Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0116

The tatami mat creaked under nimble, sweat-soaked feet.

The air in the private training room had that specific consistency that only forms after an hour of non-stop combat—dense, hot, saturated with body heat, ozone, and the metallic smell of extreme exertion pushed beyond comfort. The temperature had risen enough that the polished metal walls around them showed a thin film of condensation, as if the room itself were sweating along with them.

Erick stood in the center of the mat.

Motionless. Controlled breathing. The sleeveless vest clung to his green skin like a second layer, revealing each defined muscle with the clarity of something sculpted rather than developed—broad chest, shoulders that filled the space, an abdomen marked in dense blocks that the wet fabric dye made even more visible. His posture wasn’t one of defiance. It was something quieter and, therefore, more irritating: the posture of someone who had stopped needing to make an effort to keep up.

Artemis moved like a hurricane.

Her blond hair lay plastered to her forehead, damp and heavy, losing the battle against the sweat that ran in continuous lines down her temples, neck, between her breasts, and across her defined abdomen, finally being absorbed by the waistband of her workout pants. Her breathing was audible work—not the panting of someone losing control, but the conscious and deliberate rhythm of someone who had been trained since childhood not to lose control under any circumstances, and who now needed all that discipline to maintain technical execution while her body screamed for rest.

She attacked with a straight left punch aimed at his face.

Erick dodged, tilting his torso two centimeters—no more, no less—and his fist passed through the air close enough for the gust of wind to lift a strand of green hair on his temple. She already knew she would miss before completing the movement. She had known for ten minutes. But stopping her attack would be worse than continuing to miss, because stopping would be admitting that she had reached the end of what she could do, and Artemis Crock hadn’t reached the end of anything since she was eight years old.

She followed up without pausing: a medium kick to the left ribs with her right ankle, a horizontal elbow aimed at the chin on the return, and then a short, heavy knee strike trying to reach the solar plexus. It was a combination that had knocked out professional fighters. It was a combination that had worked against metahumans with basic resistance.

The kick to the ribs connected. Her ankle met the surface of the left side of Erick’s torso with the solidity of someone kicking a reinforced concrete wall—the force reverberated through the bone, sending a painful shock up her ankle, down her ankle to her knee, and she had time to register that he hadn’t moved an inch before her elbow also landed on his shoulder with no apparent effect. He intercepted the knee strike with his open palm. The impact sounded like a slap on solid wood.

With a minimal and precise movement — without waste, without excess, the kind that only appears in someone who had simulated that exact scenario tens of thousands of times in virtual environments with time dilation — he captured her pulse at the peak of the knee strike, rotated his hip, and hurled her towards the mat ropes.

Artemis slammed her back. Her body ricocheted with the specific violence of someone who knows the impact but can’t yet completely eliminate it, and she fell to her knees, her lungs expelling air in a muffled groan she hated having uttered. She remained like that for two seconds—the time it took for her lungs to start working again and for her pride to restore the order to stand up.

She stood up.

It had been more than an hour. Sixty-odd minutes of continuous combat, without water, without a break for recovery, without mercy from either side—because Artemis hadn’t asked for mercy, and Erick had learned early enough that she would detest him for offering it. And the result was the same as it had been twenty minutes ago, and forty minutes ago, and since the moment the training had begun and she had realized, with that cold clarity that years in the field develop in place of illusion, that something had changed.

Not gradually. Not in the incremental way she had seen Erick progress in recent months—that steady growth she had attributed to intense training with Sensei, his disciplined regimen, and favorable genetics. This was different. It was as if, at some point between the last time they had trained and now, a ceiling that had existed had simply disappeared.

Each connecting blow felt like hitting different material than what had been there before. The density was different. The shock absorption was different. And the response speed—that window of tenths of a second where the attack counter would appear and she would have a chance—was decreasing with each round, as if it were calibrating in real time, learning her patterns in a way that no human being should be able to process during combat itself.

The anger had arrived forty minutes ago. It had stayed.

She walked to the side wall with quick, precise strides, grasped the bow and quiver in a single fluid movement, and positioned herself. The bow was drawn in a second—a muscle-memory older than anything she had chosen to learn, instilled in her body by her father’s hand when she could barely support the weight of her own bow. She began to shoot.

Arrow after arrow cut through the air of the room in different trajectories — some in high arcs designed to eliminate any lateral evasion options, others low-angle shots that would force a jump or a crouch, some with special effect tips that she herself had modified in recent weeks: expanded impact tip, magnetic tip, gel restraint tip. Each shot calculated. Each trajectory designed to close the evasive space of the previous target.

Erick moved as if the air around him knew where the arrows were going to land before they arrived.

A slight twist of the torso here—centimeters, always centimeters, never more than necessary. A lateral rotation that transformed the body into a smaller target at precisely the right instant. And then—and this was what ignited the anger in a different, more specific way—his right hand extended, two fingers closing on the shaft of an arrow in mid-flight and catching it with the naturalness of someone catching something thrown slowly towards themselves. Then another. Then a third, which he split in half with his free palm before it could complete its trajectory.

Artemis lowered the bow.

His blue eyes burned with a rage that wasn’t irrational—it was technical rage, the rage of someone whose tools, however good they might be, simply weren’t enough for the problem at hand. And that was the most frustrating kind of rage because there was no one to blame.

For a moment, the two stared at each other across the room. Sweat dripped from Artemis’s chin in a regular sequence. Her breathing was heavy, audible, honest. Erick’s breathing was controlled, almost serene—not because he hadn’t worked, but because what was inside him converted the effort in a different way, burning off lactic acid before it accumulated, keeping his systems functioning near peak even after an hour of constant intensity.

Erick, in the center of the mat, assumed a stance with his feet slightly apart. Then — without warning, without visible preparation — he jumped.

He soared almost to the ceiling of the large room, his body spinning in the air with a power not that of an elite human athlete, but of something beyond that, something that had crossed a line that human biology drew as a limit and continued to the other side. Artemis barely had time to register the downward trajectory before he fell like a green meteor, his clenched fist descending in the exact direction where she had been.

She rolled desperately to the side.

The impact was brutal—but not for her. The tatami mat exploded at the exact spot where she had been half a second before, the synthetic material giving way as if a wrecking charge had detonated beneath the surface. A shallow crater formed, cracks radiating in all directions, fragments of foam and rubber flying everywhere. The dust that rose smelled of burning.

Erick emerged crouching in the center of the destruction, stood up with the calmness of someone who had performed an everyday movement, and walked towards her with steps that echoed in the heavy silence that had formed after the impact.

Artemis was still on the ground. Sweat was pouring down more intensely now, mixed with the dust that had reached her face. She felt the burning sensation in her knees where she had fallen when she rolled, felt her pulse throbbing where he had landed the knee strike, felt every muscle in the back of her legs reporting the accumulated effects of an hour of maximum effort. And beneath it all—deeper, more honest, harder to ignore—she felt the reality of that moment crystallize into a form that couldn’t be dismissed as poor performance or a bad day.

She had fought metahumans before. Beings with brute strength that could be neutralized with a simple dodge, or with basic speed that could be anticipated, or with elemental powers that obeyed physical logic and therefore could be exploited. Erick was different. It wasn’t just strength—it was strength combined with technique refined to the point of absurdity , impact absorption that rendered contact useless, reaction speed that closed windows of opportunity before she could even identify them. It was like fighting a superior version of herself multiplied by a factor she couldn’t calculate but that her body communicated with irrefutable clarity: it’s not enough .

And that idea — simple, clear, relentless — was the heaviest he had carried in a long time.

“I think it’s time for us to rest and drink some water.”

Erick’s voice was calm, without arrogance, without the condescending satisfaction of someone who had won and wanted the other to know that they knew. It was simply factual. Which made it worse, in a way—because it would be easier if there were something to object to.

The anger that had been building up for sixty minutes found a focus. Artemis stood up, walked to the side wall where the water bottles were arranged on the bench, picked one up, opened the cap—and instead of drinking, tilted it over her own head.

The icy water came all at once, cascading down her face, hair, neck, collarbones, and chest, further soaking her already sweat-soaked workout clothes. The temperature contrast was an immediate and conscious shock—she had sought it out. She needed something physical, real, something other than the accumulated heat of frustration.

He threw the bow into the corner. The bow hit the wall with a dry thud and slid to the floor.

Erick approached slowly, crossing his arms over his broad chest. There was something in the way he moved through the space—a presence that wasn’t ostentatious but simply the natural result of a body that had crossed to the other side of certain boundaries and hadn’t returned—that made the silence around him denser than it should have been.

“Getting angry won’t help.”

Artemis turned to him, her blue eyes holding that fiery quality that appeared when frustration reached a point where the social filter began to fail. It wasn’t anger directed at him. It was anger at the situation. But the situation bore his face, so it was difficult to separate the two.

“And how are you going to help me?” Her voice came out sharper than she’d intended—too honest, too weary to be polished. “Apparently I hit a wall and nothing I do makes me stronger. You’re Metal One, breathe fire, use elements.” She opened her arms in a gesture that included the destroyed tatami mat around them, the scattered arrows, the crater in the center of the room. “The only thing I can do is stab someone with large toothpicks.”

Erick remained silent for a moment—not the silence of someone formulating a polite response, but of someone deciding how much of the real answer to reveal. A smile appeared, calm, almost affectionate, without the performative lightness that would be unbearable at that moment. A smile that acknowledged what had been said without diminishing its weight.

“You can start training with the Sensei.”

It was true. It was a real solution. And it was exactly the kind of solution that didn’t get to the core of the problem—because Sensei could refine the technique, he could sculpt the reflex to perfection, he could push Artemis Crock to the absolute limit of what a human being could do with the body he had. And in the universe they lived in, the absolute limit of what a human being could do was, often painfully, insufficient.

Superman could fly. Wonder Woman had fought gods and won. Kryptonians could reconfigure themselves after destruction that would kill anything else. Captain Atom could manipulate atomic energy with his thoughts. And on the other end of the spectrum—the villains the League faced, the threats Erick monitored with that calculating coldness she had learned to recognize as his way of processing existential danger—were things equally beyond human scale.

Batman was the exception. But Batman had started earlier, had lost more, had sacrificed more, and yet had built his exceptionality on a fortune that most people wouldn’t have. And even Batman had limits.

Artemis Crock had ceilings. And she was looking at one of them now, in the most literal way possible—Erick standing before her, his body intact after an hour of intense combat that had left her soaked, exhausted, and with her fist throbbing from a capture he had executed without even looking.

She lowered her head. Her shoulders slumped under the accumulated weight of a position she had held by willpower for too long. Her chest still rose and fell faster than she would have preferred.

Erick took another step. His arms came from behind her, wrapping around her waist, pulling her sweaty body against his in a hug that wasn’t gentle in the sense of being light, but firm enough to be real. He tilted his head and placed a slow, warm kiss on her neck, just below her ear.

The contact made Artemis shiver in ways that had nothing to do with temperature.

“It’s very frustrating,” she murmured, her voice losing the sharpness it had had a minute before—not because the frustration had lessened, but because there was a different space now, where being honest didn’t require armor. “Being human is very frustrating.”

Erick felt the weight of those words from a place that wasn’t just superficial empathy. He knew what it meant to be on the wrong side of a power struggle—he had lived it at the beginning, had felt the specific vulnerability of existing in a universe of gods while being something considerably more fragile. The difference was that he had found a way out. And that way out had cost him things he hadn’t yet mentioned to her.

But there was something in that moment—the raw, unprotected vulnerability that Artemis rarely showed, and the implicit confidence in showing it—that shifted the decision from where it had been. It wasn’t the right time simply because it was convenient for the plan. It was the right time because she had arrived there through her own effort, without anyone pushing her.

He turned her gently, placing her to face him. Their sweaty bodies pressed together, their breaths mingling in the warm air of the room, the lighting from the installation capturing the damp contours of them both in the way that workout lighting always captures the things that the ordinary day covers with clothing and social distancing.

His green eyes met her blue ones with the directness of someone who had learned not to waste another person’s attention.

“Do you want power?”

Artemis blinked. The guard who had gone down a moment ago instinctively tried to return—the reflex of Sportsmaster’s daughter, who had learned that generous offers in moments of vulnerability were traps. But she had also learned, over the months by his side, to distinguish that reflex from reality, at least when the source was Erick.

“Like this?”

“My powers…” Erick paused for a moment—the kind of pause that isn’t hesitation but preparation, the kind of person choosing where to begin something that has many layers. “I wasn’t born with them. I didn’t awaken them by accident. I didn’t gain them because a radioactive explosion or a spider bite or an experiment gone wrong struck me at the right moment.” There was something in his voice—not pride in the vain sense, but the specific satisfaction of someone describing something that had been hard-won and had worked. “I manufactured them. I created them from scratch. With science, magic, and technology working together in ways that no conventional laboratory would approve and no manual describes.”

Artemis remained quiet.

Her silence wasn’t the silence of someone who wasn’t processing. It was the silence of someone processing with complete attention, surveying the implications of what had been said the way she surveyed threats in a field—methodically, without skipping steps. She knew he was a genius. She had seen impossible cures, robots that shouldn’t exist, magical rituals performed with surgical precision. But this was different. Manufacturing powers—not adapting an existing ability, not optimizing something already given by biology or luck or an accident of circumstances, but creating from scratch , in a controlled, safe, reproducible way—was an entirely different category of problem.

Heroes and villains gained their powers through accidents, most of the time. And the accidents came at a price: instability, dependence, collateral damage that never added up to zero. Erick was saying that he had found a third option that no one had seriously considered enough to try.

“There are thousands of flying cars in this universe,” he said, his tone serious and unadorned. “Technologies already exist that have redefined what’s possible in every field you can name. What I’ve done is another step in that same direction. Just in a direction that most people haven’t tried because they believed biology was an immutable frontier.” A pause. “It isn’t.”

Artemis looked deeply into his eyes. She truly looked—not just the eye contact that happens during a conversation, but that scanning she did of people when she needed to decide if she could trust what they were saying. Years of training went into that scanning, years of reading microexpressions, years of being suspicious of exactly the kind of promise that sounded too good to be true. Every single one of those years was active as she looked.

And what she saw was what she had seen since she had truly begun to know him: not the absence of an agenda—he always had an agenda—but the absence of falsehood. There was a difference.

The weight of being human in that specific universe hit her with unusual precision at that moment. Superman flew and was hit by bullets that ricocheted off his skin without leaving a mark. Wonder Woman had arrived on their island from another world and had changed the course of wars. And she—Artemis Crock, daughter of Sportsmaster, trained since before she could choose what training was, a precision archer that few people on the planet could match—had just spent an hour trying to hurt someone with everything she had and had produced nothing but an hour of sweat.

There were ceilings. And there were times when staying below them was no longer an option she was willing to accept.

“Yes.” The word came out with surprising lightness—not because the weight had disappeared, but because letting it out had relieved something that had been compressed. “I want to change.”

Erick’s smile was small, genuine, unlike the predatory and calculating grin he wore when thinking in terms of strategy. It was the smile of someone who had awaited this answer not because he had manipulated to obtain it, but because he had recognized that it would come when it came.

“Okay.” His arms remained around her waist. “Give me time. I’ll prepare everything. In the meantime, think about something.” He paused with the quality of someone asking a question that matters, not a rhetorical one. “Which element would you choose? Wind, fire, earth, or water. When you have the answer, come see me. I believe that in a week everything will be ready for your awakening.”

Artemis remained silent for just a second. Processing—not the question, which was simple, but what the question implied. That there was a real choice. That there was a process, not an accident. That she wouldn’t wake up different because of external circumstances, but because of a decision she was making now, with full awareness of what she was and what she intended to be.

The weight that had been on her shoulders—accumulated in sixty minutes of fruitless impact, in years of awareness of the chasm between what she was and what the universe around her was—shifted. It didn’t disappear. It transformed into something different. Something that still weighed on her, but weighed differently—like the weight of a tool instead of the weight of a burden.

She jumped.

Her arms went around his neck, her whole body pressed against his, damp and warm, without any of the distance that training had maintained. She began kissing his face without any particular order—forehead, temple, cheekbone, chin, and then the mouth, with the intensity of someone who had been holding back long enough and had reached the point where holding back was no longer necessary. They were sweat and heat and the specific, honest mess of two bodies that had worked together for a long time and had reached the other side of something.

Erick held her tightly, feeling her heart pounding against his chest at a high frequency that was no longer just from physical exertion. Another piece in place. Not in the cold, calculating way he sometimes applied to what he built—there was something genuine here, an affection that wasn’t reduced to mere utility, which it would be dishonest to call simply strategy. Artemis was more than an ally. She was someone who had chosen, with open eyes, to stand by his side in a universe where that choice had real weight.

And she would become stronger. Not because he needed her to go—although he did—but because she deserved to no longer have a roof over her head.

Artemis, in the center of that sweaty, warm, and real embrace, felt for the first time in a long time that the phrase she had spent her entire life using as her identity— only human —had begun to expire.

In a week, she would be a different person.

And for the first time since she had begun to bear the weight of being human in that universe of gods, the prospect did not frighten her.

It was filling up.