DC: One for All Chapter 3 — Darkseid (Patreon)

Green Lantern summoned a massive tennis racket and swung it in a wide arc that caught the first parademon across the chest and launched it back through the air into two more behind it, all three of them crumpling against the warehouse wall. He spun the racket around and brought it down overhead on a fourth that had been diving at him from above, swatting it into the concrete floor hard enough to crack the foundation.

"Oh you want some too?" he shouted at the next wave coming through the portal, swinging the racket backhand and sending another one pinwheeling into the shelving unit. He batted another away and ducked under the claws of another, then sidestepped a third, but the fourth one came in where he wasn't looking and slammed both fists into the center of his back. Green Lantern's shield flickered and he went forward crashing into a cluster of parademons that had been regrouping near the far wall.

"There's too many of them!" he shouted as he blasted his way out of the pile, a dome of green energy expanding outward and throwing bodies in every direction. 

A parademon lunged at Batman from behind and he dropped into a back handspring, both feet coming up and catching the creature under the chin as he flipped, the momentum carrying him up and over its head. He landed on its back as it staggered, grabbed the edges of its wings, and rode it upward as it tried to shake him off, spiralling toward the warehouse ceiling. 

At the apex of its climb he pulled three batarangs from his belt and hurled them in a fan pattern into the densest cluster of parademons below. The explosions went off in rapid succession and Batman kicked off the parademon's back and grappled to a ceiling beam as the creature spiralled down.

"We need to figure out how to close the portal," Batman called out as he swung from the beam and landed in a crouch on top of a shelving unit, already pulling more batarangs from his belt.

"LEAVE IT TO ME," Superman roared from across the warehouse as his eyes blazed red and twin beams of heat vision swept across the room cutting through half a dozen parademons at the waist, their upper and lower halves separating and tumbling through the air in opposite direction. He killed the beams, caught an incoming parademon by the face with one hand, drove his fist through its chest and out the back, and then swung the body around and hurled it into a group of five more that were charging from his left, scattering them like pins. 

He turned toward the portal and launched himself at it, flying straight into the densest part of the swarm, parademons bouncing off him like insects hitting a windshield.

"Jeez I'm supposed to have retired from all this shit..." David muttered. 

[One for All: 10%]

Gold lightning crackled across his body as he jumped backward, the claws of a parademon slicing through the air where his chest had been a fraction of a second earlier, he planted his foot on the creature's outstretched arm and kicked off it, the force shooting the parademon backward across the warehouse floor while simultaneously launching David up into the air where he collided shoulder-first with another one that had been diving at him from above. They hit each other hard enough that the parademon's armour cracked across the sternum and it folded around him before he shoved it away and dropped back to the ground.

"I was ready to call this whole thing a wash," David said through gritted teeth as two more came at him from opposite sides. He caught the first one's arm and redirected its momentum into the second, smashing them into each other, then spun and drove his heel into the tangled pair and sent them both skidding across the floor. "I was going to go home. I was going to sit in my shitty apartment and drink myself to sleep and not do this shit."

Three more roared and came at him. He ducked the first one's swing, drove an uppercut into the second one's chin that snapped its head back and lifted it off its feet, caught the third one's wrist as it grabbed for him and twisted until he heard the joint pop before pulling it forward into a knee strike that caved in its chest plate. He let the body drop and turned just in time to see the first one coming back at him, he stepped into its charge and hit it with a straight right that snapped its head sideways and the rest of its body followed, the whole thing spinning through the air and crashing through the warehouse wall into the street outside.

David looked up at the dozen more parademons that were pouring through the portal.

This was going to be a long day. 

A parademon tackled him from behind driving him forward through the hole he'd already made, the two of them bursting out of the warehouse and into the open air of the Metropolis waterfront. David twisted mid-flight, got his legs around the creature's torso, and wrenched sideways, slamming it into the pavement and rolling free. 

He came up to his feet just in time to see Green Lantern come flying out of a different section of the warehouse wall, a green shield flickering around him as four parademons clung to it and hammered at the surface with their fists.

Green Lantern hit the ground, bounced and rolled, the parademons still swarming, and then more came from above piling on top of him until all David could see was a mound of armoured bodies and the fading green glow underneath them.

Batman burst through the warehouse roof riding the back of another parademon, his cape spread wide behind him. He pulled a disc-shaped charge from his belt and slammed it against the creature's back before leaping off and letting his cape catch the air. 

BOOM

The charge detonated a second later, the parademon disintegrating in a ball of fire and shrapnel, Batman used the blast wave to carry him further, pulling batarangs and throwing them mid-glide, each one finding a target in the swarm below, explosions blooming across the street in a chain.

He landed on the roof of a car before surveying the scene.The sky above Metropolis was full of these alien creatures. 

Hundreds of them.

"This isn't just an isolated incident," Batman said as his lenses narrowed. "This is worldwide... this is what the plan was the whole time... a full invasion."

Green Lantern erupted out of the pile of parademons in a nova of green light, sending bodies flying everywhere, and before they could regroup he manifested a six-barrelled minigun the size of a car and opening fire. Green bullets tore through the swarm in a continuous stream cutting down parademon after parademon, their bodies tumbling out of the air and hitting the street below.

"NOTHING I CAN'T HANDLE," Green Lantern  shouted over the roar of his own weapon, swinging the minigun and mowing down another wave.

"I guess we should all go home then," David said as he rolled his shoulders and pressed his palms into the small of his back, trying to work out a knot that had been building since that morning. 

He was breathing harder than he should have been and his arms were aching in a way they hadn't been when he was eighteen. 

He was really out of practice. 

Two years of stakeouts and drinking and letting One for All gather dust had dulled him in ways he hadn't fully appreciated until right now. 'I should start going on my exercise bike again,' he thought before a massive explosion tore him out of his thoughts. 

BOOM

The sound came from inside the warehouse, and all of them turned toward it just in time to see Superman come rocketing out of the building backwards. He crossed the street in about a second and a half before slamming into the side of a high-rise, the impact cratering the concrete around his body and sending glass cascading down to the street below.

Superman then fell out of the crater and dropped. He fell four storeys before Green Lantern threw a construct under him, a green bed that caught him and bent under his weight like a trampoline. Superman lay on his back on it, one hand pressed against his chest, breathing hard.

Batman fought his way across the street, throwing a batarang into a parademon that dove at him and clotheslining another with his grapple line, before dropping down beside the construct platform. "Were you able to close the portal?"

Superman pushed himself up to sitting with a grimace, his hand still on his chest. "No," he said frustratedly. "The moment I got close enough to touch it, some kind of energy discharged into me." He looked down at his hand and flexed it. "I've never felt anything like it."

"I guess it's the old fashioned way then," Green Lantern said as he floated down to their level, and the minigun dissolved and was replaced by a massive war hammer, the head of it as big as a compact car. He swung it and brought it down on a formation of parademons that had been diving toward them, the impact creating a shockwave that flattened everything in a thirty-foot radius and sent parademon bodies cartwheeling through the air.

Superman watched the hammer come down, and despite the pain in his chest the corner of his mouth twitched upward. "Nothing better than the old fashion way," he said, and then he was gone, launching off the platform straight up into the thickest part of the swarm, the sound of it was like a jet breaking the sound barrier directly overhead.

He hit the first parademon at full speed and went through it, the creature simply ceasing to exist as his body passed through the space it had occupied, and then he was in the middle of the swarm and everything became chaos. He moved so fast he left afterimages, blue and red smears, and every time one of the smears connected with a parademon the creature either exploded or was sent hurtling into another creature that also exploded. 

He grabbed two of them by their wings and swung them into each other hard enough that the explosion knocked a dozen more out of formation, then turned and caught a stream of fire from another parademon's mouth on his chest without flinching before crossing the distance between them in a blink and driving his fist through its torso. 

He was a wrecking ball with a cape, moving through the swarm with the kind of violence and power that made the rest of them glad he was on their side.

David watched him work for a few seconds, wondering if he could slip away now before another wave of parademons cut off the only exit. 

He sighed and cracked his neck and got back to it.

[One for All: 10%]

Two of them came at him together and he vaulted over the first one's outstretched claws, planting his hand on the back of its head and using it as a springboard to launch himself into the second one feet first. Both boots connected with its chest and the parademon crumpled around the impact and went backward while David rode it to the ground, jumped off before it hit, and spun into a roundhouse kick that caught the first parademon as it turned to follow him. The kick took it off its feet and sent it tumbling into a lamppost that bent in half from the impact.

Another one came from above and he dropped, feeling the claws rake the air above his back, and then rolled onto his hands and kicked straight up with both feet, catching it under the jaw making its head come off. 

"Getting my groove back," David chuckled as he danced on his feet with his fists up. 

He ducked a swing, stepped inside the parademon's reach, and drove his elbow into its throat before pivoting and throwing it over his shoulder into two more that were closing from behind. He caught a claw on his forearm, twisted the arm, and used the creature as a shield against another one's fire breath before shoving the burning parademon into its partner.

While David might've been doing well against these creatures, they were clearly thoughtless goons. Had his old mentor seen him fighting he probably would've shed a tear at how bad it was compared to his peak form. 

He grabbed a car door that had been torn off during Superman's earlier landing and used it as a battering ram against a line of three parademons, then threw it like a frisbee into a fourth. He kicked a fire hydrant clean out of the ground and the geyser that erupted knocked two more out of the air while he used the distraction to close distance on a fifth and put it down with a combination that ended with his heel on the back of its skull.

A shadow fell across him and he turned to see Batman land beside him. He threw a batarang to David's left and David ducked under it, the projectile sailing past his head and detonating against a parademon that had been flanking him. David kicked a second parademon toward Batman and Batman met it with a spinning kick that redirected its momentum into a third creature. They moved back to back, covering each other's blind spots. "So," Batman said between strikes, catching a parademon's arm and twisting it behind its back before driving it face first into the pavement, "is  he going to show up tonight?"

David rolled his eyes as he caught an incoming claw, redirected it, and snapped the arm at the elbow before stabbing the howling parademon with it. "You don't need to act like he's a separate person."

"I was just trying to be sensitive," Batman replied, and it was impossible to tell if he was joking because Batman's voice had exactly one setting.

David snorted. "You? Sensitive? That's the funniest thing I've heard all—"

He didn't finish the sentence because a parademon the size of a small truck slammed into him from his blind side, wrapping both arms around his torso and driving him sideways across the street and through the front wall of a building. Brick and plaster exploded around him as they went through the first wall, then through an interior wall, then through a display case, before the parademon pinned him against the back wall of what turned out to be a retail establishment of some kind.

A batarang embedded itself in the parademon's neck from behind and detonated, the explosion blowing the creature sideways off David and into a refrigeration unit that collapsed on top of it. Batman's silhouette appeared in the hole in the front wall, backlit by the moon outside.

Meanwhile somewhere above the city Superman banked hard to the right and plowed through a formation of parademons like a bowling ball through pins, then reversed direction and caught three more in a heat vision sweep that cut them in half simultaneously. He disappeared into a cloud of them, and for a moment all that was visible was flashing red light and tumbling bodies, before he burst out the other side holding two of them by their throats, smashed them together, and threw the remains into a portal that had opened above a parking garage.

Superman then stopped for a moment and twisted his head as if he heard something, he then shot off into the sky and didn't look back. 

"Damn it," Green Lantern cursed, watching Superman disappear. "Our big gun has gone rogue, we need to stay together—" He was cut off as another wave descended on him. 

He quickly manifested a massive mech suit around his body, thirty feet tall and bristling with weapons. The mech's arms raised and opened fire, twin beams of concentrated green energy sweeping across the sky and cutting swathes through the parademon formations while its fists swung at the ones that got close enough.

David pulled himself out of the rubble and looked around at where the parademon had thrown him. He was inside a liquor store. Specifically, he was sitting in the middle of the whiskey section, surrounded by toppled shelves and broken bottles and the sweet sharp smell of spilled bourbon.

One shelf had survived the impact. 

Three bottles of Maker's Mark sat on it, perfectly intact.

David looked at the bottles. 

The bottles looked at David.

"What luck," he said with a grin, reaching for the nearest one.

A batarang whistled through the air and hit the bottle dead center shattering it. David stared at the wet empty space where the bottle had been, then slowly turned to look at the hole in the wall where Batman was standing with his hand still extended from the throw.

"Killjoy," David muttered as he pushed himself to his feet and climbed through the wreckage back out onto the street where the fight was still very much in progress.

He was halfway across the road, ducking a parademon that swooped over his head, when a streak of red and gold blurred past him so fast it pulled his jacket sideways. The streak hit a cluster of parademons that had been closing on Batman, and in the space of about one second all six of them were on the ground, their legs swept out from under them, their wings torn off, their bodies spinning across the pavement like tops.

The streak stopped and became a man with a red suit, gold lightning bolt on the chest, and a cocky grin. "Hey guys," the Flash said. "Looked like you could use a hand."

He blurred again and three more parademons hit the ground before David could blink.

Green Lantern's mech turned toward the new arrival and the faceplate retracted enough to show his relieved expression. "Flash! Thank God. About damn time you showed up, where have you been?"

"Central City had its own portal situation but the fellas at Star Labs have it handled," Flash said, reappearing on top of a car with his arms folded. "But honestly doesn't seem like much of a problem here." He looked around and saw very few parademons left.

Green Lantern dismissed the mech and floated down to street level, landing next to the other three. He looked around at the scattered bodies and the damaged buildings and the portals that were still glowing in the sky, and he put his hands on his hips.

"Huh I guess not... well I did say I could handle it right?" he said. "... it wasn't that hard."

David and Flash both turned to him at the exact same time.

"Don't—" David started.

"Dude, don't say—" Flash said simultaneously.

Too late.

The moment the words came out of his mouth the sky turned red.

New portals ripped open across the Metropolis skyline, not two or three but dozens and from each one a fresh wave of parademons poured out, hundreds of them, the sky darkening under their wings like a swarm of locusts blotting out the stars.

"You HAD to say it," Flash groaned.

"That's not, that has nothing to do with me, that's a coincidence—" Green Lantern started.

"Get ready there's a bunch coming our way!" Batman said as he got into a fighting stance, as did the others. 

"HOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

All of them froze as they heard what sounded like a battle cry coming from above the clouds. Then a moment later a figure dropped out of the sky and hit the ground in front of them.

She landed in a crouch with one knee down and one fist against the pavement, and when she stood up she was already in motion, a sword in one hand and a golden lasso coiled in the other. She was tall, dark-haired, wearing armour that was red and blue and pretty exposed if you wanted to be a Karen about it. 

Three parademons dove at her the instant she was upright and she met the first one with her sword, the blade passing through its armour and its body in a single clean stroke that separated it into two halves that tumbled away in opposite directions. She spun and the lasso whipped out, catching the second parademon around the throat, and she yanked it toward her while simultaneously driving the sword through its chest. The third one came in from above and she released the lasso, sidestepped the dive, and removed its head with a backhanded slash that was so fast it looked casual.

She wasn't finished. A cluster of six charged her and she went through them like they were made of paper, the sword carving theough every gap in their armour. It wasn't long before she'd destroyed what amounted to a whole platooon of them and she hadn't even broken a sweat. 

She turned to face them with a wide smile. "Hail Warriors," she said as she approached them. "Well met."

Green Lantern leaned over to David and Flash. "Dibs," he whispered.

David chuckled.

Green Lantern looked at him. "What's funny?"

"You," David said. "With a woman."

Flash burst out laughing and even behind the cowl David could have sworn he saw Batman's mouth twitch.

"Oh THAT is, you know what, that is REALLY—" Green Lantern sputtered before squaring his shoulders and floating over to Diana with what he clearly believed was a confident and charming posture. He landed in front of her and extended his ring hand.

"Green Lantern," he said. "Space cop, protector of Sector 2814, first human to join the Green Lantern Corps. And you are?"

She took his hand and shook it with a grip that made Green Lantern wince slightly. "Diana," she said. "Princess of Themyscira, daughter of Hippolyta—"

"Themyscira, right, beautiful, is that near Greece? Because you look Mediterranean and I actually spent a summer in Santorini once, amazing sunsets, have you ever—"

Superman landed between them.

He came down like a dropped anchor, his feet cracking the pavement, positioning himself directly between Green Lantern and Diana with his arms folded across his chest. 

He didn't say anything. 

He just looked at Green Lantern.

The look communicated quite a lot.

Green Lantern took two steps backward and cleared his throat. "I'll just... be over here."

David and Flash watched the entire exchange from thirty feet away.

"That man has the worst game I've ever seen in my life," David said.

"Did he really open with 'space cop'?" Flash asked in disbelief. "Who does that?"

"A man who's never had a second date," David said.

"More like a man who's never had a date," Flash corrected.

They were both laughing when something hit the building behind them.

The impact was massive, hard enough to crack the entire face of the structure and send a rain of glass and concrete down onto the street below. Something fell out of the hole it had made, bouncing off a ledge on the way down, and hit the ground about twenty feet from where they were standing. It landed on its back and lay there, and when David got a look at it his laughter died.

It looked like a man... or it had been a man, once, before someone had replaced most of him with metal. Half his face was flesh, dark-skinned, with one eye, and the other half was chrome and circuitry, a red mechanical eye glowing in a skull plate that merged seamlessly with the organic tissue.

"He is mine!" Diana shouted as she moved first and crossed the distance in two strides and brought her sword up, the tip levelled at the thing's throat.

"NO!" The thing, the man, whatever he was, threw his hands up. "I'm not one of them! I'm NOT, please, I'm not one of them!"

He was panicking and there was something that David recognized as the kind of panic that couldn't be manufactured, the kind that came from someone who was genuinely afraid for their life.

"Wait," David said.

Diana however was still charging. 

David pushed off the ground with a burst of gold lightning and landed between Diana and the man on the ground, catching Diana's blade between his palms. The edge bit into his skin, a thin line of red appearing across both palms, he could feel the strength behind it, the coiled power in Diana's arms, and holding her back even at ten percent was like trying to hold a door shut against a car.

Diana's eyes narrowed. "What are you doing?" she asked coldly as her eyes narrowed.

"Let the man speak," David said firmly, holding her gaze. "Look at him. Does he look like an invader to you? He looks like he's about to piss himself."

Diana held the pressure for another moment, studying David's face, then the man on the ground, and then she pulled the blade back and stepped to the side.

The man scrambled to sitting. "Thank you," he breathed, looking up at David. "Thank you, I'm not with them, I swear I'm not. My name is Victor Stone, I was... there was an accident, the box, one of those boxes, it did THIS to me." He gestured at his own body, at the fusion of flesh and machine. "But it also gave me access to their systems and their data and that's why I'm here, I'm here to help."

"Why should we believe you?" Green Lantern said, floating closer with his ring glowing. "For all we know you're a Trojan horse. They send you in looking helpless, we let our guard down, and—"

"I can vouch for him, he was at Star Labs when those things attacked?" Flash added. 

"Thank you Flash, but listen you'll want to hear what I know," Victor said a he pushed himself to his feet and looked at all of them in turn. "These things are called Parademons. They're foot soldiers that come from a planet called Apokolips, which exists in a dimension parallel to ours, and they travel between dimensions using those boxes, the ones you've been finding. They're called Mother Boxes. Each one is a living computer capable of opening portals and networking with other Mother Boxes to amplify their effects."

"Why are they here?" Superman asked from behind Diana.

Victor's face went serious. "They're here to terraform the planet," he said. "The Mother Boxes, when they synchronize, when all of them activate together, they'll restructure Earth's biosphere to match Apokolips. The atmosphere, the oceans, the crust, everything. It'll become a mirror of their world."

"That makes sense," Batman said quietly.

Green Lantern turned to him. "How does THAT make sense? How does any of this make sense?"

Batman wasn't looking at Green Lantern. He was looking past all of them toward the waterfront where the Metropolis harbour met the open ocean.

"The water is on fire."

They all turned.

The surface of the ocean was ignited in a wall of flame that stretched from the waterfront out to the horizon. The fire illuminated something beneath the surface, something enormous, a structure rising from the ocean. It pushed upward through the burning water, growing, rising, towering over the Metropolis skyline, a spire of alien architecture that dripped fire. 

A portal opened at its peak.

Not like the ones in the warehouse or the ones scattered across the city. This one was different. This one was vast, a circular tear in the sky maybe a quarter of a mile across. The parademons that poured through this portal were different too. Bigger, more heavily armoured,m and they came in formation, rank after rank, hundreds of them darkening the sky in a living cloud that blotted out the stars and the fire and everything else.

Then the portal pulsed and something came through it that was not a parademon.

He was massive, easily nine feet tall, with skin that was the colour of grey stone. He wore armour that was black and covered in the same geometric patterns as the Mother Boxes, and his eyes were two points of red light. 

He stood on the edge of the spire, looking down at the city below him. The figure raised one hand, slowly, and the parademons fell silent.

Every single one of them, across the entire city, stopped shrieking at the same time.

"Your planet is mine."

"Your people are mine."

"Your very souls are mine."

"I am entropy."

"I am Darkseid."

Nobody moved.

Everyone looked at each other, all of them feeling the tremendous pressure that this Darkseid seemed to produce. 

The silence held for one more second.

Then the parademons screamed, all of them, thousands of them, a sound that shook the foundations of every building in Metropolis, and Darkseid stepped off the spire and began to descend.

"Well," David said, watching the massive grey figure descend toward the city. "At least we know who the boss is now."

Victor Stone stepped forward. "You don't understand," he said, out of everyone he seemed the most scared. "Darkseid isn't like the parademons. He's not a soldier, he's not a general, he's... he's a god. On Apokolips he rules everything, every creature, every inch of that planet exists for him. He has conquered hundreds if not thousands of worlds and none of them have ever survived. Not one. The civilizations that fought back he destroyed them all."

"Hundreds of worlds," Flash repeated nervously.

Victor nodded.

Green Lantern cracked his knuckles.

"Yeah, well," he said, floating up off the ground, "those worlds didn't have me."

"Lantern, wait—" Batman started.

But Green Lantern was already gone, shooting up into the sky leaving a trail of light behind him as he rocketed toward the descending figure. He pulled his ring hand back as he flew, the energy building around it in a sphere that grew larger with every foot of altitude he gained, swelling from the size of a basketball to a car to a house.

"TAKE THIS!!!" Green Lantern roared as he released it. The beam that erupted from the sphere was massive, a solid column of green energy twenty feet across that crossed the distance between Green Lantern and Darkseid in less than a heartbeat. It hit Darkseid square in the chest and the impact created a flash that whited out the sky, a detonation of green light that rolled across the Metropolis skyline.

When the light faded, Darkseid was still descending.

He then crossed the distance between them so fast that Green Lantern didn't even have time to form a shield. One enormous grey hand closed around Green Lantern's face, engulfing his entire head, and Darkseid changed direction without slowing, driving downward, accelerating, and slammed Green Lantern into the street below with a force that cratered the asphalt in a circle fifty feet wide. The shockwave blew out the windows of every building on the block and sent parked cars tumbling end over end.

Darkseid straightened up and then kicked Green Lantern out of the crater. The body sailed through the air, hit the street, bounced, rolled, and came to a stop face down on the pavement where three parademons immediately descended on him, kicking and stamping him.

David chuckled then he ran toward Green Lantern because even an idiot didn't deserve to get curb-stomped by aliens. 

Flash was already there, a red blur that scattered the three parademons like bowling pins, and David arrived half a second later, catching a fourth parademon that had been swooping in and driving it into the ground with a knee to its spine. He pulled Green Lantern to his feet while Flash cleared the immediate area. 

"You good?" David asked, holding Green Lantern upright.

"Yeah I'm fine," Green Lantern mumbled through a mouth full of blood. "Had him right where I wanted him."

Meanwhile Superman hit Darkseid at full speed. The impact was visible from half a mile away, a shockwave that rippled outward and actually made Darkseid move, his feet sliding back through the asphalt. Superman pressed the advantage, throwing punch after punch, each one landing with a sound like thunder, and for a moment it looked like it might be working.

Diana was right behind him and came in from Darkseid's flank with her sword raised and brought it down in a diagonal slash across his arm that actually cut a thin line across his skin. Even Darkseid turned his head toward her with what might have been surprise. 

She pressed the attack working in tandem with Superman who hammered Darkseid from the front while Diana cut and stabbed from the sides, the lasso whipping out to snare his wrist and pull him off balance while Superman drove a haymaker into his jaw.

Then Darkseid caught Superman's fist. His other hand came around and hit Superman in the ribs with an open palm strike that bent him in half and sent him flying across the ground on his back. Before Diana could react Darkseid spun on her, moving faster than anything that size should have been able to move, and backhanded the sword out of her grip. The blade went spinning away into the night. Diana threw a punch and Darkseid caught her wrist and squeezed before he hurled her into Superman and they both went tumbling.

Victor raised both arms, his mechanical components reconfiguring into something that looked like a pair of cannons, and fired twin beams of white-blue energy at Darkseid's back. The beams hit and Darkseid turned, slowly, and looked at Victor with those burning red eyes. Then he reached down and picked up a car and he threw it.

Victor tried to dodge but the car was moving too fast and it hit him dead center and carried him backward, the vehicle crumpling around his body as it drove him through a storefront and into the building behind it, bricks and glass cascading down around him.

David looked at the scene, noting he was one of the last people standing. "Damn it..."

[One for All: 30%]

The gold lightning erupted across his body, brighter and more violent than before, the energy arcing off him in lines that scorched the ground under his feet. He launched himself forward, crossing the two hundred yards between himself and Darkseid and threw everything he had into a right hook that connected with the side of Darkseid's face.

The impact sent a shockwave rippling outward that shattered windows three blocks away.

Darkseid's head turned maybe an inch.

He looked at David the way you'd look at an insect that had just landed on your arm.

Danger

"SHIT—"

David threw himself sideways just as Darkseid's fist came through the space where his head had been, the displaced air from the near-miss hitting him hard enough to make his ears pop. He planted his hand on Darkseid's extended forearm, pushed off, flipped over his head, and came down behind him with a spinning roundhouse kick that connected with the back of Darkseid's skull. The impact created a visible shockwave that rippled outward in a cone, the pressure wave blowing debris and parademon bodies away from the point of contact.

Darkseid didn't stumble or flinch. He just turned around.

Danger.

'No shit,' David thought.

Darkseid's hand closed around David's face the same way it had closed around Green Lantern's and then Darkseid punched him.

The world ended.

That was what it felt like anyway. 

The fist connected with David's torso and everything after that was velocity and pain, his body leaving Darkseid's grip and traveling backward so fast that the air compressed in front of him, he hit the street and didn't stop, didn't bounce, but plowed straight through the asphalt and into the ground beneath it, carving a trench three hundred yards long, going through the foundation of the first building and out the other side and through the next building's ground floor and out the other side of that one too, walls and supports and furniture and concrete exploding around until he finally ran out of momentum and came to a stop in what had been someone's basement, buried under ten feet of rubble.

"DAVID!" Batman shouted out. 

Superman pulled himself out of the crater Diana had knocked him into and launched himself at Darkseid again, his eyes blazing red, heat vision cutting a path through the parademon swarm before converging on Darkseid's chest. Darkseid walked through it before Superman met him with a two-handed hammer blow and they exchanged strikes, each impact shaking the ground, but Flash was already running, circling Darkseid at a speed that turned him into a continuous red blur, throwing punches at every pass, hundreds per second, trying to overload the massive figure's ability to track him.

Darkseid's eyes glowed and Omega Beams erupted from his pupils and followed Flash's path with impossible precision, bending at right angles, accelerating, the beams chasing the speedster through the wreckage. 

Flash ran. He ran faster than he'd ever run, his legs a blur, but the Omega Beams followed, turning when he turned, accelerating when he accelerated, he could feel the heat of them on his back getting closer and closer until he pulled a sharp ninety-degree turn around a building corner and the beams hit the building instead, the explosion blowing out the entire south face.

Superman wasn't as lucky. The second set of beams caught him mid-charge, converging on his chest from two different angles, and the impact stopped him dead in the air. He hung there for a moment, suspended by the energy, his mouth open in a silent scream, and then the beams detonated and he fell.

Before he hit the ground the parademons swarmed him, grabbing his arms and lifting his unconscious body and carrying him upward, joining the hundreds of others who were scooping up civilians from the streets below.

"This isn't good," Batman said as he jumped off a parademon's back onto another, then another, using them as stepping stones, before flipping backward and throwing a fan of batarangs that detonated in a chain across the formation below him. 

He grappled to a rooftop and landed in a crouch on the street. 

They assembled on the street below, what was left of them. Though admittedly they were all tired and beaten, they'd been fighting these things for hours without rest. 

Flash looked around at the group, at the burning buildings and the parademon-filled sky and the massive structure still rising from the harbour and Darkseid floating above it all. "So what's the game plan?" he asked. "Because from where I'm standing, we are completely, totally, and in every possible way, screwed."

Batman turned to Victor. "Can you trace Superman? Track where the parademons take him?"

Victor's mechanical eye whirred and refocused. "I can probably interface with the parademon communication frequency, if I can isolate the signal they're using to transport, then yeah, I should be able to—"

"Do it," Batman said then he turned and started running in the opposite direction.

Green Lantern watched him go with an expression of disbelief. "Where the hell are you going?" he shouted.

Batman didn't slow down. "To get some backup," he shouted back, and then he was around a corner and gone.

...

"Fuck that hurt..." David coughed blood.

He was still in the crater, or rather in the trench, lying on his back amid rubble and broken pipes and the scattered remains of what had been someone's living room based on the couch cushion that was draped across his leg. 

He coughed again and turned his head and spat red onto the concrete, then lay there for a moment taking stock of what hurt, which was everything, but specifically the left side of his ribs where at least two and probably three of them were no longer in one piece.

He pushed himself up slowly, his arms shaking, and climbed out of the trench one handhold at a time until he reached street level. He found a car that was still more or less intact, leaned his back against it, and straightened his spine until something popped back into a position that was slightly less agonizing.

He stood there breathing carefully, each inhale shallow because anything deeper sent a spike of 

 pain through his side plus he was angry. Not at Darkseid, not at the parademons, not even at Batman for dragging him into this. He was angry at himself. Angry that he was here, angry that he'd let himself get pulled into a situation that he'd spent three years specifically avoiding, angry that he was standing in the wreckage of a city doing exactly the kind of thing he'd sworn he would never do again.

He wasn't 'this' anymore.... He wasn't the guy who fought monsters and saved cities and stood between the world and whatever wanted to hurt it. He was a PI. He sat in cars and watched motel rooms and drank cheap whiskey and found missing people for money and that was it. 

That was all he was. 

That was all he wanted to be.

"David."

Batman dropped down from somewhere above and landed beside the car. His cape was torn, there were claw marks across his chest plate, and one of the lenses in his cowl was cracked. "Where are you hurt?" Batman asked.

"Couple ribs, maybe three," David said, pressing his hand against his left side and wincing. "Could be worse though. Remember Bane's niece's quinceañera?"

Batman did not laugh, he did offer him a nod however. "I'm glad you're okay," Batman said. He then paused for a moment as he looked at David. "Things aren't looking good right now, David," Batman said.

David's eyes narrowed. "No," he said.

"Superman is—"

"No." David pushed off the car and took a step back. "No, absolutely not. Whatever you're about to say, the answer is no."

"They need you," Batman said plainly. "Superman is down. They took him. Without him the rest of us won't last long against Darkseid, you saw what he did, and the only person here with the power to help is you."

"I'm not falling for this, Bruce," David said, shaking his head. "I know you. I've known you for years. You always have a plan. You've got some contingency in that belt of yours, some secret weapon, some brilliant scheme that you've been waiting to deploy at exactly the right moment because that's what you do—"

"Not this time," Batman said solemnly. "You're it."

David looked at him for a long moment. "I'm not a hero anymore, Bruce," David said, and he hated how small his voice sounded when he said it. "You know that."

Batman looked at him, then he did something David had never seen him do in the field.

He reached up and pulled off the cowl.

Bruce Wayne looked at David Beckett without the mask between. "When I first became Batman," Bruce said, "I was angry. I was angry at everything, the city, the criminals, myself, and I thought that being something everyone feared would be enough. That if I was terrifying enough, ruthless enough, that Gotham criminals would fall in line. That fear was the answer."

He paused.

"You were fifteen years old the first time we worked together," Bruce continued. "Fifteen, in a homemade costume with a broken arm, and you threw yourself between a gunman and another criminal without even thinking about it. And afterward, when I asked you why, you looked at me like I was the one who was crazy and said 'because they needed help.'"

David's jaw tightened.

"Even when you were only fifteen," Bruce said, "it was you who taught me how to be a real hero. Not fear. Not vengeance. Just... helping people because they needed it."

David couldn't speak.

"So despite how you feel about yourself," Bruce said, "and despite what happened that day... I want you to know that you are and will always be, my hero."

David opened his mouth but nothing came out.

Bruce pulled a long coat that had been left on the ground and shrugged it on over his armour. He pulled the cowl off entirely and tucked it inside the coat, then mussed his hair and smeared some of the blood and dust across his face in a pattern that made him look less like Batman and more like a civilian.

"What are you doing?" David asked.

"Cyborg needs to get to Superman," Bruce said, buttoning the coat. "They took him somewhere and Cyborg can trace the signal but he can't fight his way through alone. He needs a distraction."

"Bruce—"

Bruce stepped out from behind the car and into the open street and raised both arms above his head, waving them, making himself visible. "The parademons are collecting people, not killing them. They'll take me wherever they took Superman. Once I'm there, Cyborg tracks my signal and follows. We get Superman back."

A shriek from above as a parademon had spotted him.

"Bruce, this is insane—"

"We need our big gun back," Bruce said, looking over his shoulder at David one last time. "So I'm going to go get him."

The parademon raked its claws around Bruce's shoulders and lifted him off the ground, he rose into the air without struggling as the creature carried him up toward the portals.

David watched him go until he was a speck against the red-stained sky.

He stood there alone in the street.

"Damn it," he muttered, and then he kicked the car hard enough to dent the door panel inward. "God damn it."

He leaned back against the car and stared at the sky.

He should just go home.

The heroes were here now, or what was left of them, Green Lantern and Flash and Diana and Cyborg, and once Bruce got Superman back they'd have their heavy hitter. Superman could do anything David could do and more. Faster, stronger, more durable, better in every way that mattered. They didn't need some washed-up PI with a drinking problem and a power he hadn't properly used in three years.

He didn't need to help.

He didn't need to do anything.

He could walk away right now and nobody would blame him because nobody expected anything from David Beckett anymore, which was exactly how he'd set up his life, low expectations, low stakes, low risk. 

No one relying on him meant no one he could let down.

"You will help them, Young Beckett."

David's whole body went rigid.

"No," David said out loud, his hands gripping the edge of the car behind him. "No, not you. Not now. I've gone years without hearing your voice and I don't need to hear it now, so just—"

"You have avoided me all these years, Young Beckett, and I understand. You have been afraid of what I might say to you. What I might think of what you've become."

David could only clench his fists, his knuckles going white against the metal of the car. 

"For years you have been haunted by the idea that I was forced to choose you. That I was dying and you were the only one there and I had no options and no time. That anyone would have done."

David braced himself and clenched his jaw and tightened every muscle in his body and prepared for the confirmation of the thing he'd believed since he was thirteen years old, the thing his father had said in the kitchen that night, the thing that had lived inside him like a splinter for a decade.

"HAHAHAHAHA! WHAT A LOAD OF RUBBISH!"

David's eyes flew open and he looked slightly confused. 

"Rubbish, complete and utter rubbish, I would NEVER have given One for All to someone I believed was not worthy. Not in a million years. Not with my dying breath. If you had been unworthy I would have let it die with me, Young Beckett."

"How can you say that," David whispered as he felt something cracking inside his chest that had nothing to do with the broken ribs. "You had no idea who I was. I was a kid, I was nobody, I didn't even... I was just there, you didn't know anything about me—"

"I knew everything I needed to know."

"Each holder of One for All has been special and unique in their own way. Their personalities are as different as the stars in the sky and that is a good thing because it means the power grows, it changes, it evolves with each one."

"It doesn't matter how different they all were from one another, the First, the Second, all the way to you."

"Because we all had one thing in common."

David waited.

"We all moved without hesitation when someone needed help. Even before our minds could catch up with our bodies."

"That is how I knew you were worthy, Young Beckett. I watched you run to that man who was trapped when you were only ten years old, in a city that was falling apart around you, with a monster behind you that could have killed you with a glance. You were terrified. You were a child. And you ran toward the danger instead of away from it, not because anyone asked you to, but because someone needed help and you were there."

"But look at everything I've done since then," David said. "Look at what I am now. I quit, I ran away, I've spent three years drinking myself stupid and pretending none of this exists. I'm not... I'm not a hero. I failed."

"You are a hero, Young Beckett. You stopped wearing the costume, yes. You stopped fighting in the streets. But what did you do instead? You became a private investigator. You spent every day finding people who were lost, helping families who were desperate, protecting people who couldn't protect themselves. You did it for less money than you deserved and more hours than were healthy and you never turned anyone away who genuinely needed help."

David pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

"If I could do everything all over again."

 "I would choose you again... Every single time."

A long silence.

"David Beckett, you are the one and only Ninth Holder of One for All."

From somewhere in the distance, muffled by the destruction but cutting through it all the same David heard a scream.

David leaned back against the car. He stood there for a moment with his eyes closed and his fists at his sides wnd tears drying on his face, listening to the scream and to the battle and to the silence inside his own head where All Might's voice had been.

Then he chuckled.

Quiet at first, then louder, and he shook his head and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and let out a breath. "You really have me pegged, huh," he said. 

He pushed off the car and rolled his shoulders. He felt his broken ribs shift and grind but he ignored them.

"If I'm gonna do this," he said, "I guess it's all in."

He ran.

...

Diana's sword opened a parademon from throat to groin and she spun through the falling halves, her lasso already whipping outward to snare two more, yanking them together and clotheslining them across a lamppost hard enough to nearly shear them in half. 

Green Lantern was behind her, his ring constructing a massive battering ram that he drove into a formation of six parademons, scattering them, while Flash circled the perimeter of the fight, picking off the stragglers, his fists connecting with parademon jaws in a continuous chain of impacts that sounded like a machine gun.

Darkseid watched them from thirty yards away, standing in the center of the street, his arms folded across his massive chest, his burning red eyes tracking each of them with the attention of someone watching insects.

Green Lantern formed a chain and whipped it around Darkseid's arm, pulling with everything his ring could give, and Flash hit Darkseid from behind at full speed, his fist connecting with the base of his skull. Diana came in from the front, her sword aimed at Darkseid's chest, and for one moment all three of them were attacking simultaneously from three different angles.

Darkseid moved one arm.

He caught Green Lantern's chain and pulled, yanking the Lantern toward him, and swatted him out of the air with the back of his hand. Green Lantern hit the side of a building and went through it. 

Flash circled back for another pass and Darkseid simply slammed his foot to the ground destroying the ground for fifty feet and destroying any footholds flash had, Darkseid caught him by the back of his costume and threw him into the street hard enough to crater the asphalt. 

Flash bounced a few times, rolled, and didn't get up.

Diana was alone.

She pressed the attack anyway, her slashed at his arm and drew blood again, that dark fluid, and followed it with a thrust toward his chest that he caught on his forearm, the blade biting into his skin but not going deep enough. She pulled it free and spun into a combination, sword high, lasso low, the golden rope wrapping around his ankle while the blade came down toward his face.

The tip of her sword caught the edge of Darkseid's left eye.

He roared.

It was the first sound he'd made and the force of it shook the buildings around them and Diana could see the wound she'd made, a cut across the orbital ridge that leaked dark fluid into his eye, and for one single moment she thought—

His hand closed around her throat and he lifted her off the ground and looked at her with his one good eye, the other half-closed and weeping dark blood, and the expression on his face had changed from indifference to something personal.

He slammed her into the ground. Then picked her up and slammed her again. And again. The street cracked and cratered under her with each impact, her armour denting, her sword falling from her grip, and then he threw her across the road and she hit a truck broadside and the vehicle folded around her. 

She fell out of the wreckage and tried to stand but he was already there, his fist coming down on her back in an axe blow that drove her face-first into the pavement hard enough to collapse the sewer line underneath. He picked her up by her hair and hit her in the stomach the sound of it was like a cannon going off and Diana's mouth opened but nothing came out as there was no air left in her to scream with, he hit her again in the same spot and this time she felt something give inside her.

He then threw her into the sky.

She went up spinning, her body limp and Darkseid raised his head and his single eye began to glow and the Omega Beam lanced upward, twin tracks of red energy curving through the air toward her unconscious body.

A streak of gold intercepted her.

It came from the east, moving so fast that the air behind it ignited, a trail of golden lightning that scorched a line across the Metropolis skyline. It reached Diana before the Omega Beams did, arms wrapping around her body and changing direction mid-air. The Omega Beams curved to follow but the gold streak was faster, cutting left and right, up and down, the beams tracking and turning and always half a step behind.

The figure landed on a rooftop with Diana cradled in his arms, just as the Omega Beams hit the building across the street instead, the explosion blowing out three floors of office space. The figure jumped, Diana still in his arms, gold lightning crackling off his body, and landed on the street below in a crouch that cracked the pavement in a web of fractures.

Diana's eyes fluttered open.

She looked up and saw a face above hers, a familiar face and eyes that were so intensely blue they almost glowed, lit from behind by the golden energy that danced across his body like living electricity. He was looking down at her with a massive smile. 

"Don't worry, Miss Diana," he said.

"Because I am here."

Green Lantern pulled himself out of the rubble of the building he'd been embedded in and stared. Flash pushed himself up from the crater he'd been lying in and stared. Diana stood where he'd placed her, her hand on her injured ribs and stared.

"Is that who I—" Green Lantern said. 

"Is he—" Flash said. 

The man standing in front of them was the same one who'd been drinking whiskey and cracking jokes and complaining about not getting paid. But something was different now. The slouch was gone, the sarcasm was gone, the disinterest that he'd worn like a second skin all night was gone. 

He put Diana on her feet and she swayed for a moment before steadying herself, one hand on his shoulder, he waited until she was stable before he took his hand away and turned.

He took a step toward Darkseid. 

Then another. 

Then another.

"You made a mistake coming to this planet," David said. "I want you to know that. Before anything else happens, I want you to understand that you made a mistake."

Darkseid tilted his head slightly. "Why is that?" Darkseid asked,.

David kept walking.

His body changed with each step.

It was gradual at first, his shoulders widening, his arms thickening, the muscles in his neck and chest and legs swelling under his skin as One for All surged through him in waves, each wave larger than the last. His jacket, already torn from the earlier fight, began to rip along the seams as his frame expanded, the leather splitting across his back and down his arms.

[One for All: 50%]

His shirt tore next, the fabric stretching and then giving up, shredding across his chest as his torso broadened and his muscles hardened and grew. He was bigger now, noticeably bigger, his proportions shifting from a lean twenty-year-old into something else.

[One for All: 60%]

The ground under his feet cracked with every step, not from impact but from the sheer pressure of the power radiating off him. M

[One for All: 80%]

His remaining clothes gave up entirely, the jacket falling away in strips, the shirt disintegrating, leaving his upper body exposed. The muscles were layered and dense and massive, his frame now closer to seven feet, his chest broad enough to block a doorway.

[One for All: 100%]

He stopped walking.

He stood twenty feet from Darkseid and the golden lightning covered every inch of him, his eyes blazing blue behind the light, his hair lifting in the updraft of his own power. "It's clear that the concept of justice is foreign on your world," David said, and he raised both fists in front of him "So I'm going to give you a crash course."

[One for All: PRIME]

Out of the people who watched his transformation Flash was the most shocked. "It.. it can't be.." Flash said with wide eyes. 

"You're seeing this right Barry?" Green lantern asked as he too was enthralled with what he was seeing. 

Flash nodded. "Yeah... I think that's Paragon."

But before they could speak about it anymore David moved.  The first step shattered the street behind him. The second sent parked cars skidding sideways from the shockwave. The third cracked the facades of the buildings on both sides of the road and the fourth blew out every window within a quarter mile as he crossed the distance between himself and Darkseid in the time it took a heart to beat.

Darkseid met him and both their fists clashed.

(AN: So yeah chapter 3 is done. One thing I've changed about One for All is basically giving All might a kind of quirk or Prime form as I call it. I just think it's cool and I really like all might as a character. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)