Chapter 628: The Greater Good

The Rulers understood it then. It settled over them with a terrible quiet clarity. For ages uncounted they had judged and ruled the worlds beneath them. They had called themselves the guardians of the balance. They had decided who lived and who died, who rose and who fell, and in all that time not one of them had ever thought to wonder what it would be like to stand in front of the Greatest Fragment of Brilliant Light, now cloaked in Death.

And they were facing it.

And Death had prepared them a place to die.

"Well," said Kara.

She stepped forward out of the shadows, and her boots rang on the ground. She was still bruised, and her hair was a tangle, and she was blazing with a light the Rulers had not seen on her all day, her fists were clenched at her sides.

One by one, the others came to stand beside her. Raven, her cloak long gone, dark wings curling behind her. Clark, with his arms folded. Zatanna, her eyes blazing gold. Frost, cold fire dancing along her fingers. Beast Boy, shifting from foot to foot, they stood in a line between the ranks of clones and the huddle of Rulers, and they looked at the white-robed figures with an expression that none of the Rulers had ever seen directed at them before.

It was the look of people who had run out of patience.

"Get ready," Kara said.

The eldest Ruler lifted his head.

"You may look like angels," she said. "I know that. You wear the robes, you carry the light, you talk about balance and mercy and the greater good. And I’m sure that’s convinced a lot of people over a lot of years." Her fists tightened. "It doesn’t convince me and I’m not going easy on you. Not because of what you look like, not for one second."

"You hurt him," said Raven. Her voice was very soft, and in the silence of the Abyss it still carried. "You let that creature loose on us. You sat in your hall and watched my friends bleed and the people of earth. And you dared to call it a necessary process." Her eyes flared red. "I’m going to remember that for a very long time."

"Earth isn’t yours," said Clark.

He said it quietly, with no heat, and it was the most frightening thing any of them had said. He stepped forward, and the red in his eyes burned bright and steady.

"It never was. It’s not yours to control. It’s not yours to seed with monsters, or to bleed dry for your balance. It belongs to the people who live on it." He took a breath. "And we’re done asking you to leave it alone nicely."

"Also," Frost added, "you threw a bunch of spears at me, and I want it on the record that I did not appreciate it."

"I got thrown across a battlefield by Doom just to get your attention," said Beast Boy, "so I’m in a mood."

"I would just like to say," Zatanna said, very quietly, "that I have never been angrier in my life. Please keep that in mind."

The Rulers looked at them. They looked at the line of six, glowing and furious, and at the burning eyes beyond them, and at the dark that had no end. For a long moment no one in the circle spoke.

Then the eldest Ruler straightened.

It was a slow movement, and it seemed to cost him. He drew his shoulders back. He unfolded his hands, and the thin silver light around him steadied, brightened, and for the first time in a long while his face looked like what it had been for ten thousand years, calm and ancient and unafraid.

"Brothers," he said. "Stand up."

The Ruler on his knees looked up.

"We will not die on our knees," the eldest said. "We are the Rulers. We were here before these children were born, and we will be here after. If this is to be our end, then let it be an end worthy of what we have been." He lifted one hand, and a spear of white light formed in his palm. "Take your weapons and take your places."

Slowly, one by one, the Rulers rose. Lances of radiance flickered into being in their hands. They drew together, shoulder to shoulder, a thin and glittering ring of white in the middle of an ocean of dark, and each of them looked outward at the endless ranks of silent scythes and the six who stood before them.

The youngest Ruler was the last to lift his spear. His hand shook. He looked at Kara, and then at the clones, and then, for no reason he could name, up into the black above, where a faint, pale smile seemed to hang in the air like a crescent moon.

"This is a battle of death," he said.

"Yes," said the eldest Ruler. "It is."

Somewhere in the dark, the Shadow Monarch’s voice spoke one last time, very soft, very calm, and every ear in the Abyss heard it.

"Do your worst."

For a moment nothing happened, then eight scythes moved as one, and the Abyss screamed.

The clones charged and eight curved blades of darkness were already falling. There was no warning, no sound, no wind in their wake. The first the Rulers knew of the attack was the shriek of their own barriers breaking.

The eldest Ruler had thrown up a shield of white light in the instant the order was given, a dome as wide as a cathedral. The clone’s scythe struck it once. The dome cracked from crown to floor and came apart in a spray of sparks, and the eldest Ruler was hurled backward across the place with a gash across his chest, his robes smoking.

"Brothers!" he cried. "Scatter! Do not let them take us together!"

They scattered. Eight white-robed figures burst away from one another in a sunburst of light, and eight silent clones followed each of them.

Clark hit the eldest Ruler a half second after the barrier fell.

He came out of the dark like a thrown spear, fist cocked, the red in his eyes blazing, and he put every ounce of the borrowed strength into a single punch. It landed square on the Ruler’s raised forearm, where a sheet of hastily gathered radiance flared up to catch it. The ground cracked in a ring beneath them. The Ruler skidded backward ten yards and didn’t break. His light held.

"Your strength is considerable," the eldest Ruler said, through his teeth. "But it is nothing to my..."

The clone’s scythe came down on the same arm.

It went through the barrier like a hot knife through wax, and the eldest Ruler cried out and wrenched himself sideways with blood running down his sleeve. He stared at the wound, and then at the silent figure that had made it, and the color left his face.

Clark stared too.

"That," he said slowly, "was my punch. That was exactly my punch. And it didn’t even leave a mark." He turned his head toward the nearest clone, and the face looking back at him was calm, patient, and utterly unbothered. "And yet... he’s hitting harder than I am."

"He’s hitting harder than all of us," Kara said. She had just come down beside him with her fists smoking, her eyes wide. "Kal, none of us had been the strongest thing in this fight."

"Just don’t get in his way," said Raven’s voice, from somewhere above them. "That’s the whole plan."

The Rulers fought back.

They fought the way they had been taught to fight, with merciless grace of beings who had been killing and fighting the Monarchs for a very long time. Spears of white fire hissed across the dark. A tall Ruler with a silver beard and shoulders like a bull slammed his staff into the ground and a wave of radiance rolled out across the dark, so hot it turned the floor to molten slag. A lean, pale-eyed Ruler wove chains of light from his fingers, each link inscribed with a decree, and flung them at Raven. A scarred Ruler hurled a lance at Zatanna that took the shape of a screaming white falcon.

They were magnificent. And not one of them was succeeding.

"The light," the youngest Ruler gasped. He had flung up a shield against the nearest clone and was holding it with both hands, his arms shaking, sweat running down his temples. "Brothers, can you feel it? The light.."

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