Quick Note: A selection from the Dark Victories 2 RP is adapted for use in this chapter.


Chapter 3: The Opening Salvo

"Azerath Metrion Zinthos!"

Once again, Argon felt the dark aura wash over him, but instead of resisting, he welcomed it. He felt a connection between himself and the woman, and time seemed to slow to a crawl. He made eye contact with her. He heard her voice in his head.

'Who are you, and what do you want here?'

'My name is Argon, and my business is personal, demon. Leave me be, and I promise I'll leave as soon as I can.'

'We can't do that, and I'm not a demon. We can't allow you to run amok terrorizing everyone.'

'Not a demon? Could have fooled me. I'm terrorizing no one, you attacked me.' And with that response, the woman decided to share a memory with him. He saw himself from the third person, guiding creatures made of flame, guiding small streams of fire over his body.

'Dammit, the dreams are becoming real…'

'Dreams?'

'I need to go. Release me.'

'I can't do that. If you'll surrender, maybe I can convince the others to help.'

'This I must do myself, for the honor of my old friends, if I can still save them from what nightmare has befallen them. Release me.'

'No.'

'So be it.' Argon sensed the depth of the connection for what he had in his mind. Before things sped up and the fight continued, he needed to end it. He concentrated his power within him, and dumped a massive amount of energy into the frail connection between him and the woman. Sensing his intentions, she did the same, sending a massive stream of aural feedback to match his own. The connection snapped, time sped up to normal, and things exploded. Crimson energy thundered into the empath, blasting her back and away from Argon, as her own aura exploded at him, the dark energy sending him flying away from her and tumbling along the ground. He recovered, down on his hands and knees, trying to control his breathing as he forced his senses out and upward, hoping he could feel something dear to him. After a moment of searching, he considered himself lucky. His ship's orbit was just slow enough to leave it overhead for a few minutes longer. Argon brought his two swords back to him, putting one back by hand, the other he guided back into the sheath mentally, his arm having reacted poorly to the explosion of energies. He shifted his concentration, and fire roared to life around him. He felt it push himself off the ground, and when he was about a foot off the ground, he concentrated all the fire around him into a powerful stream below his feet, forcing him to ascend rapidly. He tried to control himself using his hand and more directed fire as a vernier thruster, but had trouble, at the Titans watched him swoop around for a minute before he steadied himself and shot straight up. After several minutes of flight straight up, he felt the atmosphere thinning out, and assumed himself beyond the demon woman's reach, let the fire around him fade, and traversed the remaining distance with his other power. The Titans far below would only see a streak of crimson lightning strike into space.

..


..

Hours passed, and Dick couldn't sleep. He stood at a window, staring out over the city. He heard a door open behind him, someone step in, and then the door drew closed.

"How is she?" He asked.

"Don't know quite yet, man. Her brain activity is pretty low. Whatever technique that guy used, he hit her pretty hard. If this works out the same way as it did before, she shouldn't be in a coma for long." Victor responded. He watched with an old feeling of worry as Dick clenched his fists in anger.

"Dammit… He's getting better at fighting us, faster than we are at fighting him, and he's healing faster than any normal human. And what he does with fire, and that blood red energy…" He quietly raged at himself.

"I ain't sure how he's doing it. It's like the only fuel source he needs for the fire is the air around him. Somehow, he provides the ignition, and he can manipulate what he creates." Vic had decided to hazard a guess.

"He somehow beat Kory in flight. He could have let her fall, but he didn't. Is he mocking us!?" The anger in Dick's voice growing.

"Hey man, easy. We're all back now. Don't lose yourself in this like you did with Slade. You're better than that. Raven talked to the guy before that weird double explosion, remember? She formed a momentary connection with him. She's going to look at some of her books and see what she can find. Maybe there's something we can find out about him, maybe a weakness." Vic tried to cheer him up. After a moment, he stretched and yawned.

"Look, man, we both need some sleep. We'll need you at your best tomorrow. BB is sleeping off that paralysis, Raven's sleeping, and we should be too. G'night, Rob." He added, walking out. Dick thought for a few minutes more, and then went to his own room.

..


..

Argon took the gently curved staff from his back, using it to brace himself again, and as he walked by his grandmother's massive sword, he stopped, grabbed it and flipped it over his shoulder. He shuffled to his bedroom, and when he stepped inside, he gently laid the sword against a nearby wall, with his one good hand, undid the clasps holding his combat harness on, grabbed his staff again and let his weapons and gear drop to the floor. He shuffled to his bed and let himself fall on it. After a few moments, he let the fatigue and stress overpower him, and sleep came to him, along with a new dream.

A shadowy looking girl looked at the few people around her, annoyed at one of them, for being late, it seemed.

"I called you all here because… …Because I'm tired of getting my butt kicked by the cops. And don't tell me you always get away scot-free." A smirk crossed her face, and she looked off in another direction

"And yes, her powers are beautiful."

The scene faded, to be replaced by something new. A few people he recognized as his old friends, and a few he didn't recognize were fighting the Teen Titans in a large circus area. For some reason, he knew several people had been shot, and the guy who ran the circus was about to be taken down. He could see some of the fighting, and he watched as one of his old friends, a girl he remembered by her nickname, 'Night', was fighting a younger version of the woman he had fought before, but Night looked drastically different…

The tent was burning. It almost felt like fire was everywhere.

"Pyra! Put that fire out! Tell the others that it is time to go!" He watched the darkly colored girl pull out a walkie-talkie. "Everyone, back to the warehouse!"

On that command, Argon snapped awake. His body still ached, but not as bad as it was before. He pulled himself up and looked out the window. He saw what he guessed was the Crimea peninsula below him and his ship.

'Night… I had forgotten the sound of her voice… I'm not going to get anywhere like this, time to talk to my grandmother.' He thought to himself. He stood up, walked to the sword, grabbed it, and walked to his bed and sat down, laying the sword in his lap. He found himself admiring what his grandmother had built. A massive weapon weighed down with secrets, and yet it hardly weighed any more than any of his other weapons. He rested his elbows on it, rested his head in his hands, and calmed his mind. He focused on bringing himself to the spirit within the weapon.

..


..

"Morgen, Argon. Been a while?" A young woman greeted him.

"Morgen, Grandmother. Eight years" The young woman was Crimson, the fragment of her soul that remained in the sword.

"Sam still clings to my sword, doesn't he?" Samuel was the first name of Argon's father, a human name Sam's father liked.

"Dad doesn't much care to part with it, and that, I don't blame him for. I'm lucky to have had my mother for this long." Argon replied. He took advantage of the miniature realm his grandmother had created to leave his physical pains behind him. Milly was Argon's mother, and at Argon's age, on average he would have outlived his parents, as his people have children late in life. His grandmother had died when Sam was very young, younger than average, oddly.

"Milly is a good girl, if a little wild at times. She loves him, though. I wish I could have told him to go for her at the start instead of…" Crimson trailed off, lost in thought. She remembered Sam's first wife, and because Argon's father had such a weak command of Crimson's energy, Crimson herself couldn't voice her concerns. She, along with the twin girls she had with Sam were lost in a freak ship accident centuries ago, the section of the vessel they were in lost to the infinite multiverse.

"I still haven't sensed my half-sisters in my travels, and I am sorry... Grandmother, there is other issues that are pressing I wanted to speak to you about." Argon said, changing the subject suddenly. Crimson gestured to a chair that was an exact match for the one she sat in, with a small table between the two.

"What's on your mind, Argon?"

"For the past few months, I've been haunted by strange dreams and memories, of people I haven't met, situations I wasn't involved in, and they've been growing in strength." Argon continued, explaining in further detail about the dreams, his trip back to this Earth, his hallucination of Pyra's fire performance, and the resulting fights with the Titans that he was losing against.

"I don't know quite what it is. It's almost as if it's a hundred years ago for me again. I'm so much stronger and faster than I was before; shouldn't I reasonably expect to overpower them?" Argon finished.

"Your fighting style, your training, they're vastly different from how the rest of us trained. You could have been every bit the main battle tank the rest of us in the family were, but you showed a different, rare set of skills, and your father saw fit to make sure that they were taken full advantage of. We both know that one-on-one, you're unstoppable when you don't hold back. You might even be able to take me!" Crimson encouraged, but Argon just laughed. She stood, walked over to him, and crouched to his level. She took his face in her hands and forced him to look into her eyes.

"Don't you forget, I was overpowered and killed before, and when I died, I was in peak physical shape. The Flame God himself has seen fit to bless our families a third time with you. You have unimaginable power. You possess what I have, in addition to the power your father and his father before him possessed. These dreams and foreign memories have you so bound up inside that you've started holding back again, and you don't even realize it." She pulled his forehead to hers and sighed.

"The more time my sword spends near you, the more I might be able to understand the things you're going through. By the end of this, you're going to need everything you have in your possession, I fear." She added.

Tell me, grandmother," Argon started, pulling her hands away from his face, and held them tightly in his own. "Can I still call on you if I'm in trouble?"

"Nothing would make me happier than to be able to escape this shell for a while, and see things for myself. This is better than death, but seeing the lives of my family pass via a view screen is frustrating." She stopped for a moment, and then the two pulled back, and she gestured in a direction of a lone tree in the white grass field they were standing in.

"They appeared when you took possession of my sword. Any idea who they might be?" He looked over at them, the people not much more than mere shadows of themselves. He walked over to them, and a feeling of familiarity came about him. Argon knew that he knew the shades from his past, but he couldn't identify them quite yet.

"I think these may be ghosts of my past, and since a part of me is attached to this blade as well as you, they've come about now that they can manifest themselves." He said. He held up a hand at the group and waved. One of the shades held up a hand and waved once in reply.

"Clara, Andrew, Rose, Aine, Katy, Carrie, Harry, Raze, you guys just wait 'til you see me now…" He said to the shades in front of him, and then laughed. "Hang on just a little longer, I'm coming for you."

..


..

"Her brain activity is coming back up a bit. I'm guessing the neural connections that got snapped when Argon's swords went through her head are repairing themselves. The effects seem to be temporary like he said, but he must have put a lot of energy into her to put her down like this." Victor summarized Kory's condition for the others.

"Isn't there anything you can do?" Garfield asked.

"Sorry BB, but I barely know anything about Argon's powers, much less how to counteract the damage done, other than give it time." Vic replied, apologetic. Garfield swore quietly and walked over to the other side of the bed, and held her hand and squeezed. He felt a faint response squeeze from her hand. "Guys, she squeezed my hand…" That bit of good news brought smiles to everyone's faces for a few minutes.

"Argon is back." Raven spoke up.

"What? Where?" Nightwing responded.

"Don't know, but I felt a specific energy discharge in the upper atmosphere. It felt like… him."

"We need to track him, and be ready. Star might be down, but that doesn't mean we can take a day off during this situation." He said, turning to leave the room. As he and the others moved to the common area and Nightwing started to type on a nearby keyboard, alarm klaxons went off.

"What now?" whined Gar. Night hit a few keys and brought up an audio message.

"Titans? Guys, come help! Cinderblock and Plasmus both are attacking the police station here and making a mess out of everything in reach!" Then the message went to static for a second.

"I thought Plasmus was in a medically induced coma until they figured out what was wrong with him?" Victor said.

"Last I heard, they had Cinderblock put away somehow, too." Nightwing replied. He shook his head and sighed, and then gave the command.

"Titans, Go!"

..


..

As Argon was free-falling, he sensed an explosion off in the distance. He turned to look and saw a small fireball rising, several miles away from where he was intending to go.

'Don't know what the hell just happened, but that'll help keep law enforcement off of me.' He thought. After falling for a few moments more, he sent fire blazing from his hands and feet and turned a bit, heading towards what looked to be a seedy section of town. What looked like the bad section of the Little Tokyo borough. After a few minutes of flight, he landed in the middle of a street. There were some beat up cars, and some slick shiny nice ones, all useful tools to get the attention of a criminal element. He walked up to the front of what looked like a very gaudy nightclub, with a limousine parked in front. He pulled his grandmother's sword from where it sat on his back, and gently placed one of the edges on the roof of the limo, roughly around the middle. Argon gave the weapon a strong mental command, and with a loud CLANK, the two halves of the broad weapon separated about half a foot, with such force that every window in the vehicle exploded, and that section of roof smashed into the frame, and the separate ends of the car bounced. The limousine now had the general shape of a banana, save for the heavy indention in the middle.

"Very rewarding!" He mumbled to himself, smiling. The opening of the massive weapon revealed what was a light machine gun built into the frame of the weapon. He let go of it and grabbed it again by a grip inside the machine gun assembly, aimed it at the second and third floors of the building, and pulled the triggers under his index and pinky fingers. The weapon thundered, sending a stream of bullets into the building, smashing glass and shattering brick. After dumping a few hundred rounds into the building, he started walking again, noticing another nice vehicle nearby, and decided to conjure an explosion under the car and within the gas tank, causing it to erupt into a massive fireball as it flipped over. Then he fired more bullets into another car, tearing ragged hols in it as a few hundred rounds tore into it.

'Too bad I can't talk Dad out of this more often. I love this sword.' Argon thought as he walked along, leaving a swath of ruined cars and destroyed storefronts in his wake. He continued until he reached the end of the street, tossed his grandmothers sword into the air, where in closed on another mental command, caught it and sheathed it over his back, and then leaned against a lamppost, crossed his arms, and waited. After several minutes, he felt someone come out of the wall behind him.

"Did you really think we wouldn't notice you terrorizing people again?" asked a voice he recognized. He leaned forward and turned.

"Hello, demon. I know this street, no pleasant civilians live here." He greeted the woman. One of her eyebrows twitched in clear irritation.

"Just… Just call me Raven, okay? That's my name. Did you really think setting Plasmus and Cinderblock loose would be an effective distraction?"

"Who now…?" Argon had no idea who the two names belonged to, and Raven could sense his ignorance of the situation.

"What are you trying to do here?" She demanded, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Are far as anyone would be concerned with, this is just gang activity. Something for law enforcement to handle." Argon wasn't the empath she was, but he could sense enough that she didn't fully believed him, but didn't want to fight him alone. He turned back and resumed leaning comfortably against the lamppost.

"Are you hallucinating again?" She asked, emotionless.

"No. I'm me right now. All I want to do is get the Yakuza leadership's attention on me, so I can talk to them. How is the other woman?"

"Why do you care?" Raven was caught off guard by the question, as she looked harder at him, trying to sense his feelings.

"Consider me chaotic neutral overall, I believe that's the right term."

"Right… Her name is Starfire. She's in a coma." Raven replied Unsure of what to make of Argon's use of older slang terms.

"Shit, it was a little too much..." he mumbled, but Raven caught it. "If she's not out of it in a few days, come find me. Our powers have some similarities, I've noticed, and they react weird, so I'll be easy enough to find for you. Go tend to her, and tell your team to stop kicking my ass for a few days so I can sort this shit out. The people I need to see are coming out."

"No promises." Raven said, before fading back into the wall behind them.

..


"What's going on, Rae? Victor asked upon her return.

"Nothing that merits our attention. Someone just had the Yakuza sign their death warrant, that's all."

"You don't think the cops will need us?"

"Naah, they'll just do what they usually do, let them sort it out amongst themselves, then clean up after everyone." Raven said. Vic shrugged, and then turned back to the task at hand.


..

It sounded like small arms fire determined to bore a hole in a main battle tank. The sounds and situation took Argon back to a 40 year period he had served in his home planet's military. For a member of the royal family, it was never mandatory, but he saw no logical reason to break a tradition started a millennium ago. His body had responded in a way he had forgotten about. Oddly, he felt more alive at the moment then he had felt in quite some time. His shoulder was pressed to one side of his grandmother's sword, slammed into the ground to provide him cover. In one hand, a spare magazine, and in the other, a large black handgun, a copy of a design made on earth by a company called Israeli Military Industries, then improved upon by expert gunsmiths back home with technology more advanced. The pistol was chambered for the original frame's largest caliber. Normally a poor choice of a weapon to carry into battle, but Argon carried it because when he rarely did have to use one, it suited his limited purposes. He was used to it, and in his hand, it was a deadly short range extension of his physical form.

He reached out with his senses, and felt where his opponents were in front of him. He snapped his hand out and pulled the trigger. The pistol thundered, its one shot matching the fusillade of gunfire opposite it. The gunfire died down a rifle. Argon concentrated hard for a moment, then pulled the trigger eight more times, emptying the magazine, and in a split second had the new one in and he thumbed the slide release, then fired another eight times and letting the second empty magazine fall out. The gunfire had been replaced by screams. He stood up, reaching for a third magazine, and casually reloading his pistol before holstering it. Argon gave the sword he had used as cover the command to open, and it ruined the section of the street it was in. He pulled it up by the gun grip, careful not to apply much pressure to the triggers. He looked over the remains of his opponents. Blood, chunks of flesh and bone, more blood, and the screams of the injured. The few who were unharmed were trying to save the few of the fallen still alive, their gaze switching from the wounded to Argon. He pointed the sword to the sky and loosed three rounds from it. The three empty cases tinkled when they hit the ground.

"I will see the man who runs this area, or I will see everything within a mile of where I stand burn!" Argon yelled, and to punctuate his point, a building next to him erupted into a conflagration. "You have ten minutes, starting now!" He shifted his hands, closed the sword and let the point rest on the ground in front of him, his arms wrapped around it, resting them on the hilt.

He waited.

..


..

Miles away, and much later later, the Titans had returned to the tower, and were talking about the situation that didn't involve Plasmus and Cinderblock. The odd weather patterns were hard to ignore, but they had a task at hand at the time.

"So you mean that weird fire circus was him hallucinating?" Garfield asked.

"Yes. I think someone is reaching out to him, communicating the only way they may be able, by giving him their memories. When he arrived, the intensity of them increased, and they became hallucinations. That's why he's here. I don't know much more, we haven't spoken much. He's rather adamant about handling this himself. He did ask me, and I quote; 'tell your team to stop kicking my ass for a few days so I can sort this shit out.'" Raven responded. Gar found himself stifling chuckles.

"You asked him about Kory?" Nightwing asked her. She nodded.

"He told me it should be temporary. He felt genuinely regretful of how much damage he did to her, and he said that if she doesn't come around in a few days to find him." Raven mentioned.

"Her vitals are firming up. As much as I want to see her up and about and Argon dealt with, I agree with him." Vic added. Night scratched his head for a moment, then grabbed a remote and turned the TV to one of the local news channels.

"…witnesses claiming the Little Tokyo massacre was the work of one man. Descriptions vary, but it was said that the man had dark red shoulder length hair, tied back, and a massive sword…" The TV cut off when Nightwing threw the remote at it. He turned and looked at Raven pointedly.

"And how, just how, was I to know he was going to do that?" Raven glared back.

"That guy is nuts. We need to stop him before he uses that fire magic of his and nukes the city!" Gar said.

"I'll try to find him, something about this doesn't add up. There has to be more to this that the news is reporting. I know that part of town he was in, not a lot of innocent people there…"

..


..

Earlier…

A man came out, spluttering and yelling, barking orders. When he saw Argon, he raged at him in Japanese. An interpreter started translating threats. Argon drew his pistol and fired at the interpreter, the large bullet tearing into the left side of his face, dropping him instantly. The other man stared at Argon in shock.

"You know English. I recommend using it to speak to me, not jabbering at me and hoping some other bastard gets it right. Now then, I'm looking for some people." Argon walked over to the yakuza leader and buried the muzzle of his pistol into the man's eye socket, causing him to shriek in pain. With his free hand, Argon pulled out his old picture, and held it up to the leader's unobstructed eye.

"The kids in this picture who aren't me. Where are they? It's been twenty years, you old shit, you were around then, and we caused some problems for you back then. You'll remember us, bunch of badass kids who were like the Bad Teen Titans."

No response.

Argon put the picture away and shook his head. He grabbed the leader by the shirt, held him up and shot one of his knees. More screaming.

"You're trying my patience." The gun went back to the eye socket, and pushed a little harder. "One more time. Where can I find them?"

"Yaaaaah! You will not leave here alive! We will hunt you and your family down until your bloodline is extinct!" the Yakuza boss screamed.

"Hunt down my family? Huh. Survey says…?" Argon's gun thundered a second time; nearly severing the leader's other leg. He started to tune the screaming out. After a few minutes of this, Argon dumped energy into the man's battered body, staving off shock, slowing the bloodloss a bit, and numbing just enough pain to keep him from passing out. Once more, the gun went back to the same eye socket, burning the eyelids. Argon let that pain go through.

"Last chance, wheelchair bound. Where?"

The leader then told him what he knew, which wasn't much, but it was a usable lead.

"Yeah, that sounds old all right. Looks like you win the prize after all. Just barely." Argon tossed him aside. No longer getting energy from Argon, he immediately passed out from shock and pain. He holstered his pistol, and just when he took a step, all hell broke loose.

..


..

Later…

Raven walked through the area. From the looks of the surroundings, war had come to the Red Light District of Jump City.

'If Argon had a hand in this, he lived one wild Call of Duty plotline here.' She thought. She trailed a hand along the wall of a ruined building. It looked like it had been gutted by a fire. She felt Argon's lingering presence here, and death. Over a hundred people had died in this area. She could smell the blood, sweat, gunfire, and pain. She stumbled on something. Raven looked down and gasped. A shoe with a foot still inside it, the stump burned. She sensed Argon's hand in the cause, but she felt something else too. Someone had helped these people in their attack. It was something with a lot of strange power. She called out to one of the medical personnel and brought their attention to the shoe. Her communicator went off.

"Raven, where are you?" Nightwing.

"I'm at the scene of the so-called 'massacre'. I was right." She held up the communicator and scanned the surrounding area with it.

"It's only a massacre because these people had no idea who they were up against. It's a war zone here. And something else is going on. I felt another presence interfering, manipulating the situation."

"What's on your mind?" Nightwing's memorization of everything Raven was about to say was almost audible.

"It wasn't just the memories that called Argon out here. Something else entirely is out for his blood." Raven replied, wondering just what was going on under their noses.

..


At the Tower…

"Is it me, or am I the only one who finds it weird that he's named after an element on the Periodic table? Vic remarked.

"Good point. What were his parent's thinking? Weirdo aliens." Garfield replied.

"Perhaps… where he is from… they have different names for the elements… on the Perio- Periodic..." a voice stumbled.

"Star!" Gar called out, seeing her in a doorway, holding herself up shakily with an empty IV stand. He ran to her, wrapping her in a hug. "Beast boy…" She mumbled, passing out a second later.


..

Earlier that day…

Argon took shelter in the closest building he could find, only to find himself rushed from everywhere inside it by Yakuza and anyone else nearby. On gut instinct, he crouched, pulled a deep breath and flooded the building with intense green flames. Every window in the building blew out, gushing fire. Furniture was incinerated, metal framing warped and weakened, people burned to a crisp. After clearing the building of threats, it was time to go to war. He gave a mental command to the sword to open again, and holding it out by the primary handle, gave it a new command. The two blade halves opened into a V-shape, and rotated quickly around the machine gun three times. It would now fired heavy high explosive rounds. He peeked around a corner then ducked back, narrowly avoiding getting shot. Holding the grip firmly in his hands, he whipped the machine gun around the corner and pulled the triggers. It thundered several times, with a level of recoil he wasn't prepared for. He pulled it back and peeked around the corner again. A quick glimpse told him what he needed to know. Small craters spread out in the wall behind where his enemy was, and blood was everywhere.

"Shit, Crimson, what the hell did you make these bullets with?"

He steeled himself for the upcoming battle, and then charged to the next building while firing, keeping his opponents' heads down.