ic Graduation Day: There Won't Be A Next Time (IC)

[Gizmo]

The original Midnight had been Freedom City's first shadowy mystery man, a masked hero with nothing but the shadows and his wits to battle the forces of evil and corruption, striking at the darkness from the darkness. Travis Hunter's example would inspire many in the decades to come, but unlike many of them, he had no tragic origin, no senseless loss that drove him to a life of extremes. He was simply a chemist who had found himself in a position to make a choice, had taken the harder, better path and then stayed to it. No burden of responsibility to go with godlike powers, no righteous mandate from on high, no struggle for public validation and acceptance. Just one difficult, right choice after another. That was the essence of Midnight.

The lack of criminal violation also meant, Trevor Hunter reflected as he slotted the final piece of his weapon into place, that unlike many of his legacy's imitators, his preparation had included firearm training.

As Sage kept just ahead of deadly salvos, four cosmic lightning rods, gathered from the four reality bombs across four parallel worlds slid into the long-barreled railgun. As Red Falcon sacrificed himself to give the youths a fighting chance, electromagnet hummed softly to life while otherworldly electricity began to crackle about their length. As Edge's fury became a wave of physical destruction turning the sky to fire and ashes, the black clad youth planted his feet and took aim. As Wander and Cobalt Templar threw themselves against the embodiment of the end of all things, creating for one brief instant a perfect opening, Midnight pulled the trigger.

The last remnants of concealing mist were blows back as the cosmic lightning rods where flung forward by the gratuitous application of one of the universe's four fundamental forces, the cloud parting in a whirlwind to reveal the silent figure of nocturnal retribution. In the fraction of a fraction of a moment before they pierced, one after another so quickly that it may as well have been instantaneous, into Omega's very core, the Beast of Nothingness surely realized that - like so many of the world's he had overrun and sundered, reduced to tortured, hollow husks - he had never stood a chance.

[Avenger Assembled]

The energy chasing Sage evaporated as Midnight struck Omega mortally. The rods bit deep, so deep, burying themselves into Omega's torso like bullets into a man's flesh. About to crush Wander between his two outstretched hands, he gave a startled roar like a gored bull and reached for himself to find the rods too deep to remove: with his armor gone, the rods were buried in his body and visibly absorbing the energy of all that he was, all that he had been. He howled in mortal agony as the cosmic energy that was his flesh and blood filled the rods inside him, their glow building to supernatural incandescence that burned and sizzled the flesh of the Lord of the Terminus even as he seemed to deflate before their eyes. Clutching at his chest, Omega howled to the heavens. "NO! THIS CANNOT BE! I AM THE KNIGHT OF ENTROPY! I AM THE LORD OF THE TERMINUS! I AM O-" And then, with a blinding roar and hellish white flame, the rods inside Omega ignited and the lord of the Terminus combusted to ash before the eyes of Young Freedom. Omega was dead, leaving a brilliant white glow where he'd stood that began to resolve into a window: a window to a Freedom Hall that stood intact and proud and very much alive!

But the battle was by no means over: overhead, reality itself burned as entropy died, portals like the one that had summoned Omega and his drones tearing the sky open like paper burning in a fire; drones upon drones pouring out in a black wave like a horde of infinite locusts. Winds howled and the air screamed, and for a moment. the world was as a corpse overrun by maggots. And suddenly, from behind them, came an all-too-familiar voice. "You need to get your people out of this dimension right now!" barked Rick Lucas, his greying hair wild against the winds. "All of you, through the gateway to Earth-Prime! Mark and I can move through dimensions on our own," he said, clapping his son on the arm. "We can close the portals from this side and keep them from overrunning Earth-Prime, then join you! Are you with me, son?"

"I'm with you," agreed Edge, the adrenaline of the moment making Omega's death Omega's death!!! something too spectacular to be dealt with just then. They'd deal with it later, when they were safe, when all this was over. "I can do this!" he told the others with reassurance. "It's what all this power is for! I'll be fine!"

[Electra]

Wander wasted a few precious seconds gawping at the spectacular demise of a living nightmare, then a few more seconds gawping at the sky where the air was boiling with drones and portals. By the time Rick Lucas suddenly popped into existence, it was almost anticlimactic. She opened her hand and let the energy sword dissolve away, then ran over to Sage. "Are you all right?" she demanded. "That was so stupid...." She gave Sage a hug, then turned the younger girl towards the portal that led back to Prime. "Let's go, come on!" she called to the others.

She stopped outside the portal herself and looked back at Rick. "You've been a screwup," she called to him, "but this time pays for all of it. You better send Mark back alive." She waited by the portal till the others were through, but it was obvious that anyone who wasn't a world-class reality manipulator wouldn't be much help right now.

[April]

Wander's reprimand lost whatever bite it had when the taller, older teen folded Eve into a brief hug. Sage tried and failed to keep her face impassive but the ghost of a smile cross her features anyway as she started to move toward the portal. Though that portal was an uncertain future; the telepath hadn't expected to survive the fight with Omega, hadn't really expected to survive the monumental task they took on.

"It was necessary," Sage said by way of explanation, the set of her features almost daring Wander to argue otherwise. "It was right."

Hovering at the threshold of the portal, Sage's expression softened, and the smile that had laid in wait finally made its appearance. "Incidentally, you may want to find something to wear." And then she stepped through.

[KnightDisciple]

Cobalt Templar, for all his bulk, was still a mortal. So when a dark god died just a couple feet away, he couldn't help but be thrown a few yards back, his upper body armor blasted away, his skin red like a bad sunburn. For several moments, he lay on the ground, utterly dazed.

When he stood up, there was a grin on his face. He'd celebrate in full later, but he'd helped kill the next best thing to the Devil himself! He dashed towards the portal, pausing for a moment to give Edge and his father a serious look.

"See you two in just a minute, alright?"

With that, he flung himself through the portal, arriving on the doorstep of the Freedom League with a near-hysterical chuckle on his lips. He glanced down at his attire; while his bare chest would turn heads, his legs were sufficiently covered. He spared a thought to give himself a mask again; it didn't sting much, but his torso was smarting enough he didn't feel like putting any more on. He glanced towards Erin and Eve....

And immediately glanced away, a blush rising on his burned face. He coughed and waved a hand in her direction. A slightly looser version of her normal outfit appeared on her frame, making her more than decent for public exposure, and helping preserve everyone's dignity.

"Uh, right. You'll want to head back to your room soonish, but I can keep that going for a while. Just...don't get too far away from me. Can't keep it up over half the city or anything like that."

He turned back to the portal, worry creasing his face as he waited for the rest of the team.

[Gizmo]

"Hnn. Now he shows up..." Midnight grunted at Rick Lucas' arrival, outwardly unaffected by the monumental evens surrounding them as he coolly tucked the railgun into his belt without disassembling it. This... is getting a display case, he thought with a hint of triumph, enough for Eve to pick up the edges of it across their psychic rapport before she stepped through the portal. The young man stepped briskly to the portal, grabbing Erin's hand as he reached the gap in space and pulling her after him as her home dimension collapsed on itself.

As soon as they were on the other side and back on Earth-Prime, he pulled his mask from his face, letting the fabric fall around his neck and placing his soot coated fedora atop Erin's head with an uncharacteristically broad grin, white teeth contrasting against his onyx and sanguine eyes as he leaned forward to kiss her, doing his best to balance a fervored intensity with concern for her mildly burned skin. Pulling back slightly, he stayed close, a soft, baritone laugh escaping his usually somber demeanor, a lower counter-note to Corbin's giddy relief. "Did it. We did it."

[Electra]

Erin returned the kiss with enthusiastic disregard for her own scorched skin, which was already starting to heal. "We're alive!" she crowed. "Look, everyone is alive, it's so beautiful." She didn't seem to notice the few tears trickling down her face as she picked Trevor up around the waist and swung him exuberantly in a circle. "I can't believe we made it." She set Trevor down quickly before too many people could see them, but didn't let go entirely. Turning her head, she looked to where the portal had been. "And Mark will be here any minute..."

[Avenger Assembled]

On the other side of the rift, father and son worked together as they never had before, Rick sealing dimensional portals as fast as Mark could blast the Omegadrones coming through. But there were so many of them, coming faster and faster, the sky itself looking seamed and patched even under the influence of his father's fantastic power. "There must be millions of them!" Mark called, shouting over the howling in the air as the ground beneath his feet vibrated intermittently as millions of tons of earth settled into the pit dug by the Doom Coil behind them. "All this to try and break into Earth-Prime?" Those were the worst breaches of all, blinking open wormholes that could have led anywhere on Earth and let in thousands of drones, and those the two of them closed together as fast as they could manage.

"This is the closest dimension to Earth-Prime right now. If they get a foothold here, who knows how much damage they could do!? And it's not just that! They want to bring back the armor of Omega!" called Rick, the two of them standing next to that grimly empty sentinel now empty of cosmic radiation with Omega's dispersement. "Proof that he's gone for whatever Annihilists are controlling them now that he's dead!" Another breach opened, right in front of them, and for a second Mark could see his friends standing on the steps of Freedom Hall, waiting for them, before he slammed the portal shut before drones could pour through. "Whoever gets that armor will have the power to launch their own entropic crusade across the multiverse. There's only one thing to do." Father looked at son. "Pull this entire planet into the Zero Zone. All of it. Trap these drones here where they can't do any harm, and keep the Terminus from their trophy."

Edge had never done anything like that, never even dreamed it: but at his father's words, he knew they could do it. It would mean more power than he'd ever thought possible, more power than he'd ever dreamed. "All right...all right, let's do it!" He took his father's hands and both men concentrated, ignoring the swarm for a crucial instant as their mutual power lashed across the face of the Earth: across the burning remains of Freedom City, across the gone-feral continents, across dead Dakana and smoldering Ultima Thule, over every remaining square inch of the battered world that had birthed Erin White and so much carnage and that now held the corpses of so many monsters alongside so many innocents. Mark pushed as he'd never pushed before, ignoring the blasts of entropic energy all around him, and with a mighty heave of creation itself, the two men _pushed_ and reality itself gave way, Earth-EZO1 tumbling out of its orbit, the sky turning white overhead in a flash, the earth beneath them flowing and waving like the sea, buildings tumbling in an ocean of destruction that luckily never touched Rick and Mark. The portals slammed shut, on both sides, and for a moment there was no connection to Earth-Prime at all.

"Mark. Mark." Rick opened his eyes, the sky above them now the fuzzy white of the Zero Zone as an orphaned planet tumbled free in its new home, only the mutual power of the Lucas men giving them an island of sanity as Terminus-poisoned Freedom City was drowned by the cleansing waters of the sea. "You know what you have to do, Mark. Someone has to stay here and keep this world in the Zone, so Omega can't use it again. It's all right. I'm not running anymore. This is where it ends."

Mark nodded, accepting his father's words before he'd even spoken them. He was just so tired, and he just wanted to go home. This world was dying, but he didn't have to. No one else had to die, save a man who'd chosen to follow a dying world to its destiny so no one else could meet the same fate. "...friends to the end, Dad. Friends to the end." And together, they tore open one last portal to Earth-Prime and Mark hurled himself through as the ground beneath him gave way...

---

On the other side, mere seconds after the portal to Earth-EZO1 closed, Edge appeared in a flash of light to stagger and nearly fall on the steps of Freedom Hall, clutching his friends for support. He was cold, and tired, but the world was saved, and they'd won, and that was all that mattered. "We did it...we did it. We threw that Earth where it couldn't threaten ours anymore, and he stayed to make sure the Terminus couldn't come back..." An instant later, just behind Mark, in one last flash of light, a huge black shape came crashing down to crack the steps behind them. Only the teen heroes, standing with their bodies blocking the shard from view of the street, could see what it was: the chest plane of Omega's armor, big as the front end of a small car, with the now-dead symbol of the Terminus still in the middle. And alongside that, the fist-sized hole where someone had done her best to tear out Omega's heart.

[KnightDisciple]

Corbin was relieved as Trevor came through. He tensed up as the portal closed, and his tension rose a bit, until finally his reality-bending friend appeared in a flash of light. But something was still wrong; Rick Lucas wasn't there.

And then Mark confirmed Corbin's fear. Rick Lucas would not be coming back. Brave face or no, the not-quite-a-giant youth knew his friend likely needed comfort; one couldn't just brush off losing your father forever. Corbin wasn't a counselor, but he knew there was at least one thing he could do.

Moments after Omega's armor clattered to their feet, Corbin took a single step over and gave Mark a huge bear hug.

"I'm sorry, Mark. It doesn't help anything, but I am. I'm here for you, man. Whatever you need, whenever. We're Young Freedom, and we look out for each other."

[Gizmo]

Catching one of Mark's shoulders as the suddenly appearing reality warper stumbled forward, Trevor helped to hold him upright and steady himself, narrowly managing to sidestep out of the way to avoid being caught up in Corbin's massive embrace. The underclassman had certainly stepped up in a big way over the past few days, but as much as the armored ringbearer put others ahead of himself, the slimmer senior knew where his own worries lay. "Go, find Quo-Dis," he instructed with a small nod that confirmed the others could finish cleaning up in the meantime. Glancing down at the ruined armor, the faintest ghost of a smirk quirked at the corner of his mouth before his expression turned darkly sober once more. "Your mother," he said to his recovering friend, a subtle note of inquiry and tightness in his level tone. "My grandfather, the cat. Do they have a way back?"

[April]

"I'm sure Oliver has it handled." Sage quietly interjected, "He knew something was coming. He hinted at it back in April, I just never expected it would be something like this." The smallest member of Young Freedom sighed, scrubbed a gloved hand through her short white hair and glanced over her shoulder.

"Look, I'm going to go call Faith," she said after a moment before turning to walk away. Then she hesitated and turned back toward her teammates. There were tears in corners of her green eyes as she folded each of her friends into a fierce hug and, with some difficulty in more than a few cases, planted a light kiss on their cheeks.

END OF PART SEVEN

Continued in >Summa Cum Laude