Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0121

Twenty minutes since Erick had gone under, and he hadn’t moved — a green-skinned figure sitting motionless on the broken teeth of downtown Metropolis, holding a thing that had no business holding still. The link was alive under his skin, a web of minds strung together and kept taut, and through it Batman ran the whole board: the rescue on one side, the answer to Warworld on the other, every hero set exactly where he was needed. Erick had never pictured himself pinned inside something this draining, an effort that pulled at every reserve of the mind he’d spent months building.

His head hung. Sweat ran off him in heavy drops — forehead, temples, the back of his neck — soaking into his collar and falling onto the rubble. That alone was wrong. His body didn’t sweat from heat; heat and cold and ordinary pain meant nothing to it. This was pure strain, the cost of the work itself, burning through his synapses as if every rune and core and ounce of arcane charge he’d poured into himself had come due at once.

Blood ran from his nose now, not a trickle but a steady pour, hot over his lip, threading into the sweat and dripping red onto the asphalt, gathering in small pools that caught the glare off Warworld. The metal taste filled his mouth with every shallow breath, a tax he paid out one heartbeat at a time to keep the whole thing standing. He sat in the dead center of a dead city — buildings reduced to hollow shells of bent steel and powdered concrete, the air thick with smoke and burnt ozone and a fine grit that coated his lungs — and he held. Still no answer from the Martian Manhunter.

No way to know how long until J’onn reached him. Until then it was on Erick to stand, to be the post the collective mind was lashed to while the storm came down around it.

Batman had handed the civilians to the Junior Team, and they worked like they’d been built for it. Superboy ran his vision hot, X-ray cutting down through the wreckage to find the ones buried in it — the unconscious, the half-gone, the minds too dim for Erick to reach through the link at all. Then he dug them out. Steel beams came up in his hands like dry branches, dust rolling off in clouds, and he lifted limp bodies with a care that didn’t match the raw size of him, carrying each one clear in seconds and passing it straight to the Flash and Kid Flash. The two of them never stopped — red and gold streaks threading the ruins, taking whole families and the old and the bleeding out to the staging tents on the city’s edge, where the army was just beginning to set up.

Starfire and Aqualad ran off Erick directly. He fed them coordinates down the link, clean and exact — a flicker of waking thought here, a thin cry for help there, each one sent like a marked point on a map only he could read. North two blocks, third floor came down — a mother and two kids, all still awake, he’d push through, his mental voice level even with his skull pounding. And they’d take it: Starfire lifting rubble on soft fields of green star-energy so nothing else gave way, while Kaldur went into the wreck with the weight of the sea behind him, splitting metal and concrete and bringing the survivors out to drop them into the fast hands waiting to run them clear.

Robin knew where he wasn’t useful. He had no powers to dig with, and his edge was in the plan, not the lifting — so he turned to the drones instead. He moved low through the rubble, calling shots with Wildcat, Hawkman, and Red Tornado, dropping the androids that still swarmed the streets and the air with his staff and what was left in his belt. Erick caught General Lane on the link and passed it on plain: the old man with the gray mustache confirmed the cavalry was thirty minutes out — armor, medical tents, bodies enough to finally lock the evacuation zones down.

Farther out, past the edge of the city, where the shockwaves came in like long rolling thunder and put a tremor in the ground under everyone, three minds burned hottest in the link — Wonder Woman, Superman, Captain Marvel, all of them on Mongul. Through their eyes Erick could see it, and the link gave it to him with a clarity he hadn’t asked for, the horror running live behind his own.

Mongul in his yellow hide was a slab of a thing, three meters and more of stacked muscle under skin like plate, red eyes lit with a flat, joyless fury. He fought the three of them the way a man swats at flies he means to keep alive a while. He matched their speed without trying, a yellow-and-violet smear that argued with physics, fists the size of mauls trading blows that punched the air into thunderclaps.

In one minute, through their eyes, Erick watched more than a thousand strikes thrown and turned and eaten — a brutal arithmetic of fist into guard, shin into forearm, beams cut short against raised hands. And none of the three were letting go all the way. He could feel them holding it in, pulling their real strength back so they didn’t finish what Mongul started, so they didn’t open a new crater or bring another block down on the people still under it. Mongul carried no such weight. He went through the standing buildings, hauling the heroes behind him by whatever he had hold of, tearing craters into the street, beams spinning off into the dust as walls let go.

The Flash was the only thing standing between the fight and the body count — there and gone on the last second of every near miss. But even with him, even with the others working, the dying didn’t stop. Erick felt them go through the link. A child’s mind cut off mid-thought, the fear and the not-understanding simply ending, a wire pulled out of its socket. A woman calling for help right up until her heart quit and the activity behind her eyes went dark, the last of her panic still ringing in him after she was gone. He felt each one land somewhere cold and low in his chest. And under it rose the thing he’d been keeping down — that none of it was enough, that the link and the strain and the months of work were a cup of water thrown at a fire.

And the yellow wall kept coming, dragging Superman and Wonder Woman along the ground, the impacts throwing sparks and running cracks out across the asphalt. Superman tore loose with a roar that came straight down the link, climbed hard into the air, and brought his heat vision down — two beams of red landing square on Mongul’s chest. The tyrant barely moved under it. His skin smoked a little and he laughed, a low grinding sound that crawled through Erick’s mind, and then he caught Wonder Woman’s slack body and swung the unconscious Amazon like a club, driving her into Superman with a crack that shoved the air outward and reached Erick miles off as a tremor through his teeth.

The sweat came harder, running into the blood that wouldn’t stop, and Erick set his jaw and held his ground inside his own skull. Every second was a fight he could lose — a reminder, in his own marrow, of exactly what kind of world he’d come back into, where one Mongul, one Warworld, could empty a city in the time it took to watch. The powerlessness moved through him slow and heavy. He didn’t break. The link held. The coordination held. And under all of it something burned hotter than the fear: one day he would not be the one watching. One day he would be the one bringing that kind of violence down on things like Mongul, and he would not be gentle about it.

The city went on groaning and folding in around him, the air full of dust and far-off screaming, and Erick stayed where he was, the blood and the sweat marking out what his part of this had cost. Lane had promised thirty minutes. The Junior Team pulled people out of the ground without a wasted motion. The fight on the outskirts climbed and climbed. Twenty minutes had become something with no bottom to it — and he held, because that was what the training was for. Because this was how you built something that couldn’t be broken, in a world that had never once forgiven being weak.