Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0138

The sphere rested in the center of the counter as if it knew it was the most valuable object in that room.

Erick had been sitting before it for almost twenty minutes, his chin resting on his intertwined fingers, his eyes scanning the silvery surface that reflected the laboratory light in slightly iridescent hues, as if there were a second layer of color hidden beneath the metal, visible only when glanced sideways. Fifty-seven grams. He had weighed it himself. A ridiculous fraction compared to what lay dormant in the main vault, three floors below, but enough for what he needed that night: to understand.

Sixty kilograms. That was the number Jade had accumulated in the last few weeks, gram by gram, vault by vault, university by university, collector by collector. Sixty kilograms of Nth Metal, and Erick was almost certain that, on the entire planet, only Lex Luthor possessed a larger reserve. The thought brought a short smile to his face. The bald man from Metropolis didn’t know it yet, but his name was at the end of a list, and the list was getting shorter every night.

The problem was that the world had begun to notice.

The panel to the left of the counter displayed, in discreet columns, the reports that Morgana filtered daily: insurance companies exchanging notifications between continents, three government agencies opening parallel investigations, an internal Interpol memo classifying the thefts as a “coordinated pattern of unknown origin.” Since the collection crossed the mark of thirty percent of the metal cataloged on the planet, doors had begun to close. Display cases that were once protected by a sleepy guard now had armed escorts. Research samples had been transferred to military installations. The false fifteen-day interval, which he himself had ordered the previous week, was serving exactly the intended purpose: to let the puzzle cool down in the hands of those trying to assemble it.

Still, if it was online, he could find it. That was an advantage that no insurance company could neutralize.

“Let’s see what you’re really made of,” he murmured to the sphere.

He reached out and enveloped her with his fingers. The contact brought that sensation he hadn’t yet been able to precisely name in any report: it wasn’t heat, it wasn’t vibration, it was something closer to recognition. As if the metal knew it was being held and didn’t mind. Fifty-seven grams was far too little to alter a body, he knew that from the data Jade had bought from the information broker, but his refined senses picked up a residual benefit, subtle as a current of warm air in a cold room. A minimal lightness in the joints of his hand. An almost imperceptible clarity at the tips of his nerves.

Symbiotic affinity. That was the term the documents used, and Erick was beginning to understand why. The metal wasn’t sentient; Morgana’s tests had ruled out any neural structure or autonomous response pattern, but it adapted to the wearer in a way no earthly alloy could. Accelerated pseudo-regeneration in modest quantities. Flight in larger quantities, free floating, speed. Vacuum breathing. Innate resistance to magic. Each property alone would be worth a war. All together, in the same material, they were worth what he was paying: risk, money, and the growing attention of the planet’s authorities.

He opened his palm and let the fire come.

Flames shot up his fingers and enveloped the sphere in an orange crown that quickly darkened to blue and then to a furious white. Erick poured energy without restraint, the air above the workbench rippling with thermal distortion, the lab sensors firing silent warnings that he dismissed with a flick of his chin. The sphere shifted from dull red to yellow, from yellow to incandescent white, glowing in his hand like a miniature star.

And he didn’t give in.

No deformation. No softening of the surface. Erick tightened his fingers around the incandescent mass, his own body immune to the heat that would make ordinary steel melt like wax, and felt the metal resist the pressure with the same indifference with which it resisted the temperature. He maintained the flow for another two full minutes, draining from himself an amount of energy that would have reduced a city block to smoldering rubble, and the result was the same: light, heat, and a perfectly spherical sphere.

He extinguished the flames and placed the metal on the ceramic countertop. The sphere glowed like a live ember, illuminating the room with an orange glow that painted long shadows on the walls. Erick pulled the temperature panel closer and watched the numbers plummet. In just over four minutes, the incandescent material returned to room temperature, without cracks, without any change in color, without a single mark of what it had just been through.

“Absurd heat dissipation,” he noted aloud, and the system registered it. “Melting point higher than anything I could generate on my own. If there’s a forge capable of shaping this, it’s not a forge from around here.”

He moved on to the next measurements with the methodicalness of someone who had already designed the protocol weeks before. Conductivity first. He connected the electrodes, ran the battery of tests, and watched the results form on the panel with a slowly raising eyebrow. The best known conductor on Earth looked like a piece of wet wood in comparison. The efficiency of the Nth Metal didn’t just surpass terrestrial standards by a margin, it surpassed them by multiples, with energy loss so close to zero that the instruments needed to recalibrate twice before accepting their own reading.

Erick leaned back in his chair and stared at the graph for a long moment.

A material with that conductivity changed everything. Reactors. Armor. The arcane circuits that Morgana had been designing ever since the two of them had deciphered the black tome. Every project shelved due to material limitations had just gained a solution, provided he could work with the metal. And there lay the crux of the matter.

He pulled out the tray of runic instruments.

Resistance to magic was simultaneously the metal’s greatest virtue and its greatest obstacle. A material that negated arcane energy protected its wearer from spells, curses, and compulsions, and Erick had very personal reasons for valuing protection against compulsions. But the same material, in theory, would refuse any enchantment he tried to engrave on it. If the theory were entirely correct, sixty kilograms of potential would be limited by natural properties. If it were partially wrong, he would have in his hands the basis for the greatest technological and arcane leap of his life.

There was only one way to find out.

He chose the simplest rune from the repertoire, a basic single-line levitation, one of the first he had mastered in his months of study. He dipped the stylus in the conductive compound, fixed the sphere in the support, and traced the symbol with the precision of someone who had already engraved that same shape hundreds of times in steel, titanium, and ceramic. The line settled. The surface accepted the compound. Up to that point, nothing unusual.

Erick channeled a thread of arcane energy through the tip of the stiletto and activated the rune.

The sphere trembled, hesitated, and rose.

He leaned forward, his eyes fixed on the metal that floated a hand’s breadth from the workbench, spinning slowly on its own axis. It worked. Contrary to everything the available literature claimed, the rune had taken. He instinctively began timing it, and it was a good thing he did, because at forty-three seconds the sphere’s rotation lost its rhythm, the levitation swayed like a candle in a draft, and the metal fell, bouncing once on the ceramic plate before rolling to the edge of the workbench.

Erick caught it before it hit the ground. He turned the surface towards the light.

The rune was fading. Not burned, not corrupted, not shattered as happened when an enchantment failed due to a mistake in the stroke. It was being erased, line by line, like chalk on a damp cloth, the conductive compound losing cohesion and the arcane geometry unraveling before his eyes. In less than a minute, the sphere was smooth again, silvery and untouched, as if nothing had ever been written there.

He scratched his chin, and the gesture was accompanied by a smile.

Any other researcher would have recorded that as a failure. Erick recorded it as the best news of the night. Metal didn’t reject magic. Metal digested magic. They were completely different things. An impermeable wall offered no entry point; a system that absorbed and dissolved enchantments offered a mechanism, and mechanisms could be studied, circumvented, saturated, deceived. If the rune had held for forty-three seconds, there was a window. If there was a window, there was a way to keep it open.

“Morgana,” he called.

The air to the right of the counter flickered, and the hooded figure took shape, shadow and code in equal measure. Before he could say anything, she had already pulled the test records toward her, the data trickling in golden columns along the edge of the hologram.

“Forty-three seconds of adhesion,” she said, and there was in her voice that restrained appetite that Erick recognized as her equivalent of enthusiasm. “You realize what that means. The rate of dissolution isn’t instantaneous. There’s a decay constant, and constants can be modeled.”

“I can already see you modeling.” He twirled the sphere between his fingers. “I want three approaches. First: vary the complexity of the rune and measure whether larger structures decay faster or slower. Second: test conductive ink compositions, including the formulas from the tome. Third: the Engineer comes in with the physical part; I want to know if micro-etching below the surface changes the absorption rate.”

“The engineer will complain that magic isn’t his department.”

“The engineer has been complaining about everything ever since I compiled it. Let him deal with you.”

Morgana’s cloak rippled in what might have been a laugh. The panels around the room began to rearrange themselves as she distributed tasks among the processing cores, and for a few seconds Erick simply watched the lab work, that silent orchestra he had built piece by piece in a basement that had once been nothing but concrete and mold.

But modeling took time. Trial and error took time. And even with Morgana devouring data at a speed only an intelligence like hers could achieve, the two of them would be reinventing from scratch knowledge that perhaps already existed, stored in the memory of someone who had spent centuries collecting exactly that kind of secret.

The image arrived uninvited: violet hair framing a smile that always seemed to know more than it said, and those white eyes, bottomless wells of milk that had once tried to enter his mind without asking permission.

Story.

The relationship between the two had changed since that first night in the store. The monthly visits she had demanded as payment had transformed, over the past few weeks, into something Erick didn’t quite know how to classify. They weren’t lessons; she had never taught him anything directly. They were conversations in which she asked questions that were worth more than answers, corrected his course with a casual comment, and left him with the uncomfortable feeling of having been evaluated by criteria he didn’t understand. A drip-feed approach, calculated to keep him interested without ever delivering enough.

She knew about metals imbued with magic. She knew about things the books of the Black Tome only touched upon. And she charged dearly for everything, always, in coins that were rarely money.

Erick looked at the sphere in the palm of his hand, weighed the risk against time, and time lost.

He picked up the phone.

…

The car cruised through the streets of Gotham like a thought crossing a distracted mind: present, silent, and completely ignored by everything around it.

Tala was leaning back in the sedan’s back seat, her legs crossed under her dark dress, a worn-covered book open on her lap. It was a charming first edition of a treatise on minor pacts, written by a bohemian demonologist she had known personally and who had died, poor thing, exactly the way chapter seven warned against dying. She turned the page with the tip of her finger, savoring the irony as one savors wine.

In the front seat, nobody was driving.

The steering wheel turned on its own in smooth corrections, the pedals sank and rose under nonexistent feet, and the turn signal activated with a courtesy most living Gotham drivers never displayed. Tala had dispensed with human drivers more than half a century ago. They aged, asked questions, and had the inconvenient habit of eavesdropping. A well-tied driving spell did none of those three things.

The invitation from that night still amused her.

She really intended to call the boy. The intention had been brewing for days, fueled by whispered reports from her contacts in the arcane underworld: someone was emptying the world of Nth Metal, and the few minds capable of operating on that scale formed a shortlist in which the young man from Gotham occupied an uncomfortably high position. Tala had been wondering how long it would take him to stumble upon the obvious problem with the material, and how much the solution would be worth when he did.

And then her phone rang first.

There was something delightful about being surprised, when one lived long enough for surprises to become rare. The boy had not only stumbled upon the problem at the expected speed; he had decided, on his own, that she was the solution. Initiative. It was one of the qualities that had made her invest those monthly visits in him, along with the hunger in her eyes and that stubborn flame that had once burned her compulsion like paper in a bonfire. Few mortals did that. Even fewer did it at sixteen, seventeen, or however old he was.

The car left the congested arteries of the city center and glided towards the upscale neighborhoods, where the buildings stopped competing for space and began competing for grandeur. Stone walls covered in ivy. Iron gates bearing the coats of arms of families who had bought their own history. The old aristocracy of Gotham, rotting elegantly behind trimmed hedges.

When the car slowed down in front of a specific gate, Tala closed the book.

She knew that property. She had dined there once, a little over a century ago, when the name on the deed was different and the owner was a superstitious patriarch who collected relics he didn’t understand and paid fortunes for protection against curses that didn’t exist. She had sold him three useless amulets for an obscene price and a pleasant evening of conversation. The man had been dead for decades, the lineage had dwindled as all lineages did, and the house, it seemed, had ended up in the boy’s hands. Tala wondered if he knew what some of those old vultures had buried in the gardens over the generations. Probably so. He seemed the type to dig.

The gate opened without anyone touching it, which she appreciated as a professional courtesy among people who didn’t need hands for simple tasks. The car drove along a long avenue, lined with ancient trees and an impeccably maintained lawn, until it reached the roundabout where a carved stone fountain sprayed illuminated water against the night sky. The sedan circled the fountain and stopped before the main staircase, where granite gargoyles flanked the entrance with their centuries-old grimaces.

And at the foot of the stairs, in a dark suit without a tie, the host waited.

The car door opened by itself. Tala got out slowly, letting her dress settle, and raised her white eyes to the young man who was descending the last steps to meet her.

“Good evening, Tala. Always so beautiful.” Erick inclined his head in a greeting that managed to be both respectful and cheeky at the same time. “I wonder if you ever wake up looking disheveled.”

She approached and placed her hand on the open palm he offered. Erick bent down and kissed her fingers with the nonchalance of someone born in the wrong century.

“So young and so charming,” she said, her lips curving slowly. “If he keeps this up, I’ll eventually get used to him.”

“Then I will continue.”

He offered her his arm. She accepted, and the two climbed the staircase side by side, passing between the gargoyles that seemed to follow them with their stony eyes. The double doors opened before them into a high-ceilinged hall, where an antique chandelier shared the task of illuminating with modern recessed lights that someone had installed with enough taste that the two eras did not clash.

“Would you like a tour of the house?” Erick asked. “Or would you prefer to get straight down to business?”

Tala’s eyes swept across the hall, along the dark wooden handrail of the double staircase, to the exact spot where, a hundred or so years before, a pompous portrait of the former patriarch had hung his vanity.

“I visited this house a century ago, darling. The wallpaper was worse, and so was the company.” She turned her white eyes to him. “Why don’t we get to work?”

Erick smiled, without even bothering to feign surprise at the information, and she added another discreet point to the assessment that always lingered in the back of her mind. He guided her through the hall to a service door that didn’t match the rest of the house: brushed steel, reinforced frame, and a security panel that activated when they both approached.

A bluish light swept over them both from head to toe. Tala felt, along with the electronic scan, a second, finer touch, gliding across the surface of her aura like a finger reading braille. Arcane detection intertwined with the physical system. She raised an eyebrow, genuinely pleased. The door opened with a hydraulic sigh, revealing a wide staircase leading down to the basement.

And the underground impressed her.

It wasn’t a basement. It was a complex. The main corridor stretched before them as wide as an avenue, its high ceiling lined with tracks of lighting that flickered as they advanced, and tunnels upon tunnels branched off from the walls, access points sealed by doors identical to the one at the top of the stairs, each promising an entire wing she couldn’t decipher from there. There was power down there. Not the raw power of magical places, but something more alien to her senses: organized, disciplined energy coursing through veins of metal and glass in almost complete silence.

“Impressive,” he admitted.

“I’m just getting started.” Erick walked beside her, hands in his pockets, unhurried. “I haven’t even lived in this house for eleven months, and it’s already given me more trouble than any project I’ve ever worked on. The original basement was a fifth of this size. I dug the rest.”

“You dug.”

“I have efficient methods.”

She let the reply slip away with an amused sound in the back of her throat. They traversed the complex on a brief, carefully edited tour, she noticed; he pointed out corridors and mentioned wings without ever opening most of the doors, a host generous in appearance and stingy with details. Manufacturing wing. Testing wing. An entire section he summed up as “storage” with a smile that invited no questions. Tala cataloged everything, especially what wasn’t said.

Until he stopped before a door that stood out from the others because of the very fine lines engraved on the frame, seals of restraint that she recognized at a glance and silently approved, and he opened it to the place that interested them both.

“My laboratory for arcane studies.”

Tala entered, and stopped.

She had stepped into hundreds of magical laboratories throughout the centuries. Dusty towers, candlelit crypts, Parisian studios crammed with skulls and stills, war bunkers where desperate Nazis scribbled circles with chalk and blood. All of them, without exception, shared the same visual grammar: accumulation, erudite chaos, the sacred dust of stacked grimoires.

That room didn’t speak that language.

White, continuous-surface workbenches. Glass and steel instruments aligned with millimeter precision. Translucent panels where runic diagrams floated alongside graphs of energy decay, mathematics and mystery sharing the same screen without any awkwardness. Filtered air, without a grain of dust, without a drop of melted wax, without the smell of incense that she associated with the craft since before the founding of Gotham. It looked like a chemistry lab at a wealthy university. It looked like anything but what it was.

“No books?” she asked, and there was genuine curiosity in the question.

“The books are kept in another location.” Erick closed the door behind them. “Controlled environment. Some of the volumes I acquired don’t react well to… visitors.”

“And how do you access the information you need?”

“I have my methods.”

“You have many methods, it seems.”

“Collecting them is my hobby.”

Tala frowned, torn between irritation and amusement, and chose amusement, as she almost always did with him. She followed him across the room, her heels clicking against the polished floor, to the main workbench, positioned under the best set of lights in the laboratory.

On top of it, in a ceramic stand, is a small silver sphere.

Tala’s white eyes landed on the object, and recognition was immediate. She approached, leaned over the counter, and the iridescent reflection danced on the milky surface of her eyes.

“Well, well,” she said slowly, savoring each syllable. “Where did you get that from?”

“That’s a secret.”

She extended her hand in a silent request for permission. Erick nodded. Tala lifted the sphere and weighed it in her palm, her long fingers closing around the metal, and she felt what every practitioner felt when touching Nth Metal: that peculiar silence, that dead zone where her magic arrived and simply ceased to have a voice.

“I’ve heard,” she continued, holding the sphere up to the light, “that in recent months a considerable amount of this material has been disappearing. Private vaults. Universities. Collections I knew personally. The owners are furious, the insurance companies are hysterical, and nobody has the slightest idea who the collector is.” Her white eyes slid from the sphere to his face. “Am I right?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

The smile that accompanied the sentence said everything the words denied, broad, calm, almost inviting her to imagine the worst. Tala held his gaze for a second longer than necessary, just to register that he didn’t look away, and returned the sphere to its holder.

“So,” she said, straightening up, “why do you need me?”

“A friend of mine,” Erick began, and the choice of words made the corner of her mouth tremble, “has gotten his hands on a very generous amount of this metal. And right now, he needs a method to enchant it.”

“A friend.”

“A very dear friend.”

“He must be quite a fellow.” She walked two steps along the workbench, her fingers gliding across the white surface without actually touching it, her gaze returning to the sphere. “What you’re asking of me is troublesome, and I imagine your friend already knows. This metal possesses an innate resistance to magic. It’s not a shield, it’s an appetite. It consumes arcane energy the way dry sand consumes water. Most practitioners who tried to engrave permanent enchantments on it gave up centuries ago, and the few who persisted ended up with nothing but smooth metal and wounded pride.”

Erick nodded, and she noticed that he wasn’t taking notes, wasn’t consulting anything. He was just absorbing.

“My friend came to the same conclusion empirically,” he said. “A simple rune adheres for less than a minute before being dissolved. Not rejected. Dissolved. Which tells us that the process has a fee, and fees are negotiable.”

Tala stopped walking.

For a moment, just one, she looked at him without any of the usual layers, without the flirtation, without the theatrics, without the comfortable condescension of someone who measured life in centuries. Less than a minute of connection was already more than most archmages she had known could extract from that material. And he spoke of it as an engineering mishap.

“However,” she said, readjusting her mask with the fluidity of long practice, “it’s not impossible. There are paths. Ancient, obscure ones, guarded by people who don’t answer the phone. Perhaps I can gain access to that kind of information.”

”Excellent.”

“And what do I get out of it?”

She turned to face him as she asked the question, resting her hip on the edge of the counter, her arms crossing slowly. The laboratory light, designed to eliminate shadows, failed to eliminate hers; they settled around Tala’s silhouette like a garment refusing to obey physics.

Erick smiled and pointed to his own neck with two fingers.

“Right in the throat, huh?”

Tala winked at him with her right eye, slowly and deliberately.

“Well,” he continued, “I don’t know what I can offer you that you don’t already have. Money is irrelevant to you. Artifacts, you have an entire store that doesn’t adhere to addresses. Perhaps you could ask me for something.”

The pause that followed lasted exactly the time it took to breathe, and then her lips parted in the most dangerous smile of the night.

“Are you trying to tell me that you’re going to owe me a favor?”

Erick froze.

It was subtle, a split-second stiffness in her shoulders, but she saw it, and he saw that she saw it. The words had left him with one meaning and landed on her with another, and the difference between the two meanings was an abyss with centuries of arcane jurisprudence at its bottom. An open-ended favor, without scope, without a deadline, owed to a creature like Tala, was not a payment. It was a collar waiting to be put around her neck.

“Great,” she said before he could rephrase it. “We have a deal. You owe me a favor, and I’ll bring you the method. What do you say?”

She detached herself from the counter and extended her hand, elegant, pale, motionless in the air between the two.

Erick stared at that hand.

His stomach clenched at a warning that needed no translation. He had negotiated with mobsters, with underworld brokers, with literal demons summoned in containment circles, and none of those tables had left him with that specific feeling of signing a blank page. Whatever favor she might collect, and she would collect, creatures like Tala never forgot credits, it wouldn’t be simple. It wouldn’t be cheap. And it would be collected at the exact moment when saying no cost more than saying yes.

But the numbers didn’t change because of the chill down his spine. The false interval ended in a week. Paula, Artemis, and the cure awaited him with unforgiving deadlines. Luthor remained at the bottom of the list, behind defenses that would demand every advantage he could wrest from the metal. Sixty pounds of potential slept in a vault, waiting for him to solve a problem that, alone, could take years, and he was at a point where years were a luxury that didn’t exist. It was time for more drastic measures. He had always known this time would come; he just didn’t know it would have white eyes and smell of ancient incense.

He shook her hand.

Tala’s fingers closed around his with surprising firmness, and her smile blossomed fully, satisfied, storing the moment in some intimate archive of victories.

“We have an agreement,” she said.

“We have an agreement,” Erick replied.

And somewhere deep in his mind, behind the calculations and plans and the cold satisfaction of having unlocked the next step, a small, ancient voice registered that, for the first time since he had been reborn into that world, he had just signed a contract without knowing the price.