Stop me if you heard this one worlds will live worlds, Worlds will die imagine if your ever fear, each bad decision, Give birth to a malformed world of nightmares, a world that shouldn't exist and desperate for it as it tries to survive in the l...
It was supposed to be the final war. The last battle between good and evil. We fought it together, Diana. We thought it would be the end. If only we knew... the real war had just begun. I lived war practically my whole life. I was only 7 years old when my war begun, with a shot fired in Gotham City alley begun with an oath to myself that what happened to me could NEVER happen again. An oath that I would wage my battles justly. With rules, with mercy. Unlike my enemy. What a fool I was, back then. She loved a man before me. Trevor, an honorable soldier. He died in the early years of the war. War that begun overnight. Ares had forged a new helmet that magnified His power a hundredfold. It took us two years to get to the front. We vowed to kill Ares. Destroy the helmet. We never expected to win. But we did.. though it cost Diana her life. She managed to separate Ares from His helmet by using ancient and dangerous Amazon fighting techniques. During the long two years we fought she taught them to me as well. After Trevor, Diana didn't want to lose any more of the people she loved. If we only had more time for her to have taught me more, so we could have taken the helmet off Him together. She would have lived through it and it wouldn't have come to this.
"ARES!" I yelled as I held Diana's lifeless body in my arms, standing on knees in the battlefield filled the fallen soldiers and the bare headed enemy standing before us.
"YOU WILL PAY FOR WHAT YOU'VE DONE!"
"Enlighten me," Ares told me with His smug ego of a God looking down on me.
"The fields of fire are littered with dead. All have fallen. WHO ARE YOU TO CHALLENGE THE GOD OF WAR?"
Diana had warned me of the helmet's power, its ability to corrupt. But at that moment, as I picked it up from the ground, I saw it. I saw the possibility. If I took the helmet, I could wield its power mercifully, with restraint. For the first time in history, war could be just, fair. With codes and rules, I would reshape war....AS IT'S DAMNED GOD!
I would say I was corrupted by the Helmet in the months that followed your death. Killing those I showed mercy to before, my enemies and heroes who stood against me. I would say that I was purified, that my illusions were finally, rightfully stripped away, with the Helmet. My whole life, I had been afraid of doing what I knew needed to be done. Afraid to give all of myself to the battle. The Helmet showed me that my codes and rules were naïve. That all that mattered was victory. And now I would finally take it to myself. I was storming Olympus when... I heard his voice. Like mine, but it chilled me to the bone.
"It's a loosing war, Bruce," the stranger told me as he approached me with his sons. "You're playing the game right, but the rules are stacked against you. Trust me, I've been there. You're never going to see the end of your glorious war. You'll never be able to build a finer world from the ash. Or prove to Diana that in the end this scorched path was right."
I stood and listened what he told me. He couldn't have been right.
"In a matter of minutes this world will cease to exist," he told me with his sons' crows echoing in the background. "If not for the explosions, you would have already felt the tremors."
"You lie!" I protested at first.
"That helmet of yours, it lets you to peer into the hearts of men now," he said without fearing me or my power. "I might not have a heart, you can sense who I am, can't you?"
I did. I couldn't have believed it, but I didn't need the Helmet to see who he was.
"You know this isn't a trick, you know I'm speaking the truth and you know that I wouldn't be here it I didn't have an offer to make," this alternate version of me told me and I knew I had no other choice but to listen. "Your war here is over, but a greater war is just in the horizon. Perhaps the greatest war in the cosmos has ever seen and we need someone who understands how to win it."
I looked down at him as he gave me a picture of Diana.
"You've lost so much, Bruce, all to prove your way is right," he said as I turned to look at my world dying. "So, let's prove it to everyone, once and for all."
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I had nothing left to lose and everything to gain. So, I followed him. You warned me Diana, you warned me of its power. But what was I supposed to do when I found out that you were only stunned and not dead. I'm sorry Diana... Sorry that you tried to take my helmet from me... And then I had to strike him down. Just like I have no choice but to follow this Batman who laughs.
