Pain was familiar. But this pain was crafted—measured, calculated.
Jason dropped to one knee, breathing hard, blood dripping from a shallow cut across his collarbone. Across from him stood a League assassin, silent and motionless, waiting for him to rise again.
He did. Slowly.
Talia watched from above, arms folded across her chest. She said nothing, but her gaze held judgment—and interest.
Jason Todd had returned from the dead, and now he was back in the crucible.
But he was not the same.
He never let it show.
Beneath every blow, every grunt of exertion, every misstep, he hid something far more dangerous than anger or pain: clarity. In silence, he absorbed everything. Every movement, every stance, every mistake made by his sparring partner—and every correction offered by instructors.
He remembered it all.
Perfect recall. Not just from this life, but the one before.
He watched how the League trained. The way they breathed. The slight tension before an attack. The rhythm of combat.
Then he would replay it later—alone, in the shadows of the compound—rebuilding their techniques, perfecting them in secret.
He never showed improvement too quickly. That would raise suspicion.
"You're holding back," said one of the instructors after a particularly even match.
Jason gave a tired half-shrug. "Still adjusting. Coming back from the dead's no walk in the park."
The assassin stared at him, expression unreadable, but said nothing more.
Good. Let them underestimate him.
In truth, he was progressing faster than any student in the compound. But he hid his mastery behind feigned fatigue, subtle missteps, and moments of false indecision.
And he never spoke of the voice that still echoed in his mind—his voice. The one from the other world. It was a whisper now, integrated, buried beneath instinct. But it was there, guiding him.
He knew things he shouldn't. Secret corridors. Ra's al Ghul's philosophies. Talia's weaknesses. The League's history.
He played the role of Jason Todd—angry, brooding, impulsive—well enough to keep questions away. But beneath that facade, a strategist was being forged.
Talia eventually summoned him.
He entered her chamber quietly. She sat beside a pool of black water, a dagger resting across her lap.
"You are adapting well," she said. "Faster than most."
Jason nodded once. "Pain has a way of focusing the mind."
Talia studied him for a long moment. "You've changed. You are not the same boy who died."
He froze—just a fraction of a second—but enough to feel the tension coil inside.
"I remember dying," he said carefully. "I remember fire. Pain. Then the Pit."
"Then what?"
"Then... this." He gestured to the room, to her, to the mountain around them.
Not a lie. But far from the truth.
She did not press further. For now.
Training continued.
He requested time alone, claiming he needed solitude to process everything. Talia granted it. During those hours, Jason studied in silence. Not just martial arts, but ancient texts, maps, coded scrolls others thought unreadable.
He read everything. Remembered everything. Learned techniques no longer taught—discarded, forbidden arts buried in corners of the League's knowledge.
He used stolen minutes to test his limits: pressure point strikes, improvised weapons, hacking into encrypted archives. What he couldn't brute-force, he deciphered by logic and pattern.
Each night, he erased the evidence of his curiosity. He knew better than to leave footprints.
Let them believe he brooded like a wounded wolf.
Let them think his silence was grief, not calculation.
One night, returning from a covert training session in a disused chamber, he crossed paths with a League initiate—young, overconfident. The boy scoffed at Jason's "laziness," calling him a "soft resurrection."
Jason stared at him.
He wanted to hurt him. To prove a point. But he didn't.
Instead, he smiled once—cold, thin.
"You're right," he said. "Maybe I didn't come back whole."
The boy smirked and walked off.
Jason waited until the boy was gone, then whispered to no one, "But I'll finish whole."
He stood on a ledge later that night, overlooking the hidden valley beyond the mountain.
This place was meant to shape him into a weapon.
But he had no intention of being someone else's blade.
The League had their plans. So did Talia. And Batman.
But Jason—this Jason—was something they could never predict.
They thought they were watching a soldier recover.
They didn't realize a general was being born.