Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0143

The light devoured the world in a blinding flash that dazzled the senses. And, like a painting reappearing under the brushstroke of a divine artist, the world gradually came back to life, in pulses of incandescent orange.

Jade floated inside a translucent, almost imperceptible bubble that reflected the flames as if it were liquid glass.

Instinct preceded reason. In the brief interlude—that fatal half-second between the man opening his arms and the coffer becoming the core of a star—the elemental had reacted on its own. Without orders, without mercy, it had sucked every drop of determination from her and compressed it into a cocoon of dense air. The sphere of fire erupted against this aerial armor like a sea against cliffs; the flames crumbled, circled the enclosure, sought a crack. They found none.

They still hadn’t found it. That was the drama frozen in every fiber of their being.

She knelt in the center of the room, transformed into an oven, one knee embedded in the twisted steel, both arms lifting the invisible dome. Outside, hell had taken refuge inside the vault and refused to leave. Flames licked the metal walls from one end to the other, descended from the ceiling in incandescent curtains, danced around the twisted shelves in hues ranging from the most vivid amber to blinding white. The heat crossed the membrane in slow waves, boiling the air in suffocating whirlpools. And the air began to run out – the bubble held oxygen for only a few minutes: each breath came shorter, hotter, with a metallic taste that burned her throat.

The outer fabric of the uniform lay inert. Jade had felt the exact moment the camouflage had fried: microfilaments crackling against her skin, rising in microscopic sparks. Underneath, only the black bodysuit remained, stubbornly clinging to her body. He would know how to fix it. He always did.

“Natasha,” he whispered, his lips barely moving.

Static. Not silence—which would indicate a damaged communicator—but a dense, uniform white wall of interference. A deliberate sabotage, engulfing all the island’s frequencies. It was no accident.

And it was there, kneeling in the heart of that furnace, alone for the first time in months, that the puzzle came together. The pink implant in her tattooed neck. The garter belt twelve kilos lighter than the files indicated. The sharp, professional signal jammer, prepared for the exact moment. None of that belonged to Emiliano Reyes. A man who buries his fortune under a prison doesn’t give up his basement to anyone.

It was a trap within someone else’s fortress. And she had entered smiling.

Then, she promised herself, swallowing the anger before it roared her oxygen, then you allow yourself to hate yourself. Now, listen.

Because the flames were beginning to weaken.

Not of its own accord—fire of this magnitude doesn’t extinguish itself, it’s simply cut off. The curtains of flame thinned from the center to the edges, gathering towards the door like tides captive to an invisible moon. The glow beyond the entrance lost intensity, flickered, faded until only the trembling gleam of reddened steel remained. Darkness returned in black patches. And, behind the ringing in the ears, behind the crackling of the cooling walls, the awaited sound rose.

Voices.

“We wanted the thief alive.” The voice came from outside, beyond the antechamber, deep, restrained, that compression that true anger assumes when it cannot explode in screams. “Alive. Nobody authorized you to blow up the entire target. Nobody authorized you to blow up anything.”

Jade didn’t move. She had dismantled the dome in absolute silence, letting the residual oxygen dissipate into the toxic atmosphere of the vault without a whisper. She slipped behind the twisted carcass of a bookcase, her body curled up in the shadows with the naturalness of someone who grew up learning to be a ghost. The lenses of her mask still filtered the heat. Through the vault’s entrance, in the antechamber, she saw his back: bald, tattooed shoulders glistening under the emergency light, wisps of remaining smoke rising like incense.

He was staring at someone Jade couldn’t see, an invisible figure beyond the doorframe, reduced to mere presence and voice.

And the tattooed man smiled. There was no humor in the gesture—it was the cold mockery of someone who had died inside so many times that he had lost any fear of threat.

“Well,” said El Diablo, shrugging, his voice slurred, “you could be clearer.”

He remained with his back to the safe. Fatal mistake.

Jade set herself in motion even before deciding. The presence in her chest exploded in cold, insatiable flame, exacting revenge for the affront of having brought her to her knees. She channeled everything into a single stroke: a corridor. A finger of vacuum tore through the hall from the epicenter to the entrance, slender as a needle, sweeping the last embers from the floor. And through this tunnel of nothingness, she fired her cannon.

Compressed air exploded from the barrel and pierced the entire vault in a flash faster than a blink, tearing through space until it lodged in El Diablo’s stomach. There was no thud, just the dry crack of a monstrous thunderclap, like a steel whip snapping in the void, and the man simply vanished from the entrance. The blast shattered him in two, bending him over his own navel like a dry branch, and catapulted him across the entire antechamber. His feet were still kicking the air, slipping on the tiles, until the outer wall of the vault swallowed him with a dull thud, weaving cracks in webs of concrete around his back. He slid to a stop, mouth agape, gasping for air while the tattoos on his arm flickered like a short-circuited lightbulb.

And Jade, standing at the epicenter of the hall, opened her arms and returned the fury to whoever dared attack her. A whirlwind was born from her, expanding like fire in a storm, tearing away every ember, every tongue of flame hidden in crevices and expelling them in two currents: half vomited out through the main door in a crimson wave that illuminated the antechamber; half sucked into a tunnel carved into the rock that disappeared into the sewer like a comet swallowed by the earth. In seconds, the vault lay clean: dark, smoking, marked by furrows of molten steel, but devoid of threat.

Silence reigned only for the duration of a breath.

“She’s still alive!” the voice crackled in the antechamber, now free of any trace of bass. “She’s still alive!”

Before the echo died, small metallic objects rained down, bouncing across the floor: one, two, four, six grenades rolling and bouncing at calculated angles to cover every inch of the hall. Jade frowned as the nearest one spun to stop two hand spans from her boot, and her brain triggered the vital mathematics: short count, millimeter-precise throw, instant fragmentation.

In a single gesture, her arms traced a circle in the air. The wind obeyed, closing around her in a swirling cocoon, not a shield, but a whirlwind of raw air that ripped dust from the floor and lifted her in a lightning-fast spin.

The grenades detonated in a chain reaction, one explosion stepping on the heel of the next. Halls and pillars trembled, flames and shrapnel erupted in six simultaneous locations. Each fragment of metal hurled against her encountered the rotating wall: caught by the current, accelerated in a curve, and spat out tangentially, embedding itself in the walls, the inert shelves, the ceiling. When the smoke cleared, Jade remained motionless, untouched in the heart of her own storm, while the wind howled around her in a deep, waiting-out turbine tone.

And then, through the vault entrance, emerged a man she had never seen in person. His steps cut through the smoke unhurriedly. The first detail to distinguish was his helmet: polished, rounded metal, superimposed on his skull like a helmet forged by a sadistic god, reflecting the whirlwind in twisted silver. Below it, a face of hard angles, a clenched jaw, and a broad body encased in a red shirt with vivid blue details, stretched over muscles that defied comparison. In the center of his chest, solemn and absurd, a dove with open wings, emblazoned in white like a peace trophy on a battlefield.

The weapon in his hand stood out from the rest: a massive pistol, with an elongated and modified barrel, aimed with surgical precision at Jade’s forehead.

She didn’t even wait for greetings. The sphere of wind around her unfolded at her command, ceasing to be a cocoon and becoming a flood: a tsunami of air that invaded the entire vault, entangling itself around the intruder’s legs with a single purpose—to lift the ceiling. Men don’t fight hanging in mid-air.

The gale closed in on him. Jade felt his body weight sway, his boots losing contact with the ground for a fraction of a second.

Then the helmet lit up. A blue glow erupted from the polished metal, trickled down in a luminous membrane across his entire body, and the torrent that enveloped him slid down that shell like rain on sheet metal. Boots returned to the ground, shoulders straightened. Inside the celestial cocoon, immune to the roaring hurricane, the man inclined his head in a brief, courteous nod.

“Beautiful,” he said, his voice firm, cutting through the gale. “Now let me show you mine.”

The instant the last syllable died, the shot rang out. It wasn’t a defensive shot, it was pure execution, lodged in the center of Jade’s face. The bullet pierced the room with a sickly buzzing sound, painted red on the lenses, a special, explosive charge.

Jade tilted her head ten centimeters to the left, an almost imperceptible gesture – and then the shrapnel whizzed past the empty space where her eye had been. The projectile tore through the air, sliced ​​through the steel safe like a flaming knife, and exploded against the back wall in a corolla of fire that spewed sparks and forged a smoking crater. The heat crackled against her skin, but she didn’t even blink. He kept his eyes fixed on the man with the dove, and behind the mask, a crooked smile threatened to escape.

He wasted no time with niceties. He adjusted his grip, swallowed the rifle’s recoil as if it were nothing, and fired for real.

The safe became a war drum. Bursts with the rhythm of an infernal metronome: bang, bang, bang. Each bullet arrived bursting through the air, promising to tear off limbs, pulverize bones, transfigure flesh into crumbs. Jade danced among the cones of fire. Her body floated in that storm of fragments, hip, shoulder, knee – each dodge meticulously calculated, each centimeter more than necessary, defying death with disdain. The explosions exploded around her like petals of destruction, swallowing the ground where her foot had been, the space where her torso had existed, the bookcase behind which she never sought refuge. Time slowed under her newfound gifts; the bullets were swift, but the information was supreme.

And as she spun around, she gained ground.

In the whirlwind of steel and gunpowder, Jade noticed a pattern: the shots always came tearing through the same flank, closing off its left side, blocking the main door, obliterating the floor between it and the fallen bald man – and leaving free, untouched, generous, a narrow corridor. The corridor that led to the tunnel.

“He’s manipulating me like cattle,” a cold voice registered in his mind. But the answer was swift, as arrogant as the steady pulse of his shots: “What a touch.” The tunnel was the plan before it was his strategy. Outside, darkness, water, speed – his absolute domain. In that terrain, he would trade any advantage the shooter thought he had gained.

Step by step, jukes centimeter by centimeter, Jade traced a seemingly random path to the arch carved into the wall. Every second inside that steel box was a second in favor of whoever was waiting for reinforcements outside. In the sewer, the corridors were rivers of shadow and liquid where no one was pursuing her anymore.

Then, something went in.

It slid through the same door as the shooter, but crawled along the edges: a blur of bone and fur that seeped into the vault with the fluidity of a living nightmare. When Jade caught the full view, the monster looked not merely animal or human, but a hybrid outrage. Thin as if it were a walking carcass, with elongated limbs and a flabby belly hanging like an emptied bag. Its paws ended in claws arched like bent blades. Numerous, razor-sharp teeth clung to its jaw, emerging from a snout that resembled a weasel’s. Hard, sparse fur covered every inch. Its black eyes gleamed not only with hunger: there was something primal, outraged, and furious about them.

It’s difficult to know if it was ever human. It’s even more difficult to choose the least tragic answer.

The creature roars in a wet scream that echoes and tears the vault apart from end to end. Then it leaps.

The arc of the leap fills the entire space between the steel walls. At the apex, the claws open like scythes; in the next instant, the skeletal body collapses. Any ordinary fighter would have been crushed before touching the ground. But Jade replicated with the same lethal choreography: her arms closed in a precise circle, the rotating vortex roared to life in a final flash, and the world shattered into a thousand fragments of swirling hatred around her.

The weasel pierced the sphere of wind like a projectile pierces fog—and the fog closed in on it.

The rotation grabbed her by the flank and wouldn’t let go. Her body was dragged into the orbit and began to spin around Jade in increasingly tight circles, her claws, opened by the centrifuge, pointing outwards like the needles of a crazed compass, her flabby belly undulating, her weasel-like snout passing through the same repeated arc with almost mechanical regularity—and the squeal that came from her wasn’t continuous, it was choppy, cut off with each pass by the very wind that carried her, a sound of something trying to scream but only managing in fragments. When the sphere released her, it was without drama: it simply opened. The creature exited tangentially, horizontally, flush with the row of destroyed shelves, and the wall collected her with a low, full thud, the kind of sound that doesn’t echo because all the energy was absorbed at once. She didn’t slip—she collapsed. It fell in one piece, all four paws tucked under its body at angles that suggested a hasty negotiation with physics, and remained like that, its ribcage rising and falling in irregular sobs, its tiny teeth showing not as a threat but for lack of the strength to close them.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jade mapped the man in the helmet. The weapon had dropped two centimeters—not much, but enough to say something. His head was turned toward the weasel with that particular quality of attention that is neither curiosity nor concern but recalibration, the silent processing of unexpected data. The blue field around the body had receded into a thin, almost decorative halo. The mirrored helmet returned the safe without comment.

She left before he finished processing it.

The tunnel entrance exuded a cave-like chill over her—not the chill of the air, but the chill of damp stone and standing still, of water that for decades had known where to flow. Jade entered backward without turning her face, her eyes fixed on the hall until the rock closed the frame. She no longer needed to see what came next: five meters of corridor, the gallery, the trench, the service shaft, the surface. Twenty seconds. Fifteen if her body agreed.

She turned to cross the gallery.

And the water exploded upwards.

She emerged from the ditch at the only angle that didn’t exist in the field of vision of someone in motion—from below, from the front, already above—and her size arrived before her shape, a raw piece of information that the brain rejected for a fraction of a second before accepting: too big for the space, too big for any calculation Jade might have made about what would fit in that tunnel. Gray, flattened, its surface covered in a dense cartography of old scars, white and pinkish on the dark gray, each raised like a poorly sewn seam. Her eyes were two bottomless black points, lacking the illusion of expression that mammalian eyes carry by evolutionary habit—eyes that didn’t distinguish between seeing and aiming. Her mouth opened before her like a vault door opening in the wrong direction: rows and rows of triangular teeth, the lateral ones angled inwards like fishhooks, some chipped and already replaced by others growing underneath at crooked angles, all framing a dark, deep throat where she would fit with room to spare. The smell arrived with the water that exploded around the colossal body—salt and old blood and, beneath both, something that had no category, only presence: the smell of something that has existed long enough to have ceased to need anything else.

A colossal shark. A predator the size of a truck emerged from the murky sewer waters, its dark back forming a submerged loin amidst clumps of sewage and sludge. Jade floated in the air, bound to her own trajectory, each drop of water and each fragment of debris glistening under the dim light of the broken spotlights, as she fell headfirst into the whitish mouth that gaped open in her path.

Jade’s eyes widened behind her mask, and then time yielded to her inner command: each second stretched out like an elastic carpet. Panic arose, was meticulously dissected, and filed away in a forgotten corner of her mind. What remained was pure geometry: she, an isolated point in space, with no ground beneath her feet, and the only apparent law stating that bodies in free fall do not change course. But Jade’s physics had rules of its own.

In a single impulse, her knees shot up to her chest, her arms closed around them, and her body shrank into a rotating metallic sphere. The violence of the spin blurred the sewer into a whirlwind of textures and shadows. In a precise half-turn, her head and feet switched places: the soles of her boots now pointed directly at the cavernous jaw rising to devour her.

Then Jade kicked the air.
Beneath her soles, the air had compressed into a dense, strident pillar, exploding in a dry bang that reverberated through the damp tunnels. The blast of compressed air struck the shark’s bony roof, shattering it in resounding echoes, and the monster was propelled backward with titanic force. A wave of black water rushed down the sewer walls, sweeping away debris and jigs, while Jade was repelled with equal violence in the opposite direction.

She flew through the tunnel, tearing through the air like a projectile, passed the rocky entrance, and returned to the vault from which she had escaped seconds before. In a precise movement, he spun once to dissipate the rotation and landed with a muffled thud: a knee and a hand touching the concrete floor, softened by an invisible cushion of air generated by the reflection.

With calculated calm, Jade raised her head.
Beneath the metal bleachers and stone arches, her gaze swept over the vault—and, even before completing a mental inventory of the costs of this maneuver, she knew she had paid a high price.

The room was crowded.
The bald, tattooed man stood by the main door, his body firm despite the impact: the line of black ink that snaked across his skin seemed to pulse like incandescent veins. Beside him, the man with the dove tattooed on his chest raised his weapon again, the blue force field shimmering around him like a mirage on hot asphalt. And, crouching in a feline pose atop the rubble of a shattered bookcase, the third man—thin and agile as a hungry weasel—revered the surroundings with hungry eyes, ready for the climax of that deadly chase.

And behind the three of them, tensing their spines to bend and slide through the armored door of the vault, the mountain appeared.

Jade knew exactly what it was, in the first flash of instinct that came from the damp Gotham nights, from the silhouettes outlined in the soaked eaves, from the hunting rituals the Bat waged against the horrors that resurfaced from the sewers. Two meters and thirty, maybe two and forty, a colossus of olive-green scales so thick they crunched like sandpaper against the steel of the frame. Each movement scraped the walls with a harsh, almost metallic sound, as if his body defied the very vault. The claws on his fingers arched like blades, the serrated teeth sprouted from a jaw sculpted to shatter bones with the same ease as breaking a dry branch, and two reptilian eyes—incandescent yellow slits—scanned the room without any urgency. He wore only worn trousers, and the musculature, undulating beneath the leathery plates, seemed alive, pulsing with every step. Its thick tail dug up the dust from the ground, leaving a deep furrow behind it.

It was the Crocodile. Thousands of miles from Gotham, locked in a vault in the heart of a lost island, and there he was, staring at her.

A snap behind Jade: she twisted her torso without lifting her body, her senses on high alert.

Through the tunnel she herself had carved into the rock, three soldiers advanced. Firm boots echoed in the damp corridor, rifles gleaming in the dim light, each man occupying his sector with the precision of a military choreography. Automatic target recognition flashed across her retina, retrieved from the League’s secret files: the oldest, face etched by sun and battlefields, clear, measured eyes – Rick Flag. To his right, the same strong jaw, but with younger features – Rick Flag Jr. And the third, moving with surprising lightness, segmented plates clinking softly with each step, the weapon in his hand changing configuration in a mechanical whisper – Bloodsport.

And then, behind them, the herald from the depths of the seas completed its ascent.

An anthropomorphic shark, as wide as it was tall, forced its colossal body through the narrow tunnel. Shoulders scraped against the damp stone walls, each extra inch tearing drops of saltwater that dripped to the floor. When it finally unfolded inside the vault, it revealed itself whole: a massive, grey torso, legs as robust as ancient columns, hands with thick fingers topped by curved claws, and atop that brutal trunk, a flattened head, cold as a fossil. Its mouth snapped shut in a long, distorted grin, filled with rows of sharp teeth, while water trickled from its body in shimmering puddles at its feet. Two small, merciless black eyes met Jade’s in the center of the hall, and the grin widened, revealing yet another tooth yet to erupt.

The mental inventory was completed in a fraction of a second. Jade rose with the calculated slowness of someone who knows the value of each alert muscle: a soft crack in her knees, the dragging of her feet on the cold floor, and in her mind the complete chessboard was already emerging, each piece projected with surgical precision, cold as an architect’s drawing.

Ahead of her, the exit—the tunnel—no longer existed: two enigmatic men in dark trousers, the hard gaze of the Flags, blocked the passage, while Bloodsport, colossal, stood like a grey mountain, completing the blockade of the opening with his shoulder. Behind them, the old vault door smiled, now sealed in raw flesh: on one side the man with the dove, his peace tattoos contrasting with the gun barrel; beside him, the hunched weasel, sharp claws scraping the steel floor; in front, the bald man of fire, his skin marked by permanent embers; finally, the crocodile of Gotham, its pointed snout sniffing every particle of air. Eight guardians formed an octagon of flesh, metal, and mutation, rising around the immense center of the hall. She was trapped in the middle house, with fifteen kilos of impossible metal tightened around her waist and the weight of a criminal empire swaying with every breath. No open communication, no escape route, no wall without a determined face.

His brain mapped out all escape routes at the speed of his newly acquired gifts, dismissing them as useless cards. Upwards: five meters of structural rock supporting the vault’s slab, rock as dense as pure cement, and above it an entire military base, teeming with guards, sentinels, and spotlights ready to fire. Penetrateable, yes, but only with time—time that a compression sphere wouldn’t grant between busy hands and eight enemies who needed to fire only once. Downwards: the shaft dug by his own hands, three vertical meters to a hermetically sealed concrete cubicle, with no second exit—a coffin illuminated by cold lamps, humming silently. Through the tunnel: the mass of the shark, a cork of dark brown muscle, sealing the gap, and behind it the salty, living odor of water—his domain, not hers. Through the door: the fire. The flames tattooed on the bald man’s skull flickered like embers, a reminder of the inferno he could unleash inside a steel cube. To wage war in that place was a gamble of insanity: would the resistance of their bubble be worth more, or his blazing fury? One night had already been enough of a gamble.

However, the one piece of information that would change the game was missing. And she felt the tension directed at her in the small movements around the octagon. Sanguinário didn’t raise the barrel immediately, but the rifle in his hands reassembled itself with a crackling of metal plates, the barrel expanded to a caliber never before seen in human beings, and the lens assembly spun with a low hum, like a machine that had already chosen its target. The crocodile raised its snout, sniffed the dense air of the vault with a hoarse sigh, and in its yellow eyes shone a primal disappointment: there was no scent of fear there. The weasel scratched the steel with its claws in an impatient rhythm, restrained only by the order that had not yet been given. And the man with the dove remained motionless, weapon hanging in serene hands, the blue field of energy extinguished, sheathed as one who doesn’t waste ammunition on someone already captured.

All circling in orbit around a single voice, waiting.
The elemental roared in Jade’s chest, beckoning for a fight. She held back the urge to unleash that beast. The reins tightened around her soul: not yet. Information first. Always information first.

Because there was a wrong detail in the picture, a detail that screamed louder than the eight sieges: nobody pulled the trigger.

Eight guns pointed, eight monsters on guard, a thief in the center—and everyone paralyzed. They waited. A containment formation, not an execution formation. And whoever sets up a cage instead of pulling the trigger wants the beast alive.

The eldest of the Flag brothers took a step forward, the weight of his boot echoing against the cold steel of the vault floor. The rifle slid slowly down its handle, resting diagonally on his chest—a gesture that seemed casual, but was rehearsed with precision to convey contempt. Still, his eyes did not turn to her first.

They fell to the ground.

There, a perfect circle of polished edges radiated from the concrete, a turned shaft that plunged three meters to a secret chamber. It was the vault within the vault, a chamber that no official record on the planet recognized – and which she had opened to the world with nothing more than a small marble made of wind. He remained still, head tilted slightly, like a collector before a legendary artifact seen for the first time.

Then he smiled.

“Good, good, good.” The voice resonated, deep and restrained, vibrating off the high, bare walls. Jade knew that tone well: the same fury that had echoed in the antechamber, now tamed, dry, almost cordial. “Look what the net brought me.”

Finally, he raised his clear eyes—cold as steel—and fixed them on Jade. There was no anger, no fear, nor the adrenaline of the hunt. There was only the quiet satisfaction of someone who checks the accounts and sees everything add up perfectly.

“Do you know what the hardest part was?” he continued, as if commenting on the day’s weather. “It wasn’t finding you. Nobody finds you—that was obvious from the start. The challenge was discovering the pattern. You don’t repeat methods, you don’t repeat countries, you don’t repeat signatures. You don’t leave witnesses. You don’t leave fingerprints. Not even proof that you existed. Each emptied safe in opposite corners of the planet, and the only link between them was a metal that almost nobody knows exists.” He made a slight movement with his chin, pointing to the dark scarf attached to her belt. “So we stopped following you and started calculating where you hadn’t yet set foot.”

The smile widened a little more, outlining lines of triumph on his hard face.

“I confess it was costly: sleepless nights, sophisticated bait, lots of important people yelling at me in windowless rooms. But here we are.” He opened his arms in a gesture that encompassed everything—the safe, the siege, the eight Flags lined up behind him, the entire island as witness. “And here you are.”

Rick Flag let the silence settle in like a mist, took another step forward, the soles of his feet digging into the metallic floor. Then, with the calm of someone who has already locked every exit from that place, he concluded:

“Well, then… how about we negotiate?”

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