"Let's go!"
Montoya looked at the silent Batman, reading the conflict behind his stillness.
"We are powerless to change any of this. If we delay any longer, we will all be trapped here. We need to retreat."
Batman raised his head, met Montoya's eyes, which carried a quiet grief, and nodded.
The group fell in behind Constantine, navigating the maze toward its exit. Harley Quinn trailed at the back, casting one last glance over her shoulder in Shazam's direction. The recent fight had done something unexpected to her. She had grown fond of the kid. Now, with departure imminent, there was a weight to it she had not anticipated.
She was still turning this over in her mind when she missed a step and lurched forward on the stairs. Black Canary's hand shot out and caught her by the collar before she hit the ground.
"Watch where you're stepping!" Black Canary snapped, pulling her upright.
Harley straightened without a trace of embarrassment, grinning at her. "I have to admit, girlfriend, your hand speed is something else entirely."
"I am not your girlfriend."
Black Canary turned and kept walking. Harley glanced once more toward where Shazam had been, then at the enormous figure of Trigon filling the air behind them, and muttered quietly, "Goodbye, Unicorn."
The group reached a crossroads in the maze where Constantine turned to Doctor Fate, who had converged from a different direction. "What is the plan now? How do we get out of here?"
"I assumed you would have thought of that before you summoned the demon," Doctor Fate replied, his tone dry.
"My responsibility was creating the disruption, not tidying up afterward. This maze was conjured by you using the Tower of Fate. Do not tell me you have no idea how to leave it."
Constantine folded his arms, unbothered.
"Once it is activated, it develops its own momentum," Doctor Fate said. "It is no longer under my direct control. That is both the nature of this particular magic and, I should note, precisely the reason I am also not responsible for cleaning up the mess."
As the two of them traded their customary barbs, Detective Chimp stepped forward, holding a magic book tucked under one arm.
"I have a plan," Beppo said.
Everyone turned to look at him.
He handed the book to Doctor Fate. "Before we entered the Tower of Fate, I identified a suitable landing point outside. It can provide a degree of magical protection once we are back on Earth. The spell to locate and lock onto that point is in this book. I am putting it in your hands, Doctor."
"Everything is prepared. Recite the spell, anchor to the landing point, and we can leave."
Doctor Fate accepted the book carefully.
"My dear Cornelius," Harley said, tilting her head with genuine curiosity, "why not cast it yourself? You use magic. You are perfectly capable."
Batman also looked at him, waiting.
Beppo's expression softened into something wry. "I will not be going with you."
He adjusted the hem of his green jacket, which hung over a light gray plaid shirt. Because he naturally held a slight crouch, the corner of the fabric had grazed the floor. He brushed it clean with his furry hand, almost absently.
"Why not?" Harley asked, her voice losing some of its brightness.
Constantine, who had already begun gesturing for the others to move, went still.
"I cannot go with you," Beppo said. He smoothed the corner of his jacket and looked at the group with clear, steady eyes. "My continued existence here has depended on Wizard Boy's magic. His life force is fading. When it is gone, I will return to what I should have been a long time ago."
He said this without flinching, without dramatizing it. His voice carried no trace of self-pity.
"I had made an appointment with Mrs. Trellian on Bernie Street," he added, his tone shifting to something almost conversational. "She runs a laundry shop and has been telling me off for months for buying a membership card and never using it. We had finally agreed on this weekend for a proper clean-up. I suppose I will have to break that appointment."
There was a quiet regret in his voice, not for himself, but for the unfinished things. He had no fear of what was coming. He should have died long before any of this. It had been Wizard Boy's magic that gave him the time he had. Now that the magic was ebbing, he was simply returning to where he had always been headed. The only thing that stung, just a little, was leaving a few loose ends. Mrs. Trellian was one of his only genuine friends, and she had been looking forward to it.
Harley went very quiet for a moment.
Then she crossed the distance between them and wrapped her arms around him.
"This is not fair, little monkey," she said, her voice cracking. "It should not be you. It should not be anyone, but it absolutely cannot be you. You are so kind. You are so strange and wonderful and completely your own."
She held on tightly. Beppo was, without question, the only friend she had made in this entire ordeal. Among everyone here, he had been the one who never treated her with suspicion or contempt, never kept a wall up because of what she had been or who she had worked for. He had simply accepted her. That was rarer than most people understood.
"Your clothes are perfectly clean, you know," she sobbed, her hands fisting in the fabric. "You are the cleanest one here. You do not need any laundry shop. You are spotless."
Batman heard those words and went still.
He looked down, away from everyone. He did not want anyone to see what was on his face. It was something he rarely allowed himself to feel openly, a sharp, helpless grief, and beneath it, something uglier: the self-reproach of a man who watched his friend fade in front of him and had nothing to offer.
"Thank you for everything you have done, Detective Chimp," he said, his voice low and deliberate. "All of it will be remembered."
Beppo looked up at him and smiled. "Remember those two whiskeys you owe me from the bar? Looks like I will not be collecting on those."
As the last word left him, his body began to lose its solidity. The outlines of him went soft, then transparent. Then he was simply gone.
Harley, still holding on, pitched slightly forward. Her arms closed on empty air. She stared at her hands for a long moment, her face stripped of its usual performance.
"Goodbye," she said quietly, to no one who could hear her. "The greatest monkey detective in the world."
Constantine watched from where he stood and said nothing. He reached into his coat, drew out a cigarette, and lit it. He smoked in silence, letting the weight of the moment sit without trying to diminish it. This was not something new to him. He had stood in this exact silence more times than he could count, watching people he cared about step through a door that did not open back. He would stand in it again. One day, someone else would stand in it for him.
He hoped, in the way he always quietly hoped for things he never said aloud, that there was somewhere on the other side where they all eventually ended up together.
He finished the cigarette, dropped the butt, and pressed it out under his heel.
"We still have things to do," he said.
Doctor Fate cradled the book Beppo had given him, ran his fingers across its cover, then opened it. He located the landing point Beppo had prepared, anchored to it through the spell, and constructed the passage. A shimmering portal opened before them.
Constantine went first, then Black Canary, Montoya, and Doctor Fate. Harley followed, head down, eyes red, stealing one final glance behind her before stepping through. Batman brought up the rear, holding position until every last person had gone, then turned and walked toward the glowing threshold.
He had taken two steps when he heard something.
He stopped.
To his left was a solid wall. Nothing should have been making a sound there. And yet something was.
A white shape moved through the wall, a translucent figure, half in and half out of the stone, drifting into the space beside him.
Batman took a sharp step back on instinct.
"Bruce."
The figure was addressing him directly, pressing further out of the wall until the top half of its form was visible in the air.
"Bruce, I need to tell you something."
Batman looked at the ghost, and for a moment the discipline he had spent a lifetime building simply stopped working.
"Oliver," he said. "How is this possible?"
The ghost before him was Oliver Queen. Green Arrow. Dead, by all accounts, for a long time.
"I have been operating with Deadman's abilities," Oliver said. "That is not what matters right now. Listen to me."
Batman brought himself back, drew a steadying breath, and listened.
"I went to Gotham. In an unlicensed mental hospital, I found Jim Corrigan. He was in a straitjacket, Jokerized, laughing in a way no one should ever laugh. I could barely look at him."
Jim Corrigan was the Spectre's host.
Batman's thoughts moved quickly. "The Spectre engaged us only a few days ago. But if Corrigan has been confined to a mental hospital this entire time, then who was that?"
He worked through it aloud. "The Joker is dead. Eric Kent carries the virus, and while it has not erupted, he has the capacity to spread it. Could it have been him?"
"No," Oliver said. "This was not Joker toxin. Corrigan was cursed. Someone took his identity and used it to impersonate the Spectre."
Batman held the information, letting its implications settle.
"The entity that cast the curse," Oliver continued, "is the same one that has been shielding Homelander."
"Entity," Batman repeated, the word sitting differently once it was out.
"You need to go, Bruce. Remember what I have told you. Stay alert."
Oliver glanced at the portal, which had begun to contract at its edges, then looked at Batman once more. A moment later he slipped back through the wall and was gone.
Batman turned and ran.
He reached the passage in the final second before it closed, stepped through, and the white light swallowed everything.
When it cleared, they were standing in a wide, high-ceilinged hall. The room had an old, settled quality to it, carpeted from wall to wall, the kind of space that felt like it had absorbed decades of strange history. Everyone stood on the upper landing of a staircase leading down, slightly disoriented.
Constantine alone seemed merely uncomfortable rather than confused.
"Where are we?" Montoya asked.
"The House of Mystery."
The House of Mystery was not a building in any ordinary sense. It existed in a dimensional space of its own, capable of appearing or vanishing at its owner's will, and for anyone not its owner, it behaved more like a living thing than a structure. It repaired itself, shifted its interior, and could manifest in different forms when the occasion called for it. Constantine had owned it long enough that the two of them had developed an understanding. He had once gambled it away to a demon in a bet, then walked through the front door and simply ceased to be locatable. The demon had been left standing outside holding a deed to nothing.
Items stored within its walls did not fully exist in the places they appeared. Nothing inside the House of Mystery was entirely real unless the house decided it should be. It was, in the most accurate sense of the phrase, a very strange building.
While the survivors regrouped inside it, the battle Adrian was waging had reached a different register entirely.
"You are unforgivable!"
Trigon's voice cracked through the air as he fixed his gaze on Adrian. He swung one massive arm and fire erupted from him in concentrated bolts, cutting across the sky like heat lightning.
Four figures moved to meet him. Adrian, Wonder Woman, Clark, and Ares fanned out across the battlefield, each taking a different angle. Shazam and the Flash had broken off to find Rachel. Sinestro had vanished entirely, which surprised no one.
The shockwave from the first exchange of force tore into the ground, splitting it in radiating cracks as if something far beneath the surface had simply given way. The invisible pressure of the detonation rolled outward, destabilizing everything within range.
Adrian met Trigon's attack head-on, pressing both forearms together and holding as the raw force tried to collapse through him. Even augmented by the Yellow Lantern Ring, he was being pushed. Trigon in full form was not something Adrian had faced before. He had spent just over two decades on Earth, and whatever advantages he had accumulated through ability, training, and fortunate circumstance, they did not entirely close the gap between him and a being who had been conquering universes before human civilization existed. The deficit was real, and he felt it in every exchange.
Trigon broke through and landed a direct punch. Adrian went airborne, and before he could stabilize, a wave of flame hit him from behind with the force of something falling from orbit, driving him downward into the ground. The impact was catastrophic, the surrounding air splitting apart with a sound like detonating stone.
Adrian adjusted in the fall, rotating to face upward, and fired Heat Vision directly at Trigon's back. The beams hit with enough force to reduce a skyscraper to fragments. A sequence of concussive explosions rolled across the demon's spine.
Trigon did not retreat. He turned, eyes burning, and fired back.
Two beams of destructive energy crossed in midair. The collision produced something that did not behave like an ordinary explosion. It began as a point, a single blinding node of compressed force, and then expanded outward in every direction at once, filling the sky with light and pressure and heat. The maze structures below shattered under the shockwave. A hurricane-force wind spread outward from the center, flattening everything within reach.
Ares pressed through the aftermath, flying against the current toward Trigon, searching for an opening.
Trigon's hand closed around him before he found one.
The sound that followed was brief and final. Ares was torn in half. Blood scattered across the ruined ground below.