Chapter 136 You Stand Alone Before the Court

The two blood-red characters finally congealed at the top of the stele. Thick and pungently sweet, warm as living things, they seemed freshly drawn from the depths of Hell.

The blue bridge of light stretched beneath Gideon's feet. Each step sent rings of energy rippling across its surface, as though he were walking on solidified time.

The North Sea's raging waves and winds were shut outside. Only an ancient, deathly silence remained, closing in from every side with a bone-deep chill.

He walked ahead, Constantine half a step behind. The cigarette between Constantine's fingers glowed and dimmed, but an unseen force kept its smoke from drifting away. It collected around him in a murky gray-white cloud.

"Bloody hell," Constantine muttered. His spirit-sight revealed something no ordinary person could have imagined. These sunken monastery ruins were not dead at all.

Every broken brick and waterlogged wall was entwined with countless fine black filaments like nerves. They converged beneath the dome upon the solitary stele, like a living heart taking slow breaths.

"This place isn't a tomb," he said hoarsely. "It's a living trap."

The instant Gideon stepped into the monastery's central courtyard, a searing agony stabbed through the deep black fissure in his right palm!

The pain went far beyond flesh. It felt as though something were tearing at his soul, trying to wrench his very essence out through the wound.

His face remained blank. Only his eyes changed, turning colder than the surrounding sea.

As he approached the ancient stele beneath the underwater dome, its worn, barely legible runes began to glow a dim red, one after another, from bottom to top.

The light was faint but charged with unnerving power. The air seemed to fill with the soundless whispers of countless dead souls. Not lamentations. A cold summons, calling the master of their contracts to take his place.

At last, Gideon stopped before the stele.

At that very moment, the two blood-drenched characters at its summit—Gideon—came alive!

The thick blood-script boiled like molten rock and suddenly dripped downward. In midair, it stretched and twisted into a blood-red chain burning with the fire of sin. With a shriek that could tear souls apart, it lashed toward Gideon's neck!

This was the judgment of the original infernal contract! Annihilation for anyone who dared rewrite the rules!

Constantine's expression changed sharply. He was about to begin an incantation when Gideon did something he would never forget.

Facing a chain of law capable of reaping a legendary demon in an instant, Gideon neither dodged nor flinched. He did not so much as bat an eye.

He merely raised his right hand with perfect precision and caught the chain an instant before it touched his skin!

Hiss!

Blood-red fire struck the black fissure in his palm with a piercing sound of annihilation.

The chain's power of sin scorched his hand, striving to reduce him to ash. It might as well have struck an ancient, immovable mountain of ice.

"My name," Gideon said without a flicker of emotion, as though stating a fact, "is not yours to touch."

The instant he spoke, black fire erupted from the fissure in his palm, purer than night and more silent than the void.

It was not a flame that burned matter. It was Silent Flame, which extinguished concepts.

The blood-red chain had no time even to cry out. It dissolved piece by piece in Gideon's hand, forced from embodied law into the most basic, meaningless particles of energy, until it vanished entirely.

He opened his hand as though brushing away a speck of dust.

Then he reached into his coat and took out the wax-tear crystal formed from Mary's final tear.

It still held a little warmth. In his cold hand, it was like a faint but stubborn heartbeat.

A tiny, inconspicuous recess in the stele's surface had almost been worn smooth by time.

Gideon curled his finger and set the wax-tear crystal firmly into it.

A perfect fit.

Boom!

The entire underwater ruin shook violently, along with the sea around it!

An entirely different energy seemed to pour into the stele. Its red glow was replaced at once by a gentle, compassionate white radiance.

In an instant, countless spectral chains of souls appeared above the dome, woven so tightly together that they blotted out the sky.

At the end of each chain struggled a spectral soul: every life swallowed and enslaved by infernal contracts over countless ages.

Gideon slowly closed his eyes.

He did not look at the chains. He simply allowed his power as an angel of judgment—tainted by the abyss, yet faintly purified by Mary's tears—to resonate with the stele at the deepest level.

Long-sealed memories broke through Heaven's shackles like floodwater through a shattered dam.

In the ancient days before time was recorded, he had been Heaven's Seventh Judge, holding the pen of law.

He had written the original code that balanced all realms. The infernal contracts were only a distorted, abused fragment of that code. He had once been the architect of order.

His supposed "fall" had not been a punishment.

It had been the first step toward severing his ties with a hypocritical Heaven and reclaiming his authority to judge independently.

An icy smile curved Gideon's lips.

"I didn't come here to run for my life..."

He spoke softly, but his voice carried through the lamentations of souls, clear in every corner.

"I came to collect."

Meanwhile, in Gotham, at Court of Shadows headquarters.

A piercing alarm tore through the data center's quiet.

Red warning boxes flashed wildly across dozens of holographic screens.

"Sir! Highest-level alert!" Sam Reed's voice came over the encrypted line, more urgent and shaken than ever. "We've just intercepted a live broadcast of an emergency UN Security Council meeting! The location... It's at the ruins of the Statue of Liberty in New York!"

The main screen changed at once. Around the remains of the Statue of Liberty, severed at the waist, the military and S.H.I.E.L.D.... no, ARGUS forces had established layer upon layer of cordons.

Seven figures stood like gods on a temporary platform before the ruins. The world's cameras were trained on them.

Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Cyborg... For the first time, all seven of the Justice League's giants stood assembled.

Superman was delivering a grave, somber statement to the cameras, announcing the immediate activation of the Resolution on Responses to Extradimensional Extraordinary Threats.

Then the armored Amazon princess, Diana of Themyscira... no. The woman on the screen was another Amazon, taller, wilder, and more fierce.

Her gaze was as sharp as a hawk's, and she held an ancient longbow.

It was Artemis, the Amazon representative who had taken Diana's place in the League.

Before the eyes of the world, she drew an arrow from the quiver on her back. Forged entirely from Olympian metal and covered with sacred ancient Greek inscriptions, it flashed as she hurled it!

Whoosh!

The arrow struck the exact center of the lectern. Its fletching hummed. The sacred power it radiated distorted the broadcast signal for an instant.

"We Amazons once followed the gods into battle against the Titans. We also dare to judge fallen gods with our own hands!" Artemis's voice rang out across the world through the amplifiers, absolute in its resolve. "Now a false god who has stolen a divine name and toyed with mortal souls must stand before the court!"

Morris appeared silently behind Sam. He stared at her battle-eager face and at the seven figures behind her, each representing the height of Earth's fighting power. His voice was slightly hoarse with tension.

"They've classified all of your actions around the world as 'a violation of the human order'..." He forced out the conclusion. "They aren't seeking negotiations. They aren't issuing a warning."

"They intend to put you on public trial."

Deep beneath the North Sea, in the sunken monastery.

Gideon's eyes snapped open. Black and white light intertwined deep within them before sinking into unfathomable stillness.

In his open right hand, the remaining fragments of law from the blood-red chain destroyed by Silent Flame gathered together again. They became a short broken length of chain with a metallic gleam.

At its end was an ancient, imposing emblem: scales and a sword suspended within a seven-pointed star.

It was the old mark of the Seventh Judge, long erased by Heaven.

He closed his fingers and gripped the broken chain tightly in his palm.

He turned. Without another glance at the stele now giving off gentle white light, or the spectral souls slowly growing calm overhead, he started back toward the bridge of light.

His pace was unhurried, but each step seemed to fall upon the world's pulse, firm as iron and heavy as a mountain.

"Oi!" Constantine could no longer hold back as he watched that resolute figure leave. He took a fierce drag on his cigarette and threw the butt into the bottomless trench below. "Are you really fucking planning to face those seven monsters alone?"

Gideon did not turn.

"I've always been alone."

His quiet voice crossed the deathly silence and reached Constantine's ears, stirring a storm inside him.

"Only now, at last, someone is willing to hear my footsteps."

Beneath the night sky, Liberty Island became the focus of the world.

Sea wind swept through the broken ruins, carrying the sharp smells of smoke and dust.

Gideon stood alone atop the shattered base of the Statue of Liberty's torch. His ragged black wings held firm in the gale like a battle flag that would never fall.

Farther out, the bright blockade formed by dozens of warships lit the ruins as clearly as day.

Above, military satellites invisible to the naked eye had already completed their global target lock.

The air carried an oppressive disturbance: kryptonite dust, concentrated magic-suppression fields, and the distinctive energy of countless advanced weapons charging.

This was a cage built for a god. An execution ground made for him alone.

Gideon slowly took off the black coat already torn by successive battles and let the wind carry it into the dark sea.

His upper body lay bare. Across that near-perfect form, an enormous, hideous scar ran from his left shoulder to the right side of his abdomen.

The scar seemed alive. Faint traces of Heaven's holy light still moved and burned within it. It was the Brand of Exile, cut into him by Michael's own hand when he was cast out.

He raised his right hand, with its black fissure, and gently brushed the old wound that would never heal.

Then he curled his fingers and lit a small, deep-black flame at their tips. It pulsed without a sound.

"You call me a false god?"

He spoke softly, yet his words carried clearly above the wind and waves, as though sounding directly inside every surveillance device and every person's mind.

"Very well..."

The black flame slowly rose from his fingertips, reflected in eyes that held no fear, only endless cold. It was like the first spark at the opening of the world's final act.

"Then tonight, I'll burn through your temples with the truth."