Chapter 405: [509] - Ikaris, We Meet Again

"He's already here," Hawk said calmly, raising his gaze toward the sky above Wall Street.

Wanda followed his eyes but saw nothing except an endless stretch of blue.

"Where?" Wanda asked, frowning.

"There." Hawk kept his attention fixed on one particular point. "You can't sense him because he's gotten stronger."

Wanda turned toward him. "That Celestial we've been waiting for?"

"No." Hawk shook his head before giving her a name. "Ikaris."

"Ikaris…" Wanda searched her memory and came up empty. "Who the hell is that?"

"An Eternal. Remember when Peter disappeared?" Hawk glanced at her.

"Of course. You found him on Skull Island." The rest of the memory returned as she spoke. "Wait—is Ikaris the one who fought you there and then disappeared? The member of that species the Celestials created to protect the birth of new Celestials?"

"That's him." Hawk smiled as the approaching presence grew more familiar.

"BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!"

A tremendous sonic boom tore through the sky before he finished speaking. Something punched through the upper atmosphere, spreading a vapor cloud across half of New York.

A familiar figure appeared high above the city.

It was Ikaris, one of the Eternals created by the Celestials.

He looked almost exactly as he had during their first encounter. The same blue-and-gold battle suit covered his body, and the same cold, humorless expression rested on his face.

Ikaris hovered silently above New York and lowered his gaze toward Hawk, who stood atop one of the few Wall Street towers that remained mostly intact. Smoke poured from the damaged building around him.

Their eyes met across the distance.

Hawk saw a hunger for battle in Ikaris's gaze that the Eternal couldn't—or didn't care to—hide.

That made two of them.

"I'm heading up," Hawk told Wanda.

"I'll wait for you here," Wanda replied with a gentle nod.

"Good." Hawk smiled.

He launched himself skyward, leaving a red streak behind him as he climbed into the upper atmosphere. Within seconds, he stopped a few hundred feet from Ikaris.

"Been a while," Hawk greeted him. "I figured the Celestials had scrapped you as a defective unit."

"The Celestials destroy aberrations, I was never one," Ikaris replied.

"I'll give you that." Hawk smiled faintly. "You're not defective. You're just heartless. When you had to choose between your masters' orders and the people who fought beside you, you chose the orders."

Most of Earth's Eternals had gradually grown attached to humanity after living among them. Given enough time, they had come to see Earth as their home and refused to sacrifice it for the birth of another Celestial.

That reaction was hardly surprising. Even the Celestial gestating inside the planet hadn't wanted its emergence to result in its immediate destruction, which was why it had offered no resistance when Hawk came to take what he wanted.

Ikaris had been the exception.

He remained the Celestials' most loyal hound.

"There was never any bond between us," Ikaris said.

"We were created to serve the Celestials. That was our purpose in the past, it remains our purpose now, and it will remain our purpose in the future."

"So they sent you to kill me?"

"Yes."

"You?" Hawk gave him an openly mocking look. "If I remember correctly, you barely escaped Skull Island with your life. If you hadn't run—you would've died there."

A shadow crossed Ikaris's severe expression when Hawk mentioned their first battle.

"That was then. This is now."

"So the Celestials rebuilt you, and now you think you can beat me?"

"I didn't come here to beat you." A cruel smile appeared on Ikaris's face. "I came to kill you. Hawk Phoenix, you are an aberration beyond the control of Eternity, the Celestials, and Time itself. YOU MUST DIE."

Hawk's smile became radiant.

"All right. Let's do this... Just don't run away again." He beckoned Ikaris forward.

"Die," Ikaris answered.

"WOOSH!"

They moved simultaneously.

The thin air split around them as Ikaris became a blue-and-gold meteor and Hawk transformed into a scarlet comet. They collided head-on high above New York.

A ring-shaped shock wave exploded from the impact, crushing a hole several miles wide through the sea of clouds below.

Golden energy blazed from Ikaris's eyes and hammered into Hawk at point-blank range. Hawk neither flinched nor tried to evade it. He drove straight through the searing beams and buried his fist in Ikaris's chest.

There was no sonic boom. Sound itself had already fallen too far behind their battle to keep up.

Hawk's punch landed with enough force to fracture Ikaris's blue-and-gold armor like glass. The Eternal shot backward like a cannon round, tearing through three mountainous banks of storm clouds before finally slowing down.

Those clouds had been gathering all morning, preparing to drench New York in a torrential downpour. Ikaris scattered them before they got the chance.

The punch hadn't put him down.

Ikaris stopped in midair, and golden light flared brighter in his eyes. Rather than retreat, he accelerated back toward Hawk with even greater force, drawing his fist behind him as his charge left a long trail across the sky.

Hawk's pupils contracted as he followed the attack.

"The same technique never works twice on a Saint," Hawk said.

"Didn't I tell you that, Ikaris?"

He read Ikaris's trajectory and turned aside at the last possible moment, allowing a punch powerful enough to level a mountain to pass beside him. Hawk's elbow came down immediately afterward, carrying the force of a collapsing galaxy into the center of Ikaris's back.

"BANG!"

A spherical shock wave burst around them.

Ikaris's spine bowed beneath the blow, but he converted the momentum into a turn instead of allowing himself to be thrown away. His fist opened into a knife-hand strike aimed directly at Hawk's neck.

Hawk raised his left arm to block it. Bone snapped beneath the impact, disabling the limb, but his right hand had already formed a blade of its own.

He drove it into Ikaris's jaw.

Golden blood sprayed across the sky as the strike tore away part of the Eternal's lower face. Before Ikaris's head could finish snapping backward, Hawk shifted behind him, planted himself against empty air, and twisted through his waist.

His elbow struck Ikaris's back for the second time.

This blow carried enough force to crack a planet.

Ikaris became a streak of blue-and-gold light. Air ignited around his body as he plunged toward Manhattan like a burning meteor.

On Wall Street, the Sentinel fighting Jean and the other mutants sensed something approaching and looked up.

Wanda reacted at the same moment. She extended her right hand, opening a portal of scarlet sparks beside Jean, and yanked her daughter out of the battle.

The Sentinel was still calculating a response when Ikaris hit it.

His body punched straight through the machine's chest, tearing a massive hole through the Sentinel that had been overpowering Jean, Storm, Cyclops, and the others. Ikaris continued downward and struck Wall Street beneath it.

A visible shock wave erupted before the sound arrived, expanding through Manhattan in a perfect ring.

Then came the roar.

The entire island shook.

"Wh—"

"Holy shit!"

"Look out!"

Wanda's intervention spared Jean from the shock wave. The other mutants weren't so fortunate. They had barely registered Jean's disappearance before the blast struck and hurled them through the ruins.

Jean stood beside Wanda with her eyes wide, watching the visible wall of force race across Manhattan.

Wanda focused on the impact crater.

The hole was so deep that its bottom couldn't be seen, and water had already begun surging upward through it. Hawk had turned Ikaris into a living drill and punched straight through Manhattan Island.

Hawk descended from the upper atmosphere and stopped above the crater. He first glanced toward the Sentinel, which staggered through the ruins with a hole in its chest while attempting to repair itself. Then he examined the left arm Ikaris had broken before looking into the water-filled pit.

Blue-and-gold light erupted from below.

Ikaris shot through the rising water and returned to Hawk's altitude. Compared with Hawk, who had suffered only a ruined arm, the Eternal looked considerably worse.

A third of his jaw had been torn away, and golden blood continued pouring from the wound. His blue-and-gold armor hung in broken sections across his body, its radiance far dimmer than before.

Under Hawk's gaze, the missing portion of Ikaris's jaw began regenerating. Within a few breaths, his face had returned to normal.

The restoration came at a cost. Even more of the golden light faded from his damaged armor.

Hawk smiled and looked at his useless left arm. With Ikaris watching impassively, he rolled his shoulder and forced the limb back into place. Bones clicked and shifted beneath his skin, and within the same few breaths, his arm had completely recovered.

Their eyes met again.

"Round one is over," Hawk said with a smile.

"Ready for round two?"

"I agree," Ikaris answered without emotion.

He charged.

Hawk met him head-on, and another colossal impact tore through the sky above Manhattan.

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