Chapter 24: The Citadel of the Dreamer
The colossal black gates opened completely, revealing not a throne room, nor an army, nor a monster.
They revealed an absolute darkness, a silent void that seemed to swallow the light of the nightmare landscape behind them. The roar of the river of stories faded, replaced by a silence so deep and oppressive it made their ears ache.
The team stood motionless on the threshold, a group of disparate characters on the blank page of the final chapter. The air drifting from inside was cold, sterile, and smelled of nothing, like the inside of a freshly opened tomb.
Batman, as always, was the first to react. His world was one of shadows and intimidation; this darkness did not unsettle him. It was his home. He took a step forward, his cape swirling around him, ready to face whatever was inside.
"Ah, ah, ah. Manners, Batman-san," said a cheerful voice, and Urahara Kisuke nimbly passed him, opening his fan with a snap that echoed unnaturally in the silence. "Ladies first. But since I am the only one who remembered to bring a fan for this stifling weather, I suppose I will go."
With a confidence bordering on madness, Urahara Kisuke took the first step into the absolute darkness.
The instant his wooden sandal crossed the threshold, the darkness did not dissipate: it was replaced.
A cold, white, sourceless light, identical to that of a morgue, flooded existence. The group blinked, momentarily blinded. When their eyes adjusted, they found themselves in a place that was, in many ways, more terrifying than the chaos outside.
They were in a hallway. An endless corridor, stretching to a vanishing point in infinity, made of white, polished marble, without a single vein, without a single imperfection. The floor, walls, and ceiling were of the same material, glowing with a sterile light. There were no doors. There were no windows. There was no dust. The air was cold, still, and motionless.
It was the architecture of dead perfection. A surgeon's utopia. A tyrant's dream.
"No..." whispered Zatanna, stepping back. The chaos outside had been terrifying, but this... this was oppressive. She felt her magic shrinking, cooling inside her, drowned by the absolute order of the place.
Constantine let out a stifled curse, lighting a cigarette out of pure reflex. The smoke didn't rise in lazy wisps; it shot from his mouth in a straight, perfect line before dissolving instantly. "I hate this place," he hissed, his voice sounding flat. "I hate this place much more than the swamp. It's so... clean. It gives me the creeps."
And then, Klarion, who had been vibrating with power, landed on the marble floor. The sound of his boots was the only noise. He looked around, his manic smile fading, replaced by a grimace of absolute disgust.
"NO!" he shrieked, and his voice, instead of echoing, was absorbed by the perfect walls. "BORING! BORING! I HATE THIS PLACE! IT'S TOO STRAIGHT! TOO... CLEAN! IT SMELLS LIKE RULES!"
The Lord of Chaos kicked the marble floor. He left no mark. The surface was conceptually perfect. Klarion screamed in frustration, a sharp sound that died instantly. This was his personal hell.
"Quiet," growled Batman, his voice a low whisper, but even he seemed uncomfortable. His cape hung dead at his back, without the slightest movement of air. "Move. Find Faust."
They began to walk down the endless hallway, the only sound the muffled echo of their own footsteps. The hallway was a maze, but not a physical one. There were no forks, no dead ends. Just a straight, endless line. It was a psychological maze, designed to break them not with fear, but with something far more insidious.
The attack began without warning.
It wasn't monsters. It wasn't illusions. It was whispers.
Calm, logical, accusatory voices that seemed to come from the white light itself, resonating directly inside their skulls.
Constantine was the first to falter. The smell of sulfur and stale beer filled his nostrils, but the voice he heard wasn't that of a roaring demon. It was Astra Logue's. But she wasn't screaming. She spoke with the disappointed calm of a schoolteacher.
"You should have known, John. The summoning was logically flawed. Nergal was too powerful for the ritual you used. It was a procedural error. Your arrogance exceeded your preparation. Your failure was not passionate; it was technical. You should have prepared better. Logically, my soul belongs to you, not to them."
"Shut up..." hissed John, clutching his head. This was worse than ghostly hands. This wasn't guilt; it was an audit. It attacked his pride, his only defense.
Then, the house attacked Zatanna. She heard her father's voice, Giovanni Zatara, not proud, not angry, but simply... appraising.
"You failed the spell, my daughter. The cost was clearly written in Nabu's grimoire. You sacrificed your own safety for mine. It was a poor tactical trade. Your love made you careless. It was a failure of discipline, not heart. And a magician without discipline... is just an illusionist."
"No... no, stop..." she whispered, her steps faltering. The words were like acid, dissolving the very foundation of her power, her legacy.
Jason, beside her, went rigid. He heard a voice he hated more than any other: Etrigan's. But the demon wasn't rhyming. He spoke with cold, cutting logic.
"You failed, Jason Blood. Your mortal weakness condemns us. The bond should never have been forged. Your failure to control me is a failure of will. Merlin was wrong about you. You are a flawed container."
And then, the maze unleashed its most powerful weapon. It turned to Batman.
The detective was being bombarded by a voice he knew better than any other. His own.
It wasn't his parents' screams. It was his own inner voice, the cold logic of the detective analyzing his greatest failure, over and over and over again, like a training simulation he couldn't escape.
"Calculation error, Bruce. You should have anticipated his movement. A narrow alley is a tactical trap. Ambush risk: 85%. You should have had a contingency plan for a single armed assailant. Your failure to save them was not emotional; it was a calculation error. Unacceptable. Logically, their death is your responsibility. Your mission of 'vengeance' is based on a simple tactical error. Your own error."
The assault was so relentless, so precise, so logical, that the man who had withstood Scarecrow's fear gas and Darkseid's torture... stumbled.
His knee hit the perfect marble with a dull thud. His steely mind grated against this perfect, ruthless logic. It wasn't a monster he could punch. It was an argument he couldn't win.
While Earth's strongest heroes collapsed under the weight of their own structured guilt, Urahara Kisuke strolled down the hallway, hands tucked into his haori sleeves, as if taking a walk through a particularly boring modern art museum.
He heard the whispers too.
"You should have seen Aizen's betrayal coming. It was an error in judgment. Your blindness doomed the Soul Society."
"Yoruichi left you. Your complacency pushed her away. You failed as a friend."
"The K'tharr. You destroyed them with your arrogance. Your 'help' was genocide. You are a monster."
Urahara listened to the voices, tilting his head with a polite smile, as if listening to a child recite a poorly memorized poem.
'Oh, how fascinating,' he thought, passing Batman, who was struggling to get up. 'A spell based on regret. A weapon that uses the victim's own intellect against them. It doesn't attack fear, it attacks the 'should have been'. What a wonderfully human weapon. And so... so boring.'
To him, Aizen was not a regret; he was a lesson in strategy. Yoruichi was not a failure; she was a bittersweet story. The K'tharr were not a guilt; they were the doctoral thesis that had defined his philosophy of non-intervention. His memories were not traumas; they were completed readings. The voices found nothing to anchor to.
But his team was compromised. And that was a problem. 'A mess,' he thought. 'My conceptual pack mules are giving up. We can't reach the throne room like this. I need... a palate cleanser.'
He turned to the only other being who was immune, but for the exact opposite reason.
Klarion wasn't being attacked by logic. He was being oppressed by it. The child-god was curled on the floor, hands over his pointed ears, body vibrating with contained, furious energy.
"SHUT UP!" he screamed at the silent hallway. "BORING VOICES! STRAIGHT WALLS! STUPID LIGHT! HATE! HATE! I HATE THIS PLACE!"
Urahara saw his weapon. This maze's weakness wasn't logic. It was illogicality.
He approached the Lord of Chaos, his voice a conspiratorial whisper. "It's terrible, isn't it, Klarion-san?"
Klarion glared at him. "SHUT UP, HAT-MAN! I WANT TO LEAVE! THIS GAME IS STUPID!"
"It is," agreed Urahara, his smile pure malice. "So many rules. So many clean walls. It's so... permanent. So orderly. I bet this Doctor Destiny thinks his 'order' is stronger than your 'chaos'. How boring."
That was the spark.
Klarion went still. The trembling stopped. Slowly, he stood up. "Stronger?"
"Well, look at it," said Urahara, gesturing to the perfect hallway. "It's so clean. So sure of itself. Probably thinks nothing can break it. Thinks its rules are the only ones."
"NO!" roared Klarion, and the scream, this time, was not absorbed. It was a challenge. "CHAOS IS STRONGER! CHAOS IS MORE FUN! CHAOS...!"
The child-god raised both hands.
"...BREAKS... EVERYTHING!"
With a shriek that tore the fabric of logic, Klarion unleashed his power. It wasn't a targeted attack. It was an explosion of pure existential anarchy.
The perfect white marble hallway screamed. It was a sound Batman would never forget: the sound of logic dying.
The flawless marble cracked, but not with normal cracks. They were fractures bleeding a purple color that smelled of jazz music. The perfectly straight walls melted like ice cream under the sun, sinking into puddles of impossible geometry. The sterile white light flickered, turned a nauseating green, and then was replaced by a cacophony of carnival strobe lights, as manic circus music began to play from nowhere.
The logical whispers of guilt turned into panicked clown screams and honking horns.
The conceptual maze, a structure built on the foundation of perfect and immutable order, could not compute the assault of pure irrationality. It broke. It shattered.
The voices in the team's heads stopped instantly, replaced by the sound of rubber ducks.
Batman jumped to his feet, his tactical senses returning as the world around him turned into a Dali nightmare. Zatanna and Constantine looked at each other, faces pale, as the floor beneath them turned into wobbling lemon jelly.
Urahara Kisuke stood in the middle of the now shattered, dripping, and pulsating hallway, his fan open, an island of calm in the sea of chaos.
"Ah, much better!" he said cheerfully, fanning himself. "It was a bit bland for my taste! Wonderful redecorating job, Klarion-san! Keep it up!"
Klarion, now in his element, laughed loudly, firing bolts of chaos at the dripping walls, making them sing opera backward.
Through the now shattered hallway, they saw their destination. The maze had collapsed, revealing a vast chamber at the end. The throne room.
"Well," said Urahara, taking the first step onto the lemon jelly. "Let's not get left behind."
The chaos of the hallway, the manic circus music, and the lemon jelly-dripping walls, stopped abruptly at a perfect threshold. As if Klarion's vandalism had hit an invisible glass wall, the madness ended, and what lay beyond was a silence that was, in itself, a scream.
The group stopped dead at the entrance of the final chamber. It was, or had been, Lucien's library. The heart of the Dreaming.
But it had been desecrated in a way that made Klarion's destruction look like an act of mercy.
The vast hall, which once must have been a cozy chaos of knowledge, a maze of stacked stories and cluttered wisdom, was now a cathedral of sterility. The light was white, cold, and unforgiving, emanating from the perfectly smooth marble ceiling. All the wooden shelves had been replaced by identical metal racks. And the books...
Zatanna let out a stifled cry that turned into a silent sob.
The books were arranged... incorrectly.
They weren't classified by subject, nor by author, nor by era. They were classified by size. And then by color. Perfect gradients from red to blue, with every spine aligned with micrometer precision. Millions of books, millions of stories, sorted by the meaningless logic of a color chart. It was a place of knowledge that had been lobotomized, its soul ripped out in exchange for senseless symmetry. All loose scrolls, notes, clutter... everything had been burned. The ashes were nowhere to be found, undoubtedly erased for being "messy."
"No..." whispered Zatanna, the horror in her voice palpable. "Lucien... what has he done to you? What has he done to his library?"
"I hate this place," hissed Constantine, his voice a croak in the absolute silence. "I hate this place even more than the hallway. It's so... fucking clean. Makes me want to tear someone's skin off."
Batman said nothing. His white lenses scanned the room. He saw the obsession, the absolute control. This was Arkham on a cosmic scale.
Klarion, for his part, was shaking. Not from fear. From pure, absolute repulsion. This place was the anathema of his very existence.
"NO!" he shrieked, his voice sounding strangely muffled in the dead air. "CLEANER! STRAIGHTER! STUPID BORING PLACE! BORING! BORING!"
Urahara was silent, his usual shopkeeper smile replaced by a mask of deep academic fascination. He walked slowly to the nearest shelf, pulled out a book (ruining the perfect line), and opened it. The pages were blank. All of them.
'A conceptual lobotomy,' he thought, genuine wonder in his mind. 'He hasn't just ordered the books. He has erased the stories that didn't fit his vision. He has taken a place of living ideas and turned it into a graveyard. What... what incredibly pure lack of imagination. What sublime and boring ambition.'
In the exact center of the vast room, where Lucien's desk should have been, there was a throne.
It wasn't made of stone, nor metal, nor bone. It was made of a pulsating grayish material, a solidified mass of... something. Looking closely, they could see faces. Thousands of human faces, mouths open in silent screams, hands outstretched, all frozen in a material that looked like dream clay. It was a throne made of humanity's stolen imagination, a monument to the silence he was imposing.
And on the throne, sat a man.
Or what was left of one.
"Faust," whispered Zatanna, recognizing the renegade sorcerer.
But he was Felix Faust in name only. The man was gaunt, skeletal, his skin pale and almost translucent like old parchment stretched over bones. His rich sorcerer's robes were gone, replaced by a simple gray cloak, utilitarian and unadorned. He looked like a monk of an order of nothingness.
And his face... his face was the worst desecration.
Where his eyes should have been, there was nothing. Just the same smooth, pale skin they had seen on the Censor, stitched with the same dark threads of energy. He didn't need to see the physical world.
Because in the center of his forehead, where the third eye should be, was the source of his power. Embedded in his skull, pulsing with a sickly and obscene purple light, was the Dreamstone. Morpheus's Stone. It wasn't on his forehead; it was in it. The skin had fused with the gem, and dark, pulsing veins, full of conceptual power, spread from the ruby across his scalp and down his temples, connecting him directly to the heart of the Dreaming.
He was Felix Faust. He was Doctor Destiny. And he was the new machine running reality.
He didn't move. He didn't react to their presence. But his voice filled their minds.
It wasn't a scream. It wasn't a speech. It was a whisper. A chorus of a billion whispering voices, all speaking in perfect, quiet unison, a calm that was more terrifying than any roar.
"Intruders," whispered the voice in their heads. "Disorderly."
He didn't attack. He simply... explained. Not out of ego, not out of villainous arrogance. But out of a sense of order, as if dictating a lab report.
"I saw the disease," whispered the voice. "The plague of chaotic imagination. Your fevered minds. Your irrational fears. Your contradictory dreams. The nightmare of free will. It is... inefficient. It is painful. Humanity suffers because it is allowed to dream of chaos."
As he spoke, images filled their minds: the visions they had seen on Earth. The man seeing demons in his family. The snake bus. The fear. The panic.
"I... am the cure," continued the voice. "I am not causing the nightmares. I am... stopping them. I am purging the disease. The plague of fear you saw was not my attack. It was the symptom of the cure. The sound of the world's minds resisting, their psychic fevers breaking as I purged their filthy, chaotic nightmares and replaced them with mine."
'What a magnificent story,' thought Urahara, absolutely captivated. 'What a perfect villain! He doesn't seek power, he doesn't seek revenge... he seeks silence. He is the ultimate censor. He has become the embodiment of absolute order. What ambition... so singular.'
"I am saving humanity from itself," whispered Faust. "I am giving it the greatest gift. Peace. Silence. Order. A single, perfect dream from which no one will ever wake. A world without fear. Without pain. Without choice. A world... without disorder."
The monologue ended. The god on the throne of stolen dreams finally focused his attention on the five anomalies that had desecrated his sterile library.
"Your stories," whispered Faust, a hint of... annoyance, for the first time. "Are noisy. Are messy. Contradictory. Must be silenced."
He raised a pale, skeletal hand.
There was no energy beam. No incantation. Simply, he rewrote their realities.
"Silence."
He pointed at Constantine. John opened his mouth to scream a curse, a defensive spell. No sound came out. He brought his hands to his throat, eyes wide with panic. His vocal cords still worked, but the concept of him making noise had been erased.
"No gestures."
He pointed at Zatanna. She raised her hands to cast a counter-spell, lips moving silently. Her hands froze in mid-air, chest-high. She tried to lower them. They wouldn't move. Her "story" of gesturing, of using her hands for magic, had been indefinitely paused.
"Order. No unnecessary movement."
He pointed at Batman. The detective, seeing the pattern, lunged forward, pulling an explosive from his belt. He froze mid-stride. The explosive fell from his hand, stopping in mid-air three feet off the ground. His high-tech suit, his servos, his joints... everything locked. He had become a statue of iron and rage.
"No contradictions."
He pointed at Jason Blood. Jason screamed, a guttural sound of agony. Golden, sulphurous light poured from his mouth and eyes. Etrigan was forcibly expelled from his body. The demon, separated from his mortal anchor for the first time in centuries, materialized on the marble floor, writhing and whining, not in rage, but in naked terror. He was a creature of rhyme in a world of prose, and he was completely vulnerable. Jason Blood collapsed beside him, mortal, visibly aging and unconscious.
In less than five seconds, the team had been neutralized. Removed from the equation with terrifying efficiency.
Only two remained.
Klarion, who had been watching this display of "order" with a growl of deep disgust.
And Urahara, who was still standing calmly, fanning himself, as if he had just seen a particularly clever card trick.
Faust/Destiny's eyeless head turned, "looking" at the last two messy pieces on the board.
"Anomalies," whispered the collective voice. "A noisy child who doesn't belong. And a reading error... a foreign story. I do not understand you. It is messy. Therefore... you must be erased."
The collective whisper of a billion dead voices stopped. Felix Faust, the being who had renamed himself Destiny, focused on the last two pieces of disorder on his perfect board. His movements were economic, emotionless. First, he addressed the most obvious threat, the loudest one.
"A noisy child," whispered Destiny's voice in their minds, a sound like dry sand sliding over marble. "The embodiment of disorder. You are the first I will erase."
The mistake was monumental. It wasn't a calculation error; it was a script error. Faust, in his perfect logic, assumed an order of operations, and in that order, he momentarily ignored the man in the hat, believing him a passive anomaly.
Klarion, who had been watching the team's neutralization with a mix of boredom and disgust, suddenly went very still. His manic smile faded, replaced by a grimace of disbelief. Ignored? Called "noisy child" and relegated to being the first to be "erased," as if he were a simple stain? The fury he felt wasn't hot; it was absolute, existential cold.
But before he could unleash his own storm, the second anomaly intervened.
Faust turned to Urahara.
"And you," he whispered. "A reading error. A foreign story that does not belong in this library. Your narrative is foreign. I do not understand you. Therefore... you must be erased."
The Lord of Absolute Order raised a pale hand. He didn't fire a beam. He didn't recite a spell. Simply, he focused his will, the power of the Dreamstone, and unleashed conceptual negation. The same power that had destroyed the Censor.
A wave of "nothingness" spread from Faust. It wasn't darkness, it was the absence of story. The air around Urahara began to blur, light refused to touch him, his "idea" began to be erased from the manuscript of reality. Batman, frozen in his suit, watched helplessly as the shopkeeper's edges began to fray.
In the center of the annihilation wave, Urahara Kisuke didn't even flinch.
He kept his fan open, covering his smile. The wave of negation hit him.
And split.
Like river water hitting a bridge piling, the erasure wave flowed around him, unable to find a foothold, unable to affect him in the slightest. Reality came undone to his left and right, but he remained, an island of absolute certainty.
"Oh, what an admirable attempt!" said Urahara's voice cheerfully, his tone polite mockery. "What wonderful power! Erasing stories! How enviable."
He fanned himself, the gesture slow and deliberate. "But I'm afraid there is a tiny flaw in your logic, Destiny-san. You cannot 'erase' my story for a very simple reason."
Urahara lowered the fan, revealing his gray eyes, shining with ancient and dangerous amusement. "You aren't reading it. I am the one reading you. And I'm afraid my personal copy... is read-only. With administrator rights."
Faust hesitated. For the first time.
The concept of "immunity" was messy. It was illogical. His power was absolute. This... this shouldn't be happening. His perfect order had encountered a variable it couldn't compute.
And in that second of hesitation, Urahara unleashed his true weapon.
He didn't attack. He simply turned, completely ignoring the god on the throne, and spoke to the Lord of Chaos.
"Hat-man!" shrieked Klarion, his voice pure venom. "This boring guy with the jewel in his forehead... says his toys are better than mine!"
Urahara gave Klarion a radiant, conspiratorial smile.
"So it seems, Klarion-san," he said, his tone one of feigned sadness. "How boring. He built this whole straight, clean place just to prove his story is the only one that matters. What a lack of imagination."
The bait was set. Klarion's vanity, anarchy, and ego collided, and the mixture exploded.
Klarion looked at Faust. Faust, the epitome of order, the being who had silenced his playmates, the monster who had created a realm of pure and absolute cleanliness and dared to call it "better."
"NO ONE...!" roared Klarion, and the voice was no longer that of a child. It was a chorus of a billion madnesses, a burst of pure potential. His childish body swelled with power, his blue skin glowing with a sickly red light. Teekl, beside him, grew again, becoming a beast of shadows and claws the size of a rhinoceros.
"...IS MORE FUN... THAN ME!"
With a shriek that tore the fabric of logic Faust had built, Klarion unleashed his power. This wasn't a child's tantrum. It was the fury of a god.
The conceptual battle began.
"Silence," whispered Faust, launching a wave of absolute order. He tried to "silence" Klarion as he had Constantine.
Klarion laughed. He opened his mouth and, instead of silence, a torrent of manic circus music and the sound of a thousand rubber ducks being tortured shot out, hitting the silence wave and shattering it.
"Order," whispered Faust, tighter now. He threw the laws of physics against the child-god. Perfect equations, 2+2=4, E=mc², flew through the air like spears of white light, seeking to anchor Klarion in logic.
"BORING MATH!" mocked Klarion. He waved his hand. The equations twisted.
2+2 no longer equaled 4. It equaled FISH!.
The equation transformed into a giant flying fish with shark teeth, which turned in the air and lunged at Faust's throne.
Faust erased it with a disdainful gesture, but the attack had forced him to act.
"Symmetry," he ordered. The perfectly tiled marble floor beneath Klarion turned into a trap, the grout lines rising like cages, trying to catch him.
Klarion stomped. The perfect marble floor shattered. And from the cracks erupted, not lava, but a seething ocean of brightly colored polka-dot socks and bouncing rubber balls.
"HA, HA, HA!" he laughed, surfing on a wave of socks.
Chaos was winning.
It wasn't a battle of power; it was a battle of definitions. The library, Faust's sanctuary of order, was being infected. The perfectly aligned books on the shelves screamed in terror as their covers melted and their stories rewrote themselves with nonsensical jokes. The clean white walls became covered in graffiti that moved and sang obscene songs.
Faust was on the defensive. For every rule he imposed, Klarion created a thousand exceptions. Order was fragile. Chaos was corrosive. And Klarion was the natural predator of a tyrant who believed logic was the only answer.
The realm itself, the citadel, began to tear apart. The walls cracked, revealing the nightmare sky outside. The battle between the two conceptual beings was breaking the Dreaming.
Amidst this apocalypse of madness, Urahara watched with a calculating smile. The anchor in his hand, the puzzle box, vibrated so violently he almost dropped it.
'Time's up,' he thought. The diversion had served its purpose: creating the ultimate distraction.
While Faust fired a beam of pure "negation" at Teekl, who dodged it by turning into a puddle of ink, Urahara Kisuke moved.
He didn't run. He didn't fly. In a blink, he was simply there, standing on the armrest of Faust's throne, the smiling shopkeeper now a figure of deadly intent.
Faust, distracted by the tide of chaos threatening to drown him, turned, his stitched sockets "looking" at the man he had forgotten. It was too late.
"The problem with perfect stories, Destiny-san," Urahara said quietly, his voice the only note of calm in the cacophony, "is that they are terribly predictable."
"Nake, Benihime." (Sing, Crimson Princess).
There was no flash of light. No battle cry. Just the hiss of a blade being unsheathed. With the precision of a surgeon severing a single nerve, Urahara didn't attack Faust. He attacked the bond.
Benihime's blade, glowing with crimson light, sliced the air. It didn't touch skin. It didn't touch the gem. It severed the conceptual veins of dark power binding the Dreamstone to Felix Faust's mind.
The effect was instant.
Felix Faust screamed.
It was a real, human scream, a sound of agony and loss. The purple light in the ruby died out. The dark veins on his face withered and turned to dust. The chorus of a billion voices in his head fell silent. The power of "Destiny" shut off like a switch.
He stopped being a god. He went back to being just Felix Faust, a mortal, broken sorcerer. His eyes, still stitched shut, flew open beneath the skin, and he slumped from his throne of dreams, unconscious before he hit the ground.
At that same instant, across the galaxy, the plague of fear on Earth stopped. The man seeing demons in his family blinked, and saw his weeping wife. London buses went back to being just buses. The crisis was over.
In the broken library, Klarion, who was about to turn a bookshelf into a giant squid, stopped. His "toy" (Faust) had broken.
"BORING!" he shrieked, losing interest instantly. "BROKEN! NOT FUN ANYMORE! I'M LEAVING!"
He began to tear a new portal in reality, ready to abandon the game.
"Not yet!" shouted Urahara. He was already on the ground, sheathing his sword. With one hand, he caught the Dreamstone, now inert and cold, as it fell from Faust's forehead. With the other, he held the puzzle box, the anchor, aloft. "Not without your travel companions!"
The moment Faust's power broke, the team's bindings dissolved.
"Batman, now!" roared Urahara.
Batman, freed from his paralysis, moved, grabbing Faust's unconscious body from the floor. Zatanna, hands free and voice back, ran to a mute and shocked Constantine, grabbing him. Jason, seeing his mortal anchor in danger, lunged for Faust's body, but the demon Etrigan, now free but terrified of Klarion, refused to rejoin.
"JASON, NO TIME!" shouted Urahara.
Klarion was about to jump into his portal.
"ZATANNA!" roared Urahara, his voice of command resonating above the chaos. "THE HOUSE ANCHOR! PULL THE LEASH! NOW!"
Zatanna, reacting on pure instinct, shouted the return spell. "Soma et artnoc!" (Bring us home!).
The conceptual loop binding them to the House of Mystery library tightened like a cosmic bungee cord.
Klarion's portal collapsed. The Lord of Chaos screamed in fury as he felt Teekl's anchor dragging him. "TRAP! CHEATER! HAT-MAN...!"
With a flash of orange and blue light, the group was ripped from the Dreaming, just as the corrupt realm began to collapse upon itself, now masterless.
CRASH!
With the grace of a sack of bricks, the five (Batman, Zatanna, Constantine, Jason) and their prisoner (Faust) fell from the ceiling, landing in a pile of limbs and curses on the dusty Persian rug of the House of Mystery library.
A second later, Urahara Kisuke landed nimbly on his wooden sandals beside them, not a hair out of place.
One last shriek of fury ("I HATE YOOOUUU!") echoed from nothingness, and then, the anchor snapped, releasing Klarion.
There was absolute silence, broken only by John Constantine coughing and catching his breath.
The Dreamstone, Morpheus's Stone, fell from Urahara's open hand. It rolled languidly across the rug and stopped, glowing with an ominous and now free power, right at the tip of Batman's boot.
The apocalypse was over.
Urahara brushed dust from his shoulders and adjusted his hat.
"Well," he said cheerfully to the shell-shocked room. "Mission accomplished. Although I think we've angered the tour guide. I don't think he'll give us a good review."
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