The King Of Shadows
Chapter 6: The King of Shadows
Nobita noticed first.
Not because he was the most observant person — he wasn't — but because he had been standing in left field for twenty minutes waiting for Giant to come back, and twenty minutes was long enough that even Nobita started wondering.
"He's been gone a while," Nobita said.
"He's probably still looking for the ball," said Suneo.
"Should we check?"
"He said he'd be back in two minutes."
"It's been twenty."
"Giant has no concept of time."
This was true. It was also true that Giant always came back. He went into things and he came back out of them. It was one of the constants of their lives.
Shizuka looked at the dark gap in the fence. Then she looked at Doraemon.
"He's not coming back, is he," she said.
Doraemon sighed. He had already pulled out the Pocket Radar, which looked like a compass but pointed toward dimensional anomalies. He'd had it in his pocket since he saw Giant walking toward the forest, because he had known — he always knew.
"There's something unusual in the forest," said Doraemon.
"Unusual how?" said Nobita.
"Dimensional-gateway unusual."
Suneo took two steps backward. "Absolutely not."
"Giant is through it," Doraemon said.
Suneo stopped taking steps backward.
They found the glowing hole at the base of the oak tree.
It was smaller than it had been when Giant fell through — a little dimmer, the edges softening, like something losing charge. The purple light pulsed three times while they stood around it.
"That's a portal," Doraemon said. He checked the Pocket Radar again. "Dimensional shift. He's on the other side."
"Voluntarily?" said Suneo.
"Almost certainly."
Nobita crouched down. The hole showed something — not the forest floor, but somewhere else. Grey and dim. He put his hand near the edge, and the cold came off it like opening a freezer.
"It's closing," said Doraemon. "If we're going, we should go now."
"Do we have to?" said Suneo.
Shizuka was already going.
She sat at the edge, swung her legs over, and dropped. No hesitation, no ceremony. She was through.
Doraemon went next. Then Nobita, eyes squeezed shut, hands gripping the grass at the edge for one second before letting go.
Suneo stood alone next to the oak tree.
He looked at the portal. He looked at the forest behind him. He looked back at the portal.
"Nobody will ever appreciate this," he said to no one, and jumped.
They landed on the grey plain.
Giant was twenty meters away, surrounded by four shadow soldiers, punching through them with a look on his face that was usually reserved for the worst innings of the worst baseball game.
"Giant!" Nobita shouted.
Giant spun around. His expression shifted from furious frustration to something that wasn't quite relief but was adjacent to it.
"You took forever," Giant said.
"It's been twenty-two minutes," said Suneo.
"There are things," Giant said, gesturing at the shadow soldiers. "You can't punch them."
"I can see that," said Doraemon, who had already produced the Dimensional Scanner, a flat grey disc that looked like a coaster for a very large cup. He held it up and turned slowly, reading the readout.
The shadow soldiers regarded the newcomers. Then they multiplied — four became eight, spreading to encompass the whole group.
"Can you fight them?" Giant asked Doraemon.
"Not that way." Doraemon lowered the scanner. "They're made of a kind of psychic energy. Physical force passes through them. You'd need to interact with them on a different level."
"What level?"
"I'm working on that."
Giant muttered something uncharitable.
The scanner told a story that Doraemon explained quietly as they huddled together, the shadow soldiers patient around them.
The realm was real — a dimension adjacent to their own, but older, colder, organized. It ran on a principle that Doraemon's scanner labeled, in careful future-Japanese, as ANTI-LIFE FREQUENCY DETECTED. HIGH SATURATION. The citizens weren't prisoners. Or rather, they were, but the prison had no walls and no locks. The frequency pressed down on everything, a sound below hearing, and it rewrote how people felt. Not what they thought, exactly. More fundamental than that. It rewrote what they wanted.
"They want to walk in lines?" Nobita said.
"They don't want anything," Doraemon said. "That's different. The frequency removes the part of a person that chooses. Once it's gone, they follow the loudest voice. And there is only one voice here."
"Whose voice?" said Shizuka.
And then the voice spoke.
It was not loud. That was the first strange thing.
It was deep and slow and it came from everywhere at once, the way a sound comes from everywhere when the source is too large to have a direction.
"Small things," it said.
They all turned.
He was standing at the end of the street — the far end, where the street ran into the base of a tall black tower they hadn't noticed before. He was enormous, in the way that mountains are enormous: not just big but solid, permanent, as though he had always been there and the world had been built around him. His skin was grey stone. His eyes were burning red, steady and ancient, like embers that had been burning for ten thousand years.
He wore no expression. His face was simply the face of someone who had already decided everything.
"Small things," he said again. "With loud hearts."
Giant squared his shoulders. "Who are you?"
The pause before the answer was long enough to make Suneo back into Nobita.
"I am Darkseid," it said. "This is my realm. Everything in it belongs to me."
"Giant," Doraemon said quietly. "Don't—"
"It isn't your realm," Giant said. "Those people didn't choose to be here."
"They chose nothing. That is why they are here. Choice is suffering." The red eyes moved across the group. They were unhurried. They had all the time there was. "I have removed their suffering. I am very kind."
"That's not kindness," Giant said.
"Giant," Doraemon said again.
"It IS not kindness," Giant said, louder.
"You are five small things with loud hearts," Darkseid said. "You will be quiet, or you will be quiet."
Giant charged.
He covered twenty meters in three seconds. He had always been fast for his size, which people forgot because he was also loud, and loud made people think slow. He hit Darkseid with his shoulder, a full running tackle, his whole weight behind it.
He bounced off.
Not dramatically. He simply bounced, like running into a cliff face. He stumbled back four steps, shook his head, and looked up.
Darkseid had not moved. Had not shifted his weight. Had not blinked.
"Giant, get back," Doraemon said sharply, and reached into his pocket.
The Omega Beams came without warning. Two lines of red light, hot and absolute, burning through the air at Giant like they had his name on them.
Doraemon threw down a Deflector Tile — a small flat square, 30 centimeters, product label reading WIDE-FIELD DEFLECTOR, SINGLE USE — and it bloomed into a full shield, and the Omega Beams hit it and split wide, scorching the ground in two curved lines that left trenches in the grey stone.
Giant staggered to a stop. He was unhurt. He stared at the trenches.
The air smelled like burning.
"Those would have worked," said Doraemon, which was the closest he usually came to expressing alarm.
Giant was breathing hard. His shoulder hurt where he'd hit Darkseid. His knuckles hurt from earlier attempts on the shadow soldiers. He'd punched things since before he could remember, and he had never, not once, punched something that simply did not notice.
He looked at his hands.
Doraemon produced the Hercules Belt and held it out. It was a simple leather belt — a little thick, a little heavy, a product label reading HERCULES BELT, STRENGTH ENHANCEMENT 10,000X, with a small buckle that was actually a calibration dial.
"This will help," Doraemon said.
Giant put it on without a word.
The difference was immediate. He felt it in his feet, in his legs, in his arms. Like everything had been turned up ten thousand times. He bent his knees and stood and felt the grey stone flex slightly under his weight.
He looked at Darkseid.
He looked at the trenches in the ground from the Omega Beams.
He looked at the belt.
He said nothing for a while.
Darkseid watched him, patient as a mountain.
"This doesn't change anything, does it," Giant said. It was not a question.
"Darkseid's power isn't physical," Doraemon said. "It's the frequency. It affects—"
"I know," Giant said.
He did know. He could feel it now, pressing against the edges of his thoughts — a low hum, below hearing, below feeling, like standing too close to a large machine. His fists were ten thousand times stronger and it didn't matter, because Darkseid wasn't standing across from him as a person. He was standing across from him as a fact.
Giant had spent his whole life being the strongest. Being the strongest was who he was. It was his name — not literally, but functionally. He was Giant. He was the big one, the loud one, the one who could make things happen by being large enough and forceful enough that the world moved out of the way.
This world would not move.
He stood there in the grey city, with the belt around his waist making him stronger than anyone had a right to be, and it was perfectly, utterly useless, and he did not know what to do.
"We should find cover," Shizuka said. "And we should find it quickly."
Darkseid raised one arm.
The shadow soldiers converged.
They ran.
Doraemon knew where to go — the scanner showed lower-frequency zones in the city's outer rings, spaces that the Anti-Life frequency hadn't fully saturated. The shadow soldiers followed, but at a walking pace. They didn't need to hurry. They had all the time there was.
"Why are they so slow?" Nobita gasped as they ran.
"They know we can't leave," Doraemon said. "The portal closed."
Everyone except Giant glanced back at the place they had come from, which was now just grey air, no trace of the morning, no forest, no oak tree.
Giant didn't look back. He already knew.
He kept running, the belt heavy on his waist, his fists clenched at his sides.
Behind them, Darkseid's voice moved through the air without effort, reaching them easily despite the distance, the way truth does when you don't want to hear it.
"You cannot hit me," the voice said. "You cannot hurt me. You can only belong here, in the end. As everything belongs here, in the end."
Giant ran and said nothing.
He was thinking.