Chapter 138 Where Conscience Begins

The black feather hovered above Gideon's bowed head, neither rising nor falling, yet it seemed to crush all of space and time beneath its weight.

Within the Garden of the End, everything was silent.

Superman's fist, swinging toward Gideon with the power to shatter stars and overturn the heavens, now moved as slowly as an old man's hand.

His blue eyes no longer reflected an enemy. They held the image of a red planet breaking apart.

The cries of countless Kryptonian babies crossed the gulf of death and time, gathering in his ears into a torrent of accusation.

Then the scene changed. A Gotham orphanage collapsed in flames. Criminals he had sent to Arkham, only for them to escape again and again, raised their blades over innocent children with vicious grins.

Krypton's destruction had been beyond his power to stop.

For Earth's tragedies, he had chosen "procedure" and "forgiveness."

Two kinds of anguish: one fate, one choice. Now they overlapped in his mind, becoming an invisible hammer that shattered the foundation of the beliefs he had taken such pride in.

For the first time, he discovered how unsteady a heart his body of steel contained.

"No..." Clark Kent murmured. The force of his punch stopped completely.

On the other side, the edge of Wonder Woman Diana's Godkiller sword froze less than an inch from Gideon's throat.

She could hear nothing outside. Only a gentle, weary whisper crossed the divide between the underworld and the living, sounding deep within her soul.

It was her mother, Queen Hippolyta's voice before she died.

"My daughter, you protect the mortal world with your life... But has the 'peace' you protect ever come at the cost of trampling some forgotten justice?"

The question sank into the core of her beliefs as precisely as the most venomous hydra's fang on Themyscira.

Was the peace she fought for truly absolute?

When she let villains go, did the peace that followed merely transfer the suffering to those less able to bear it?

The sword could advance no farther.

High above, Green Lantern John Stewart's ring of will gave a strained cry. Cracks spread like a web across the giant energy hammer.

In his mind, a top-secret recording forcibly sealed away by the Corps' leadership played over and over without mercy. A remote colony world had been invaded by the armies of Apokolips. Hundreds of millions of lives had cried out for help in the flames. The Green Lantern Corps had chosen to abandon the rescue to "preserve our main forces and serve the greater good."

That day, he had obeyed orders.

Today, the shrieks of those countless dead became the deepest fracture in his ring of will.

Crack!

The energy ring fractured, piece by piece.

The Flash, Artemis... Every member of the League faced the original sin buried deepest within them inside the Garden of the End.

They had not been beaten by Gideon's physical power. They had been judged by the bloody truths he exposed, the countless truths concealed beneath "great causes."

No one dared advance.

They stood frozen like statues forgotten by time, watching the blood-soaked fallen angel walk past them, calmly, one step at a time.

Gideon leaned on the black sword formed from his own bone and blood, his body stooped as he struggled forward.

With every step, he left a mark of divine blood and black fire, etched deep into Liberty Island's ruins.

A bloody mark with each step. Judgment with every one.

He approached no one. Slowly and steadily, he walked toward the broken base of the statue's torch—the tribunal they had prepared for him.

Far away, behind a shelter of twisted rebar, Captain Sponge, forcibly conscripted into service, clamped a hand over his mouth. His eyes held terror and a strange, inexpressible fervor.

He looked at the lofty "gods" who stood as still as though under a spell. Then he looked back at the man moving forward, for whom simply staying on his feet seemed to demand everything he had.

"Fuck..." he muttered, his voice shaking with excitement. "That bastard... At least he actually has the guts to act... What about us? We're just fucking standing here, watching these saints put on a show?"

He hesitated no longer. Silently, he removed the tracker from his wrist—a device custom-built by the Atom to monitor location and vital signs—and tossed it into a puddle nearby.

It gave a soft hiss. Without looking back, he turned and slipped into deeper smoke and shadow until he vanished completely.

At the same moment, in a safe house somewhere in Gotham, Kara Danvers watched the entire battle through a tiny drone. Her fingers flew across the keyboard.

She encrypted the footage she had just captured—the Justice League standing motionless while Gideon walked on, drenched in blood—and uploaded it live to a heavily trafficked darknet channel.

The video's title was a single, cold line:

"They're afraid of a man who tells the truth."

Inside the Garden of the End, Gideon could clearly feel the domain's power draining away.

The torrent of memories spanning countless ages was about to return to nothingness.

He had little time left.

He gave no further glance to the heroes trapped in self-doubt. Reaching his chosen spot, he thrust out his right hand and gripped the bronze feather-blade still embedded in his left shoulder, with a brutality close to self-mutilation!

Wet flesh tore.

Blood and torn tissue welled up. His face unchanged, he wrenched Artemis's weapon out of his bones.

Without pausing, he reversed his grip and drove the feather-blade, slick with his fallen divine blood, deep into the hard stone beneath his feet!

Then he drew a deep breath and reached with his left hand toward the enormous scar across his chest, the one that had been there since his exile.

A feather darker than night was stubbornly growing from the wound.

He tore it out by the root!

The pain made his body shudder. Yet he took the black feather, soaked in the blood of his very essence, and drove it into the huge crack at Liberty Island's center, fiercely and irrevocably, like the final nail hammered into a coffin!

A deep hum rang out.

The black feather took root. In the raging wind, it spread like an unfallen flag, snapping and fluttering!

Around it, in ground scorched by divine power and technology, a gray-white thorn resembling bone quietly broke through the earth. It curled around the black quill and stubbornly climbed upward.

At that moment, the Garden of the End abruptly dissolved.

A roar!

A long howl, as though from the dawn of the world, pierced the clouds.

The spectral form of an enormous hound, made of pure shadow and the remnants of a soul, flashed above Liberty Island. It gazed deeply in Gideon's direction, then raised its head and howled. The sound scattered the clouds across the sky.

Then it vanished as though it had never appeared.

It was the remnant soul of Shadowhowl, the hound of Heaven, sensing its old master's return.

Almost as soon as the domain faded, an old beggar in rags, reeking of sour filth and leaning on a crooked stick, hobbled into the ruins of the battlefield where gods and demons had fought.

Ignoring the superheroes who had just recovered from the psychic shock and still looked horrified, he walked to one side and picked up a black-feather fragment broken by the energy clash.

The old beggar, Prophet Joe, now had startlingly bright eyes beneath their usual cloudiness. He gripped the fragment in his palm and murmured, "The Judge... has finally awakened."

At Court of Shadows headquarters, a thousand miles away, intelligence chief Morris stared at the last image on the surveillance screen. That black-feather flag pierced his heart like a needle.

He clenched his fist and gave an order to the subordinate beside him, his voice low but firm:

"Activate Project Echo. Broadcast one sentence across the entire network."

"He didn't win—but none of us will ever be the same."

At the center of the battlefield, Gideon slowly raised his head. His fathomless eyes passed calmly over Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern... over every hero's face, marked by shock, confusion, and apprehension.

Without a word, he turned and dragged his battered body toward the deeper shadows, one step at a time. It looked ready to collapse at any moment.

His back remained bent, but his pride was something even gods could not break.

Behind him, above the ruins, the black feather stood firm in the howling sea wind.

The view drew farther and farther back. From above, across all of shattered Liberty Island, only one flag flew. Not the Stars and Stripes. Not the Justice League's emblem. It was a black feather belonging to a "loser," a symbol of absolute judgment.

Far away in the depths of the universe, seated on a throne in orbit around a dead moon, Darkseid saw Earth reflected in his scarlet eyes for the first time.

He murmured with a hint of cold approval:

"Interesting... This fallen one has begun to touch the rules themselves."

Night wind lifted the ash on Liberty Island and swept through its broken walls with a low moan.

The black feather remained driven deep into the cracked ground, snapping in the wind as though waiting for something—or declaring something.