The axe of Steppenwolf came down with the speed of a being who had conquered worlds, devastating speed of absolute confidence in his own strength. His blade, forged in the furnaces of Apokolips, had carved through gods and monsters. It had ended civilizations. It had written history in blood.
Yet it passed through empty space.
Arthur was gone, not backward, not sideways, he stood three meters to the left, his hands clasped behind his back, his expression one of mild disappointment.
"Thousands of years of conquest," Arthur said, "and you still telegraph your swings."
Steppenwolf's eyes blazed. He pivoted, the axe reversing direction in a sweeping arc that should have bisected anything in its path.
Arthur stepped through the blade's trajectory like a man stepping through a doorway. The axe passed so close that Steppenwolf could have counted the threads in Arthur's shadow armor, but it did not touch him.
"What are you really trying to achieve here?" Arthur asked.
"Your death!" Steppenwolf roared.
He lunged, not swinging this time, but thrusting, the point of the axe aimed at Arthur's chest. The weapon's edge gleamed with the orange light of Apokolips's fire, hungry and eager for blood.
Arthur was behind him, Steppenwolf spun, axe raised,
Arthur was on the other side of the room, leaning against a console, arms crossed.
"Are you doing all of this," Arthur said, "just to hear 'good work' from Darkseid?"
Steppenwolf's face contorted with rage.
"You know nothing of loyalty, shadow!"
"I know loyalty." Arthur's voice was quiet. "I see it every day, in my Lanterns. In my shadows, in my family. In the people who chose to follow me when they could have chosen anything else."He tilted his head. "What you're describing isn't loyalty. It's desperation."
Steppenwolf threw his axe.
The blade spun across, a blur of dark metal and orange fire, aimed not at Arthur's body but at the space around him, anticipating his movement, predicting his teleportation.
Arthur caught it, with his hand.
The axe stopped dead, its blade inches from his face, its momentum stopped by fingers that didn't even tremble. Steppenwolf stared, frozen, as Arthur examined the weapon with the casual interest of a man examining a knife at a market.
"You do realize," Arthur said, "that you have no chance against me? No way of defeating me?"
He dropped the axe. It clattered against the floor, its edge chipped.
Steppenwolf's chest heaved. His hands, empty now, weaponless opened and closed at his sides.
"The reports from my Lanterns," Arthur continued, walking slowly toward him, "speak only of you. Not the other New Gods of Apokolips, not the Elite, not the Furies." He stopped a meter away. "Just you."
Steppenwolf said nothing.
"You know what that means, don't you?"
Still nothing. But Steppenwolf's weary eyes, flickered.
"You are a sacrifice," Arthur said. "A piece on a board, moved into position so that your master can see what I'm capable of. So that Darkseid can watch me kill you and learn everything he needs to know about how I fight, how I think, how I get rid of my enemies."
Steppenwolf's voice was a rasp. "You speak of things you do not understand!"
"Then please, do explain them to me."
Silence.
Arthur sighed. "I thought not."
He turned away, offering his back to a New God of Apokolips. Steppenwolf's hand twitched toward the fallen axe. His muscles coiled.
"I will not give him that pleasure," Arthur said, looking out at the stars beyond the viewscreen. "The only way Darkseid will understand what I can really do is for him to come for me himself."
"Do not speak his name casually!" Steppenwolf growled.
Arthur turned back.
"What a coward."
Steppenwolf moved, not for the axe this time, but for Arthur himself, his gauntleted fists swinging with enough force to shatter mountains. The blow would have crushed a lesser being's skull.
Arthur wasn't there.
"Using his followers as bait," Arthur said from across the bridge. "Watching from a distance while others do his dying. Sending you... you, to die in his place."
"ENOUGH!" Steppenwolf charged, sweeping his arm through the air, summoning a shockwave.
Arthur stood in the center of the shockwave, untouched, his shadow armor rippling.
"I congratulate you," he said softly. "Coward."
Steppenwolf's eyes went wide.
"Your efforts gave us plenty of information about Apokolips." Arthur's smile was thin, cruel, without mercy. "I'm sure your lord will be pleased."
The words hit harder than any blow.
Steppenwolf faltered just for a moment, just long enough for his guard to drop, for the fury in his eyes to flicker into something that looked almost like despair.
Arthur's fist slammed into his chest.
The impact was apocalyptic.
Steppenwolf flew backward across the ship not stumbling or rolling, he was flying, his body a projectile that tore through two command consoles, shattered a support pillar, and embedded itself in the far wall. His armor, the armor of a New God, forged to withstand gods bent. A crater formed in its chest plate, spiderwebbed with cracks that glowed with violet light.
Steppenwolf's thoughts scattered. 'What is this strength? This presence?'
He had stood in Darkseid's throne room, had felt the weight of the Omega Effect pressing against his soul, had knelt before a presence that could unmake reality.
This was the same.
'It's the same.'
'The same as...'
Arthur appeared beside him.
"Do not," the Shadow Monarch said quietly, "compare me to him."
His foot connected with Steppenwolf's face.
The horned helmet cracked. Steppenwolf's head snapped sideways, his vision swimming, his jaw, was broken, blood sprayed across the wall.
Arthur's invisible hand closed around Steppenwolf's ankle.
Ruler's Authority yanked him.
Steppenwolf was pulled from the wall, dragged across the ship, and delivered directly into Arthur's waiting fist. The punch caught him in the gut, doubling him over, lifting him off his feet.
He landed hard, gasping, tasting something that might have been his own organs.
'Get up... Get up... GET UP.' that's what he wanted to do.
Steppenwolf's hand found his axe, still on the floor where Arthur had dropped it, still glowing with the orange fire of Apokolips. He grabbed it, swung it upward with the last of his strength, aiming for Arthur's throat.
Arthur's hand closed around the blade.
Not the handle. The blade. The axe, the weapon that had conquered worlds, cracked. Fractures spread across its surface, Arthur's fingers tightened and then the axe shattered.
Steppenwolf stared at the pieces in his hands, at the hilt, useless now, connected to nothing. At the shards of blade scattered across the floor, their light fading, their power gone.
His eyes lifted to Arthur's face.
The Shadow Monarch's violet eyes burned.
"You are not even worthy," Arthur said, "to be called a warm-up."
He grabbed Steppenwolf by the throat.
And rose.
The Ship's ceiling armored, reinforced, designed to withstand orbital bombardment, ruptured. Arthur ascended through it like a blade through flesh, dragging Steppenwolf with him, shattering deck after deck, tearing through the mother ship's superstructure as if it were paper.
They emerged into space.
The void embraced them, cold and infinite. Behind them, the mother ship drifted, wounded, its hull gaping open, its lights flickering.
Arthur held Steppenwolf by the throat, suspended in the darkness between stars.
Steppenwolf's hands clawed at Arthur's grip, his legs kicked against the void, finding no purchase. His eyes looked into Arthur's and saw something that made even a New God of Apokolips feel small.
"Do you wish to share something about Darkseid?" Arthur asked. "Now's your chance."
Steppenwolf's jaw worked, his mouth opened.
Nothing came out except a groan, torn from somewhere deep in his chest.
Arthur watched him for a long moment.
"I thought as much," he said. "Cowardly, and loyal to someone who uses you as a dog."
He looked past Steppenwolf, into the void, into the darkness beyond the darkness. His eyes narrowed.
"At least my Lanterns will rest in peace now."
His hand tightened.
Steppenwolf's neck exploded in a spray of blood and fragments of bone, liberated from each other, scattered across the void, his body what remained of it drifted away, armor and flesh, tumbling end over end into the endless dark.
His head remained in Arthur's hand.
Arthur held it by one horn, dangling like a trophy. The face, frozen in its final moment, eyes still wide, mouth still open stared at nothing.
Arthur looked past it.
Into the void, even beyond the void.
To the place where something ancient and terrible watched from the space between spaces. Where a presence that had existed before stars were born sat on a throne of skulls and considered the fate of universes.
"I know you are watching," Arthur said. His voice carried across the void, "Darkseid."
He paused.
"The real one, behind the mere avatar."
The void did not answer.
But Arthur felt it, a pressure against his consciousness.
"That time will come," Arthur murmured.
He looked down at the head in his hand.
"Arise."
The shadows answered.
Darkness coiled around Steppenwolf's head, and a shape that was almost familiar to him emerged.
Shadow Steppenwolf knelt before Arthur in the void.
"My lord," the shadow of Steppenwolf said.
He bowed his head.
Arthur looked at him, at the thing he had made, the servant he had claimed, the enemy he had turned into a tool.
"Dismissed," Arthur said.
The shadow dissolved, fading into the void, returning to Arthur.
Arthur raised his hand to his ring.
"Lanterns," he said. His voice carried across the stars, through the void, to every shadow-ring in the universe. "Follow these coordinates."
He transmitted them.
"The mother ship of Steppenwolf. Seize it and keep it in Nyx." He looked at the wounded vessel behind him, its lights flickering. "We will have a use for this."
Acknowledgments flickered back, dozens of them, hundreds, a chorus of voices speaking in unison:
"As you command, Supreme Commander."
Arthur lowered his hand.
He looked at Steppenwolf's head still in his grip, still dangling by the horn, still staring at nothing.
And he threw it.
The head tumbled into the void, end over end, disappearing into the darkness between stars. It would float forever, perhaps. Or be found by some passing ship, some unlucky space traveler who would wonder what kind of being could do such a thing to a New God of Apokolips.
Arthur didn't care.
He looked one last time toward the place where Darkseid watched, the presence beyond the universe, the tyrant on the throne of evil, the enemy he had not yet met.
"Your move," Arthur said.
Then he was gone.
The void closed around where he had been, swallowing the last traces of violet light, leaving nothing but darkness and silence and the drifting remains of a conqueror who had finally met something he could not conquer.
/-\
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