Chapter 593: Shadow Monarch VS Darkseid

Darkseid regarded the man standing amid the wreckage of Warworld with the same silence he reserved for things he had not yet decided whether to respect or simply attack on sight. "I’ve been watching you for a long time." he said at last.

"I know you have," Arthur said, entirely unbothered, his tone calm.

"I wonder about that," Darkseid said. "Shadow Monarch."

Arthur allowed himself the smallest smile. "Oh, please. I know precisely how long you’ve been watching me. I know your eyes have lingered on the Justice League as well, through a number of channels. Cyborg, for one."

Darkseid went utterly still.

"You think I didn’t know?" Arthur continued. "I did. And I let you watch, because I wanted you to see exactly what I could become. Your only real mistake, Darkseid, was failing to act against me a long time ago.. back when you might actually have stood a chance. Instead you kept feeding me your soldiers, wave after wave, throwing them at Earth, at me, again and again. You made me stronger with every attempt. For that, truthfully, I thank you." His eyes hardened, violet light deepening at their edges. "But your reign over this universe was never as solid as you liked to believe. I think you understand exactly what I’m telling you."

"Your intent," Darkseid said, "is hardly subtle, human."

Arthur’s smile widened slightly. "Exactly. I intend to kill you here and now. But we both already know it’s the real you I’m truly after. I will find you, eventually, wherever you’re hiding behind all of this, and when I do, I will remove you from this universe permanently."

"Such arrogance," Darkseid said. "Or is it merely confidence, dressed up as something grander?"

His eyes flared crimson, a slow, probing pulse of psychic force pressing outward.

"...I see," he said slowly. "She, too, bends to your will. Even her... I’m impressed."

"Not quite, but I won’t explain that to you." Arthur said simply, offering no further explanation.

A long dark scythe materialized in his hand, he turned it once in his grip, and studied Darkseid with unimpressed patience.

"You’re truly out of options, aren’t you," Arthur said. "To the point that you’d come all the way out here yourself, to claim a weaponized planet as some kind of answer. Warworld would certainly be enough to level Earth to rubble." His eyes narrowed. "But you know it won’t be enough to kill me, I assume you simply want to kill my people."

"We shall see," Darkseid said.

They clashed.

The impact tore through the ruined surface of Warworld like a second cataclysm layered atop the first that already happened, a shockwave that split the ground for miles and sent the last of Warworld’s automated defenses sparking and dying under the sheer overpressure of two forces meeting that the planet itself had never been built to withstand.

Darkseid struck first, and struck fast a punch that could have unmade a lesser being.

And it found empty air.

Arthur was already elsewhere, a bare, impossible shift of position that left no visible transition between one instant and the next, and his response came from an angle Darkseid hadn’t accounted for, a strike that connected cleanly across his jaw and rocked his head sideways with far more force than should have been possible.

Darkseid’s eyes blazed and the Omega Beams tore free twin lances of crackling, hungry annihilation, curving through the ruined air with the terrible, seeking precision that had killed countless enemies before this moment, lethal not merely on contact but through their sheer, inescapable will to find their target.

Arthur didn’t dodge them.

A portal split open in the air beside him, a perfect circle of violet-black nothing, and the beams vanished into it without so much as slowing, only to erupt from a second portal that had already opened directly behind Darkseid, catching him full in the back at point-blank range.

The explosion rocked the surface of Warworld itself, throwing Darkseid forward through the ruin of his own conquest, smoke boiling up from where his own weapon had finally, impossibly, found him.

He rose from the wreckage slower than he wished to admit.

"This is..." he started, and then stopped.

"Don’t look so surprised, Darkseid," Arthur said, floating a short distance above the cratered battlefield now, scythe held loosely at his side, his expression calm, almost sympathetic. "I’ve been leveling up this entire time. Growing stronger in every aspect I could.. precisely for moments like this one."

Darkseid answered with raw, furious violence, closing the distance in a burst of force that cracked the sky itself, fists driving forward in a relentless barrage, trying to overwhelm through sheer volume what he could no longer guarantee through single, decisive blows.

Arthur wove through all of it.

Every strike passed through empty space where he’d stood a fraction of a second before, his movements defied every law of motion Darkseid’s ancient, battle-hardened instincts had ever relied upon. He didn’t retreat. He simply wasn’t where the violence expected him to be, again and again, until Darkseid’s assault began to fray at the edges, and his frustration building up.

In the narrow gap that frustration opened, Arthur struck.

The scythe’s curved blade found Darkseid’s face in a single, precise move, driving into one crimson eye with a force that tore a raw, roar of genuine pain from the Lord of Apokolips. blood welled from the wound as Darkseid staggered back, one massive hand rising instinctively to the ruined socket.

"You dare..." he began, fury replacing whatever little composure remained in him.

"I’m daring," Arthur said simply, drifting closer, his violet eyes glowing brighter now, the scythe steady in his grip, dripping with Darkseid’s own blood. "Now, Lord of Darkness.. let me show you the true power of Death itself."

The world around them suddenly went dark.

Not merely dark, or shadowed, it was an absolute, consuming absence that swallowed the ruined battlefield whole, the wreckage of Warworld, the distant burning wrecks of Apokoliptian warships, the last flickering embers of automated defense fire, all of it vanishing beneath a darkness so great.

Darkseid turned, searching the void with his one remaining eye, finding nothing, finding no horizon, no ground, no stars, only an endless, encroaching black.

Arthur remained visible within it, floating perfectly still at its center, scythe held loose in one hand, his violet eyes the only true light left in the entire, swallowed world, watching Darkseid with a calm, menacing patience that needed no further words to make its meaning clear.

"What... is this?" Darkseid’s voice, for the first time since the fight had begun.

"One of my strongest aspects as Death," Arthur said, his voice carrying without effort through the consuming black. "The Abyss. Here, in this plane of existence, I am everything." His violet eyes were the only true light left in the void, steady and unblinking, fixed on the being before him. "Anything else... is nothing."

Darkseid searched the darkness with his remaining eye, finding no edge to it, no depth, no direction that promised escape.

"Killing you here will only destroy this shell of yours," Arthur continued, drifting closer, scythe held loose and patient at his side. "You’d reincarnate eventually, I imagine. A hundred years, perhaps longer. It hardly matters to something like you.. you would return, one way or another, given enough time." His gaze hardened. "I don’t intend to let that happen. I wanted you to know that, before the Abyss finishes consuming what’s left of your hollow body."

Darkseid, impossibly, smiled.

"I’m truly impressed," he said, blood still weeping from his ruined eye, his voice utterly unbowed despite the void pressing in around him. "You truly prepared for this. For me." His remaining eye gleamed. "But mark my words, human. I will destroy everything you hold dear. You did defeat me today.. but I always have other measures in motion. Always."

Arthur said nothing for a long moment, regarding him as if looking down at something small, not with hatred, not even with real anger, but with the flat, absolute indifference of a god passing judgment on an insect that had, for a little while, mistaken itself for a threat.

"You’re welcome to try," Arthur said at last.

His eyes glowed brighter, violet swallowing the last of the darkness around them both.

"Now... Die." The Abyss closed in.

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