Sell you a Bridge chapter 363

July 15th 2016 Scala ad Caelum, 8:00 PM EDT

About  six million of me died within the first ten seconds of the fight.  Barbatos lashed out with a claw and rent the air of Scala ad Caelum, and  darkness tore through the fabric of space and ripped me apart ad  infinitum. I was fine, of course. There were far more of me than that,  and about half of me didn't even get hit as I inverted illusion and  reality.

There was an ominous rumble around us as the  stairway began to shake. The multiverse didn't like Barbatos being here,  and it didn't particularly like me using my powers here either.  Scowling, I stepped sideways into my dark world, entering the mirror of  the Scala ad Caelum I'd created. I passed through it and stepped through  the void again, vanishing and reappearing in yet another world, this  one an empty plane in the Dark Multiverse.

Barbatos  followed, snarling as he tried multiple times to kill me with rending  slashes in the fabric of reality. He didn't manage to lay a hand on me  at all of course, not the real me. I reappeared in front of him. "You  done?" I said dryly. "Because you aren't going to be able to kill me.  This whole multiverse is my Domain now."

The hooded figure's glare was one of the only things about him that was visible in the darkness of that cloak. "Boy" He rasped angrily. "Nothing  is yours. I will pick the power of my dominion from your very bones.  Crack them open and suck the marrow from them oysters from a shell. You  may have power, but you are a CHILD. You have no idea how to use it."

"Ah."  I said mockingly. "Another one of your famous theories? We've seen how  well those worked out for you upto now." I gestured to the millions of  me standing around us.

The Bat  God scoffed, then he inhaled. I was expecting him to speak again, but  when the sound issued forth from under his hood it wasn't speech. Some  sort of...horrible discordant noise tore the air. It sounded like the  opposite of music. Not meaningless sound, but even worse. Music was  designed to evoke emotion, to conjure feelings of various kinds. This  abomination was designed to destroy the mind. Discordant notes hit at  just the right time to unbalance the mind and soul.

Distortion  began to creep and twist through the air as the monster performed his  'song'. As the air shifted, I saw new forms crawl up from the darkness  around us, immeasurable new Barbatos's, red eyes glowing, clawed their  way up out of the darkness, which warped even as I watched.

I  WAS the Dark Multiverse, so I knew something was being done, this  world, the empty one I'd found, was SINKING into the Abyss. That same  whirlpool he'd used to interfere in the dark corridors had been employed  again, and this world was being dragged down into the depths.

My  eyes widened. I'd wondered for some time what the dark corridors were.  They weren't the void. I could still use that without his knowledge.  Weren't the shadows, which I could travel through unimpeded at short  distances. Watching this bullshit though, I FINALLY realized what they  were. They were him.

Barbatos  had been bleeding himself into the Dark Multiverse's equivalent of the  void, filling up the cracks trying to replace it with himself. He'd  tried countless methods to save the decomposing worlds, for some value  of the word save at least. This had been one of them. He'd been trying  to slowly and incorrectly do what I'd done naturally when I created the  keystone world.

Now  he was mobilizing the much that was himself to try to forcibly drag  this world to the bottom of this reality, into the maw of this massive  multiversal version of himself, even as the army of his clones attacked  mine.

Each  version of me was me and not me, so they had my powers. We possessed  immeasurable power in our Domain, so we weren't working with anything as  finite as a mana pool, we were just millions of inputs in one entity.  Unfortunately his power was absurd too. With the revelation that the  fucking dark sludge that filled the cracks in my multiverse was ALL  Barbatos, I understood the sheer scale of him better than I had before.

Worse,  the...not music, was a fucking infected splinter in my eye. I could  feel it perverting and twisting my multiverse with its unnatural  cacophony and I couldn't reach that section of reality, not even as an  Endless. It was almost another version of the Domain I used to have,  though more...insidious.

All  of me did battle with all of him as I tried my best to figure out how  to counter this new ability, which was so fucking alien and twisted I  couldn't effect it. How do you make a lie out of something that has no  truth. I opened my unlimited eye, the vision of an Endless that let me  see all within my domain. I always knew what was going on in my  territory if I wanted to know it, but that was different than SEEING.

As  I watched, the monstrous sound shook the structure of the world in the  void, not just this world, but all worlds. It was twisting and eroding  the foundation of reality. A chuckle echoed out from him "Do you like it, boy?" He somehow purred without ever stopping the song. "The  multiverse has its foundational forces. The Dimensional Superstructure  is among them. This is its opposite, the Sixth Note, a force of  impossibility, discovered when one sees that which is so unnatural it  can never logically exist."

I  sneered at him, despite the discomfort of this sick noise. "It's very  pretty Barbie. I always loved listening to dogs howl at the moon." I was  running into a problem. I was a rogue archetype at heart. Even as a  Dark Endless I was Deception, which made avoidance and trickery my  forte. I WASN'T the Endless of kicking ass, so I couldn't think of a  fucking blow in my arsenal that was powerful enough to put him down.

On  a true multiversal scale, my void magic and some gravity spells  wouldn't cut it. Even Thanatos was, by its nature, not big enough to  kill something like Barbatos, given it was only a small fragment of the  X-blade, which had shattered back into its component parts when I sent  the rest of my crew away. I needed something that would end him, and I  was pretty sure some sloppy conceptual attack wouldn't get the job done.

I  scoured my brain for possible answers as we fought in legions. He was  right, I didn't have the skills to do this. But that was fine. My power  was me, and it was beyond time or space. I had guided myself this whole  time, through all of this, so I was sure that I had the answer in me  somewhere. I had the power to end this, I just needed to figure out  where it was hidden in my own past.

Considering  the Dark Multiverse, I tried to think of a way to use that, to mobilize  it in a way that would let me...do something. Anything. It felt strange  being aware of both the world we were in and the area around it.  Feeling the plane sinking into the abyss like I was on an elevator and  was somehow the elevator shaft at the same time.

It  didn't matter. This was my Domain, I could go anywhere I wanted, slip  away through the cracks in reality at any point. I could even clean  Barbatos out of the void as soon as I worked out how to fucking kill his  consciousness. I kind of wished I had my gun. I paused. My gun. A  mortal weapon of conceptual death made from condensing the murderous  intentions of an entire city.

Was  it possible that my power had given me the answer all that time ago?  The dark multiverse belonged to me, and it was FULL of people. I could  feel them all if I focused, feel their thoughts and emotions. I had seen  the aura of that gun more times than I could count. Had seen it grow  and change and evolve. I had seen a fucking roadmap to how to make  something like that, and from its aura I'd seen its origins.

I  left Barbatos tearing through my other selves, and focused on  inhabiting one space as I let them battle, blocking out the other  versions of me. The dark multiverse was whole and the corruption had  been hammered out. I'd refined and purified the worlds, but they were  still worlds. Still places full of people with flaws and anger and hate.

I  reached out through my connection to this reality and PULLED. I  pictured a gun. A simple revolver, nothing like my uncle's twenty two, a  massive black metal colt python. I'd seen one form naturally, seen how  the resentment and malice needed to condense, and it was the easiest  thing in the world to do it again. To begin the formation process of a  mortal weapon made not just from Gotham, but from all the Gothams, from  all the Londons, all the Nightsides.

A  conceptual weapon that embodied the worst of the dark multiverse. I  realized now what this was. It was my totem. A focus for my powers. I  knew the other Endless had totems. I was pretty sure Destiny's was a  book for instance. The Python would be mine.

I  could have gone with something related to Deception, but Destiny had a  book, which was more knowledge than fate based. I was making a weapon,  an item that would serve a purpose. As it condensed, the power in it  started to become more visible, waves of conceptual darkness buffeting  the world around me. It was driving back the horrible music at this  point, there was that much power in it.

Barbatos  hadn't noticed yet, but as the black metal gun finally manifested, he  spun to look at me. I saw those red eyes widen with horror. He'd been  dragging us down into the depths of the abyss, where his totality was  waiting like a dark beast at the bottom of the sea, and now that he saw  my weapon I could see him starting to panic, but sadly for him it was  too late.

I  opened a dark corridor for the first time in quite a while, but didn't  step through, I just stared through it into the swirling darkness. A  massive whirlpool or black shadowy sludge. I stared into the center of  it, where the whirlpool showed me the opening I could use. I raised the  Python, which I decided to name Jormungandr, and cocked it, pointing it  into the corridor at the almost invisible form/

I  pulled the trigger, and the gun barker once. The bullet sped through  the corridor and disappeared into the dark. I waited for a second and  then, suddenly, there was a crash of thunder. A bright light exploded  from the whirlpool. Not a light I'd exactly caused, but something more  unnatural. Like the dark was going out. It rippled through the void of  the Dark Multiverse, eradicating the sludge between the worlds.

The  corridor burned away itself at the last second as did all the Barbatos  clones, and I dismissed my own copies, leaving me standing there alone  on a dead world. I sighed with relief, putting my new gun away. I turned  to leave, to head back to Gotham. This was over. I was done now. My  work complete. Now I just wanted to go home. As I turned though, I found  myself somewhere else. A familiar cave with an upside down figure I  recognized. "Hello new partner." Cooed the upside down man. "I thought  maybe we can have a bit of a conversation." Ah right. Him. Well, might  as well get this over with.