chapter 65: In Darkest Night...

Oa, headquarters of the Green Lantern Corps, what many thought was the epitome of justice and law, and in a way, it was, doing their best to maintain peace among the stars and fight evil whenever and wherever it reared its ugly head.

An afro-american man in his mid-thirties walking through the Relaxation Garden would disagree in a point.

He was John Stewart, former staff sergeant of the U.S.M.C and the first native of Sector 2814, or 'Sol', to join the Corps, a non-sense enforcer of the peace whose sense of duty hadn't shriveled after leaving his home. Or, in simpler terms he was happy to acknowledge, a hardass.

Naturally, that hardassness was the reason he and Katma Tui began their relationship, for she too was a former military with a knack for toughness. Unfortunately, and the fact he was dating his tutor during training, was not seen kindly by many in the Corps, and thus they ended up breaking. That very same day.

Hal Jordan and Kyle Rayner, two more recent enrolled humans, were not supposed to follow his orders now that they had completed their training, but due to his age, skill and the fact he had been part of the Corps for nearly ten years before either came, they preferred to follow his lead, as did a few others, even those who had been there just as long as he had, maybe longer. If only they knew...

The destrution of Olinda still ate him from the inside. How could have the known the Rings had the power to destroy a whole world? Just... how? And why hadn't the Guardians found it out, or anyone else for that matter? He should had told them, should have given up the ring, should just kill himself to spare them the trial, and a lot more 'should' crossed his mind. He knew he needed help, but he refused to see the therapist, out of shame and because, as a psychic, he would find out. And then Apokolips attacked and occupied Earth. With fucking Superman at the head. The Guardians forbidding him and the others to intervene

So deep was John in his self-loathing and doubt that he didn't hear a certain noc'sagian calling for him until he landed in front of him. John faced an annoyed Galius Zed.

"Zed?"

"Stewart, is Rayner."

John grunted. "What did he do?" Even though he had been part of the Corps for well over two years, it was as if Kyle wanted to be that 'perpetual rookie' cliché given flesh, if only in attitude and not actual performance. Didn't mean John liked it, but he got the others to laugh and lighten up.

"You might want to see this."

"What is it this time? A new car? The Berlin Wall's Fall coming late again?" Sometimes STL messages and retransmissions came to Oa, very late ones. He knew Galius didn't particularly care about Earth's affairs, and many other Lanterns for that matter, but he nonetheless was a trusted colleague, if not enough to consider him a friend, and thus trusted his word.

"Apparently your world really is a magnet for superpowered individuals."

John raised an eyebrow. Another kryptonian?

Unlike John or Hal, Kyle was more involved in the affairs of Sol, if only by getting news from his family. How and why he managed to do that, John didn't know, and frankly, he didn't care, since it allowed him to have a connection, however faint, to Earth thanks to a holo-projector he had nabbed from a tyrant in Sector 4359.

"Don't tell me is some stupid 'technological advancement' bullshit." John asked after reuniting with Kyle and a few other Lanterns, who were also interested in what was happening on Earth During the early days, Kyle thought John didn't know about the progress Earth in general had gone through, thinking him a man with only knowledge of the eighties and not the modern day. Aside from the fact that ten years was not that long, he forgot John had gone back to Earth five times before Kyle even knew they existed.

"Well, CCTV's gotten better, and it's kinda related, but no." With that he turned the projector on.

The screen depicted... a room, an empty one at that.

"Who in the Seven Hells is that?"

The 'who' he was talking about was a large, armored figure. The armor didn't cover all of his body, since his arms were bre to the world, and he had a blade connected to his right gauntlet, but the tense way he marched towards the moaning perp and the way his armor looked screamed military to John.

"Doom Slayer's, Earth's newest hero. Apparently he's a soldier from another universe."

Kilowog's (and by extension, everyone else's) reaction was understandable. "What."

Kyle just shrugged. "He said it himself. May be lying, may be not, but he lives in a medieval castle on Mars and moves around through portals, and there are pictures of the castle, so I'm inclining on the latter."

The last time an interdimensional being had appeared, things hadn't ended well for the involved parties, to say the least. John himself had the misfortune of meeting such an entity before, but fortunately it turned out to be a lost animal from a lesser dimension.

"He also tends to kill. Hasn't done it much, but he has."

"The kryptonian tolerates that? Wasn't he supposed to abide by a no-killing belief?"

"Does he look like a maniac?" Kyle asked rethorically. "And I think it only applies to himself, not others."

"You tell me, you three are the only humans we know of." Galius took a closer look. "If he's human and not a humanoid or an android."

Busy as they were arguing, none of them, except John, paid attention to the screen as the man, Doom Slayer, gave a speech to the... criminal? Terrorist? What had he done, really?, about reaping what you have sown, before grabbing him by the head.

John thought he'd shoot the man or something, or gut him, or punch simply kill him or wound him, something simple.

Instead, Doom Slayer grabbed the man by a leg, pulled... and the man was literally torn in half, his intestines hanging from the upper half, a pool of blood and viscerae forming beneath him. The worst, though, had to be the shriek of agony the victim uttered... at least before the giant crumpled his head like an egg.

"Holy shit..."

Many screamed or gagged at the dantesque sight from across several million light years away.

John's eyes merely widened, but from a man like him, it was enough.

He had seen just as bad, if not worse, he had fought in Iraq and seen the effects of heavy ordnance of the human body, an unlucky corpsman finding out the hard way that medics were fair targets, feral beasts and monsters maul people and eating them alive... but this... seeing a man, a human man doing it... if, of course, he was human under that skin.

"When is this from."

"Earlier this month, more given the range. He's been in the spotlight since he stopped a robber in Metropolis."

"Well, when you think about it, it was a matter of time someone decided to just off certain criminals." Hal said after the recording ended. "Not all are rehabilitable."

"He tore a man. In half. Does that speak calm, reasonable, or even stable to you?" John rebuked.

"That guy he just killed could be a pedophile, could be a mass murderer, could be anything! Look, we may not have the full context for this, but Doom Slayer only does that to guys who'd otherwise get the gas or the chair, not common crooks!"

"We only have images and words for that, and both can lie."

Before things could escalate, Kilowog intervened. "You could ask the Guardians to allow to go to Sol, to check on him."

That was not enough for John, and not only because of regulations, schedule and shame, but then, Doom Slayer hadn't done anything that would paint him as a gun-toting madman, just another do-well who simply happened to take justice in his hands and killed his targets depending on their actions, all them being deserving of capital punishment otherwise.

He did not like it.

Alas, the Guardians predictably told the earthlings than a murderous, if stable metahuman was not worth their (both the Guardians themselves and the three) time even if he was from another dimension, that the galaxy was bigger than just their sector home, much less a single planet, although they still assured them they would investigate if Doom Slayer really was from another universe.

Then again, they didn't do anything when Darkseid attacked, John thought ruefully. Still, it was not in his hands.

But then the man, Doom Slayer, did it again. And again. And again... And with every kill, killing progressively stronger targets, it became clear that he wasn't just strong enough to tear a man apart, but something else, something most beings of Earth wouldn't be able to fight. The idea of someone so powerful yet so willing to kill did not sit well with John, even though he knew it was irrational paranoia (at least after figuring out what kind of man Doom Slayer was) and used to the admittedly flawed and unrealistic outlook of incredibly powerful beings divided being good and evil, even though the universe, by and large, was not like that. Despite his increasing reservations, though, John supposed he wouldn't have to do anything. After all, the 'future space soldier', strong as he was, couldn't be able of taking on a kryptonian and several powerful metahumans even on on one, right? Besides, with time Doom Slayer proved he wasn't just a fighter: repairing dams with Superman, reuniting families.... He even managed to rehabilitate the most dangerous of Arkham's inmates, with the exception of a certain clown John wouldn't actually mind being turned into bloody confetti.

And then one day, things changed.

An old man, entirely human-looking except from his orange hair and green eyes, had been found in the middle of space onboard a small FTL ship. A quick inspection made clear he wasn't from Earth... and that, for all intents and purposes, he should dead: left arm and right leg ripped out (not cut or severed, outright torn by something), nearly all of his bones broken, a deflated lung, bruised heart, no kidneys, severe concussions, barely enough blood

A surprise, given that his species was only a stone throw away from matching Superman's in sheer destructive capacity, and unlike them they numbered in the millions.

"A tamaranean."

John frowned. He knew of the bad blood between the Corps and Tamaran, of what the Manhunters had done to them during their rampage a millenium prior,

None of them expected the old man to wake up screaming from his bed, force his way out of the hospital with surprising ferocity for someone with such injuries, and fly away, all the while alternating between screaming and laughing. John was the first one to recover from the shock and fly after him, managing to catch up, but even with the ring and the man's injuries, he was unable to inmobilize the elder.

"Easy, sir, I just want to help!"

The man, however, just laughed. For some reason, his laugh reminded him of that clown's. He heard it only once before, again in a recording from Rayner, basically a reduced documentary about Gotham's criminal underworld. Again, it was just a recording of Joker laughing.

It still made his skin crawl.

And yet, the tears in the alien male's eyes made clear his cackle, his insanity, was born out of agony.

"Help?! HELP?!"

And then, to John's horror and shock, the tamaranean plunged his hands into his belly and ripped his own guts before the Lantern could do anything.

"Kalibak... invade... kill..."

With that the tamaranean gave his last breath and died, just as the healers reached them.

Had any of them being psychics, or at the very least not comforting John, they'd seen a strange, red aura emanate from the corpse and enter John's head through his eyes, but as it was, no one realized what happened.

The man's arrival prompted the Guardians to send a satellite to Tamaran's sector to see what the hell was going on there. They didn't show them images, but their words were enough: Apokolips had invaded yet another planet, this time by way of a ship instead of the world itself. The head of the operation? Kalibak himself. Apparently the last invasion had made him decide that being a conqueror would earn him his father's approval. Not that the Corps cared, for the old tamaranean's suicide made clear it wasn't the bastard wa. The fact each tamaranean was strong enough to hurl a LAV like a tennis ball and outfly most jets yet were unable to fight the invaders off implied several things about Kalibak, things no one liked.

"And we're supposed to do nothing?!" Hal all but screamed after the Guardians told them their new orders: ignore Tamaran's plight.

"After what the Peacekeepers did to them?" 'Peacekeeper' was how a few GLs called Manhunters, for one reason of the other, but mostly out of politeness, which as far as John cared the robots didn't deserve. "We're lucky they're xenophobic isolationists instead of fanatic purifiers hellbent on exterminating all intelligent life out of fear of it happening again."

"C'mon, it cannot have been that bad."

"Kyle, a thousand years ago Tamaran was a spacefaring culture with a population of several billion. When the Peacekeepers were defeated, they numbered less than a million. Again, that was just a millenium ago.

"Kilowog, they're being exterminated."

But Kilowog shook his head sadly. "If we want to help, we'll have to do it without involving the Corps."

The lack of action from part of the Guardians angered many Lanterns, not only because of principle but also because Tamaran was less than a kiloparsec away from Oa itself. Allowing Apokolips to take such a foothold to their headquarters was practically asking for a surprise attack! And yet, their leaders refused to intervene.

Robots, hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, coming out of vortexes and annihilating parademons with surprisingly destructive slugthrowers.

"What idiot uses such primitive weapons?"

"I've been hit with blasters that did nothing but scorch my shirt, and bullets that would'd killed me. Primitive and useless aren't synonymes, you know."

After the robots came half of the Justice League itself, Doom Slayer included plus a black-haired, pissed off tamaranean. Suddenly, the somewhat even fight between apokoliptians and robots became a losing battle for the former

"Oh, well, good for them, then." Hal said with a shrug, mirrored with relief by many others. If Superman and his allies wanted to take the fight to Darkseid himself, the Green Lantern Corps would be happy to help, but until then...

John, however, didn't see it that way.

For John, the thought of Doom Slayer going to another planet, to cause death and destruction, turning people he looked up to into killers, the fact he had a fucking robot army all this time... And that old man's death... He didn't care if Doom Slayer had nothing to do with it, his mind couldn't take it any more. It broke the camel's back.

He snapped.

Kyle, Hal and Kilowog did not realize this until John, followed by twenty similarly-minded Lanterns who did not like someone spitting on their tenets so close to base, assembled in a teleporter dome. A ring could take its wearer across the galaxy in a matter of hours, but the dome was instantaneous.

"John, the Guardians said no!" Kilowog shouted as he bashed at the hardlight dome, to no avail.

"And this is Apokolips we're talking about! You could start a war with Apolokips, for God's sake!" The hypocresy of some people.

"And he hasn't?! He's killing Kalibak, for fuck's sake!"

"All the more reason to do nothing! One less apokoliptian in the universe is nothing but good news for the universe, and don't tell me I'm wrong!"

Had any of them, any, been close enough, they'd seen that John's usually green-coloured pupils had acquired a darker, reddish tint.

"I'm not going to wriggle my hands and do nothing while that motherfucker kills more people."

Hal and Kyle looked at each other, bewildered and confused by what he had said. Sure, the Corps was forbidden from taking lives unless it was strictly necessary... and only them. "And what happens when he resists? Because you and I know he will."

John merely raised his right hand, the ring activated, and before the dome sent them away...

"He'll wish he stayed in his universe."

No, John hasn't gone THAT 'no one kills' obsessed, he's being used, although methinks I should had expanded a lil' more. Also, is my reasoning for the Guardians of the Universe not doing anything about an interdimensional supersoldier arriving to theirs for the better part of a year? As for the cliffhanger ending, Kyle and Hal DO try to stop them from leaving and causing a clusterfuck, but they leave and choose damage control over a futile chase.