Chapter 51: Chaos
"Barry, no!"
Rachel heard Superman's desperate cry and felt the world around her tremble violently.
The blue figure flashing across the sky was incredibly fast. Rachel recognized him; the TV always claimed there was no disaster he couldn't arrive in time to save people from.
Clearly, the world's understanding of speedsters was far too shallow.
A crimson spray of blood froze in mid-air, like a peony suspended in time.
When golden and red lightning crackled, everything snapped back into motion. Rachel only caught a glimpse of Luka being hurled backward.
"No!"
The girl stumbled as she ran towards Luka. Her mind went blank with panic, but the surging emotions, potent enough to easily tear apart her magical restraints, were building up like a flash flood about to break through a dam.
Faint cracks glowing with red light began to spread across Rachel's forehead. The magic from Trigon was on the verge of breaking free.
But a voice suddenly invaded her mind.
The voice was distorted, as if someone were deliberately pressing a massage gun against their throat while speaking through a voice modulator.
"He's fine."
Sure enough, Luka sat up abruptly from the ground. Though his chest was a bloody mess, it was clear that the blow originally aimed at his heart had somehow been deflected.
The attack had merely torn through his clothes, leaving a horizontal gash across his chest.
"Rachel!"
Luka grabbed Rachel as she lunged toward him. Seeing the additional pairs of eyes about to open on the girl's forehead, he spoke urgently.
"Control your emotions first. If you let Him out now, Earth will become completely uninhabitable."
Only after Rachel began closing her eyes, struggling to calm herself, did Luka have a chance to survey the scene.
Just as the Flash, who had tried to kill him without explanation, was about to pierce his heart, some force had pushed him aside.
Superman landed with a thunderous crash, finally positioning himself between Luka and the Flash.
Standing beside him was another unfamiliar, blurry figure.
A blur of yellow, a vibrating voice, and red lightning crackling all around him.
The murderous Flash gritted his teeth and spat out the identity of the one who had intervened.
"Eobard Thawne! You're always so damn hard to kill!"
Reverse-Flash.
Superman stared at Reverse-Flash with a mixture of suspicion and uncertainty. Reverse-Flash was one of the Justice League's top-priority warning targets.
Normally, anyone who encountered this guy would immediately prioritize capturing and containing him.
But this guy had saved Luka in the split second even Superman couldn't react.
Should they still try to capture him?
Reverse-Flash paid no attention to Superman's gaze. Instead, he faced the Flash. Because he remained in a state of high-speed vibration fueled by the Negative Speed Force, no one could see his expression clearly.
"Hard to kill?" Reverse-Flash seemed genuinely surprised.
Then, as if quickly realizing something, he let out a mocking laugh.
But he didn't take up the Flash's remark.
"I was wondering why I kept feeling disturbances in the Speed Force field."
Luka and Superman frowned simultaneously. Reverse-Flash's speech patterns were completely different from the Flash's familiar cadence.
While his speech wasn't particularly fast, his enunciation was so slurred that some words required contextual deduction to understand the full meaning of his sentences.
Oblivious to his peculiar accent, Reverse-Flash casually rested his chin in his hand.
"Since last night, I've sensed a change in the Speed Force Field. Knowing you're the source of it all, I traveled from the future to this time period and camped outside your little girlfriend's house."
"You didn't show up until morning. Then you suddenly ran out. I followed you all morning. To the Hall of Justice, the Watchtower, the Batcave. You searched through a lot of files."
"You even scoured all of Metropolis looking for this... person."
Reverse-Flash delivered his verdict with finality.
"You're not the Flash of this world. You're not even from this world. There's no record of you in the future."
Reverse-Flash spread his hands, clearly disappointed.
"I thought you were about to pull off some world-altering event lost to history. Turns out you aren't him at all. Still, thanks for the tip. When you said I was hard to kill, you meant the Reverse-Flash in your world creates time remnants, right? Now, I've learned that too."
Superman's confused mind finally caught up.
For Superman, too much had happened in less than a day.
His emotions had been on a rollercoaster. After a tiring voice conference with the Justice League, Kara suddenly woke up.
The two caught up, reminisced and mourned Krypton, embraced and shed tears. The overwhelming joy dispelled the gloom of the Justice League's near-disintegration that morning.
But before he could teach Kara how to control the powers she would soon gain under Earth's yellow sun, he heard Luka's rapidly increasing heartbeat at the center of Metropolis.
A Viltrumite had suddenly decided to unleash his full power in the center of Metropolis. Compared to such a catastrophic event, even Kara, newly arrived on Earth, had to be sidelined.
The moment he flew into the sky, he saw the Flash about to drive a hand straight through Luka's heart, and he himself might not be able to stop it in time.
His super-brain and super-heart nearly buckled under the strain of such rapid and extreme shifts between joy, sorrow, and shock in such a short span of time.
Of course, Superman didn't notice the girl behind him, the Trigon's malevolent mark flickering on her forehead. Had he seen that, the shock would have been even greater.
The residents of Metropolis had no idea that in just a few minutes, their lives had been tossed in a pan and flipped again and again.
The battle-worn Flash glared darkly at Luka.
With Reverse-Flash and Superman blocking the way, no amount of determination would let him succeed now.
Luka also realized this. After glancing back to confirm Rachel was gradually calming down, he calmly stood up and brushed off the already healed wound on his chest.
Superman looked at the battered otherworld Flash and hesitantly spoke.
"Why did you attack Luka? The Flash I know would never do something like this."
The Flash briefly shifted his death glare away from Luka.
"He's been seen near Wonder Woman and Aquaman, and then this morning's incident happened. He is dangerous. He acts just like Reverse-Flash, manipulating seemingly insignificant details to achieve critical outcomes."
Reverse-Flash, innocently mentioned, just shrugged.
Beneath his shattered helmet, the Flash's face suddenly contorted in agony, as if his mind were enduring unbearable pain.
He gritted his teeth, his eyes rapidly vibrating, bloody drool spilling from the corner of his mouth.
"Like a butterfly... plucking at the strings of fate... and the world spirals toward destruction under the chaos of countless cascading effects."
"He's dangerous... so dangerous. He shouldn't even exist in this world. He's an error born from nothingness, a mistake that must be corrected. Must be corrected!"
"Wait!"
Superman quickly stepped forward and placed a hand on the Flash's shoulder.
"What happened to the Justice League has nothing to do with Luka, I guarantee it. And you don't look well right now. Let's all find a place to—"
"No."
Luka cut off Superman, his voice cold and low.
"Sorry, Superman. I have nothing to discuss with him. This is a line I absolutely cannot tolerate. My right to exist was threatened just now."
Superman's pupils constricted, his super-brain feeling like it was about to explode.
Reverse-Flash smirked, as if watching a long-awaited movie.
"This is something I cannot allow under any circumstances. Once my life is in danger, every rule and every boundary goes out the window."
"You can't keep this Flash here forever. The moment Mr. Thawne leaves, he could try to kill me again at any moment."
The Flash beneath Superman's palm began convulsing like a zombie, but Superman still turned back, needing to confirm Luka's condition once more.
That was when he noticed the dim yellow ring already resting on Luka's finger.
"I need to ensure my absolute safety first."
With only eight seconds of energy remaining in the ring, Luka channeled it all into sending an outward signal.
A rift from the antimatter universe tore open in the sky above Metropolis.
An elegant, magnetic voice drifted out from within.
It sounded like a despairing dirge heralding further chaos for Earth.
"Finally..."
"I have been waiting for this day, the day you would put on that ring properly."