Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0122

Chapter 122

It was the hardest thing Erick had ever done, in this life or the half-remembered one before it. No fight had ever cost him this. No burn, no broken bone, nothing his body had survived came close, because his body was not the part being asked to bleed out. His mind was. It lay stretched across hundreds of other minds at once, a living switchboard of terror and pain and grim resolve, every line of it pulled taut and humming, and the pressure pressed inward from all sides toward the one fragile point in the center where he still sat thinking of himself as Erick.

Every mind he carried leaked into him. A young soldier’s panic, sharp as copper at the back of the throat. A field medic running the cold arithmetic of who could still be saved. A woman pinned under rubble somewhere in the Lower District, absolutely certain this was the end, her certainty bleeding into his like ink into water. Each thought landed somewhere behind his eyes and left a mark, and there were thousands of them a second now, far past the count he could have named an hour ago. He felt the careful architecture he had spent so long building start to give. Whole sections of himself sheared loose and drifted, fragments of who he was flaking away like rust scoured off by a current too strong to swim against. He had stopped trying to swim a long time ago. Now he only held the line and let the river take what it would.

Blood ran from his nose without pause. It had soaked into the collar of his suit and dried to a dark crust at his throat, then split again under the fresh sweat sheeting down his face. He had dropped where he sat, legs folded beneath him on a heap of broken masonry, and from a distance he might have passed for a man at prayer. He was not praying. He was the floor the entire war stood on, and the floor was beginning to crack.

He did not fight. That was Batman’s work. The man moved through the link like a cold blade through water, taking the raw flood Erick offered and turning it into something usable, sorting voices, weighing reports, threading orders to the exact unit that needed them a half second before they knew to ask. To everyone receiving those orders, it felt like the hand of a single perfect commander reaching across the whole city. None of them felt the weight, because the weight did not fall on them. It fell on Erick, all of it, the way the full load of a bridge falls on the one beam no one ever sees.

Ninety minutes had passed since the first impact. He knew the number without checking it, the way a drowning man knows how long he has held his breath. Every minute that slid past did not just add to the exhaustion. It tipped the odds, quietly, toward the end of everything. Warworld hung in the sky where the sun should have been, a second and hateful star, and its presence bent the world out of true. Orbits dragged. Compasses wandered. Every clean channel of communication dissolved into noise the moment it opened, which was the whole reason the link mattered at all. The army had finally reached Metropolis, columns of armor grinding up the ruined arteries of the city, infantry pouring out behind them into streets that no longer had names. But the sky belonged to Mongul. No jet could climb into that interference and stay flying. No helicopter, no drone, nothing with a sensor in it survived more than a pass. The fight would be settled at street level or not at all.

When the ground forces arrived, the link nearly killed him.

He had braced for it and it still hit like an avalanche coming down a slope he was standing at the bottom of. Hundreds of new minds, every one of them trained and disciplined and absolutely soaked in adrenaline, slammed into the network in the space of a breath. Shouted coordinates. Casualty figures climbing too fast. The flat, repeated litany of men telling each other where to go and what they had just lost. His skull answered with a pain so total it had no single source, as though every nerve in his head had been threaded onto the same hot wire and pulled tight at once. He poured everything his training had ever given him into the work of not letting go, and the network held, barely, the way a rope holds at the exact fiber where it should snap.

The new arrivals bought breathing room at the front, and that room went straight to the heroes who needed it most. Starfire and Aqualad broke off and threw themselves back at the Warworld drones, the two of them cutting in fresh against an enemy that never tired. The ones who had held that line until now were close to finished. Erick could feel them through the link without wanting to, their powers guttering, their bodies marked by the relentless machines, every fighter running on the last reserve of something that was nearly gone. Only Red Tornado kept the position from collapsing outright, the android’s storms doing the work of a hundred soldiers. Cyclones tore the drones out of the air and folded them into scrap. Smaller funnels reached into the swarm and crushed whole clusters at once. But even that had a ceiling, and the swarm had no ceiling at all. The drones came in greater numbers every minute, an endless metal tide pouring from the underside of Warworld, and through every mind on that line ran the same buried thought, which Erick felt as clearly as his own: this cannot be held forever.

Superboy peeled away from the rescue work next, and that was its own kind of loss. He had been pulling civilians out of collapsed buildings with X-ray vision and bare hands, fast and precise where speed was the only thing that mattered. But something had gone wrong with Mongul in a way the whole network could feel. The tyrant was stronger than any record of him said he should be. Faster. A thing that had come down on Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel and simply refused to register their best.

That was what made it wrong. Superman had beaten this enemy once before, in a battle fought far from any camera, somewhere out past the edge of the system. In the middle of the present fight he had let Erick reach back through the link and borrow the memory of it, a few stolen frames meant to explain the impossible. The Mongul of that older fight had been a brute, broad and dangerous, but a man-shaped one. The creature swinging at them now stood better than three meters of yellow and purple muscle, his frame swollen past anything natural, the air around him seeming to warp under the sheer mass of what he had become. Comparing the two left no room for comfort. This was not the same enemy grown angry. It was the same enemy upgraded, and the upgrade was still running.

Even with his own mind tearing along its seams, Erick watched the central fight through three sets of borrowed eyes, his consciousness riding behind Superman, Wonder Woman, and the captain at once. They were giving it everything. Wonder Woman had gone up the monster’s back and locked her arms around the thick column of his neck, every Amazonian muscle in her body drawn to its limit, trying to choke the consciousness out of him by raw pressure alone. Superman worked the front at a speed that left afterimages, hammering ribs and abdomen and jaw in sequences fast enough to draw shockwaves out of the open air, each strike landing with a crack that carried for miles. Captain Marvel stood off Superman’s shoulder and filled the gaps with bolts of channeled magic, that crackling blue lightning of his pouring into the monster from every angle, the kind of force that should have cooked flesh down to the bone.

Mongul took all of it. The choke, the barrage, the lightning, none of it bought so much as a stagger. His huge body simply drank the punishment and stood there in it, and his laughter rolled out through the telepathic link like thunder heard from the far side of a valley, low and pleased and utterly unbothered.

Superboy hit him as a black streak, young face set hard. Mongul had cocked his arm for a cross aimed at Superman’s skull, and the boy chose that opening, vaulting clean over the monster’s shoulder and coming down on top of him with both hands locked into a single hammer, the full weight of a Kryptonian’s strength driven straight down. The blow snapped Mongul’s head violently to one side. The sound of it cracked across the ruined street, flesh and bone meeting force. And nothing. The impact might as well have landed on a wall poured for the purpose of stopping exactly this. Mongul’s head rolled back into place on its own, unhurried, and a slow and sadistic grin spread across the warped yellow of his face.

“Another toy,” he said, the words crawling through Erick’s mind on the same channel as the laughter. “Try not to break so fast.”

Superboy was still in the air when he saw the arm move, and the world stretched out long and slow the way it does just before something terrible. His vision smeared. The arm was almost lazy, a backhand thrown with the indifference of a man brushing off a fly, and behind that indifference rode a force he had no frame for at all. The blow caught him and the lights went out.

When they came back on he was more than five hundred meters from where he had been, folded into a crater that had been a corner store a moment ago. His body had punched through the front of it and stopped only when it reached the reinforced rear wall, which had refused to give, the one structure on the block stubborn enough to catch a thrown Kryptonian out of the air. He hung there, half buried in it, concrete and twisted shelving driven into his back, the dust still settling around him in a gray haze.

A long shard of rebar had gone into his chest, low and to the side. His shirt was gone, shredded to hanging rags, and his bared torso told the story plainly enough on its own, but his X-ray vision had flicked on without being asked and the truth of it was worse from the inside. A rib had broken clean. The free end of it had turned inward and now sat against the surface of his lung, a sharp white line of fracture that flared into white agony every time he tried to draw a full breath. He had not even understood the blow as it happened. One instant of casual contact and Mongul had folded him out of the fight, the way a man flicks a coin off a table.

The scream that came out of him was raw, an animal sound that rolled back down the gutted street. He tore himself free of the wall, and the store came apart as he did, masonry and brick and the wreck of the shelving raining around his feet. Blood and concrete dust caked his chest. The broken rib hammered him with every motion. He turned toward the distant fight and saw Mongul still standing easy against the three strongest figures in the League, handling all of them at once like a man holding a door against children, and for the first time in a long time Superboy felt something cold settle under his sternum next to the broken bone. Doubt. Real doubt, the heavy kind that does not move. He had thrown his full strength into that creature and learned, in the space of a single heartbeat, exactly how little it weighed.

Back at the center of the ruin, Erick felt all of it pass through him at once. Superboy’s flight and his fall. The rebar. The doubt, which was somehow louder in the link than the pain. He held a thousand panicked voices and one impossible monster and a city coming apart at the joints, and the rope of his mind frayed another fiber, and he did not let go.

He understood, in some quiet room of himself still standing, why he refused to. Powerlessness had a flavor and he had it in his mouth right now, the same one he had tasted in the swamp with Vertigo’s needles in his brain, the same one that had been chasing him since before he could properly remember why. He was tired of it. Not afraid, past afraid, simply done with ever feeling it again. So he stayed where he was, bleeding into his own collar, holding a network that had no business holding, because this was the price. The thing that would one day put him past the reach of any Mongul was not bought with one clean victory. It was paid for in nights like this one, in fibers, one at a time, by a man who would not put the weight down.