Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0141

The elevator descended for forty-three seconds before the doors opened.

There was no sign on that complex. There was no record in the public budget, no mention in any official organizational chart, not a single line in documents that a lawyer, a journalist, or a curious senator could request. Access required three independent biometric checks, a permanent armed escort, and a level of credential that fewer than twenty people in the entire United States possessed. Buried beneath layers of reinforced concrete and Louisiana swamp, the operations center breathed to the rhythm of its own employees, a deep, continuous hum that staff learned to ignore in their first week on the job and whose absence bothered them on their first day off.

Amanda Waller never took a day off.

She stood on the elevated platform overlooking the main hall, her fingers resting on the brushed steel balustrade, her chin lifted toward the screen that stretched across the entire wall in front of her. Below her, two rows of analysts worked in near-absolute silence, their faces bathed in the cold light of the monitors, their fingers running across keyboards without anyone needing to utter a word. No one spoke loudly in that hall. No one needed to. When Waller wanted something, the entire room seemed to know before she even opened her mouth.

On the giant screen, a world map projected in dark pulsed with dozens of red dots.

Each stitch was a wound.

Two months. That was the amount of time it took for thirty percent of all cataloged Nth Metal on the planet to simply cease to exist in the hands of its owners. Corporate vaults in Germany. Private reserves in Hong Kong. An eccentric collector in Dubai who kept his bars inside a pressurized chamber on the seventieth floor. A military depot on the Indian border. Facilities protected by lasers, pressure sensors, armed guards, multi-million dollar contracts with the best private security companies in the world. None of that mattered. The red dots continued to light up, one after the other, with the patient regularity of someone crossing items off a shopping list.

And the worst part wasn’t the robbery itself.

The worst part was that that list was supposed to be hers.

The United States government had decided, months ago, in meetings not documented in any minutes, that the nation needed to consolidate as much of that metal as possible. Rare enough to be traded by the gram, with properties that federal laboratories were still far from exhausting, Nth Metal had become a strategic priority overnight. The official route took care of what could be bought: generous offers, diplomatic exchanges, politely applied commercial pressure on smaller governments. For the owners who refused any offer, there was another route. Her route. Task Force X had been tasked with recovering, so to speak, the reserves that diplomacy couldn’t reach, and during the first few weeks the operation had gone exactly as Waller had planned. Clean. Silent. Efficient.

Until the thief showed up.

At first, the disappearances seemed like mere noise. An emptied safe in Malaysia could be a local crime. A second one in Argentina, an improbable coincidence. But the targets kept falling, always reserves of Nth Metal, always without witnesses, always without a single shot fired, and the frequency curve began to rise in a way that no analyst could explain. In the last week, the number had exploded. Seven robberies in five days. And then came the data that had prompted Waller to call that meeting: two of them had happened on the same night, in different time zones, with less than four hours between one continent and another.

Randomness was no longer an acceptable hypothesis. This was an operation. And an operation of that scale, running faster than the American government machine, had ceased to be a nuisance and had become a national security problem.

Waller turned around.

Behind her, a few steps from the platform, four men waited in silence. Rick Flag, the old man, his white hair and beard framing a face that four decades of war had turned to stone, kept his hands crossed behind his back in the posture of someone who had never stopped being a soldier. Beside him, Rick Flag Jr., the younger version of the same mold, tense jaw and eyes that never left the map. A little further back, the Peacemaker occupied space as he always did, shoulders too broad, his chrome helmet under his arm, chewing something with the tranquility of someone waiting in line at the movies. And closing the group, Bloodthirsty, leaning against a column with his arms crossed, the sniper’s gaze silently scanning the screen, cataloging.

“So, gentlemen,” said Waller, and the entire room seemed to lower its volume by a tone. “What do you have for me? Have you discovered who’s responsible for this yet?”

Flag, the old man, stepped forward. “Madam.”

He approached the platform’s side console and typed a short sequence. The world map receded into the corner of the screen, giving way to a grainy security camera image: a concrete corridor, industrial lighting, the date and time stamp flashing in the lower corner.

Flag pressed play.

For a split second, nothing. Then a black blur crossed the frame from left to right, and the image returned to showing only the empty corridor.

The recording switched to a second camera. Another angle, another corridor, the same blur cutting across the screen, this time close to the wall. The third camera came next, and it was there that the faces around the platform zoomed in: the figure was no longer on the ground. It was running vertically along the wall, ignoring gravity with the same ease with which it ignored the sensors, the alarms, and the eight guards on duty at the facility that night.

“Slow down the video,” Waller ordered.

“It’s already at the maximum reduction the system allows,” Flag replied, without taking his eyes off the screen. “What you’re seeing is the slowest we’ve managed to set it.”

Waller narrowed his eyes. “A sprinter?”

“Possible, but not conclusive.” The answer came from Flag Jr., who had stepped aside to side with his father. “There’s no residual energy trail, no thermal distortion in the air, nothing of the sort that recorded speedsters usually leave behind. We only know it’s fast. Fast enough to turn our cameras into ornaments.”

“Fast enough to make me feel bad about my time in the forty meters,” commented the Peacemaker, still chewing.

Nobody laughed. He didn’t seem to care.

Flag fast-forwarded the recording. The fourth camera belonged to another safe, another country, another date stamp, and this time the figure did something it hadn’t done in any of the previous recordings.

It stopped.

Standing before the door of a maximum-security vault, the blur condensed into a person, and the entire room seemed to tilt a few centimeters toward the screen. It was a woman. The silhouette left no room for doubt, the black suit clinging to her body outlining curves that no image distortion could disguise, and at the same time revealing absolutely nothing beyond that. No face. No skin. No emblem, stitching, manufacturer’s mark, any detail that a database could chew up. A uniform designed by someone who understood exactly what cameras were looking for and had decided not to give them anything.

The woman reached into her own clothing and removed small objects that the camera’s resolution reduced to faint blurs between her fingers. She brought them close to the safe door.

And the door opened.

No explosion. No spark. No groan of forced metal. Forty tons of steel and locking mechanisms deemed inviolable by the manufacturer simply turned on their hinges, gently, as if the lock itself had decided to cooperate.

Waller felt the faces around her close in on hers.

On screen, the woman entered the vault. The timer ran. Three minutes and twelve seconds later, she reappeared at the door, and in the next frame there was no one left, just the black blur crossing the last corridor and the entire facility waking up too late, alarms finally going off to protect an empty room.

“Go back to the vault scene,” Waller said.

Flag rewound the recording and froze the frame at the instant when the silhouette was clearest, standing in front of the door.

Waller stepped up a step, approaching the screen, and studied the image with the patience of someone who has interrogated monsters before. “Do you have any clue who this is?”

“Difficult to say,” replied Flag, the old man. “We processed what we could gather. Motion analysis, gait biometrics, comparison with all the cataloged meta-humans, ours and those of foreign agencies. Nothing matched. No fingerprints at the scenes, no genetic material, no tissue fibers. This woman doesn’t make mistakes, ma’am. Or hasn’t yet.”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Waller said. “Some just take longer.” She let the silence settle for a second before asking the question that really mattered. “And the next target? Do you have any idea who it will be?”

“That was a little easier to define.” Flag typed again, and the map returned to the center of the screen, now with red dots accompanied by a few yellow circles, scattered irregularly across the globe. “However random the collections may seem, they aren’t. We cross-referenced the complete history of thefts with the inventory of what remains on the market. The pattern exists. She’s clearing reserves by density and vulnerability, in that order. If the behavior continues, we can project the targets with a reasonable margin.” He pointed to the yellow circles. “These are the largest concentrations of Nth Metal still outside our control. That’s where she’ll appear. It’s just a matter of which one first.”

Waller stared at the yellow circles for a long moment.

That’s when one of the first-level analysts spun in her chair, her headset still clipped to her ear, her face pale under the light of the monitors.

“Director. Interception of police channel in Johannesburg. Confirmation of a break-in at the Silverline Holdings warehouse seventeen minutes ago. The shipment of Nth Metal… is no longer there.”

All eyes turned to the map in time to see one of the yellow circles in the southern hemisphere change color, the yellow drowning in red before the entire room. No one said a word for three seconds. It was no longer a delayed report, a video from days ago, a point added to the history. It was their list shrinking in real time, while they discussed how to protect it.

The Peacemaker let out a low whistle. “She works during the day now. What dedication.”

“Or there’s more than one,” said the Bloodthirsty One, his eyes still on the map. “No one covers the planet at this pace alone. I bet my contract there’s a structure behind it. Logistics, intelligence, transport. The girl in black is just the tip of the iceberg that appears on camera.”

It was the same conclusion Waller had been putting off for days, because accepting it changed the nature of the problem. A metahuman thief was a hunt. An organization with that reach, that discipline, and that appetite was a different category of threat, one that didn’t end with a pair of restraining handcuffs.

“That’s it,” she said, and the word came out with the weight of an executive order. “I want the team prepared for approach. Scale the assets, set up the perimeter, cover the priority targets. We need to locate where the rest of the metal will be and bring it all back to the nation before this woman empties the shelf. Was I clear?”

The four nodded, each in their own way. Flag with the rigidity of someone who was already mentally planning the logistics. Flag Jr. with a single, dry movement of his chin. Bloodthirsty straightened up from the column, which for him was equivalent to a solemn oath. And Peacemaker tucked his helmet under his other arm and smiled.

“Just so you know,” he said, “if the mission is to ambush a mysterious woman dressed in black who runs along the walls, I’m in. For peace, obviously.”

“Obviously,” repeated the Bloodthirsty One, without any inflection.

Waller no longer heard them. She had returned to staring at the frozen silhouette on the side of the screen, and behind the impassive expression that thirty years of service had forged onto her face, frustration simmered. This operation should have been the simplest of Task Force X’s recent career. Recovering metal from wealthy civilians and third-tier governments wasn’t hunting Starro, it wasn’t containing an invasion, it wasn’t any of the nightmares that had earned her squad the codename whispered in the corridors of Washington with a mixture of contempt and fear. Suicide Squad. For this mission, the name even sounded exaggerated. On paper, the level of danger was the lowest they had faced in years.

And yet, a single individual was winning.

A faceless ghost had accomplished, in two months, what the entire American government machine had failed to do: get her hands on nearly a third of the rarest metal on the planet. And each vault emptied before her team arrived meant one less report on the right desk, one less conversation postponed in the right office, one less promotion informally scheduled slipping through her fingers month after month.

This wasn’t going to stay like this.

Now they had a pattern. A pattern meant prediction, prediction meant ambush, and ambush was the native language of Task Force X. The woman in black was fast, she was clean, she was good. But she was running alone against a state, and Waller had built her entire career proving what happened to individuals who thought themselves bigger than the state.

One chance. That was all she needed.

“Dismissed,” Waller said without turning around. “I want the coverage plan for the priority targets on my desk within twelve hours.”

The four men’s boots echoed toward the elevator, and Amanda Waller remained on the platform, alone above the hall, holding the gaze of the silhouette on the screen as if memorizing the face of a debt.

…

The morning sun beat down on Metropolis in a way it never would on Gotham.

The entire city seemed designed to receive that light: glass and steel towers reflecting off each other’s gleam, wide avenues running in clean lines to the horizon—an architectural optimism that Gotham had strangled in its infancy. And at the highest point of it all, crowning the city’s tallest building, stood the top floor of the LexCorp Tower.

The office occupied the entire floor. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls on three of the four sides offered Metropolis to whoever was inside as if the city were a decorative element. Polished black marble floor, so polished it reflected light. A work table carved from a single piece of dark wood, long enough to host a board meeting, occupied by a single man.

Lex Luthor didn’t look at the city. He never did. The view existed to impress others.

He was leaning back in the chair behind the desk, his smooth skull reflecting the morning light, his eyes scanning the three thin screens erected before him. Acquisition reports, market projections, raw data from a research division he personally oversaw. His fingers glided across the interface with the economy of movement of someone processing information faster than most people can read.

Standing across the table, his personal secretary conducted the weekly update.

She was a woman who could make any reception look like a catwalk. Brown hair falling in heavy waves over her shoulders, a tailored suit that didn’t hide a model’s figure, and behind that beauty, the only attribute that truly guaranteed her place on that floor: a cold and absolute competence. Lex didn’t keep anyone around for aesthetic reasons. Aesthetics were merely the finishing touch.

She read from the tablet resting on her forearm, her voice steady and well-rehearsed. Closing of stocks. Dinner with the senator on Thursday, confirmed. The Applied Sciences laboratory requesting a budget review. The acquisition of the German telecommunications company entering the final audit phase. Lex absorbed everything without taking her eyes off her own screens, responding here and there with a monosyllable, a curt correction, a short gesture that was worth a paragraph of instructions.

“So,” he said, still without looking at her, his fingers running over a spreadsheet of projections, “anything else or just this?”

The secretary slid to the last page of the report. “Yes. Apparently, thirty percent of the Nth Metal was stolen. Across the globe.”

Lex’s fingers stopped.

It was a small, almost imperceptible movement, but she had worked for him long enough to know what it meant. For the first time that morning, Lex Luthor lifted his eyes from the screens and looked directly at her, and all the attention of that mind, the same attention that entire boards of directors fought over in shouting matches, focused on a single point.

”Like this?”

“Well, apparently,” she began, touching the tablet to organize the data, “there’s a series of thefts underway across the globe. Someone has started actively working to collect the metal. Corporate vaults, private reserves, smaller government depots. The incidents had been treated as isolated cases by local authorities, but the accumulated volume crossed a threshold. It reached thirty percent of known reserves, and the information came to light through the channels we monitor.”

Lex frowned, and the gears behind that forehead began to turn at a different speed.

Thirty percent. Of the rarest metal on the planet. In silence.

That bothered him for a very specific reason, and it wasn’t the market value. It was the fact that he didn’t know. Lex Luthor maintained the world’s largest private reserve of Nth Metal, and consequently, he also kept his eyes and ears on every auction, every discreet sale, every collector, every gram of that material that changed hands on any continent. Any serious buyer looking for quantity would, sooner or later, have stumbled upon one of his networks. They would have made a traceable offer, hired a known intermediary, moved money through some pipe that ultimately led to his screens. Nobody had stumbled upon anything. Someone was swallowing the entire market right under his nose, and Lex Luthor’s nose wasn’t a place where things usually went under his nose.

“Was it the government?” he asked.

The hypothesis was the most logical, and he had concrete reasons to start with it. He knew very well that Amanda Waller was scouring the planet for that metal in the name of the United States. He knew about the programs, the aggressive purchases, the unfriendly visits to stubborn collectors. He knew because Waller’s own machine had already knocked on his door months ago with a purchase proposal dressed in patriotism, and he had dismissed it with the ease of someone who has half of Washington’s important phone numbers on speed dial. The pressure had subsided. For now. Lex had no illusions about this: a government that decides it wants something doesn’t give up, it just reformulates its approach, and the conflict with Waller was less a possibility and more an agenda commitment still without a date.

“No.” The secretary shook her head. “Our sources have confirmed that Task Force X is actively collecting, but there’s a catch. Since this mysterious thief began operations, Waller’s team hasn’t recovered a single shipment. All the targets they mapped were evacuated before they even arrived. The government isn’t behind the thefts, sir. The government is losing the race.”

That elicited Lex’s first genuine reaction of the morning: the corner of his mouth curled up, a subtle hint of amusement. The image of Amanda Waller reaching vault after vault to find empty shelves had an entertainment value that no streaming service offered.

But the fun lasted two seconds, just enough time for the implication to sink in. Someone wasn’t just beating the market. They were beating Waller. And anything capable of beating Waller deserved her full attention.

“Do you have any kind of recording of this thief?”

The secretary nodded and touched the tablet twice.

In Lex’s presence, the central screen flickered and began displaying a compilation of security images. He recognized the compression pattern of the files even before seeing the content: leaked material from at least four different surveillance systems, breached custody, unrecoverable origin. The work of her sources was, as always, impeccable.

And then he saw.

The black blur traversing corridors. The chase along the wall, filmed by a camera that clearly had never been installed, expecting to record anything on that axis. And finally, the image that made Lex lean forward in his chair: the silhouette standing before a vault door. A woman. Full black suit, anonymous with professional precision, her body silhouetted against the industrial lighting of the corridor. She removed something from her suit, brought her hands close to the door, and forty tons of steel opened for her with the gentleness of a bakery door.

Lex watched the entire sequence without blinking. Then he went back to the beginning and watched it again, this time breaking down each frame. The speed of movement, incompatible with any public catalog of metahumans that he kept updated on his own. The total absence of structural damage. The economy of movement, without a single wasted gesture, without hesitation before any security system, as if every obstacle had already been resolved before she left home. This wasn’t a talented thief in a series of lucky heists. This was methodology. This was logistics. It was, and the word formed in his mind with an almost physical weight, an organization.

“If they’ve already managed to collect thirty percent,” said Lex, his eyes still fixed on the frozen silhouette, “I highly doubt they’ll stop at just that amount.”

The reasoning was elementary. No one mounts a global operation, burns resources of that magnitude, and takes the risk of attracting the attention of all the world’s intelligence services, only to stop halfway. Whoever collects thirty percent is on their way to one hundred. And one hundred percent of the world’s Nth Metal necessarily passed through a very specific address.

His.

Lex hadn’t amassed that hoard out of a collector’s whim. Nth Metal was, as far as all of LexCorp’s science could determine, the only known substance that treated magic with the disdain it deserved. Energies that passed through lead, titanium, and force fields as if they were paper simply died on the surface of that metal. In a world increasingly infested with sorcerers, amazons, demons, and artifacts that physics refused to explain, this wasn’t a material. It was an insurance policy against half the supernatural on the planet, and Lex Luthor didn’t sell his policies. Which made the inevitable question even more interesting: whoever was collecting the metal knew exactly what it was worth. And people who understood the true value of things were, in his experience, the most dangerous people there were.

“Strengthen security?” the secretary asked.

Lex looked away from the screen at her, and the smile that spread across his face was pure scorn.

“It’s not necessary. After all, we have the best defense on Earth.” He leaned back in his chair, savoring his own words. “I highly doubt that little thief will manage to break into our base.”

The secretary maintained the neutral expression required by her position. Internally, her logic politely disagreed. Additional security was never a waste, especially not for someone who had just turned the world’s best vaults into a warm-up exercise. But she didn’t question her boss. Not because she was afraid, although she was, but because she had learned, over years of working together, that when Lex Luthor displayed that specific level of arrogance, it was because he knew something the rest of the room didn’t. His confidence was never empty. It was based on something, and that something, invariably, was terrifying.

She wrote down the decision on the tablet and said nothing more.

Lex turned back to face the screen.

The silhouette remained there, frozen before the open safe, offering the world absolutely nothing. And it was this nothingness that bothered him, a subtle and persistent unease, lodged in the place where his mind kept the problems that refused to close. He knew all the players on the board. Governments and their front agencies. Rival corporations and their departments that weren’t listed in annual reports. The white-collar mafias, the self-funded cults, the opportunistic aliens, the costumed adventurers who insisted on calling themselves heroes. He knew them by name, by pattern of behavior, by margin of error. He had spent his life transforming the chaos of the world into manageable variables.

And that woman was nobody’s favorite.

Someone, somewhere, had built up operational capability of that level in absolute silence, leaving no trace on any of the networks he monitored, and had chosen to spend it specifically collecting the only metal on the planet that money could no longer buy. There was a purpose there. Purposes of that magnitude were never modest. And Lex Luthor didn’t share the chessboard with purposes he couldn’t see.

Perhaps it was time to make some calls.

He had, for lack of a better term, friends. Individuals of considerable resources and flexible scruples, each seeing the world from an angle the others couldn’t, all united by the same allergy to surprises. It wasn’t the kind of group that would come together for just anything, and activating that structure had costs he preferred to avoid. But a new player accumulating thirty percent of a global strategic resource, invisible to all their networks at the same time, was no small thing. It was exactly the kind of anomaly the group existed for.

After all, he couldn’t continue without knowing who the big new player was.

Lex reached out and touched the screen, enlarging the silhouette until it filled the entire frame, a dark cutout in the shape of a woman.

“Who sent you?” he muttered, to no one.

The image, evidently, did not respond.

Yet.

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