Chapter 623: Betrayal?
Arthur drove his spear between Nidhogg’s eyes with everything the last seven days had left him, and the violet lightning along its length did not simply strike. It poured and it punched through the serpent’s skull, out through the underside of its jaw, and then it spread, racing along every crack in those ruined scales until the whole colossal body was lit from the inside like a lantern made of bone. For one suspended moment the creature’s shape was nothing but a silhouette of white-violet fire hanging against the Abyss.
Then the roar cut off.
The serpent’s head sagged. Its jaw went slack. The great coils that had been wrapped through the sky for a week stopped thrashing and simply hung there, and the silence that followed was so complete that the army below lowered their weapons without being told to, thousands of faces tilting upward in the dead light.
"Is it..." Clark started. He had floated back a few feet, chest heaving, one hand still half raised as though he didn’t trust the stillness. "Arthur, is it finished?"
"No," Arthur said.
He hadn’t loosened his grip on the spear. His eyes were fixed on the wound, and Clark, following his gaze, felt his stomach turn over.
The hole was closing.
It wasn’t healing the way flesh heals. Threads of black matter crept out of the torn edges and stitched themselves together, scale folding over scale, bone knitting itself back into the shape of a skull. The lightning guttered and went out. And beneath the lids that had been dim with exhaustion a moment earlier, two eyes ignited, redder and angrier than before.
"That was a killing blow," Clark said, his voice thin. "That should have..."
"It should have killed anything else that has ever lived," Arthur agreed quietly. "That’s the point. I wanted you to see it with your own eyes, Clark. Break its body, burn it, cut it in half, and it simply learns the shape of the wound, you can’t end it by destroying what it wears."
Nidhogg answered him by lunging.
Arthur was already pinned in place, the spear still lodged in its head, and the serpent’s jaws opened wide enough to swallow a skyscraper. Clark moved before he’d consciously decided to. He hit the creature’s snout from the side and caught it with both arms, boots gouging invisible furrows through the air as he dug in, every muscle in his body screaming.
"Arthur!" he bellowed through gritted teeth. "Whatever you’re about to do, do it now! I can’t hold this thing forever!"
"You won’t have to." Arthur let go of the spear. It dissolved into sparks, and he lifted both hands, and the Abyss that had been hanging over the sky for seven days answered him like something that had been waiting for exactly that gesture.
The darkness contracted. Every shadow in the World of Chaos, every pool of black in every crater and fissure, bled upward and inward, converging on the serpent in a spiraling vortex. Pale hands unfolded out of the black, hundreds of them, then thousands, closing around Nidhogg’s body, its throat, its limbs. The serpent screamed, and this time the sound had fear in it. It tore at the dark with claw and fang, and for a long moment the whole battlefield shook as ancient power fought ancient power.
"Clark, let go!" Arthur shouted. "Now!"
Clark let go and threw himself backward, and the Abyss closed over the serpent.
Nidhogg’s body came apart into streaming ribbons of black. They didn’t scatter, they flowed toward Arthur in a single, roaring river, pouring into his chest, his open palms, and the serpent’s furious voice dwindled with them, from a roar to a snarl to a whisper that Arthur alone could hear. His body went rigid. Veins of crimson crawled across his skin beneath the violet glow and burned there, flickering, struggling.
Then his eyes closed.
The last thread of darkness slid into him. The Abyss thinned, curled in on itself, and was gone, and the sky of the World of Chaos returned to its own bruised and broken colors. Arthur hung in the air with his head bowed and his arms limp at his sides, the cracked remnants of his armor flaking away like ash.
"Arthur?" Clark was at his side in an instant, one hand hovering near his shoulder, afraid to touch. "Arthur, talk to me. Are you alright?"
Two streaks of light came tearing across the sky. Kara arrived first, favoring her left side, her hair plastered with dried blood, and Raven came a breath behind her with her cloak in tatters and her eyes ringed with exhaustion.
"Is he..." Raven began.
"Arthur!" Kara grabbed his forearm. "Hey, look at me, say something, please..."
His eyes opened.
Violet. Steady. Calm as a still lake.
"Of course I’m alright," Arthur said, and smiled, tired and warm and entirely himself.
Kara’s knees nearly gave out. She laughed, a cracked, breathless sound, and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. "Don’t do that to me. Don’t ever go quiet like that again."
"Nidhogg?" Raven asked, searching his face.
"Quiet," Arthur said. "For now. It’s a loud tenant, and it will complain about the accommodations for a long time. But it isn’t going anywhere." He tapped two fingers lightly against his temple. "I’ve lived with louder."
Below them, the fighting had already ended a long time ago. Without the serpent to cover them, the Rulers’ heavenly soldiers had been defeated. A roar rolled up from the battlefield, ragged and triumphant. The creature the Rulers had unleashed was sealed. Their army was in ruins. Seven days of brutal fighting had finally, impossibly, come to an end.
Arthur let the sound wash over him for a few seconds. Then he looked at the three people hovering around him, one after another. Clark, bloodied and cape-less. Kara, shaking with exhaustion alongside Raven.
He nodded once.
Clark’s expression tightened. "Arthur. Are you sure this is the right way to do this?"
"No," Arthur said honestly, and rolled his shoulders, drawing the last scraps of his shadow armor tighter around himself. "But I’m sure it will work. So just trust me."
Kara and Raven traded a glance, and Kara’s face crumpled. "I don’t think I can do it," she said, so quietly it was barely a sound. "Arthur, I can’t. Not you. Not even pretending."
"If you can’t," Arthur said gently, "then we won’t be speaking again, Kara. The Rulers won’t stop until the world is safer without every Monarch in it." He held her gaze. "I need you to hit me like you mean it."
"That’s not..." Kara’s voice caught. She looked at Raven, then at Clark, then back at him, her eyes shining. "That’s not fair."
"Very well," Clark said, before it could become a longer conversation.
He moved.
His fist crossed the distance between them like a falling mountain, and Arthur caught it on a crossed forearm. The impact boomed across the broken sky, a shockwave that rolled outward and shook the clouds, and every face on the battlefield below turned upward in shock.
"Sorry," Clark muttered, so low that only Arthur could hear.
"Don’t be," Arthur murmured back. "Mean it, Clark."
Clark’s eyes hardened. "You’ve gone too far, Arthur!" he shouted, loud enough to carry. "You and your Abyss, you and your armies! Did you really think no one would notice what you’ve become?"
"Come at me, Superman." Arthur answered, equally loud, his voice cold.
Behind them, Raven stared at the two men colliding in the sky, and her hands curled into fists at her sides. "You have to make it very convincing, Kara," she said. "Come on. Arthur knows what he’s doing. He’s always known what he’s doing." She drew a shaky breath, and her eyes began to burn with dark power. "We do this, we get through it."
"Fine," Kara whispered. "Fine."
She went in.
On the ground, a long way from the sky, the Monarchs’ armies had stopped cheering.
The roar had faded into confused murmuring that rippled outward from the front lines. Shadow soldiers stood with weapons half raised, their glowing eyes fixed on the sky where the Monarch of Shadows, was being struck at from three directions at once. They shifted. They looked to one another. But nothing moved them forward, held where they stood by an instruction Arthur had set in place long before this day.
Zatanna watched it all with her hands folded in front of her, her expression carefully neutral. "It seems the plan is underway," she said at last.
"I hate that it’s underway," Beast Boy said. He was still in his towering wolf form, shifting from paw to paw. "I really hate that it’s underway. Why do I have to be the one who goes and gets punched by the guy who made me a monarch?"
"Because you volunteered," Frost said. "Sort of."
"I was voluntold!"
"Same thing." Frost cracked her knuckles and frost bloomed across her fingers, crackling in the dead air. "Come on, Zee. Arthur’s the one who said it has to look real. And he’s the one who picked the moment."
"He did pick a good one," Zatanna admitted, her gaze sharpening. "Everyone’s exhausted. Everyone’s convinced they’ve won. If the Rulers are watching, and they are, they’ll think this is the perfect opening to finish the job themselves." She drew a breath and lifted her chin. "So let’s give them a show. Come on, you two. Give Arthur a beating, if you can."
"I’ll try to stay alive," Beast Boy muttered, and leapt.
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