Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0135

Chapter 135

Gotham breathed slowly at that hour. The moon hung high above the buildings, cutting the streets in stripes of silver and darkness, and Erick walked through them as if crossing his own living room. White skin, flawless human features, a six-foot-nine frame that he himself had sculpted now that his morphology obeyed his will. The dark sweatshirt hid the rest. To the eyes of any passerby, just a tall young man cutting through alleys that no sensible person would cross.

He didn’t quicken his pace. He didn’t look over his shoulder. There was something almost nostalgic about walking around there unprotected, without armor, without drones for cover, just him and the night. Months ago, that would have been carelessness. Today it was a silent realization: he doubted that anyone in Gotham, at that exact moment, could scratch him. The thought didn’t bring arrogance. It brought peace.

A robber assessed him from inside a fire escape, measured the width of his shoulders under the fabric, and decided, with a wisdom he could never quantify, to look for another victim.

Destiny appeared around the bend of the third corner. The building remained exactly where it shouldn’t be, squeezed between two cracked concrete buildings, with its facade from another century, dark wood, foggy shop windows, and a sign that no living language claimed. Erick had lost count of how many times he had climbed those steps, and yet the place retained the same quality of something dreamed of, as if the whole street pretended not to see it.

He climbed the worn steps and pushed open the door.

The bell above the door rang a note that didn’t belong to any bell. Inside, the air, thick with incense and something older, greeted him along with the overflowing shelves: glass bottles with liquids that pulsed in mismatched colors, amulets that seemed to watch him attentively, skulls of creatures that zoology preferred to ignore. Nothing there had changed. Nothing there ever changed.

Behind the counter, she was waiting for him.

Stunning was too small a word. Her purple hair cascaded over her bare shoulders, her white eyes shone with an inner light that needed no candles, and the low-cut black dress seemed sewn onto her body at that very moment. Her lips, painted black, curved as she saw him.

“Well, well,” she said, resting her chin on her hand. “It’s been a while since you’ve come to visit me. I was starting to wonder if I’d scared you.”

Erick approached the counter, a smile appearing easily.

The research is becoming increasingly extensive. And more difficult to decipher. I hope you understand.

“Hm.” She studied him from head to toe, slowly and without shame. “Acceptable excuses are as rare as interesting clients. You’re lucky to be both.” Her gaze narrowed in an old amusement. “So? What do you have for me?”

He reached into his sweatshirt pocket. The pocket was perhaps twenty centimeters wide; what emerged from it was twice that size in every dimension. A large, heavy book with a reinforced cover pierced the fabric as if physics were a polite suggestion, and landed on the counter with a solid thud.

The sorceress didn’t even flinch at the impossibility. She leaned over the volume and began to leaf through it, her black nails gliding across the pages.

The content gradually revealed itself. A lightning-casting spell, rewritten from scratch, with marginal notes on conduction, dispersion, and structural damage. A few pages later, an arcane shield with a supporting geometry she had never seen applied in that way. Further on, X-ray vision, broken down into steps so clean they resembled assembly instructions. And so the entire book continued, spell after spell, each simple in function and surgical in execution.

The pace of her page turning slowed. Erick noticed the exact moment when her curiosity turned into something else, something more still, more attentive. Her fingers paused on the diagram of the shield and she went back two pages to reread a footnote.

“Truly impressive,” she murmured, and there was no pretense in her voice.

She went back to the X-ray page. She read it once, silently. Then she raised her left hand and executed, step by step, exactly as it was written.

Erick watched. He knew what she was feeling even before seeing the reaction: the structure rising upright with almost offensive ease, the mana cost plummeting to a fraction of the original spell. The glow of her gaze shifted, and she slowly turned her head, her eyes scanning the shelves, the wall, the street outside, adjusting her focus between layers of matter like someone rotating the lens of binoculars.

“Consumption…” She let the sentence die, testing it again. She looked across the counter, across the floor, and then back at him. A low laugh escaped her dark lips. “You’ve impressed me once again. Modifying a spell is, shall we say, complex. There are sorcerers who dedicate years, some even their lives, to modifying a single enchantment. And you bring me a book of them. In months.” She closed the volume carefully, her palm pressed against the cover as if claiming ownership. “One day you’ll have to show me your methods.”

“Well…” Erick rested his elbows on the counter, leaning close enough for the provocation to sound intimate. “Everything has a price. Maybe one day you’ll be willing to pay it.”

Her smile widened slowly, savoring the reversal. How many centuries had it been since a mortal dared to sell her anything?

“Perhaps someday,” she conceded, her tone making it clear that the idea amused her more than it offended her. “But first: what do you want for this book?”

It wasn’t a pointless question, and Erick knew it. He could read the calculation in her eyes, behind the white glint. The world of magic had been stagnant for centuries. Spells were useful, venerable, powerful, and yet a hail of bullets pierced the flesh of most sorcerers with the same indifference as it did an accountant. The entire magical community hid because of this, shrinking before a science that doubled in size every decade while the arcane arts took a century to take a step. And there, on the other side of her counter, was someone breaking that system from within. Someone she couldn’t, under any circumstances, let escape.

Erick let the silence stretch out just long enough to make himself comfortable.

“That’s what I asked you for months ago,” he finally said. “Did you get it?”

The change in her face was subtle. The amusement hadn’t disappeared, but it had receded a step, giving way to something more mature.

“What you want could lead you down a path of no return.” The voice lowered slightly. “And the chance of ruin is far greater than you imagine. I’ve seen men more powerful than you, and far less curious, end up as footnotes in books like this one.”

I’m ready.

She stared at him. Her white eyes met his and lingered there, weighing, measuring, searching for the crack that bravado always leaves behind.

Is that so?

Erick didn’t change his mind. He didn’t answer again. The answer had already been given, and repeating it would be admitting doubt.

Something about that stillness seemed to satisfy her. She rose from her chair with fluid ease and walked to the wall behind the counter. Erick followed the movement without any effort to disguise it: her wide hips swaying beneath the black fabric, the side slit of her dress revealing the white, silky skin of her legs with each step. She knew he was watching. He knew she knew. It was part of the game they had been playing since their first visit, and neither of them was in a hurry to declare a winner.

Before her, a rectangle of light appeared on the bare wall. The door, which hadn’t existed a second before, opened onto a darkness that swallowed the glow of the candles, and she disappeared into it.

Erick waited. He glanced at the shop windows out of habit, cataloging two or three objects that might warrant a question on another visit, and counted the minutes. Five, almost exactly, until the bright door reopened.

She returned carrying a book.

Its size was indescribable. The volume was black from edge to cover, bound in a material that resembled leather and yet defied comparison, untitled, unadorned, nothing but its own weight. She placed it on the counter, next to the spellbook he had brought, and for a moment the two volumes stood side by side like the two pans of a scale.

“I had to call in some favors to get this,” she said, and something in the way she pronounced “favors” suggested that the word covered debts Erick preferred not to imagine. “And let’s be honest: the book you brought me doesn’t even come close to what this is worth.”

” But…”

“But I consider this an investment.” She placed both hands on the counter and leaned toward him, her gaze fixed on his. “You’ve proven to me so far that you can do impressive things, to say the least. Things that people ten times your age and a hundred times your blood wouldn’t dream of. I want to see how far you’ll go.” A thin smile. “And investors like to keep a close eye on their investments.”

“Of course.” Erick pulled the black tome towards him, feeling the true weight of the thing, much greater than its size suggested. “And speaking of keeping a close eye on things…”

He returned his hand to his sweatshirt pocket. This time what emerged was mundane: a rectangular, white box with clean corners, bearing a logo that any Gotham resident would recognize from afar. The same device plastered on every billboard in the city for the past few weeks. WayneTech’s new smartphone.

The witch’s face wrinkled. She looked at the box as if she had found an insect in a wine glass.

“Rest assured,” Erick said, raising his palm. “I worked on this one myself. It’s untraceable and completely protected. No signal enters or leaves it without my permission, and not even the original manufacturer could locate it.” He pushed the box across the counter toward her. “This gives you access to my research center. Use it to contact me whenever you want to visit my facilities.”

She picked up the box with two fingers, still wary, turning it in the candlelight. Then something seemed to click into place behind that pupil-less whiteness, and the wariness melted into a new, almost delighted expression.

So you belong to both worlds.

“Yes.” Erick held her gaze. And, in a response more eloquent than any sentence, he let the remote control slip.

The white skin of his face and hands rippled. It was like a tide passing beneath the surface: the human tone gave way to a deep green that rose from his collar to his scalp in less than a second, remained there for exactly the time it takes for a breath, and then receded, returning him to his former appearance without a single visible seam.

“I have many talents,” he said.

The witch laughed. A low, genuine laugh, like someone who has just confirmed that the new toy has more pieces than the box promised.

“I can’t wait for my visit,” she murmured, and the smile that blossomed on her dark lips had layers ranging from amused to downright predatory. Her gaze traveled slowly down him, lingering on his chest, his arms, the line of his shoulders beneath his sweatshirt, and Erick registered, with a mixture of amusement and something warmer, that her X-ray vision was still active. She wasn’t looking at his sweatshirt.

“I’ll take that as a compliment to my work,” he said.

” Consider this a compliment to several of them.”

Erick chuckled under his breath and picked up the black tome. The book was twice the width of the pocket and probably three times the size, yet it slid into the sweatshirt with the comical ease of a letter entering an envelope, disappearing completely without leaving even a crease in the fabric. The sorceress watched the scene with a raised eyebrow, less because of the impossibility and more because of the lack of ceremony.

“See you soon,” he said, already turning towards the door.

“See you soon, my talented young man.” Her voice followed him to the threshold. “And take good care of this book. It has already outlived better owners.”

The bell tolled its impossible note. Erick descended the steps, and the instant his sole touched the pavement, something shifted in the texture of the night behind him. He turned. Where the time-displaced building had been, there was only the dark gap between two concrete structures, too narrow to contain even a door. No sign. No step. Nothing.

He smiled at the empty space.

Then his body rippled. Not the controlled, superficial, cosmetic rippling of before, but something total: flesh, bone, and tissue scrambled into an indistinct mass that lasted less than a blink, the clothes dissolving into the transformation along with the rest, and in the place where there had been a young man in a tracksuit, a pair of wide wings struck the air.

The eagle flew up.

It flapped its wings forcefully for the first few meters, gaining space between the buildings, and then found a thermal current escaping from a ventilation duct and let it do its work. Gotham opened up below, a chessboard of yellow and red lights cut by the black of the rooftops, and the blue-eyed eagle soared higher, until the wind cleared and the city became geography.

Erick never tired of it. Flying inside the armor was pure power: thrust, telemetry, the roar of the thrusters. Flying like that was another language. Each feather responded to the air individually, each course adjustment was a conversation between the wind and a body designed over millions of years for exactly that. There was no HUD, no sensor readings. There was only the night, the altitude, and a freedom so physical it bordered on intoxication.

He tilted a wing and traced a long arc over the city, toward the hills of Crestview Heights.

…

The mansion’s underground corridors recognized his footsteps long before any door opened. Erick descended levels not shown on any blueprint, traversed containment chambers and decontamination antechambers, and stopped before the complex’s final door—the newest, the thickest, the one not even the other AIs had full authorization to open.

She gave way with a hydraulic sigh, and he was plunged into utter darkness.

The light flickered on the instant his feet touched the floor, revealing the room in all its functional brutality. Walls, ceiling, and supporting beams forged from their latest alloy, a matte gray metal that represented the opposite of everything he had learned about elegant engineering. Absurd density, obscene hardness, weight that rendered the alloy useless for any application requiring subtlety, mobility, or common sense. Armor made of it would crush the wearer. A drone coated in it would never leave the ground.

But for a cage, it was perfect.

Erick glanced at the welded panels and recalculated, out of pure habit. The amount of material invested there would have supplied three production lines for a year. And it was worth every gram, because he suspected, with a reasonable margin of confidence, that even Superman would find it very difficult to get through those walls. Not impossible. Difficult. In the type of work he planned to do there, the difference between the two words was measured in seconds, and seconds were all he would need.

On the metal, covering every available surface, ran the runes. Hundreds of them, laser-engraved and hand-filled, in alphabets that shared no origin, era, or continent: Sumerian seals of imprisonment side by side with Enochian geometries, Tibetan containment circles intertwined with Nordic barriers, each tradition covering the gaps left by the others. No people in history had trusted a single fence to guard their monsters. He wouldn’t either.

And at the center of it all, on an immaculate white floor that contrasted with the oppressive gray of the walls, the circle.

Red ink on white, traced with milling machine precision: concentric rings, anchoring vectors, writing currents closing each quadrant. A complete ritual circle, verified, locked and, for now, inert. Switched off. A disassembled machine waiting for the key in the ignition.

Erick approached the outer edge and stopped there, without crossing it. He didn’t enter that perimeter without protocol. The rule was outside of himself, and rules that we ourselves write are the easiest to betray and the most expensive to break.

The last few months of research paraded through his memory as he traced the outline with his eyes. He and Morgana had mined that knowledge fragment by fragment, cross-referencing sources that deliberately contradicted each other, deciphering texts written not to be deciphered. This kind of information wasn’t anywhere by accident; it was hidden because entire generations of people wiser than him had decided it was better that way. Finding it anyway, piecing it together anyway, had a taste he didn’t bother to deny. Satisfaction. The purest kind.

” Morgana, pedestal.”

The floor responded before the echo. A section of the floor opened beside him, a hatch slid open, and a dark metal pedestal rose silently to chest height, its upper surface angled at the precise angle of a pulpit.

Erick removed the black tome from his sweatshirt and placed it there. The pedestal registered the weight and didn’t even wobble.

The air to her right flickered, and Morgana materialized, the hooded figure in robes that were both shadow and code in equal measure. The hood tilted toward the book, and when the voice came, it carried that rare note that, in her, amounted to euphoria.

Sir, we really did it.

“Yes.” Erick let the monosyllable settle, and a smile curved his face. “We did it. But we still have to prepare. Increase the defense before any activation. I want redundancy upon redundancy. If something fails in here, I want it to fail inside.”

I’ve already started calculating the additional layers. I’ll have the reinforcement proposals in forty hours.

He nodded and began to circle the outer perimeter of the circle slowly, his eyes passing from rune to rune like a conductor checking each stand of the orchestra before the premiere. An anchor line in the northern quadrant deserved thirty seconds of scrutiny. A secondary seal in the south, another twenty. He knew every stroke of that design, had personally reviewed each one, and yet he still checked. Perfection was not a state; it was a routine.

“What we’re going to do here, Morgana,” he said, without interrupting the inspection, “maybe it’s the most reckless thing we’ve ever done. And the competition is fierce.”

” Are you including the incident with the plasma reactor?”

“I’m including everything.” He stopped in the eastern quadrant, crouched down, assessed the thickness of a red line, and stood up again. “But if we want to go far, if we want to overcome our limitations, we have to take risks. True power has never been on the safe side of the fence. Never, in any world.”

“Indeed, my master.” Morgana floated to the opposite edge of the circle, her hood turned toward the inert center. “We are one step away from something incredible.”

Erick completed the lap and returned to the pedestal. His fingers landed on the black cover, felt the texture that wasn’t leather, and opened the book.

No title page. No title, no table of contents, no author claiming the work. The tome began where it wanted to begin, in the middle of itself, as if any attempt to organize it were a courtesy that the content did not deserve.

And the content justified the lack of ceremony.

He turned the first page and a name stared back at him, written in characters that his mind translated with an uncomfortable delay, as if the language itself resisted. A name he had never heard, never read, never encountered in any of his memories from any of his lives. Below it, an illustration: something with too many joints and too little symmetry, drawn by someone who had clearly seen it up close and barely survived. And around the image, in dense columns, everything. History. Hierarchy. Capabilities. Behavioral patterns. Weaknesses.

Weaknesses.

Erick turned the page. Another unknown name, another abomination, another complete file. He turned it again. A demon of inverted flesh, cataloged with the coldness of a field manual, each vulnerability listed and commented on. Again. A creature that fed on proper names, and the three documented ways to make it choke.

Page after page, the pattern remained. This wasn’t a grimoire. It was a census. A bestiary of everything that crawled between dimensions, compiled by someone, or many someones, over the ages, with a rigor that would make his own databases blush. He leafed through ten more entries and made a preliminary estimate of the value of that material in the right market, for the right buyer. The fortune of a small country. Maybe more. Because it wasn’t just Earth that suffered from that kind of plague; it was the entire cosmos he now inhabited, each world with its own particular hells and poorly locked doors. And the map of all those hells lay open on a pedestal in the basement of his house, beneath his fingers.

Euphoria ignited in his chest, warm, clean, rising up his sternum like the first sip of something strong. Not the euphoria of victory, he knew that, but another, rarer kind: that of holding a key and not yet knowing how many locks it opens. Perhaps in his hands lay the path to a power he couldn’t even begin to fathom. Perhaps it held the very damnation the sorceress had promised. Both possibilities, he noticed, quickened his heart to exactly the same degree.

He looked up from the book. On the other side of the red circle, Morgana waited, patient as only the code knows how to be.

Let’s get to work.