Chương 15: Reverse Shazam

The faint gold shimmer still hadn't fully faded off the apple's surface, that strange warmth still lingering against his fingers, when a familiar sound cut through the air behind him. That specific tear of displaced wind meant Diana. Coming in fast. Faster than any of her usual returns to the training ground. Something tightened in Kaelvorn's chest, his grip on the apple closing a little on reflex.

The greed the magic had stirred up hadn't fully drained out of him yet, and one blunt, ugly thought surfaced without asking permission. Hide it. Keep it. Back on Viltrum during the civil war, anything worth having belonged to whoever was strong enough to take it, full stop. Take it, and it's yours. That rule sat carved into him at the bone. The thought rose, and he forced it back down almost as fast.

He glanced at the last traces of black smoke still dissolving on the corner where the woman had died, then thought about the patience Diana had spent this past week teaching him control. Earth wasn't Viltrum. Taking what he wanted by force wouldn't solve anything here. It would just tear apart the fragile stability he'd only just started to find. And Diana had that lasso hanging at her hip. Lying to her over an apple of unknown function wasn't worth what it would cost.

He pulled in a breath, let his fingers unclench, and stood there quietly, waiting. Red blurred into solid shape almost instantly. Diana landed in front of him, her eyes locking on the apple in his hand before anything else. Her brow drew tight in an instant, her whole presence going heavy.

"Eris. Goddess of discord. She was here?" Kaelvorn nodded, keeping it short.

"Bald woman. Green eyes. Showed me this thing, and I lost control for a second. I broke her spine. She turned into black smoke and disappeared." He left the details out on purpose, keeping only the essential shape of what happened. Diana let out a tired sigh, something knowing in her eyes, and something heavier underneath it.

"So we've still got a long way to go before that killing instinct is actually gone." Her gaze settled on the black scorch mark at the corner.

"What you killed was her mortal-world vessel. Not her real body." Something close to irritation flickered behind Kaelvorn's eyes. Killed was killed, as far as he was concerned, and now it turned out he hadn't even finished the job properly. Whatever. She'd started it, and it was obvious she wasn't the type to reason with anyway. He held up the apple, a little sheepish.

"Is this thing... valuable?" The pull that had nearly taken his mind over a moment ago told him, on instinct, that this apple wasn't a simple object.

"Golden apples aren't especially rare in the divine world." Diana explained.

"Zeus's court eats them fairly regularly, actually, to extend their lifespan and keep their vitality stable."

"But Eris's is different. It's her personal artifact." Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Her tone sharpened.

"Beyond the basic effect, it draws out the deepest desire buried in any living thing, feeds jealousy and conflict. More than one divine war and more than one mortal war got started because of that specific apple." Diana paused, then added more.

"More importantly, Eris doesn't actually die just because her mortal vessel gets destroyed. The moment she reforms in the divine realm, the malice woven into that apple comes right back online with her." Something in Kaelvorn's chest jolted, and his grip on the apple loosened noticeably. So this wasn't some prize worth fighting over. It was a bomb that would go live again whenever it felt like it.

As for the life-extension effect, that wasn't especially interesting to a species that already lived as long as Viltrumites did. That intense pull of possession from a minute ago had just been the magic and the illusion behind it. Nothing more. Diana looked at the legendary golden apple in his hand and felt the beginning of a real headache. In principle, she should be telling Kaelvorn to hand it over to the Justice League for safekeeping.

Except the League, as it currently stood, didn't really have a great answer for how to handle a furious goddess bent on revenge. The League was barely two years old at this point, hadn't had time to bring on many members yet, and out of everyone in it, exactly two heroes had any real connection to the magical side of things. Her, and Shazam. Shazam, more often than not, came across as a little immature. A little unreliable.

She'd even heard from Batman that Fawcett City, Shazam's home turf, had seen a handful of messes involving lost magical items, apparently down to Shazam's own carelessness. None of it had turned catastrophic in the end, but handing a magical object with real potential to kick off a third world war to Shazam for safekeeping was obviously not a great plan. As for herself. She was tied closely to the magical side, no argument there.

But her actual abilities mostly ran off bloodline blessing and a handful of gifts from the gods. She knew some magic, technically, but most of it fell somewhere between party tricks and light entertainment. Nowhere close to matching a literal goddess of discord, let alone containing an artifact capable of triggering a divine war. Also. How exactly had this kid taken down a goddess of discord in the first place?

"Maybe you should hand it to the League. This isn't something you should be getting tangled in..." Right as Diana settled into her sense of duty, ready to actually make the case, Kaelvorn's eyes opened and he shut the idea down flat.

"No. It doesn't go to the League."

"Ms. Prince, you went quiet for a full three seconds just now. If you actually believed the League could handle this apple right now, you'd have said so immediately." Kaelvorn looked at the pure gold light shimmering off the apple's surface in the sunlight, thinking it over.

"What we should actually do first is figure out why this happened at all."

"A goddess of discord doesn't just casually pull out an artifact that valuable to mess with some random person. If she wanted this apple to make me lose control, that means she sees something in me worth doing that for." Diana's face, which had started out concerned, slowly shifted into something closer to genuine surprise as Kaelvorn kept explaining.

"Put differently. To gods, or at least to whoever's out there using magic seriously, there's something specifically unusual about me." Diana felt a flicker of embarrassment. She was half-divine herself, technically, and she still didn't have a single useful suggestion to offer right now.

"I've already made an enemy of a goddess of discord. Whether I want it or not, handing this apple to the League means putting an entire group of superpowered people directly on her radar."

"That's not a burden your side can just take on with one line about hero duty, Ms. Prince." Kaelvorn didn't say the rest out loud. It didn't need saying. If Eris's magic ever got its hooks into Superman, or the Flash, the fallout would be genuinely unthinkable. And the League, as things stood, was already sitting on shaky public trust. Even with every resource they had, even one hero acting compromised for a few minutes, doing something ugly, would be its own PR catastrophe afterward.

"Wow." Diana crossed her arms. She hadn't been especially curious about Kaelvorn's background up to this point, honestly. In her head this had mostly registered as one more standard League favor.

"You and Shazam really are two extremes of the same thing. Bruce actually told me you're fourteen. That true?" Kaelvorn laughed a little, tucking the apple into an inside pocket.

"If my actual thinking matched my physical age, I'd be exactly what I look like. Right now, and forever after. Just one more conqueror off Viltrum's assembly line." Diana blinked. Whose conqueror? Kaelvorn was already lifting off the ground. He'd come out today just to walk around and maybe pick up some fruit, and this whole mess had ruined the mood entirely.

"Wait, so what's your plan now?" Diana had a growing sense that this kid was missing some fundamental respect for his elders somewhere deep in his bones, and gritted her teeth as she followed him up into the sky anyway.

"The League must keep some kind of list, right? You people track global anomalies and dangerous individuals proactively, don't you?" Kaelvorn answered flatly.

"The League doesn't have anyone who actually specializes in this. So we go find someone ourselves. Speaking of which, Ms. Prince, you're telling me you genuinely don't know a single Earth magician?" Something clicked for Diana. Right. This was a Batman problem..... +40 advanced chapters on Patreon [email protected] /YATOOO Not satisfied? Full refund, no questions asked.