Dark Nights: Death Metal Vol 1 7

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Warning! This comic is very recent and may contain spoilers! Read beyond this point at your own risk!

"An Anti-Crisis, Part VII: A Slap in the Face"

Part of the "Dark Nights: Death Metal" event.

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Dark Nights: Death Metal Vol 1 #7

An Anti-Crisis, Part VII: A Slap in the Face

Editors

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Dark Nights: Death Metal # 6	—

See, the thing about a war is, when it's over, folks, they want to celebrate and mourn and honor and put it behind them. A chapter closed. But the secret is, the real war, it's never over.

— Sgt. Rock

Dark Nights: Death Metal #7 is an issue of the series Dark Nights: Death Metal (Volume 1) with a cover date of March, 2021. It was published on January 5, 2021.

Synopsis for "An Anti-Crisis, Part VII: A Slap in the Face"

Earth-0, the Metalverse. The Battleground of the final battle

Wonder Woman is transformed, thanks to the power of Truth and the Element X. She is more than a god: she can see everything happening in the present, and she can feel the past, too. But when she looks into the future, she can only see him, and his laugh. She faces him, and when she attacks him, she finds out he is stronger than her and she also feels the Darkest Knight knows it. He tries to taunt her, and he tries to distract her by making her allies feel pain. And he is right, it works. He hits her so hard, she is knocked back in time together with him...but the others keep on fighting, and even in another era, Diana still feels them.

The Batman Family, in company of their worst enemy, the Joker, battle against the Robin King and his army of Groblins, deranged and monstrous Dark Robins. Superman and his Family are fighting as well, against the Last Sun, a Clark Kent whose rocket was corrupted by thousand suns before coming to the Earth, making him a monster feeding on energy of other living beings. But with their combined effort, they are destroying him. And the others too: Flash and the speedsters, Aquaman and the Atlanteans, the Amazons, the Titans...they feed hope to Diana. But then Batgirl falls, for the desperation of Nightwing, and more and more Groblins come to feed on the Family. The Last Son is even more powerful, after absorbing the energy from the blows of the Kryptonians. The forces of the Darkest Knight are not losing...

160 Million Years Ago, and then before. The origin of the first Multiverse Wonder Woman and the Darkest Knight find themselves at the origin of the very first Multiverse, where they see the hand of Perpetua. And the Darkest Knight explains to Diana a thing: even if they win, the Hands are coming. They are the same species that Perpetua comes from, creators of Multiverses. They won't let any Multiverse reform again here, with them as protagonists, or even with their children. There is no future. But Diana has enough power to see for herself, so why not looking into a possible victory, and see if the Darkest Knight is lying?

So she does, and she discovers he's telling the truth. The Hands will come if they win, and they will undo them like they are nothing, all their precious history disappearing. So he tells her to join him: he will give them a paradise to live in, where all is good, happy, safe. And he will proceed with his plan, creating a Multiverse able to fight, and kill, the Hands, making him king of the Omniverse. But of course Diana refuses, and hits him with Perpetua's own hand, awakening a surge of power in her and her allies. Every time she hits him, the collective stories of their Multiverse becomes more important, uniting them all. And she knows now he's afraid of her.

The End of Everything, the Death Sun

With a powerful blow, Diana hits the Darkest Knight right to the end of time, a place called the Death Sun, where all stories, all the Multiverses, all matter ends. And while she pushes him into this sun, they both feel them coming. The Hands. But she also feels her friends fighting back: Batman tricking the Robin King, making an even bigger army of zombies while his enemy believed the Black Lantern Ring destroyed. Superman saved by Lex Luthor, who with a special suit triggers a Black Hole Event and kills the Last Sun, sacrificing himself. And she decides what she will do: she won't listen to the Darkest Knight, even if it means the end. She closes her eyes, she imagines the world, the future, she would like to end, and then pushes the Darkest Knight inside the Death Sun. And she disappears....

Somewhere. Somewhere new...

Diana takes consciousness of herself: she is still something. And she hears a voice: it is one of the Hands. She asks her what will be next, and the Hand tells her they were horrified by how much her Multiverse, time and time again, defied the rules and tried to feed its basic instincts, instead of evolving and ascending. The Hand will tell her what happen, but to do it the Hand will assume a shape that incarnates what they admire. The Hand transforms into Wonder Woman. Diana is shocked: why her? But the answer his simple: Diana, and her friends with her, chose to become nothing, to disappear, to save beings they never saw, beings that were going to undo them all.

They chose goodness even in the hardest situation someone could imagine, and that impressed them. So, some part of them chose to give this Multiverse another opportunity. developing it with a different method. Its previous history will be set in stone, and left untouched. And the new Multiverse shall be reborn, without boundaries, with new possibilities, new threats. It will be new, in every aspect. But for this to become true, she must pay a great cost: she will have to ascend, to become a guardian of this new, experimental Multiverse they want to create, thanks to what they did for them. And Diana, of course, will accept any kind of burden for another possibility.

After the war. Earth-0

Superman makes a speech in front of the Hall of Justice, remembering Diana and her sacrifice, and the fact they all feel her presence around. Then, they start a great party to celebrate the greatest victory ever. In the meantime, Barry brings Wally to the dark side of the Moon, to make him see the Totality, the evolution of the Hall of Justice and Doom combined, a project led by both heroes and villains, to protect reality from threats beyond it. And inside it, they study what is happening to creation, after the mighty clash and Wonder Woman's sacrifice.

Hypertime is healing. New futures will come, and in the present they will all experience flashes of them, and of some alternate past, too. The present time, it was brought all to where it was before the Batman who Laughs allied himself with Perpetua. But some of the dead came back to life, and not only people who died in the great battle, but other beings, too. The only one which there is no trace of is Darkseid. But more importantly, beyond their Multiverse, an infinite web of other Multiverses is developing. They are becoming an Omniverse, rich with possibilities.

Still, there is something strange going on. Their Multiverse does not have only one center, one core world anymore. Other than their Earth, another planet acts as center of the Multiverse: a planet still mysterious they called the Elseworld. This is top secret information, only for the Totality's members to know.

In the end, Sgt. Franklin Rock is back in his age, 1945, in Earth-0. He's writing the final part of this great story inside the journal of his friend, Carter Hall. And he wants to deliver a message: in this great war, the only war, between us and ourselves, there is one thing we must always remember: all stories, all characters, all people...it all matters.