Capítulo 145: Sad news
After Darkseid's extremely brutal beating, which clearly demonstrated the superiority of Good over Evil, and shoving the still resisting body into the portal funnel, strange things started to happen. For the first time in my memory, the heroes did not leave quietly, but went to help the special services! But that's not all.
I was not going to break away from the group and together with the warm company approached one of the gloomy towers, which, contrary to all the comic clichés, after the victory over the protagonist did not even think to disappear from the face of the planet, even if the rapidly withering black roots around left a small hope for just such a turn of events, as suddenly a man dressed in gray rags came out of the dark yawn, slightly staggering and shivering from the cold, and then another and another. At some point, dozens of inhabitants who had been kidnapped by the parademons began to appear from the seven-meter gate. This was happening everywhere!
"Pinch me - ouch, what the hell! - Lantern was outraged when I kindly responded to his request.
Hmm, this time the protective aura wasn't activated, which meant that the ring could be stolen without being noticed, if I didn't use any energies and didn't wish the keeper harm, though I wasn't sure about the latter. I wonder, if he was drugged with sleeping pills, would the artifact turn on any protection or go into passive mode?
"You asked for it," I shrugged indifferently, turning my gaze back to the people who were arriving and who didn't know what was going on.
Based on a superficial interview with the captives, after the kidnapping they were shoved into yellow capsules that dotted almost all the free space of the gloomy structure, making it look like a giant beehive or a bioelectric plant from the movie The Matrix. There, under the influence of the blue thick liquid, the bodies of the earthlings began a painful transformation, gaining mass, but at some point the pain became much worse, and the changes began to reverse rapidly. At the end of the procedure, the restraining shackles fell, and the numerous capsules opened, letting their exhausted victims out. Not everyone was so lucky, though: about ninety percent of the people from the very first batches whose transformation had gone too far were unable to endure the reversal procedure to the end. Instead, they were left disfigured pieces of melted flesh in which one could barely make out human outlines. By the way, not all of the subsequent batches were able to survive, but the statistics was less sad, and according to the most rough estimates of the Oracle, monitoring the situation in the world space, came out about ten percent in favor of the corpses.
Such a turn of events seemed astonishing. Even Cyborg, the only one of our company who could somehow interact with alien technology, was completely unaware of such functionality, which meant that someone had secretly organized the whole thing from the inside. And, according to Victor, who still managed to connect to the control panel of the terraforming tower, such a trick could only be pulled off with the equivalent of administrator rights, or with long and hard work with security protocols. The same hacking of the portal installation was possible only because it was obviously made in a hurry and did not have normal protection, which, by the way, also looked incredibly suspicious, although everything can be written off to the fact that there are few suicidal people in the world, ready to put their head in the mouth of a hungry lion, and in addition, able not to give themselves away on a planet entirely populated by hostile life forms.
In short, none of us believed that, after losing contact with Apokolips, the towers had suddenly started reversing the changes on their own. They would rather complete the reversal in a forced mode, and then release new undemons into the world to wreak havoc and destruction. And the behavior of the real cyberjukes, when they rushed into the portals working in the reverse mode, raised many questions, to which no one was in a hurry to give a clear answer.
To summarize, there were surprisingly few dead, and the destruction caused by the towers was not as fatal as it seemed at first glance, since they grew in open areas of space. So soon we all decided to celebrate.
-May I? - Flash asked, pointing to the three-liter container of coffee next to me.
I started looking at the speedster very carefully until he started twitching.
"All right, here you go. You deserve it," I handed over the requested item when Barry was ready to get the hell out of here.
"And I'll have those eclairs over there," the Amazon asked.
"And me," Harley joined in, who could have taken it herself, but I could see perfectly well that someone wanted her to be fed.
"It doesn't look right..." Mouse said, blushing, watching me feed the satisfied blonde an eclair. Harley, dressed in a tight cheerleader outfit, didn't miss a chance to lick my fingers, which embarrassed the redhead even more and made Hal Jordan sitting on the opposite side of the table sincerely jealous.
The man tried in vain to hit on Diana, but she successfully ignored all his pathetic attempts, and she reacted not too favorably to my attempts to get closer, devouring a good pastry and looking very carefully at Superman, who had risen from the dead. The resurrected superhero was sitting at the table with us, but he clearly felt out of place and reacted to all the questions with a slight delay, as if he still didn't believe that he had returned from Hel's embrace. Though it didn't stop him from thanking me for the idea with the sun and for fixing it.
Now it was a traditional superhero vacation, combined with a slightly delayed New Year's Eve celebration after the epic rescue of the planet, if Marvel movies are to be believed. However, instead of a shawarma shop, we sat down in a bakery recommended by Cyborg, so the choice was limited to various pastries and very good coffee.
We didn't suddenly become such good friends, but we became battle buddies. We even managed to discuss further cooperation and exchange contacts in case of global problems, and Bats suggested creating a main headquarters, from where it would be easier to monitor the situation in the world. The mouse conspirator answered to quite logical questions about the location of the headquarters with a mysterious smile, but I knew that it would be an orbital station, so I asked him to paint the future lair in purple color, arguing that it would be easier for me to protect it magically.
After a little rest and discussing further plans, the heroes began to scatter to their homes. Harley and I were no exception, and after seeing Mouse home, we went back to our place, only to find the mansion a huge excavation covered with plants. The sight of it knocked the fear of Abby's reaction out of my brain. I'd gotten two and a half thousand ba-hion for the win, which more than covered my recent spending, and I was justifiably afraid of rape.
"What happened here..."
"You've finally arrived," the dryad's silhouette emerged from behind a nearby tree. - I'm sorry, I had to destroy the portal gates with the reactor when the Furies got too far apart trying to take away the magic box.
The confused and distraught green-skinned beauty looked unrealistically cute, but hearing the news once again really threw me off.
"Furies? Reactor? - I struggled to get two words out, still amazed at the scale of the battle. My true vision was showing an incredibly high background of natural energy that could be mistaken for parasitic radiation from a dragon vein. And that, just an awful lot of mana.
"Mm-hmm," she bowed her head sadly, causing Harley and I to glance at each other perplexed. Still, a frustrated elemental under two and a half meters tall was a rather unconventional and at the same time incredibly cute sight.
"I was quietly watching a movie when the walls of the mansion shook violently, and then the air was saturated with that rotten energy. I-" Moisture came to her eyes. - I fought until the last moment, not allowing myself to tap into the Forest's energy, not to destroy anything, but then there was a massive explosion that destroyed the west wing, and with it part of the movie theater.
The dryad sobbed naturally.
"My tapes went up in flames..." she squatted down and hugged her knees like a little girl.
It's a sight like that that's got my brain all jammed up. I mean, really. Abby is the avatar of an incredibly powerful and equally retarded entity on a universal scale. Plus, the girl has always struck me as unemotional, and now she's upset over some tapes. And even if we take into account that some of them were limited edition - it's still no reason to worry so much, because no one canceled the electronic media. To be honest, I feel more sorry for the mansion itself, because it will be much harder to restore. And I'm not even thinking about the secret base, which, judging by Swampy's caveat, was also seriously damaged, having lost its backup power source.
Hmm, I wonder if the insurance will cover the rebuilding of the supervillain's lair?
Unlike me, Harley didn't think long, immediately rushing to comfort her distraught friend.
"Well, well, well, come on, they're just tapes," she murmured, stroking and hugging the dryad gently, and without even a sexual connotation. Sort of.
"But..." the still-sad Forest Keeper tried to languidly resent the still-sad Forest Keeper.
"No buts, as soon as we rebuild the house, we'll give you more tapes. Right, Mr. J?"
"Naturally! We'll restore the whole collection and buy new movies," I joined in the hug, putting on my stone skin just in case. Too much ba-hion causes serious concerns for my dignity. Good, except for slightly grayed skin and a slight decrease in sensitivity, the spell manifests itself only at strong blows, something reminiscent of the behavior of a non-Newtonian fluid, albeit with some reservations, like the ability to partially redistribute kinetic energy.
"Exactly! - My faithful companion backed me up, raising her fist belligerently. - And then we'll use our magic box to get to Apokolips... You managed to save it, didn't you? Oh, fine," her eyes lit up with a feverish glint after Abby nodded affirmatively. - So, let's infiltrate Apokolips, find those fucking Furies, rip out their legs and arms, rip off their tails, gouge out their eyes, and saw their heads off with a rusty saw!
"Ahem... Sunshine, a little too much," I tried to lower the heat a little.
"Ugh, that's right, we're for the Good now," she slapped herself on the forehead. - Then we'll just rip out the limbs... And maybe poke out one eye each.
Swampy sobbed.
"That's what I wanted to do... But their bodies were too strong. Even your advice about ultimatum weapons against wizard girls didn't work. The tentacles couldn't get under the armor no matter how hard I tried. So I pushed them through the portal and threw in a nuclear reactor, just like in Sylachi: The Last Frontier. Radiation isn't very pleasant for plants, but it's still better than the energy from the portal," the beauty wrinkled her nose. - It's a lot like a diluted emanation of Rot.
The words about Strongman gave me Vietnamese flashbacks. Despite the fact that the green-skinned cutie was not particularly fond of dynamic pictures, Harley, after a very long persuasion, managed to persuade us to watch this "masterpiece" of cinematic art. Let's put it this way, if in the old world the pedestal of endless action movies of "G" level was occupied by Fast and Furious, with its constant "this is the last thing", then here this place is rightfully occupied by Silachi with his eleven feature films, several TV series and a huge number of short films based on them.
"Okay, I don't think we should be standing outside like this, especially not in these disguises near Mr. Arkham's mansion," I gently helped the girls up.
"Where do we go? - The blonde glanced at the plant-filled pit, with occasional islands of smoked steel, concrete, and wood peeking through.
"Hmmm, now I need to calculate the damage to the hive and hide anything extra away from looters or the curious. And then I think we can move into the studio for a while. Victor lives in the basement, Mark and Jennifer - in the south wing on the second floor, so the whole first floor and the north wing of the second floor are at our disposal. As a last resort, we'll rent an apartment or ask to stay with Bats, just to finish the level with the mutant centipede.
After the plan was approved, we began to remove the debris, with the dryad's help. By now Abby had calmed down enough to not only control the many vines that parted before her like the sea before Moses, but also to talk normally about what had happened.
So, the attack was carried out by a squad of Furies (that's how they introduced themselves when they screwed up a quick grab of the magic box) right after the black towers appeared. Apparently they stumbled upon my signal net, figuring it was some sort of attacking construct, so blithely decided to eliminate any obstacles in their path by simply destroying them. In principle, Cuba cannot be harmed by conventional methods, so such a step was justified. But only the invaders did not expect that immediately after such a reckless act they would have to face the avatar of Green. Correction, a very, very angry avatar of Green, who was prevented from watching the movie by destroying his favorite movie theater.
Back in the old world, I remembered that Darkseid had a special squad of incredibly strong and fanatically devoted female warriors. I have no idea how many of them there were, but there were only three creatures that came after the cube, looking like women in strange outfits. Except that the aliens' abilities could put them on par with the strongest heroes. Not Superman, of course, but they could beat up Green Lantern. Incredibly strong bodies, excellent reactions, strength, agility and speed to match, and metasilas or their semblance. One could be mistaken for an ordinary Amazon due to her outstanding statues, dark hair, light tan, and level of weaponry, but her strength was too incredible even for a true warrior, reborn at the peak of the goddesses' development. And Amazons don't use handheld rocket launchers that can take down a large chunk of a fortified building in one shot. The second Fury was the owner of green hair, stylish steel gloves up to the elbow with energy claws, easily cutting steel like a hot knife butter, as well as crazy laughter and absolutely unpredictable style of combat. The third member of the squad looked like a snow queen because of her overly arrogant appearance. She had snow-white hair, the same color of loose robes, and wielded a pair of swords that could very skillfully cut numerous vines and send energy slashes.
In short, if any of the League encountered such a unit, it could get a lot of pussy, because each girl was not only an independent powerful unit, but could always support her partner. In addition, it was not worth forgetting about the parademons that were everywhere, coming as reinforcements. Here they were just unlucky to face an immortal opponent who wielded strong area attacks and was able to control multiple plants at the same time. Though the fact that Abby never managed to finish off the Furies on her own and had to use a nuclear reactor gives me serious concerns. I do remember Darkseid having several such units, which means that the next time he invades, he's unlikely to leave them behind, and the superheroes (including one green-haired gentleman) will have to face some very strong opponents, and I'm not ready to carry nukes in my space pockets just yet! Napalm grenades alone are enough for me.
However, Victor claimed that after the last portal was closed, there would be an incredible explosion initiated by the Mother Box left on Apokolips, so there was hope that Darkseid wouldn't be able to recover from such a slap in the near future, and then our planets would disperse like ships at sea, and one cube wouldn't be enough to create a boom pipe.
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