DC: A New Beginning-Chapter 60: Desolation

A dark, gloomy street.

The streetlamps on the side of the road were rusty from years without any repairs, and even the glass covers at the very top had been smashed by something.

The tall buildings flickered bright neon colors.

"The Gotham vibe here is very... cyberpunk, huh?"

He stepped through puddles of old, dirty water that had been sitting there who knows how long, and looked left and right with a slightly confused expression.

"Shazam?"

"Thawne?"

No one answered him.

Logically, Batman’s technology shouldn’t have had this kind of weird problem. The three of them seemed to have been transported to different places.

Viktor shot up into the sky.

The cold night wind swept across his face as he squinted and looked around in every direction.

’No...’

This Gotham was almost like an empty city, and there wasn’t a single person everywhere he looked.

Even in the distant district, where red, orange, blue, and purple neon lights flashed in dazzling patterns, Viktor still couldn’t hear any human voices at all.

He said "almost" empty because, the very next second, dozens of red laser dots aimed right at him.

"...Looks like this world was well prepared for our arrival."

Viktor clicked his tongue.

The Flash’s situation was probably a whole lot worse than any of them had imagined.

The hissing sound of launchers firing came from every direction at once, and hundreds of missiles howled through the night sky.

The nonstop explosions swallowed Viktor in a thick ball of blazing fire.

After the fire finally dissipated, Viktor looked at the thick smoke around him, flickering with tiny green dust.

He stared at the barely visible green crystal particles sitting in his palm. After a brief silence, Viktor let out two dry chuckles.

"You even extracted intel about our world from that poor Flash’s brain? You even used missiles mixed with kryptonite powder... because you saw me flying, you immediately switched to attacks designed for Superman?"

Shazam wasn’t by his side, and this world was far too bizarre at the moment.

That meant Viktor didn’t need to hold back anymore.

He crouched slightly and stared up at the night sky above Gotham. The air was so smoky and dirty that a single star couldn’t be seen.

He planted his feet firmly on the ground beneath him and pushed off with both feet.

"Boom"

Two sonic booms exploded in the air, and in an instant, he shot tens of thousands of meters into the air.

Three seconds later, a meteor came down burning with deadly red-orange light from the intense friction of the air, carrying unstoppable force, and slammed directly into the very middle of Gotham City.

For just a moment, everything in the world seemed to freeze completely still.

Then the entire city lurched upward, like it had been punched from below.

After a few moments, the ground finally started shaking. An enormous earthquake and a giant shockwave smashed everything into dust.

Inside the massive cloud of smoke shooting up into the sky, Viktor looked down and scanned the area carefully.

After checking and realizing there were no survivors, Viktor calmly lifted his eyes and quickly figured out which direction to go.

The next destination: Metropolis.

This city had clearly already been ravaged by the forces of Atlantis and Themyscira, and more than half of it was already ruined.

There was only a little bit of resistance left.

The forces hiding in the corners and alleyways couldn’t even manage to fire a single missile.

Luckily, a group of soldiers in military uniforms appeared with their eyes carrying a calm look of people ready to die.

Following the commands of someone who was clearly the officer in charge, a thousand guns aimed up at Viktor in the air.

"Bang!"

"Bang!"

"Bang!"

He glanced down at the sparks bouncing off his body.

He didn’t immediately wipe out the city this time, and only half of its buildings still stood intact. Instead, Viktor slowly descended until he hovered just two or three meters above the ground.

He floated above a soldier crouching behind an overturned car covered in layers of dust, and looked down at him from above.

The soldier’s face was covered in what might have been camouflage paint or just the dirt of living in an apocalyptic world.

It was impossible to tell.

The soldier’s lips were so dry they were cracked and bleeding, and his eyes shone with strong belief, but there wasn’t a trace of fear visible anywhere under all that paint.

He simply kept his rifle steady. The barrel trembled slightly, but every single bullet stayed aimed directly at Viktor’s head.

He reached out, snatched the weapon, and crushed it into a lump of scrap metal.

The soldier instantly drew the tactical pistol at his waist.

Bang!

He only managed to pull the trigger for a second before Viktor closed in, lifted him up, and casually slammed him into the ground, turning him into a smear like street graffiti.

The figure locked under the crossfire vanished instantly, and several rapid flashes followed, with sharp crackling bursts echoing one after another.

The last of the gunfire in Metropolis went completely silent.

Then, Viktor landed right in front of the commanding officer, whose arm was still frozen halfway in the air.

The officer slowly lowered his arm.

He stared at Viktor, then pulled a knife from his waist with tiny beads of sweat appearing on his forehead, but he held the tip of the knife pointed steadily at Viktor without a single hesitation.

Viktor felt like just slaughtering his way through everyone like this wasn’t going to get him any useful information at all.

"You seem to hold a high position. If you’re the commander officer, you probably know more than the average soldier, right?"

The officer forced out a stiff smile.

"All I know... is that this world will survive."

Viktor had expected that kind of attitude, but an ordinary human being really shouldn’t have this kind of unbreakable will.

...

The sound of bones snapping over and over echoed through the city, along with screams of pain that no one could hold back.

After two hundred distinct cracks of shattered bone, Viktor was covered in blood and flew out of Metropolis, thinking.

’Why were so few people deployed in cities that should have been fairly important?’

No matter how well hidden they were, the destruction Viktor was causing should have drawn out those who were desperate to live to come out.

It would also help him find Shazam and Reverse-Flash who had landed somewhere unknown.

At an altitude of about a hundred meters above the ground, Viktor entered a semi-warp state.

At about a hundred meters above ground, Viktor entered a half-warp state, and his figure became a blur of light as he began streaking back and forth across the entire planet at incredible speed.

A huge, burning hot blast-balls followed and kept exploding in different cities, leaving behind deep scorched craters of burnt earth.

But after about half an hour of tearing up the planet, Viktor stopped, looking seriously creeped out.

He looked up and shot straight out of the atmosphere, staring down at the Earth with roughly one-seventh of its cities now destroyed, glowing faintly in white light.

There was no one... no screams, no resistance, and no trace of Captain Atom detonating himself.

Moreover, Viktor still hadn’t run into Shazam or Reverse-Flash. He looked back at outer space with a feeling of uneasy suspicion.

"In a world-ending war like this, Earth shouldn’t have the kind of space technology that could evacuate billions of refugees all at once."

He seemed to have figured out what kind of approach those desperate lunatics had come up with.

"They’re using the Flash’s Speed Force to keep splitting the Flashpoint world’s timeline over and over?"

"This is bad—really bad. How am I supposed to find the entire organization hiding inside one specific timeline?"

...

600 POWER STONES = 1 BONUS Chapter

[email protected]/Sothisq

You can find up to 15 advanced Chapters on my Patreon.