Chapter 624: Perfect Betrayal

Arthur took the next three minutes one blow at a time.

He deflected Clark’s first flurry with his forearms, turning each punch aside a hair’s breadth from his ribs, and answered with a shadow-wrapped palm that caught Clark in the sternum and sent him tumbling backward through a bank of cloud. The tumble ended in a flash of red and gold: Clark’s heat vision, two blinding beams stabbing out of the vapor, and Arthur tore a portal open in front of his face without even looking. The beams vanished into the rift and erupted from a second tear behind Clark’s shoulder, and Clark twisted out of the way with barely an inch to spare.

"Cute!" Clark called, flaring his cape-less shoulders.

"I picked it up from watching Darkseid," Arthur said dryly. "He didn’t enjoy it either."

Raven arrived like a storm. Her cloak ripped away from her shoulders, and the soul-self burst out of her chest in a towering raven of black fire, its talons spread wide to seize him. It caught Arthur around the middle and squeezed. Arthur grunted, shadows crawling up his arms to push against the grip. "That’s good," he got out, and then louder, "You were always the one I trusted least, weren’t you?"

"I always trusted you too much," Raven said, her voice shaking. "That was the mistake."

The shadows slashed through the talons, and she staggered, and Kara was already there.

She struck him in the shoulder, a clean blow, but the force behind it was a fraction of what she could have thrown. Arthur felt the difference immediately and saw her face. It was strained, her jaw clamped tight, her eyes wet and unfocused, every punch landing like an apology.

"Kara," Arthur said, quietly, catching her wrist. "Stop holding back."

"I can’t," she whispered.

He let go of her wrist and hit her.

It was a hard, fast, honest punch to the jaw, almost everything he had left, and Kara’s head snapped sideways. She tumbled backward in the air, stunned, tasting blood, and for a half second the only thing in her mind was blank, ringing disbelief.

Then the disbelief turned to something else.

She came back at him with a scream that was half sob and half fury and drove her fist into his face with a crack that echoed over the whole battlefield.

Arthur’s head turned with the blow. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. Kara froze in the air, her fist still extended, her breath stopping in her chest. She flinched.

Arthur turned his head back toward her, and he was smiling.

"There it is," he said softly.

"I hate this," Kara said, her voice breaking. "I hate this."

"Hate it later," Arthur told her, and tore himself backward as the world fell on him.

Zatanna’s voice rang out from the ground, a long, clear call. "Dnib mih!" And the dead earth beneath Arthur’s feet, a hundred feet below him, rippled and surged upward in ropes of living stone, snaking through the air to seize his wrists. He twisted and the Abyss rolled out of his shoulders like smoke, cutting the stone to ash, but another call followed it. "Nrut ot ssalg!" The air around him went rigid and clear and sharp as a pane of window glass, trapping him in a transparent cage that cracked and sparked as he pushed against it.

"You always did show off, Zee!" he shouted, putting his fist through the glass.

"Ask me if I regret it!" she called back, and her voice trembled.

A wall of ice slammed into his back. Frost hovered a few yards away, her arms flung wide, her breath streaming, a glittering carpet of frozen air spreading outward from her hands and crawling up Arthur’s legs. "Sorry, boss!" she yelled, and then, quieter, "not really sorry, you know, but..."

Arthur broke the ice, and the wolf came out of the dark.

Beast Boy hit him like a collapsing building, enormous and green-furred, claws spread, his eyes burning. They tumbled together across the sky, Arthur’s arm locked against the wolf’s throat, the wolf’s jaws snapping inches from his face. "Ow!" Beast Boy yelped, somehow still audible through the snarling. "Ow, ow, ow, you bit back, you can’t bite back, that’s not in the rules!"

"There are no rules!" Arthur said, and flung him bodily into a descending Superman. They hit each other and tumbled away in opposite directions, Clark’s cape-less shoulders slamming into a floating chunk of ruined earth, Beast Boy shrinking mid-fall into a startled green hawk who squawked his way out of the collision.

The six of them came at him together after that.

Arthur’s world narrowed to a storm of motion. Clark’s fists pounded at his guard from one side while Raven’s chains of shadow tried to wrap his ankles from the other. Kara hovered above him now, and her blows were landing, really landing, her whole body shaking with the effort of not stopping. Frost’s ice lanced up from below, and Zatanna’s magic wrenched at the very air around him, twisting it into spikes and nets and walls of burning light. Beast Boy came around again as a rhinoceros the size of a house, and Arthur caught the horn with both hands and spun him around and flung him at Frost, who dove under the thrown beast with a shriek of laughter and rage.

Arthur bled. He was exhausted beyond anything he had felt in a long time. Every blow they landed cost him something, and he gave back exactly as much as he needed to, no more, no less, because it had to look real. It had to look right.

Clark’s next punch came close to staggering him. Arthur turned with it, barely, and lashed out with a shadow-wrapped heel to Clark’s chin that made the Man of Steel’s teeth click together. They broke apart, panting. Across the sky, Raven wove her next spell, and Kara’s hands were shaking. Zatanna’s face was white with strain, and in the pit of the broken battlefield below, tens of thousands of soldiers stared up in horror.

Arthur drew a ragged breath, and in the pause he felt it.

Far above them, in the torn seams of the sky where the Rulers’ light still lingered, something was watching. It didn’t have a shape or a face. It was a pressure at the edge of his senses, cold and pale and patient, leaning in the way a predator leans toward a limping animal. Their attention was fixed entirely on him.

A weakened Shadow Monarch. A battered Superman. A handful of traitors, bruised and bleeding, locked in the kind of savage civil war that no one could have staged.

’Good,’ Arthur thought.

He pushed a thread of thought down the telepathic link he shared with the five who knew, and every one of them heard it as clearly as a spoken word.

’They’re watching. Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.’

Kara’s eyes were streaming. She set her jaw and threw herself at him again.

Arthur raised his fists to meet her, and somewhere high above, something pale and patient leaned a little closer.

.

.

.

Far above the World of Chaos, The Rulers watched.

Now, as the last coil of Nidhogg poured into the Shadow Monarch’s chest and the Abyss folded itself shut, the silence in their hall was so deep.

"He took it into himself," said one of them at last. His voice was soft, almost reverent, and it did not sound like a man who enjoyed what he was saying. "Nidhogg. The thing we caged with the labor of an age. Do you remember what it cost the Absolute being? It took him a whole month to cage it."

"And he folded it away like a man pocketing a coin," murmured another. "Within a single week."

" The Shadow Monarch did not do it alone. Do not give him more than he has earned." said a third, coldly.

"He did not do it alone," another agreed, "but look at what he did with them." He gestured at the basin, where the final moments of the seal were replaying in a slow loop, the black river flowing into Arthur’s chest, the crimson veins burning beneath his skin. "The Abyss. Did any of you believe it could contain a thing like that? We spent a thousand years assuming the shadow monarch powers would burn itself out. Ashborn never showed us a fraction of this."

"Ashborn was also limitless, but he lacked a reason to go this far." the eldest Ruler said.

"Ashborn wanted justice," she went on. "This one wants to conquer. That is a different, and far more dangerous, kind of hunger. A king can be bargained with. A man with ambitions cannot."

The silence returned, and then the basin shifted.

The image of the Abyss dissolved. In its place, tiny and sharp, was the sky above the World of Chaos, and a battered Superman driving his fist into the Shadow Monarch’s guard.

Several of the Rulers inhaled at once.

"There," said the Ruler softly. "There it is."

"They’re fighting him," someone said. It was almost a whisper. "Even them."

"Even his lovers," said the Ruler beside the basin, with a thin, bitter satisfaction that he didn’t try to hide. "Look at her. The one who bore his child, she is weeping as she strikes him."

"And she strikes him anyway."

The eldest Ruler said nothing, but the corner of her mouth moved. It was not quite a smile.

"We anticipated this," said one of them, turning to the others. "I told you at the council. Do not mistake me, I take no pleasure in it. But we have seen the same story play out across a hundred worlds. Power of that kind does not stay loyal to those who wield it. The darkness of the Monarchs cannot be contained, not by love, not by oaths, not by the best intentions of the man holding the leash. It pulls at everyone around it. It twists them. He passed that darkness to his allies like a plague, and now he is paying the price for it."

"He suffers the consequences of his own arrogance,"

"He suffers them in a way we could not have arranged better ourselves," said the eldest quietly.

"I only wonder," he went on, carefully, "why the Shadow Monarch’s closest allies would choose this exact moment. He has just defeated Nidhogg. Every one of them has fought at his side for a week. Every one of them has bled for him." He pointed at the basin. "And now, in the instant he is weakest, with our army broken and the heavens watching, they decide to betray him. In the open. Before an audience. I would not stage it differently myself."

"You would suggest it is a performance," said one of them, not unkindly.

"I would suggest we are meant to see it."

"Look at the blood," the Ruler at the basin said impatiently. "No actor bleeds like that. The Kryptonian’s fist broke the Shadow Monarch’s guard in the first exchange. The girl’s last strike split his lip. The ice has frozen to the bone. There is nothing in that fight that is gentle."

"The Shadow Monarch is not a man who loses to the people he loves," the younger Ruler said.

"Then he is learning that everyone does," said the eldest.

"There is another matter," he said, turning back to the basin, where Arthur had caught a hurtling Kara by the collar and thrown her into a floating slab of broken earth. "Nidhogg. He carries it now. Whatever he does with it, whether he can bear it, whether it will gnaw its way out of him, that creature is no longer ours to command or to cage. If he survives this day with that darkness inside him, he will be more dangerous than he has ever been. And he will remember what we sent against him."

"You propose that we act," said another.

"I propose that we consider what we lose if we wait." One of them folded his hands. "The Monarchs tire each other, and that is useful. The Shadow Monarch is hurt, and that is useful. But he has also just proven that he can stand against a creature we could not. A weakened Arthur Blackwynd is the best opportunity we will ever have. A rested one will not give us another."

"And if the Dragon Monarch should stir while we are occupied?" the eldest asked.

"Then he stirs into a world where the Shadow Monarch has already fallen. That is a better war than the one we are facing now."

No one answered immediately. The silver of the basin trembled. Far below, a seam of the sky was torn open by Clark’s heat vision.

"He is magnificent," One of them said, almost to herself. "It is a pity that we have to do this."

"It is necessary." said the eldest.

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