Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0142

The forest was breathing.

Jade felt it in her skin, even through the fabric of her new uniform. The humidity of the tropical forest rose from the ground in warm waves, carrying the smell of rotting earth, sap, and flowers that only opened at night. Insects sang in overlapping layers, a chorus of millions of tiny voices that swallowed any other sound. Above her, the treetops closed in so densely that the sky simply didn’t exist. No stars. No moon. Only the absolute blackness of a living cathedral, and she there in the middle, motionless on a thick branch twelve meters from the ground, like just another shadow among shadows.

For anyone else, that darkness would be complete blindness. For her, the world unfolded in shades of silver and green through the lenses of the mask, each leaf, each drop of dew, each beetle crawling on the tree bark rendered with a clarity her own eyes could never achieve. Another gift from him. Another piece of the arsenal he was building around her like one dresses a queen for war.

And behind the dark mask, Jade smiled.

He couldn’t help it. He hadn’t been able to help it for days. The smile would come on its own, at the most inconvenient moments, in the middle of a reconnaissance, while memorizing a floor plan, now perched in a tree in the middle of nowhere, observing a fortress he would need to breach. It came because his mind kept returning to the same phrase, uttered with that absurd calm that only he possessed, as if he were discussing the dinner menu.

Next week, bring your mother and your sister.

Seven words. Seven words and her world had shifted.

The cure existed. It was ready, waiting, kept in some corner of those underground laboratories that smelled of the future. After years of watching her mother wither away in bed, a prisoner of her own body while the Sportsman rotted in a cell without ever truly paying for what he had done, after years of swallowing impotence like one swallows ground glass, the answer was seven days away. Her mother would walk again. Her mother would be free again. And Artemis would be there to see, and perhaps, just perhaps, what their lives had broken so many years ago could begin to be reassembled, piece by piece.

Everything she’s done so far has been worth it. Every risk, every sleepless night, every border crossed with her heart in her throat. She gained power that League assassins would kill for. She gained a purpose that didn’t smell of old blood. And she gained the one thing she never dared ask of the heavens, because the heavens never listened to a Nguyen: a second chance for her family.

All thanks to him.

A low laugh escaped her before she could hold it back, muffled by the mask, swallowed by the chorus of insects. How silly. An assassin trained since childhood, forged to trust not even her own shadow, and a boy younger than her had won her loyalty with the ease of picking a ripe fruit. If the Jade of two years ago could see the Jade of now, grinning like an idiot in a tree because of a boss, she would have spat on the ground in contempt.

Jade from two years ago, she thought, was a much poorer woman.

That’s enough. She deliberately suppressed her smile, took a deep breath, and let the training take over. The games could wait. Ahead of her, on the other side of the sea of ​​vegetation, there was work to be done.

The installation had just turned on the perimeter lights.

She adjusted the focus of her lenses, and the complex leaped closer, filling her field of vision. An old maximum-security prison, built decades ago to bury the worst men from three continents, bought years later by a man worse than all of them combined. Emiliano Reyes. The Treasurer. The human safe of the crime syndicate, the man who laundered, guarded, and multiplied the money of people whose names were whispered even in the basements of the underworld. Rich enough to buy an entire island off the coast of South America. Paranoid enough to transform it into a fortress that would make any dictator weep with envy.

And she could understand the paranoia. Getting there had been a logistical nightmare. The island wasn’t on any commercial route, the airspace was monitored by radars that shouldn’t exist outside of military bases, and the exact location of that particular safe had cost weeks of work, three burned identities, and an amount of money she preferred not to remember. The metal she came to retrieve this time wasn’t in some distracted university or in the collection of an eccentric billionaire. It was in the hands of a man who knew exactly what he possessed and who would kill entire countries to keep it.

Jade followed the patrols’ lanterns with her eyes as they moved along the wall, counting the intervals. Watchtowers refurbished with bulletproof glass. Machine gun nests at the four corners. Anti-aircraft batteries disguised as water towers, which her lenses identified and marked with small red diamonds. Reyes had state-of-the-art weaponry, trained men, and decades of accumulated fear working in his favor.

But she had her master.

And if Jade had to push all her chips into the center of the table, she would bet on him every time. Without hesitation. Without looking at the cards.

‘Natasha,’ she murmured, her voice reduced to a whisper that only the communicator could pick up. ‘Status.’

‘Good evening to you too, dear.’ The artificial intelligence voice blossomed in her ear, elegant and slightly playful as always. ‘Satellite repositioned. I can see the entire island. Thirty-one guards on the outer perimeter, forty-minute rotation, and the two o’clock shift change happens in exactly eleven minutes. The window is yours.’

‘And what about the new toys we found during the reconnaissance?’

‘The drones continue to fly in a figure-eight pattern. Lazy, predictable, almost offensive. The pressure sensors in the inner courtyard are active, as are the mines in the open field. Nothing you haven’t danced over before.’

Any surprises?

There was a pause of half a second. For Natasha, half a second was an eternity.

‘Nothing in the systems. But I confess that the internal garrison is leaner than the personnel records indicated. Twelve fewer men on the night shift.’

‘Reyes cutting costs?’

‘A man who bathes his safe in gold doesn’t cut costs on security. Watch out, darling.’

‘I’m always here.’

‘I know. That’s why I like you.’

Jade left the channel open and stored the information in a corner of her mind, along with all the other small irregularities that a decade of infiltrations had taught her to collect. Twelve men less. It could be desertion, it could be malaria, it could be the Treasurer moving people to another property. It could be nothing.

Eleven minutes later, when the lanterns on the wall converged on the west gate in the sleepy choreography of the changing of the guard, she moved.

…

The forest died suddenly.

It wasn’t gradual. The dense forest simply ended in a straight line cut by machine, and beyond it opened an artificial desert three hundred meters wide, grass too short to hide a rat, terrain too level to cast a shadow. A moat of perfect visibility surrounded the entire fortress, designed by someone who understood that walls stop armies, but open spaces stop ghosts.

Jade stopped at the edge of the vegetation and almost laughed again. Almost.

Ordinary ghosts, perhaps.

A mental command, silent as a thought, and the uniform responded. The surface of the fabric rippled for an instant, like water touched by the wind, and then it ceased to exist. Not true invisibility—he had been very clear about that when he handed over the suit—but something close enough: the outer mesh read the environment and rewrote itself in real time, returning to each angle of observation exactly what should be there if it weren’t. Against the moonless night, the effect bordered on perfection. A camera would see grass. A guard would see darkness. A drone would see the island itself, bored and empty.

She climbed down from the tree without a rustle and stepped onto the open field.

She walked. She didn’t run. Running left trails in the grass, displaced air, created patterns. She walked with the liquid patience of someone who has the whole night, each step placed where the mask dictated. The lenses swept the ground ahead of her in constant pulses, and one by one the mines bloomed in her field of vision like poisonous flowers, amber circles marking the ground, forty centimeters of earth over each one. She snaked between them without altering her rhythm, her body flowing through the safe corridor that only she could see.

Above, a faint hum grew and faded. One of the drones crossed the sky diagonally, its thermal camera rotating beneath its metallic belly. Jade didn’t even lift her head. The suit had already captured her heat signature the instant she left the woods, dispersing her body temperature into a diffuse cloud indistinguishable from the still-warm tropical soil of the afternoon. The drone passed over her as one passes over a stone.

The wall grew before her, twelve meters of concrete topped with barbed wire and vibration sensors. She pressed her back against the base, in the exact dead zone between two spotlights, and waited.

Footsteps. Heavy boots on the walkway above, the creaking of leather, a poorly disguised yawn. The guard on duty walked right over her head, dragging the boredom of someone completing the thousandth identical patrol, and continued on his way.

Jade bent her knees.

The feeling came before the movement, that presence within her chest that never left after the ritual, awakening like an animal recognizing its owner’s hand. The air around her felt light. She felt light. And when she jumped, the world simply relinquished its right to pull her back.

Twelve meters of wall passed by her like a sigh. Jade crossed over the barbed wire with half a meter to spare, her body bent into a perfect comma, and descended slowly on the other side, as slowly as a feather decides to fall, her feet touching the concrete of the inner courtyard making no more sound than a drop of dew.

She remained crouched down for three heartbeats, listening.

Nothing. Just the warm wind and, in the distance, the murmur of a radio playing some old Spanish song in a distant guardhouse.

The courtyard stretched out before her, vast and ghostly under the security lights. She could see what it had once been: the faded markings of a basketball court, the rusty supports where benches had once been bolted on, the concrete bleachers where armed guards watched over men sunbathing whom the world preferred to forget. Reyes had kept the structure almost intact. There was something poetic about that, she thought, crossing the courtyard like a breath of breeze. A man who built his fortune locking away debts and secrets, choosing to live inside a cage.

The lenses painted the ground ahead of her with a mesh of bluish lines, the pressure sensors embedded beneath the floor designed with surgical precision. She floated among them more than she walked, her body weight reduced to almost nothing, each step a diplomatic agreement between the sole of her boot and the ground. At this hour of the morning, the inner patrol was disjointed, men too far apart, their attention diluted by sleep, and Jade slipped through them like water through fingers.

The entrance to the main building awaited her at the end of the courtyard. Brushed steel, electronic lock, military-grade card reader. She crouched before it and reached for her utility belt.

The drone she retrieved from the compartment was no bigger than a mosquito, and in the dark, that’s exactly what it looked like. She released it with a delicate flick, and the little thing buzzed down the door, disappearing through the two-millimeter gap as if it had been born for that. His vision blossomed in the corner of his mask: a long corridor, cold industrial lighting, polished gray resin floor.

Empty.

‘Clear corridor,’ Natasha confirmed. ‘The internal cameras scan in eight-second cycles. After you open that door, you have very little time before someone in the monitoring room notices something. Doors don’t open by themselves in this base, honey. They know that.’

‘Then I’ll be quick.’

‘You always are. Charting your course… now.’

The card she pulled from her belt was anonymous, white, without a single marking. He had prepared it weeks ago, cloned from credentials gathered who-knows-where, who-knows-how. Jade pressed it against the reader.

The light flashed green. The lock gave way with a soft, almost gentle click.

And she turned into wind.

…

Running like that was still, even after months, the closest thing to ecstasy Jade had ever experienced for free.

The corridor transformed into a tunnel of blurred light. The walls slipped off the sides of her vision, doors and signs and fire extinguishers reduced to mere brushstrokes, and at the center of it all she existed in a pocket of absolute silence, the elemental enveloping her body in a film of air that silenced the sound of her own footsteps before they were even born. The base’s layout was etched into her memory down to the last ventilation duct, and above it, projected onto the lenses, the golden line of the route Natasha was tracing unfolded before her like a carpet laid out just for her.

First fork, left. Service staircase, two flights down. Corridor of the administrative building, sixty meters straight ahead.

Two guards appeared on the route, standing before an old coffee machine, one of them chuckling softly at something on the other’s cell phone. Jade didn’t slow down. She didn’t need to. She slipped between them through the gap of an arm’s length, a transparent distortion cutting through the air, and the only evidence of her existence was the sudden breeze that made the taller one glance at the air conditioning duct and grumble about the maintenance.

She was already three aisles away.

The base was immense, larger on the inside than the outer wall suggested, decades of renovations piling annexes upon annexes, and even at top speed the journey took almost a full minute. A minute was a long time. A minute was enough for a bored operator to rewind a recording and frown at a door that opened to no one. She felt the seconds slipping down the back of her neck like cold sweat, and she sped up.

The golden line ended in a forgotten service corridor at the back of the maintenance block, in a spot where the lighting was more spaced out and the air smelled of oil and rust. And there, embedded in the concrete floor like a circular scar, was the hatch.

Jade stopped in front of it and, were it not for weeks of research, would have walked right past it. It was the perfect portrait of irrelevance: old metal, peeling paint, the kind of sewer access that exists in every industrial facility on the planet and that no human being voluntarily opens. No sign. No flashy padlock. Nothing to scream of what slept beneath.

That was what made her respect Reyes, deep down. Any rich criminal buys steel doors. Few understand that the best safe in the world is the one nobody knows exists.

She gripped the hatch wheel with both hands and turned it. The mechanism resisted for an instant, decades of zeal disguised as neglect, and then gave way with a low groan that she muffled with a breath of air before she traversed the corridor. The cover lifted, revealing a vertical shaft that plunged into total darkness.

Jade jumped without looking.

The fall lasted six seconds. She spent them in silence, the elemental slowing her descent with the smoothness of an elevator, and when her feet touched the bottom, the world around her had changed its nature. The base’s sewer opened before her, a concrete artery wide enough for a truck to pass through, dark water running lazily through the central ditch, the ceiling lost in shadows above. The air was dense, hot, saturated with humidity and that sweetish smell of decay that no ventilation system in the world completely eliminates. A facility of that size needed plumbing to match, and there it was, vast and dark and splendidly poorly guarded.

The cameras existed, of course. She saw them, points of glass gleaming at intervals that were far too long, models two generations behind those that patrolled the upper floors. Nobody wastes a budget watching over crap. Against her camouflage, those aged lenses were little more than decoration.

She smiled behind her mask and resumed running.

The tunnel swallowed her speed without witnesses. This time she didn’t even bother to contain the air displacement, and her passage raised a trail of ripples in the still water, marks that no one would ever read. Thirty seconds of racing at a speed that would shame sports cars, following the countdown that Natasha projected in the corner of her vision, and then the golden line bent into a curve, descended a service ramp, and died.

Facing a wall.

Jade braked, the air cushioning the stop in a single step, and raised her eyes.

Bare concrete. No door, no markings, nothing. To any observer, the natural end of a secondary gallery, the kind of blind alley engineers leave behind when they change a project mid-construction. But the data stored in her memory said otherwise, and the suit’s computer agreed, superimposing a diagram in red lines onto the wall: five meters of rock and structural concrete and, behind them, a shielded chamber that had never appeared on any plan registered in any registry office on the planet.

The real treasure chest. The hidden heart of the island.

‘Now comes the fun part,’ Natasha murmured in her ear, and Jade swore she heard a smile in her voice.

‘Now comes the noisy part,’ Jade corrected.

‘Also. From here on out, the watch is no longer mine, it’s yours. Make it look good.’

Jade flexed her fingers inside her gloves. Brute force work, then. Perfect. She’d wanted to measure how much she’d grown for a long time.

She stepped back until she was a meter and a half from the wall and spread her stance, her legs assuming a martial posture that the Sensei would have approved with a dry nod. She took a deep breath. And she brought her hands together in front of her chest, palms curved facing each other, forming an empty shell.

The sensation deep in her chest became inflamed.

It was no longer that timid sensation of the first months, a whisper that needed convincing. Now it was hunger. The elemental awoke completely at once, coursing through her arms like an electric current made of wind, and the air between her palms began to stir. First a puff. Then a whirlwind. Her hands vibrated with the increasing pressure as the air was drawn into the shell, compressed, folded upon itself, and between her palms a sphere began to take shape, invisible at first, real only by the thin howl it emitted.

And then she remembered his advice. His calm voice explaining, on the training field, that order was efficient, but chaos was devastating.

Jade closed her eyes and let go of the reins.

Inside the sphere, the airflows abandoned clean rotation and began to collide. Currents clashing against currents, vortices being born and dying and reborn at impossible angles, a billion tiny disasters compressed into a space smaller than a football. The sphere became visible, a translucent blur of pure swirling violence, and the sound changed from a howl to a roar. A tornado-like roar, deep and growing, spreading through the gallery with Jade as its epicenter. The water from the central ditch receded from it in waves, pushed by a wall of pressure, opening a circle of dry concrete around its feet as if the sewer itself had decided to keep a respectful distance.

Anyone else would have thrown it right now.

Jade was no ordinary person. And her smile, hidden beneath the mask, widened.

She squeezed.

The sphere struggled. Gods, how you struggled. All that chaos roaring against the invisible walls that its will imposed, each inch of contraction costing an effort that made your arms tremble and cold sweat run down your spine. But it squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed, the roar rising in pitch as the same power was squeezed into an ever-smaller space, the size of an orange, an egg, a walnut, until between its palms floated only a tiny bead of maddened air, the size of a marble, one of those glass balls that children play with in the dirt.

A marble screaming like a turbine.

Jade opened her eyes, aimed, and threw.

The sphere crossed the meter and a half distance in no time and kissed the concrete.

The world exploded.

There was no fire. It wasn’t needed. The bead pierced the wall like a divine drill, and the rock around the point of impact simply ceased to be solid, pulverized by the rotational violence that unfolded as the compression gave way. The sphere dug, and grew, and dug, advancing through the wall in a tunnel that widened with each inch, spitting back a jet of dust and gravel, and three meters inside the rock it finally reached the limit of its own containment.

And it expanded all at once.

The shockwave swept through the gallery like a giant’s hand. Jade covered her face with her arm at the last instant and was ripped from the floor, thrown back against the opposite wall with enough force to crack the concrete behind her and empty her lungs in one blow. She slid to the floor, her ear ringing, dust raining down around her like dirty snow.

For a long second, she sat there, blinking.

Then he looked up at what he had done, and the air that was finally returning to his lungs came out again, this time in a disbelieving laugh.

Where there had once been a wall, now there was a passage. A perfectly rounded tunnel, its edges smooth as if turned, cutting through the rock from side to side. The lenses measured it: five meters of structural rock drilled from end to end, and beyond them, twisted inwards like torn wrapping paper, a final one-meter layer of solid steel.

One meter of steel. The sphere had passed through one meter of steel.

‘Darling,’ Natasha said, and for the first time that night her voice came without any trace of irony, ‘remind me never to make you angry.’

Jade stood up, brushed the dust off her shoulders with two pats, and walked into the hole she had opened in the world.

‘No promises.’

…

The safe greeted her with a golden gleam.

Jade stopped at the tunnel entrance and, for a moment, just stared. She had seen wealth before. She had grown up orbiting the League, worked for underworld princes, robbed collectors who lit cigars with works of art. But this was another category. This was obscene.

The chamber was the size of a ballroom, and Reyes had filled it like a pharaoh fills a tomb. Gold bars stacked on pallets that rose to chest height, row upon row, the metal capturing the cold light from the recessed lamps and returning it warm, liquid, alive. Suitcases of money organized by coin on steel shelves. Display cases housing watches, jewels, loose stones the size of walnuts. Paintings hung on the walls with individual museum lighting, and she recognized at least two that the official world mourned as lost in fires. Statues. Artifacts. A throne, a real throne, gilded, leaning against a corner like an old-fashioned piece of furniture.

All the net worth of the union treasurer, hidden beneath a prison, at the bottom of an island, behind five meters of rock.

And Jade knew exactly what it meant for that to disappear.

It wasn’t just money. For a man like Reyes, that safe was his very existence. It was the guarantee he offered to the union, the material proof that trusting him paid off. A treasurer who loses the treasure isn’t fired. He’s dissolved in acid while the members watch, to make clear to future candidates the price of incompetence. When the sun rose over that island, Emiliano Reyes would be a dead man who still breathed.

She should have felt something about it. She didn’t.

Because the memory still burned: months ago, on the trail of the metal, a closed auction in Morocco, an identity she had spent three years building, expensive, solid, perfect. And Reyes, fat with suspicion, sending his sniffers after any buyer who asked too many questions about rare metals. She escaped. The identity didn’t. Three years of work burned in one night because a paranoid old man decided to mark his territory.

He annoyed her once. Once was enough.

‘Time?’, she asked, already walking towards the center of the hall.

‘The explosion woke up the entire base. Seismic sensors went off in three locations, and the monitoring room is trying to figure out if it was an earthquake or an attack. I’d say you have four minutes before someone smart puts the pieces together. Three, if there’s someone very smart.’

‘There’s plenty of time.’

Jade unfastened from her belt the gift he had designed especially for those collections. Folded, it looked like a plain, dark cloth handkerchief. She held it by the edge, channeled a thread of arcane energy through the elemental, the way he had taught her with that teacherly patience that never matched his age, and the fabric absorbed the power and grew in her hand, unfolding upon itself until it became a bag the size of a regular garbage bag.

A regular garbage bag with an interior space that mocks geometry.

She knew she had little time. So she allowed herself to be a little blunt.

Jade raised her free hand, and the air in the entire hall obeyed.

It began as a sigh, all the camera’s currents shifting direction at once, and in the blink of an eye it turned into a whirlwind. The paintings were ripped from the walls. The display cases exploded inward, spewing jewels into the stream. The suitcases took off from the shelves like clumsy birds, and then, with a sharp flick of her wrist, the whirlwind found its center and became a tornado.

The funnel got caught on the mouth of the open bag and began to drink the contents of the safe.

It was a miniature apocalyptic vision. Tons of gold ripped from the floor as if they weighed mere crumbs, bars swirling in the current in gleaming spirals before plunging into the dark opening and disappearing without a sound. Rivers of money. Hail of diamonds. The golden throne spun across the hall like a toy and vanished into the sack along with everything else. Some centuries-old screens were crushed along the way, shredded by the impact against the flowing gold bars, and few survived.

Jade didn’t care. I doubted he would. Funds were funds, and Reyes’s downfall looked more beautiful the more complete it was.

In just over thirty seconds of relentless wind, it was over.

Silence fell back over the camera like settling dust. Jade lowered her hand and looked around: bare walls, swept floor, empty and warped bookshelves. A deserted ballroom. Anyone looking would think the safe had been emptied to the bone.

Jade knew that the most precious thing there was still not in the bag.

She walked to the exact center of the room, guided by the floor plan in her memory and the marking pulsing in her lenses. The Persian rug that had previously covered that spot was now sleeping in its bag along with the rest, and what it had hidden was now exposed: a patch of floor that pretended to be identical to everything else. Smooth. Metallic. Innocent.

Liar.

She set the bag down, cupped her hands together, and called upon her power once more.

The second sphere was born faster than the first, the elemental already heated, already hungry, the internal chaos reaching boiling point in half the time. It compressed all the fury again to the size of a marble, but this time, before releasing it, it wove around itself a cocoon of dense air, a concave shield anchored between itself and the target.

Learning through one’s own body was the Sensei’s method. Once a night was enough.

She threw the sphere against the ground.

The wind drill bit into the metal and plunged in, spitting out a fountain of sparks and filings, and when the final expansion came, the shockwave broke against her shield and split around her body like a current winding around a rock. Her hair didn’t even move.

Where there was once ground, there remains a smooth-edged, steel-turned shaft, descending three meters to a smaller chamber.

The safe within the safe.

Jade hat.

He landed in the center of a spartan cubicle, four bare walls, automatic lighting activating with his presence, and there, alone on a concrete pedestal in the middle of nowhere, was the reason for that entire night.

At first glance, gold bars. The same shape, the same organized stacking. But the color was different, polished silver with a pearly sheen that trickled across the surface when the light changed angle, and no silver in the world could make the presence within her chest shrink like that, bristling, like a cat before water. The elemental didn’t like that metal. No magic liked it.

That was exactly why he wanted him so much.

Jade approached the pedestal and began to count, and the count went up, and her smile went up with it.

‘Natasha. Check with me. The information said three kilos.’

‘He was saying, “I’m weighing it by your sensors and…” A pause. ‘Well, well. Fifteen kilos, my dear. Fifteen. It seems the Treasurer has been buying off the list recently, or our source would have known.’

Fifteen kilos. Five times what was expected. In a substance traded by the gram, that wasn’t luck, it was a lottery. She heard his voice in her memory, at one of the late-night dinners in the lab, philosophizing with a fork in his hand: you can’t always know what awaits you in destiny. He said that about risks. It applied to prizes too.

And it made sense, in the end. The official world had cataloged most of the world’s metal, and it had been collecting that for two months, vault by vault, country by country. The problem was always the hidden slice, the one that slept in basements like that one, outside of any record, because players of that level wouldn’t share inventory even under torture. Nobody knew the real size of that shadowy slice. Apparently, it was bigger than anyone had calculated.

This time, the house paid for them.

Jade stretched the mouth of the bag and the bars floated from the pedestal one by one, escorted by fingers of wind, plunging into the bottomless darkness. When the last one disappeared, she closed the bag, channeled the reverse arcane command, and the fabric swallowed its own size, withering in her hand until it was once again a dark, drab scarf, which she fastened to her utility belt with a click.

Tons of gold and the future of his project, hanging from her waist, weighing less than a wallet.

She smiled and leaped, the wind carrying her up the well in a single clean leap, back to the ransacked hall.

She landed lightly, already turning her body towards the tunnel she had opened in the wall, mentally tracing the escape route: sewer, well, service corridor, wall, woods, extraction. By this point, the alarms were surely blaring throughout the base, but she doubted, sincerely doubted, that anyone there would be able to reach her before she became a legend.

He took two steps.

And the safe spoke.

A deep, mechanical sound emanated from the opposite end of the room. Gears the size of truck wheels turning inside the wall. Hydraulic locks retracting one by one, in a ceremonious, almost polite rhythm.

The main door of the vault was being opened. From the outside.

Jade stopped. And, beneath the mask, the smile returned, now with teeth.

Honestly? It had been a while since she’d had a bit of action. Two months of clean work, surgical entrances and exits, not a single soul even knowing she’d been there. It was elegant. It was efficient. It was, admitting it only to herself, a tad monotonous. If Reyes’ henchmen wanted a souvenir of the visit so badly, who was she to refuse?

She turned to face the door, planted her feet and raised her arms, the elemental spirit already boiling in her fingertips, ready to receive the entourage.

The forty-ton door completed its arch with a hydraulic sigh.

And whatever came through the opening caused Jade’s smile to die inside the mask.

It wasn’t a squad. They weren’t Reyes’ mercenaries with rifles and vests and shouted orders. It was a lone man. Barefoot on the cold steel, simple trousers, white t-shirt, walking into the vault with the slowness of someone carrying something much heavier than their own body.

Bald. Dark skin covered in ink, from scalp to waist, skulls and flames and gothic lettering dripping down his face, neck, arms, an entire chronicle of violence tattooed onto human skin.

And Jade recognized him.

The recognition came from old files, from League dossiers on cataloged metahumans, from whispered stories in the crime circuits of the American West Coast. A Los Angeles gang gunman who didn’t need guns. A man who reduced a city block to ashes. Chato Santana. El Diablo.

Her first thought was quick and cold: he’s under arrest. All the files agreed. Maximum security, isolation, American soil. Men like that didn’t roam around private islands in the Southern Hemisphere.

The second thought was even colder, and it came along with a detail that the lenses magnified on their own: on the side of the tattooed neck, small, discreet, surgically enhanced, a protrusion under the skin. An implant. Recent enough that the surrounding skin was still pink.

Men like that didn’t go for walks.

Men like that were sent.

The twelve available spots on the night shift. The lean crew. The thought process assembled itself, piece by piece, with the speed of well-trained panic, and Jade opened her mouth to call Natasha, to shout the only word that mattered now, extraction, but the world had run out of time.

The man stopped ten meters from her. He raised his face. And the eyes that met hers carried neither hatred, nor hunger, nor the professional pleasure of a hunter before his prey. They carried something much, much worse.

Pity.

‘I’m sorry,’ said El Diablo softly, and his voice was almost gentle.

The white t-shirt was the first to burn.

The fire didn’t come from outside. It was born from within, from his skin, each line of ink igniting from within like a lightbulb filament, and in a second the man’s entire torso was a column of living flames, his tattooed face floating serenely in the heart of the fire like a saint in a stained-glass window. The heat struck Jade before any movement, a scorching wall filling the vault from end to end, sucking the oxygen, making the air ripple and weep.

She was caught off guard. That was the stark truth. Two months undefeated, the perfect night, the prize around her waist, and she had smiled at the door like someone welcoming guests.

The elemental screamed inside her chest, and Jade moved, her arms rising, the wind responding, but the man in flames had already opened his arms as well, in a wide, almost welcoming gesture.

And the epicenter flourished.

The explosion was born from it and devoured the world. A sphere of white-orange fire expanding in all directions at once, swallowing the floor, the ceiling, the empty shelves, the distance between them, advancing upon it like the rising sun inside a steel box.

The flames grew in Jade’s eyes, reflected in the lenses of the mask, ever larger, ever closer.

And then there was only light.

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