The storm of uncontrolled energy raging around Link kept everyone at bay.
Diana clenched her fists, ready to charge in again and end the chaos by force. Captain America had rallied the last of his fighters for a final assault on the god-king who had lost his mind.
Then, without warning, everything changed.
An invisible shroud seemed to cover the sky above the entire Earth, plunging it into darkness.
Huge, silent cracks opened overhead, as though the world itself were a pane of glass about to shatter.
More Eradicators had arrived.
Tens of thousands poured from the cracks, packed together like a silent plague of locusts.
They were no longer "erasing" only cities engulfed in chaos. This time, their targets were clear and merciless: every unit that still showed signs of "energy" or "life."
A Wakandan royal guard had just raised his Sonic Spear when an Eradicator appeared before him. Its mirrorlike palm brushed past. The brave warrior and his weapon vanished without a sound, as though they had never existed.
Not far away, Thor summoned a bolt of lightning that spanned heaven and earth and hurled it at the Eradicators. The instant it struck their ranks, their silent, mirrored surfaces absorbed and dissolved it without a ripple.
These things were immune to energy attacks!
The battle turned in an instant.
Link's technological forces and the resistance led by the heroes alike became helpless prey before these silent "erasers."
"Retreat! Everyone, find cover!" Captain America's roar rang across the battlefield, but the order sounded hopelessly inadequate.
Against absolute conceptual erasure, cover meant nothing.
This was a deeper kind of despair.
Link was a "tyrant" they could fight with strength or outwit with strategy. The Eradicators were an incomprehensible, unstoppable "natural disaster"—a death sentence written into the laws of the universe.