The Legends of Forever by Barry Lyga (books to read for beginners .txt) 📕

a green blur in the distance. An enormous flamethrower—a massive, hulking thing straight from a nightmare—floated nearby, gushing fire onto Egg. Barry thought of a marshmallow left too long over a campfire.

The flamethrower finally ran out of fuel. Barry watched smoke and fire peel away from the planetoid. He half expected the rock to crumble into pieces as he watched.

Instead, something else happened.

Incredibly, the Time Trapper appeared there, growing from a space on the surface of the planetoid to a monumental figure who dwarfed that same planetoid. And then he continued to grow, bigger than Anti-Matter Man. Hundreds of meters tall. Mick was a green speck, a dying emerald ember.

“I am Entropy,” said the Time Trapper, his voice the texture of eel flesh and sandpaper. “The end-death of everything.”

Barry realized he was shaking, ever so slightly. Entropy. The most powerful force in the universe, really. All life and all matter and all energy were the result of movement at various levels: molecular, atomic, subatomic, macro-atomic. But motion could not continue forever; motion could not be perpetual. Eventually, the theory went, energy ran out; systems flagged, tired, died.

And now, billions of years in the future, the universe itself was running out of energy and collapsing into itself, ending all space and time.

It was happening on a Multiversal scale, with the various universes of the Multiverse collapsing individually and then into one another. Meeting in a single point of dying energy. A single point of dying energy that had a name now. A name and a will and a plan.

“I am the End of All That Ever Was. My victory is preordained.”

Then why are you working so hard for it? Barry wondered suddenly. There was the Iron Curtain of Time. The machinery to poke through it. Kidnapping Wally so that he could power the machinery that liberated Anti-Matter Man. Opening breaches between universes . . .

If the Time Trapper was the logical, natural end point of reality, then why did he have to scheme and scam and build traps?

“Why are you working so hard for it?” This time Barry said it out loud.

“You . . . you think he’s not as powerful as we think?” Wally asked slowly.

“No.” Barry stroked his chin, thinking. “I think he’s probably more powerful than we think. But it’s not about power—it’s about how it can be used. I think his power is enormous but constrained. I don’t think he can leave the End of All Time.”

And something else occurred to him: The Time Trapper had kidnapped Cisco for a reason. And he wouldn’t have merely stood by while Mick turned Cisco into a charcoal briquette along with the rest of that planetoid. So that meant . . .

“If Cisco isn’t there, then the only other place . . .” Barry’s gaze flicked to the central asteroid, Needle, where the Time Trapper had been when they’d arrived. Superman was almost there.

44

After a brief conversation with James Jesse to explain the plan, Joe got out of the way and let the Earth 27 speedsters do their thing. The fastest among them were no more than 10 percent as fast as Barry Allen, but what they lacked in sheer velocity, they made up for in overall numbers. There were ten thousand of them, so each of them only had to grab and crush twenty bees.

Sonic booms reverberated along the concrete and glass canyons of Star City. Shop windows fractured and spiderwebbed. Joe winced. Barry knew how to vibrate his body so that he didn’t create sonic backlash, but the Earth 27 speedsters were still new to their powers. Oh well—a little property damage was better than dead bodies in the streets.

He tried to watch the action, but it was just a series of overlapping, vibrating blurs, a moving, shifting kaleidoscope of flashing colors and bursts of light. The sight nauseated him, so he turned away. The space around him began to unclot as the speedsters plucked bees from the air and crushed them underfoot.

“Get out here for crowd control and to hunt the Bug!” Joe ordered Dig. He knew that in mere moments, Diggle, Dinah, and Rene would be out of the Bunker and out on the streets. The speedsters could handle the bees, but Joe wanted to be the one to bring down Ambush Bug. He’d been mocked and made a fool of too much.

As the swarm thinned under the aegis of the speedsters, Joe checked the complicated gee-whiz science gadget strapped to his wrist. They still had the satellite tracking data that could track the Bug as he teleported. According to that telemetry, the Bug had just teleported nearby.

He rounded a corner. Ambush Bug was pop!ing from bee to bee as a speedster fruitlessly zipped around in an ever-tightening circle, trying to get his hands on the Bug. Teleportation was still faster than superspeed, though, and the speedster was clearly flagging. Ambush Bug teleported right over the speedster, dropped onto his shoulders, bearing them both down to the ground, then teleported across the street, then back again to kick the speedster while he was still down.

“Ambush Bug! Freeze!” Joe leveled his weapon.

“Joe West! Thaw!”

Pop!

Joe struggled as the Bug, who’d teleported to his side, grabbed his gun.

Pop!

Joe winced as the gun was torn from his grip. Ambush Bug was gone, returning an instant later without the gun.

“Where’d you leave my gun?”

“Rooftop,” Ambush Bug explained, then frowned. “I seem to have a lot fewer places to go right now. Say, Joe, are you up to something nefarious?”

The speedsters were doing their jobs—eliminating the bees and reducing Ambush Bug’s possible teleportation targets.

Pop!

And Ambush Bug was behind Joe, who spun around to confront him. “Give it up. With every second that passes, we’re winnowing down your escape routes.”

“Winnowing? Did you say winnowing? You never hear winnow anymore these days. It’s a good word. Why don’t people use it more often?”

And then Ambush Bug waved goodbye, took a step to the left—

Nothing.

“Hey!” the Bug complained. “Nothing? Really? C’mon, this is a moment of existential crisis* for me and