DC: All for One Chapter 32 — This isn’t a Fairy Tale (Patreon)

All for One hovered behind the glass and for a moment none of the heroes could do anything but stare.

His suit was torn open across the middle, hanging in ribbons around a body that was covered in gashes and burns. But that wasn't the strange part. The strange part was the way his body kept phasing, the edges of him blurring and doubling as if he was vibrating at a speed the eye couldn't hold. Golden lightning crawled across every inch of him, arcing off his shoulders and his hands and dancing along the shredded remains of his suit.

None of them had ever seen him look like this. And none of them wanted to know what it meant.

But it didn't matter what he looked like. The fact that he was here at all meant every one of them was in serious trouble.

"Shit," Green Arrow breathed. "Shit, shit, he's back, GO. Robin, GO, RUN, NOW!"

[Air Burst]

Every window on the floor exploded inward at once, and the compressed air hit all of them like a wall and threw them off their feet, the wind roaring through the open floor now that nothing separated it from the fifty-story drop.

Diana was the first one up. She rolled to her feet before the glass had finished falling and shouted over the wind, "RUN, I'll hold him off!" and then she launched herself at All for One with everything she had.

She never got the chance to build any speed. All for One blinked and appeared directly in her path and body-checked her before her momentum could gather, and then his hand shot out and closed around her throat and he turned and threw her straight down through the floor. She smashed through the concrete and through the ceiling of the level below and through that floor too, tearing down through the tower story by story, the whole building shaking with each impact she made on the way down.

"Robin, GO, NOW!" Green Arrow shouted again, already up on one knee, and he drew and loosed a fan of arrows across the room, smoke and flash and concussion rounds bursting between All for One and the fleeing heroes.

All for One walked through them.

He simply moved through the distractions without slowing and he came down to hover over Green Arrow. Green Arrow swung his fist aimed at his head and it connected with All for One's skull and did nothing, but the shock of the impact traveled back up Green Arrow's arms and something in his wrist gave with a wet snap, the bow tumbling from his broken hand.

All for One raised his own hand, and Green Arrow looked up at him and knew he was about to die.

Then Diana came back up through the floor.

She erupted out of the hole she'd been thrown through and slammed into All for One from the side, driving him across the penthouse and into a support pillar that cracked from top to bottom, and Hit-Girl came off the wall a heartbeat later and joined her, the two of them pressing All for One together, Diana with her fists and Hit-Girl with her katana, hammering at him from both sides.

It wasn't enough. 

He easily avoided Diana's punches and even flicked his finger at Hitgirls katana making it nearly fly from her hands. Behind him the rest of the floor was coming apart. Robin, Batgirl and Artemis ran for the stairwell while the penthouse disintegrated around them, walls collapsing from the shockwaves of the fight, a chunk of ceiling coming down where Robin had been standing a half-second before, forcing him to dive and roll. Batgirl grabbed the back of Artemis's jacket and yanked her sideways out of the path of a support beam that crashed through the space she'd been running through, and the three of them kept going, half-running and half-falling through the ruin toward the stairwell door.

[Bone Manipulation]

[Carbonisation]

All for One thrust both hands forward and fired a volley of bone spikes that crystallized into diamond as they left his palms, and the projectiles tore through the air and punched through Hit-Girl's shoulder and thigh and through Diana's side and arm, both of them staggering back with fresh wounds gushing blood. 

Green Arrow twisted out of the path of the volley and came up firing, an explosive arrow catching All for One dead center in the chest, the blast washed over him but when it was cleared away he stood there completely unharmed.

Then, for the first time since he had arrived, All for One spoke.

"I did not expect," he said, and his voice had a strange doubled layerr to it now as if more than one person was speaking through the same mouth, "that you heroes would attempt to kill me."

He floated down to the ruined floor and stood in front of them, the lightning still crawling across his body.

"It was an ingenious plan that preyed on nearly every psychological vulnerability I possess. The distraction, the ego, the assumption that I would engage rather than retreat, the use of my own arrogance as the mechanism of my defeat. I can only assume that your little primate detective was the one who designed it."

Green Arrow pushed himself upright, cradling his broken hand, and glared at him. "What did you do to Shazam," he growled. "What did you do to Cyborg."

All for One chuckled an ugly sound. "Cyborg has been," he paused, "decommissioned."

Then he laughed at his own joke, a disturbing laugh that went on too long, his head tilting at an angle that wasn't quite natural, it was nothing like the emotionless Ethan any of them had ever seen.

"As for Shazam," All for One said, and the grin spread across the exposed lower half of his face. "You're looking at him."

_____________________________________

(Ten Minutes Ago)

Ethan fell.

The two halves of his torso trailed behind him as he dropped out of the sky, the ground came up fast, and the instant before he hit he triggered the only thing that could keep him alive.

[Instant Clotting]

The severed tissue sealed itself, the arteries closing, the bleeding stopping before it could empty him out, he hit the earth in the crater Shazam's body had left and lay there in the dirt and the rubble.

And then he panicked.

He couldn't move below the chest. 

Nothing responded. 

The lower half of his body was there, connected by a thread of spine and muscle and clotted flesh, but it was dead weight and it wouldn't obey him, the damage was too catastrophic for his regenerative nanites to heal in any reasonable amount of time, and he was too far from Sanctuary, too far from the lab, too far from anything that could help him.

For the first time in a very long time.

Ethan Kane was afraid.

Footsteps crunched across the gravel toward him, and Cyborg came into view, one arm reconfigured into the smoking barrel of the railgun that had cut him in half, and he looked down at Ethan with an expression somewhere between grim satisfaction and disbelief.

"Good job, Shazam," Cyborg said over his shoulder toward where Shazam lay against the electrical cabinets. "I'll be honest, I didn't actually think that would work. But your arrogance really did all the heavy lifting for us, didn't it, Kane?" He looked back down at Ethan and there was no warmth in it. "I'm not gonna let you bleed out. You don't get off that easy. You're gonna answer for every single person you killed. You're gonna go away for a very, very long time, and you're gonna have a lot of time to think about it."

Ethan looked up at him from the dirt, half his body dead and he saw that there was only one option left.

He didn't want to do it. 

He had never done it to a real person. 

He had built the body in his lab precisely so that he would never have to, a blank canvas engineered to his own DNA, no consciousness, no will, nothing to fight him. Doing it with a living person was a variable he had never tested.

But he was out of options.

[Air Burst]

He fired it one-handed and it caught Cyborg full in the chest and launched him backward across the compound, and then Ethan turned his attention to Shazam and began, slowly, dragging himself toward him with his one working arm, floating the dead weight of his lower body behind him.

Shazam saw him coming and started scrabbling backward on his one good arm, his heels digging into the gravel, his broken face wild with terror at the sight of the half-severed thing floating toward him. "No," he croaked. "No, get back, get away from me, GET BACK—"

[Rivets]

The spines shot from Ethan's hand and pinned Shazam to the ground through his arms and legs. Shazam screamed and thrashed against them.

Ethan closed the last of the distance and reached out and put his hand against Shazam's chest, over the lightning bolt.

"Please," Shazam begged. "Please don't, please, I don't want to, please—"

[Fusion]

It was a horror to witness.

Ethan's hand sank into Shazam's chest and Shazam's body began to come apart at the edges, dissolving where it met Ethan, the flesh flowing and merging,  Shazam screamed the whole time, a raw shredding scream as his body was pulled apart and drawn into the other man's, his form losing cohesion, his features stretching and blurring as he was absorbed piece by piece.

"STOP," Shazam screamed. "STOP, PLEASE, IT HURTS, IT HURTS, SOMEONE HELP ME, PLEASE—"

And then, at the very end, with the last of himself. 

"SHAZAM!"

The heavens split open and the lightning came down and struck both of them at once in a blinding white column that shook the whole waterfront.

But it was too late. 

There was no separate person left for the magic to transform. Ethan absorbed the last of him, and with him he took the entirety of who Shazam was, every power, the strength, the speed, all of it flooding into Ethan at once, and as his ruined body drank it in he began to heal, the two halves of his torso rushing back together, the flesh knitting, the burns fading, and when it was done he rose off the ground whole and more powerful than he had ever been in his life, golden lightning dancing across every inch of him.

Cyborg staggered back to his feet across the compound and saw it happen and his face fell apart in horror. "No," he said. "No, Billy, what did you, WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM—"

All for One laughed and flew at Cyborg faster than he'd ever moved before and slammed into him and grabbed his head in both hands and tore it clean off his shoulders. Then he set about the rest of him, ripping Cyborg apart piece by piece, an arm, then the other, then peeling the chassis open, laughing the entire time, and when he was finished a massive shockwave of golden electricity pulsed out from his body and rolled across the entire city.

_____________________________________

(Now)

Green Arrow stared at him. 

Hit-Girl stared at him. 

Diana stared at him.

"You absorbed him," Green Arrow spat. "You're a monster," Diana said, her chest heaving.

All for One laughed again. "You misunderstand. I never intended to fuse with him. It's a crude and dangerous thing, fusion with a living person, far too many variables, far too much I couldn't predict. The only body I ever meant to fuse with is downstairs in my laboratory, which is a blank slate, tailored to my exact genome, no will of its own to resist me." 

He tilted his head. "But circumstances forced my hand, but it seems my caution was entirely unnecessary. All I had to do was suppress the person I absorbed, crush his consciousness beneath my own, and everything he was became mine. His power. His body. Eventually even his memories." The grin widened. 

"There's a frightened little boy screaming somewhere inside me right now. His name was Billy."

Diana screamed and threw herself at him.

She was faster than Green Arrow had ever seen her, driven past reason, and she threw a combination that would have leveled a building, but All for One wasn't there for any of it. He swayed around her strikes, each one missing by inches, reading her like she was moving in slow motion, and then he caught her fist mid-swing and yanked her forward off balance and directly into a volley of arrows Green Arrow had loosed hoping to catch All for One, then All for One spun her by the arm and kicked her body across the room at Green Arrow, who threw himself in a roll just in time for her to sail over him and crash into the wall.

[Blink]

He was in front of Green Arrow before the archer had finished rolling. Green Arrow came up with an arrow gripped in his good hand and drove it at All for One's throat, but All for One caught his wrist and snapped it in half without effort and tossed him aside, and turned just in time to catch Diana's fist as she came at him again.

She headbutted him.

The crown of her skull cracked into his face and tore away the lower portion of his mask and it clattered to the floor showing a grin on his face.

"I've always wondered," he said, holding her fist in his hand, her whole body straining against his grip and unable to move it an inch. "How an Amazon's physiology might affect my own."

Diana's eyes went wide with understanding and horror and she wrenched at her arm, trying desperately to break free.

All for One laughed a manic sound, and drove her down into the floor. He was on her before she could recover, and he began to pummel her, blow after blow raining down, cracking the concrete beneath her with the force of it. She fought back with everything she had until she couldn't anymore, until her arms fell and her guard broke and she lay beneath him barely able to lift her head.

Then he pressed his palm to her chest.

[Fusion]

"No..." Diana groaned. "No, I will not, I am an Amazon, I will not—"

She fought it harder than Shazam had, her will hammering against his, but she wasn't strong enough, and he absorbed her entirely, her body dissolving and flowing into his, and when the last of her was gone All for One arched his back and shuddered and let out a long groan of something close to ecstasy.

"YES," he shouted, his body convulsing, the lightning around him flaring brighter as new power flooded through him. "Oh, this is, do you feel this? Do you have any idea what this feels like? The strength of it, the, oh, it's INCREDIBLE, it's—"

An arrow struck him in the shoulder.

He caught the second one out of the air and crushed it to splinters and turned, and there was Green Arrow, on his feet somehow, one hand broken and the other still holding his bow, blood running down the side of his face.

"You're still here?" All for One said, and he grinned and blinked across the room and appeared in front of Green Arrow and seized him by the throat and lifted him off the floor.

He held him there and studied him.

"You know, of all of them, you interest me the least," All for One said. "The others at least had something. Power. Purpose. But you're just a man in a costume with a great deal of misplaced confidence. You're not special. You've spent your whole life pretending to be, playing at heroism because it made you feel like you mattered, but you don't. You never did. You couldn't build the world I'm going to build if you had a thousand lifetimes to try, because you don't have the vision, you don't have the will, and you don't have the strength. You're nothing. You've always been nothing, and you're about to die as nothing."

Green Arrow while choking started to laugh.

It came out as a wheeze at first and then got louder, his one working eye fixed on All for One with something like joy.

"That's the funny thing," Green Arrow rasped. "You think I'm the one pretending, but what are you? You're just a machine that learned to wear a face. There's nothing behind your eyes, there never was, everybody can see it, and that's exactly why you're gonna lose. You'll never build a world worth living in because you don't understand a single thing about what makes life worth living." He coughed a spray of red. "You're no different than a fuckin' toaster."

Something moved behind All for One's exposed face, a flicker of real anger for the first time.

"You aren't even worthy of being absorbed," he said quietly.

He raised his free hand and slashed it down, and a blade of hardened bone extended from his fingers and cut Green Arrow clean in half at the waist.

Green Arrow dropped to the floor in two pieces, blood pooling out beneath him and with the very last of the air in his lungs he got out two more words.

"Fuckin'... toaster."

[Flame Manipulation]

The fire poured from All for One's hand and washed over Green Arrow's body and reduced him to ash. 

All for One stood still for a moment. Then he composed himself and he turned.

Hit-Girl hadn't moved.

She was still frozen where she'd been standing, her katana loose in her hand, her eyes wide, it wasn't the deaths that had frozen her. She'd seen death her whole life. It was the fusion. It was watching people get eaten alive from the inside and screamed out of existence, absorbed into another person, something in her animal survival instinct had recognized that as a fate worse than death.

All for One blinked in front of her and grabbed her by the throat.

"I told you," he said, "what happens to traitors."

He pressed his other hand to her chest and reached inside and ripped the meta-gene out of her, the Rabbit Anatomy tearing free. Hit-Girl arched and screamed as her ears withered away and the strength drained out of her legs and she was, suddenly, just a badly beaten sixteen-year-old girl hanging in his grip.

"Fuck you," she spat at him through the pain, tears cutting down her bloody face. "Fuck you, you lying piece of shit, you told me you were gonna make things better, you told me you were the good guy and you're just, you're just another fucking VILLAIN—"

"On the contrary," All for One said. "I am the last hero this world will ever need."

He drew his hand back to end her.

"STOP!"

All for One looked up.

Artemis stood at the far end of the ruined floor, her bow in her hands, it seemed she hadn't run after all. She'd gotten Robin and Batgirl to the stairwell and then she'd turned back.

All for One tossed Hit-Girl to the floor, where she landed hard and lay gasping, and he looked at Artemis with an expression that was, for once, something close to genuine.

"Of all the people who might betray me," he said, "I hoped you would be the last."

Artemis said nothing. 

She just watched him come.

"You saw this city for what it was," All for One said as he walked toward her, stepping over the rubble. "Just as I did. We both lived in its rot, we both felt what it does to people, and yet you turn on me and stand with the ones who would keep it exactly the way it is. Why? Help me understand."

Artemis's hands tightened on the bow. "I betrayed you because you're insane," she said. "I thought you had the world's best interest at heart. I gave you everything because I believed that. And then I found out the truth." Her voice cracked. "You planned the nanovirus from the very beginning, didn't you. From the day you started the Saviours."

"I did," All for One said.

"You planned to murder thousands of people from the start," Artemis said, and the tears started. "You had it in your head the whole time. Every soup kitchen, every clinic, every free phone, and the entire time you were building a weapon to slaughter so many. How? How could you do that?"

"They were the rotten of society," All for One said simply. "Addicts. Scum. Criminals. The people the world had already discarded. No one would miss them, Artemis. No one did miss them. Look around. The city didn't mourn. It moved on."

"You don't KNOW THAT," Artemis screamed. "You don't get to decide that, the world isn't that simple, it isn't black and white, not every addict is a criminal, not every person who used your product was scum, they were PEOPLE, they had families, they had lives, they were TRYING, and you murdered them because they didn't fit into your perfect little vision—"

"Perhaps you're right," All for One said, unmoved. "Perhaps some of them were more than I gave them credit for. But they were still the foundation of a rotten society, and you cannot build something new on top of a foundation you refuse to tear out."

He stopped a few feet from her.

"Where are the other two," he said. 

"Far from here," Artemis said. "Somewhere you'll never reach them."

"Forgiveness can still be earned," All for One said, and his voice softened. "I mean that. Tell me where they went, and all of this is forgotten. You come back to my side, you take your place again, and when the new world dawns you stand in it beside me. It's not too late for you, Artemis. It never had to be too late for you."

"No," Artemis said. "It has to end. What you're planning, it's too awful to let it keep going. I won't help you."

All for One reached up and pulled the rest of his ruined helmet off and dropped it on the floor, so that his whole face was exposed, he looked at her the way he'd looked at her a thousand times before, back when things had been simpler between them.

"Come back to me," he said quietly. "Please. Just see it through to the end. See the world I'm going to build with your own eyes, and you'll understand that every sacrifice we made to get there was worth it."

Artemis drew her bow and set an arrow to the string and aimed it at his heart.

"You're going to have to kill me," she said.

Ethan stood there for a long moment, looking at her over the point of the arrow.

Then he stepped forward and took hold of the bow and tore it out of her hands and closed his fingers around her throat.

"I won't kill you," he said. "I could never do that." He drew her in close. "It's a shame you don't want to see my world for yourself. You'll just have to settle for seeing it from within me instead."

[Fusion]

Artemis closed her eyes.

She didn't fight it. Where Shazam had begged and Diana had raged, Artemis simply let it happen, her body dissolving into his without resistance, and it was over in seconds, and when it was done Ethan stood there alone with his eyes closed, absorbing the last of her.

He was still for a moment.

Then Hit-Girl drove her katana at the back of his neck with the last of her strength, screaming, trying to take his head off. The blade struck his skin and snapped in half, he chuckled and turned and backhanded her across the face, sending her crumpling to the floor where she stayed, barely conscious.

Ethan floated across the ruined penthouse to where Okoye lay slowly returning to human form.

[Healing Touch]

He knelt and pressed his hand to the big man's chest, and Okoye's wounds closed and his eyes fluttered open, and he sat up and looked at Ethan and immediately bowed his head.

"Take her to the cells," Ethan said, nodding toward Hit-Girl. "Alive. I'm not finished with her."

"Of course, boss," Okoye said, climbing to his feet. He hesitated, then asked, "And the ones who got away? They took something from your lab."

"It's not a problem," Ethan said. He reached into what remained of his suit and drew out a phone and made a call.

It rang once before someone answered.

"Selina," Ethan said. "It's time to make good on our deal."

(AN: So as you can see Ethan fused with Shazam and Diana... a decision that he may come to regret or not, who knows. But who knows the kind of effect a child's mind might have on Ethan. Anyway hope you enjoyed the chapter.)