Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0123

Chapter 123

Erick watched the fight from inside four bodies at once, and it was tearing him apart faster than anything Mongul could have done with his hands.

It was nothing like watching four screens. Through the link the heroes did not arrive as separate feeds he could glance between. They arrived layered, four fields of vision pressed over one another, four sets of nerves reporting four different agonies into the same overloaded skull, and somewhere beneath all of it he still had to be Erick. Superman’s cracked ribs ached in his own chest. Wonder Woman’s knuckles split against something that refused to give. Captain Marvel’s borrowed lightning ran down arms that were not his and left them numb. Superboy’s broken rib, which had not finished knitting from the blow that put him through a storefront, ground with every breath the boy took. Erick felt each of those wounds as if they had been carved into him personally, and on top of them sat the older, heavier load of holding hundreds of minds in formation so the city would not fall apart while its defenders bled.

He had not moved from where he dropped. He sat folded on the broken stone at the center of the ruined district, his green body shaking with a fatigue that had stopped being physical a long time ago. The blood that ran from him pooled dark on the cracked ground and caught the diseased glow of Warworld hanging where the sun should be. One thought would have ended it. One quiet decision to close the link, and the pain would stop. He kept the link open, because the four of them were still trying, and someone had to hold the war on his shoulders while they did.

Through Superman’s eyes he watched Superboy throw everything he had into the monster and accomplish nothing. The boy was the weakest of the four by a wide margin and the fight made no secret of it. His fists landed on Mongul’s enormous torso with the full weight of Kryptonian muscle behind them, each strike cracking the air with a shockwave, and the tyrant absorbed them the way a mountain absorbs rain. Worse, Mongul kept pace with the boy’s speed. He read every attack before it arrived and slid through them with a lazy, predatory ease, as though he stood at the still center of the fight while everyone else flailed in slow motion around him.

Superman himself was failing in a way Erick had never seen him fail. His uniform hung in cut ribbons. Bruises the color of storm clouds spread across skin that was supposed to take a missile without marking. His ribs gave a wet creak each time he turned. He answered the only way he had left, with heat vision, twin lances of red light shrieking out of his eyes and burning straight into the exposed meat of Mongul’s chest, trying to bore a hole through the thing and cook whatever lay behind it. The stink of seared flesh poured into the link, acrid enough to make Erick gag in a body sitting half a city away. And it meant nothing. The smoking crater Superman opened in that chest closed before the smoke had finished rising, fresh muscle spooling back into place, new skin pouring over it, the whole wound simply un-happening in the span of a breath. Erick had seen healing factors before. He had nothing to set beside this. And in the flashes of memory Superman let slip through the link, the older Mongul did not heal like this at all. The difference was not an improvement. It was a different category of creature wearing the same name.

Wonder Woman had given up on the chokehold. Nothing was working, so she had moved to her fists, and she threw them with a precision sharpened over centuries of war. She came off the ground with each strike, driving into his jaw, his temple, the bridge of his nose, a sequence of blows that detonated the air between her knuckles and his face. When the head took nothing she went for the frame, hammering ribs and spine and the wall of his gut, every impact landing like artillery. It changed nothing. Superman could not break him. Captain Marvel could not break him. She, stronger than neither, was not about to be the one who did, and her best hits faded from his skin before she could draw back her arm for the next.

The captain stood off the line and gave it the only thing he had not spent yet, calling down the storm. Thunder rolled across a sky that held no clouds. The air went thick with ozone and the metallic taste of building charge, and then the lightning broke loose from his chest and converged on the tyrant in a single cataract of blue and white fire, divine current that should have reduced living matter to vapor. Through Superman’s X-ray sight Erick watched what it actually did. Bone splintered and reset. Torn fiber rewove itself. Charred tissue sloughed away and grew back clean underneath. From the first second of the battle to this one, every wound the strongest beings on Earth had inflicted had been undone almost as fast as it was made. They were not fighting an enemy. They were pouring themselves into a well with no bottom.

Then Superboy bought them a moment the only way he could, with mass and desperation. He tore a fuel truck off the ruined avenue, one of the heavy diesel haulers brought in to keep the army’s reinforcements running, and hurled it overhand. The vehicle spun across the open ground and folded around Mongul’s torso with a shriek of crushed steel, and a half second later the tanks went up. The fireball swallowed the tyrant whole, orange and black climbing forty meters into the choked sky, a wave of heat rolling out hard enough to make even Superman flinch back a step. The blast kicked the ground and sent new cracks racing out through asphalt that had nothing left to break.

Mongul walked out of the fire.

He came through the wall of flame unhurried and unmarked, the way a man steps out of a hot shower, the burning fuel sliding off skin that had not so much as blistered. His voice came through the link soaked in contempt, and there was something almost intimate about how bored he sounded.

“Disappointing.” His red eyes found Superman across the burning ground. “The last time we did this, you were interesting. I almost remember it fondly. Now I look at the four of you and I feel nothing at all.”

He let the silence stretch, savoring it, his teeth gleaming in the dying flames.

“That is the curse of real power. The whole universe turns soft in your hands. Nothing holds its shape long enough to be worth breaking.”

He did not run at them. One instant he stood inside the fire, and the next he was simply among them, his bulk crossing the distance faster than the eye could follow. His hand closed over Superman’s entire head, fingers thick as roots wrapping the invulnerable skull, and he lifted the Man of Steel off his feet with the indifference of a man picking up a tool he meant to use briefly and discard. He turned the dangling hero toward the others almost helpfully, as if presenting an example.

“Is this everything?” he asked. “You have done nothing to me. Truly nothing. Show me there was a reason this took an hour.”

Erick was watching now through Captain Marvel’s eyes, and from that angle he saw the smoke begin. It rose from where Mongul’s palm gripped Superman’s face, thin gray threads thickening fast, the air around the hand shimmering with heat. Mongul tilted his head toward his captive, and his smile turned warm in a way that was far worse than any snarl.

“Go on,” he said gently. “Show me. Burn me. Use all of it.”

The smoke poured thicker. The smell of cooking meat flooded the link, and for ten full seconds Mongul stood there and let Superman pour heat vision into his open hand at point-blank range, the way a man might let a child wear itself out hitting him. Alien flesh bubbled and ran. Layers of it sloughed off and dripped. The bones of the fingers screeched and blackened and showed white through the ruin, the entire hand reduced to a melting claw clamped over Superman’s skull.

Mongul looked at it without interest.

“Pathetic,” he said, and threw the hero away like refuse. Superman hit the street hard enough to punch through it, crashed down into the sewer main below, and kept going another ten meters into the earth, the impact opening a crater that swallowed him in a column of dust and broken pipe.

The tyrant turned to Captain Marvel and lifted the wreck of his hand between them, holding it up almost as an invitation to watch. The melted claw was already reversing itself. New bone surfaced under the char, fresh muscle laced across it, clean skin closed over the top, and in seconds the hand was whole again, unscarred, as though the last ten seconds had been a thing he had imagined.

“I hope,” Mongul said, flexing the new fingers, “that you have something better in you.”

Captain Marvel set his feet and went at him. The hero’s whole body lit, that storm-blue light flooding from his eyes, the great bolt blazing across his chest at a brightness that hurt to look at even through the link. The cloudless sky answered with thunder, the air screaming with magical charge, and he drove that power down his arms and into his fists and began to hit. Each blow carried enough divine force to unmake matter. Mongul stood and took them. He did not block, did not slip, did not bother to brace. He simply let the storm break against his torso and watched the captain with the patient, faintly amused expression of a man waiting for a tantrum to end.

Wonder Woman seized the opening. She drew her shield off her back and her sword from its sheath, and now she fought with edges instead of fists, and for the first time something cut. The god-forged blade opened deep wounds across his flesh, and the rim of the shield cracked bone where it landed. For an instant Erick let himself hope. Then the wounds drew shut behind the blade as fast as she could open new ones, the cuts sealing in real time, and the only lasting damage she managed was to his clothing, the alien fabric falling away from his body in smoldering shreds while the body beneath it stayed flawless.

Superboy threw himself back in alongside her, fighting through the rib that screamed in his chest, hammering Mongul from every direction at the limit of his speed. Jabs, elbows, knees, a blur of impacts that turned the air around the tyrant into a single roar. None of it registered on the creature’s face. In the span of a minute the boy landed more than a thousand strikes and the count meant nothing. Captain Marvel, faster and stronger, put ten times that into the same body in the same minute, and the body did not care. Wonder Woman’s blade flashed without rest beside them and left not a single mark that outlived the swing.

From the rubble at the center of the ruin, holding all four of them inside his fracturing mind, Erick understood the thing none of them had said aloud yet. They were not losing. Losing implied the fight was still being fought. Mongul was standing in the middle of the three strongest fighters on the planet, letting them spend everything they had, and he was bored.