Hey everyone RoseSaiyan2 here again. So the saiyans will be getting introduced soon , just not sure how I should introduce them. Anyways, this chapter will cover how our main character and others of his race came to earth. The team will learn about the origins of our main character, who's name will be revealed this chapter. It's exhausting having to refer to him in the 3rd person without giving his name away. Also forgot to mention this but, since their are demons in this story.. I'll be using some inspiration from Fairy Tail's and Black Clover's versions of Demons/Devils. If in a future part of the story you recognize a scene similar to a scene in Black clover, just know that I'm drawing parts of inspiration from Black Clover, not creating a carbon copy of it.
Disclaimer: I don't own DBS or YJ/JL and their characters, those belong to their respective creators. I only own the oc's. I also have permission via ComparedDreadx to use both Tarro and Daikon in my stories. Full ownership of those characters belongs to ComparedDreadx. ComparedDreadx
Chapter Two: Tragedy and Rage
◆ I. ◆
J'onn J'onzz did not enter minds the way a soldier enters a room.
He entered the way water enters stone — slowly, through the smallest available gaps, with the patient certainty that eventually there would be enough passage to move through. It was a discipline he had cultivated over a lifetime of learning that other people's minds were not territory to be conquered but to be witnessed, and that the difference between those two things was the difference between understanding and violation.
He looked to Kara.
Superman, following his colleague's gaze, sighed through whatever reservation he'd been building and gave a single, quiet nod.
J'onn extended his hand toward the girl.
Kara looked at it for a moment — at the slate-grey of his palm, at the calm certainty in his red eyes — and then she rose from the ground and drifted toward him, one hand reaching out to complete the connection. The moment her fingers met his, the room around her didn't so much disappear as recede, pulling back the way a tide pulls back from shore: gradually, completely, until all that remained was—
Memory.
◆ II. ◆
Planet Arkynor — Territory of Albanar Capital City: Xenia Time: Before.
The sun over Xenia was warm.
That was the first thing Kara noticed — not with her skin, because this was not her body and she was not truly here, but with something more fundamental than skin. The warmth of it existed in the memory the way warmth exists in old photographs: not felt, but known, inseparable from the image. The sky above the Albanar capital was a deep amber-violet, two moons visible even in daylight at opposite ends of the horizon, and the city below was alive with the particular unhurried energy of a civilization that had been here long enough to stop rushing.
Streets of pale stone wound between buildings that managed to be simultaneously ancient and perfectly maintained — architectural history worn with pride rather than apology. Elven folk moved through the market districts and residential lanes with the ease of people for whom this was simply Tuesday: vendors, children, couples, soldiers off-duty carrying their helmets under their arms. The ambient sound of it was the sound of a place that had learned, over centuries, how to be at peace.
Kara absorbed all of this in the compressed, total way that memory allows — all at once, no sequence required — and then the memory narrowed its focus, and she was in the fields outside the city walls.
The training ground was a wide meadow of something that was not quite grass — deeper in colour, more silver than green, bending in the wind with a different weight than any plant Kara had seen on Earth. At its centre, two figures moved through forms that were half combat exercise and half something more like conversation — the kind of exchange that happens between people who know each other well enough that sparring becomes a language.
The older figure was a man.
Dark skin and fiery orange eyes, hair the same dark blue as the boy he was training, a beard that had been maintained to the precise degree of formality appropriate for a king who was currently getting dirt on his ceremonial coat. He was tall — not unusual for an Elf, Kara understood instinctively, drawing on the context that memory provided — and he moved with the particular economy of someone for whom physical excellence had long since ceased to be an achievement and had become simply a baseline.
This was Berethon Albanar. King of the Elves of the Albanar Territory. And from the patience in his eyes as he watched the younger figure miss him by a half-step again, clearly a father.
The boy — Odyn, Kara thought, and felt the name settle into her understanding like a key turning — was perhaps half a head taller than his father already, which, given that he was apparently not yet considered an adult, suggested he would eventually be genuinely remarkable in stature. He had the same dark skin, the same blue hair worn loose to the mid-back, the same sharp features that Kara had been looking at while he slept suspended in their basement. He wore a dark green headband below his Elven crown, a black hooded garment beneath an army-green parka coat, steel-grey trousers, black boots, silver gloves, and the blue-and-gold sheath at his back that Kara now recognized.
He was frustrated.
It was written clearly in the set of his jaw and the controlled way he reset his stance after each failed attempt to land a hit on his father — the frustration of someone who is trying very hard and is fully aware that trying very hard is precisely the wrong approach.
"Dad." The word came out somewhere between a complaint and a demand. "Why are you taking it easy on me?"
Berethon didn't deflect the question. He stepped back out of the training circle and regarded his son with the unhurried amusement of someone who has been waiting for the right moment to teach a particular lesson.
"Relax," he said. "You're getting in your own way." He tapped the side of his own temple. "You're letting your frustration run your footwork. I'm not holding back — I'm simply letting your anger do the work for me."
Odyn was still for a moment, processing this.
Then something shifted in his posture — a visible, almost architectural change, like watching a building settle onto its foundations — and he bowed, inclining slightly forward with both hands pressed to his sides.
"Forgive my impatience, Father. I would like to continue, if I may."
Berethon reached out and ruffled his son's hair with a warmth that Kara felt even through the membrane of someone else's memory, and it made her chest ache in a way she hadn't quite expected.
"Don't overthink the apology," he said. "You'll be leading our people someday. Every lesson in patience now is a lesson in becoming a king they can be proud to follow." He stepped back into position, and his eyes were warm and absolutely serious at the same time. "Come on, then."
—
There was a second figure at the edge of the training ground.
Another young Dark Elf, roughly Odyn's age and bearing, watching the exchange between father and son with the comfortable familiarity of someone who had seen versions of this scene many times before. His presence in the memory carried the weight of someone important to Odyn — not family by blood, but by the rarer kind of bond that forms when two people have been through enough together that the distinction stops mattering.
Baron, the memory offered.
Kara filed the name away.
The two were being directed to spar with each other, ki-forms only, when the meadow shook.
—
Not an earthquake. Something sharper, more directional — the concussive displacement of something landing at tremendous speed and scale nearby. Birds that were not quite birds scattered from the silver-grass in a cloud of panicked wingbeats. The training came to an immediate stop. Berethon's hand went to his sword without apparent thought, the motion automatic, seasoned.
Then the messenger came.
He was running before he was fully visible — a young Elven soldier coming from the direction of the city gate at a sprint that suggested he had been running for some time already, and that what had prompted the running was the kind of thing you did not stop running from.
"Your Highness!" He was breathless, nearly stumbling as he pulled up before the king. "Terrible news — the capital, it's—"
The ground shook again. Harder this time.
Everyone looked up.
The sky over Xenia — that warm amber-violet sky, with its two leisurely moons — had changed.
There were holes in it.
Dozens of them. Then hundreds. Perfectly circular tears in the upper atmosphere, each one rimmed with a sulphurous dark light, each one pouring something through it with the mechanical efficiency of an invasion that had been planned and timed and executed against a population that had no warning and had done nothing to earn it.
The creatures that came through looked wrong in the particular way that things designed specifically for violence look wrong when observed in a place that had been, moments ago, peaceful. Black-winged, beetle-bodied, armoured in something that was not quite metal and not quite bone, with a symbol at the chest that Kara recognized immediately — immediately, a cold spike of recognition driving through her — as the Omega.
The messenger never finished his sentence.
Kara looked away.
She had learned, in the past year, how to be a hero. She had not yet learned how to watch what followed without flinching, and she suspected — she hoped — that she never entirely would.
Berethon's sword was already drawn.
"Odyn. Baron." His voice was the voice of a king and a father at the same time — two registers of authority folded into one command, and it was the father's that made Odyn hesitate. "Get back to the others. Now."
"But Father, we can't—" Odyn started.
Berethon looked at him.
It was the kind of look that does not raise its voice because it has never needed to. The look of someone who has already considered every argument you are about to make and has decided, with regret rather than dismissal, that the decision is already final.
Odyn straightened.
He pressed one fist to his chest in salute — the motion of someone performing a ritual they have trained for but hoped never to use in earnest — and said: "Understood, my King. Please — hurry back, Father."
Berethon said nothing. He turned toward the creatures.
And then the ground between the boys and the invasion erupted in a spiraling column of Flame.
"Shining Flare Bomb!"
The fire was not the ordinary orange-red of combustion. It was shot through with gold — the same gold that appeared in Odyn's magic when the memory showed him fighting back, driving a path through the swarming creatures with a dragon-shaped torrent of gilded flame while Baron beside him detonated smaller fire-blades with the kinetic precision of someone who had been practicing this exact application since childhood. Father and sons working in concert without discussion, the way families do when they have trained together long enough that communication becomes unnecessary.
Berethon watched his son and his son's friend break through the horde and vanish into the smoke on the other side.
He turned back to face the rest.
He was still smiling.
◆ III. ◆
Xenia — Shortly After
The capital was on fire.
Kara drifted through the memory of it beside Odyn, and even filtered through the distance of secondhand recollection, the scale of the destruction was — total. That was the word. Not devastating, not severe. Total. The streets of stone that had been busy with ordinary life twenty minutes ago were now carpeted in debris and silence, broken only by the sounds of fire working its way through everything that could burn.
And the bodies.
Kara kept her gaze forward, level, and concentrated on breathing slowly and steadily, because she was not really here and none of this could hurt her, and she had been trained for exactly this kind of scene, and none of that was entirely making the automatic human responses that rose in her chest go away.
There were so many.
Citizens who had been in the market. Soldiers in their armour, some still holding weapons that had not saved them. People who had tried to run and not made it far enough. The particular horror of it was in its indiscriminate quality — the attack had not distinguished between combatants and civilians, between the young and the old, between anyone at all. It had simply proceeded, like a weather event, and what remained was the aftermath.
Baron stopped.
Kara saw what he saw a half-second after he did, and she felt Odyn see it through the memory, and the weight of it moved through the recollection like a wave through deep water.
The girl on the ground was young.
She had been young, anyway.
Baron was on his knees before Odyn had processed what he was looking at, and the way his hands moved — gentle, careful, as though gentleness still meant something — told Kara everything she needed to understand about what that girl had meant to him. He checked for breath. He looked up from the absence of it with an expression that was not quite grief yet, because grief takes a moment to arrive, and he was still in the space between knowing and feeling.
Then he punched the ground. The stone cracked beneath his fist in a near-perfect radial pattern.
Odyn said nothing. There was nothing to say. He stood there with his hands at his sides and let Baron have the moment, because that was what you did, and he understood this completely, and understanding it was its own kind of pain.
That's his sister, the memory told Kara, in the way memories provide context without requiring explanation.
Hailfire.
Baron wiped his face with the back of his wrist. He placed his sister's hands over her chest with a care that was almost ceremonial. He closed her eyes. He rose.
When he looked at Odyn, there were still tears on his face, and he made no attempt to conceal them, and the determination in his expression was the kind that comes from having nothing left to lose in a particular direction.
"We'd better check on your family," Baron said.
Odyn nodded. They went deeper into the city.
◆ IV. ◆
On the far side of the capital, in the ruin of what had been a commercial district, a woman pressed herself and her daughter against the standing wall of a destroyed building and listened to the sound of the creatures searching the debris nearby.
She was violet-haired, and she held her daughter with the particular controlled stillness of someone who has decided that her own terror is irrelevant to the task in front of her. The daughter — dark-crimson hair, tanned skin, the orange eyes that the memory marked as characteristic of the royal line, her Elven Knight's armour fine enough that it could have been mistaken for exceptionally wrought clothing — was asleep, because her mother had made her sleep, because some things a child should not have to witness.
Hyatan, Kara understood. The High Queen.
And Sarai. The youngest.
Hyatan peered around the edge of the wall at the centre of the street.
The figure standing there was everything the murals had shown, and the murals had not exaggerated. Grey skin. Red eyes. Armour of midnight black with the Omega symbol placed where another man might place a crest. He stood in the ruins of Xenia with the complete, unhurried composure of someone who was exactly where he had intended to be and had encountered nothing that required him to adjust his expectations.
Around him, the creatures moved in their searching patterns.
Hyatan began to chant.
Silent syllables in the tongue of her people — the Taizlan Woodlands tradition she had carried from her homeland, distinct from the mainstream Albanar magical practice, something she had never stopped practicing precisely because the day might come when it was the only thing available to her. A magic circle formed beneath her touching hand, barely visible, runes cycling through it in tight radial patterns.
She needed to be quick.
She needed to be very, very quiet.
And she needed to not think too hard about the fact that she could feel, through the ambient magical resonance of a Queen who had been tuned to her people's presence for decades, exactly how few of them were left.
Sybyrh Arkham came from the direction of the eastern quarter.
Blonde hair with black highlights, armour of emerald and silver that had been designed for genuine battle and showed signs of having recently been in it, shield and vambrace both marked with the insignia of her rank. She moved with the directional confidence of someone who had made a decision she fully intended to follow through on.
Beside her, Khanna Albanar — eldest cousin of the royal family, dark-haired, furious in the very specific way of someone who has just seen things that cannot be unseen — moved at the same pace, held at the same pace by the hand Sybyrh had discreetly placed on her arm.
Not yet.
Khanna held.
Sybyrh stepped forward into the open space of the street, and let the figure at its centre become aware of her on her own terms.
"Can I assume," she said, with the carefully measured tone of someone who has decided that even now, in this rubble, the words are going to be said correctly, "that you are the one these creatures call Darkseid?"
The figure turned.
"Yes," he said. As though it were a perfectly ordinary thing to confirm.
Sybyrh looked at him for a moment. When she spoke again, the measurement was still there, but beneath it something had stopped being controlled — not volume, but intensity, the way a fire stops being contained.
"We have done nothing to you. Nothing. Two thirds of our people are dead, and we have done nothing to earn it. So tell me—" She took one step forward. "Tell me why."
Darkseid regarded her with the expression of someone to whom the question was mildly interesting in the way that a researcher finds a subject's confusion mildly interesting.
"The reason," he said, "is straightforward enough. Your blood holds the key to eternal life. Through its application, you become part of something greater than yourselves. A step toward the final resolution of the Anti-Life Equation."
"I see."
Sybyrh's expression shifted into something that, in a less controlled face, might have been contempt.
"Then I'm afraid you have wasted an enormous amount of effort for nothing. Arkynorean power is not something that can be taken. It is gifted. The consent of the one who holds it is prerequisite to any transfer." She tilted her head slightly. "You will find it considerably more difficult to obtain than you apparently assumed."
The red eyes narrowed.
"Is that so," Darkseid said.
"It is." Sybyrh watched him process this with the attentiveness of someone who has already selected her next move. "What's the matter? Did something I say upset you, oh mighty God of Apokolips?"
He moved fast.
She moved faster.
The fist that should have ended the conversation was in her grip before it arrived, caught between both her hands with a precision that said I saw this coming and a force that said and I was ready. Darkseid looked at his arrested fist with an expression that Kara, watching, recognized as the specific face of someone encountering something that was not supposed to happen.
Then Sybyrh looked at him directly.
Something that was not visible in the ordinary spectrum radiated outward from her gaze, a concussive force that expressed itself through eye contact alone, and Darkseid went backward across the street in an uncontrolled slide, arms crossing on instinct, skidding to a halt in the rubble of what had been a market stall.
He straightened.
Sybyrh was no longer in front of him.
He was still processing the absence of her when the blow landed in his midsection — not a strike that announced itself, but one that simply occurred, with the clean efficiency of something that had been moving to that exact point since before he turned around. He lurched over the impact. In the split-second that afforded, Sybyrh hit him again, an uppercut from below that launched him skyward with the kind of force that made the sound of it arrive after the event.
Khanna was already there.
She came from above with the deliberateness of someone who had been tracking his trajectory the whole time — foot already chambered, timing already calculated — and the axe kick she delivered drove him back to the street with enough force that the impact registered seismically. She was buried to the wrist in the crater before he'd stopped moving, a single, total blow to the gut that left him pinned at the bottom of a depression in the stonework.
She stepped back. Rejoined Sybyrh.
Both of them waited, watching.
Darkseid attempted to rise.
Made it to one knee.
Stayed there.
The confusion on his face was, Kara noted, almost the most frightening thing she had seen in this memory — not because it was unfamiliar, but because it was genuine. He did not understand. He could not understand. The last time he had encountered something he could not rise above, it had required forces on a cosmic scale, and these two girls—
"How—" He pressed one hand to his chest, coughed. A dark substance appeared at the corner of his mouth. "How can two blows affect me this much—"
Sybyrh made a sound of quiet, disappointed exasperation.
"You genuinely don't understand," she said. It was not a question. "You attacked an entire civilization to acquire a power you didn't even bother to research." She looked at him with the expression of a person facing an enormous problem that has turned out to be embarrassingly straightforward. "Why don't you ask your subordinates, if you need it explained. I suspect even they know the answer."
"I am the conqueror of worlds—" he began, and found Khanna's voice cutting across his before he could finish.
"We don't care."
The words were not loud. They were the opposite of loud — stripped of everything except their absolute sincerity.
"We don't care who you are," Khanna said, and in this moment she was not merely angry, she was a person who had run out of room for the kind of fear that keeps you careful. "You came to our home, and you killed our people, and you did it for nothing. And now you want to stand there and tell us who you are—"
She stopped herself.
Something had materialized from the direction of the square's far entrance — a war hammer, travelling at a velocity suggesting it had been thrown from somewhere well outside normal visual range, arriving with zero warning and even less mercy. It made contact with Darkseid's face in a way that was entirely definitive, and he went into the building behind him with enough force to bring most of the remaining facade down on top of him.
The building settled. Dust rolled across the street.
A pair of crimson beams destroyed the rubble from within.
Darkseid walked out of the dust cloud, and the elves who had been confronting him were gone.
In their place stood the soldiers. The ordinary Elven foot soldiers who had been watching from the perimeter, waiting, buying time for the Queen and Princess to get clear. They had known, Kara understood, exactly what they were buying time at the cost of. They stood there anyway.
Darkseid looked at them.
And to his apparent surprise, he found himself genuinely pausing.
"I have to commend you," he said, and even through the filtered membrane of memory Kara could hear that this was not irony. "Your courage is admirable, if strategically futile. You have my sympathies."
"Keep them," the soldier nearest the front said.
He spat.
The soldiers charged.
Kara closed her eyes.
She knew what the Omega Beams could do.
She kept them closed until the memory moved on.
◆ V. ◆
Berethon found them near the ruins of the eastern gate.
He was cut — side of his face, his forearms, his coat in three places — and he was moving with the careful energy of someone who had been in sustained combat for some time and was managing reserves they didn't entirely trust yet. When he saw Odyn and Baron, the relief that moved across his features was the kind that only fathers produce: involuntary, total, briefly undoing every layer of composure he'd assembled.
He counted.
The magic he could feel: his wife, his daughter, his son Roy, his niece Khanna, Odyn, Baron, Sybyrh and her brothers. His own presence made ten total, not counting those who had already gotten off the planet.
Fewer than a couple hundred remaining, he thought. Of everyone.
He kept that thought contained and approached his son.
He saw, when he was closer, what Odyn and Baron were looking at.
And he stopped.
He did not allow himself to fully process it in sequence — he had the control of a king and the experience of a man who had seen things that needed to be survived rather than felt in the moment — but the knowledge settled into him anyway, irrevocably. Three of his sons lay among the fallen. Banryu, still on his knees, taken mid-prayer or mid-stance. Ragnarok, arms spread, the wounds on him telling the story of someone who had died putting himself between something and someone else. Zerick — Berethon looked at what remained of Zerick and looked away, and did not look back.
His cousins' sons. His nephews. Alek, Zephyr, Borhdak — a cloak hanging from a weapon, a body split by something with no regard for the ceremony of death.
Berethon breathed.
In.
Out.
Not yet. Not now. There is still work to do.
—
Sybyrh and her brothers arrived first, then Khanna, then Hyatan running with Sarai unconscious in her arms, and the group became complete in the worst possible way — complete in the sense of accounting for everyone who remained.
Khanna saw her brothers.
She dropped to her knees in the dust of the street, and the sound she made was something Kara had not expected and would not forget — not a wail, not a scream, but something under the breath, something beaten inward and still breaking out, No, no, no, not you too, and her fists found the ground again and again and the stone yielded to them because it had no choice, because grief of that magnitude generates its own physics.
Hyatan knelt beside her and held her.
Nobody spoke.
—
The clapping, when it came, was the single most obscene sound Kara had ever heard.
It came from above. It came with the sound of a descent — slow, deliberate, theatrical — and it resolved into the figure they had all been bracing for, landing at the edge of the gathered survivors with the ease of someone who had never once in his existence had to worry about what he was landing in the middle of.
He looked at Berethon.
"I can spare you further suffering," Darkseid said. "Serve me. Become part of something that will outlast the memory of this place."
The offer was made in the tone of something that had been decided before it was stated.
Odyn's hands were burning.
Not metaphorically. The golden flame magic he carried was manifesting at his fists without permission, rising in response to a fury his body had stopped asking the rest of him about. The air around him shimmered with it.
"Odyn."
His father's voice. One word.
The fire subsided.
Not because the rage had gone anywhere. Because his father had asked.
Berethon looked at his family. He looked at his friends. He looked at the remnants of his world gathered in a street that smelled of smoke and ruin, and something moved across his face — resignation, yes, but not the collapsed kind. The quiet, decided kind. The kind that precedes action.
He drew his sword.
"Unfortunately, Darkseid—" The blade leveled, pointing directly at the tyrant with the steadiness of a man who had made peace with what came next. "—I cannot do what you ask. To do so would doom my people to something worse than death."
He looked at his family one last time. His gaze lingered on Hyatan longest.
A magic circle appeared beneath the group — clock-runes, portal-runes, a spiraling gateway rendered in the gold and blue of Albanar magic. The air beneath their feet became luminous with it.
"Berethon—" Hyatan's voice cracked on his name.
"Please," he said, gently. "You have to live. All of you. I leave the future in your hands." He paused. Then, softer: "Please, Aya. Don't make this harder for me."
The name — the private name, the one from before crowns and wars and everything that had come after — did what arguments could not. Hyatan understood. She nodded, and the tears on her face were witness to the understanding, not argument against it.
He crossed to her. He kissed her — not quickly, not formally. The way you kiss someone when you have decided it is the last time and you want them to be able to remember exactly what it was.
Then he stepped back.
"I'll come back to you someday," he said, barely above a whisper. "Efrai naleth macaah Torii kazahaneth."
She smiled.
The portal swallowed them — Hyatan, Sarai, Odyn, Baron, Khanna, Sybyrh and her brothers, Roy — swallowed them whole and closed behind them without ceremony, and Berethon was alone in the street.
He picked up a loose sword from the debris and walked to the center of the space, and set it point-down in the ground in front of Darkseid.
The tyrant looked at it. Looked at him.
"I know what you're still feeling from their magic," Berethon said. "Your kind are weakened by it — that's well documented. I'm leveling the field." A pause. "If I'm going to die, it will be in the manner of my people. I'm asking you to honor that."
Darkseid was quiet for a moment that seemed to stretch beyond its dimensions.
"Berethon Albanar," he said finally. "King of the Elves. I will remember you and your people as brave warriors who passed into myth." He reached down and took up the sword. "I grant you the death you have earned."
Berethon adjusted his stance.
"My people will live through my family and my friends," he said, and the words were not addressed to Darkseid. They were addressed to something larger and further away — to a future he could not see but had chosen to believe in anyway. "They will make you answer for everything you have done. I am ready."
They moved simultaneously.
The memory compressed here, the way memories sometimes do around moments that were too significant and too fast to retain in full detail: two charges, two slashes, a half-second of suspension before physics reasserted itself. When the two had passed each other, Berethon's legs gave way beneath him with a gentleness almost at odds with the cause, and he knelt, and then the ground came up to meet him.
The King of Albanar was dead.
Darkseid stood in the empty street with a gash across his chest that would scar, even on him — the price of an Arkynorean King's last exchange. He looked at the fallen man for a moment, and if there was anything in his expression beyond the clinical satisfaction of a mission's conclusion, the memory did not linger on it.
He turned.
He flew.
Behind him, the ground received the omega beams at the precise angle required to reach the planet's core in minimum time. Arkynor ruptured from the inside in a chain of detonations that rendered the memory white, then silent, then absent.
Darkseid set a course for Apokolips.
The universe continued.
◆ VI. ◆
Mount Justice — Present
Kara opened her eyes.
The basement of Mount Justice. The familiar ambient hum of the building's systems. The rune-lit walls. Odyn still suspended above her, still asleep, the heartbeat she had been listening to for the past hour still marking its steady count.
She became aware that her cheeks were wet.
She did not immediately do anything about this. She stood with J'onn's hand released from hers and looked at the floor for a moment, letting the present reassemble itself around her — letting the warmth of the room, the ambient sounds, the faces of the people watching her, all settle back into being real.
Then she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and breathed.
"Are you alright?" J'onn asked, his voice carrying that particular register of his that was gentler than his normal cadence.
"I'm fine." A beat. "It's just—" She exhaled. "Sad. It's just very sad."
She drifted back down to the floor and stood among the others, looking for a moment at the middle distance, and then up at Odyn. She had looked at his face before without this context, and now she looked at it again with the weight of what she'd seen inside his history, and the difference between the two lookings was considerable.
Superman spoke first. "Kara. What did you see?"
She looked at her cousin.
"Everything," she said. "Darkseid took all of it, Kal. His family. His people. His city. His planet. Because he wanted their blood and couldn't understand why he couldn't just take what he wanted." Her jaw was set. "He killed his brothers. His father died so that the others could get clear. And this—" She gestured upward at the sleeping figure. "—this is what's left."
Superman's expression had gone through several stages during this. What it settled on was the kind of controlled anger that comes from someone who has learned through long experience that anger alone accomplishes nothing, and has not entirely succeeded in making peace with that lesson.
"His name," Kara said, "is Odyn Albanar." She let the name occupy the room for a moment. "And there are others like him here on Earth. Other survivors. They're just scattered."
Wonder Woman, who had been listening with the focused attention she brought to everything, stepped forward. "Do you know where?"
Kara shook her head. "I couldn't pinpoint locations from what I saw. But they're here. Somewhere."
"The League will need to investigate," Green Lantern said, from where he had positioned himself slightly apart from the main group — the unconscious body language of someone thinking operationally. "We'll need to know where they are and whether they pose—"
"Whether they pose—" Kara turned to him, and the controlled quality of her voice was doing more work than it usually had to. "You want to lock them up, don't you? Contain them, in case they're a threat. Because that's what the League does when it encounters something it doesn't understand yet."
"I have a responsibility—"
"And they have been through something you cannot begin to understand from a briefing. I saw it and I can barely process it." Her voice remained level, which was impressive given everything it contained. "They were peaceful people, Hal. Warriors, yes, but peaceful. Darkseid attacked them without provocation. Without negotiation. Without warning. He decided it was more convenient for them to become a myth."
"Their blood," The Flash said, quiet and a little tentative. "You said he was after their blood?"
Kara nodded. "He believed it held the key to immortality. That if he could find a way to harness whatever's in their bloodline—"
"An Arkynorean's natural lifespan," J'onn said, smoothly completing the thought, "is approximately twenty-five times that of a human being."
The pause that followed this was the pause of a room doing arithmetic.
"Twenty-five times," Robin said slowly. "That's... that's around—"
"Two thousand years," Zatanna said. She had been quiet for some time, calculating.
"Two thousand?" The number hit the room in the particular way large numbers do when they carry consequences — not with disbelief, exactly, but with the weight of implications spreading outward from a centre point.
"If Darkseid could harness that," Superman said — more to himself than the room, working through it — "and actually weaponize it—"
"He can't," Kara said. "That's the thing. That's the thing he didn't know when he made this decision. Arkynorean power can't be stolen. It can only be given — freely, willingly, with the consent of the person it belongs to. No method of extraction works without that agreement. It can't be taken by force." She paused. "He wiped out two thirds of a civilization chasing something he never would have been able to take anyway."
The silence that followed this was a different kind again. It had a quality of — not irony exactly, because irony requires distance, and this was too recent and too significant for distance — but something adjacent to it. The particular horror of a violence that was not only monstrous but pointless.
J'onn confirmed it quietly, methodically, for those who needed the confirmation. He had seen the same things Kara had. He spoke with the even precision of a witness.
Batman, standing at the edge of the briefing space with his arms folded, said nothing for a long stretch of time. He was constructing scenarios, as he always was, and the scenario he was constructing involved a near-extinct race whose power could not be appropriated without consent, whose natural lifespans exceeded human by orders of magnitude, and whose primary and apparently singular emotional target was the same entity the League was almost certainly going to have to face again before this was over.
J'onn looked at him.
"I understand the caution," he said, addressing Batman directly. "But I want to offer a specific reassurance: these are not people who will turn on humanity without cause. They are, by nature and by culture, deeply peaceful. What they feel toward Darkseid is specific and earned, and I believe—" He paused, weighing the words. "—I believe that if and when they succeed in defeating him, they will leave judgment to whatever authority humanity considers appropriate. The Green Lantern Corps. The League itself."
"That is—" Green Lantern stopped. Started again. "If you're wrong about that, Supergirl—"
"I know," Kara said. "If I'm wrong, report it. I'm asking you to give them the chance to show you I'm not."
Green Lantern looked at her for a long moment.
Then he looked up at Odyn, and at the runes cycling on the walls, and at the orange luminescence that pulsed in quiet synchrony with a heartbeat that had been counting out its patient rhythm for as long as any of them had been standing in this room.
"Very well," he said. "I'll see what I can do with my superiors." A pause. "Don't make me regret it."
"Thank you," Kara said.
—
The League members filed out shortly after — returning via boom tube to the Watchtower, taking their briefcases full of implications and intelligence and newly complicated strategic calculus back up to Earth orbit with them. Batman was the last to leave, and he paused at the door for exactly one second longer than necessary — the Batman equivalent of lingering — and then he was gone.
The basement exhaled.
Kara exhaled with it, a long, slow breath that released considerably more than air.
Karen was beside her almost immediately.
"I'm proud of you," she said, and the smirk she wore was the particular one Kara had learned to identify as genuine affection wearing the costume of teasing.
"Don't start—"
"You stood up to three of them at once. That was genuinely impressive."
"Karen—"
"Also." The smirk deepened. "You said yet."
Kara blinked. "What?"
"When you were talking about him." Karen gestured upward with the casual economy of someone deploying a precision weapon. "You said you didn't know him that well yet."
Kara's face did something involuntary and comprehensive.
"That's not — I didn't mean to—"
"You really have it bad for him, don't you?" Karen said, with the tone of someone making a medical observation.
"No! I just — it's sad, what he and his people went through! I feel for him! That's normal, Karen, that's just empathy—"
"Mm-hm."
"It is!"
"Absolutely." Karen put an arm around Kara's shoulders, which was even more infuriating because it was also comforting. "That's exactly what that was."
Kara opened her mouth to continue the argument, recognized that she was losing it in the particular way you lose arguments when the other person has correctly identified something you're not ready to admit yet, and closed her mouth again. Her face was still doing the comprehensive involuntary thing.
"I can never stay mad at you," she muttered.
"I know." Karen squeezed her shoulder. "I'm sorry. Sort of."
"You're not sorry at all."
"A little sorry."
Kara pouted in a way that was dignified for about three seconds. Then, reluctantly, the tension drained out of her and she looked up at Odyn again.
"He reminded me of myself," she said, quieter now, the teasing having cleared the way for the real thing. "When the team first found me. I was angry and I didn't understand anything that had happened and nothing made sense and everyone wanted to figure out whether I was a threat." She paused. "I just don't want him to wake up in the middle of all those faces staring at him and have nobody who—" She stopped.
"Who's on his side," Cassie finished, from where she had been standing quietly nearby, listening.
Kara looked at her.
"Yeah," she said.
The three of them looked up at the sleeping figure together — at the dark blue hair drifting slightly in the ambient movement of the magical dome, at the tribal markings that pulsed with the same orange light as his aura, at the face that was still working through something even in sleep, still not entirely at rest.
The heartbeat continued its patient counting.
I am here. I am alive. I am waiting.
◆ VII. ◆
Conton City — Time Nest Year: Classified Approximately Midday
The Time Nest occupied a space that was technically within the universe and practically beyond it — a place where causality checked its coat at the door and linear time was understood as a convenience rather than a law. The architecture of Conton City stretched around it in the medium distance, and over the whole arrangement hung the particular atmosphere of a place where very important things were managed by people who were, for the most part, very small.
The Supreme Kai of Time was not always taken seriously on first impression.
She had learned to tolerate this.
The group she had assembled today was substantial: six time patrollers whose files she could recite from memory, plus the two cousins who rounded out the roster. Trunks — the one from the future that shouldn't have happened, nineteen years old, carrying himself with the particular weariness of someone who has survived more than that age should accumulate. Goten, eighteen, from a timeline that had diverged in ways that were still being catalogued. Bulla Briefs, seventeen, from a parallel branch that the Academy tactfully referred to as "significantly altered." Pan — sixteen, small and precise, from a distant universe that rhymed with the seventh rather than matching it. Bulchi and her partner Gogeta: two survivors of an apocalyptic future branch, nineteen years old each, who had arrived in the present with the particular watchfulness of people who had learned not to take the continued existence of any given moment for granted.
And the cousins: Tarro and Daikon, whose records spoke for themselves.
Bulla was, as usual, the one who asked the operational question.
"Daikon, do you have any idea why we've been gathered?"
Daikon shrugged. "Same amount of idea as anyone else here. None."
The Supreme Kai cleared her throat.
Everyone turned.
"I'm glad you're all here," she said. "I'll come directly to the point. You have been selected for a mission. It will take some time to complete — the situation it pertains to is currently in a state of some delicacy — and it is not, I should note, a mission that originates with me."
"Not from you?" Pan repeated, and the question carried the very reasonable weight of then where, exactly.
"The request came from elsewhere," the Kai said.
Then a voice they recognized — or several of them recognized, anyway — came from the end of the corridor.
"It came from me, Saiyans."
Lord Beerus walked in with the unhurried cadence of someone who was constitutionally incapable of being hurried by anything, Whis a precise half-step behind him as always, the attendant's expression carrying its usual quality of benign amusement at everything in the universe simultaneously.
Trunks straightened so fast he nearly gave himself a sprain.
"Lord Beerus—" He turned quickly to the others. "Show some respect—"
The others, processing the urgency in Trunks' voice and running a rapid calculation on its likely basis, bowed.
Beerus surveyed them.
"At ease," he said, with the tone of someone who finds excessive formality mildly annoying but has decided not to address it today. He looked to Bulla. "You had a question."
"Yes, my Lord." She met his gaze with the steady practicality that was her particular gift. "Why us, specifically?"
Something in the God of Destruction's expression shifted — the private, almost feline quality of someone preparing to reveal information they have been waiting to deploy at the correct moment.
"I'm glad you asked," he said.
He began to explain.
And in Conton City, under an afternoon sun that was technically simultaneous with every other moment in the history of its star, the next piece of a story that spanned universes began to move.
— End of Chapter Two —
Next Chapter: "Awakening — Revival of the Elves" The ice breaks. The heartbeat changes. Odyn Albanar opens his eyes.
— Author's Note —
Thanks for reading! The pacing is being actively worked on — the goal is to give each perspective room to breathe without the larger story losing momentum.
A few things to watch for going forward: Kara and Karen's friendship will be an ongoing source of warmth (and teasing), the Arkynorean survivors are out there and the League will need to find them, and the Saiyan characters will be integrated into the main plot carefully — they'll take a little time to arrive, but they're on their way.
Gogeta and Bulchi's arc is being developed with care — suggestions welcome.
And yes: two characters who technically shouldn't still be around are going to show up. Not quite as you might expect. Stay tuned for that.
Peace out until next time.