Prologue - The Prodigal Son of Apokolips

Scott awakened to the familiar stench of sulfur.

A tremor coursed through the dungeon as a pit outside spewed lava. Yellow smoke snaked its way through cracks in the stone floor.

He was back. Home. Hell. Choices never much mattered here.

Suspended in midair, facing the ceiling, Scott was hogtied to a floating, bow-shaped metal frame with optic chains and alien locks.

Child's play. Literally. He'd built this thing himself, when he was a ten-year-old military trainee on the planet Apokolips. He could get out of it in three seconds flat—or for that matter, any trap. He'd had plenty of practice growing up. He wasn't called World's Greatest Escape Artist for nothing. He never failed to live up to the title.

Until today.

To be ensnared in a primitive design of his own creation—there was only one purpose for that: To elicit humiliation. And there was only one person who would know to do this. The twisted teacher he'd known as a child, the reason he was the master of escape that he was today. Granny.

Scott was so weak he couldn't move. Every muscle in his body ached like he'd been pummeled with hammers, and he could taste blood in his mouth. The salty, slimy taste of bile sat in his throat and what portion of his knees he could see through his torn Mister Miracle stage costume was tinged with gray and covered with open sores.

He closed his pale eyes. He'd been poisoned. Radion.

His Mother Box was gone. The loyal lifeline that stood by to heal him, help him, rescue him at his mere will, had been ripped out with the hooded part of his costume that contained his wavy black hair. He could hear the mechanical artifact's panicked bell faintly. Repetitive, rapid, like his ragged breath.

It was somewhere nearby. He gave his head a slight jerk upward, sending his body into a slow spin on a horizontal axis. He spotted it on the floor as he revolved. The circuitry lay damaged, spilling out of the hood's red and yellow synthetic casing; clear, glittering connectivity fluid evaporated from the heat of the volcanic bricks.

"You've been a naughty boy, haven't you?" Said a voice with an ululating quality.

A chill crept up his spine.

It was a voice he knew too well. Sickly sweet, grotesquely masculine, and usually followed by some kind of pain.

Scott stopped his slow spin, but not of his own volition. A tractor beam of soft purple light encased his form and made him stop, facing the dungeon's entrance.

Granny Goodness stood with her legs parted, her enormous girth filling the whole doorway, her wild white hair as coarse as the goat brush in a Spartan helmet. She slapped her Boom Stick into the palm of her hand, making Scott bob up and down in the air. "You've been keeping secrets, haven't you?" She taunted. "Granny will get it out, don't you worry."

"Wh-what are you talking about?" Scott asked, his voice hardly above a raspy whisper.

As she pulled him along with the tractor beam, his Mother Box's pinging intensified, growing high-pitched, frenetic, sensing imminent danger, but unable to describe what was about to happen because it was no longer connected to him. As he was led away, its warnings faded, and a hard stone of dread settled inside Scott's belly.

When Granny entered a large under-lit chamber with a cross-walkway, Scott spotted a devise over her shoulder. It was equipped with a chair and several circuits, power inverters, clamps, gauges, pumps, and conductors.

Granny turned to face Scott.

He couldn't do anything as she slammed him with a fat backhand—which felt like it had steel bars inside instead of bones. He blacked out instantly.

He woke up clamped upright into the chair, electrodes glued to his freshly shaved scalp. Chunks of black hair still dusted his shoulder, his lap. His sores itched and ached under the prickly hair.

"This will be your chance to serve Lord Darkseid like I taught you," Granny said with a somber nod. She grasped his chin with her gloved hand to protect her own porky skin from his Radion poisoning and looked into his pale blue eyes with her coal-black ones, beads of volcanic rock wedged inside papery folds of skin. "You haven't forgotten, have you?"

She let him go and activated the devise with a few pushes on a remote panel perched on a slender black pedestal.

Blades stirred into motion, began to beat behind him, sending locks of hair flying off his shoulders. Electricity pulsed through clear glass chambers and began to intensify, charging up.

Until then he had not noticed a figure standing in the black shadow of the devise, cloaked in sheets of sulfuric smoke rising from the lava far below. His arms were clasped behind his ramrod-straight back—a position to assert dominance, lordship, and cold surveillance. The red glow of his eyes intensified. Bright gossamer tendrils came away, blown into vapor by the beating blades at Scott's back. "I had hoped you would come to me. And so you have."

Scott regarded his step-father. "I didn't come for this."

Darkseid, ruler of Apokolips, stepped forward, pensive. The tyrant smiled. Lopsided, full of scorn. He gestured to the devise. "But you already have." He approached Scott, picked up a helmet with wires attached and placed it onto his own head. His body was etched from gray stone, without the curves and human-like beauty usually possessed by the New Gods. His flesh was marred by the scars of his soul, the coldness of his heart. "And you will continue to submit to the will of Darkseid."

"Never."

"I have always admired your tenacity, Scott. My victory will be all the greater for it." Darkseid's eyes glowed brighter, the fabled, notorious Omega Effect building power behind his eyes. Scott realized the devise would not work without the Omega. It was the only way to ensure that whatever information was in Scott's mind would go into another mind of Darkseid's choosing. And in this case, it was the mind of Darkseid himself.

Omega beams blast out of Darkseid's eyes, jagged, hard-angled, and took hold of two conductors.

Scott screamed in pain as splinters of Omega beams pulsed through the devise, shaking the ground, the walls. Rubble rained down upon them. Scott's brain seemed to shift inside his skull, contract and then explode. His eyes began to burn and he closed them tight, squeezing out tears of blood and salt.

He could do it now, destroy Darkseid with the knowledge he sought. Speak the words and it would be done. Darkseid and his will, annihilated forever. But Scott never would. He'd spent a lifetime resisting despair, fear, and failure, all pieces of the Anti-Life Equation. It was the knowledge that Scott carried in himself, the knowledge that Darkseid had spent his lifetime seeking. It was the knowledge to destroy the universe and rebuild it anew, in exquisite and total submission to Darkseid's will.

Scott opened his eyes before Darkseid could siphon the whole Knowledge. Scott saw nothing but white light. He felt his retinas searing. Pain and power went hand in hand. His vision cleared slightly. Darkseid stood before him, a specter of black haloed in white, head tilted at Scott, curious as to what was happening to him.

Scott's eyes released plumes of glorious, curving beams of white light from his eyes. A ground-shattering, darkness-banishing blight. Scott's own Alpha Effect, the only inheritance from a father who had abandoned him to be a slave soldier of Darkseid. The devise exploded behind him. The lava below erupted into columns of fire, crimson molten rock spilled over the crosswalk and oozed off like thick blood. Knockback flung Darkseid away. He flipped and rolled, landing hard on his back.

Granny fell off the crosswalk with a strangled scream.

Scott's eyes stopped emitting the Alpha Effect, and he sagged in exhaustion against the chair. He was free.

Granny's Boom Stick dropped with a clatter and a glowing portal opened up in front of Scott.

Darkseid lunged for the Boom Stick. Scott had the presence of mind to fall toward the boom tube portal as his peripherals frayed into black. The Boom Stick went over the edge of the crosswalk.

The boom tube closed above Scott as he fell. He twisted in the air to see if he was being followed.

He wasn't.

The World's Greatest Escape Artist had done it again.

Author's Note: I'm fulfilling a story request from Bighead98 with the premise that, at the end of The Dark Knight, when Batman becomes a fugitive from Gotham PD, what if Superman, after the events of Man of Steel, was hired to hunt him down? What happens next escalates everything across the DC Universe. He gave me leeway to do whatever I needed to do to make the story work. I haven't told him any plot details so as not to ruin his enjoyment of the story.

Since many of DCU's characters have not yet been introduced in these movies, I'll do my best to introduce these characters to you, do them justice, as well as keep the timeline accurate and comprehensible.

Song I was listening to while writing this chapter: Ghost Walking by Lamb of God.

Since I have a hard time completing stories and updating them in a timely manner, I've decided that a weekly update is doable for me. By 11:59 PM every Sunday night, there will be a new chapter uploaded.

Enjoy the story.