The Throne Room of Apokolips loomed vast and oppressive, its grandeur steeped in dark majesty. Towering columns of cosmic basalt stretched into an impenetrable void above. On his throne sat Darkseid, his colossal form encased in armor the color of clotted blood and midnight sky, utterly still. Only the crimson sparks flickering in the depths of his eye sockets betrayed the churn of his mind.
When he spoke, his voice didn't merely fill the hall—it thrummed in the bones of every Parademon and mage present.
"Commence artificial world-conjunction."
The order, delivered without inflection, ignited a monstrous conquest machine. Countless holographic projectors flared to life across the hall's expanse, displaying Earth in real-time. Dozens, then hundreds, of blood-red points sparked—reality tears, portals primed to unleash the Devourers' hordes. But before a single Parademon could step onto alien soil, the points began to converge, merging into one. The crimson light coalesced over endless yellow-brown sands. The process was too smooth, unnaturally swift—as if an unseen force on the other side aided the vectors' focus, not resisted it.
The Senior Mage-Technocrat, a being more cybernetic node than flesh, leaned toward his terminal. His voice, mechanical and toneless, rang clear:
"Lord. Conjunction complete. All portal vectors reduced to a single coordinate: the desert region designated 'Sahara' by the natives. Anomalous coherence detected. Their spatial anchors… did not resist. They facilitated the focus. This deviates from projections."
Darkseid didn't turn his head. His heavy, all-seeing gaze remained fixed on the massive hologram of Earth.
"Probability of subjugating this world within three standard solar cycles?" he asked, his voice devoid of interest or impatience—only a need for data.
The Mage-Technocrat froze briefly, his cybernetic sensors and arcane crystals merging in calculation. Symbols and numbers, incomprehensible to mortal minds, flickered before his inner vision. Finally, he spoke with mathematical precision:
"Twenty-five point seven four two three four one one two four percent. 25.742341124%."
The Infosphere, the fundamental field of rules and probabilities underpinning reality, limited his queries. It offered only generalized answers, as if condemning attempts to gain tactical edges beyond the permitted.
Then, something unprecedented occurred. The corners of Darkseid's lips—those eternal lines of power and ruin—twitched upward. Not a smile of triumph or a sneer of contempt. It was… satisfaction. Deep, almost philosophical, a rare visitor to the Lord of Apokolips. He had conquered countless worlds, erased civilizations from existence. But his Great Anti-Life Equation, the key to absolute dominion over the fabric of being, demanded more than strength and destruction. It required emotions. Pure, intense, collective. Fear, despair, hatred, even love—he'd harvested these in abundance from the ashes of fallen worlds. But the final, most elusive, most repugnant component—Hope—always slipped away.
Hope. It bloomed only in one crucible: resistance. From the stubborn, irrational faith of the defeated that they could prevail. It couldn't be wrung from broken slaves or simulated. It had to ripen, a venomous fruit on the tree of defeat. The hardest part: to let it grow, he couldn't yield to it. He couldn't grant the illusion of possibility. He'd come close to collecting the full spectrum only once, during the Second Expansion. Hope had boiled like lava there… but the conflict resolved too quickly, before it reached the intensity needed for the Equation. It hadn't ripened.
"Finally," Darkseid grated, the word heavy with eons of waiting. Earth, with its defiant heroes, its concentration of power, and above all, its belief in salvation, offered a unique, long-awaited chance. The Hope it birthed was real, priceless.
He raised a hand, heavy as an asteroid. The gesture was simple, inexorable:
"Prepare the Annihilation Beam. Target: the convergence point. Strike: total. They await us there. They've massed their forces. Erase their stronghold in one blow before they become a threat. Clear the field for the true beginning."
A wave of activity swept the hall. Massive energy capacitors embedded in the walls and burrowing deep into the artificial planet hummed, amassing unimaginable power. Hundreds of mages and technologists hunched over consoles. The Sahara hologram zoomed in, overlaid with targeting markers. Power capable of vaporizing an ocean focused, ready to pour through the single portal and obliterate all life across a continent, turning the desert into a sea of glass and plasma.
Seconds dragged, filled with the rising hum of death. Darkseid watched, his satisfaction shifting to anticipation of the final act.
Then, as fate's juggernaut seemed unstoppable, space at the Annihilation Beam's core shuddered. A blinding white flash engulfed the hologram, distorting the projection. The capacitors' hum turned to a screech of severed energy links and cracking crystalline matrices.
The Senior Mage-Technocrat, his cybernetic parts smoking, arcane crystals dimmed, turned to the throne in horror, his mechanical voice stuttering with static:
"Lord! Catastrophe! Annihilation complex… destroyed! Internal sabotage! Colossal energy surge… source… interdimensional breach! Systems couldn't react!"
Darkseid didn't move. But the crimson sparks in his sockets blazed with furious flame. He showed no anger, no disappointment. Instead, his stillness held… acknowledgment. Acknowledgment of a worthy move. This wasn't defeat. It was confirmation. Confirmation that Hope might ripen on this wretched planet, reaching the critical mass needed for the Equation.
The silence after the sirens' wail was heavier than any hum. Darkseid slowly raised his head. His voice, quieter but more terrifying, brimmed with ancient, inhuman authority:
"Summon…" He paused, as if tasting an ancient curse, "…the Furies of Apokolips."
***
In the underground command center, space thickened. Doctor Fate stumbled out, swaying like a drunk. The Helmet of Fate, usually radiating menacing power, now flickered dimly. Its empty sockets seemed bottomless wells leaking inhuman exhaustion. From beneath the hood came Nelson's ragged, labored breathing—a frail human shell barely containing Nabu's roiling ocean of consciousness.
He lifted his head. Each word was a tortured effort:
"Task… complete. Complex… erased. Annihilation Beam… dust. Zatanna's radiation barrier… stable." He paused, struggling to breathe.
Alex stood motionless, his cold, analytical eyes scanning Fate's exhausted form, assessing depletion, combat readiness. A faint shadow of gratitude and relief crossed his face. His gaze snapped to the exit airlock, where Superman and Power Girl stood frozen. Their capes barely stirred from vibrations above—the first rumbles of the approaching storm.
"Superman. Kara." Alex's voice, sharp and uncompromising, made both Kryptonians turn. "Listen and remember: He knows you. From the ashes of other Earths. He has kryptonite, no doubt. If you sense the slightest hint—green glow in an ambush, sudden weakness, anything suspicious—you retreat. Your strength is our main fist. If he takes you out early…" He didn't finish, but the unspoken weight hung heavy.
Alex spun to Shazam. The young titan in bright red fidgeted nervously, wide eyes—full of fear and faint shame for it—darting to screens showing the first shadows emerging from the portal. A tiny camera was pinned to his chest, a near-invisible earpiece snug in his ear.
"Billy," Alex's voice crackled through the earpiece. Shazam flinched. "Listen only to me now. Forget 'everyone.' Saving everyone is a child's fairy tale. Save one at a time. The one closest, the one you see, the one crying for help. Don't look back. Don't think about those left behind. Don't think 'could have.' Emotions in this war are your enemy. Anger, fear, pity—they cloud your mind, slow your reactions, make you err."
The earpiece went silent, leaving Shazam with the echoing order and the rising roar of battle above. He nodded, swallowing hard, fists clenching to summon strength he didn't feel.
Alex moved to Flash.
"Barry," Alex gripped his forearm. Flash's eyes held not panic but deep weariness. "When the main wave hits, in the chaos' peak… you need one. One Parademon. Alive, not dead—relatively intact, able to breathe. Grab it at speed. Knock it out, break its limbs, bind it with ultra-strong cable—whatever. Just alive. Deliver it to the lab's isolation box." He nodded toward an armored door. "We need its flesh, blood, neural impulses. Any key to a weakness. We'll try for a biological weapon. Slim chance, but a chance."
A roar from above was inhuman—a wail of alien wind and the merged, frenzied scream of thousands of throats. The first Parademon wave poured from the blood-red sky rift. Short, predatory, clad in armor like clotted-blood chitin, they surged, wielding plasma blasters spitting green energy clots.
They met a steel, soulless wall. LexCorp robots—swift assault drones like mechanical wasp swarms and hulking platforms with massive energy shields and twin plasma cannons—unleashed a firestorm. The air howled with discharges. The front Parademon ranks vaporized under the concentrated energy deluge. Shields rang and sparked, absorbing return plasma barrages, glowing blue from strain. For a moment, the first line seemed an unbreakable barrier. Deep in the bunker, Luthor, watching via screens, allowed a thin, cold smile of satisfaction.
But the portal was insatiable. Hundreds became thousands. Then came others—winged, buzzing like cicada swarms. Fly-Parademons dove from above, blasting robots from the rear, trying to flank the steel shields. The tide grew overwhelming. A flood of living metal and flesh crashed against Luthor's line. Shields cracked. Blue glows turned to red warnings, then black patches of molten metal. One shield fell, then another. Robots beneath were torn apart by claws and melted by plasma. The line wavered.
"LANTERNS! CONSTRUCT—NOW!" Kilowog's strained, resolute voice crackled over comms.
Above the hellish portal, not one but dozens of emerald lights flared. The Green Lantern Corps' rings merged into a pulsing sphere of will. They didn't try to seal the portal—its energy was too alien, too vast. Instead, they formed a massive energy dome over the exit, like a lid. At its center, pooling their collective will, they compressed space into a ten-meter-wide bottleneck of pure emerald energy, a tunnel from hell into a deadly trap.
Parademons bursting from the portal could no longer spread wide. Space crushed, pushed, broke them, forcing them through the choke point. At the exit, surviving drones and heavy platforms, positioned around the perimeter, met them with relentless, concentrated fire. It was a high-pressure cauldron. A hellish grinder. Parademon bodies, armor fragments, plasma clots, and acrid smoke blended into a bloody-metal paste under crushing salvos. Defense efficiency soared. It seemed a solution was found.
"Hold… the line!" a Lantern reported, voice hoarse with strain, heavy breathing in the background. Maintaining such a construct under relentless pressure demanded immense effort.
But Apokolips knew no stalemate. From the portal's bloody pulse crawled something else. Crude, angular, the size of a small house. An Apokoliptian war platform. Its dull-gray armor, studded with eerie, organic growths, bristled with multi-barreled turrets aimed not at ground robots but upward, at the Lanterns' glowing dome. Energy coils on its hull ignited with ominous crimson.
Alex, watching on the bunker's monitors, opened his mouth to shout an order. The words died on his lips.
Two bolts—blue and red—streaked forward with a supersonic crack. Superman and Shazam, the first echelon, living shield and ram, reacted instantly. Superman, a silver arrow, slammed a fist into the nearest machine's frontal armor. A blow that could split mountains left only a deep dent and cracks on the strange, dull-gray surface. His laser vision, capable of slicing tank steel, struck the same spot—the armor glowed red-hot, melted locally, but didn't breach.
"Armor… composite! Unfamiliar!" Superman's voice over comms was steady but tinged with surprise and caution. His eyes narrowed, pupils flickering oddly. He pushed his X-ray vision to full power. The armor's structure unfolded in his mind: an ultra-dense outer alloy, a network of energy-absorbing cells beneath, and deeper, bio-like fibers distributing impact. "Weak points! Plate seams, power nodes!" he shouted, sharing the insight. "No kryptonite… we can hit it!"
He surged, a supersonic projectile, focusing on a seam his X-ray vision revealed. He struck not with a fist but his whole body. A piercing VJUUUH!—like a jet engine breaking the sound barrier in confined space—rang out. Superman punched through, leaving a clean, smoking hole the size of his body, edges glowing molten. The machine didn't explode but lurched, spewing black smoke and sparks from severed nodes. Its engines choked, guns silenced, and it collapsed, helpless.
"Like that, Billy! Hit weak points precisely!" Superman called, already banking for another strike. Shazam, mimicking him, hurled a lightning bolt at another machine. The strike was powerful but less focused—the armor buckled, smoked, but held.
Then something emerged from the portal, making the air itself recoil. Each step shook the sand. It wielded a massive halberd, its tip crackling with pure destructive energy. Steppenwolf. Eternal Herald of Conquest. His yellow, heatless eyes scanned the chaotic battle with disdain, as if watching ants scurry. They locked on the Lanterns' glowing dome. His craggy face didn't twitch. Behind him, with grinding screeches, crawled a larger, deadlier war machine, its multi-barreled guns spinning to aim not at the ground but upward, at the pulsing Lantern shield. Its engines' roar merged with the rising hum of charging energy.
Its crimson-charged guns spat concentrated destruction—not at ground forces but at the Lanterns' emerald dome. The first shot struck. The dome rippled, sparking, black cracks racing across it. The Lanterns shuddered, faces contorted with inhuman strain. Kilowog shouted in his native tongue, urging them to hold. A second, stronger shot followed almost instantly.
BA-BAM!
The sound wasn't just loud—it was a physical blow, making sand jump. The emerald dome didn't shatter—it imploded, bursting into a billion green shards that briefly lit the desert in ghostly light. The Lanterns were hurled back like dolls. Some crashed into the sand, unconscious; others barely stayed aloft, their rings flickering dimly—their collective will broken, the dome's restoration needing time.