Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0137

Chapter 137

The office was bathed in that calculated twilight that Erick preferred for working. No direct light, only the bluish glow of the holographic screens floating in a semicircle in front of his armchair, painting his face with cold reflections that accompanied each data update. Outside, beyond the reinforced walls of the complex, night was advancing over Gotham. Inside, time was measured in reports.

And the reports from that night were good.

The central screen displayed a table that updated itself, line by line, each entry stamped with a time, a coordinate, and a weight. Kansas State University: twelve grams recovered from the physics department’s safe, in and out in four minutes, with no conscious witnesses. Private laboratory on the outskirts of Prague: eighty-three grams, security system disabled before even registering the intrusion. Private collection of a billionaire in Singapore: three hundred and twelve grams displayed in a glass dome as if they were a jewel, now on its way home inside an armored container that no customs agency on the planet could track.

Erick’s eyes scanned the columns with the attentiveness of an accountant auditing his own empire. His new servants were proving efficient. Not elegant, never. Efficient.

He had divided the world into two types of targets. On one side, the dust: hundreds of tiny fragments scattered across research institutions, eccentric collectors, and forgotten warehouses, each holding grams, sometimes less, protected by security guards who never imagined anyone would bother to steal them. For this dust, the servants. Creatures that didn’t need documents, didn’t leave fingerprints, didn’t appear in facial recognition, and didn’t feel the weight of crossing three time zones in a single night. On the other side, the real warehouses: corporate vaults, layered security facilities, places where metal was concentrated in kilograms and protection was measured in millions. For these, Jade.

It wasn’t merely a matter of skill, though it was by far the most precise blade he possessed. It was risky arithmetic. Each blow the servants signed with their grotesque presence was a blow no one would attribute to a six-foot-seven human assassin. Each eyewitness account describing claws, wings, and the smell of burnt flesh pushed investigators away from the one person he couldn’t afford to expose.

She would carry the critical targets. The servants would bear the blame. That was the architecture, and so far it has held up.

A new alert pulsed in the corner of the screen. Mission accomplished. He didn’t even need to open the file to know who it belonged to. He already knew that pattern of completion: clean, punctual, without a single line of unforeseen events in the observations field.

The office doors opened behind him.

Erick didn’t turn around. He didn’t need to. The security system would have vaporized anyone else before the second hinge, and besides, he recognized those footsteps. Or rather, he recognized their absence. Jade didn’t make noise when she walked; she made noise when she wanted to be heard, and at that moment she did. The light tap of her boots against the floor was an announcement, a courtesy of an assassin, her equivalent of knocking on the door.

From the darkness that swallowed the back of the room, she slowly emerged, first as an outline, then as color. Her green combat clothes clung to her body as if sewn onto her skin, leaving her legs exposed as far as her high boots climbed up her calves. Her two sais hung crossed at her waist, clean, which meant that the night had not demanded blood. Her black hair, loose, still carried the scent of wind from high altitudes.

She walked slowly around the armchair, rested her hands on the backrest, and leaned in until her lips were a finger’s breadth from his ear.

“Good evening, boss. I’ve completed another search.”

The whisper came out warm, deliberately drawn out, laden with the provocation she exuded with the same naturalness with which she breathed. Erick smiled succinctly, his eyes still scanning the numbers.

“I saw it. Four minutes ahead of schedule.” He moved two fingers and the table rearranged itself, consolidating the totals into a single circular graph that slowly spun in the air. A slice of it glowed green. “With this, we’ve reached thirty percent of all the cataloged metal we currently have on the planet.”

Jade whistled softly, the sound vibrating against his neck.

“A third of the cake in such a short time. We should celebrate.”

“We should be worried.” He enlarged the chart with a gesture. “Thirty percent is exactly where the luck runs out. Up until now, we’ve been stealing from people who didn’t even know what they had. Forgotten fragments, research samples, curiosities from display cases. Nobody cross-references reports from a museum in Toronto with those from a laboratory in Prague. But from this point on, I believe the bigger leagues will start to see the pattern. Insurance companies talk to each other. Agencies too. When someone draws a map of all the thefts from the last month, they’ll see what we see: someone is collecting Nth Metal. And then protection will change to a whole new level.”

Jade slid down the backrest and moved to the front of the armchair, sitting on the edge of the holographic table with a fluid movement, facing him, one leg crossed over the other. The light from the screens streamed down her profile, and Erick noticed, not for the first time, that she looked prettier when she was thinking about work than when she was trying to be pretty.

“You’re right, boss.” The playful tone receded slightly, giving way to the professional the League of Shadows had honed since childhood. “We’ll need more planning if we want to continue using your new servants. They’re helping a lot, I admit. More than I expected. But you know as well as I do that they’re limited in certain ways.”

“Elaborate.”

She raised a finger. “They don’t improvise. You give an order, they execute the order, literally, down to the last detail, and if the scenario changes mid-way, they don’t adapt anything, they just force the original execution with more violence.” A second finger. “They don’t go unnoticed. They can come and go unseen, but when they are seen, and they will be eventually, nobody forgets. There’s no such thing as a discreet version of something like that.” A third finger. “And they leave a trail for those who know how to look. I’m not talking about cameras. I’m talking about the other kind of people. The kind who can smell sulfur from an ocean away.”

Erick nodded slowly. None of this was new to him, but hearing her list her weaknesses aloud had its own unique value. Jade thought like a hunter because she had been hunted her entire life, and that perspective was a tool none of his artificial intelligences could replicate.

“This smokescreen you’re creating works today,” she continued, leaning slightly forward, her green eyes fixed on his. “Everyone’s looking for monsters, nobody’s looking for a woman. But a smokescreen is just that, smoke. Strong enough wind and it disappears. If the Justice League gets involved in this investigation, and with this many incidents it’s only a matter of time, they have people capable of sniffing out the difference between a demon acting on its own and a demon acting under command. And the day they ask that question, the next question will be who’s holding the leash.”

Erick closed his eyes for a moment, his fingers interlaced over his abdomen, and let her reasoning settle upon his.

She didn’t know, or perhaps she did know and had the elegance not to say, that the smokescreen hadn’t been designed to protect the operation. It had been designed to protect her. If Jade had continued alone at that pace, robbing vault after vault around the world, the pattern would point to a single silhouette. A female thief with superhuman skill, bearing the training signature of the League of Shadows. The list of suspects would have three names, and hers would be at the top. She would become the most wanted person on the planet, the perfect scapegoat for every missing gram, and the League of Shadows, always eager for a pretext, would gladly lead the hunt.

Erick didn’t build pieces only to burn them later. That’s why the demons were the faces. That’s why each of Jade’s major heists happened within the same timeframe that a servant caused a noisy incident on another continent, polluting any line of investigation with monstrous clues. The main culprits, when the bill came due, would be creatures without names, addresses, or families to pay for them.

He scratched his eyebrow and reopened his eyes.

“We’ll have to take safer measures. Greater rotation between servos, less predictable attack windows, and starting next week I want a false interval. Fifteen days without any theft anywhere. Let whoever is putting the puzzle together think the collector got what he wanted and stopped.”

“And in the meantime?”

“Meanwhile, reconnaissance. You map out the remaining large targets without touching any of them.”

Jade smiled slightly, approvingly. Then, with that seamless transition only she could make between assassin and woman, she slid off the table and settled into the wide arm of his armchair. Her arm encircled Erick’s head and pulled him with gentle firmness, resting it against her chest, and her fingers began to run through his hair in slow movements, drawing circles on his scalp.

Erick couldn’t resist. He had learned, over the course of that month, that resisting Jade’s affection was a pointless battle. And, if he were honest with himself, which he made a point of being, the touch felt good. Her warmth, the rhythm of her fingers, the steady beat of her heart against his temple. The body he had rebuilt cell by cell didn’t need that. Some other part of him, older than any project, did.

“Boss,” she said, her voice now lower, almost domestic, “answer me one thing. Isn’t the amount you have now enough for you to start your projects? Thirty percent of what exists on the planet. That’s more metal than most governments will ever see in their lifetime.”

Erick smiled against the fabric of her clothes, savoring the affection for a few more seconds before replying.

“More than enough. With this quantity, I can already build quite a lot. The first applications are already in the production queue, and the rest of the stock gives me room for error, which is a luxury I’ve rarely had.” He paused, and his tone shifted slightly, cooling down. “The problem was never whether it’s enough. The problem is whether it’s enough in time.”

Jade’s fingers paused for a split second in his hair. She recognized that shade.

“At the time of that?”

Instead of answering, Erick raised his hand and twisted his wrist. The holographic table reacted, and the thievery tables dissolved, replaced by a globe that inflated to dominate the center of the room, slowly rotating on its axis. On the planet’s blue and gray surface, red dots began to light up. First dozens, then hundreds, scattered across all the continents without any apparent geographical pattern. Some glowed brightly, almost pulsating. Others were dark, almost faded spots, like old scars.

“The brighter spots are recent hotspots,” he explained, straightening up in his armchair, though without moving away from it. “The darker ones are the older ones. Each one marks a detection. And look at the timeline.”

He dragged an invisible control through the air, and the globe rewound. A year ago, the dots were rare, a scattered handful, weeks apart. As time moved back to the present, they multiplied in visible progression, the intervals shortening, the clusters forming.

“In the last year, the number of incidents has been increasing exponentially. At the current rate, in six months this will cease to be an anomaly and become routine.”

Jade studied the globe with narrowed eyes, her hand still resting on his shoulder.

“And what would that incidence be?”

Erick’s face furrowed, and when he spoke, each word came out heavy, carefully chosen.

“Extraterrestrial energy. More precisely, portal energy. The signature is similar to that of the zeta tube the League uses; I know that reading by heart, I’ve traveled through it. But it’s not the same. It’s related, not a sister.” He pointed to one of the brightest points, over Eastern Europe. “The zeta tube needs a focal point. A platform, a receiving structure, a fixed address at both ends. This energy doesn’t need any of that. It tears through space wherever it wants, whenever it wants. It can appear at any moment, anywhere on this globe, without warning and without infrastructure.”

He let the silence do its work for a moment, the globe spinning between them, speckled with red wounds.

“And I feel this is more complicated than I imagine. There are things in the galaxy, outside this planet, far more dangerous than you can imagine, Jade. I’ve already encountered one of them. One. And that was almost enough.”

He didn’t need to say the name. She had seen the recordings of what remained of that Gotham city block, and she had seen, above all, what was almost all left of it.

Jade stared at the globe, reflecting. Her face slowly hardened, not from fear, but from calculation, weighing something that bothered her more than any red dot on that map. Ever since she’d met Erick, however young he was, however much his work was just beginning, he carried an unwavering confidence. Not the noisy arrogance of the men she used to kill for contracts, but something rarer and more frightening: the silent certainty of someone who had already done the math and knew the numbers added up. She had never seen him hesitate. Not in the face of the League of Shadows, nor in the face of things that made the League of Shadows seem like a neighborhood club.

And now that same man was preparing. Stockpiling metal like someone stockpiling food before winter, building in silence, speeding up deadlines.

“If he’s planning something big,” she thought, and felt a wave of hesitation wash over her chest like a cold draft, “then that something is really big.”

Her fingers resumed their movement in his hair, more by instinct than intention, while her mind continued working.

It’s good that at least he’s preparing. The thought came bitterly, tempered by comparison. If it were the League, they’d put me on the front line without telling me what I was up against, and I’d be lucky to get out alive. Lucky, and no thanks.

It was impossible not to compare. One month. She had only been working for him for a month, and in that time she had evolved more than in entire years under the shadow of Ra’s al Ghul. The air elemental connected to her soul had multiplied her abilities in ways she was still discovering, granting her speed, lightness, and powers she never imagined possessing. And he had fulfilled the other part of the agreement as well, without delay, without hidden clauses: the organ attached to her body worked day and night, and each week she felt her own physical strength grow exponentially, the old limits becoming ridiculous in the rearview mirror. She had never felt so strong in her entire life. And all thanks to him.

She had worked for the League of Shadows since she was a girl. Since before she understood what work was. And in all those years, she only gave. She gave her body, she gave her blood, she gave her childhood, she gave her soul in installments, and in return she received promises that never came and a leash that tightened more with each birthday. It was the first time, the first time in her entire existence, that someone had truly invested in her. That someone had looked at Jade Nguyen and seen not a tool to be used up, but an asset to be valued. Resources to prosper, to grow, to be something more.

And she couldn’t help but think that only he would do that. Only he was capable of looking at a discarded assassin and deciding she was worth an empire of resources.

“If my master is worried,” she concluded, “and the word ‘master’ no longer stung inside as it had on the first day, then I’d better redouble my efforts to get what he needs.”

A certainty settled in her heart, quiet and definitive like a blade returning to its sheath. She would break her own limits, as many times as necessary, to provide what was needed. Not out of fear. She knew obedience born of fear too intimately to confuse it with that. Out of something she didn’t yet have the courage to name.

His voice shattered her thoughts.

“There’s one more thing I want you to see.”

Erick rotated the screen once more. The globe shrank to one corner, and a video window materialized in the central space. The image was poor, distorted, grainy, with interference bands cutting across the frames, as if it had been captured by an old, dying camera. Coordinates and a date stamp flickered at the bottom.

“That image was difficult to get,” he said, and in Erick’s vocabulary, who had access to practically every system on the planet, “difficult” was a word Jade had never heard him use before.

The video started playing.

An open field, nighttime, some abandoned industrial yard. For two seconds, nothing. Then the air in the center of the frame tore. It didn’t open, it ripped, like fabric giving way, and from the tear exploded a cylinder of light and wind, a great tube made of energy spinning on itself, spewing wind in all directions. The dust of the yard rose in circular waves, debris rolling out of the frame, and the camera shook with the force of the air displacement.

From inside the tube, crates began to emerge. Large, metallic, dumped in sequence, bouncing heavily on the concrete floor and stopping at the feet of a group of men waiting on the edge of the gale. Black uniforms, tactical vests, balaclavas covering each face. None of them recoiled before the portal. None showed surprise. They moved with the bored routine of stevedores unloading a truck, dragging the crates out of the wind’s reach even before the tube closed.

The tear collapsed in on itself and disappeared. The video froze on the last frame.

“Intergang,” Erick said.

Jade frowned, her eyes still fixed on the frozen boxes on the screen. She knew Intergang by reputation and from a few contracts that came too close: organized crime with weaponry that no land-based arms dealer could explain, technology that appeared out of nowhere in the hands of street thugs and turned street shootouts into war zones.

“And what could they possibly be achieving?” she asked, her voice low. “And where is it coming from?”

Erick remained silent for a long moment. When he finally responded, the furrow in his brow had deepened into something Jade had never seen in him before. It wasn’t fear. It was the recognition of an opponent whose size he had already gauged, and whose size displeased him.

“I have a suspicion.” He didn’t name it, and his refusal to name it said more than any name would. “And if it really is what I imagine, we won’t be talking about organized crime, or invasion, or war. We will be facing an unparalleled calamity in the coming months. Something for which this entire planet, with all its heroes, is not prepared.”

He turned off the video with a curt gesture.

“I need to speed up my plans.”

Jade felt a cold, sharp pang of anguish rise in her chest. Not because of the threat itself; threats were the native language of her life. But because of the arithmetic she had unintentionally performed: if he, who had faced what he had faced and survived what he had survived, felt it necessary to run, then the clock ticking was of a size she preferred not to imagine.

Silence stretched between the two, a silence inhabited by the globe and its red dots.

Then Erick spoke, in a loud and clear voice, and the subject changed with the abruptness of someone who had already decided this days ago and was just waiting for the right moment.

“I want you to prepare your mother.”

Jade stood motionless. Completely motionless, in that way that only assassins can be, when even breathing seems to ask permission.

“I’ve found a cure for her condition,” he continued, his eyes meeting hers without flinching. “It’s ready, tested, and validated. Next week, I want you to bring it to me.” A short pause. “Bring Artemis too.”

For a moment, Jade said nothing, because there was nothing inside her organized enough to become words. And then the smile came, and it came whole, without the veneer of provocation, without calculation, a smile that made, for a second, all the red dots on the globe cease to exist.

Her mother. Her mother was finally going to return to normal. After all those years trapped in that chair, trapped in that body that prison and life had broken, her mother was finally going to be able to be what she once was. To walk. To run, if she wanted. To live without depending on the weary charity of two daughters who barely spoke to each other.

The League had promised her this. It was because of this promise that Jade accepted the collar, it was because of this promise that she donated years and blood, and the promise was never more than renewed bait for each mission. He had promised the same thing in a dark shed, a month ago. And here it was, fulfilled, delivered with the same naturalness with which one delivers a report.

But along with the joy, in the same heartbeat, came the weight. She felt it settle in her chest, solid and familiar.

Because from the moment her mother was healed, they would know. The League of Shadows kept a close eye on Paula Crock precisely for that reason, to ensure the bait remained bait. A paraplegic woman who regains the ability to walk doesn’t go unnoticed by those watching. And when they knew, they would also know that someone had given Jade what they used to control her, which meant the leash had been cut. She knew her former masters all too well. The League will hunt me down, she thought, without drama, like someone witnessing the rain. They hate it when someone plays with their toys.

That’s when Erick’s hand landed on her thigh.

The touch was firm, warm, without anything furtive. An anchor, not an advance. She lowered her eyes to his hand and then raised them to his face, and found there a calmness that disarmed her more than any weapon ever had.

“Rest assured,” he said, and the confidence in his voice wasn’t consolation, it was information. “I know what this cure means and I know what it will cause. It’s all within the calculations. And I believe I’m reaching a point where, very soon, we can exterminate the League of Assassins. Not run from it. Not negotiate with it. Exterminate it.”

He said the last word the same way he said all the others, without emphasis, without theatrics, and that was exactly what made hope ignite in Jade’s heart. A hope she hadn’t felt since childhood, before she learned that hope was a luxury that assassins couldn’t carry into the field.

Because, after all, up until now her master hadn’t made a single mistake. Not one. Every promise kept, every plan executed, every enemy accurately assessed. He could still improve, of course. He was still young, still had much to learn, and she had seen him bleed enough to know he wasn’t invincible. But in everything she had witnessed that month, he had only demonstrated great capabilities and unparalleled greatness. If there was anyone in the world capable of saying “let’s exterminate the League of Assassins” and turning that into a timeline, that someone was sitting in that armchair with his hand on her thigh.

Jade stared at his hand for a moment longer. Then she leaned in slowly and placed a lingering kiss on his neck, where his pulse rested, feeling the warmth of his skin against her lips.

“I have to go,” he murmured, straightening up. “The metal isn’t going to collect itself.”

She slid off the arm of the armchair and walked towards the doors, her steps returning to absolute silence, the provocation returning to her walk. She was almost reaching the exit when Erick’s voice reached her from behind the armchair, without him turning around.

“If you need help, contact us. We now have services for different types of situations.”

Jade couldn’t help but shudder.

Servants. The word was too small for these things. She had seen one up close, just once, bent over obediently beside its master, its ruined eyes fixed on the ground, and the memory still sent shivers down her spine. Useful, undoubtedly. Dangerous in a way that made the League of Shadows seem honest. And she wondered, not for the first time: who is crazy enough to make a pact with this kind of creature?

The answer was sitting in the armchair behind her, analyzing a disaster map like someone reviewing a shopping list.

But—and this she thought as the doors opened—apparently her new master had a very tight leash around the necks of these new servants. She had seen the creature obey. She had seen the reverent terror with which that thing, straight out of a nightmare, looked at a man in his early twenties. And she couldn’t help but feel a shiver inside, a chill that wasn’t just fear, imagining how strong someone has to be to tame a creature like that. How strong he would become.

She left the room smiling.

The doors closed behind her, and the office returned to its machine-like silence. Erick remained in the armchair, alone with the globe. The red dots were still there, patient, silently multiplying across the planet’s surface, each one a conflict preparing to explode. He stared at them for a long time, his fingers interlaced in front of his face, and began to rearrange the timeline in his head.

Winter was arriving sooner than he had anticipated.

Better this way. He never functioned well with too much free time.