Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0125

Erick came up out of the dark the way a diver comes up from deep water, slow, with the pressure still ringing in his skull, and opened his eyes to a place he had surfaced in a thousand times before. The healing capsule had not changed since the day he designed it. Cold metal walls held a soft blue glow that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. A breathing mask sat sealed over his nose and mouth, feeding him oxygen he did not have to work for, and the thick green fluid pressed in around every part of him, warm and faintly alive against his skin. Through the muffling of it he could still make out the synthetic voice that ran the cycle.

“Vital signatures normal. No permanent neural damage detected. Recovery at ninety-eight point seven percent.”

The lid cracked open with a hydraulic sigh and let out a roll of cold vapor that thinned and vanished in the air above him. Erick set his palms on the rim, felt the ache still lingering in muscles that remembered being pushed past their limit, and pulled himself up. The mask released on its own and dropped away with a click. He came over the edge and onto his feet in one motion, bare soles meeting the chilled floor, the green fluid sheeting off him in slow ropes. He shook it from his arms and shoulders, the smell of it filling his nose, clean and metallic with something herbal underneath. Old scars caught the blue light across his chest and stomach, faded but never quite gone, the record of a body that had been built and broken and rebuilt for years.

A Baymax unit crossed the room on near-silent feet and held out a white towel. Erick took it and dried himself in quick, practiced passes, his skin prickling as the conditioned air found his open pores. While he worked he took in the room out of habit, the floating monitors, the nutrient lines still trailing from the open capsule, the low hum of systems holding themselves ready. When he had the worst of the wet off him he drew a long breath and let it settle his chest.

“Report.”

The Doctor answered the word by appearing in front of him, a hologram resolving out of the air in a crisp white coat and thin glasses, its expression the flat patience of something running a great many calculations behind a calm face. The avatar blinked once, sharpening its own projection.

“Before that, sir, indulge me. Tell me what you remember.”

Erick had not expected to be questioned, but he gave it a second’s thought and closed his eyes. The memories came back hard. The grinding agony of carrying hundreds of minds at once. The network straining toward the point where it would have taken him with it when it tore. Mongul’s roar rolling through the link like something out of an older world. The taste of pulverized concrete and burnt blood hanging over Metropolis. He remembered all of it precisely, and what was strange was that none of it hurt anymore. It had become a scar he could press without flinching, a thing that throbbed faintly and then went quiet.

He opened his eyes. “I went up against something I had no business surviving. And I survived it.”

The Doctor tilted its head, a small smile touching its rendered mouth. “You did. You were one decision away from brain death, sir, to be exact. Sustaining a psychic network at that scale ran past every limit we modeled for you. Your neurons were burning out faster than they should recover from. By any projection I had, you should not be standing here.” The hologram paused. “And yet your mind held where the model said it would break. Whatever you are, sir, your mind is a fortress. There are very few in this universe who could have endured what you carried last night.”

Erick nodded, slow, allowing himself the smallest flush of satisfaction. He flexed his fingers and felt the strength settling back into them where it belonged. “Good. Then give me the rest of it. The world’s still standing, from the look of things. I want to know how.”

The Doctor lifted a holographic hand, and its form began to fray and pixelate, the projection breaking up like a signal losing its hold. “Of course, sir. I’ll let her walk you through it.”

The white-coated figure dissolved into a swirl of blue and green, and from the same light Natasha stepped forward. Dark hair, sharp green eyes, a tactical suit fitted close to a body the projection rendered with deliberate care. She inclined her head, the gesture somewhere between a soldier’s report and a courtier’s bow.

“Good morning, sir. Where would you like to start?”

Erick folded his arms across his bare chest, the last of the fluid still tracing thin lines down his skin. “The part that matters most. Skip the preamble.”

She raised a hand, and the air in front of them filled with a wide three-dimensional record of the night before. Metropolis came apart in slow, silent footage. Towers folded into their own footprints. Columns of black smoke stood over the city like grave markers. People in nightclothes ran through the streets while Mongul’s drones swept them with energy fire. Superman tore through whole formations of machines in streaks of red and blue. Captain Marvel’s lightning burst across the sky in gold. Wonder Woman’s lasso whipped out and took the heads off three drones in a single arc. Superboy and a scattering of lesser heroes dragged civilians clear of the collapses. Members of Erick’s own people moved through the chaos in flashes, running evacuations and clean counterstrikes. Then the record narrowed in on a single figure at the heart of it all, a green man folded on broken stone, blood running freely off his face, his whole expression locked in the agony of holding a web of terrified minds together by will alone.

Erick watched himself bleed and said nothing for a moment. Even having lived it from the inside, the scale of it from the outside took the air out of him. Steel run molten by the heat of the blasts. The ground split into trenches. This world he had been reborn into was a furnace that made everything from his first life look like a rehearsal.

“How was he driven off?” he asked finally, his voice low.

Natasha pulled the image wider and threaded in footage from one of his own stealth drones, an autonomous unit that had hung over the fight recording every second in clean detail. The record caught the exact moment the Martian Manhunter descended into the battle and took the psychic network onto his own shoulders. Erick watched his own body fold and drop. An instant later his armor woke on its own, joints driving, the thrusters at his back and heels firing blue, and lifted his unconscious form out of the fight, carrying him low and fast toward Gotham and the fortified caves where the recovery systems waited.

The footage rolled on. The Green Lantern Corps came down out of the dark in numbers, rings burning with raw will. A portion of them locked into a single immense construct and threw a barrier around Warworld itself, shoving the invading planet back off its approach and bleeding the worst of the tides and tremors out of the effort. Others peeled the new waves of drones out of the sky. And inside the artifact, somehow, Batman had gotten into Warworld’s central systems and was tearing through the architecture of an interstellar civilization’s computer like a man reading his own notes.

Erick let out a low whistle despite himself. “A human cracking the technology of a starfaring empire. That’s beyond me. I couldn’t do that on my own and I know it.”

The main fight ran underneath all of it with a brutality that did not let up. Mongul traded blows with Superman that punched holes in the air. Wonder Woman opened him with her sword. Captain Marvel poured down divine lightning. Captain Atom came off the line and emptied nuclear fire into him at point-blank. The Lantern rings bound him in constructs the size of buildings, hammers and chains and shields of green light. And his body shrugged off all of it, every wound sealing as fast as it opened, the damage rewinding itself out of existence. Erick froze the playback on a single frame. Mongul mid-strike over a falling Superman, fist cocked, that sadistic grin spread wide, the bare torso under it carved like stone with the veins standing out under the skin.

“Stop there. Pull the file the League gave us access to. Everything they have on Mongul.”

Natasha’s hands moved through the air, opening encrypted archives, and to Erick’s mild surprise the data was actually there. An older image surfaced beside the frozen frame. Mongul, but smaller, a touch over two meters eighty, dangerous but recognizably a person. Set against the titan from last night, better than three meters thirty, the gap between them was almost obscene.

“He changed,” Erick murmured, staring between the two. “Not grew. Changed. What did this thing do to itself to become that?”

The record played on through the parts he had missed. Even with the Corps holding the planet at bay, Mongul broke loose more than once and left fresh ruin behind him. The fight dragged on for a full hour after his own armor had carried him away. And then, with no warning and no apparent reason, the tyrant simply stopped, smiled at the heroes with a mouth full of fangs and quiet promises, and was gone, teleported clean off the field. Superman’s telescopic sight confirmed it a beat later: Mongul standing back aboard Warworld, watching. The Corps and Captain Atom and Superman gave chase, but Warworld folded itself away into the dark of space and left nothing behind but rubble and a silence that felt worse than the noise had.

Erick frowned and began to pace, leaving damp prints across the floor while the hologram hung in the air behind him.

“That makes no sense. He was holding his own. He flattened half the city, killed thousands, and he walked away at the height of it. He wasn’t being beaten. He could have pressed and he didn’t.” He stopped and turned. “That wasn’t a battle he lost. That was a battle that ended when he decided it had given him whatever he came for. So what did he come for?”

Natasha folded her arms, the projection matching the motion with an ease that was almost a performance. “Still being assembled, sir. But the pattern around it is clear enough. Extraterrestrial anomalies have climbed sharply these past months. Smaller incursions. Artifacts waking up that should have stayed dormant. Readings that look a great deal like contact with parallel dimensions. Mongul was not a villain who happened to show up this week. He was a symptom. Something larger is moving toward this world, and the dark is getting deeper around it.”

Erick crossed to the reinforced window and stood looking out over the mountains that hid his base. The sun was coming up, dragging orange and red across the ridgeline, but he was not seeing the color. He was seeing the next thing, and the thing after that.

He had not been born into this world soft. In his first life he had been an ordinary man losing a quiet war against being ordinary. Then he had opened his eyes as an infant in a universe where Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne were real men breathing real air, where Darkseid and Brainiac sat on the far side of the board waiting their turn, and he had understood the rule of the place before he could walk. This world ate the weak. Everything he had built since then had been one long answer to that single fact. The allies. The technologies. The women he had drawn around himself. All of it served the same end, which was never glory and never even victory. It was survival, total and on his own terms, the kind that no Mongul could ever come and take from him.

He turned back to her.

“Keep watching. Daily reports on every anomaly, no matter how small. And open the next phase of my training.” His jaw set. “If Mongul could turn himself into that, then I’ll make myself into something worse than what he became. I won’t be the one who has to be carried off the field again.”

Natasha smiled and let her projection drift nearer, close enough that the rendered warmth of her seemed to reach him, a deliberate intimacy in the way she held his eyes. “As you wish, master. The world is becoming a more dangerous place by the day.” Her voice dropped. “And you are becoming exactly the kind of predator a world like this deserves.”

Erick closed his eyes a moment and let the weight of the road behind him sit on his shoulders without complaint. He had bled for this. He had killed for it in the quiet places no one watched, and he had built hidden empires out of the proceeds. He thought, without flinching, of the violence still ahead of him, the villains he would one day break apart with his own hands, the streets that would run with the blood of things that deserved it. That was a promise to himself, not a fantasy, and he set it aside for later with the ease of a man who knew it would keep. For now there was only the work in front of him, the analysis and the preparation, and he gave himself over to it fully.

The hours after that disappeared into it.