The arena was carved from obsidian and old gods’ promises, a ring at the heart of a floating coliseum where stars watched and mortal laws didn’t apply. Torches burned without wind, their flames throwing gold across banners stitched with impossible sigils. The crowd—faces both human and inhuman—roared like a storm in a canyon, hungry for spectacle. Above them, three judges sat behind a wall of smoke; they were the ones who called it "The Slave Crisis": a title as cruel as the rules that made it stick.
Bound in enchanted manacles was a narrow column of stone at the center of the ring. Atop it, a young rebel named Mara—eyes bright with stubbornness—was chained to an ancient crest. She was not a fighter, only a voice, a spark of dissent that had ignited a resistance across a city of oppressed people. Today she was the prize, and whoever broke the manacles would claim not only her freedom but the right to demand a favor from the Judges—small kindnesses in a world that corrupted favors into debts.
From the eastern gate strode Wonder Woman: armor that drank light, lasso coiled, eyes steady like the dawn. She moved with the kind of certainty born in a homeland of ideals; her presence quieted a slice of the crowd into respectful hush. Beside her glided Zatanna: top hat tipped, sequined jacket reflecting the arena’s flames, her words already simmering with quiet power. Where Diana brought unyielding duty, Zatanna brought mischief braided with principle. Together they were a promise—one of diplomacy, the other of subversion.
Across the ring stood their challenger: Best. Few knew his history beyond whispers. He wore a crown of jagged gears and new-fashioned greed, his mantle stitched from confiscated promises. Best was clever in ways that turned kindness into leverage, compassion into a currency. He’d won his place not on brute force but on cunning—contracts that bent truth and loopholes that snapped like whips. His eyes glittered with the knowledge that rules were only tools to be sharpened.
The Judges boomed the terms: no lethal force. No leaving the ring until one contestant broke the manacles binding the prize. The crowd cheered like thunder; the show began.
Best smiled, his hands folding as if to pray. He spoke, and the men near him echoed his words—contracts unrolled in the air, ink galloping like snakes. His power was subtle: he conjured obligations. The ropes that bound Mara tightened with legalities; promises previously made to her people now counted against them. The crowd watched, transfixed as debts wrapped tighter, whispers of despair seeping into the stone.
Zatanna stepped forward. She raised her gloved hand, tipped her hat, and spoke backwards—an old magick of straightening what had been bent. "Eniomereht rieht ecitcarp." The backward words sliced through Best’s contracts like shears. Ribbons of ink rewound into placid pages; clauses unraveled and floated away, fluttering like guilty moths. The manacles trembled.
Best smirked and twisted his wrist. From the cuffs sprang little gears and ledger-keys—physicalized bureaucracy—each one a talisman that made a chain heavier. He whispered to the judges, and the law of the arena echoed his bargain: for every contract Zatanna undid, another would morph into a different kind of tie. It was a game of law by trickery.
Wonder Woman moved like a force of nature. She did not shout or strike; instead she walked to Mara and knelt, respectful but resolute. "You are free if I break this," she said, voice steady. "But freedom is more than a broken chain." She looked up at Best. "You can’t bargain for a person’s right to choose."
Best laughed. "And who will enforce your ideal? Not you. You’re bound by rules you refuse to change."
What followed was not a clash of fists but of principles made visible. Zatanna and Best traded volleys that bent reality and interpretation. Zatanna pulled threads of meaning from the very language Best used—phrases, definitions, the architecture of contracts—making ironies physical. Best countered with loopholes that coiled like vipers. Each time a loop snapped, the judges muttered, tweaking the arena's edicts to favor spectacle.
Diana recognized a tactic she had seen in other courts: the erosion of rights through the accumulation of small, plausible exceptions. So she changed the battlefield: instead of attacking Best's spells, she targeted the heart of the crowd’s appetite. She called forward the spectators who had cheered the loudest, those who’d traded empathy for entertainment. "You are not guests at this killing," she said. "You are the jury. If this arena remains a house of bargains for tyranny, it will be because you let it." slave crisis arena wonder woman and zatanna v best
The crowd shifted. Faces that had been rapt started to squirm; some looked away, some whispered. In an arena built on spectacle, doubt was dangerous—doubt unmade the currency Best trafficked in.
Best, sensing the shift, unleashed his masterstroke: a legion of compelled witnesses. Their memories reshaped—past kindnesses they’d once done vanished; promises to the oppressed were erased. They believed they had always supported the auctions of favors. It was a ghostly thing: you did not lose your soul all at once; each erasure pried open a new quiet.
Zatanna answered with a single, dangerous word backward: "S'jo." The spell did not undo Best's work directly; instead it revealed what's been hidden. Spectators remembered small truths—handshakes, a face saved, a child once helped—and those flickers became embers. Emotions surged and broke the spell’s neatness. The compelled witnesses staggered, some furious, some ashamed.
Then Diana stepped between Best and the manacles and unrolled a scroll she had acquired in earlier days—a treaty from Themyscira, as old as the island, its language both simple and binding: "No one shall be made property through contracts or coercion." She spoke the words slowly; every syllable was a stone placed in a dam. The arena's rules, rooted in the Judges' prerogatives, resonated with the treaty’s authority. Best sneered; he had many tools, but the treaty was a mirror. For every loophole he could conjure, the treaty offered a simple, thunderous counter.
Best struck back—not at Diana directly but at what she represented. He began to expose the small hypocrisies of those who supported her: “You fight honorably for outsiders but ignore your kingdoms’ colonial pasts!” he shouted. The Judges loved drama; they fed on moral complexity. The crowd wavered again, the game twisting into layered judgments.
Mara, until now a prize, found her voice. She had been taught to stay quiet, to count obligations rather than opportunities. Now she laughed—not a mirthless thing but an honest sound. "This isn't about your laws," she shouted. "It's about whether we are allowed to choose." She slammed her heels, and the stones under her shifted. The ancient crest hummed in response to a resonance that had nothing to do with contracts or treaties: the question of consent.
At that, the arena stilled. Wonders and magicks faltered in the face of a simple human insistence. Best’s edges dulled; his mechanics could twist paper and memory but could not hold a determined will in place without a willing collapse from within.
Zatanna, seeing the opening, cast a final incantation—not to force but to reveal. Her words unspooled threaded lights that touched each manacle latch and opened a childlike window into memory: who had once fastened this chain and why. The answers were small and mean: vows broken in panic, bargains made in fear. Each revealed origin took away some of the enchantment that powered the chains.
Wonder Woman needed no spell. She pressed the tip of her gauntlet to the crest and called upon the treaty and the claim of Themyscira, calling the arena to witness a principle older than any of its judges: dignity cannot be traded. The crest cracked—not in shattering, but opening like a book. The manacles, having fed on falsehoods and loopholes, shrank until they were nothing but rust in the sand.
Best roared, but the Judges hesitated. Their power in this coliseum had always come from certainty—knowing what a favor cost, what it was worth. But certainty is brittle when people decide they will not be treated as objects. A murmur rose, then a chant. It started small—Mara's name—then became a litany for freedom. The crowd, concerning themselves for the first time with the lives at stake rather than the spectacle, stood.
In defeat Best did not bow. He disintegrated into contracts fluttering outward—each line a syllable of lost authority, each clause dissolving under the weight of witness and will. The Judges scowled; their advantage waning, they retreated into smoke and statute, leaving a ring slick with the residue of their decrees. The arena was carved from obsidian and old
Diana helped Mara down from the crest. Zatanna tipped her hat and winked at the crowd, then turned her charm into a softer thing—words that would stitch back the frayed memories of those who’d been manipulated. The arena did not vanish—the city had other coliseums—but the precedent was set. Today a chain had been broken by the combined force of lawful insistence, mischief-wrought truth, and a person’s refusal to be a prize.
Outside the arena, whispers turned to action. The rebels who had once thought themselves small began to speak up in marketplaces and council halls. Contracts were scrutinized more carefully; debts that had been used as shackles were opened to daylight scrutiny. Best’s name became a cautionary tale—the kind whispered in taverns—but his methods lingered in corners where law and power met greed. It would take continued vigilance to ensure this victory endured.
Under the dimming torches, Wonder Woman and Zatanna walked away together, their silhouettes framed against a city that had, for an instant, chosen humanity over spectacle. Zatanna twirled her hat and said, softly, "Not bad for a night’s entertainment."
Diana looked at Mara, then at the horizon where the first thin line of dawn bled into the sky. "Freedom is not an entertainment," she said. "It’s a duty."
Mara squeezed Diana’s hand and looked up at Zatanna with a grin. "And it’s always better when people keep their promises."
They left the arena knowing it would not be the last time such a contest was staged. But they had proved something vital: that the combination of law held to its ideals, magic used to show truth, and the simple will of a person could break even the most cunning of chains.
The torch flames dimmed, the banners drooped, and the crowd dispersed, carrying with them a new story—one that would ripple into the alleys and council rooms where laws were whispered into being. In the heart of the city, a new question pulsed: who owned the right to make bargains at the cost of someone’s life? The answer, for now, belonged to those who had the courage to refuse the spectacle—and that was everything.
Zatanna — Language, Consent, and Transformation
The Overlords, enraged, trigger the arena’s self-destruct. Reality folds inward. Zatanna uses the freed Garmr’s momentum-absorption to reverse the collapse—shouting:
“Esrever eht allaf, esrever eht niar, esrever eht evaw dna esrever eht raef!”
(Reverse the fall, reverse the rain, reverse the wave and reverse the fear.) Zatanna — Language, Consent, and Transformation
The arena turns inside out. The Overlords are pulled into their own psychic trap. Diana grabs Zatanna and the now-conscious Garmr-being and leaps through a shattered mirror into the space between dimensions.
The hypothetical storyline begins at the end of a failed Crisis. In this narrative, the combined might of the Justice League has been fractured. The antagonist—The Best (often theorized to be a corrupted version of the Champion of the Arena, or a rogue Amazon from a lost tribe)—does not seek to destroy reality. Instead, he seeks to own it.
The "Slave Crisis" refers not to chattel slavery in the historical sense, but to a metaphysical subjugation. The Best constructs the Arena of Absolute Will (sometimes called the "Primus Penitentiary"), a pocket dimension where captured metahumans are stripped of their external powers and forced to fight for the amusement of a multiverse-hopping elite. The “Crisis” element comes from the fact that multiple Earths have already fallen to this Arena; characters from Earth-2, Earth-11, and the mainline Earth-0 are all mixed together.
The key difference in this arc is that brute force doesn’t work. The Arena dampens physical invulnerability and raw strength—it amplifies will and cunning. This is why the survivors are not Superman or Batman, but Wonder Woman (Diana of Themyscira) and Zatanna Zatara.
The phrase "v Best" is hotly debated on forums (Reddit’s r/whowouldwin, CBR, ComicVine). In the canonical "Slave Crisis" headcanon, the "Best" is a rotating team of enslaved champions from other franchises (or DC-dark mirrors). The most accepted lineup includes:
The keyword "Slave Crisis Arena Wonder Woman and Zatanna v Best" isn’t really about winning a fight. It’s a Rorschach test for DC fans.
But the narrative answer is clear: Wonder Woman and Zatanna, together, become better than the sum of the "Best."
Why? Because the "Slave Crisis" cannot be won by an individual. The only way to break an arena built on enslavement is through trust. Diana trusts Zatanna’s deceptions; Zatanna trusts Diana’s truth. Their synergy—warrior and wizard, muscle and magic—overcomes every "best" fighter thrown at them.
The arena is not made of stone or steel, but of compressed, screaming psychic energy. It exists in a pocket dimension ruled by a cabal of sadistic psychic vampires known as The Overlords of the Silent Cry. They kidnap metahumans, enslave them via enchanted collars that suppress free will, and force them into gladiatorial combat. The arena shifts biomes every 60 seconds—one moment a flooded Roman colosseum, the next a razor-edged crystal forest, then a burning jungle.
The crowd: spectral, hooded figures who feed on pain. Their cheers are silent—only a high-pitched psychic whine that drills into the combatants’ skulls.