There wasn't time.
Not for speeches. Not for comfort.
Only procedure.
Wildcard stood in the center of his flickering med-bay, coat brushing at his ankles, Sharingan analyzing each stasis cocoon like a field surgeon prepping for controlled explosion.
"Same method," he said to M'gann. "As before."
She nodded once, silently activating reinforcement coils of telekinesis around the next cot.
He pointed.
Red. Robin.
The moment the Genjutsu Kai hit him, Robin snapped upward like someone yanked his soul by a wire. A blade wasn't in his hand—but his reflex thought it was. His arms moved like he was mid-combat.
But M'gann reacted quick.
A telekinetic clamp locked both wrists mid-punch. His head whipped toward Wildcard's silhouette between heartbeats.
His breathing was aggressive. Heartbeat erratic. Eyes flickering with phantom enemies.
Wildcard didn't hesitate.
Lightning Style: Paralysis Fear.
Robin froze—locked from chin to boot soles, a training simulation in freeze-frame.
Eyes wide.
Wildcard crouched just beside him.
"No demons in this room but me. Deep breath. You're free."
Robin didn't trust him yet.
But he stopped fighting.
That was enough.
***
Blue– Cyborg –
Target Locked
The most dangerous of the three.
Because his mind didn't twitch.
His systems did.
The moment the genjutsu shattered, Cyborg's HUD stuttered violently. Runes danced across his optic systems in corrupted spell-code. Red warning sigils blinked behind his iris while his body began to lock into defensive mode—like waking up mid-glitch—with fatal protocols ready to fire.
"Heart-Code resonance still present in his neural net," Sage pinged urgently. "He's caught between mech override and soul spasm. You've got seconds."
His cannon arm primed itself unintentionally—building energy without consent.
"I've got this."
Wildcard's voice dropped to combat resolution grade.
He leapt to the side, chakra charging down his blade-hand in a clean ripple of electric blue.
"Lightning Release: Slash."
CHOOM—
With one fluid motion, Wildcard whipped his arm horizontally—sending a compressed arc of crackling lightning across the space between them.
The bolt surged like a blade writ in plasma, not aimed to cut—but to disrupt.
It struck Cyborg in a shoulder-sweep pattern—deliberate.
Metal sparked violently at the point of contact, cascading electrical energy through his circuits, shattering the rune-polluted glyphs blazing across his HUD.
Cyborg's body jolted, then froze—arcing for just a moment like a machine stuck in hard reboot.
One knee hit the cot. Smoke trailed from his arm.
"System—force-reset detected," he gasped. "Magic protocols—terminated."
Wildcard stepped in, hand glowing with follow-up chakra, ready. "Vitals returning to stable."
"Technique successful," Sage confirmed. "The lightning blade uprooted his corrupted interface. No permanent hardware damage. Ten out of ten, would slash again."
Cyborg collapsed backward into the med-bed, breathing hard but clear behind the eyes for the first time.
"…You… hit me," he said.
Wildcard nodded. "Precisely. Voltage-therapy. Chakra-rated."
Cyborg actually gave the ghost of a smile.
"I hate how effective that was."
Wildcard stepped back from Cyborg, his coat settling as the smoky static faded.
He didn't let the relief linger.
He glanced once at the next cot—a flicker of intense pink aura visible beneath the reinforced sensor shell.
***
Pink –Starfire.
The air jolted—first in memory, then in motion.
The Nightmare Shattered
Starfire's psyche was split:
The lingering, insidious drip of Asmodeus's voice, his poison of cruelty and power—"Shed your weakness. Burn your softness. Make them run."—echoed through her mind.
But for every venomous word, a counterpoint grew inside: faces of her friends, the warmth of shared trust, the ache of real love and loyalty.
Her compassion screamed louder than any devil.
The shift was seismic.
Abrupt, Disorienting Reality
Suddenly—
The nightmare dissolved.
No gradual exit.
Just the harsh slap of waking reality.
She shot upright with a single, piercing scream—so loud it threatened to fracture the walls.
Her room spun, incandescent with overloaded power—a frenzied blast of starbolts erupted, wild green lightning searing bedclothes and gouging shadows across the ceiling.
Her body vibrated with the aftershocks of the dream's unleashed fury and violation—an emptiness so sickening it nauseated her.
Every muscle burned with the echo of rage, fear, and shame.
Her heart slammed against her ribs:
Alien. Dangerous.
Breath came in torn gasps; her throat raw, lips stung by the memory of smiling with fangs.
She nearly tumbled off the cot.
Adrenaline, terror, betrayal—all at once.
Immediate Crisis Response
Wildcard's voice sliced through:
"M'gann—don't let her escape!"
No hesitation—
M'gann's telekinesis lashed out, emerald coils clamping around Starfire's arms and legs, anchoring her mid-air before she could detonate another bolt or vault for the windows.
All the freshly-awakened Titans snapped into defensive stance—Beast Boy melting halfway into tiger form, Robin's fists up, Cyborg's arm-cannon prepped—instinct, not intention.
Wildcard closed in.
Jutsu lightning seethed around his fists.
"Lightning Release: Jolt Clamp!"
He lunged, grabbing Starfire's forearm—sending a sharp pulse of electricity through her major muscles, paralyzing her arms and legs without causing harm, keeping her immobile.
In the same instant, his chakra flared.
"Lightning Release: Four Pillar Bind!"
Four rock pillars—summoned from reinforced panels—rose up at the cot's edges, each spitting arcs of blue lightning that laced Starfire's body in place, pinning her without burning her skin.
Only Wildcard moved; the rest held position, as if in a bomb disposal zone.
Starfire's eyes blazed—half fury, half terror.
Her fists shook violently, fighting against the bind, against herself, against the phantom voice whispering in her head.
Wildcard leaned close, Sharingan spinning to full focus:
Memory Flood—Info Dump.
A torrent of truth hit Starfire's mind—images, context, every horror and every saving fact—Asmodeus's manipulation, the Crimson Heart's power, the truth of her own heroism in the dark.
In one brief, blinding second, the knowledge overtook the nightmare.
Starfire struggled, wild starbolts flickering from her skin—her chest heaved, gasps coming ragged and desperate as she tried to press hands to her face and couldn't.
She remembered the dream's monstrous smile.
The sick fear of losing herself.
She slammed her fists (what motion she had) into the mattress, fighting for control.
Wildcard offered no comfort—only steel.
"If you don't stop thrashing by tower now," he warned, voice cold as mercury,
"my next shock will fry your neural core. I'm not bluffing."
That clinical threat—the certainty and the power—cut through the chaos.
It wasn't compassion, but it was control.
Starfire met his gaze—tears in her eyes, but resolve flickering back to life.
Slowly, painfully, she forced her starbolts to die down—wrestling the wild power into stillness.
She took in the room:
Her team, battered and frightened but alive.
Her hands, shaking, but still hers.
Starfire's breaths steadied, stringing together broken gasps into shaky control. Slowly, she lowered her gaze to her trembling hands. Green sparks retreated, her power finally bridled. Around her, Robin, Cyborg, Beast Boy, and Jinx watched—shell-shocked, but present.
M'gann stepped forward, eyes glinting with protective anger. "Don't threaten her, Wildcard. She just got dragged out of a living nightmare—then you electrocuted her, and dumped a torrent of trauma on her brain."
Wildcard met her stare with cold indifference. "Your friends went through the exact same procedure. None of them complained, at least not sincerely. And don't pretend your hands are clean, M'gann—you held them down for me. Every step. So suck it up."
M'gann bristled, but didn't answer.
He turned to the recovering Titans—each of them tense, uncertain, bruised in ways no medbay could fix.
Wildcard's tone dropped—blunt, no sympathy.
"Listen. No sugarcoating: the last one left is the girl in indigo." He pointed at Raven, her form eerily still beneath reinforced containment fields.
He flicked his gaze across the room, noting the tight defensive postures, the barely-contained trauma, the collective fear. "Every single one of you, on waking, tried to destroy something. You tried to fight me, or run, or blast half the furniture."
His gaze lingered on Raven's unconscious silhouette.
"When we wake her… odds are, she's going to try and kill all of us, and maybe anything else in the blast radius."
The tension grew thick; Starfire's knuckles whitened. Robin's eyes narrowed, Beast Boy shrank into himself, Cyborg glanced nervously at Jinx.
Wildcard continued, unforgiving. "And the longer we wait, the worse it gets. Raven's powers are tied to her pain—and if Asmodeus left any residue, it's only growing darker by the second."
He let the warning hang, eyes hard under the rim of his mask.
"So, decide for yourselves. Right now. What are you going to do?"
The brief hush that followed was filled with dread, but also determination.
The next move was theirs.