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[Emissary] Chapter 12 - Earth Prime
🕑 Added 2024-03-05 06:49:58 +0000 UTCAN: One of my fics is close to ending, so I'm thinking about starting to write a new story once that happens. I have posted a poll with over ten story options on my FFN profile, so you can go vote there. It is a blind poll so that you do not get influenced by other voters. The poll will remain open for several good weeks.
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Chapter 12 - Earth Prime
Previous chapter
“Before you go, be careful with that woman. She’s as strong as Wonder Woman but more cruel and vicious. Don’t underestimate her. Don’t hold back, or she’ll kill you,” Batman warned him.
Harry just gave him a two-finger salute before Disapparating.
⁂
The very moment that Harry Apparated in the Sahara Desert, the Mana Shield covering his body like a second skin was shattered, and he was slammed backwards like a cannonball, rolling and tumbling through the dunes of sand uncontrollably.
Instead of looking around to see where she had been sent, Superwoman had stood in the same spot, lying in wait. It was as if she had known all along that he would teleport after her.
Harry didn’t hear the sonic boom that she left behind when she launched herself at him a second time, but his survival instincts kicked into overdrive, and he Disapparated.
And it was not a second too late. His body would have been turned into a smear of blood and gore on the sand if her fist had touched him while his shielding spell was down. Fortunately, he managed to get away, and her punch only created a large crater in the ground, blowing away the entire top of the dune.
Having teleported himself three kilometres above the ground, in the air, Harry didn’t waste any time casting four spells on himself.
[Mana Barrier]
A white membrane of light shimmered on the surface of his body for a moment before becoming invisible.
“Protego Aegis.”
A golden membrane of light appeared on top of the other one before turning invisible too.
Then he drew two Runes with his wand in the air and chanted:
[Lost Magic: Rune Magic: Iron Skin]
[Lost Magic: Rune Magic: Enhanced Reflexes]
The two Runes flew towards him and sank into his body.
Now that his magical defences were up, Harry teleported back to the ground.
“And here I thought you ran away with your tail tucked between your legs,” Superwoman said with a smirk as she flew slowly towards him.
“Can’t let someone as violent as you rampage around now, can I?” Harry replied, but he didn’t let his guard down. His fingers were gripping the Elder Wand’s handle tightly, and his mind was alert, ready to react the very moment she made a move.
“Who are you even? I’ve read the Justice League’s files on all metahuman criminals. If there was someone like you in their database, I would have remembered her.”
She was hardly forgettable. Leaving aside the fact that she was tall, athletic, and drop-dead gorgeous, the extreme speed and strength that she had demonstrated in their fight so far put her on the same level as the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman. She was even more troublesome than them due to how resistant she was to his magic. It was hard to believe that the Justice League had not heard of her before.
Superwoman’s smile widened at his words.
“Oh, my, what a flatterer! For that compliment alone, I’m considering actually letting you live.”
Before Harry could reply, Superwoman lunged at him again, stirring a great cloud of sand and dust as her body broke past the sound barrier once more.
However, at the very last moment, his body turned into a shadowy wraith, and her fist went through him, hitting nothing but air.
Right after she flew through his smoke-like body, Harry materialised himself at her back, and a red jet of light burst from his wand.
But his Stunning Charm didn’t meet its mark. Superwoman’s body seemed to have become a blur as she dodged the spell and threw herself at him again.
He evaded her charge again by Apparating behind her and firing an Incarcerous Spell at her. Thick ropes were conjured out of thin air, and this time around, Superwoman was half a step too late to react. But those ropes restrained her for not even a second before she ripped them apart like paper.
For the next couple of minutes, Harry and Superwoman played a violent game of tag where Superwoman was ‘it’. But while the mad woman was having the time of her life chasing him around and dodging and slapping his spells away with her bare hands, Harry was one second away from getting killed every time she charged at him.
‘That level of magic resistance is insane... Should I just kill her?’
Due to the fact that he had cast a colossal spell earlier that day, Harry was currently drained and weakened. But he reckoned that even if he were in perfect form, he would still have a hard time with this woman. She was inhumanly fast, almost too fast for his spells to hit her.
‘My spells land on her only if I Apparate behind her back and ambush her. But even when they do hit, my regular spells don’t deal much damage… ...The Dao Curse or Fiendfyre would do the trick.’
But he was hesitating.
He had not cast those curses on her yet because he would set himself up for failure if he cast such draining spells and she dodged them. She was so fast that even firing a spell at her from a blank-point distance wasn’t guaranteed to hit her.
‘Should I just kill her?’ he asked himself a second time. ‘The Killing Curse would also end it on the spot… No… I can’t do that. Criminal or not, the Justice League won’t let it slide if they find out that I murdered someone…I need the Justice League on my side in order to kill Darkseid.
The Killing Curse was his great equalizer. Let alone Superwoman; as long as his Killing Curse hit them, even a god would die because he was Death’s Emissary. Whenever he cast the Killing Curse, Harry’s will was Death’s will.
“You’re getting more interesting with every passing minute,” Superwoman flirted and put a hand on her waist. “And those green eyes of yours are to die for. Say, how about we stop this pointless game of tag that we are playing and do something else? Something more…pleasurable.”
“No, thanks. You’re not my type.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll come around. What’s there not to like about me?” Superwoman said with a grin and lunged at him again.
A bolt of lightning burst from the Elder Wand, but Superwoman didn’t even attempt to dodge his attack this time. She actually laughed as she let the lightning spell hit her right in the chest. It crackled harmlessly over her exposed cleavage and bare shoulders before fading into nothingness. It didn't hurt her in the least.
Not having expected Superwoman to shrug off his lightning spell like that, Harry was too late to react. Her supersonic speed was too much, and she finally got her hands on him.
“Really? Using lightning magic against me? How cute!” Superwoman laughed as she grabbed him by the back of his neck.
He was unable to fight against her monstrous strength as she pushed the back of his head with her hand, forcing his face closer to hers.
But just as Superwoman was about to kiss him against his will, Harry said while their lips were only two centimetres apart:
“Crucio!”
For the first time since the start of their fight, Superwoman was affected by Harry’s magic. An agonising cry burst from her mouth, and she lost control over her ability to fly, collapsing onto the sand below, her body convulsing uncontrollably.
A headache as if someone were hammering a nail into his skull hit Harry as he felt the side effects of exhausting his magic. But he couldn’t afford to back down now.
Maybe it was due to the fact that she was nigh-invulnerable to most types of damage, but Superwoman’s pain threshold was even lower than that of regular people. She wasn’t used to being hurt or feeling pain, much less experiencing such agony.
His headache exploded in intensity, and he saw white in front of his eyes for a few seconds when he landed on the ground next to her and forced himself to cast yet another highly draining spell. Superwoman had yet to recover from the horrifying pain induced by the Cruciatus Curse when Harry conjured two thick steel casts, binding her legs and arms together.
Then, as a precautionary measure, he also cast a Stunning Charm at her. Considering her current state, Superwoman was in no condition to fight off against the spell. She was knocked unconscious.
Harry lay on the ground on his back, spread eagle. He didn’t even care about the burning sun in the sky or how hot the sand felt to the touch. He just needed a moment to catch his breath and wait for his headache to go away.
A lack of magic power had hardly ever been an issue for him. Ever since he was a child, he could compete in raw power with some of the strongest wizards and witches of his homeworld.
As a 13-year-old boy, he had cast a Patronus Charm so powerful that it had driven away nearly a hundred Dementors (meanwhile, most adults struggled to fight off even one or two of them at a time). When he was 14 years old, Voldemort lost to him in a battle of willpower and magic during their clash in the cemetery. He had always been gifted, and his amount of magic only increased with age.
Nevertheless, that [Arc of Time] spell that he had cast over New York City had simply been too big, covering almost 100 square kilometres. He was both mentally and physically exhausted. In the battle against those three superhuman criminals just now, he had to scrape the figurative bottom of the barrel.
‘I’ll just rest my eyes for a minute,’ he thought, closing his eyes.
⁂
He woke up with a start.
‘Did I fall asleep?! Bollocks!’
Grabbing his wand, he rose to his feet as fast as possible and looked around him. He let out a sigh of relief when he saw that Superwoman was still unconscious and tied up where he left her.
Looking at the sun’s position in the sky, he realised that he must have slept for more than four hours.
“Can’t believe I actually fell for the classic ‘I’ll rest my eyes for a minute’!”
It was so ridiculous that he started chuckling.
Regular humans would have died of heatstroke after sleeping for so long under the Sahara Desert’s burning sun, but he felt refreshed and full of energy after his power nap. His body’s reserves of magic were full again.
He went to Superwoman and took her with him, Side-Apparating to the Watchtower.
⁂
When he teleported into the monitor room at the Watchtower with Superwoman in tow, he saw Batman busily typing on a laptop, the light coming from its screen being the only thing illuminating the darkness.
The sound made by his Apparition made Batman turn around.
“What took you so long?”
Batman closed the top of the laptop when he saw Harry looking at its screen. There were satellite images.
‘Was he searching for me?’ Harry thought.
He hadn’t given Batman an exact location other than a general ‘I left Superwoman in the Sahara Desert', so Batman had no way of reaching him when he realized that Harry wasn’t coming back even after several hours passed.
“I managed to subdue her,” Harry said as he gestured at the bound and unconscious Superwoman, “but I was too exhausted to teleport back straight away. I was too drained from restoring New York City. Anyway,” he changed the subject, “Care to tell me where these guys popped out from? I haven’t seen any of them in the Justice League’s database, I’m sure of it.”
“That’s because they aren’t. We’ve never seen them before. They appeared inside the Watchtower out of nowhere, as if they had teleported. If my guess is right, these people are from Lex Luthor’s dimension.”
That answer confused him, and Batman had to spend a few minutes explaining to him what had transpired in his absence.
“So you’re saying that the rest of the guys crossed over to that parallel Earth while you stayed behind?”
“Yes. I didn’t expect that some of that world’s villains would cross over to ours. That woman dropped a special detection device before you teleported her away. It seems like they were looking for something. This,” Batman said and showed him a small flask with a sphere of light glowing brightly from within.
“What’s that?” Harry asked, looking curiously at it.
“I’m not sure, but I intend to find out. I just couldn’t risk trying to interrogate these guys without someone else backing me up. They’re too dangerous.”
Having fought against them, Batman didn’t underestimate the power of the Made Men.
“How are you going to interrogate them? Torture?” Harry asked. He was very curious to see how the goody-two-shoe superheroes were going to deal with such a situation.
“I have my ways to make them talk before it gets to that. But if it comes down to it, I’ll do what I must.” (1)
“Before we get to that, do you have any way of contacting Power Girl?” Harry asked.
“I do, why?”
“We were having dinner when your beacon summoned me here. I need to let her know everything is alright.”
Batman went to his laptop and dialled Power Girl’s number. However, seeing as it was night in the USA at that hour, she didn’t pick up the phone.
“She must be sleeping at this hour and probably put her phone on silent mode. Superman does the same; their hearing is too sensitive,” said Batman. “But you can leave her a voice message.”
⁂
Batman’s guess was half right. Kara’s phone was indeed in silent mode, but she wasn’t asleep.
Currently, the blonde was having a battle in the bathroom with the stinky old cat that she had picked up from the streets a few hours ago.
“Meooow!”
“Jesus, stop screaming!”
After spending nearly an hour killing all the lice in its fur with her Heat Vision, Kara took the cat to the bathroom. She was trying to give him a bath, but he was meowing and thrashing as if he were getting burned. She reckoned that if it wasn’t for her Kryptonian powers, the cat would’ve already turned the skin on her forearms into confetti with how many times he scratched her.
Giving the grumpy old cat a bath was only half the battle. The other half of the battle started when she took him out and tried to use the hair dryer to dry his fur.
By the time she was finally done cleaning the cat of parasites and giving it a bath, Power Girl was as tired as after a fistfight against Solomon Grundy.
It was well past midnight when she got in bed and grabbed her smartphone, intent on catching up with news, social media notifications, and missed calls and texts.
Just as she had anticipated, the mass media was going crazy about the miracle that Harry Potter had performed earlier that day.
New York City restored. Is this the power of a god?
Just who is Emissary? Is he human? Is he an alien? Click here to continue reading.
Thousands of people were left without jobs after New York was magically restored. Was this truly a miracle that we needed?
[...]
Power Girl didn’t spend a long time browsing through those articles because most of them were talking about the same things, and the information they had on Emissary was all pure speculation. She quickly grew bored of them and started checking her voicemail.
“Batman? What does he want from me?” she muttered in annoyance when she saw that Batman had left her a voice message.
In spite of her annoyance, she tapped on it to listen to it. Although she had retired from the Justice League, she wouldn’t turn a blind eye if they were in dire need of help.
Unexpectedly, it wasn’t Batman’s gruff voice that rang.
“Harry?” she thought in surprise when she recognised the sound of his voice and his clear RP British accent.
“Hey, Kara, this is Harry. I didn’t mean to just disappear on you; Batman summoned me to the Watchtower. There were some intruders, and he needed my help. Don’t worry; we took care of it already. I-”
He paused, seemingly hesitating.
“-I’m glad we went out for dinner. It was brilliant, and you were lovely. I’d like us to meet again. I didn’t have the chance to finish telling you everything I wanted.”
“I have to go now. Batman needs my help. I hope to hear from you soon. Good night.”
⁂
Once Batman heard the voice message that Harry left Kara, given how perceptive he was, it became as clear as day to him that things weren’t exactly peachy between the two of them. But he didn’t pry. Instead, he told Harry to follow him out of the monitor room.
Luckily, the destruction caused by Harry’s spellcasting a few hours ago was limited only to the monitor room. His magic didn’t fry the entire satellite.
Now, Harry was in an observation room adjacent to the interrogation room, watching Batman question Superwoman, who was still restrained by the steel casts that he had conjured to bind her.
“Is the fake deep voice supposed to scare me? Or is it the Halloween Costume that’s going to do the trick?” Superwoman said mockingly and laughed.
Batman punched her in the face with all his strength, but it didn’t even shake her head. The strength of a regular man was a joke compared to someone blessed with the gods’ strength and toughness.
“Insect!” Superwoman said in anger and suddenly spat at Batman.
It was only by pure luck that Batman managed to dodge her spit. Turning to look back, he was inwardly startled to see that her spit had made a dent in the wall.
‘This is such a waste of time,’ Harry thought, torn between amusement and exasperation.
He couldn’t quite understand what Batman was trying to achieve by interrogating that metahuman while he was unarmed and bare-handed. He was just a regular human, and his reputation as Gotham’s “Dark Knight” meant less than bird poop to someone who was from another world.
He stood up and went inside the interrogation room as well.
“Look who has come! Green eyes, are you going to get rough with me too? I normally prefer to do the hurting myself. I like my lovers to make a little noise… but I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad to be on the receiving end for you.”
Batman alternated between looking at her and then at Harry.
“Don’t look at me like that; there’s nothing between us,” Harry said with a deadpan.
But the fact that Emissary and Superwoman had only returned to the Watchtower after 4 hours didn’t paint a good image.
When Harry took out the Elder Wand, Superwoman stopped joking around, and Batman noticed the sudden shift in the mood too.
“Are you going to torture her with your magic?” he asked.
“You probably know this already, but torture is rarely a good method to extract information from a prisoner. Even if you make them talk, you have no guarantee that they are telling the truth. Why torture her when I can pull the secrets straight out of her mind?”
He raised his wand to her face and said:
“Legilimens.”
As Harry delved into her mind, all sorts of thoughts and memories flashed before his eyes like crystal globes. Given his mastery of the mind arts, he didn’t waste time by accessing each and every one of them. A surface scan of those crystal globes was enough to give him a general idea of their contents.
But then, a particular memory-globe made him stop. It was a rather recent memory, barely a few hours old. Touching the crystal globe, his point of view suddenly changed as he was sucked into Superwoman’s memory, watching it all play out from her eyes.
⁂ Superwoman’s memory ⁂
Five costumed individuals were seated at an oval table in a conference room. Judging by their looks and hero suits, they looked strangely similar to the Justice League.
One of the seats at the table was empty. From their discussion, Harry gathered that the empty seat belonged to one of their former comrades who had passed away recently. Now, they were in the midst of discussing how to split his assets among the five of them.
“We’ll work out details later,” said the red and blue-costumed man seated at the head of the table. His looks reminded Harry of Superman a bit. “For now, Owlman can keep J’edd J’arkus’ guys.”
“Heh. From what I hear, it sounds like you could have used a few dozen more,” said a yellow-customed young man in a thick Australian accent. He looked similar to the Flash.
“Luthor’s new Justice League is not to be underestimated,” replied Owlman. Aside from having a different theme going on for him (an owl instead of a bat), he looked almost identical to Batman from Harry’s world.
“Nether are we. They’ll fold,” said the one who looked like he was part of the Green Lantern Corps.
“Or we’ll fold them. Just like everybody else who gets in our way,” their leader, the muscular man dressed in red and blue, also said.
“Which brings us to the topic at hand,” Owlman cut in. “Last meeting, five of the six family heads approved of Project Damocles. Per our vote, I have begun construction on this, the Quantum Eigenstate Device (QED).”
As he said those words, Owlman pressed the button on a remote control, and a hologram came out from the centre of the table. Judging by the looks of it, Harry thought that it looked similar to a space shuttle, but the words that Owlman said next made him understand how far off the mark his guess was.
“Once completed, the QED will give us life-and-death power over the entire planet.”
“We spent 37 billion on government bribes last year,” said the blue and red-costumed man. “No more of that. We’ll be the government.”
“I still don’t see why they would give up the little bit of power they have left,” the Green Lantern among them said.
“Because if they don’t, we’ll do this,” Owlman replied and pressed another button on the remote control.
At his command, the hologram changed to show an image of the Earth and the QED device being detonated, obliterating the planet.
“The device’s Heisenberg uncertainty override allows us to tap into a limitless pool of destructive energy. That will leave the governments of the world with two very simple choices: bow down to us or die.”
⁂
“These people are insane,” Harry said once he cancelled the Legilimency spell.
“What did you learn?” Batman asked.
“They’ve built a bomb. I didn’t understand the technical terms, but apparently, it’s a bomb that taps into an unlimited pool of energy and is capable of destroying the whole world. They’re planning on using that bomb to blackmail the United Nations into submitting to the crime syndicate. Otherwise, they’ll detonate it and blow up the planet.”
Despite the fact that he had just read her mind, Superwoman didn’t seem too affected. She was even comfortable enough to mock him.
“Destroying only the planet? You think too small.”
Harry narrowed his eyes at her words. Not leaving Batman the chance to ask what she meant by that, he aimed his wand at her face again and dove into her mind one more time.
⁂ Superwoman’s memory ⁂
“Still looking for the quantum trigger?” Superwoman asked Owlman, who was busy designing something on his supercomputer.
“Yes. But in the meantime, I’ve been working on something equally interesting. We can use it to travel to any of the alternate Earths. It’s based on Luthor’s design, but I’ve made some improvements,” Owlman said, handing her a device that looked like a mixture of a pistol and an antenna.
“Do you realise what we could do with this?” Superwoman said in wonder as she fiddled with the futuristic-looking device.
“The philosophical implications are tremendous, of course,” Owlman replied.
“Philosophy!” Superwoman scoffed. “There’s an infinite number of Earths out there to conquer. You and me. We wouldn’t have to share our cut with the Crime Syndicate.”
“...That’s certainly one way to go.”
“You don’t sound enthused,” she remarked.
Owlman turned to look her in the eyes, as he said. “What good is a bomb if you don’t detonate it?”
Superwoman was both surprised and intrigued.
“You never had any intentions of using the QED for blackmail... You’re going to use it to kill everybody.”
“What if I am?” said Owlman noncommittally.
“Just tell me, why?” she asked.
“Why not?” he asked back.
“I’m serious,” she insisted. “Look, I know I’m a murdering psychopath. It’s part of my charm.”
“I do find it attractive,” Owlman quipped.
“But you never make a move without a reason. Why would you want to destroy the world?” Superwoman asked seriously.
“Because it’s the only action that one could take that would have any purpose,” said Owlman.
Superwoman looked at him with a deadpan. “You lost me there.”
In response to that, Owlman went to a holographic device and turned it on, showing the image of an Earth splitting into countless other identical planets until there were a countless number of them.
“Every decision we make is meaningless… because somewhere, on a parallel Earth, we have already made the opposite choice. We’re nothing. Less than nothing.”
“How can you say that?!” she retorted. “We’re rich! We’re conquerors!”
“And here we’re poor; we’re slaves,” Owlman said nonplussedly and gestured with his hand towards one of the many Earths shown by the hologram. “And here, our parents never met, so we were never born.”
Gesturing to another Earth, he continued:
“Here, the world ended in nuclear war.”
“Here, no fish was ever brave enough to crawl up on land, and humans never evolved. And so on. Ad infinitum.”
Superwoman didn’t understand what he was getting at.
“So even if you destroy the world, there are billions of others, right? What difference would it make?”
“Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a world I call Earth Prime,” Owlman explained. “Every Earth is a variation of this one, the Original. And once I destroy it, all reality will follow.”
Saying that, he clenched his hand around the Earth Prime hologram, which in turn prompted the rest of the hologram planets to disappear by the dozens.
“I take it back. You’re much crazier than I am,” Superwoman said. She sounded impressed.
“Don’t get in my way,” he said in a threatening voice.
“To the contrary,” Superwoman said before cupping his cheeks and kissing him. “I’m in.”
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AN: I have relayed Superwoman’s memories pretty much as they were in the movie, without changing much stuff. Owlman’s monologue is brilliant; I felt like I didn’t have anything of value to add, so I left it as it was. I believe it also helps those who haven’t watched the movie get a better idea of what is going on.
For those not familiar with DC, Superwoman is the other-world equivalent of Mary Marvel. You can think of her as an evil, female Shazam. Also, Superwoman acting flirty, seductive, and violent is canon.
(1) Batman does torture criminals for information in comics and movies; it’s not something I made up.
You can join me on Discord at https://discord.gg/xd2DCtyY if you are interested.
