I do not own any of these characters nor any rights to any trademarks mentioned in this fanfic.
- - -
Ever wondered what it would feel like to watch your entire world fall apart, knowing it might be erased from existence altogether?
Unless you're a superhero, probably not. At least, not until I planted the thought in your head.
That was my reality. My friends and I—a team of heroes—had exactly one plan that stood even the slightest chance of saving everything. There were no contingencies, no backup strategies. We bet everything on a single desperate gamble.
One thing led to another, and somehow I ended up stranded in another universe, fighting an endless horde of creatures that could only be described as monsters from another realm. Hell. Tartarus. Honestly, I couldn't tell you where they came from, so I settled on calling them hell-minions.
Standing beside me was another god of lightning, except he wasn't Zeus.
This blond guy carried a hammer instead of hurling thunderbolts. Back in my world he existed only in myths, yet here he was.
If you haven't caught on by now, my life veered spectacularly off the rails somewhere along the way. And judging by everything that's happened since, the other side of those rails isn't exactly any saner.
Then again... maybe I really was losing my mind.
Because what other explanation was there for me standing alone in a restroom, staring at my reflection while talking to myself like someone teetering on the edge of a breakdown, desperately trying to make sense of how I'd ended up here while halfheartedly attempting to convince myself this was all some elaborate dream?
The problem was that I'd come from a world where reality itself was constantly hanging by a thread. Timelines collapsing, history rewriting itself, universal resets becoming disturbingly routine—it had happened often enough that pretending this was just a dream felt impossible. I'd seen too much to hide behind denial.
Recapping everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours would probably leave me reliving enough trauma to last a lifetime. Losing your world—and everyone you ever cared about—had a way of doing that to you. So... maybe a shorter version would be better.
Wait. To clarify, I meant for me. Not for you.
...Damn it. There I go again.
A whistle disrupted my spiraling thoughts, snapping me out of them. I flinched and turned around to find the hammer-wielding blond watching me with an unmistakable 'you doing okay there, buddy?' expression. To his credit, he also looked like he was putting genuine effort into not judging me.
At least he wasn't carrying the hammer this time. That would've been a little unsettling. Bringing a legendary weapon into the restroom felt like crossing a line even for a god.
"Pardon me. I didn't hear…or see anything," he said awkwardly.
Still giving me the occasional sideways glance, as though quietly reevaluating my mental state, he headed toward one of the stalls and got on with his business.
That's the thunder guy I mentioned earlier. Thor Odinson.
Yeah... that Thor. The Norse God of Thunder.
Anyway, I should probably get to the point before he starts wondering why I'm standing here in complete silence, apparently listening to him take a leak.
Oh, right. I'm Billy Batson. Some people call me Captain Marvel, though you probably know me better as...
SHAZAM!!
- - -
Our world was facing a catastrophe unlike anything we'd ever encountered, one that threatened not just humanity, but existence itself.
The Justice League and I were already losing our fight against the Anti-Monitor. He wasn't invading, neither was it a conquest.
He was erasing our world.
An endless wave of antimatter swept across reality, consuming everything in its path. The worst part? It had already reached our universe.
"There's nothing we can do," Batman said.
Hearing those words felt like a hard punch to the gut. If Batman—the man who always had a contingency, no matter how impossible the situation—had run out of options, then we truly were at the end.
"The antimatter wave has already entered our solar system."
The room fell into a heavy silence.
We were Earth's greatest heroes, yet there we stood, completely powerless to save the very world we'd sworn to protect.
The tension finally boiled over when Wonder Woman slammed her fist onto the conference table hard enough to rattle it, her frustration laid bare by the simple fact that there was nothing left to punch, no enemy she could overpower, no battle she could win through sheer determination.
"There has to be something," Superman insisted, his eyes shifting between Batman and Cyborg, searching for even the smallest glimmer of hope.
No one answered.
Even Constantine had gone quiet, staring toward the horizon where the antimatter wave swallowed the heavens, its impossible darkness bearing down on a world already beginning to unravel.
That was when we turned to our final option.
As the sky itself dissolved overhead and annihilation crept ever closer, every eye in the room settled on the Flash. He was the only one who could still do something.
The plan itself was simple enough, in theory.
Flash would run back through time and warn the Justice League before any of this happened. Maybe—just maybe—that would give us enough of a head start to find another solution.
The uncertainty came afterward.
What if Flash succeeded in changing the past... and we still couldn't stop the Anti-Monitor? What if this wasn't a disaster we could prevent, only one we were destined to witness again?
Frankly, spending eternity in Hell with Constantine was starting to sound like a surprisingly reasonable backup plan.
Sure, I could've taken my family to the Rock of Eternity instead. But who wanted the Seven Deadly Sins as immortal neighbors? More importantly, that wasn't living. It was just condemning everyone to an endless existence inside a magical prison.
No.
Saving only my family wasn't enough.
The answer couldn't be surviving in exile while everyone else vanished. We had to survive here.
In our world.
Another thought wormed its way into my mind.
What if Flash made it back? What if we somehow found a way around this catastrophe... only for everything to happen again anyway? What if this was some fixed point in history, an unavoidable checkpoint that our world was always destined to crash into?
I never got the chance to dwell on it.
Flash was already moving.
One instant he was standing with us. The next, he was nothing but a crimson streak tearing across the dying landscape, beginning his impossible mission.
I looked back one final time.
The antimatter wave was consuming Earth.
The sky was disappearing before my eyes, every cloud, every star, every living atom swallowed by absolute nothingness. If this was truly the end, I should've been with my family, spending our final moments together.
But I couldn't.
I wouldn't.
There was no way I was putting the fate of the entire world on one man's shoulders while I stood by doing nothing. If these were going to be my last moments, then I'd spend them fighting with everything I had until there was nothing left to give.
Acting on pure instinct, I shot after Flash at full speed.
A blinding burst of light suddenly ripped open ahead of him, as though reality itself had been torn apart, revealing what looked like a portal suspended in the void.
He never even hesitated.
Instead of slowing down, Flash charged straight into the portal without a second thought. I poured on every ounce of speed I had and chased after him, only to see the opening already beginning to collapse. It shrank rapidly, its edges folding inward as though reality itself was stitching the tear back together. In another second, it'd be gone.
"Agh!"
Desperation drove me harder than fear ever could. I forced every last bit of speed from my body and barely slipped through before the portal snapped shut behind me.
I wasn't ready to die.
Not like that.
Whatever lay beyond this gateway had to be better than being erased from existence without even getting the chance to fight for my world.
The moment I crossed over, lightning erupted around me.
It wasn't my lightning.
It twisted through the endless darkness in violent arcs as an invisible force tore through my body. It felt like something had reached beneath my skin and started pulling me apart at the cellular level.
"Aghhh!!"
A blinding flash swallowed everything, followed by a savage tug that gripped my entire being. It wasn't just my cape or my limbs, it felt as though every atom that made me 'me' was being yanked in a different direction. The agony was beyond anything I'd ever experienced.
I had no idea how long it lasted. Time had become meaningless, stretching and folding in ways my mind couldn't comprehend. Then, without warning, a pulse of violet light rippled across my body.
Everything changed.
One moment I was being torn apart.
The next...
I was falling.
Gravity seized me with horrendous certainty, and only then did I realize something was horribly wrong.
I couldn't fly.
This wasn't the same force that had dragged me through the portal. This was gravity, likely stronger, and utterly relentless.
There was nothing around me.
No sky.
No stars.
Nor horizon.
Only endless blackness stretching in every direction, as though I'd been cast into the heart of an infinite abyss. I tried to will myself into flight, to stop my descent, but nothing happened. No matter how hard I struggled, I continued sinking into the darkness.
It felt as though I'd been falling forever.
Part of me insisted I'd only followed Flash a few moments earlier. Another part was convinced I'd spent an eternity trapped within whatever impossible dimension this was. Time had unraveled so completely that I could no longer tell which feeling was true.
Then a brilliant white light exploded around me.
It was so blinding that I instinctively threw my arms over my face and squeezed my eyes shut.
THUD!
The impact came without warning.
My body slammed into solid ground with enough force to rattle every bone in my body, the collision sending a violent shock through me as the earth beneath cracked under the weight of my landing.
"Ow..." I groaned, lying there for a moment as pain radiated through every muscle, trying to remember how breathing was supposed to work.
For a few disorienting moments, I was practically blind, my head still spinning from the landing. I had no idea where I'd ended up. All I could make out was chaos—the clash of battle echoing from every direction, voices barking orders over one another, thunder rolling across the sky, and shrill screeches that no human throat should've been capable of making.
With no idea what was happening but every instinct screaming that staying on the ground was a terrible idea, I shot into the air. Putting as much distance as I could between myself and the carnage below, I climbed higher while my vision slowly struggled to refocus.
Just as the blur began to fade, a voice rang out from somewhere beneath me.
"He must be the commander of these creatures!"
"On it!" another voice answered immediately.
A split second later, something tore through the air at impossible speed.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to make sense of the battlefield below. The blue sky gradually came into focus, as though I were looking through a fogged-over window, and then I saw it—a blur hurtling straight toward me with incredible speed.
I barely had time to brace before something solid and metallic slammed square into my face.
The impact lasted only an instant, but I felt the magic woven into the strike. It wasn't just heavy. It carried a divine weight behind it, as though the weapon itself had been forged with power far beyond ordinary enchantments.
The blow launched me across the sky like a ragdoll. I crashed back to earth, plowing through the ground before bouncing across the landscape, splintering trees and carving a trail of destruction until I finally came to a grinding halt.
"...Again, ouch."
Still dazed and probably sporting a concussion,
I struggled to piece together what had hit me. Some kind of magical artifact? Whatever it was, it packed enough force and magical power to send me flying. More importantly...
Who the hell had thrown it?
I was just pushing myself back to my feet when a bolt of blue lightning crashed into the ground directly in front of me.
The explosion of crackling energy forced me to shield my eyes as dirt and debris blasted outward. Through the fading sparks, the blurred outline of a broad-shouldered blond man draped in a crimson cape slowly came into view. He descended with the lightning itself, landing hard enough to leave a crater beneath his boots, as though the thunderbolt had carried him here.
He shouted something at me, but all I heard was a dull, muffled ringing. My ears still hadn't recovered from the earlier hit.
Gripped in one hand was a massive hammer, arcs of electricity dancing across its head as he purposely strode toward me. Whether he meant to scare me or simply intended to finish what he'd started, I couldn't tell.
Either way, he wasn't wasting any time.
As my vision finally sharpened enough to make out his face, he suddenly lunged forward, swinging the hammer in another devastating attack.
- - -
The weapon crashed into the ground with a deafening THWUMP, the impact splitting the air like a thunderclap. A deep, rolling boom rippled across the air as a shockwave tore through the plain, kicking up dirt and flattening the surrounding grass.
"I'm only going to ask this once," the blond warrior said, tightening his grip on the hammer as blue electricity danced across its head. "Answer before this gets a whole lot worse for you." His gaze settled on the golden lightning bolt emblazoned across Shazam's chest, carefully sizing up the hooded stranger before him. "Name yourself."
Still shaken and with little idea where he'd been thrown, Shazam answered with a question of his own.
"Where... am I?"
Rather than focusing on the man confronting him, his eyes swept across his surroundings. Beyond the ruined park, towering buildings rose against the skyline, while groups of armored warriors clashed with grotesque creatures that looked as though they'd crawled straight out of a nightmare.
"I said I wouldn't ask again!"
The warrior exploded into motion, surging forward with the hammer raised overhead.
Shazam's eyes tracked the descending weapon.
Ordinarily, he would've stood his ground. The strength of Atlas made him durable enough to shrug off almost anything.
Almost.
That hammer wasn't ordinary.
Neither was the man wielding it.
Choosing not to gamble on either, Shazam vanished in a heartbeat before the strike landed. The hammer smashed into empty ground while he reappeared at his opponent's flank in a blur of speed. His forehead crashed into the warrior's face with a sharp crack, immediately followed by a powerful punch to the torso that launched the blond man through a cluster of trees.
Hovering just above the ground as his white cape drifted behind him, Shazam approached cautiously without lowering his guard.
"There's clearly been a misunderstanding," he called, attempting to defuse the situation, his hood still casting his face in shadow.
The warrior recovered almost instantly.
His hammer flew back into his waiting hand before he hurled it once more.
Shazam twisted aside with ease, watching the weapon streak past.
"I—"
THUNK!
The hammer slammed into the middle of his back before snapping back into its master's grasp.
"...It comes back," Shazam muttered with a wince, rubbing the sore spot beneath his cape. "Good to know."
"A misunderstanding?" the warrior replied, his expression hardening. "Allow me to clear that up."
He swung the hammer skyward and rocketed into the heavens, thunder rumbling overhead as storm clouds gathered with unnatural speed.
Watching the sky darken, Shazam frowned.
"I've got a really bad feeling about this."
The heavens answered with a deafening RUMBLE.
A colossal bolt of lightning split the clouds and crashed into the raised hammer. The warrior wielded the storm as though it were an extension of himself, every movement was effortlessly controlled.
Shazam shot upward to meet him.
The instant he saw the lightning gathering around the weapon, he knew exactly what was coming.
Blue lightning erupted from the hammer and tore across the sky toward him.
Golden arcs immediately crackled over Shazam's body in response, dancing across his arms as the lightning bolt on his chest blazed with a bedazzling radiance.
Thrusting both hands forward, he unleashed a torrent of divine lightning of his own.
The two bolts collided between them like rival storms crashing together, blue and gold consuming the sky as thunder roared across the battlefield. Neither yielded an inch. The clashing currents twisted together in a violent struggle, filling the air with blinding flashes and wild arcs of electricity that lashed out in every direction.