Chapter 625: Strike True

Tens of thousands of violet-eyed soldiers stood motionless on the broken ground of the World of Chaos with their weapons lowered, bound by an order they had not understood and had obeyed anyway, because the one who had given it was the only thing in the universe they had ever been willing to obey.

Then Arthur spat blood in the sky, and rose again, slower than before.

Bellion unfolded his wings.

He didn’t speak at first, he stood at the head of the ranks with his blade held loosely at his side and his four black wings spreading wide, and every Marshal within sight of him went still, watching his face.

"My Monarch commanded us to hold," Bellion said. His voice was calm. "He did not command us to stand here and watch him die."

"That is not what he meant," Igris said quietly, though he had already drawn the demon king’s longsword, and lightning was crawling up the blade in thin, restless threads.

"I know what he meant," said Bellion. "I will answer for it afterward."

"Finally!" Beru’s wings snapped open with a crack like a whip. His mandibles clicked together, and there was something dangerous in his voice, something almost happy. "Do you know how long I have been standing here? Seven days! I counted every one!"

"You didn’t count anything," Galatea said. Her eyes were already burning, the air around her shimmering with heat. "You complained for six and a half of them." She cracked her neck.

"Something is wrong," Ultra said, almost to himself. "He gave the order to hold for a while, for a good reason. Our Monarch is no fool."

"Now is the time," Bellion said. "Go."

They went.

Beast Boy hit Doom at a dead run, and it was a very bad idea.

The collision rang across the battlefield like a bell. For half a second the green rhino and the monster stood locked together, horn against chest, boots plowing furrows through the dead earth. Then Doom closed one hand around the horn and ’lifted,’ and Beast Boy’s feet left the ground.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me!" Beast Boy yelped, still somehow audible through the rhino’s lungs. "Of course I’m fighting the one with the insane adaptation..."

Doom threw him, and Beast Boy went hurtling backward through the air in a tangle of limbs, shrinking mid-flight into a green hawk and a green pigeon and finally a small and extremely alarmed green mouse, which hit the ground, rolled, and came up as a wolf again, panting.

"I said I’d try to stay alive," he muttered, and went back in.

Zatanna had planted herself in the middle of a field of ruined stone, her hands blazing gold, her hat gone somewhere in the first hour of the fight. Bellion’s blade came screaming out of the sky at her, shifting to a whip mid-strike, and she flung up one palm.

"Pots meht!"

The whip’s length turned to a ribbon of silk. Bellion’s blade flicked sideways as the weapon went limp in his grip, and for the first time in a very long time, the Grand Marshal looked genuinely surprised.

"You!" Bellion said.

"I know," said Zatanna, her face white and set. "I’m so sorry."

"Don’t be," Bellion said, and the ribbon stiffened back into steel in his grip. "I am going to hit you now."

Frost, meanwhile, had Galatea pinned.

She had caught the Marshal at the edge of the skirmish and thrown a sheet of black ice around her legs, and Galatea had blasted her heat vision down through it in the same breath and melted half the glacier, and the two women were circling each other now, their breath steaming.

"You’re good," Galatea said, through her teeth. "I’ll give you that. But I’ve been training under Igris since you were still stealing jewelry, measly Monarch."

"I was never stealing jewelry," said Frost, offended, and flung a lance of ice at her face.

Igris was moving toward the sky, his lightning leaving afterimages in the air. Beru was a smear of violet and black, tearing through a wall of stone that Zatanna’s magic hurled up before him. Ultra’s laughter echoed across the battlefield, joyless and ferocious, as he met Raven’s soul-self head-on. The dragons wheeled overhead, and their roars shook the earth.

None of them got within two hundred feet of Arthur.

In the middle of it all, in a pocket of quiet that the fighting had somehow left behind, Arthur hung in the air with a spear in his hand, bleeding.

He had stopped pretending a while ago. It was real blood now, and it was a great deal of it, soaking through the tattered remains of his armor, running down his arm and dripping from the point of the spear to fall into the Abyss-dark clouds below. His breath came in short, harsh pulls. His eyes, those steady violet eyes, had begun to dim at the edges.

’Listen to me, everyone.’ he said.

The words moved into the minds of six people at once, as clearly as a spoken sentence. Clark, Kara, Raven, Zatanna, Beast Boy, Frost. Every one of them flinched.

’This isn’t enough. They’re still watching, and they’re still waiting. They won’t come down for a bruise. They’ll come down for a corpse.’ He drew a ragged breath. ’I need you to strike me. A mortal wound or something great. Something that no one in that hall could mistake for anything but the end.’

Nobody answered.

Below him, Kara had stopped moving, she hovered with her fists half raised, and she stared at him, and her face was the color of paper.

’Arthur,’ she said. ’No.’

’Yes.’

’We’ve already done enough, maybe they won’t come at all...’

’We haven’t,’ Arthur said, and it wasn’t cruel. It was very gentle, and very tired. ’Please, Kara, we must end it all here and now.’

Raven’s soul-self had stopped mid-swing, her eyes were wide and for a long moment she said nothing at all. She had felt this plan taking shape for days. She had told herself it was just a performance, a trap, a convincing act. She hadn’t let herself think about the moment it would stop being an act.

’I think,’ she said slowly, ’that we have gone too far.’

’Then it’s too late to go back,’ said Arthur.

Clark, hanging in the air beside the wreck of a mountain, had his hands curled into fists at his sides so tightly that the knuckles had gone white. He had stood beside this man through a week of war. He had given his word. And now he was being asked to look into the eyes of a friend and do something that every instinct he had ever possessed told him was monstrous.

’Arthur,’ he said. ’I don’t know if this is going to work.’

’It will.’

’You can’t know that for sure.’

’No,’ Arthur admitted. ’I can’t.’

He raised one hand.

Darkness began to gather in his palm, not the wild darkness of the Abyss but something cold and focused and very, very powerful. It pooled in his fingers, dense as ink, humming at a pitch that made the air itself ache. The sky overhead began to darken as well. A single bolt of lightning cracked down out of the clouds and struck the ground a mile away. Then another. Then another, every pair of eyes on the battlefield turned upward to the dark star forming in the Shadow Monarch’s hand.

’Do it,’ Arthur said. ’Strike true. Or you will end up taking this attack of mine instead.’ and he meant it.

Every one of them knew he meant it. It was in the steadiness of his gaze, in the way the darkness hung in his hand without so much as a tremor, in the quiet that had fallen over the six of them. Kara’s lips were pressed together so hard they’d gone white. Raven’s soul-self had begun to shake. Zatanna, on the ground, had stopped speaking altogether. Beast Boy had shrunk into a small human boy with wide eyes, staring up at the sky as though he were watching something terrible being born.

A seventh voice slipped quietly into Arthur’s mind, warm and low and entirely without humor.

’My,’ said Didi. ’You really are serious about this.’

Arthur said nothing. He kept the darkness gathered in his palm, and his eyes dimmed another shade.

’I do not like this,’ Didi said. ’I want you to know that. I’ve watched mortals do very foolish things to bait very dangerous enemies, and in all the years I have been what I am, I have rarely seen one succeed.. Not saying that you are a mortal or that you fall in that category but...’

’I know.’ Arthur said.

’But I have never seen anyone do it for this reason.’ A long pause, and something softer in her voice. ’So make it count.’

It was Frost who broke the silence.

She had been listening for a while, and she had been staring at her own hands for most of it. Now she lifted her head, and her face was pale and set and very strange, and there was something almost like a laugh trembling at the corner of her mouth.

"I have no problem with doing this!" she shouted.

Every head on the battlefield turned.

"What?" Zatanna whispered. "Frost, wait!"

"Nobody else wants to? Fine!" Frost’s voice cracked, and she didn’t care. "I’m the new girl! I’m the one nobody trusts! I’ve got a reputation! You know what? Best offer I’ve had all week!"

She flung both arms wide, and the temperature of the entire sky plummeted.

The ice came up out of the clouds. It was not a lance. It was a spear of ice, a thousand tons of blue-white ice gathering itself out of nothing, frost screaming across its surface, its tip sharp, it hung in the air above her head, glittering, enormous and terrible, and for one last moment the whole battlefield stared at it.

Kara said, "Frost!"

Frost threw it.

It crossed the sky faster than the eye could follow. Arthur didn’t raise a hand. He didn’t dodge. He looked at it coming, and his gaze didn’t waver, and the darkness in his palm flickered once and went out.

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