At the top of Wayne Tower, within which a group of prospective investors had gathered, Bruce Wayne put on his nicest, prize-winning smile as he leaned back in his chair.
"Gentlemen, given our projected returns, I do not believe an investment of two, three, or even four Power Stones and a review each is too much to ask. Right, Mr. Fox?"
One of said investors smirked. "I do admit these numbers look good, Mr. Wayne, but..." He trailed off, glancing toward another, who readily chimed in. "Though we do not lack Power Stones, and our existing investments will sustain us for several generations to come, what additional value does your company offer us?"
"Excellent question! Considering you're all already benefiting from the output of our team..."
(Author: What team?! WHAT TEAM, MOTHERFUCKER?!! WHERE IS THIS TEAM YOU SPEAK OF?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
"... Additional capital would provide greater incentive for our lead writer to increase chapter output, especially now that Book 1 is nearing its end and he'll need to build a sufficient backlog for what comes next. Alternatively, you could consider supporting us through his Patreon at P @ tr 3on . c 0 m / Regularrr, though I understand if you're hesitant to make a long-term commitment. Still, the least you could do is contribute a few Power Stones, which, by your own admission, can last you... Generations, was it?"
He glanced over to Lucius Fox, who sat but a seat away, then back at the investors.
"I believe that was the word he used, sir."
"Hmmm..."
The prospective investors exchanged glances before one of them finally spoke.
"Your proposal is satisfactory. However, you understand that we'll need more time to... Deliberate?"
"That's completely understandable." Bruce offered them another light, cocky smile as he rested his chin on the backs of his hands. "But please, do not take too long. If our lead writer becomes too discouraged, I fear we may have no choice but to outsource the production of Book 2 to an LLM."
"That sounded like a threat, Mr. Wayne."
Bruce's smile widened by but a fraction.
"Oh, I assure you, it is no threat."
— — — — —
The Finger River hadn't always been the cleanest waterway in Gotham, which was saying something in a city where the harbor occasionally caught fire.
Decades back, it had been little more than a dumping ground for everything the city's factories and tenements didn't want to deal with properly. Human waste, industrial runoff, the occasional body…
If it was toxic or inconvenient, it all ended up in the Finger.
The stench alone had been enough to clear entire blocks during summer months. Then came the doctors and their reports about sanitary hazards, followed by lawsuits, federal regulations, and the kind of public outcry that even Gotham's most corrupt couldn't entirely ignore.
Cleanup efforts took years and cost millions, backed by hefty fines for violators and even heftier prison sentences for repeat offenders who thought they could keep dumping with impunity. The real turning point came when every body pulled from the river got the kind of scrutiny that spooked even the crime families.
The rest, as the saying went, was history, and eventually the river started to resemble actual water again.
These days, the Finger River ran surprisingly clear—even cleaner than most places in the city.
Nobody was going to drink from it anytime soon, but people could stand on either side of the banks without gagging, and in Gotham, that more than passed for progress…
Bruce had expected to find the cleanup undone, the water fouled again by the chaos tearing through Gotham.
Instead, the river's surface remained undisturbed, almost serene in contrast to the madness everywhere else. Most people still remembered the cesspit it had been and gave it a wide berth without thinking twice.
Criminals avoided it for different reasons, convinced that all those bodies dumped in the silt over the decades were just waiting for the chance to pull someone down with them.
Not entirely baseless superstition, those fears, and neither were the high railings built to prevent drunks from ending up as permanent residents of the Finger's murky bottom.
"You still there, Bat?" The pointed ears of his cowl, which by all rights should have served no purpose beyond intimidation, twitched as the Dark Knight fixed his gaze on the shapeshifter below.
Ripples crawled across the Symbiote's surface, slowly dispelling the camouflage that had rendered him all but invisible against the night sky.
Bruce had to admit, it suited him.
The passive enhancements alone justified its use, but what truly caught his interest was its transformative ability, which, from what he'd observed, rivaled Clayface's.
He had also confirmed it could harden into bladed weapons on command, and more curiously, increase and decrease its total mass with no discernible energy source to account for the difference. The hows still eluded the Dark Knight, but Metahuman abilities rarely had the courtesy of making sense.
"Bat?"
He landed behind Clayface without a sound and positioned himself in front of the rusted iron gates. "I'm here."
The Meta nearly jumped out of his skin, concentration slipping long enough for his face and clothes to melt into a shapeless brown smear. He grumbled something under his breath, then shoved past Bruce to get at the lock while the roaring of the infected swelled closer behind them. The muddy approximation of Hagen's hand instantly filled the keyhole, hardened with a heavy clunk, and open the gates swung.
"In you go. Don't keep the boss waiting."
"You first."
The Meta grumbled, glancing back with a scowl that barely held its shape. "Lock it up. I'm not dealing with those freaks if they follow us in." His cape unraveled into tendrils that wrenched the gate shut as their silhouettes dissolved into the darkness ahead.
"So… Hell of a night, huh?"
"Hm." Bruce absentmindedly grunted.
Everybody in the city knew Cobblepot's story. The kingpin never let a chance to speak of his past slip.
Born into a name that once carried weight in Gotham high society, only for his father to drink and gamble the fortune into dust. His mother worked herself into an early grave trying to keep them afloat, and when she died, the boy she'd tried to shield from the worst of the world was left with nothing but a deformed body and a city that had never once been kind to a soul, much less his kind.
He'd been homeless for years after that, sleeping in storm drains and dumpsters, begging for scraps with a face that earned him more kicks than coins.
The other urchins called him Penguin.
So did the men who ran the shelters.
So did everyone.
The shelters chased him out first, because a bed was a bed and nobody wanted to share a room with the freak. After that came the alleys, then the dumpsters behind restaurant rows where he fought stray dogs for scraps; where Oswald Cobblepot spent winters burrowed in garbage and swore on his mother's unmarked grave that if he survived, he would never touch anything cheap, worn, or secondhand again.
And he kept that promise with a zealously. Every suit was bespoke. Every meal was five-star. Every room he slept in had to smell of polish and clean linen, because the alternative was remembering what rot and filth tasted.
Which was precisely what made his choice of safehouse so effective.
The cells beneath Finger River had once been Gotham's slave market, back when the city was young enough to call the practice legal and old enough to know better.
Centuries of suffering had soaked into the stone, and the locals swore the place was the most haunted in all of Gotham, with only the Finger itself as close competition.
Not one sane person would venture down here willingly.
Certainly not a man like Cobblepot, who'd spent his formative years clawing his way out of holes not unlike this one, and would sooner die than return to such a place voluntarily. Or so any reasonable person would assume, and it was that very assumption that served as the safehouse's greatest defense.
The Dark Knight's thoughts faded as they rounded yet another corner and were greeted by the soft glow of yellow light sneaking out fron under an old room.
"Boss? Got the Bat."
"Send him in!" A gravelly voice answered from beyond the cracks almost immediately.
The room that greeted them was modest by anyone's standards, let alone Cobblepot's. The portly stump of a man sat in a chair that looked like the only piece of furniture he had bothered to upgrade, cigar smoldering between his lips and a newspaper unfolded across his stubby legs.
Bruce's eyes went to the paper first.
It was Central City's Citizen, and recent by the look of it, likely smuggled in through the port within the last day or two.
"Take a seat, Bat."
"I'm busy." Bruce responded coldly, earning himself a grunt that sounded all too similar to his own, albeit considerably more irritated and less dismissive.
"Didn't your mother ever teach you manners?"
"She did, and you've earned none of it."
The Knight grunted as his cowl flickered restlessly between black and grey, before settling for something in-between.
"If you have something to say, say it."
With a long, rattling exhale that seemed more exhausted than theatrical, the kingpin relented.
"You want to know why I dragged your ungrateful carcass down here? Fine."
Biting down on the cigar, he gestured at nothing in particular. "Do you have any idea what those two cost me? Any idea at all? I had eleven warehouses, Bat. Eleven. Seven chemical, four munitions, all stocked to the gills and spoken for."
He jabbed the cigar at the air between them.
"Fifteen years I spent building that supply chain. Fifteen years of greasing palms, dodging your fists, burying competitors, and playing nice with people I'd sooner feed to the river. All that, only for some burlap-wearing freak and two clowns with disgusting facefuls of makeup to help themselves to everything I own. I want to get even… I want reinbursement, and I need them inside a cell for that."
Stubby fingers dug into the stained vest that barely clung to his gut, Cobblepot fished from his breast pocket a small, dog-eared handbook which he slapped onto the crate between them.
Inside you'll find a list of every warehouse those two ransacked, and every item that was in stock… Consider it a gesture of goodwill." Bruce thumbed through the pages in silence, scanning column after column of names and quantities in the kingpin's handwriting, then grumbled.
"That won't be possible."
He pivoted on his heels.
"Oh? And why's that?"
Bruce thought of the people outside—some crippled, some killed; all damaged permanently.
He thought of his family who'd been driven to insanity…
He thought of the gas masks stuffed between candy bars and cigarettes in convenience stores, the flimsy hazard suits and off-brand filtration systems marketed as household necessities because Gotham had suffered too many chemical attacks for them not to be. And then the Dark Knight scowled, tendrils nearly toppling Clayface off balance as he marched to war.
Only after he'd submerged himself completely in the dark did the Metahuman dare mutter—to himself mainly. "That was new."
.
.
.
"And I looked, and beheld a great city adorned in sin, whose towers reached toward the Heavens in defiance, and whose foundations were laid in the blood of the innocent. And upon its highest wall stood a watchman clad in darkness who kept the beasts at bay. But the watchman was struck down and cast into the deep, and the waters swallowed him, and his light was seen no more. And the city, finding its wall unmanned, did tremble."
The first of the Afflicted had stumbled through the hidden door with a baseball bat and a grin that had already torn the skin at the corners of his lips, and was soon put to slumber by a pommel to the sternum.
"And the wolves, seeing the tower unmanned, sharpened their teeth and fell upon the flock. They carved the city into kingdoms and did war amongst themselves, for each desired the whole of the spoil. And the paths of escape were sundered in fire, and those who fled were consumed, and those who remained were made prisoners in their own dwellings. And the blood of their quarrels ran in the gutters, and the people wept, for there was none to deliver them."
A second woman who'd clawed her own cheeks raw followed not long after; carried to the back room where the others lay bound and gagged.
"And there arose from among them a man who wrapped himself in the garments of the righteous and spoke with the tongue of prophets, and the people, starved of hope, did kneel before him and called him blessed. But his prophecies were smoke, and his miracles were theatre, and he fed not the flock but fattened them for the wolves he claimed to shepherd them from."
The third was a teenager who dropped from the vent and onto his back while he was occupied with the half-conscious woman. It hadn't taken much to rip her off, and even less to put her to sleep, although Jean must admit he could have done without the elbow to the jaw.
"And from the tall chimneys rose a green and noxious cloud, and it spread across the city and blotted out the firmament until neither sun nor moon nor stars gave their light.
And there were spirits within the cloud, unclean and many, and they descended upon the people and entered into them as breath enters the lungs. And those who were entered laughed without ceasing, though tears ran from their eyes, and they fell upon one another as beasts. And the city became as the Pit itself, for the Demons wore the faces of men, and the men could no longer be told apart from the Demons."
He laid the two down beside the others, pressing two fingers to her forehead as her high-pitch giggles faded to shallow, hitching breaths.
"Be free of this, child… The Lord delivers thee from the unclean."
"And the heavens wept, but their tears were not of water. They fell as blood upon the streets and the rooftops, and the gutters overflowed crimson, and the people lifted their faces to the sky and could not tell whether it was rain or judgment that drenched them. And the earth groaned beneath the weight of it, and the air grew thick with the scent of iron and sulfur, and even the wicked fell silent in their revels.
And from the ruin of innocence, from the madness and the suffering there stirred a darkness that had no name among the tongues of men. It had been promised before the foundations of the world, spoken of in whispers by those who dared not speak it aloud. And those who believed they knew Evil will learn they had only ever glimpsed its shadow. And may He bring salvation upon it."
The last of the Afflicted arrived at half past four… Jean-Paul had been caressing the Sword of Salvation with an oiled cloth when the man's sobbing reached him all the way from the stairs. Erik had descended sideways, one arm cradling a boy who could not have been older than eight, the other pressing spilled intestines back into the child's abdomen as if it would help.
"J-Jean. Help me!"
"Erik..."
They'd been having breakfast when the green fog seeped through the window.
He'd covered his son's mouth first, then his own, but the fog had fingers, found its way in regardless.
The boy started laughing before Erik did...
Then his eyes started to change.
And then his face.
His voice.
His tone.
In his effort to defend himself, Erik's own hands had dug into the boy's stomach before the man could properly comprehend what he'd done.
He couldn't quite remember what happened afterward, only the screaming, the sticky wetness that seeped into his rolled up sleeve, and the silence that followed. He remembered clearly everything after the silence.
"Please." He choked, grinning so wide his gums showed. "Save him, Jean. Save him!"
Jean-Paul set the Blade down.
He lifted the small wrist, held it for a long moment, then gently turned the child's head. The skin along the jaw had already begun to discolor, with greenish pallor settling beneath the mottled grey. The warmth was long gone from the body save what it had borrowed from the older man's chest. "He is with God now."
"Please, please, please!"
"There is nothing more I can do."
"Ple—" The word broke apart into laughter that doubled him over next to his still son.
When he came back up, the grief and the madness had already engulfed what remained of his sanity…
Jean-Paul caught the fist and wrapped his arms around the man's neck.
"Why? WHY?! WHY?!! What cruel God would allow this?!!" Jean-Paul held him as Erik thrashed and laughed and wept all at once, choking him until the fight bled from his form as did the air from his lungs…
The man slid to the floor with his son still cradled in his arms, rocking gently in the dark.
Jean was alone once more, kept company only by the Afflicted, the prophecy of the Order and the sounds of armor pieces clicking in place.
Sword in hand, Azrael ascended to the now trashed street and a blotted sky.
"O Lord, vouchsafe me strength to hold the darkness at bay, to pour forth righteous vengeance upon Thine enemies, and to lead astray souls unto Thy saving grace.
Per fidem pugnamus.
In tenebris lux sumus.
Gloriam Tuam exaltamus."
— — — — —
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