The world outside was quiet.
But inside Wildcard's hidden medical bay, silence was not peace. It was tension held in suspense. A scalpel balancing on the edge of gravity.
The sharp scent of ozone, sterile antiseptic, and warm blood clung to the air like old guilt. Chakra smoke curled into ventilation shafts as six Wildcard clones dissolved into nothing, their task complete.
The Titans had been retrieved. Their bodies placed on recovery beds like fallen kings in metallic tombs.
On the central gurney lay Jinx.
Broken. Bleeding. Breathing.
Wildcard stood over her, armor worn and whispering soft alerts. He dismissed the diagnostics with a blink. There were more urgent things than heat sync fractures and cracked seals.
He lowered Jinx onto the table with unhurried precision—a warrior's grace tuned to a surgeon's clarity. He didn't tremble. Not even when her body tensed under his hands.
Her face was too pale. Her skin glistened with sweat under the surgical lighting. The bandages around her leg were red-black and blooming. Her Bardock mask, cracked down one side, had protected her mind.
Her survival? That had been him.
He crouched beside her.
There was no shaking in his hands—not because he wasn't worn down, but because failure wasn't an option tolerated. He peeled back the last remnants of her clothing. The wound beneath greeted him like open rebellion.
Twisted flesh. Bone like shattered porcelain. Magic still clinging around the edges like smoke after a detonation.
As he shifted her leg into position, her hand shot out and latched onto his wrist with unexpected strength.
"You better have pretty hands," she rasped, "or I'm hexing you in my dreams."
A smile flickered across the corner of his lips. Not a laugh. Just acknowledgment of her defiance.
"My hands?" he said, dryly amused. "They rewrite damage like artist's brushes across canvas. Some say divine. I say practiced."
His chakral field surged to the center of his palm—brilliant green light spilling over her torn leg like morning sunlight over frost.
"You'll still scream. Fair warning."
Then he began.
Mystic Palm Jutsu. Controlled. Deliberate. Absolute.
Relays of nerve pathways, skipped. Muscle realignment, enforced. Bone drawn inward by chakra like a magnet pulling destiny. She screamed, of course, because pain has no regard for elegance.
Her hex-charged nerve system resisted him.
Wildcard didn't blink.
"Chaos is instinct," he murmured, "but I've always preferred precision."
Her body jerked again. Her grip dug into his forearm.
He didn't slow.
The healing sequence completed itself exactly 4.2 seconds after it began—an eternity in pain, but a blink in calculation.
Jinx exhaled once, sharply. Then passed out.
Wildcard removed his hand and stood.
She would survive. She'd limp. She'd hurt. But she would return.
Success, as expected.
He turned toward the glowing object on the bench nearby.
Not the Titans—not yet.
First, the shard.
The Heart's Shard
The broken fragment of the Crimson Heart lay beneath flickering containment lights. Its glow wasn't red. Not really. Nor violet. It was something in-between. A hue that didn't exist in mortal color theory. The color of temptation given pulse.
It wasn't just magic. It was hunger encased in a promise.
His Sharingan rotated, bringing cross-spectrum analysis into his gaze. Suit resonance modules activated, filtering out subliminal suggestions. Even then... the effort taxed the field.
"Sync attempting to stabilize," said Sage, calm but terse. "Neural resonance at 36% match. It's tuning itself to your bio-pattern. Congratulations. You've impressed the evil crystal."
"How flattering," Wildcard responded, dry as stone. "Let's make sure it never gets the wrong idea."
He activated a stasis field around the shard. Containment snapped shut with a flicker of crystalline blue. Its light dimmed as if sulking.
"Asmodeus didn't create this as a weapon," he continued, eyes scanning new telemetry. "He created it as a mirror. One that shows you your deepest, hungriest design… and hurries you toward it."
Behind him, Jinx stirred.
Her voice—weak, but laced with curious sharpness. "So… he's weaker now?"
Wildcard didn't turn.
"He's off-balance," he replied. "The ritual's incomplete. The architecture's broken. But damaged doesn't mean disabled."
Then he looked over his shoulder at her, chakra still humming around his spine.
"We broke the tempo. He'll try to dictate the next verse."
Jinx smirked through her pain. "What makes you so calm?"
Wildcard's hands rested behind his back. His tone never wavered.
"Because I'm not improvising," he said. "He is."
The Titans
He turned. Six cots. Six legends in stasis.
But not asleep.
Cyborg's fingers tapped against the diagnostic port—seven rhythms, then error resets. An echo loop. His HUD flickered with corrupted glyphs—spell-script hidden inside machine code.
Starfire's radiant skin had dulled to pale firelight. Her aura pulsed like a dying star. Too even. Too contained. She was wrapped in peace—but the forced kind. The kind extracted by pressure, not rest.
Beast Boy groaned softly. His physical form mutated between animals with no conscious cue—cat to wolf to raven to nothing. Memory-induced shapeshifting disorder. Classic symptom of recursive trauma loops.
Robin held nothing in his hand.
And yet,
The enemies his mind conjured wore bladed shadows and unseen eyes. He was already fighting the next war with no doorway out.
And then—
Miss Martian.
M'gann's body trembled softly as if caught mid-transmission. Her brow twitched. Her shapeshifting was dormant, locked behind a firewall of dissonance. Yet her psychic field reached everywhere, as though clawing at the walls for escape.
Wildcard viewed her aura as threaded light—splintered. Fragmented. Her mind was being tuned like an antenna not for signal reception…
…but possession.
Asmodeus had touched her differently. Not with seduction—but reconfiguration.
She wasn't being pulled inward.
She was being overwritten.
And beneath it all—
Raven—
She looked perfect. Blank.
An angel at rest.
Wildcard stood over her silently, Sharingan spinning.
Perfection… was always a lie.
And Raven's mind?
Not a void.
A citadel under siege.
The pressure wasn't metaphor. It had shape. Density.
An eye opened behind her consciousness. Not hers.
Watching. Feeling. Calculating.
He tested contact.
And recoiled instantly.
There was no spell. No memory.
Only architecture. Waiting.
Asmodeus had planted a sleeper command.
They weren't dormant.
They were vessels.
Jinx stirred again. "They look dead."
"No."
His gaze moved slowly from cot to cot, like a monarch inspecting war-torn lands.
"They're dreaming in languages not their own."
The Warped God
The museum lay in ruin, a graveyard of shattered illusions—ash, broken glass, and sacrilege marking its hollow heart.
At its center stood Asmodeus, convulsing briefly like a string pulled taut beyond endurance, then straightening with a resounding crack of otherworldly vertebrae.
The Crimson Heart was gone.
"He stole it..."
The words poured from his throat thick and viscous like forbidden oil, laced with blasphemy and pain.
Then rage surged, breaking all restraint.
"HE STOLE IT!"
The calm, Slade-like facade shattered for a breath—a mask fallen away.
Beneath it was something older, more terrible.
A shifting silhouette, moving like smoke caught in rewind—every edge out of sync, every motion deliberately wrong, like a marionette whose severed strings could not stop its dance.
"Wildcard," he hissed, voice cracked with equal parts fury and dark amusement, "you meddlesome, clever little beast."
At his feet, the fractured ritual matrix glowed faintly. The absence of the Crimson Heart echoed like a missing drumbeat in a song only he could hear.
Yet his grin returned—slow, serpentine.
"He thinks he ended the dream."
Stepping forward, his bare feet glided over burning rune-circles wilting beneath his touch.
"But I already fed."
He spread his arms wide.
The air shimmered with spectral haze as shadows flickered into view—memories and imprints left behind like spiritual afterimages of the Titans: their fears, their desires, their truths.
Broken. Sampled. Claimed.
"They opened their hearts so wide, I barely had to ask. So eager to feel something. So afraid of what they already are."
He turned slowly, admiring the ruins as one might a desecrated cathedral.
"I don't consume lust," he whispered to the silent dark. "I cultivate it. I water obsession. I prune restraint. I make them believe they want to burn."
His smile deepened as he waved a single elongated hand through the air.
From the city beyond, sultry whispers rose—soft, strangled, and heavy.
Mothers weeping for husbands who no longer touch them.
Lovers sobbing alone in bathrooms after being abandoned.
Teenagers cutting sigils into skin to feel seen.
"A city of starving souls," Asmodeus murmured. "They beg to be known. To be claimed."
Crouched like a preacher at a shattered altar, his fingers traced soot-stained stone.
"Their lust isn't sin. It's surrender.
Their longing isn't weakness. It's worship."
Then he laughed.
Low, musical, almost charming.
"Let the Titans believe they escaped. Let them limp back to their tower and count their blessings."
"They still dream of me."
His body trembled with dark delight—twin suns burning behind hollow, ruined eyes.
"And that's all I need."
Rising, his form smoothed into perfection: seamless skin, a voice like velvet laid carefully upon razors.
"I don't need the Heart anymore. I have the hunger."
With a flick of his wrist, shadowy tendrils slithered from the walls—ghostly outlines of stolen memories: lips pressed to lips, fists thrown in passion, whispered betrayals given as offerings.
"They'll paint alleyways in blood and call it poetry.
They'll choke on each other's pain and call it love."
"And when they cry out for meaning in the dark..."
He stepped back into shadow, his too-perfect grin carved across his face.
"...they'll pray to me."
Stormfront
Back in the bay, Wildcard stood in front of the central console. Scans rippled across his field of vision.
The shard pulsed evenly within the containment field. But something shifted.
Sage opened another private channel. "Sir. I believe it's adapting—forcing negotiated frequencies against the stasis field. It may be listening. Or pinging."
"To whom?" Wildcard asked without emotion.
"To itself," Sage answered.
Wildcard calmly input new resistance thresholds.
If the ritual still had ears, let it listen.
What it would hear?
Silence. Strategy. And warfare calculated in degrees.
His gaze moved to the Titans. Their breaths. Their twitching fingers. The minds he had pulled back from the edge.
"I saved them," he said aloud. "I slowed the fall."
But his expression told the rest:
SThis isn't over. The battle changed format. That's all.
Then, from the cot beside him, a whisper touched the air like a hairline fracture in glass.
Raven.
Eyes closed.
Lips barely moving.
"He's still dreaming…"
"...through us…"
Wildcard didn't blink.
Didn't falter.
Instead, he smiled.
Not kindly.
Not cruelly.
Just... sharpened.
He cracked his fingers, his tone clipped and certain.
"Then I'm going to destroy his beauty sleep."
End of Chapter 41