Sell you a Bridge chapter 206

March 21st 2016 The Himalayas 8:00 PM EDT

The  Abyssal Alloy teeth I conjured onto Tartarus rotated so fast they  formed a single cohesive blur around the keyblade as I brought the thing  down on the Black Beetle. Sigfreid had locked the bastard up in a grip  by twisting his arms unnaturally around the scarab warrior's like a  corkscrew, pinning him in place. The big warrior snarled and cannons  began to form on the chestplate of his armor, a series of powerful and  horrifying blasters that even my armored ally was going to feel.  Fortunately for us he didn't get the chance.

I slammed the  chainsaw keyblade into the bend of his knee where it would have to be  thinner to allow movement. As I did I tapped into my demonic energy and  flooded my body with it for the first time, strengthening and enhancing  myself with the limitless potential of a devil and propelling the  whirling blade at speeds that would make Wally blush. There was a loud  screeching grind and a clang as the two surfaces met, and after a brief  second of resistance the teeth tore through the dark armor and bit into  flesh.

The cannons faltered and were absorbed, sprouting  from his back to ventilate me, but I spun away with a twisting jerk that  did insane amounts of damage and vanished into the dark. As he whirled  sloppily to try to meet me Sigfreid released him, conjured his massive  broadsword and smashed it down full strength on the back of the bastards  neck. The Black Beetle roared with rage and went pitching forward, but  the blow didn't manage to penetrate the armor. The neck was heavily  reinforced and without the spinning teeth the blow only drove him  forward to his knees.

Judging by the agonized howl of  impotent rage that issued forth from his mouth being brought to your  knees when one of them was just raggedly chewed up by a chainsaw was not  pleasant. I lashed out with Tartarus, calling an Abyss Alloy stockade  into existence around his head and shoulders, reinforced as much as I  could on the fly, and than emerged from the dark to one side and brought  my still spinning chainblade down right on the slight nick in the armor  where Sigfreids sword had landed.

There was a jerk and a  scream as I felt the blade chew into flesh again, ripping into the  fucking spine of the big warrior. He bellowed angrily and there was an  explosion of force, knocking both of us back and shattering the stocked.  Apparently he'd opened up millions of pores in the armor and used them  as cannons to release a massive wave of energy from every part of his  body. Sig and I regrouped a ways away. I expected him to be  incapacitated after the spinal damage, but he just closed and reinforced  the armor on those spots.

I cursed internally. Fucking  bugs. He probably had an exoskeleton, which meant no gods damned spine.  Black Beetle's eyes were lit with incandescent rage as he snarled at me.  "You're going to pay for that meat." He spat sideways, and I noted the  neon green fluid looked an awful lot like the shit that spurted out when  I hacked into him. "I would have made this quick. I didn't have a  reason to make you suffer, but now?"

Eight more arms  unfolded from his back, clearly operated independently by the scarab to  free him up for movement. I suspected there was some predictive  algorithm that would find viable paths around his own movements so he  didn't get in his own way. Still, the new limbs had nothing on the  absolute hatred in his voice in terms of being terrifying.  "I'm going  to redefine what pain means to your garbage species. I'm going to start a  research project on torment, experiment on every person you love in  front of your eyes as I learn the secrets of your agony. And only then,  when every person you care for has been butchered in agony and I know  exactly how to hurt you the worst, will I finally torture you to death."

The  extra limbs sprouted a dozen offshoot cannons and leveled them at me,  firing with deadly accuracy. I shifted incorporeal but they chewed holes  in Sigfreid. I circled the insane scarab warrior, looking for an  opening, for some kind of hole I could exploit to fucking hurt him. I  reached out to Miss Martian with the sending stone. "Link me to  Nightwing." I focused hard to allow myself to receive what she was  sending, to fudge the nature of my mind blindness with my power. I lied  to the world again, and whether because I was editing a power I already  had or because this was my second time, it was a bit easier.

His  voice filled my head. "What the hell is going on O'malley? Miss M told  us about your orders and the battle, but we're sitting blind in here.  Artemis and Wally are going ballistic, and Impulse isn't doing much  better knowing his best friends are out there about to get smashed by  scarabs." I ignored the words, focusing on the intent, and I  felt...worry. Fear. For all of us. Even me. Nightwing didn't like me,  but he did feel responsible for me. I was eighteen, and he brought me out  here, and personal dislike aside if I died he was going to feel like  fucking scum.

Sig grunted as the blasts bit into his  armor, dispersing the sword to conjure a huge tower shield to take the  abuse. Black Beetle stalked forward with murder in his eyes, but he was  swarmed by the little armors collecting from scattered bits of Sig.  "Don't have time to talk long. The scarabs are here, there are seven  though they claim there's a hundred on planet. The Black one is kicking  my ass, and my other Knights have been waylaid dealing with the others. I  need to ask you something, and I need you to think about it carefully  and not just answer as a kneejerk reaction."

I exhaled  mentally. "Is there any chance that being an intergalactic people eating  child kidnapping monster makes someone eligible for the death penalty?"  I knew it was a long shot. This was the disciple of the bat. Not  killing was baked into his DNA. I hurried to explain. "Because I'm kind  of in a him or me type situation here man. He isn't Jaime, I can't knock  him out. The Reach have exoskeletons or some shit so I can't immobilize  him, and his armor compensates for any injuries to let him keep  fighting. We're stuck in here, and if he doesn't die, I think I might." I  sent him a series of clips of this psycho and what he'd been saying and  doing.

The Black Beetle was on a whole other level  compared to the green and blue. I had the forces to take him down if I  could use them, but they brought enough to offset my numbers, and I was  in sink or swim territory here. If I was going to stop this monster it  was going to be permanent, and I needed to know if I was going to get  thrown in prison for that shit. I'd still do it if I had to but I hoped,  prayed, that deep fucking down, like mariana trench deep, that Dick was  willing to let it slide.

His voice in my head was quiet.  Deadly serious. "I would never, under any circumstances allow a member  of my team to kill anyone. If they did, there would be severe  consequences. I do not condone death in any form, there is always  another way. Now get back to your fight and hurry up....don't drag your  feet. We're going to be in a hurry when we escape, so if you leave  something behind here, no one is ever going to find it." Then he cut the  connection, and I just sat there, stunned. He gave me permission. Not  directly, but he as good as told me to do what I needed to do.

I  wasn't on his team, which meant no consequences, and he as good as said  they wouldn't look for the body. This was self defense, and I suspected  he didn't want to be the one to tell my mother I'd died. I drew my gun  again, glaring at the monster trying his level best to crush my  strongest summon. I analyzed the situation, waiting for him to be  distracted or to hold still, but calculating the speeds involved I knew  no shot I took was ever going to land. I was fast enough, but my bullets  weren't.

I considered my options. Maybe a void portal?  But if he dodged a super sized shot from the holiday gun would end  whoever it hit, that might be dozens of people, hell it might even be  one of ours. I could teleport in and do it point blank, but those arms  would turn me into swiss cheese before I would be able to fire. I needed  some other way to do this. Maybe some kind of backup?

I  looked around for my allies. Wonder Girl, Superboy, and Blue Beetle were  wailing on a green scarab as Dreamer trapped it's mind in a cloud of  dreams. Her eyes glowed violet as she wove nightmares and illusions  together into a tapestry of confusion and fear that left even the  systems of that monstrous creature confused as to which way was up. Both  external and internal stimuli twined around each other like the worlds  most horrible bad acid trip left the thing dazed and open for the trio  of powerful warriors to lay into the thing as it fired at imagined  phantoms and ghostly images.

The other blues and greens,  and even a pink, had been pinned down by the Knights operating under the  control of my clones, and were mostly immobilized or on the way to it,  but it was taking everything they had to manage. The pink one was about  halfway between the blue and black scarabs and Zee was helping the boys  with that one while patches harried at it's legs to distract it enough  for them to pin it.

That left one open ally though, one  I'd only created today, and I smiled as I remembered what he could do. I  sent a command through the keyblade to Solomon, ordering him to use his  magic when I said to, and then I turned incorporeal but not invisible  and floated through the battlefield towards the Black Beetle. The  monster was chewing up Sig, and my armored summon was on his last legs,  only a few minutes from destruction.

The savage scarab was  beaming gleefuly at the destruction he was inflicting, but he saw me  coming and looked up to glare at me. He fired a few shots at me and they  phased through my phantasmal form. He sneered at me. "Too afraid to  stand before in person meat? Have to send a ghost or illusion? Why am I  not surprised you're a coward. Don't worry, I'll find a way to ruin you  once I destroy your automaton. If I cant get my hands on you maybe I'll  put them on one of your teammates. The one with the point ears  looks...fun."

I didn't rage. Didn't seethe or hate him,  didn't curse or anything of the sort. I simply decided he was going to  die, and there was reason to waste emotion on a corpse. I raised the  gun, still incorporeal, and he laughed at me. Laughed at the twenty two  pistol with bullets so slow he could dodge them in his sleep. Laughed at  how useless and pointless I was, how little I could do to him.

He  laughed and laughed. Probably for longer than he should have, given  that his laughter was slowing down. His eyes widened as he registered  the temporal bubble of slow around him from the stop spell Solomon had  cast. Too bad he wasn't fast enough to dodge this one. I found it  fitting that he was still laughing when the gun of conceptual death  sprayed his brains out the back of his shitty armor and into the open  air to drift in slow motion in the time bubble. I didn't even need to  watch his aura go out like a light to know he was dead. I did anyway  though. And what do you know? I was laughing too.