Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0120

Erick flew low and fast, his body a black sliver against the smoke, chasing the two streaks of red and gold that ripped down the broken avenue below. Flash and Kid Flash moved faster than the eye could hold — there one instant, gone the next, the wind of their passing dragging dust and shattered glass up into spirals behind them.

Metropolis was coming apart. Every block they crossed was worse than the last. Towers that had stood for generations leaned and shuddered now, their faces splitting into long cracks, whole floors folding inward and dropping in slow avalanches of concrete and black smoke that smeared out the sky.

The noise never stopped. The groan of failing steel. The crack of stone giving way somewhere overhead. Under all of it, thin and constant, the screaming of people still trapped in the gaps the rescue lines hadn’t reached. Heat rolled off the secondary fires and pressed against him even through his sealed helmet, carrying the stink of ozone and melted metal. His pulse hammered — not from fear, though the wound torn open in the sky above kept reminding him how small he was, but from something closer to hunger. He had spent months stacking up power for exactly this. Runes. Armor. Arcane energy bled into every plate he wore. This was what all of it had been for.

Flash and Kid Flash had run the evacuation of this sector themselves, herding civilians out while Erick worked the air, sweeping his sensors for any heartbeat they’d missed. As they neared the center — the throat of the disaster — he dropped lower for a clean look.

His team was waiting in a half-flattened plaza ringed by rubble and dead cars. Superboy stood with his fists shut and his cape shredded at the hem, jaw working around whatever he wanted to hit. Aqualad — the younger one, in Atlantean armor that still caught what little light there was — held his trident like a man bracing against a tide. Artemis had an arrow nocked already, weight forward, waiting. Starfire hung a few inches off the ground, starbolts crawling green over her knuckles, her hair the only warm color left in the square. Robin stood in the middle of them with a tablet that flickered uselessly in his hand, his cape moving like something alive.

They weren’t alone. Wildcat had planted himself at the edge of the circle, old gloves laced, the look of a man who’d been to worse places sitting plain on his face. Hawkman half-mantled his wings, mace low, his helmet throwing back the sick glare of Warworld overhead. Red Tornado turned slowly in place inside a column of held wind. And Aquaman — the king himself — had driven his trident into the cracked ground and left it standing there like a flag.

Erick swept the group once, his mind brushing each of them as he came down. One signature was missing. Megan. Miss Martian. The gap where she should have been sat wrong with him, an empty seat at a table he was used to reading whole. His boots met the asphalt beside the two slowed streaks of Flash and Kid Flash, and Robin was already moving toward him, fast and tired, every line of his young face pulled tight.

“It’s getting worse by the second.” Robin kept his voice steady, but only because he was forcing it. “Communications are gone. Not the city — the planet. Warworld is jamming everything. All of it. Everywhere.”

The words landed and stuck. For a moment no one spoke; there was only the far thunder of things colliding above the cloud line. The whole planet, blind and deaf at once. Satellites dead. Networks down. Radio scoured to static. They were working in the dark, and so was everyone else — which meant that right now, somewhere, other cities might be dying the same way with no one able to call it in. Planes. Hospitals. Governments shut inside their own borders. A collapse with no floor under it.

“Where are J’onn and Megan?” Erick asked. “If they’re here, I can link us mind to mind. Clean. We could coordinate all of this properly.”

Robin turned to him, eyes narrowing under the mask, and gave it to him straight, the way he gave everything. “Manhunter took her to Japan. Family weekend — training and a break. They’d been planning it for weeks. We got word right before the blackout that they’d been warned and were on their way back.” He let out a breath. “But it’s Japan, Erick. The distance, the hours it takes, all of this between here and there — they don’t make it in time. Not even flying straight.”

The air seemed to thicken. Superboy didn’t wait for the quiet to finish. “Zeta tubes,” he said, and it came out like a fist.

“Down.” Robin didn’t slow. “First thing Warworld killed when it hit orbit. You came through last, Erick. After that, nothing. No transfers, no signal. We’re cut off from every other point on Earth.”

Erick felt the color drain out of him, his green skin paling in the smoke-light. The size of it hit like something physical. But he was already talking, low and fast. “And air traffic?”

He watched it dawn on all of them at once. The caught breaths. The way they stiffened. Because the only thing keeping a sky full of aircraft from killing itself was the thing that had just gone dark — no towers, no guidance, no shared navigation. Passenger jets, freight, military, all of it flying blind under a sky that Warworld’s mass was bending out of true. Mid-airs. Crashes. Cockpits in freefall panic. A second disaster stacking on top of the first.

Red Tornado answered, flat and exact, no weight on the words at all, which somehow made it worse. “By my estimate, aircraft that took off recently have a few hours before fuel or disorientation forces them down. The danger is the ones already airborne when the systems failed — long-haul, low on reserves. Those face fuel exhaustion, total loss of bearing, and unpredictable collisions. We have perhaps one to two hours before the rate of loss climbs sharply.”

And Erick understood that he might be the only anchor left in the whole equation. His mind — the one he’d spent every night in the mansion sharpening — was the one tool nobody else here had. He turned to the Flash. “I can link all of you. Hold you together long enough to run a plan.”

“That’s insane.” Robin cut in before he’d finished, and there was real fear under the tactician’s calm. “You’re not a born Martian, Erick. You don’t actually know what you can do. M’gann is forty years old — a true Martian, decades of it — and even she wouldn’t hold this many minds at once without it breaking her. You take on more than you can carry and you don’t come back.”

Erick held the thought a second. Robin’s words hit like surf against rock, and rolled off. We don’t have another option. And under it, quieter and harder: if I want to stand with the ones at the top someday, the fear of dying is the first thing that has to go. This universe didn’t pardon weakness. He’d come back into it knowing that. Every rune he’d carved, every drop of power he’d hoarded, had been him saying he would never again be one of the bodies left in the rubble.

The Flash crossed to him and set a hand on his shoulder — steady, near enough to a father’s. Up close Erick barely came to the man’s chin; the armor put him at five-eight, and under it he’d kept the Martian frame lean, nothing like the slab of muscle he could pull on when he wanted it.

“Son.” The speedster’s voice dropped. “This isn’t a fair thing to ask you. I hate that it’s you. But you’re the only one who can.”

Erick nodded, slow, and let his eyes move over them — his own team watching him with that mix of trust and dread, the veterans behind them holding still, saying nothing, watching all the same. He shut his eyes. When he sat and folded his legs under him the way Megan had drilled into him, the cold of the broken asphalt bit up through warm green skin.

He found the current first — the old, familiar river of psychic pressure rising in him — and let it out into the air, fine and searching. Robin’s mind came easiest; they’d done this before, and the contact was a firm, known grip. Superboy next, hard and forward, a thrown punch. Aqualad, deep and still as cold water. Kid Flash, fast and bright — and the moment Erick touched him, a thin needle of pain began working at the edge of his skull. He frowned and kept hold of him anyway.

He widened. Wildcat — sharp, blunt, no give in him. Hawkman. Flash, a blur even in the link. The strain of holding all of them at once closed like a slow vice on his temples, sweat running cold down his neck, and this was only the start. The collisions overhead were getting closer; the ground shivered under him with each far impact, and the sound rolled in long and clean across the miles.

He reached further and brushed two more — Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel — and the instant he was inside, Diana’s voice came down on him.

“Who dares enter my mind?”

“Easy, Diana.” The Flash was already there, calm on the line. “It’s Erick. He’s making himself the link so we can coordinate.”

The resistance eased, both of them letting him settle in. He kept spreading. He passed over civilians — bursts of fear, pain, a thin thread of hope — and didn’t pull them into the link, but he marked every one, points of light laid out across a map only he could see. He spread wider, touching only the heroes still out there, the ones digging people loose or trading fire with Warworld’s drones, until —

Two more. Superman and Batman, up on Warworld itself. The Man of Steel’s mind flared like a struck beacon.

“Who are you? How are you here?”

“Superman.” Flash again. “It’s Erick. He’s holding us together telepathically.”

Batman’s voice came in dry and immediate. “Good. Report.”

The Flash had it ready. “We’re evacuating the city. Multiple heroes on the ground, but we’re thin. The general reached the President — reinforcements are inbound. What we need is communications back.”

“Working on it,” Batman said.

Then Wonder Woman, urgent: “Superman — we need you. Mongul is stronger than he was. Much stronger.”

“On my way.”

By now blood was running from Erick’s nose, hot, dripping off his chin to the asphalt in a rhythm he couldn’t spare the focus to stop. The link carried more than words. It carried the fray of everyone’s breathing, the pressure each of them stood under, and it all came back through him. Batman spoke again, low and flat and absolute, the kind of voice that straightened spines.

“The Lantern Corps. Anything?”

“Nothing.” The Flash’s frustration leaked through even at speed. “We sent the distress call the second Warworld made orbit. Jordan, Stewart, Rayner — every Earth Lantern should have it. Total silence.”

Batman went quiet for a beat. On the link, that pause stretched out. When he spoke it was with a certainty that put a chill through all of them. “Then Warworld took the signal the moment it went out.”

It went through the group like a hammer. Erick felt it ripple in his own head and nearly lost his grip for a heartbeat. Mongul’s machine wasn’t only a weapon — it was a wall around the whole planet, cutting Earth off from the stars with the same ease it had cut the cities off from each other. The Lanterns, with rings that could move worlds, were either fighting somewhere they couldn’t be reached or had never heard the call at all. No green light in the sky. No one coming from outside. Whatever held Warworld off would have to come from the people standing in this plaza.

Robin’s jaw tightened. Superboy’s fists drew in until the knuckles paled. Aqualad left his trident in the ground and said nothing, his face set like old stone. Artemis traded a look with Starfire, whose starlight guttered. Kid Flash had gone completely still — which, for him, said everything.

Wonder Woman closed it, steady and grim. “Then we are alone with Mongul. No reinforcements from beyond.”

Batman was already past it, running orders out across the link like a man feeding a machine. “Troops are too far to count on. Everything on evacuation and clearing drones. Erick — hold the link. Any drop and we lose the picture. Flash, keep moving, eyes on everything. We need them in real time.”

Erick sat with the blood drying on his lip and the heat of it still coming, his mind braced against the load like a stake driven into the seabed. Every plate of his armor, every rune, the core burning slow in his chest — all of it took the weight, and he didn’t give. Through him, Batman started to move them. The young ones — Superboy, Aqualad, Starfire, Robin, Kid Flash — he turned toward the trapped pockets of civilians in the buildings most likely to come down. The veterans he aimed at the thickest of the drone strikes, to cut them out and open the roads for the larger evacuations.

The link beat like one slow heart, Erick at the center of it. The blood came faster now, dropping steady to the ground, and still he held. Each mind hanging off his own was another stone laid into something he was building. The ruin around him went on — Warworld burning overhead, Mongul roaring through the distant fighting — but here, in the middle of Metropolis, the chaos had an order to it now, and the order ran through him. He breathed out, set his legs, and kept the link open for whatever came next. The fear of dying had been pushed all the way to the bottom. What burned over it was older and stronger — the will to never be powerless again. This was the training made real. Not surviving it. Bending it.