Young Justice: Salem
July 28th, 2010
Well, I certainly wasn’t going to be doing that. Judging from the mulish look on Zatanna’s face, she wasn’t any happier about Red Tornado’s order. I twirled my wand, thinking quickly. “Tower,” I called out softly, “what’s happening to Kent?”
The tower spirit flicked into existence on the platform beside me, and I noticed that its body was strangely blurrier than it had been a few minutes earlier. The edges of ‘Kent’s’ suit were hazy instead of sharp and his features were not as well defined. “Master Kent is sparring with his Friends,” it reported. Unlike the previous times I’d heard it, however, there was a lot more emotion its words than there had been before, and it sounded angry.
“Can you do something to help him?” Zatanna asked hurriedly.
The spirit clutched its cane with both hands, its back ramrod straight and a slight frown on its face. “The Tower is not permitted to interfere with Friends of Kent Nelson,” it said flatly.
“But they’re hurting him!” she exclaimed.
“The Tower is not permitted to interfere with Friends of Kent Nelson,” it repeated.
I raised a hand before Zatanna could say anything else. Clearly whatever people had entered with Kent had somehow tricked the wards into seeing them as friendly entities. Very unfortunate, otherwise this would have been much easier.
There was no use asking the Tower to attack the intruders––it clearly wanted too but couldn’t. Instead I asked, “What friends did Kent bring to the Tower, Tower?”
The spirit smiled tightly, its body flickering again. “Master Kent arrived with Friend Unidentified Humanoid, Friend Unidentified Humanoid, and Friend Unidentified Feline. The first appears to be a mundane human. The latter two reek of Chaos.” It spat the last few words like a curse, then vanished into sparks of golden light that dispersed out into the air.
Well, names and abilities would have been helpful, but that was still a lot of useful information. “Three of them, tw––five of us, six if Kent isn’t too beat up. I like those odds,” I declared. “Zatanna, stay behind me and keep a shield ready to cast. You two…” I eyed the Atlantean and the Martian. “You’re free to stay here and wait, but I’m not sure how well the Tower will respond to two unaccompanied guests right about now.”
“Red Tornado said––” Aqualad began, but I cut him off before he could finish his thought.
“I am not subordinate to your Red Tornado. He has no right to command Zatanna or I.” Then I turned away, unwilling to waste any more time. I flicked through a series of wand movements, then tapped Zatanna on top of the head. She shivered slightly and vanished from view, the spell making her blend into the background until only a faint shimmer remained. In the monotone yellow hall, combined with the heavy ambient mana, she was all but undetectable. Only the hand on my hand told me that she was still standing next to me.
I quickly repeated the spell on myself, then turned to go. Before I could, however, Miss Martian called out, “Can you do me too?”
I weighed the idea over, then shrugged. It wasn’t like disillusionment was an overly costly spell in terms of magic or focus, and ever since I’d become a Planeswalker such spells had become even easier to maintain. “Sure. Aqualad?”
“Yes please. Thank you Hydrys.”
With all four of us disillusioned, we quickly hurried in the direction of the noise. Miss Martian flew through the air beside us while Zatanna and Aqualad followed me up the nearest flight of stairs.
I could hear sounds of combat in the distance. Loud crackles, the howl of wind, and words lost to echoes and swallowed by noise. My footsteps felt unreasonably loud as I rushed up the stairs, two more sets of running feet sounding just behind me. Emerging onto a platform perpendicular to where we’d been standing a minute before, I still couldn’t see anything, but it felt like we were getting closer. I led the way across the platform and around its side onto another staircase. A few steps later, and I could finally get a glimpse of what was going on between the floating paths.
Kent was kneeling on the ground, his suit rumpled and a strange-looking black collar wrapped around his neck. Beside him stood a pale skinned boy with pitch-black hair styled into horns on either side of his head. He looked like a prepubescent boy, but the cruel smirk on his face and the magic pouring off him in waves meant that I could never mistake him for a real child.
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He was wearing an angular black suit with flared sleeves. There was a cat perched on his shoulders, its fur a bright ginger with black stripes that made it look a bit like a tiger, along with two more markings above its bright red eyes.
A bright red bubble enveloped Kent, the boy, and his cat, and inside the bubble I could see that he was laughing uproariously. Just outside the bubble was another man, older and taller with long black hair pulled back into a slick ponytail and a goatee framing his mouth. He wore an open-fronted white shirt that showed off his hairy chest, long black pants, and a belt with a gaudy golden belt buckle emblazoned with a symbol I couldn’t quite make out from this distance.
We suddenly caught a glimpse of Red Tornado as he flew wildly through the air past the platform that Kent and the two men were standing on. The tall man pointed something at Red Tornado, a wand, and a net of pale lightning shot from its tip towards the hero. Red Tornado turned sharply and twisted around a staircase and out of sight. The net tried to follow him, but instead crashed into the staircase and dispersed in a flash of golden light.
The man cursed loudly and waved his wand through the air, blasting a torrent of crackling lightning into the air––presumably towards Red Tornado. A massive whirlwind crashed into the platform a moment later, a swirl of dust and a loud howl the only sign that anything was happening. The wizard was shaken slightly, but remained on the platform, though his lightning spell petered out. The red bubble didn’t so much as flicker.
Zatanna suddenly gasped, the sound cutting off as I heard her slap a hand over her mouth.
“Zatanna?” I asked worriedly.
“Hydrys, that’s Klarion!” she hissed in my ear.
“Who?” I asked quietly, most of my attention on the fight. The name didn’t ring any bells, but then again I didn’t know very much about the various dangerous individuals in this world. The name meant just as little to me as Grindelwald’s did to Zatanna.
“Klarion the Witch Boy. He’s a freaking Lord of Chaos!”
Ah. Now that did mean something to me. Something very bad.
My mouth suddenly felt very dry. I’d done quite a bit of reading about the various magical dangers in this Plane, and the Lords of Chaos were pretty damn high up on that list. They were, one and all, incredibly powerful spellcasters and actively malevolent towards basically everyone, including each other.
I took a deep, fortifying breath. “And the other one?” I asked, already dreading her answer.
Zatanna was silent for a moment except for a soft rustle of cloth, “Um, I’m…not sure. He doesn’t look like any of the magical villains dad’s told me about. Maybe he’s like…Klarion’s student or something?”
Well, at least it wasn’t the ‘blot out the sun’ guy, and he probably wasn’t nearly as powerful as his companion, but I was suddenly a lot more leery about our chances, even with a numbers advantage.
“His name is Abra Kadabra,” the martian girl suddenly said from less than a foot away from me. “He’s the one that kidnapped Mr. Kent.”
Abra…Kadabra. I didn’t dare so much as mouth the words. That was…certainly a choice. My mental threat assessment of the man rose several notches. I wasn’t sure how knowledge of that incantation had appeared in this Plane––I had seen nothing about the Killing Curse in any of the books I’d read here––but only someone very foolish or very dangerous would dare call themselves that name.
Megan continued, “I can’t get much from him, but he’s really mad, and I can’t seem to reach Mr. Kent or the boy at all. That shield is blocking me out!” She sounded both frustrated and somewhat scared, and I couldn’t really blame her. Things had gone from maybe bad to good to much worse very quickly.
Well…nothing to it then. Red Tornado was clearly not accomplishing anything, and even through the red-tint of the shield around him, Kent didn’t look very good. I reached inside myself and felt for the Spark gleaming within my soul. If things started going poorly, that was my ticket out of here. I still wasn’t particularly good at planeswalking, but I was confident I could at least pull myself to Shadowcrest or Slaughter Swamp, or possibly some random place in the multiverse where I could hopefully recuperate.
Leaving Zatanna and Kent here would be…very unfortunate, but my survival had to come first. Some tentative experiments had told me that trying to take a passenger into the space between worlds was a capital-b Bad Idea, and, while I could apparate within the confines of the Tower, I couldn’t apparate in or out.
I took a deep breath and released it. “Aqualad, Miss Martian, I don’t know enough about what you can do to really come up with a plan. Just…try to distract them or something. Our first priority is getting Kent away from Klarion. If we can manage that, he might be able to adjust the Tower’s wards and then we’ll be in a much better spot. Zatanna…” I squeezed my eyes shut. I wanted to tell her to run or hide, but there was no way she’d listen to that. Instead, “Be careful.”
I could almost imagine the fierce smile on her face. “Right back at you,” she whispered in my ear.
I nodded, even though none of them could see me. “Right. Let’s do this.” I raised my wand, incantations rising to the tip of my tongue. I could feel my connections to Shadowcrest and Slaughter Swamp, ready to provide me with mana at a moment’s notice. I had one good shot before they knew I was here. I had to make it count.