Chapter 198. The Burden of the Mind Stone
The heavens above New York were no longer a battlefield, but a graveyard of twisted metal and frozen fire. With the Chitauri mothership reduced to a blooming flower of nuclear ash, the Hive Mind had stuttered and died. All across the soot-stained sky, thousands of alien soldiers simply... stopped. Their bio-mechanical armors went dark, and they plummeted toward the concrete canyons below like leaden rain.
Corvus, trapped within the shimmering boundaries of Noah's spatial cage, felt the psychic backlash like a physical blow. He slammed his fist against the command console of the remaining scout craft he had commandeered. The Chitauri pilots were slumped over their controls, their spirits extinguished the moment the command signal vanished.
His mission was a scorched ruin. The grand fleet was a memory, the Tesseract was in the hands of a mere mortal, and the path back to the Black Quadrant—back to the looming shadow of his father, Thanos—was closed. To return empty-handed was a fate worse than the void, but to stay was to be hunted.
Beside him, Proxima Midnight let out a ragged, wet cough. Her armor was shattered, and dark ichor seeped from a dozen deep rents in her side. She looked at him with eyes clouded by agony, her breathing a frantic, shallow whistle. In that moment, Corvus felt the walls closing in. The Space Stone belonged to the enemy; without it, there was no bridge to the stars.
Desperation is a cold, sharp blade. Left with no other choice, Corvus reached for the scepter.
Noah had only just received the report from Lissandra regarding the nuclear strike launched by the Council. While his general dealt with the soaring missile, Noah's focus remained fixed on the golden prize still held by the enemy. Nick Fury's panicked transmissions flashed across his HUD, a constant buzzing of "status reports" and "demands for communication," but Noah silenced them with a curt, dismissive [OK]. He had no time for the politics of men when a god-killer was cornering himself.
Corvus gripped the scepter, his knuckles white. With a guttural roar of defiance, he slammed the butt of the weapon against the deck, then gripped the blue containment crystal with his bare hand. He squeezed until his muscles bunched and his bones groaned.
CRACK.
The casing shattered, and for a heartbeat, the cabin was plunged into a terrifying, absolute silence. Then, the gold light emerged. It wasn't the soft glow of a lantern, but the blinding, primordial radiance of the Mind Stone.
Corvus hesitated, the sheer cosmic weight of the artifact making his soul tremble. But then, he heard the approaching hum of Noah's power. He lunged forward and seized the raw gem.
"AAAAAAAH!!!"
The scream that tore from his throat was barely human. The power of the Mind Stone surged into him like molten lead poured into his veins. His skin, toughened by a thousand galactic wars, began to spiderweb with glowing gold fissures. The light didn't just surround him; it erupted from him. It spilled from his eyes and mouth in jagged spears of brilliance, burning away the shadows of the cockpit.
The agony of his cries acted like a jolt of electricity to Proxima. She blinked away the haze of near-death, her gaze falling upon the nightmarish spectacle of her husband. He looked as though he were being unmade from the inside out.
"Corvus! What have you done?!" Proxima gasped, dragging her broken body across the deck, her hand reaching out to stop him.
"Stay back!" he bellowed, his voice vibrating with a frequency that made the very air hum. "Don't touch me! I feel it... I feel the universe screaming in my mind! The power... it's... AAAAH!"
As the final syllable left his lips, a colossal pulse of golden energy detonated from his chest. It hit the boundaries of Noah's spatial trap with the force of a collapsing star. Space itself began to groan. The invisible walls that had held them captive shattered like frosted glass, the shards of reality dissolving into the ether. The scout ship, freed from its cage, lurched forward into the open sky.
Corvus slumped against the console, gasping for air. Every breath brought a spray of golden mist and blood from his lips—the price of touching the infinite.
The Infinity Stones were never meant to be wielded by hand. They were forces of nature that required vessels—the Scepter, the Tesseract, the Gauntlet—to bleed off the excess energy that would otherwise incinerate a mortal soul. By breaking the Scepter, Corvus had traded his life for a moment of absolute power. He had sought the full, unbridled potential of the Stone to carve a path of escape, but the cost was written in the cracks spreading across his heart.
He looked through the viewport, his vision swimming in gold. He saw Noah approaching, a silhouette of calm in a world of chaos.
Should I kill him? the thought whispered, fueled by the Stone's influence. Or should I run?
The answer was etched in the sky. Behind Noah stood the Asgardian prince and the man in the iron suit, their weapons primed. To fight was to die. To run was to perhaps live long enough to face his father's wrath.
Corvus coiled his muscles, the golden light wrapping around him like a shroud. He gripped his glaive, the weapon now thrumming with the borrowed power of the Mind Stone, and prepared to leap.
Noah watched the display with narrowed eyes. He saw the desperation, the reckless gamble of a cornered beast. He didn't fear the power; he respected the danger. With the Tesseract held firmly in one hand and the cold steel of Maramuna in the other, Noah accelerated. He would not let the Stone slip through his fingers.
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