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

villains and ninjas. Screams buffeted them. “No one give me any grief about lethal force!” he warned. “These folks have all been dead for billions of years.”

Yeah, they had a few moments while the Time Trapper dealt with the overlapping series of breaches that Cisco Ramon had summoned. That might be enough time to regroup, but then what?

Still, she did what any good field commander would do: take advantage of the moment and call a retreat. And also called in air support.

“Mick! See if you can help take some heat off Cisco!”

“Someone say heat?” Mick asked, dipping low in the sky. It was truly terrifying how quickly he’d taken to the power ring. She worried about how they would take it back from him when this was all over.

Mick created a giant green baseball bat and smashed the Time Trapper in the head. He followed this up with a Gatling gun the size of a small moon, pumping round after round of glowing green ammo into the Trapper.

Sara thought it might be working. A little, at least. Between the breaches and the power ring, the Trapper seemed to be on the ropes. Maybe they had a chance. Maybe they would survive this.

Mick roared into the void and launched a fusillade of enormous arrows at the Time Trapper, who cuffed them aside.

“That’s my gimmick,” Oliver huffed as he ran toward the sphere.

Barry grabbed Wally and helped him over the lip of the sphere. He hated to drag Kid Flash back to the site of so much of his torment, but Sara was right—they needed some shelter and a place to plan. If the sphere could contain a speedster’s energies, it could probably weather the villains’ assault for a couple of minutes at least.

A couple of minutes. An eternity to the Flash, but to his friends it was just . . . a couple of minutes. No time at all.

“Are we all here?” Sara asked as Barry and Wally hit the bottom of the sphere.

“We’re missing Cisco—”

A breach opened, wobbled briefly, and Cisco fell through just before it closed. He collapsed to the ground. “I’ve given ’er all she’s got, Cap’n. She canna take nae more.”

“And Mick—” Oliver said.

Just then, a green slash of light illuminated the sky above them. Mick executed a barely controlled landing in the center of the gathering. His left arm was smoldering and most of his exposed flesh was cut, burned, or bruised. He looked like a man who has walked through a desert to an oasis only to realize the oasis was poisoned.

“How’s the ring treating your head, Mr. Rory?” Superman asked with concern.

“Feels like someone’s excavating my brain with a rusty, old grapefruit spoon and pieces of it are flaking off inside.”

“That’s . . . a very graphic simile,” Barry said.

“He’s a bestselling author,” the Atom said proudly.

“Then someone get his editor on the phone and tell him to come up with a plot twist to get us out of here,” Sara said. “Even with Mick’s ring and my fancy new rope tricks, we don’t stand a chance against that army out there. It’s every super villain I’ve ever seen, plus all the ones I haven’t.”

“Look, most of us are disposable,” said Ray, “but he needs Cisco’s powers. And he needs a speedster. And the ring can only help him.”

“Volthoom and the Time Trapper, a match made in hell,” Mick observed with disgust.

“We need to get the speedsters and Cisco and the ring out of here.” Wally stood, leaning against Barry.

“Great idea, fleet-feet,” Cisco said with sarcasm. “But the Time Trapper’ll just figure out how to yank us back here again. Paradoxes being what they are, he might’ve already done it.”

“What if we can trap him?” Superman asked. “Lock him up here at the End of All Time? His power means nothing if we go and he’s left here.”

“Again, Man of Die-Cast,” Cisco grumped, “he could just pull us here another time.”

“We need to use his own technology against him,” Ray said. “Even he can’t go through the Iron Curtain of Time. He just moves it through time so that he can reach into whatever era he needs.”

Barry snapped his fingers. “Exactly! So we hack his technology and move the Curtain to this relative moment. Right now.”

“And if there’s a way to lock it into place . . .”

“Then we’ve trapped the Trapper,” Cisco said, warming to the ideas. “Pinning him between this moment and the actual heat death of the Multiverse. He’ll have nowhere to go. And without me, he’ll have no way to punch through to the other Multiverse and complete his plan.”

“Caught between a rock and a hard place,” Oliver said.

“More like a quantum-fluctuating Heisenberg barrier and an entropic collapse,” Ray said with great cheer. “But, uh, why get all technical and pedantic with friends, right?” he added quickly at Oliver’s scowl.

“There’s one big problem with this plan,” Sara chimed in. “Us. We’ll end up stuck here, too.”

“I think that’s a small price to pay in order to save the Megaverse,” Superman told her.

“Plus, I’m not sure it’s necessary,” Barry said. “I have an idea. All I have to do is relax my internal vibrations. We’re all connected by our passage through the collider tunnel so that we’re in tune, linked to me. Once I shift my internal vibrations, we’ll instantly return to our own time.”

“Running away?” Mick clearly didn’t like the idea.

“Think of it as a strategic withdrawal,” Superman told him.

“We’re running low on fight,” Oliver said. “There’s no shame in a retreat to regroup and come back, fortified, to win the battle.”

“And we’ll return to this exact moment to trap the Trapper,” Barry said, “so it’ll be like we never left.”

He took Wally’s hand to help attune the younger speedster to the proper frequency, then adjusted his vibrations.

And screamed in pain.

His agonized bellow had company in the yelps, cries, and hollers of the rest of the time-traveling crew.

When the pain ended, they were all crumpled on the floor of the sphere. And when they looked up,