Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0155

Chapter 155

The mirror couldn’t resist.
For a moment, that immense slab of darkened glass seemed to hesitate, as if the obsidian surface still refused to succumb. But then, from an almost imperceptible thread, a crack tore open, singing in the air: sharp, clear, a hiss before the crash. The glass shattered in a cataclysmic shard, turning into luminous dust that swirled under the cold light of the ceiling spotlights. For a second, the fragments floated, gleaming like falling stars, before plummeting onto the floor of the next room in an uneven carpet of crystals and ashes.

The body wore an orange jumpsuit that was excessively large for the fragile structure it supported. It emerged, launching itself through the debris, spinning uncontrollably in the air, and collided against the opposite wall with a dull, definitive thud. The sound echoed like a hammer, irrefutable in its conclusiveness. An instant later, the head followed, less loudly, but with equally brutal consequences: the skull gave way with a damp crack, like ripe fruit bursting open, and a trickle of scarlet blood began to slide along the wall, staining it in a slow trail to the once immaculate floor. The body slid until it was sitting, the neck twisted at an impossible angle, the reddened and opaque eyes still capturing, for a fraction of a second, the direction from which it had come. The silence that followed weighed more than any noise, as if the environment itself recoiled, unable to assimilate what it had just witnessed.

In the cell from which the body had been catapulted, Paula remained upright.
Years had passed since she had last seen her standing like this. The sensation of weight on her legs was strange, almost forgotten, but each muscle responded without hesitation, as if it had never forgotten its function. She slowly lowered the arm that still hovered in space, looking at each finger as one rediscovers an ancestral tool, forgotten in a dusty trunk.

In front of her, restrained by her wrists, was her daughter: Jade. Her skin, marked by purple and yellowish bruises in various stages of healing, trembled incessantly since Paulo had entered that room. The child still displayed the naked posture of someone who had been treated as an object—exposed, vulnerable—for weeks on end. Paula interposed herself between Jade and the shattered glass, forming a living shield even before uttering a word.

Jade watched, unable to fully process what she was seeing. The woman she had imagined for years reduced to a frail, dependent figure in a wheelchair had just lifted a man and thrown him with the same nonchalance as someone discarding a broken piece. She felt no fear; she felt twenty years of feigned fragility crumble in a single blow, each gesture of submission with which she had grown now reorganizing itself under an unfamiliar light.

Paula felt no remorse. Cizko had spent his final moments choosing which parts of the bound bodies of mother and daughter he would mutilate first. She interrupted the decision before he reached the second choice.
“Never again with mine.”

For a brief moment, he allowed himself to feel his own stature, upright, without the stoop he had feigned in front of strangers for so long. It was a fleeting flash of victory—there was work to be done.

The satisfied smile that had lit up his face on impact faded, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the room with a meticulous gaze. He searched for the corpulent, dark-skinned woman who, somewhere behind the monitors, must have orchestrated every detail of that grotesque spectacle. He found nothing: only blank panels, a chair hastily pushed aside, and a lukewarm glass of drink on the table. The silence of someone who had fled in haste, without time to recover their dignity, filled the space.

Paula searched every visible corner twice, as if a second check might reveal traces of the traitor hidden in the first. But she revealed nothing.

The absence hurt more than any confrontation ever could. Paula longed for that look with the urgency of someone gasping for air at the bottom of the sea: she wanted the exact moment when control would slip from Amanda’s face, trickling like a trickle of water through her fingers. She swallowed the disappointment in less than a second—the same way she swallowed anything that hindered her next move—and raised her chin, illuminated by the pale light of the fluorescent lamps, towards the cameras that, shining discreetly in the corners of the ceiling, continued recording, even though the woman on the other side had chosen the cowardice of distance.

The icy air of the cell, the same air that for weeks had served as a silent weapon against Jade, now seemed to caress Paula with a sharp touch, reminding her that this place had been designed to break people. She shuddered for a moment, but smiled at the biting cold, determined to rebuild every piece of the blueprint they had tried to use against her.

“Look, look.” Paula’s voice cut through the silence like a blade, loud enough for any microphone embedded in the white walls to pick up. “You seem scared, Amanda. Even of someone in a wheelchair.”

The answer echoed through the loudspeakers, restrained, measured, each syllable drawn out as if bound by shackles. Even so, Paula sensed the contained panic in her rival’s voice—she knew exactly where to look for the fear, and Amanda, it seemed, had never learned to hide it completely.

“There was something different about you.” The words came out calculated, paused, each one hammering in the silence. “My instinct told me this from day two, and now I see I was right all along. You fooled me very well, Paula. I admit it.” A pause long enough to echo in the camera lenses. “Most people in this position would beg. You chose to wait. That says a lot about who you really are.” Another pause, briefer, but sharp. “But you made a fatal mistake. As wrong as I was about one thing, I hold onto another certainty: your daughter remains under my control.”

Paula remained silent, letting the threat hang in the air like a ghost waiting for a reaction, denying even its very existence.

Jade, hanging by her wrists in the center of the cell, raised her pale face toward the ceiling, the speakers, the invisible monitors. She said nothing. Two weeks of confinement had taught her the exact value of each word—and this was not the time to waste any.

In the true command room of the Vault, Amanda Waller remained motionless in the main chair, her eyes fixed on the hypnotic glow of the central monitor. Her hands, crossed on the brushed steel table, rested with the serenity of someone who controls not only screens, but destinies. The room was airtight: titanium doors, reinforced concrete walls, infrared cameras testing every inch of the environment. The constant hum of the refrigeration system sounded like the mechanical pulse of a war machine.

Around Amanda, agents on duty watched every movement on the screens. They recognized Paula—her name was legendary among mercenaries, whispered in seedy bars as something more than a resume, almost mythical. Many doubted it, thought the stories were exaggerated. But now, facing that woman on the screen, they felt a primal chill: they had let the tiger in.

Paula stared at the camera as if she could see right through it, into the very soul of the observer on the other side. At each station, an agent felt the ancestral dread of confronting a predator. At one of the consoles, a young man pressed the mouse until his knuckles turned white, in the vain hope of turning back time before any of this had happened. Another, in an unconscious impulse, turned his chair a few centimeters, moving away from the image panel.

Then, the service elevator creaked as it stopped on the floor. The metal doors slid shut with a sharp squeak, and two agents assigned to watch Jade and Paula rushed out. Boots echoed on the cold floor, weapons banged against their hips, beads of sweat formed on their foreheads even in the frigid air of the complex. One of them held the radio close to his ear, repeating a code without response. The other almost tripped on the threshold, regained his balance, and kept running until their bodies instinctively formed a barrier between him and the monitor showing Paula.

They followed Amanda’s precise instructions for this scenario: if the prisoner dared to stand up on her own, no one would stay to negotiate or confirm. They would flee first and ask questions later—if there was still time for questions.

When they stopped running and their lungs gave them a break, one of them looked up at the nearest screen and saw Jade, still suspended by her wrists, beginning to move her shoulders, opening and closing her fingers as if testing the strength of a limb relearning life. Neither of them dared to comment. Being alive was already too much of a privilege; to offer an opinion on how the next scene would unfold was an unthinkable luxury.

On the other side of the concrete wall, in the central room, Amanda stood motionless, staring at mother and daughter through the invisible glass of the monitors. Chin raised, hands resting on the tabletop, she displayed the same impenetrable expression she had used before generals and senators, men who never suspected how much she manipulated them behind the public eye.

That’s when she realized: Jade was rehearsing a calculated move, as if testing the return of her dormant nerves. A slow smile formed on Amanda’s lips. There was still one card to be played—and she had never been the type to abandon the last hand of a game.

“You may have regained your mobility, Paula,” he said into the microphone, his crystal-clear voice piercing both rooms, “but I’m still the one who controls your daughter.”

She raised her hand in an almost bored gesture, pointing to the operator on her right: the signal to activate the electronic collar, the instrument of coercion that had been waiting for days for the right moment to be used. Everyone’s breath seemed to stop for a second, as if the order – simple and definitive – could restart the game in Amanda’s favor. The operator, with trembling fingers, typed the final command. On the screen, a red icon flashed, confirming the sending of the signal.

Nothing happened.

Five seconds dragged on like ropes stretched to their limit. Then, ten more—each second scratching at the silence of the cubicle. The operator, hunched over the console, felt his heart pounding against his ribs in a drum-like rhythm. Under the cold light of the monitors, glistening beads of sweat clung to his forehead; his fingers drummed desperately on the keyboard, searching for life in a reluctant protocol. He forced a restart, listened to the electronic click of the cables, checked each connection as if searching for an invisible fault.
“Signal sent.” His voice came out muffled, almost a whisper drawn from his own lips. “Go… but disappear before you get anywhere.”

At that instant, the panel in front of him flickered twice, as if breathing with sobs, before dissolving into a mosaic of gray static that buzzed in traces of dying energy. The operator froze, his hands suspended over the keys, and turned in a slow movement to the station next door. There, another monitor agonized in irregular flashes, turning on and off, expelling fragments of screen like dry leaves in the wind.

He tried to speak, but could only swallow hard. “We’ve lost some of our control.”

Amanda tilted her head slightly, keeping her voice low and measured, but with a sharp edge that made the coach shudder. “What do you mean?”

Dragging his chair to the center console, the man stared at three screens simultaneously, his eyes darting from graph to graph, as if trying to decipher a riddle before even uttering it.
“Part of the satellite network servers were hacked. Someone exploited a vulnerability and stole our access. Everything that depends on this connection is out of our reach.”

Amanda’s face lost its serenity. An ancient, incandescent fury rose in her chest, raising silent flames beneath her skin. Her foundation—the fortress she had built over decades of meticulous work—had, at that moment, an invisible, treacherous crack, one that no protocol had foreseen. And the most painful blow: the control of Jade’s leash, the only one she wished to see obey flawlessly, was now ripped from her power, as if it were a defective toy.

“But all is not lost.” The coach raised a trembling hand, trying to contain his own panic, as if that gesture could hold back the storm.

Amanda swallowed. Every syllable of the question that escaped her rang out, etched in the room: “What do we still control now?”

He counted on his fingers, trembling. “The entire internal command center of the base. The information network on the local servers. The detention sector, including the control of the prisoners’ collars. Except for Jade’s—because she was running on the same remote priority that we used for this operation.”

That single exception was enough to ignite her thoughts. She could still control cameras, environmental systems, electromagnetic locks, but someone, somewhere, was pulling a lever she believed unreachable. It felt like a secret door was opening in the heart of her own creation.

…

In the cell, Paula didn’t wait for any orders from headquarters. She turned to the surveillance camera in a decisive movement, the cold reflection of the metal illuminating her face. She approached Jade, her footsteps echoing on the cement floor, and placed her hand on the collar that still throbbed against the thin flesh of her daughter’s neck.

A moment later, with superhuman strength, she bent the steel as if crushing a dry branch. The metal creaked, the twisted fibers sounded with a sharp crack, and the collar broke in two, each piece falling with a soft clinking—almost gentle, compared to the brutality of the gesture.

The air in the cell seemed to ripple even before Jade reacted: an invisible current ran along the walls, as if the environment itself were breathing, acknowledging the breaking of the device. The pressure that had tightened around her neck for two weeks evaporated in a second, and the first breath Jade took was so deep that it expanded her ribcage like never before.

She floated. Her body, instantly lighter, rose a few centimeters off the ground, as if obeying a hidden force. Her eyes, until then blurred by fatigue, rekindled in a blue glow, reflecting wisps of light that flickered off the walls. Her hair and the torn fabric of her dress followed the movement, fluttering like flags in a gale.

With a graceful turn, Jade extended her foot and struck the chain that fastened her shackles to the ceiling. The weakened steel gave way with a shrill hiss, shattering into fragments that rattled through the air before shattering on the floor. The unseen wind that rose roared for a moment inside the cell, and the metallic clinking echoed throughout the facility, announcing that the contained power had finally been unleashed.

She landed on her feet as if she were part of gravity, a whisper of movement that defied any physical explanation. The compressed air around her trembled as her knees flexed, cushioning a leap that, to those watching, seemed both impossible and inevitable. Still with her wrists and ankles shackled, Jade pressed the tip of her lip against the metal arch of the bolts and released a restrained breath. The jet of air exploded at high speed, causing the handcuffs on her hands to break first and, in a knife-on-stone reflex, shattering those that bound her feet – all in less than two seconds. The crack of the metal breaking echoed through the damp cell, reverberating off the concrete walls like spectral applause. For the first time in fourteen days, every inch of Jade’s body was free.

On the other side of the prison bars, Paula remained motionless, her arms hanging limply at her sides, her face finally uncovered from the mask she had worn in front of the cameras for weeks on end. Her eyes held no pride from a spectacle, but rather the raw warmth of a mother watching her own daughter rise up on her own, free from the chains that had dragged her into the abyss.

In silent synchronicity, both turned to the camera in the upper corner of the cell. Jade placed her hand on her hip, leaned forward, her barbed gaze emanating defiance – a silent invitation to the audience of a world watching them. Paula mirrored each gesture: same hand on her waist, same weight distributed on her feet, as if time had melted away twenty years of difference in just an instant.

In the control room, Amanda shuddered. A chill ran down her spine, as familiar as a premonition. She recognized in that angle, in that twin gesture, the reflection of a story that seemed to have ended. The unease wasn’t pure fear, but the feeling that the final pieces on the board were moving relentlessly.

“You’re not the only one,” Paula whispered through the audio system, her voice low, almost affectionate. “Who has a support network.”

The word “support” had barely echoed when the first monitor plunged into gray static. Next to it, another sank into a monotonous blue, devoid of icons, like a frozen lake. A third flickered red, silent alarms flashing in chaotic cadence, none corresponding to the emergency manual. In less than sixty seconds, more than half the wall of screens was invaded by a noisy mosaic of lights and noise—as if the room itself had succumbed to a nervous breakdown.

“We lost the main controls,” the IT technician choked out, his tone seething with panic.

“The elevators too,” shouted another agent three stations to the left, without taking his eyes off the panel. “Stopped between floors. Not even with manual return.”

Through dark ducts beneath them rose a growing chorus of distant alarms. Doors sealed decades ago began to give way, containment systems collapsing in successive failures, far beyond what any team could quickly contain. The hum of servers mingled with the distant siren, and the corridor of monitors became a feverish organism.

Amanda jumped to her feet, her palms pressed firmly against the cold surface of the control panel. Each flickering screen robbed her of sight of that place which, years ago, had been the brain and heart of everything he had built there. Her pulse throbbed like its own alarm.

“Call Flag,” he shouted, his voice louder than he intended—the first crack in front of the entire team. “Tell him to come down now.”

She turned to the last monitor that was still stable, expecting to see Paula and Jade, side by side, challenging the lens. But the screen displayed only the dull reflection of the empty room. There was no one else there.

No bodies. No trace, except for the shards of safety glass that covered the floor like crushed ice, shimmering under the emergency lights that flickered in an increasingly faint, almost pink, red. The wheelchair remained exactly where it had been abandoned, its empty nylon seat still retaining the ghostly shape of whoever had sat there, tilted on its side like a slaughtered animal, its front wheels still spinning slowly, aimlessly. It was the only object in the scene that still made any sense to Amanda. And then, one by one, the last lights in that sector went out with an electronic sigh, first the fluorescent ceiling lights dying with a descending hum, then the red LEDs on the doors, as if they had witnessed something impossible and decided, on their own, that it was no longer worth keeping them lit.

Amanda stared at the blank monitor for exactly thirteen seconds—she mentally counted each one—long enough to notice how her own ghostly reflection flickered on the dark surface of the screen. Her hands, which had been crossed on the table for minutes, were now clenched into fists so tight that her knuckles had turned white like marble beneath the taut skin.

It was at that moment that a different alarm cut through the room, three tones lower than usual, almost physical in the way it vibrated through the steel walls, making the plastic cups on the workstations tremble.

“Collision registered.” The voice came hesitantly from across the room, hoarse, as if it didn’t trust its own equipment. “Sector one. Main access point.”

Amanda turned so abruptly that the swivel chair creaked against the non-slip floor. The technician was already pulling out the few cameras that were still responding in that section of the base—three in total—his trembling hands moving across the keyboard. The image came in shaky, grainy from the digital compression, but sharp enough to distinguish shapes and movement.

Something had just burst through the first-floor entrance—not through the main titanium doors, but through the adjacent wall, leaving behind an irregular opening of concrete and twisted rebar.

It wasn’t human. Nor did it exactly look like a machine, although no one in that room could say otherwise with conviction. It stood on two legs as thick as oak pillars, more than two and a half meters tall, its scaly skin—or armor—reflecting the emergency light in a deep amber glow that shouldn’t exist in anything living or built by human hands. Its elongated head, without a defined neck, resembled the drawing of a reptile torn from an old book: a tailless lizard with jaws that opened sideways revealing rows of metallic teeth, or something that had once been called a dragon, before the world stopped believing in that sort of thing.

“Is that… a robot?” The question came from someone at the back of the room, without any conviction, dying before it was finished when the creature took another step and the concrete floor cracked under its weight.

No one answered. No one knew.

Amanda watched the creature advance down the main corridor on the center screen, its movements strangely fluid for something so massive. In the lower right image, sector agents retreated in defensive formation, their weapons raised. The first bursts of gunfire impacted the scaly torso without any visible effect—just bluish-green sparks that dissipated in the air like electronic fireflies. She clenched her fists even tighter, feeling her nails digging damp furrows into her palms.

“If we really want to hold our base,” he said, his fists still clenched, his voice low and definite like the sound of a knife being sharpened in the darkness, “we’re going to have to use everything we have at hand.”