Chapter 23: The Logic of Nightmares
"Welcome to the Dreaming, gentlemen, lady. Please, don't touch anything. Or rather, touch everything. But for the love of all that is holy, don't get lost. The reception here is terrible."
Urahara's cheerful words hung in the dead air, a bad joke at a cosmic funeral.
No one responded. The only one who might have appreciated the joke was Klarion, and he was too busy laughing maniacally, a sharp sound that pierced the realm's unnatural silence.
The rest of the team was broken.
The "landing" hadn't been physical. There were no broken bones, but minds were bruised and bleeding. John Constantine was on his hands and knees, his body wracked by dry, violent heaving. He opened his mouth to vomit the contents of his stomach, but instead of bile, a cloud of gray, dusty moths poured from his throat, flapping their wings frantically in the sickly air before dissolving into nothing. He collapsed onto his side, gasping, the taste of guilt and ash coating his tongue.
Zatanna was kneeling, her hands pressed against the surface of the "cloud" of hourglasses. Silent tears streamed down her cheeks, but she wasn't crying from fear. She was crying from helplessness. She had spent her entire life mastering a language of power, a system of order and rules. And in that fall, that system had shattered. She tried to whisper a simple centering incantation—"Mlac" (Calm)—but the words felt like dead stones in her mouth, powerless, meaningless. Language, her greatest weapon, had abandoned her.
Jason, pale as a corpse, was trembling visibly. His terror wasn't his, or not entirely, and that was the worst part. Deep within his being, in the cage of his soul, Etrigan, the Prince of Hell, the demon of rhyme and fury, was cowering. Jason could feel the demon's pure, primal terror, a sensation so alien and so cold it froze his blood. Etrigan was a creature of rules, of an infernal order, but this place... this pure chaos was anathema to his existence. The demon was afraid, and that fear seeped into Jason like poison.
Batman was the first to try to stand. He was on one knee, a gloved hand on the ground to steady himself, his breathing a controlled growl. His mind, the greatest fortress of logic on the planet, was under assault. He had activated his cowl sensors by instinct, but the data appearing on his HUD was conceptual madness.
TEMPERATURE: Monday. GRAVITY: False. AIR PRESSURE: Orange. STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS: Maybe.
It was gibberish designed to break his analytical mind. With a growl of fury, Batman deactivated the display. He was blind. He was in a realm where his senses, his logic, and his science were worthless. He stood up with an effort of sheer will, his fists clenched, a king of logic in a land of madness.
And then there was Urahara.
While Earth's mightiest heroes struggled to rebuild their psyches, Kisuke was... delighted. He had approached the edge of the "cloud" and was examining the surface with the tip of his sword-cane, Benihime.
He crouched down, his face full of childish curiosity. The "cloud" was made of millions of tiny hourglasses, and the sand in each of them flowed upward. With a smile, he gently tapped one of the glasses with the tip of his cane. The sand stopped. He tapped it again. The sand began to flow sideways, spilling into the neighboring hourglass.
'Oh, how wonderful!' he thought, his mind buzzing with delight. 'This... cloud? Clocks? It is only solid because we expect it to be. It is an idea pretending to be ground. A conceptual consensus. What a lazy, yet brilliant, design principle. No physics. Only narrative. How refreshing!'
"BORING!" shrieked Klarion suddenly, making everyone jump.
The child-god, mounted on a tiger-sized Teekl, kicked his heels impatiently. He was sick of waiting for his new "toys" to recover.
"They're broken! Your friends are broken, hat-man!" he complained, his voice a drill. "It's not fun if they can't play! The ugly house is over there!" he shouted, pointing a bony finger at the distant, cracked dark citadel rising against the sickly sky. "That's where the 'Boring Doctor' lives! Last one there is a fool!"
With a manic cackle, Klarion spurred Teekl to jump off the cloud of hourglasses, diving into the swirling mist below.
"No!" screamed Zatanna, jumping to her feet. "The anchor! He's abandoned us!"
"Damn him!" spat Constantine, managing to get to his knees. "The little bastard left us here to rot! I knew he would!"
"Patience," said Urahara calmly.
He didn't even look worried. Slowly, he reached into the sleeve of his haori and pulled out the small dark wooden puzzle box. He held it aloft.
The instant he did, the box glowed with an intense orange light.
A second later, a furious, unnatural shriek echoed from the depths of the mist. It was a sound of pure frustration.
As if he were a fish caught on an invisible line, a blue and orange blur shot out of the mist and flew back toward them, landing with a dull, furious thud on the cloud. Klarion was thrown from Teekl's back, landing face down.
He jumped to his feet, his face contorted with rage. "TRICK! TRAP! CHEATER!" he screamed, pointing at Urahara. "This leash is too short! Loosen it, hat-man! I can't PLAY!"
"Walk with the group, Klarion-san," said Urahara cheerfully, putting the box away. "It is safer for everyone. Besides, you wouldn't want to miss our friends' wailing. It's the best part."
Klarion growled, a sound like breaking stone, but he stayed. The promise of a game, combined with the fact that he was physically tied to them, left him no choice. Teekl hissed at Urahara, but the shopkeeper simply winked.
"Let's go," Batman said, his voice a growl. He was the only one who seemed to have regained his composure. He headed to the edge of the cloud, looking down at the impossible landscape below. "We have to move."
The team, reluctantly reunited, abandoned the relative safety of the cloud of hourglasses.
The "ground" below was a shifting landscape, a nightmare of broken logic. One moment, they were walking on an infinite chessboard, where the white squares were made of cold marble and the black ones of twitching human skin. A step later, the chessboard dissolved, and they sank up to their ankles in a swamp made of wet newspaper ink. The air smelled of old news and printed lies, and the words of forgotten headlines stuck to their boots. In the distance, mountains made of rotting books crumbled into clouds of meaningless adjectives.
Constantine, desperate to regain some kind of control, to impose some rule on this place, stopped. He raised a trembling hand, concentrating.
"Fuck this!" he growled. "We need light."
He recited the simplest and most fundamental incantation in his arsenal. "Lux!" (Light!)
The magic failed in the most spectacular and humiliating way possible.
There was no light. Instead, the words themselves solidified in the air in front of him. The letters "L-U-X" appeared, made of rusty, shiny brass.
For an instant, they hung in the air, defiant.
Then, the brass began to melt, like candle wax. The letters warped, dripped, and merged into the ink ground, forming a puddle of molten metal. The puddle bubbled and rose, forming a grotesque bodiless mouth.
"LIGHT? THERE'S NO LIGHT, JOHNNY-PRETTY!" mocked the mouth, its voice a chorus of all the souls John had failed to save. "YOU ARE IN THE DARKNESS WITH US! AND THERE IS NO LIGHT HERE!"
Constantine screamed and fell backward into the ink, scrambling away terrified from his own failed spell.
And Urahara laughed.
It wasn't a giggle. It was a genuine, delighted, ringing laugh. The sound of a scholar who has just witnessed the most amazing experiment.
"Oh, Constantine-san, what a classic mistake!" he said cheerfully, walking over to help the mage to his feet. "You are trying to use a rulebook in a place where paper doesn't even exist! Your magic is based on 'order' and 'intention'! There is no order here! And your intention is contaminated by your own fear! The Dreaming is laughing at you!"
"Then what the hell do we do, genius?!" spat John, wiping ink from his trench coat.
"It's simple," said Urahara. "Stop thinking. Stop trying to control."
To demonstrate, he turned and began to walk.
He walked with absolute, carefree confidence, as if he were strolling down the Kyoto alley. The landscape beneath his feet reacted to him. The ink swamp dried up. A path of dry gray stone materialized an instant before his wooden sandal touched it, and dissolved into dust an instant after he lifted his foot. He wasn't imposing his will on reality; he simply expected reality to be compliant. And it was.
'Fascinating,' thought Kisuke, as he walked calmly through the chaos. 'Reality here does not respond to logic or power. It responds to confidence. The one who doubts, sinks. The one who believes, walks. What a simple and elegant system. It is a world governed by arrogance and certainty. How refreshing.'
He stopped several meters away, on conceptual solid ground, and turned to the group gaping at him.
"Well," he said, fanning himself. "Are you coming? Or would you prefer to stay here chatting with the floor."
The rest of the group watched, jaw-dropped, as Urahara created a path out of nothing, a miracle of pure, arrogant confidence. The ink swamp continued to bubble at their feet, and the chattering mouth that had been Constantine's spell dissolved into a puddle of metal, muttering insults to the end.
"Smug bastard!" hissed John, but there was a new note in his voice: terror mixed with a hint of awe.
"We can't stay here," growled Batman. His voice was the anchor. He took a step, not with Urahara's carefree confidence, but with a forced, steely determination. He placed his foot where the ink swamp should be, and the ground solidified beneath his boot, not into stone, but into a patch of Gotham asphalt, cracked and wet. He took another step, and it was a marble step from Wayne Manor. Every step he took, the reality beneath his feet turned into a fragment of his own world, of his own story. He was crossing, not by faith in the Dreaming, but by unwavering faith in himself.
Zatanna watched Batman, then Urahara. She took a deep breath. 'Don't think. Don't cast spells. Just... walk.' She closed her eyes and took a step, expecting to sink. Her foot landed on something solid: the wooden stage of her first magic show. She took another step, and it was the tiled floor of her father's library. She was crying again, but she was walking, crossing the swamp on a path of her own most cherished memories.
Jason and Constantine helped each other cross, the former with grim resignation, the latter cursing every inch of the way, the ground beneath his feet shifting between London cobblestones and infernal stone.
Klarion, bored by their slowness, simply floated over everything, making a fart noise with his lips.
They walked for what seemed like an eternity, or perhaps just a few minutes. Time, here, was another broken rule. The landscape around them was a parade of conceptual madness. They passed through a forest where the trees were gigantic human hands growing from the ground, their fingers twisting slowly, trying to catch clouds made of silent screams. They saw the mountains of teeth in the distance, chewing the bruised sky. The air smelled sometimes of ozone, sometimes of burnt apple pie, sometimes of the melancholy of a Sunday afternoon.
And then, they stopped.
They had reached the edge of an obstacle that made the ink swamp look like a puddle.
A canyon.
A colossal abyss, a kilometer wide, plunging into darkness so deep and absolute it seemed hungry. It had no visible bottom. But it wasn't silent.
From the depths rose a sound: a thunderous roar, like a waterfall, but it wasn't water. It was voices. A billion voices whispering, screaming, laughing, and crying at once, all overlapping until they became a deafening white noise that made their teeth ache.
They were at the edge of a river. A torrential river of pure, chaotic narrative.
As they watched mesmerized, they saw fragments of stories flowing in the dark current. They saw the image of a boy in red pajamas flying over a suburb, a forgotten dream of an Ohio accountant. They saw the plot of a science fiction novel an author had abandoned halfway through, its characters screaming as they dissolved. They saw a soldier's fear in a trench, a recurring nightmare flowing like rust-colored sludge. They saw the babble of an idea that never fully formed, a flash of pure inspiration snuffing out instantly.
It was the Dreaming's conceptual sewer. The place where broken stories, lost ideas, and discarded nightmares went to die, falling into oblivion.
"Mother of God..." whispered Zatanna, stepping back from the edge. The power emanating from it was overwhelming, the psychic cacophony deafening.
"Right," growled Constantine, his voice barely audible above the roar of voices. "That's it. Game over. There's no way to cross this fucking thing. Let's go back, if there is a 'back' to go to."
Batman, as always, ignored the defeatism. His eyes scanned the opposite edge of the canyon, a kilometer away. Without hesitation, he pulled his grapple gun from his utility belt.
"Batman, no!" screamed Zatanna. "Physics doesn't...!"
Too late. He fired. The titanium hook shot out, trailing its high-tensile cable. It flew cleanly across the abyss, a line of logic in a world of madness. It headed straight for a ledge of dark rock on the other side.
And instead of hooking, it went through it.
The hook didn't bounce off. It didn't spark. It simply passed through the rock as if it were a ghost, as if the concept of "solidity" hadn't applied. The hook, now with nothing to hold it, fell into the river of stories below.
The instant it touched the dark current, the metal hook and cable came undone. They didn't melt or break. They dissolved. Their "story"—that of being a grappling hook—was erased, devoured by the chaos of a billion other failed narratives. It disappeared.
Batman stared at the end of his empty launcher, his jaw clenched under the cowl. He had just lost a piece of his equipment... conceptually.
"Well," said Constantine with a tremor in his voice. "That's one of my worst nightmares come true. Now what, Z? A magic bridge?"
Zatanna stepped forward, face pale but determined. If Batman's logic failed, her ordered magic would be next. She put her hands in front of her, gathering her will, ignoring the chaos surrounding her and focusing on a single intention.
"Raeppa egdirb!" (Bridge appear!)
And it worked.
For a glorious moment, it worked.
A beautiful bridge, made of arcs of pure, solid golden light, sprang from nothingness at her feet. It began to extend across the canyon, a line of perfect order and beauty amidst the nightmare. It stretched ten meters. Twenty. A hundred meters...
And then, the river noticed.
The whispers turned into a roar of mockery. Voices rose from the current, swirling around the golden light.
"A BRIDGE?" hissed a voice that sounded like a billion snakes. "WHAT STORY IS THAT?"
"BORING!" shouted another voice, sounding like a petulant child.
"A BRIDGE FALLS DOWN!" whispered a third, the embodiment of doubt. "BRIDGES ALWAYS FALL DOWN!"
Zatanna's bridge "story"—"a bridge is strong and connects two points"—was being overwhelmed by a million stories of failure.
The golden light flickered. The beautiful arc began to twist. It stopped being a bridge and, for a second, turned into a giant snake of senseless words, eating its own tail. Then, with a psychic moan that drove Zatanna to her knees, the bridge crumbled. It shattered into a million shiny golden letters—A, G, T, Z—that fell into the river like confetti and extinguished.
Meanwhile, Klarion had sat on a pulsing purple rock that had appeared out of nowhere. He was eating something from a bag that looked like skin, something that squirmed and glowed. He was laughing out loud.
"FOOLS! BORING! STUCK!" he chanted, kicking his feet with every word. "You're stuck, stuck, stuck! HA! Now you'll have to live here forever with me! How fun!"
Urahara hadn't said anything. He had completely ignored his companions' failed attempts. He wasn't looking at the abyss as an obstacle. He was looking at it with the awe and ecstasy of a librarian who has just found a river of lost manuscripts.
'Incredible... it's a leak,' he thought, his mind buzzing with wonder. 'Lucien's library is bleeding out. These are all the loose pages of the world, falling into oblivion. What... what a waste.'
He approached the edge, his face that of a child looking into a pond filled with the rarest koi fish in the universe. He knelt down, heedless of the danger, his gaze sweeping the torrent of ideas.
"We can't cross over it," he muttered finally, his voice barely audible above the roar. "The current of broken stories is too strong. It would destroy any 'idea' we try to impose on it. It is like trying to build a bridge over a hurricane using kites."
He leaned further, his face inches from the roaring abyss. "No. We can't build a new one. We have to... find a story that already exists here. A story simple enough, fundamental enough, that this river cannot break it."
He closed his eyes. He ignored the chaos, the nightmares, and the white noise of a billion failures. He concentrated, searching through the torrent of conceptual trash.
He was looking for a thread. A narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. An idea so pure it was unbreakable.
His hand, without hesitation, plunged into the river of stories.
Constantine let out a choked scream. "Idiot! It's going to rip your soul out!"
The rest of the team watched in horror as Urahara's arm, up to the elbow, seemed to dissolve in the chaos of words and images, his flesh turning translucent.
But Urahara didn't scream. His face was serene. He was... fishing.
And then, his fingers closed around something.
"Aha!" he said. And pulled.
He didn't pull out a bridge. He didn't pull out a weapon. He pulled out a simple thread of golden light. It was thin, almost invisible, but it shone with a warm, steady light. It was a story. The simplest and one of the oldest stories. The idea of "a bridge." Not a bridge, but the idea that "a bridge connects two sides."
"Quick!" he shouted to Batman, his voice full of effort for the first time. "Hold this! And believe in it!"
Batman grabbed the thread of light. It was solid to the touch, warm, and vibrated with a simple truth.
Urahara pulled from the other end. With every pull, the story thread grew thicker, more real. The river roared around it, trying to break it, but the idea was too pure, too fundamental.
The thread widened. It became a rope. Then a beam. And then, before their eyes, it solidified, becoming a suspension bridge, precarious and trembling, made of pure golden narrative. It anchored on both sides of the canyon.
"It's unstable!" shouted Zatanna, feeling the tension. "It's just an idea!"
"Exactly!" replied Urahara cheerfully, standing up and dusting himself off. "So believe in it with all your might! It is a bridge! It will take us to the other side! And for the love of Hestia, don't look down!"
Klarion stopped laughing, mouth open in shock and fury. "You made a toy! That's cheating!"
"Move!" ordered Batman, being the first to set foot on the golden bridge. It gave under his weight, but held.
One by one, the team crossed the wobbly bridge. They could feel their feet sinking slightly into the solid light, and beneath them, they heard the whispers of a billion failed dreams trying to pull them down, jealous of a story that was succeeding. It was the most terrifying crossing of their lives.
Urahara was the last to cross, walking with absolute confidence, as if he were on a stone bridge in Kyoto, never ceasing to smile.
The bridge of golden light, its narrative purpose fulfilled, dissolved into the air behind them, fading into the roaring chaos of voices in the canyon. There was no turning back. They were standing on the other side, on a plain of cracked obsidian stretching to the very base of the dark citadel.
The castle was no longer a distant silhouette. It was an overwhelming presence, a monument to tyranny and oppressive order. It was the direct opposite of the chaos they had just crossed. Where the Dreaming's landscape was twisted, unpredictable, and alive, the citadel was a wall of dead logic. Its walls were of a smooth black metal that seemed to absorb light, without a single battlement, window, or imperfection. They were perfect.
In front of them rose the main gates. They were colossal, a hundred meters high, made of the same light-absorbing black metal. They had no handles, no hinges, no locks. They were hermetically sealed.
"Well," growled Constantine, wiping cold sweat from his forehead. His terror of the river had turned into sullen misery. "We crossed the river of shit. Fantastic. Now, how the hell do we open Dracula's castle door? Do we knock again?"
Batman stepped forward, ignoring him. His white lenses scanned the door's surface. "It's not metal," he said, voice a low growl. "Or not just metal. My sensors can't find a molecular composition. It is... a concept. The idea of 'sealed'."
"Great," spat John. "So we have to open the idea of a door. Any ideas, Z?"
Zatanna shook her head, face pale. "No. I can't. The magic here... is dead. It is... oppressed. There is nothing to work with. It's like trying to breathe in a vacuum."
Klarion, who had been kicking a complaining stone, snorted with boredom. "BORING! This place is stupid! No colors! No screaming! Too... straight! I hate this game!"
"The door is not the problem. The door is the statement."
The voice came from none of them. It was new.
It was a dry, emotionless voice, like the whisper of old book pages turning, a voice that hadn't been used to speak in a long time.
From the shadows beside the colossal door, where the darkness was so thick it seemed solid, a figure emerged.
He was tall and gaunt, so thin his body was lost inside the robes of a librarian from a forgotten era. His skin was pale as parchment, and his hair, thin and white. He should have looked like a harmless scholar.
But something was terribly wrong.
Where his eyes should have been, there was nothing. Just an expanse of smooth, pale skin. And stitched onto that skin, closing eyelids that no longer existed, were thick threads of dark, pulsating energy. They were conceptual sutures, as if someone had sewn his eyes shut not just to blind him, but to negate the very concept of sight.
Zatanna let out a choked scream, a sound of pure horror and recognition. "No... oh, gods, no! Lucien!"
The name seemed to cause a brief hesitation in the figure. A tilt of the head.
"The Librarian is gone," said the dry voice, without the slightest inflection. "That was a messy narrative. Inefficient. Now, there is only order."
The figure straightened, his blind face turning to the group. "I am the Censor. Doctor Destiny's Dream is the only dream. All other stories are illegal. They are forbidden. They will be erased."
An aura of power, so cold and so absolute it made the air crystallize, emanated from him. It wasn't Klarion's chaotic power. It was the power of absolute negation.
Batman reacted first. A guardian's logic was simple: a threat that speaks is a threat that can be neutralized. From his belt, he drew three sonic batarangs, designed to disorient even metahumans. He threw them with flawless precision.
The Censor didn't move. He didn't even raise a hand.
"Weapons," he said, his voice flat. "Violence. Disorder. Forbidden."
The batarangs stopped in mid-air, a meter from his face. They vibrated for an instant. And then, they came undone into a fine cloud of metallic dust, their "stories" as weapons erased from existence.
Batman's face under the cowl tightened. His best tools, useless.
"My turn!" shouted Zatanna, her fear replaced by fury. It was her friend. It was Lucien. "Etativel!" (Levitate!). She put all her power into the simple spell, an attempt to lift him away, to contain him.
The word left her mouth, solidified in the air in front of her in letters of ice... and then broke. It shattered, like glass.
"Magic," said the Censor, as if reading a dictionary entry. "Based on the chaos of intention and emotion. Messy. Forbidden."
"Oh, a dummy with rules! MY FAVORITE!" shrieked Klarion, his boredom vanishing in a surge of malicious joy. Finally, something to break!
He leaped forward, his hands crackling with red energy, the raw, untamed power of Chaos. He threw a car-sized ball of anarchy at the Censor. "BREAK! BREAK! BREAK!"
The Censor, for the first time, raised a pale hand.
He caught the ball of chaos.
The uncontrollable power that could tear reality apart, the power that had terrified the heroes, simply... extinguished in his palm, like a match in a vacuum.
"Chaos," said the Censor, his voice the height of disdain. "The highest form of disorder. Forbidden."
Klarion's smile faded from his face. He blinked. He had been... negated. His very nature, his identity, had been discarded as an error. This was no longer fun. This was insulting.
The Censor slowly turned to the group. "Your narratives are a mess. They are contradictory, illogical, and noisy. You will be erased for being disorderly."
He raised a pale hand. The air around the group solidified, became heavy. They began to feel their edges blurring, as if the ink of their existence were running.
"One moment, please!"
The voice was cheerful, polite, and absolutely out of place.
Urahara Kisuke stepped forward, snapping his green and white striped fan open. He placed himself between the Censor and the rest of the group, his smile that of a scholar who has just found a fascinating logic error in an ancient text.
"An admirable rule, Censor-san!" said Urahara, his voice jovial. "Bravo! Very clear. 'All other stories are illegal'. I get it. How efficient! I love it!"
The Censor paused, his raised hand trembling for an instant. He was built for confrontation, for negation. He wasn't prepared for... an academic discussion.
"You understand," said the dry voice, wavering. "Then, accept your erasure."
"Almost," said Urahara, hiding his smile behind the fan. "I have just one procedural question. A small clarification, if it's not too much trouble."
The Censor stood still, his purpose paused by this strange new input. "Question?"
"Yes," said Urahara, his tone pure innocence. "This 'Doctor Destiny's Story', the one you are protecting. The one you say is the 'only story'. Is it a story?"
The Censor processed the question. The answer was simple. "It is the only story."
"Ah, but it is still a story!" said Urahara cheerfully, as if he had just won a point in a debate. "And your rule! Your one wonderful rule... is that 'all other stories' are illegal."
Urahara took a step closer, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "But if Destiny's story is the only story... logically... how can there be 'other' stories that are illegal?"
The Censor froze.
The dark threads stitching his eyes began to vibrate, like the strings of a badly tuned instrument.
"No..." began the dry voice, losing its certainty. "There... are... no... other... stories..."
"EXACTLY!" exclaimed Urahara, hitting his palm with the fan. "They cannot exist! Which leads me to my next question! If there are no 'other' illegal stories to erase... what is your purpose?"
The Censor began to shake, a low-frequency tremor that shook the obsidian ground.
"Why do you exist?" continued Urahara, his voice now relentless, but still smiling. "Your own rule, the fundamental edict of your new existence, makes your job impossible! Your purpose is to erase something that, according to your own law, does not exist! Your existence is a paradox! Your job forbids you from working! You are an illegal story!"
"No..." whispered the Censor. "I... serve... order..."
"But your order is based on a logical contradiction!" retorted Urahara. "You cannot erase other stories, because you have been ordered to believe they do not exist! You cannot exist without a purpose, but your purpose negates itself! Your story makes no sense!"
"ERROR!" screamed the creature, its voice no longer a whisper, but a shriek of a thousand pages being torn. "NARRATIVE ERROR! LOGIC DOES... DOES NOT... COMPU...! ILLEGAL! I AM... ILLEGAL!"
The Censor grabbed his head, body shaking violently. The dark threads over his eyes tightened and then, one by one, snapped with the sound of a whip. Blinding light poured from the empty sockets.
"NOOOOOO...!"
With a final scream that sounded like a billion books being burned at once, the Censor exploded.
There was no blood or fire. There was an explosion of pure information: a cloud of old page dust, loose commas, periods, and meaningless adjectives raining down on the group.
The team, having watched the philosophical execution with absolute awe, brushed the dust from their shoulders.
Constantine's mouth was open. "You... you... just talked him to death."
Urahara closed his fan with a snap. He brushed a word ("melancholy") from his shoulder.
"What a pity," he said with a sigh. "I hated that paradox. Very poorly written. A very poor deus ex machina on this Doctor Destiny's part."
He turned to the gates.
With their conceptual guardian destroyed, the colossal black gates, representing the concept of "sealed," no longer had a purpose. With a groan so deep it shook the mountains of teeth in the distance, the gates began to slowly open, revealing the darkness within.
The group gathered behind Urahara, looking into the heart of the nightmare empire.
"Well," said Kisuke, returning to his tour guide role. "Looks like the library is open. Ladies and gentlemen, stick together."
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