! I needed a way to make sure that I could put him down and keep him down. Stuck with my fists, I couldn’t think of any way I could put down someone this durable with my bare hands. Pow! As I did with most things, I began to look into fiction I could remember. My first thoughts went to Hercules and the Nemean Lion. Could I choke him out? I turned my head to him, and took him in before the next punch landed. Pow! Nope. No way would I manage to hold that neck like that. First of all, I’d never be able to fit my hands around that. I couldn’t use my arms either because the neck was too short to find the space. 

Pow! What else was there? Eren and the Armoured Titan? Nah. I couldn’t even remember how that had gone except vague memories of him choking him out once and the rest helping out with their missile things the other time. Wouldn’t work. What other super durable characters could I think of? The juggernaut? Nah. He was durable, but that wasn’t his whole schtick, and I also had no idea how the Xmen ever managed to defeat him apart from taking off his helmet and letting Xavier do his mojo. Who else? 

Pow! Another hit. Turning my head back reminded me of the comparison I’d made between him and Dinosaurs when I first saw him. Not just dinosaurs though, his scales reminded me of a snake’s if I was being honest. Eureka! There it was. Harry Potter and the fucking Basilisk. Samson and the Lion. The next hit met unflinching skin. I did not let myself be moved this time, and before he could adapt, I flew straight upwards, punching him right in the midsection. 

He didn’t flinch, but what did it matter. I put all my strength into a knife hand aimed right at his neck and executed with so much speed that I broke the sound barrier with that movement alone. It didn’t break skin, but the scream was well worth it. Not every reflex could be trained out, I noted, and I latched on to the weakness like a dog with a bone. Before he could close his mouth, I flew upwards just a bit and grabbed a hold of both sides of his mouth with my hands, stopping him from snapping his jaw shut. I pushed my hands apart, forcing his jaw open even further. He strained against me, but it was useless, like the struggle of a child against the dentist. You’ll take your bitter medicine. 

My eyes flashed as I called upon the power within me, unleashing the solar radiation my body stored through my eyes. My heat vision created wide lasers that went right into his mouth and began cooking him from within. His screams were music to my ears if I was being honest. When the screams finally ended, I still didn’t stop, just in case it was an attempt to get me to lower my guard. I didn’t stop until well after his heart hand stopped beating, and I was sure that all his entire organs were cooked to charcoal. I slumped backwards, drained. 

I hadn’t felt it when the fight was going on and adrenaline was running through my body, but that was one hell of a foe to put down. I stared at the body before speaking to Kelex through my communicator. “Please ensure we don’t forget this here”. Just thinking of the knowledge I could gain from the body of a child of Thanos sent shivers through my body. 

I turned my head to the ship that had brought the Black Dwarf here, all the way across the planet, and destroyed it with my heat vision as I saw it begin to prepare to take off. Nah uh. No going to tell the big bad just who I am and what I can do. I flew back to the office, and wasn’t surprised to find Tivan in the middle of an escape. The mercenaries he hired for his protection just stepped aside, allowing me to walk up to him uncontested as he tried to pack up the office. “Killing you is going to cause so many problems down the line,” I told him, and he smiled. He actually smiled. 

“It’s a good thing you know that. At least you’re not a complete brute. So what can I offer for the both of us to put this tiny bit of misfortune behind us?” He asked me. 

“Everything.” I said, watching him blanch. “Everything you own. The deeds to the planets you personally own, the bank accounts, the natural resources, everything” I said. He looked at me like I’d asked him to sacrifice his firstborn son. But just the way Abraham had done it when asked, he was going to. He was going to sign everything over because he had faith. Faith in himself to build it all again. Faith in the knowledge that for a being as old as he was, there would never be a shortage of opportunities across the universe. That fate was why he took a deep breath and then began the transfers. I checked with Kelex to make sure that there was not a single thing being hidden from us, but every bit that his servers had on record was being transferred over to me. 

I’d created a bank account with the Intergalactic Bankers Guild, the biggest bank in the universe, and I watched as the account grew from a modest few hundred credits that I’d been able to get in exchange for some gold to billions upon billions of credits. Tivan had been sitting on so much raw capital that it was a bit staggering. Hundreds of billions in cash and ten times that amount in assets began to be transferred. His shares in the various companies that he called his were the hardest to transfer since most of them required other shareholders to consent, and once he mentioned that, I let him skip them. There wasn’t anything I was going to find them useful for, at the end of the day. Even the Tivan corporation turned out to be beyond my reach. Tivan’s brother, the Grandmaster, was the other shareholder and his consent was needed for any assignment of shares to outsiders. 

However, the fraction of his wealth I was able to secure was more than enough to jumpstart the economy of my Kingdom. I’d wanted to integrate galactic credits into the economy forever, but since I didn’t have the authority to make them and I had no way of gaining them in the amounts I needed to begin an economy, I’d shoved the plan into the back burner, but now with this much money, a State Bank was the least I could do. 

When he finished, he looked up at me expectantly. And I took joy in grabbing him by the throat. His look of surprise was something else. Beautiful. “You killed my people,” I said, and squeezed. For such an old being, his durability was nothing notable. It took a second for his head to pop right off his body. 
“Leave Knowhere. Tell everyone I want the planet evacuated now” I said the mercenaries around us, and they wasted no time. They’d seen me kill a child of Thanos, after all. And I was pretty sure that with Tivan gone, there was nothing particularly keeping them here. 

A/N; No, Kal has not been nerfed. Each of those strikes would shake a planet. The Black Dwarf is just that durable in this fic. Just like the rest of the Black Order, he has been buffed to the most logical limit I could come up with. His strength is somewhat comparable to the Hulk in the first Avengers film, but his durability is even higher than Infinity War Thor.