Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0144

Chapter 144

The silence that followed Rick Flag’s question had a palpable weight, as if the metal walls of the vault imprisoned not only sound, but also air. It wasn’t the hollow silence of an empty room, but rather that of eight predators holding their breath in unison, every muscle tense, every mind coldly calculating the distance separating them from their prey in the center of that room illuminated by pale, flickering emergency lights.

Jade remained silent for a deliberate instant. She let the second stretch, stretching herself to the limit, absorbing every fraction of it as if it were a breath of extra time. Because now, under that cold, cutting light, the fragments of the stolen League of Shadows files fit together in her mind like pieces of a macabre puzzle she never wanted to assemble. The distant hum of the generator mingled with the accelerated beating of her heart as she recognized, with a shiver, the formation that appeared clearly before her eyes.

That obscene mix of decorated soldiers and monsters with miles-long criminal records, all lined up under the same flag, was a setup Jade knew all too well. Military containment structures intertwined with the savagery of low-level criminals, armed to the teeth and ready to explode in violence at any sign. In the secret corridors of the underworld, there was a name whispered with contempt and caution, laden with barely disguised reverence:

Task Force X.

The Suicide Squad.

The most efficient leash ever forged by the United States government. Disposable prisoners, snatched from the most hellish prisons on the planet, with bombs implanted in the base of their skulls and reduced sentences hanging from their snouts like rotten carrots. Rabid dogs that, once caught by the throat by the State, were released one by one on missions too dirty to bear any official stamp. If they died, they would be mere statistics. If they were captured, they would be nothing more than garbage. If they succeeded, their name simply wouldn’t exist in the reports.

And behind all those invisible chains, with the reins unified in her hands, stood a single woman:

Amanda Waller.

Jade had never seen her in the flesh, but she had devoured dossiers larger than those of many heads of state. League analysts described her with the same incredulity: it was impossible. A bureaucrat without superhuman powers, without a miracle serum, without a ring of command or inherited fortune, swimming for decades in the same aquarium as sharks like Luthor, the Court, and agencies that devour their own directors every four years—and not just surviving, but thriving. People like that either harbor a dark secret, or they are a secret themselves. Both alternatives sent a chill down Jade’s spine, because if Waller was willing to consume the entire Squad on a lost island in the ocean, it meant that the metal had long ceased to be just a treasure.

It had become political.

Jade’s eyes scanned the room once more, now attaching faces to names that, until the day before, had existed only as silhouettes in encrypted files.

Before her stood Rick Flag: one of the most decorated soldiers in the United States, whose reputation transcended the barriers between the official and clandestine worlds. The man had already given the League of Shadows real headaches, dismantled two Intergang weapons routes in Southeast Asia, and survived at least three operations that analysts called mathematical suicides. In secret circles, his name was spoken like one speaks of storms: with respect and the desire never to have to face it. Beside him, his son: less legendary, with more subtle scars, but whose record already boasted achievements that many men twice his age would envy. The same firm jaw, the same unwavering posture, the precise way of holding the rifle—as if it were a natural extension of his own body.

If it had only been the two of them in that room, Jade would have already declared the matter closed. Not out of arrogance, but out of pure arithmetic: however great the opponent’s feats, two bodies of flesh and blood remained – tissues that tear, bones that break – and she had ceased to be an ordinary human being the day she knelt in the center of a ritual circle and returned with a whirlwind trapped in her soul.

But we were not alone.

Under the cold light streaming from the ceiling, King Shark stood motionless by the entrance. His gray skin, furrowed with scars, dripped water at a patient pace, each drop echoing on the metallic floor. Beside him, El Diablo kept his arms crossed, his chest studded with incandescent tattoos that seemed to burn under the lamp, his head bowed in silent reverence, like someone praying before unleashing chaos. And, among the rubble, the Crocodile of Gotham crouched, his tail sweeping dust in slow arcs, his scales gleaming beneath the dirty varnish of the surroundings. Three titans: any one of them, individually, would be reason enough for governments to evacuate metropolises.

And, above all, the two pipes pointed towards Jade.

Peacemaker, the man with the dove embedded in his chest, wore a polished helmet that distorted the walls in silvery reflections. She knew his stories too well: a ghost prepared beyond reason, capable of justifying carnage in the name of a peace that only existed in his head. Experience had taught Jade that whoever hides their face behind a symbol has already chosen the emblem above the consequences. Beside him, the Bloodthirsty One rested the modular rifle, still smoking from the last shot; his fingers rested on the trigger with the familiarity of someone sleeping embraced by the cold barrel. It wasn’t a style: it was a walking arsenal with “exceptional” aim, according to dossiers that rarely invoke that term.

Two of the deadliest snipers on the planet, and the scope’s blade rests on their foreheads.

She felt flattered. Almost.

The last observer needed a few more seconds to catalog. Huddled in the corner, the thin, hunched creature let slip through its long fingers that scratched the steel; its round, moist eyes fixed on her without blinking. “Weasel,” the records said – a former child killer metamorphosed into something neither man nor beast. Jade doubted this represented a real threat, but dispelled the doubt in an instant, remembering the lesson hammered home by Sensei: even ants, in swarms, possess immense strength. There were eight pieces on that board. None could be ignored.

A metallic crack behind her made her turn her head: Rick Flag had lowered his rifle completely with a slow, methodical movement, almost theatrical in its composure. The barrel now pointed at the cracked ground, his shoulders relaxed as if he were there to negotiate the price of a used car.

“So, what do you think?” he repeated. Two steps forward, his boot crushed shards of glass with dry crackles. “Can we negotiate?”

And Jade, planted in the center of that octagon of flesh and metal, sank into the dilemma that had been pushing her since the explosion of the first grenade.

She was alone.

The signal jammer isolating the island worked with surgical precision: Morgana, miles out to sea, wouldn’t hear a whisper; her master, deluded by redundant security, would only learn everything hours later. There was no extraction, no cavalry landing in helicopters, no Plan B descending by parachute. There was only her, fifteen kilos of impossible metal, and eight reasons not to hesitate.

Escape was always an option. Ever since the door had sealed shut, her elemental spirit had been whispering maps of air currents in her ear: every crack, every ventilation duct, every cubic inch of the vault revealed by the invisible vacuum. But escaping meant crossing two lines of crossfire – and Jade stared at the Peacemaker and the Bloodthirsty, noticing how the gun barrels seemed to dance to the rhythm of her breath, motionless in pure control. Almost supernatural aim. Her elemental spirit could slow bullets before her eyes, but slowing inevitability didn’t guarantee survival. It was a glimpse of destiny, not its annulment. There was still a persistent doubt: the weapons weren’t ordinary. No one raids impenetrable vaults with ordinary equipment. Gambling on luck against unknown ammunition was a one-way ticket to the graveyard.

And then, as always when recklessness threatened to win, the master’s voice echoed from the shadows of memory:

“However important the mission may be, your life is worth at least as much – if not more.”

He had said this on the first day and repeated it before each operation, with a cadence she had initially considered rhetorical, but which she soon understood to be fundamental law. No contractor had ever looked after his players like he did. The League had taught her to see agents as ammunition. He had treated her as an asset. And this difference – more than her mother’s cure, more than his powers, more than any promise – was the reason for her loyalty.

Jade would not die on that island. And, if possible, she would leave without shedding a single drop of blood.

Information first. Always information first.

Jade shifted her weight to her right heel, feeling the fabric of her jumpsuit creak under the pressure. She tilted her head at an almost formal angle and, as she spoke, let her voice escape lightly, like a bored breeze, muffled by the mask covering her face.

“Okay. First of all, could you tell me exactly what you’re looking for?”

The corner of Flag’s mouth curled into a slight smile, almost a shiver down the line of his jaw.

“You know very well what I’m looking for.”

“I wish it were a little clearer.” She opened her hands delicately, a gesture of an honest merchant that contrasted sharply with the metal railings and thick walls of that fortified chamber. “All the cards need to be on the table, if that’s really what you want.”

“You want to.” She savored the word like someone chewing a stone, aware that no operation of this magnitude is mounted for a simple chat. No one invests a fortune in expensive bait, rents a remote island, mobilizes an elite squad, and locks everything in a vault protected by eight monsters just to present a proposal. There are infinitely more economical ways to negotiate: an intermediary, an anonymous account, a coded message at a pre-arranged meeting point. That wasn’t a negotiating table.

It was a cage — and inside it was an empty form.

But cages have a peculiarity: those who build them love to describe them.

Flag nodded with the studied slowness of a satisfied professor.

“Right. So let’s start from the beginning.” He stood up and began to walk around the crater dug in the ground, his firm step echoing on the metal floor. The red emergency light outlined angular features of his profile as his eyes scanned the dark shaft of the secret vault. “As you probably already know, considerable quantities of a very rare metal are disappearing all over the globe. And when I say very rare, I mean the world’s reserves would fit in a moving truck. Museums, laboratories, private collections, military depots: every cataloged fragment simply vanishes. No alarm, no fingerprints, no witnesses. A mysterious force whose success rate surpasses any thief, living, dead, or legendary.”

He stopped on the other side of the crater, his mask streaked with shadows cast behind him.

“This raised questions in rooms where each question costs a fortune. Who is the thief? Who ordered it? And the most crucial of all.” Flag raised a finger, sharp as a wink. “Why would anyone need such a large quantity of this metal? Because, you see, both you and I know that its astronomical value doesn’t just come from scarcity. It comes from its properties. And with enough volume, you can build things capable of giving very powerful people sleepless nights.” The finger lowered with a dull click, pointing to the dark bag attached to her belt. “Finding that out is my job. So here’s my offer, thief: I’ll buy everything. What you’re carrying and what you’ve hidden.”

Jade allowed the silence to stretch like an empty hallway, using the pause to think about Natasha.

Because none of this was new. Weeks ago, the AI ​​had dumped a report on the master’s desk that it had itself classified as “interesting”—Natasha’s code for “catastrophic instability.” The United States government was sniffing out the metal. Not in dry notes, but with satellite orbits and squads ready to invade. Natasha had intercepted a chain of encrypted emails between an unnamed department and LexCorp: urgent, impatient negotiations, increasing in value with each exchange. Luthor was stalling. The government was pressing. The master read everything in silence and, at the end, uttered only one word: speed it up.

Perhaps the plan was simply this: to concentrate every gram of Nth Metal in the hands of the State, far from billionaires, thieves, anyone who could activate that fragment of power. It made sense. It was what she herself would do if she wore that suit and tie.

Or perhaps they wanted something more.

And the detail that was turning her stomach? Her master was, at that moment, the largest single holder of Nth Metal on the planet. Thirty percent of the entire known stockpile – theft by theft, gram by gram – kept in a vault that didn’t even exist on a map. If they were willing to buy from Luthor and hunt her down with an entire squad, what would they do when they discovered who held the biggest burden?

“And how exactly do you imagine me to be this thief?” she challenged, her voice slippery behind the mask.

She already knew the answer. In some bunker, on some mirrored wall, some lens had captured her silhouette. She and the master knew the day of the encounter was coming. No camouflage lasts forever. The question wasn’t seeking information. It was bait to gauge how much they would gamble for free.

Flag laughed softly, a dry burst of laughter.

“Let’s not be naive. You know that we know. If you had the slightest doubt, you wouldn’t be sitting here so calmly, chatting away. So let’s get straight to the point.”

“The metal, then.” Jade tilted her head defiantly. “You all want to buy everything I own.”

“We know you’re not the mastermind behind this.”

The phrase exploded in the vault. Beneath the mask, Jade’s face stiffened. Her muscles didn’t give way, but her thoughts stumbled. How? The entire operation pointed to her: lone thief, obsessed metal collector, seller of crumbs to mislead the true owner. No transaction came close to the mastermind, no route named him. Morgana had wiped every digital trace, Natasha had audited every wash. And yet, there was a soldier, looking at months of perfection and saying, effortlessly, that he knew: there was another head behind it.

A camera doesn’t reveal that. A sensor can’t do that much. It was cold analysis. Or a leak.

“And since we know this information,” Flag continued, breaking the silence, “it’s our secret. What matters is this – I’ll say it only once, so pay attention.” His voice turned to stone. “Either you – you and your employer – sell everything to us for a price I guarantee is obscene. Or we’ll extract it from you, at any cost, wherever the metal is hidden. Between the two of us, I prefer the first option. It’s cleaner, faster, and prevents them from finding out what your boss is capable of when given permission.” He didn’t point the gun. He didn’t need to. “So? What’s your choice?”

What she found inside was, in fact, simply hilarious.

And the laughter erupted—loud, sudden, utterly genuine—rolling behind the mask and spreading through the vault, bouncing off the cold steel walls like a gold coin thrown into a silent temple. Jade saw Flag’s son pull the trigger of his rifle, his fingers trembling; saw Weasel shrug, as if each sound were a blow; saw Crocodile raise his snout, the thick skin of his nostrils flared in alert—and she laughed harder, savoring every second of others’ discomfort.

“You are quite a show,” she said, when the laughter finally subsided. Her voice was calm, yet sharp as a blade. “You can keep any illusions of intimidation you have in mind.”

“It doesn’t work that way.” Flag shrugged, and for the first time a hint of genuine humor peeked into his eyes. “I never thought I could intimidate you. But I tried—better safe than sorry, don’t you think?” The smile vanished in a blink. “Let’s simplify. A gesture of goodwill: hand over what you achieved today.”

The glare of the spotlights reflected off the glass of Jade’s mask, but it was her low, cold smile that said it all. Very slowly, in time with the electric crackling of all eight weapons in the room, she slid her hand to her utility belt and unlocked an old metal clasp. She pulled out a small black cloth packet so ordinary it could easily go unnoticed in a toolbox.

“This?” She shook the bag and saw the flame of desire ignite in Rick Flag’s eyes. It was an almost imperceptible spark, but Jade noticed: the spark of a man about to cross another impossible mission off his list. He fixed his gaze on the crumpled cloth—a piece of rag worth more than the GDP of entire nations—while she, with her fingertips, gave the bag a light flick, making it float in suspended air.

“Fascinating,” she murmured, watching the cloth sway lazily in the cool light of the vault. “Everyone’s chasing after this metal: governments, tycoons, entire squads of trained monsters.” The cloth began to fall back down. “But my master will be the only one to possess it.”

The fabric made one last turn and landed in the palm of the glove.

And then the glove awoke.

No one inside could have imagined it, but that glove wasn’t part of Jade’s standard kit. It was a prototype recently delivered by Morgana, with dry instructions: “Field test.” Along with it was a notebook of limitations that Jade studied until she memorized it. Between layers of reinforced fabric, in the center of the palm, lay a silver rune—a secret unknown even to the Master himself, given that Jade spent more time on operations than at the base. The Baymax robots were the only welcome back, dripping supplies; the voices of the AIs echoed in empty corridors. And Morgana? She was in another lab, working on another project, miles away. Now, however, the rune was there, resting against the most coveted metal in the galaxy.

Jade focused. He felt the elemental that inhabited his soul, that youthful and impetuous whirlwind, ready to serve. With restrained violence, he drew all the arcane energy at once—without subtlety, without sparing any strength, a brutal plunder that would create pools of power in the palms of anyone who dared try.

The rune drank.

The safe became day.

A burst of light exploded from Jade’s hand with a ferocity no one there expected. It wasn’t a simple flash: it was a detonation of absolute white, a luminescent catharsis that swallowed shadows, textures, and depth in a blink. In a fraction of a second, the world turned into a blank page. She heard the cry of astonishment, the mass recoil of eight bodies, arms rising to protect trained eyes that should never be blinded—and her own grunt of surprise, for not even the self-leveling lenses of the mask were enough: the light passed through them, and she found herself forced to squeeze her eyelids shut, seeing only a reddish pulse behind them.

Morgana was talking about a “controllable light signature.” Jade, at that moment, mentally concluded that the supposedly limiting notebook needed an urgent review.

When the light faded—half a second later, maybe less—her hand was empty.

The little bag wasn’t lying on the ground. Nor was it floating in the air. It had simply disappeared from the vault. It was somewhere beyond a runic anchor, oceans away, under the care of an artificial witch who, at that very moment, was probably coldly and clinically noting the success of the experiment.

Rick Flag blinked, brushing the afterglow from his eyes, and fixed his gaze on his empty palm as if staring into an abyss. His face hardened a deep red, veins bulged, and his jaw clenched with an almost audible creak. Years ago, he would have been the hero of a breach in the world order. Now, yet another impossible mission slipped through his fingers.

“So that’s how it’s going to be.” The voice came out low, hoarse with tension. There was no question.

“Exactly.” Jade replied with a yes so sharp it pierced the mask like a blade of voice.

In an instant, the air inside the safe changed hands.

…

Before any orders could be given, she moved.

The wind obeyed in a gust: two tight vortices formed around her ankles, whirlwinds of air that lifted her from the ground like a champagne cork being popped. It wasn’t luck, it was geometry—she had spent the entire night aligned between the barrels of the Peacemaker and the Bloodthirsty, exactly in the firing line of both. The instant she left the ground, both pulled their triggers.

The bullets crossed the empty space where her chest had been a second before and continued their journey toward their opposite adversary. Down below, the Peacemaker let out a muffled curse as he threw himself behind a pillar, and the Bloodthirsty, growling, twisted his torso to avoid his own shot. In that first second of combat, the two most lethal assassins in the room nearly annihilated each other—while, up on the ceiling, Jade floated, untouched, her eyes gleaming behind her mask.

Ants united form a wall of strength; ants in panic trample and crush each other.

Upside down, her feet firmly anchored to the ceiling by an almost imperceptible air pressure, Jade was already molding her second move. Her hands compressed the air layer by layer, squeezing it until it became a glassy, ​​palpable sphere, exactly the size of a bowling ball, shimmering with an electric green and trembling as if it wanted to escape its own confinement. In a swift gesture, she launched the orb into the void below, straight for the cluster near the central crater where Rick Flag, her son, and Bloodsport were regrouping.

When the sphere touched the ground, it evaporated in a sharp flash. The trapped energy exploded in a concentric shockwave, a flameless thunderclap that swept across the metal floor of the vault. Rick Flag and his son were ripped from their feet like rag dolls, thrown back several meters, rolling among rubble and concrete shards, their rifles flying from their hands. Bloodsport, however, reacted with his usual lethal precision: a mechanism in his belt crackled, spitting out a steel hook that pierced the ground with a hydraulic snap, and a taut cable held him in place like an anchor against the storm. Before the dust even settled, he had already raised his modular rifle, lenses spinning in a low hum, and the barrel erupted in blue flames.

Jade kicked the ceiling.

The momentum propelled her sideways moments before a hail of bullets ripped through the space where she had been. High-speed projectiles carved parallel craters in the reinforced concrete, sparking metal and dust. She spun in the air, slow motion dissolving into instinct: before falling, she activated her ultimate technique.

From the soles of her feet gushed a continuous jet of compressed air, the dense roar of an invisible engine. Her body ceased to obey gravity, hovered two handbreadths off the ground for a suspended instant – long enough for a cold smile – and then she opened all the valves.

The safe became a living pinball table.

Jade shot horizontally, a green and black comet that ricocheted off the east wall, bracing herself on her palms like redirecting wings. She streaked diagonally across the room, released herself from the ceiling, plummeted in a deadly arc, braked at the last instant just inches from the ground, and leaped again at an angle that seemed to defy human biomechanics. Each turn exploded in bursts of compressed air, each trajectory lasted less than a blink of an eye before being followed by another, and finally her path turned into absolute chaos: unpredictable even for her, a green and black embroidery stitching the vault together in tortuous lines that no sight could reach.

She saw the world slow down through the heightened perception of the elemental: the Peacemaker struggling to calculate an interception point and giving up, Flag’s son firing twice at where she should have been if he obeyed the laws of physics, the Weasel throwing himself to the ground, hands on his head, eyes bulging.

But he didn’t see the King Shark interrupt his frantic chase.

The primeval colossus had already hunted beings whose speed turned seconds into hours: sprinters who ran across the sea, fugitives shattering space-time. And from each hunt he had extracted an ancient lesson: don’t waste time hunting the fast. Flood the entire world with pain, and let the speed come and crash into you.

In a monumental gesture, he rose to his full, absurd stature, his arms rising like titanium pillars, his palms opening slowly, immense and smooth as war drums.

Then, he clapped once.

The sound was no mere noise: it was a seismic event. The crack erupted like an internal thunderclap, reverberating through the sealed walls of the vault, generating a spherical shockwave that shook the floor, caused the top shelves to crumble, and transformed all the air into an invisible, crushing fist. The other members of the Squad already knew this fatal blow – they had already felt their bones reverberate during the operation – and, seeing the colossal arms rise, they dove behind any possible cover, mouths agape in an instinctive attempt to equalize the pressure.

Jade had never seen anything like it before.

The shockwave hit her in a brutal ricochet, trapped in dead space between two cold walls of concrete and metal. There she floated without support, without an anchor—only the compressed air sustaining her body. And when everything rises from nothing, the thunder becomes complicated: it is born from the same void. The pressure exploded against her propulsion jets like imperative suggestions, collapsing the support all at once, crushing her eardrums even protected by the acoustic shell, and invading her chest through the sternum, a brutal and uniform impact, without a song of origin or time to dodge.

Suddenly, his flight simply stopped.

She plummeted from the void like a stoned bird, and the vault floor received her body with enough violence to create a crater—the second of the night. Shards of concrete and fragments of steel flew around, cutting through the air with a metallic screech. The ground trembled, and Jade’s world transformed into a continuous white hum, a shapeless sea of ​​sound.

“Attack!”
Rick Flag’s dry voice pierced through the buzzing, and the octagonal structure of beams and railings collapsed on top of her, shattering the enclosure even further.

Peacemaker and Bloodthirsty advanced in sync, like pieces of a lethal mechanism. No gesture there was improvised: everyone knew the objective was to capture the thief alive. Peacemaker holstered his pistol with a fluid movement and, with an electric snap, drew a tactical baton from his back, its metal rings glowing blue as sparks snaked across the surface. Bloodthirsty, without even looking, ejected the rifle magazine, snapped another one into place with a mechanical click, and watched the lens assembly realign with a satisfied click, the barrel widening for containment ammunition—whatever that meant in the repertoire of a man driven by hatred.

Deep in the crater, Jade struggled to rise, but the world refused to cooperate.

Everything swirled in turmoil: the edges of his field of vision rippled, folded, and trickled like diluted ink in water. Two silver figures emerged and unfolded—two simultaneous Peacekeepers, helmets floating out of sync. To the left, three Bloodthirsty advanced in formation, rifles at the ready. A metallic taste rose in his throat, and a cold diagnosis dawned on his panting mind: concussion. The inevitable conclusion followed: under those conditions, against that contingent, technique and elegance would not suffice.

It was time to let go of all inhibitions.

She delved deeper into herself, beneath the training, beneath the control—until she found the master’s secret gift: the organ hidden beside her adrenal glands, the result of clandestine bioengineering, stitched into her entrails. The biological impossibility awoke with a breath of will. Jade shook him from his slumber.

And the river gushed forth.

There was no other word: a torrent of adrenaline and a new compound that her body manufactured as if it had always known how, flooding every artery. Suddenly, the hazy world burst into crystal-clear focus. The pain was pushed beyond an imaginary glass, the buzzing became mere background noise. Her body obeyed the immediate call: muscles filled with electricity beneath the tight suit, fiber by fiber, arms sculpting into dense angles, thighs widening until the enchanted fabric creaked under extreme tension. Shoulders rose like beams, her spine cracked in a muffled symphony. In seconds, Jade grew almost thirty centimeters, and the thin woman at the bottom of the crater gave way to a giant whose presence made the word “Amazon” sound timid.

The Peacemaker was already cutting through the air above her.

At the precise peak of the transformation, he leaped into the crater, the electric baton raised in a precise and lethal arc, aiming at the skull of the fallen thief. A perfect blow—it would have been fatal half a second earlier.

Jade stood up.

The speed of the movement was obscene: a body of that size shouldn’t take off from the ground with such fury. Even so, Jade leaped brutally, the Peacemaker’s forearm meeting his, and her left hand closed around the staff with iron strength, stopping the blow an inch from her head. In an instant, everything stopped. No skidding, no hesitation. The Peacemaker remained there, suspended at the peak of his leap, eyes wide behind the visor, aware that he was looking upwards—at the woman he himself had tried to assault, now lifted above the top of his helmet.

Then Jade’s free fist shot out.

The impact against the Peacemaker’s abdomen thundered like a car crash: it shattered ribs, ripped the air, and bent his body around the fist made of steel and flesh. His feet lost contact with the ground, and Jade completed the movement with a torso rotation that launched him into the air. He crossed the vault like an out-of-control projectile, collided with the opposite wall with a damp crack of crumpled metal, and slid to the floor under a shower of plaster and pieces of concrete.

For a long second, there was no sound but the echo of the impact. Then, a grunt that mixed pain and wounded pride echoed through the chamber. The Peacemaker rose, limping, animated only by the shield: that blue membrane of energy flickered around his body, worn but firm, absorbing what should have been a fatal blow and exacting its price. He opened space inside his helmet with a harsh spit, cracked his neck, and retrieved the baton from the ground like someone picking up the last bullet from an empty chamber.

On the other side, El Diablo was already changing form. Tattoos spiraled across his skin, the subcutaneous lines swelling like veins of lava. Fire was born in his right hand, condensing into an incandescent globe that roared between his fingers, heavy and eager to fly.

But Jade was no longer there. Against all expectations, her enlarged body hadn’t lost speed—on the contrary, the same chemistry that had swelled her muscles had energized them. She vanished from view in a blur, escaped the crater left by the fireball, and reappeared behind El Diablo even before the flash dissipated. A whisper of torn fabric, a breath of air—the enemy only had time to turn his neck.

His eyes widened. The woman who had appeared behind him was now a living tower of green, compressed muscles, taller than he had imagined. Beside her raised hip, a fist emerged, enveloped in a sphere of air so dense it distorted the light, spinning like a drill forged by a storm.

As the fist rose, the wind drill devoured it completely. Impact and torque merged into one, ripping El Diablo from the ground and violently hurling him down the vault corridor. He traversed the antechamber in a descending arc and vanished into the tunnel, leaving a trail of fading tattoo smoke in his wake.

But there was the Crocodile, exacting its price for the distraction. It moved with a wicked silence—reptiles that size shouldn’t slither away without warning—and landed a direct hit on Jade’s face. Her head snapped ninety degrees, a crack shook her mask, and the metallic taste of blood bloomed in her mouth. Her swollen body staggered two steps, sending sparks flying from the concrete.

Still dizzy, Jade barely had time to look up when a colossal shadow fell upon her. The King Shark was already beside her, immense and silent, two fists raised above its head like meat hammers wider than its entire torso. Even with thirty extra centimeters of height and all the recent mass, she was smaller, weaker, a mere target before that ancient predator.

The hammer fell.

The blow struck her between the shoulder and the nape of her neck, throwing her to the ground like a puppet without strings. A third crater opened around her body, deeper than the previous ones, layers of steel and concrete crumbling into debris. Jade felt the impact as if a truck had delivered her sentence: it wasn’t pain, but a verdict. The air exploded from her lungs. Two ribs sent out formal protests. The double lens that the Orggano protected behind the glass shattered into glittering shards.

And yet she stood up.

Because, behind all that mass, pulsed the girl who survived the League, the assassin who defied the world, the woman who one day was beaten by her own master until she fainted—and woke up begging for the next training session. Her trembling hands sought support in the rubble, dug their nails into the rust, and pushed. Her right knee creaked under the weight. Her head, thick as lead, slowly rose.

On the other side of the safe, the Bloodthirsty One pulled the trigger.

No projectile was fired, but a brutal wave of sonic pressure, visible only by the distortion in the air. The hollow blow exploded against Jade’s chest, throwing her backward and pinning her to the steel wall. And yet the sonic wall advanced, cold and relentless. He kept the trigger pressed down, feet planted on the cracked floor, the belt hook firmly anchored, unleashing a continuous stream of that invisible and hallucinatory force. The pressure crushed his body, invaded his ears, his eyes, shattered his teeth, made his bones vibrate like tuning forks. Reasoning became a labyrinth; breathing, a price to be negotiated at every instant.

The side effect also affected its allies. Just a few meters away, the King Shark collapsed in a violent spin, its colossal hands clutching the sides of its head as a guttural groan escaped between rows of teeth. Not even that predator of the seas could withstand the proximity of such auditory torture.

Then Rick Flag and his son completed the symphony of violence.

They advanced at calculated angles, rifles raised with the surgical coldness of those who had taken down opponents in twenty countries. They aimed at the limbs: thighs, calves, shoulders—nothing lethal, everything incapacitating. They fired short, interspersed bursts, each shot burying itself in different points of Jade’s already immobilized body, maximizing the damage without annihilating the only witness that mattered. The Peacemaker, recovering from the impact, limped until its barrel aligned with the whistling chorus of gunfire.

The suit, however, held up.

No ordinary fabric could withstand it: forged by the Engineer on unprecedented looms and then enchanted by Morgana, layer upon layer, with the obsession of one who sees protection as art. Bullets that would pierce ceramic died there, cushioned by blunt impacts. But “broken” was still force, and force accumulates—and even masterpieces have limits. Jade felt each projectile like muffled hammer blows, noticed the heat at the points of tension in the spell, heard within herself the whisper of the artifact: “The end is near.” The damage piled up, the sonic waves ground her mind and crushed her organs, the heavy lead hammered limbs that the Orggano could no longer properly nourish. The mystical transformation began to drain, muscles deflating centimeter by centimeter, the body returning the stature it had borrowed.

With his free hand, without easing off the trigger, Sanguinário ripped a grenade from his belt and, in a lethally lazy arc, threw it at Jade’s feet.

It bounced once and exploded.

There was no flame, no fragmentation. A jet of vivid, grey foam spewed from the grenade, rose up his legs, embraced his hips, torso, and arms in seconds, and then solidified. From liquid to rock in an instant, forming a synthetic chrysalis glued to his body and fused to the wall, so tightly that every breath became a struggle. Only his head remained free.

The sonic boom ceased. The rifles were lowered. And the silence that dominated the ruined vault was the same cold, utter silence of the night, the silence of predators circling their prey—this time, no one held their breath anymore.

Jade inhaled sharply through her nose, her ribs protesting and burning. With the last vestiges of consciousness not swallowed by the concussion, she took stock: an exhausted elemental, an Orggano with a chemical hangover, armor on the verge of collapse—and zero mobility.

Footsteps drew closer, cracking crumbs of concrete and metal on the fragile floor.

Rick Flag emerged unhurriedly down the smoke-filled corridor, as if the shattered vault around him was the natural state of things and he had simply arrived too early for the cleanup. He stepped over a bent beam without looking at it. He paused two meters away, then took another step—just enough for her to slightly lift her chin to meet his eyes.

The rifle still hung on his chest. His hands were free. He didn’t need either of them now.

He stood there and looked at her for a time she felt in every broken rib. His eyes traveled down the chrysalis with the clinical attention of someone inspecting another’s work—foam at the ankles, foam at the waist, arms fused to the torso like insect wings in amber. There was a new scratch on his cheekbone, thin and red, which he clearly hadn’t noticed yet. When his gaze finally reached her face, it lingered.

“You fought well.” Dry. Unadorned. The kind of compliment that doesn’t require a response because it wasn’t given to flatter. “Better than any report predicted. Half a ton of ammunition, my best marksman, and the biggest clap I’ve ever seen the shark give.” He bent his knees slowly and lowered himself to her eye level, elbows on his knees, his face less than half a meter from hers. She saw his forehead still damp, the gray hairs on his right eyebrow, the corner of his mouth moving before the smile appeared. “I’ll need two pages just to describe the last three minutes. But now it’s time for you to sing like a bird, so to speak.”

Jade stared at him through the cracked lenses. The fissure split his forehead in two uncoordinated planes. She said nothing.

Flag rose with a crack in his knee that he didn’t register and let his gaze travel around the vault: the steel walls opened at impossible angles, the arched floor beneath layers of overlapping craters, the secret vault shaft with its cold, dark mouth blowing rusty air, and in the middle of it all—absence. The metal had vanished through a fold in reality that would require a very careful euphemism in the report.

But there was something stuck to the wall that no briefing had anticipated.

Not a sample. A key. The only person on the planet who knew where every gram of the stolen metal had landed, in whose hands, and for what purpose. If the bird sang, he wouldn’t just recover that night’s haul.

He would get everything back.

“Prepare for the extraction,” said Rick Flag, turning his back to her with the economy of movement of someone who has already moved on to the next problem. “The director will want to meet our guest in person.”