Shadow Monarch in DC

The crater from the last collision between Galatea and Beru was still settling, dust hanging in the air, when they came at each other again and this time there was no strategy left in it, no dance, no feints. Just two exhausted, battered shadow soldiers refusing to be the first to stop.

Fist met fist. Claw met forearm. Beru’s remaining talons raked across Galatea’s ribs and she answered with a hook to his jaw that snapped his head sideways; he retaliated with a strike to her thigh that buckled her knee, and she drove an elbow into his skull before the leg had even finished giving way. Neither of them dodged anymore. There wasn’t enough left in either of them to dodge. It had become simpler than that a trade, blow for blow, punishment for punishment, each hit landing because neither one could afford the fraction of a second it would take to avoid it.

Above, on the arena’s edge, the Marshals who had already fought or hadn’t yet watched in various states of stillness.

Ultra’s arms were folded, his eyes narrowed with something between admiration and concern. "They’re not fighting like proper soldiers anymore," he muttered. "They just don’t want to lose."

"Indeed," Bellion said simply, his gaze steady. "Neither of them has lost a battle in front of him before.."

H’El watched with his arms loose at his sides, his expression unreadable in that particular Kryptonian way that made it impossible to tell whether he was impressed or simply bored.

Igris stood a little apart from the others, one hand resting on the pommel of his sheathed sword, his eyes tracking every exchange with quiet, professional intensity. "Galatea has improved a great deal," he said, mostly to himself, though Ultra glanced over at the words. "Her training under me clearly yielded results. Beru is not an easy opponent to read, his movements defy pattern by design and yet she is countering him with real precision now, not raw force alone." A faint note of pride touched his voice. "She has learned to see him."

And beside them all, silent, arms crossed over a chest built like a tank of shadow bones, Doom simply watched. He did not speak, he could not speak, but his eyes tracked every motion in the arena below with an intensity that needed no words to convey.

Below, the fight reached its breaking point.

Galatea’s eyes flared, and this time the heat vision came not as a sweeping arc but as a single, point-blank burst, fired at a range too close for Beru to escape the beam tore across the side of his head and sheared one of his mandibles clean away in a spray of shadow and smoke. He shrieked, a raw, furious sound, and in the same instant drove his claws forward on pure reflex, burying them into her stomach, a brutal impact that folded her forward around the strike.

For a moment, neither moved.

Then Galatea’s hand shot out and closed around his claw-arm.

She tore.

The limb came away at the joint, Beru’s scream tearing across the arena as she discarded it without ceremony, her other hand already closing around his throat before he could react to the loss. And then she was airborne, carrying him with her, ascending faster than sound in a streak of black and violet that punched a hole through the low-hanging twilight clouds above the arena and at the peak of that climb, she twisted, and dove.

They struck the arena floor together like a falling star.

The impact didn’t just crater the ground, it swallowed it, a pit forty feet deep and easily two hundred across, walls of shattered obsidian slumping inward, a shockwave that rolled outward and knocked shadow soldiers off their feet three streets away. Dust and smoke boiled up from the crater in a column that briefly blotted out the violet sky entirely.

When it cleared, Beru lay at the bottom, unmoving, half his body a mess of slowly knitting shadow wounds, one entire arm gone, his breathing shallow and ragged. He could not get up. He didn’t have the strength left to try.

Galatea stood a few feet away, swaying, her own left arm missing at the shoulder, black shadow-matter creeping slowly, painfully across the wound as it began, inch by inch, to regenerate. But she was standing. That was the difference. That was the whole of it.

Beru’s remaining violet eye rolled toward her, dim with exhaustion, and after a long moment, his voice came out cracked, stripped of all its earlier venom.

"...It is my loss."

Galatea tilted her head, something almost gentle in the motion. "What did you say, bug?"

His remaining claw dug into the shattered stone, his whole body trembling with something that was less rage now and more sheer, wounded pride. "Don’t make me repeat... it!" he screamed, the words tearing raw out of his ruined throat, echoing up out of the crater and across the silent arena.

Galatea’s mouth curved, it was not mockery this time, it was warmer.

"You fought well, Beru."

From the platform above, Arthur’s voice rolled out over the wreckage, carrying easily to every corner of the arena. "Both of you fought well," he said. "That was a brilliant display of skill."

He raised one hand, and the restriction he had placed on their regeneration and everything else simply ceased. The effect was immediate. Beru’s severed arm surged back into being in a rush of shadow and violet light, bone and chitin knitting themselves whole in seconds; Galatea’s shoulder did the same, black matter flowing and solidifying until the limb hung whole and unmarked at her side, as though it had never been torn away at all.

Both of them rose. Both of them turned toward the platform, and in perfect, wordless unison, bowed low.

"Thank you, my Monarch," they said together.

"My, they seem to be on good terms now," Didi said.

Arthur inclined his head to them both, and for a moment something almost soft crossed his face before he turned it back toward the rest of his gathered Marshals.

"Have you all decided on your opponents?"

Igris stepped forward first. He bowed low at the waist. "I shall fight Doom."

Beside him, without a sound Doom lowered himself onto one knee, head bowed, accepting the challenge in the only language he possessed.

A ripple of murmurs ran through the watching shadows.

Arthur’s eyes moved between the two of them, something sharpening in his gaze. "This will be an interesting match."

Didi drifted closer. "Your knight seems very brave," she said, "and very confident, to challenge what is probably one of the strongest beings in your entire army."

Arthur allowed himself a small smile. "Igris’s battle experience is not something to underestimate. Centuries of it, against enemies that would have unmade lesser warriors. But Doom’s adaptation is unstoppable as well, the longer a fight goes, the more he understands, the harder he becomes to touch, Igris needs to be very quick if he wants to truly defeat him." He watched the two of them take the arena floor. "This will be a good one to watch."

With a slow gesture, Arthur swept his hand across the ruined battlefield below, and the arena answered him shattered stone knitting itself back together, the crater sealing, the scorched and cratered floor smoothing once more into an unbroken expanse of black stone, as though the battle before it had never happened at all.

Doom and Igris took their positions at the center of the restored floor.

Every eye in the arena turned toward them the crowd of watching shadows, the Marshals who had already fought, Beru and Galatea still catching their breath at the edge of the field, all of it fixed on the two figures standing opposite each other in the twilight.

Igris drew his blade, the Demon King’s longsword, lightning already beginning to crackle and hiss along its edge in response to its wielder’s rising focus and settled into a low, ready stance, sword angled before him.

Doom did not move. He simply stood, massive and silent, arms loose at his sides now, patient, and from the platform above, Arthur’s gaze swept over them both one final time.

"Ready?"

Silence answered him, the taut, breathless silence of an entire shadow kingdom holding still.

Arthur’s hand rose to the great shadow bell, and brought it down.

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