The problem with dealing with someone capable of warping reality so thoroughly; it was impossible to know just what he was responsible for, and what he wasn’t; or just what the limits to his power were. The only place he trusted the imp was beneath his foot, where his precognition would warn him if he was about to do something…. But what could he do? Long-term imprisonment would just have to work, even if that risked an eventual escape. Wouldn't it?

  Every form of attack he could envisage would do so little harm he could see the creature recovering even in the short time of his precognition.

  Of course….. If he just stuck the imp inside one pocket reality and dumped it in another, he’d be gone. But that might kill him, or it might just…..

  He blinked. That…. Was the thing. The only reason he could even be hurt at all was because they were suppressing magic so heavily.

  “The ward seems excellent at preventing people from interacting with things they aren’t already connected to. But from what I can tell, magically tough creatures still retain most of their durability. Just not as much as they normally have. If we can make that ward even more intense, locally… we might be able to weaken his magical durability and regeneration enough to actually kill him.”

  He studied the imp for a moment, then looked up at Superman. “Just using him as the power source for the ward might do the job, since we’re already inside such an overpowered one. But… if we could channel even more magic into the ward, it’d be better. Give us improved odds.”

  Superman looked thoughtful for a moment. “Wonder-Woman and Captain Marvel might be magic-users, but they aren’t the strongest ones among our allies. The most powerful directly would be Raven… and the one most likely to have a way to help with this….”

  He grimaced. “Would be Constantine.” The hero spoke his name with apparent distaste… and the imp quivering beneath his foot started struggling when he heard the name. Which… was a good sign, as far as Eyeball was concerned.

  He might be wrong, but the Imp hadn’t actually seemed afraid until he heard that name.

  ***

  When the two figures arrived, it would be hard for them to be more different. The beautiful young woman with pale grey skin wearing an odd, black dress; and the tall brown-haired man in a long brown coat who looked as if he hadn’t slept in days or shaved in weeks, taking a drag on a cigarette as he approached.

  As the two entered the room, the man walked up to the imp, and dropped to his knees…inspecting the creature, and blowing smoke onto his face.

  “Well.” The haggard-seeming man looked around the room, appraising the various figures present, one by one… and then returned his gaze to the imp. “...This would be the most dangerous company I’ve ever kept in my life. And I’ve bargained with all the rulers of hell. You lot are some of the scariest fuckers I’ve ever seen, and I’m not sure who’s the worst.”

  He looked askance at Eyeball. “Though not even the lords of Hell could make a ward like whats going on right now, so we might already have that answer.”

  Constantine looked around the room… and then back at the imp. “This thing right here. To call it powerful would be to use the wrong adjective. If it weren’t for that ward above us, it could turn the whole bloody world into a cinder with a snap of its fingers. And you want to kill it.”

  Eyeball shrugged. “Its either that, or we figure out a way to imprison it forever. Wards, black holes, so forth.”

  He gave a slow nod, and flicked a bit of ash off of the cigarette onto the restrained creature. “Well then. You’ve come to the right place. Though I wonder what I get out of sticking my neck out like this. He might have friends, after all.”

  Eyeball glanced down at the imp, then at Constantine. “He’s probably toyed with you before. A bit of revenge should be enough. If not… I’m carrying a charm on me right now. It was made when the whole ocean of a water-world was rendered toxic, so all of the people living in it crowded onto what little landmass there was… before it was bombarded from orbit. The spirit of hate, rage, and fear of billions of souls all crowded into one tiny city, already starving and dying before the bombardment started, was distilled down into this lump of molten metal, which was at least partially made of one of the weapons that did it.”

  He patted his chest. “I used it to make a charm of magic nullification, just like the ward in the sky, but smaller. If he dies, you can have it.”

  Constantine stared at Eyeball for a few seconds. “Industrial-scale death-magic on a level that would scare the Nazis. I can see how you made that ward up there. Is the power for it something similar?”

  “Multiple something similars, and the spirit of Medusa. Its doing a far worse job on the Olympians than it is on the little bastard here. Some of them might be dead by now. Hard to be sure.”

  “Well that’s gonna make a mess....I’ll do it. Just to be clear, though, this is gonna be a multiple step process. First, I’m gonna feed him to something thats nasty, and dangerous, but much easier to kill when I’ve got you lot around. Then you either kill it or toss it into the sun.”

  “...Feed it to something?” Eyeball blinked. He couldn’t imagine what could possibly eat something this tough.

  ***

  The imp was bound in cuffs made of what Superman called ‘Nth metal’, whatever that was, and curled in on himself, shaking back and forth.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Outside the shuttle, Superman; back in his red and blue suit instead of the odd grey one; was keeping an eye on them as they flew by… with Eyeball glancing back and forth between Raven and Constantine… neither of whom seemed fond of the other.

  “Ye don’t want the name of the bugger. Just call him bob, for now. He’s not from around here, and when he showed up, he got into a bit of a brawl with some folks… and I dumped him down a mine-shaft. He can eat anything that lives… anything at all… but you can hurt him with a hot enough fire, or the right sort of magic.”

  “....And you left him at the bottom of a mine shaft?”

  “He doesn’t have arms, or legs. He can’t climb or anything. Unless you go down there with him, or he eats something with limbs, he’s pretty much helpless. Just a fat disgusting blob-thing.”

  The imp was quiet, staring at the wall… and turned to Constantine. “You free me, get me out of here. I can get you anything. Make you a god. Fix up all your kids. Give you all of your exes as an obedient harem. Give you part of my power! Anything!”

  The man just shook his head and turned away…. As Raven stared at him. She seemed… cold. Emotionless. Almost like a corpse that just happened to be posed facing the imp.

  As the shuttle started to settle down… the high canyon walls dropping them from sunlight into darkness… Eyeball rose to his feet, and reached down… grabbing the imp by the manacles… and dragging him down the ramp even as the door opened. “Lets get this handled. We all have things we’d rather be doing.”

  The Imp stared into the mineshift, and then looked around at the gathered heroes; and other. “...You’ll all regret this. Even if I don’t come back, someone else will coming looking for me someday! I have a girlfriend! A whole civilization back home! Thousands of us!”

  Eyeball picked him up, swiveling him to face his chrome helmet. “Really. I wonder… if we let it eat almost all of you, and released you right at the very moment it ate the last bit… would your corpse take it home as it finished its meal, and start eating your friends back there?”

  He blinked…. And lowered his gaze. “....Just… just make it quick.”

  Superman floated forward, and looked at Constantine; taking the imp’s shackles from Eyebal. “Should I be worried?”

  “Nah, mate. Hellfire wards the thing off, so your whole eye bit should burn it away. Just toss the imp at him… and when he finishes eating…. Cook him. To ash.”

  He nodded… and vanished, floating down into the darkness. Raven and Constantine both stared down the mineshaft after him, as Eyeball looked around; they were in a dull, dark, canyon somewhere in the eastern US; Kentucky, maybe? And he could see signs of old mining operations in every direction.

  Constantine turned to look at Eyeball. “So. This charm you’re giving me. It have a name, anything fancy? Any codewords to turn it on or off?”

  “Not at all. I could tell you the name of the world that died to make it… of the monsters who killed the world… but the only name this thing has so far is ‘Dead World Slug #19’. I had it all set to be used as a weapon, but repurposed it when I found out how fucked up earth was.”

  He nodded. “That…. Sounds about right. Your version of earth isn’t like this one?”

  “Not even close. The number of beings of incredibly vast and frightening power there is… a tiny fraction of what it is here. Odin and his family could probably take on the whole world… and that Superman fellow could likely get all of them into the sun before they realized something was going on.”

  “Looking to get back there, if you can?”

  Eyeball frowned. “..... No. I’ve got some refugees I’m going to help get settled down… and if we can get all this nonsense worked out, just see if I can give the world a nudge in the right direction.”

  Screaming had started to sound from the mineshaft. It was loud… terrible…and very clearly the Imp’s voice.

  He looked over the edge. Whatever it was, there was a… thing… that hurt to look at. Even imagining looking at it with his precognition hurt his brain… to the point that he started backing away from the hole…the pain not fading until he was a solid distance away.

  Constantine looked at him, and smiled. “Well now. So you could see what it really was?”

  “I’d prefer not to.” He glanced back at the pit. The screaming had stopped. Smoke was starting to rise from the shaft. “Hopefully he couldn’t.”

  “Ehh. He can see through walls, and make out the ocean’s depths while standing on its shores. Impressive and all. But in some ways, he’s as blind as anyone. Perfect for this. If he knew its name, though… he’d see it clearly, too.”

  It was a surprisingly long time… at least several minutes… before the blue and red form floated up out of the mine, and stopped by Constantine. “The moment it tasted the imp it started growing dramatically. If I hadn’t been there….”

  “Then I’d have come with Firestorm, or someone else. I’m not completely daft.” He turned to Eyeball. “Well. Deal’s done. I believe you owe me something? I would also just accept a single favor.”

  The two men studied each other… and Eyeball simply handed over the smaller warding charm.

  As Constantine started to walk away, heading down a path that was clearly familiar to him, Superman settled to stand beside him. “Well. Now that he’s dealt with. Are you going to remove the ward?”

  Eyeball glanced at him for a moment… then at Ascension. If the world were going to get turned into a turnip, he would have at least enough warning to get it turned back on… so long as he didn’t lose comms.

  “Mute. Go ahead and disconnect her. But if I drop off comms, reconnect her immediately. If I give the code-word ‘Kamikaze’, do the same. Unmute.”

  He could see the machine give a subtle nod…. And a few feet away, Raven suddenly clutched her head, backing away a step, inhaling deeply… before nodding. “That….. Its both a relief, and a headache, all at once.”

  Eyeball blinked. “Oh? Why a headache?”

  “Ehh. My father. Trigon. He’s always there, in the background, waiting for me to lose control. While your ward was up, my magic was barely there…. But he was gone, too.”

  “Huh.”

  A sudden beep. A line of text appeared on his HUD. ~Note. Those units that were built while the ward was in effect are only 17% as effective as the rest at basic calculation, and inferior in a variety of other ways. It seems apparent that while my mental processes are not inherently magical, my ability to produce more of myself is, somehow. This is new information, and will be studied.~

  Well. That…. Was interesting. What to do first? See if he could get Ascension to start harnessing magic? Kill one of these overlords? Darkseid seemed like the more dangerous one, but if the ward would be more effective against Trigon….

  Superman stepped closer. “Now. We need to have a few words. About the crippling of Flash…. And that attempted assassination of Batman.”