Hello everyone!
Sorry for the delay, I've been a bit busy.
Here are the 3 chapters, from 20 to 22.
Enjoy them.
Mike.
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Chapter 20: The House in the Alley of Hell
It was a quiet morning in Kyoto. The sun filtered through the rainy season clouds, casting a diffuse, silver light over the Gion alley. The air smelled of damp stone, moss, and the distant incense of a nearby temple. Inside the Urahara Candy Shop, the only sound was the rhythmic shhh-shhh of a bamboo broom sweeping invisible dust from the spotless tatami floor.
Urahara Kisuke hummed an out-of-tune melody, an old Soul Society chant he had mentally transformed into a song about the merits of rice crackers. Klarion's mess had been cleaned up, the merchandise had been reordered, and peace, his favorite form of manufactured normality, had been restored. He had spent the last few hours hand-grinding some imperial-grade gyokuro tea leaves, and the resulting aroma was so heavenly, so perfect, that it almost made him forget the smell of sulfur and rotting apple pie the Lord of Chaos had left behind.
He finished sweeping, put the broom in its place, and headed to his counter. With the reverence of a priest in a ritual, he prepared the tea. The water, at the exact temperature. The leaves, in the perfect ratio. The steeping time, counted in silent seconds. He poured the bright emerald green liquid into his favorite cup.
He held the cup, inhaling the steam. It was the scent of calm, of order, of a civilized world.
He turned toward the backroom, where his personal control room awaited him, and sighed.
"Well," he muttered to himself. "Let's see how long it lasts."
The instant he crossed the threshold of his pocket dimension, the scent of tea was drowned out by the psychic stench of global panic. The laboratory was bathed in the flashing red light of dozens of crisis alerts. The holographic screens he had left paused, displaying his research on Tibet, were now hijacked by emergency broadcasts from around the planet.
The world was going crazy.
Urahara walked calmly to his console, without spilling a drop of his tea. He sat down and watched the unfolding apocalypse with the fascination of a theater critic on a very experimental opening night.
On the main screen, Metropolis. Broad daylight. A man in a business suit was running screaming down the sidewalk, his face pale with terror. He had dropped his briefcase, his papers scattered by the wind. He was screaming... at his wife and two small children, who looked at him with confused desperation from the door of a taxi.
Kisuke activated a conceptual sensor, tuning into the man's "perception."
Instantly, Urahara's image changed. The woman was no longer a civilian; her eyes were pits of fire, twisted horns sprouted from her forehead, and her children beside her were not children, but small gray, scaly imps hissing with forked tongues. The man wasn't running from his family. He was running from a portal to Hell.
"Hmm," muttered Kisuke, taking a sip of tea. "Interesting."
He changed the channel. London. The chaos was more... picturesque. A red double-decker bus had swerved sharply on Westminster Bridge, but people weren't fleeing the bus. They were fleeing the giant metal red snake writhing, its windows like the eyes of a thousand screaming souls, its front grille a roaring mouth. It collided with another bus, and the crowd watched two metal titans coiling in a deadly battle. Several civilians, faces twisted in terror, were jumping from the bridge into the cold waters of the Thames.
A quick sweep showed more. In Rome, the statues of Vatican City seemed to weep real blood, sparking a religious panic that overwhelmed the Swiss Guard. In Sydney, the Opera House had come alive, its famous concrete "sails" flexing and breathing like the shell of a colossal sea creature.
Urahara leaned back in his chair, genuinely impressed.
'What a cruel work of art,' he thought, his mind savoring the complexity of the attack. 'It's not a plague of destruction. It's not a virus. It's a plague of perception. A semiotic virus attacking the brain's ability to interpret reality. It has turned civilization's most fundamental tool, trust, into its primary weapon. You can't punch a shared hallucination. You can't arrest collective fear. It is... elegant. Simply elegant.'
He checked his own sensors. The energy was magical, no doubt about that, but it wasn't chaotic like Klarion's. It was... ancient. It tasted of dust, forgotten books, dreams, and nightmares.
'The artist behind this has a true talent for tragedy,' he concluded. 'This isn't a random attack. It's a composition. A symphony of terror spreading across humanity's psychic web. And it's barely in its first movement.'
At that moment, one of his smaller screens, one he had set up to monitor Justice League communications out of pure curiosity, lit up with an incoming call.
Two hundred thousand kilometers above the panic, the mood was not one of fascination. It was one of absolute helplessness.
The main conference room of the Justice League Watchtower was steeped in tension. Kara Zor-El stood at the monitor station, a position she had taken as part of her re-entry into hero life. But she was no longer alone. Beside her, Kal-El, her cousin, slammed a gloved fist onto the steel console, his face, usually a beacon of hope, contorted with frustration.
"It's not working!" he growled. "I flew to Metropolis. I tried to calm people, talk to them. They saw me as... as some kind of fire monster! They ran from me! They were afraid of me! How can I save people who run away from me?"
Diana, Wonder Woman, stood by the panoramic window, looking down at the sick Earth. "Same in Rome. I tried using the Lasso of Hestia. People told the truth, yes. They screamed the truth that they saw the devil in my eyes, that the statues had ordered them to repent. The lasso only... only confirms their terror. It doesn't dispel it. We cannot fight what their souls see."
Martian Manhunter, J'onn J'onzz, materialized through a nearby wall, his green form flickering with distress. "I've tried... contacting their minds. It is... chaos. A roar. It isn't direct mind control, but an infection. A viral idea rewriting their senses. And it is... hurting. The planet's psychosphere is screaming."
The panic in the room was palpable. Their greatest powers—Superman's strength, Wonder Woman's truth, J'onn's telepathy—were useless.
"There's only one option left," Clark said finally, his voice grim. "We need someone who thinks... differently. Someone used to this kind of madness."
Diana nodded, her face stern. "Call Batman."
Clark activated the League communicator, his 'S' symbol reflecting on the dark screen. "Batman. We need you. The world..."
The voice that answered was a harsh growl, full of static and infinite weariness. "I'm busy."
"Batman, the world is going crazy!" Diana insisted, stepping forward. "We are blind. We need your strategy."
"I know," the voice replied. There was the sound of a struggle in the background, a scream that wasn't quite human, followed by a dull thud. "I'm in Arkham. Or what's left of it. And I am... very busy."
There was a pause, and the static seemed to intensify. "Whatever is hitting the world, it started here. The patients aren't seeing demons. They are... calm. Too calm. And they're all singing the same song."
"What song?" asked Clark.
"Not a song. A name," Batman's voice growled. "Over and over. 'Doctor Destiny has opened the book'. 'Dreams will save us all'. This isn't my field, League. This is mystic. And it is out of my depth."
The silence that followed that admission was more terrifying than the panic. Batman, the man with a plan to kill gods, the man who was the plan, had just said "I'm out of my depth."
Kara, who had been listening in silence, felt a cold knot in her stomach. Helplessness. Chaos. Magic. A problem you couldn't punch. A puzzle.
'...a puzzle that hates rules.' The memory of Kisuke's infuriating calm came to mind.
"Wait," she said, her own voice sounding small in the vast room. Clark and Diana turned to her.
"I... think I know a guy."
Clark looked at her, confused. "A guy? Kara, what are you talking about? Your friend...?"
Kara nodded, ignoring her cousin's confusion and pressing the communicator. "Batman," she said, her voice gaining a hint of confidence, the confidence of someone holding a secret card no one else knows. "You're in Gotham, right?"
"Affirmative," the harsh voice replied.
"I know someone," Kara said, firmer now. "He's... complicated. Not a hero. But he's the best consultant in the universe for... weird stuff. If anyone can understand this, it's him."
There was a long pause on the line. Batman was undoubtedly weighing the desperation of their situation against the recommendation of an ally who, while powerful, had spent the last few months on a mysterious trip with an unknown "friend."
"Is he trustworthy?" asked Batman.
Kara thought of the demons, the farm, the sword training. She thought of his mischievous smile and his two-thousand-year-old eyes. "He is... trustworthy to do what interests him. And this... this will interest him. Trust me."
"I don't have time for this, Supergirl," Batman growled, the sound of another fight breaking out in the background.
"But I do!" insisted Kara. "He can help. I know it. I'll send you an address. It's a dead end in the Coventry district. Go there. Knock three times."
"An alley? Knock three times? Is this a joke?" said Batman, his voice dripping with disbelief.
"No," Kara replied, with total seriousness. "Trust me. He is the only person I know who might find this entire apocalypse... 'fascinating'."
The communicator went silent, but the connection didn't cut. Batman hadn't hung up.
In his shop-laboratory, Urahara Kisuke smiled, his eyes fixed on the screen showing the Watchtower conversation.
'Coventry district,' he thought with amusement. 'What a deliciously gloomy choice. I love it.'
He rose from his chair, left his now-empty tea cup on the console, and headed for the door of his Kyoto shop.
"Well," he muttered to himself, adjusting his hat. "I guess it's time to open the Gotham branch. I hope the neighborhood isn't too noisy."
The rain in Gotham didn't fall; it seeped. It was a cold, greasy drizzle that made the asphalt shine with a sickly glow under the few working streetlights, carrying with it the smell of rust, old trash, and that particular city desperation. Coventry Alley, in the district of the same name, was a place where architecture had given up. It was a dead end, a knife slash between two abandoned brick warehouses whose boarded-up windows looked like eyes closed in an autopsy.
The only sound was the constant dripping of water from a broken drainpipe and the distant wail of a siren, so omnipresent in Gotham it was just another layer of silence.
A lightning bolt, unnatural and greenish in hue, illuminated the alley for an instant, revealing a silhouette already there. Batman stood in the deepest shadows, a gargoyle of flesh and blood, so motionless the rain seemed to avoid him out of sheer indecision. He had arrived ten minutes ago. He was analyzing. The alley was, as expected, empty. No business doors, no apartments, nothing. Just a brick wall at the end, covered in faded graffiti and the grime of decades.
'A dead end in Coventry. Knock three times.'
Supergirl's instructions were absurd. Childish. And yet, she had spoken with a conviction he rarely heard in her voice, and the global crisis unfolding on his holographic contact lenses left him no room for skepticism. Madness was eating the world. Absurdity was already the baseline.
A new presence distorted the air to his right. There was no sound, but the rain seemed to sizzle for an instant. Zatanna Zatara materialized, not with a flash of stage light, but with a simple step through a shadow. She wore her civilian attire—a leather jacket and jeans—but her face was pale, lips pressed into a line of concentration.
"Batman," she said, her voice a low whisper, breath visible in the cold air. She rubbed her arms, though the cold didn't seem to be the reason. "This place is... wrong."
"Magically?" he asked, his voice a low growl barely distinguishable from the wind.
"Worse," she replied, looking not at the back wall, but at the air itself. "It is... silent. Too silent. It's as if all the ambient mystical energy of Gotham, all the... background noise, were being sucked away. As if there were a conceptual black hole right here." She looked at the brick wall. "Or behind that wall."
"Hmph. Or maybe it's just a shitty alley in a shitty city, and the girl in blue has sent us on a wild goose chase."
The voice, heavy with nicotine and a cynicism so deep it made the rain seem clean, came from the alley entrance. John Constantine was there, his ragged beige trench coat dripping, his poorly knotted red tie hanging like a hanged man. Hands shoved in pockets, wearing an expression of profound weariness.
"You're late, Constantine," Batman growled, without turning.
"And you're early, as always. Someone has to keep the balance, right?" John retorted, walking lazily down the alley, dodging the worst of the puddles.
He stopped at a safe distance, pulled out a crumpled cigarette, and lit it with a snap of his fingers, the small sulfur flame illuminating his tired face.
"So, is this Supergirl's big solution? A dead end? Wonderful. Here we are, freezing to death, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket because Doctor Destiny woke up on the wrong side of the bed, and our plan is... to stare at a wall."
"Zatanna senses something," Batman said.
"Of course she senses something!" snapped John. "I feel it too! I feel like I'm getting soaked and could use a drink. This place has nothing, Batman. My magic senses are blank. It's a bloody alley."
"No," insisted Zatanna, taking a step closer to the wall, hand outstretched as if trying to feel the heat of an invisible fire. "They aren't blank. They are being... silenced. It's a void. There is something here. Or rather, there is a very powerful 'non-something' here."
Batman had heard enough. Zatanna's analysis confirmed Kara's suspicions. The absurd was the way forward. Ignoring Constantine's complaints and Zatanna's caution, he approached the brick wall at the end of the alley.
It was exactly what it looked like: cheap red brick, crumbling mortar, and the smell of urine and hopelessness.
"Oh, this is brilliant," muttered Constantine, taking a long drag of his cigarette. "What are you going to do now, big guy? Interrogate the wall? Ask it nicely if it can stop swallowing magic?"
Batman stopped in front of the grimiest section of the wall. And, following instructions to the letter, he raised his gloved fist.
And knocked.
Knock.
Knock. Knock.
The sound wasn't the dull clack of metal hitting brick.
It was a deep, resonant, hollow knock. The sound of a knuckle rapping on a heavy, ancient oak door. The sound reverberated in the small alley, so out of place it seemed to absorb all noise of the rain and sirens.
Zatanna took a step back, eyes wide. "Heavens...!"
Constantine, mid-drag, froze. The cigarette fell from his parted lips.
"Bloody hell," he whispered.
The wall's reaction was immediate. There was no rumble of rocks. No glowing portal. It was much subtler, and much more terrifying.
The brick wall seemed to... lose focus.
As if it were a watercolor painting splashed with water, the edges of the bricks faded. The grime, mortar, and graffiti swirled, not as physical matter, but as concepts. The idea of "abandoned alley wall" faded, replaced by a new one.
In the span of a second, the wall dissolved, not into nothingness, but into a perfect wooden sliding door with shoji paper. A warm, amber light glowed from within, a beacon of impossible welcome in Gotham's oppressive darkness. The door was perfectly clean. Beside it hung a small wooden sign with elegant calligraphy reading "Open."
Batman, Zatanna, and Constantine stood in stunned silence.
Batman was the first to recover. He had seen stranger things. Maybe. He wiped away irrelevant information (the impossibility) and focused on the mission (the door). He placed a hand on the wooden frame. It was real. It was dry.
He slid the door open.
The contrast was a sensory slap.
In an instant, they went from Gotham's freezing cold and greasy rain to a dry, cozy warmth. The smell of trash and wet asphalt was instantly replaced by the overwhelmingly clean scent of cherry wood, freshly brewed green tea, and sugar. The sound of dripping and sirens was replaced by absolute, peaceful silence.
They were standing at the entrance of a small, perfectly ordered Japanese shop. Dark wooden shelves lined the walls, stocked with glass jars filled with colorful candies. The floor was pristine tatami. And in the center of the small room, sitting on a cushion on the floor by a low table, was a man.
He wore a dark green kimono, wooden sandals, and a ridiculous green-and-white striped bucket hat that somehow managed to look completely natural on him. He held a small ceramic tea cup in one hand.
The man, Urahara Kisuke, looked up, without the slightest shadow of surprise. He smiled at them, a calm, lazy smile, his gray eyes twinkling with amusement beneath the brim of his hat.
"Ah, Batman-san," he said, his voice quiet and welcoming. "And Zatanna-chan, what a joy to see you again. I see you've brought a friend."
His gaze landed on John Constantine, who remained paralyzed in the doorway. Urahara's smile tightened for just a fraction of a second, losing its warmth and becoming purely professional.
"... And... ah," he said, his tone dropping a degree, turning cold. "You."
The word "You" hung in the warm, scented air of the shop.
It wasn't an accusation. It wasn't a surprise. It was a statement of fact. A full stop to a sentence only Urahara and Constantine knew. A cold acknowledgment, like a landowner finding a familiar pest in his garden.
Batman remained motionless, a statue of armor and shadows in the entrance. He wasn't looking at Urahara. He was watching his team. He was a master at reading his specialists, and right now, his specialists were giving him conflicting and terrifying readings.
Zatanna was pale. Her hands, usually so steady and full of power, were trembling slightly at her sides. Her magical senses, which she had been using to probe the room, returned nothing. It wasn't a shield, it wasn't a barrier; it was a void. Like trying to sense the presence of a black hole.
The man in front of her had no magical signature, which was, in itself, the most terrifying magical signature she had ever encountered. It was as if the universe didn't even know he was there.
And then there was Constantine.
Earth's most cynical mage, the man who had tricked demons, laughed in the faces of angels, and smoked in the libraries of the Lords of Order, was frozen in his tracks.
His usually pale face had taken on an ashen hue that made his blueish skin look healthy in comparison. His eyes, those pits of weary cynicism, were blown wide open, fixed on the man in the bucket hat. But it wasn't just surprise in them. It was abject terror. Pure, unfiltered terror, the kind of fear reserved for the end of the world or a particularly thorough tax auditor.
The lit cigarette he held between his lips, forgotten, trembled once.
And then, it fell.
It dropped from his slack mouth, tracing a small arc in the pristine air of the shop, and landed with an almost imperceptible hiss on the tatami floor, inches from Urahara's sandal. The cherry tip burned for an instant against the woven straw, a small, profane orange scar on the room's pristine perfection, before dying out with a faint whisper of smoke.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Urahara Kisuke's lazy smile vanished. Gone. There was no transition. In an instant, his face became a mask of absolute, cold disappointment. His gray eyes, previously full of amusement, shifted slowly from Constantine's face to the smoking butt on his floor.
"Oh, no," whispered Constantine, his voice a croak of panic. "No. No, no, no. Fuck no."
He ran a shaking hand through his hair, taking a step back, bumping into the doorframe as if groping for the dirty, safe world of Gotham he had just left.
"Of all the sorcerers," he began to rant, voice rising in pitch with every word, bordering on hysteria. "Of all the ghosts, demons, and mystic nutters on every bloody plane of existence... Of all the people who could have helped us...!"
He turned to Batman, his face a mask of terror and fury. "Batman, did you have to find the bloody Urahara?! We're done! We are so, so fucked!"
As Constantine began his tantrum, Urahara exhaled a sigh. It wasn't a sigh of anger. It was a sigh of deep, deep weariness. The sigh of a man who has just watched a dog soil his new carpet.
Completely ignoring the mage's apocalyptic panic, Urahara rose with lazy fluidity. He approached the counter, pulled a white silk handkerchief from a box, and, with an elegance that was almost insulting, picked up a pair of bamboo chopsticks from a nearby vase.
"You're worried about the floor?!" screamed John, his voice cracking. "The world is ending, hat man, and you...!"
Urahara knelt. With the chopsticks, he picked up the offensive butt with the delicacy of a surgeon removing a tumor. He wrapped it carefully in the silk handkerchief and then stood up, heading to a small trash bin behind the counter, where he deposited it as if it were nuclear waste.
Only then did he turn to Constantine, his face a mask of quiet disapproval.
"What a bad habit, Constantine-san," he said, his voice soft, but cutting the air like ice. "And on my clean floor, no less. How rude."
Batman, who had remained silent, processing his specialist's reaction, finally spoke. His voice was a low growl that cut through John's hysteria.
"Explain."
The one-word command wasn't directed at Urahara. It was directed at Constantine.
John laughed, a dry, humorless sound. "Explain? Explain what? How do you explain the Grim Reaper? How do you explain gravity? How do you explain the universe's bloody accountant?"
"He's not a wizard, Batman!" he shouted, gesturing wildly at Kisuke, who had now returned to his table and was considering brewing his tea again. "He's not a warlock! He's worse! Much worse!"
He turned, bloodshot eyes fixed on the detective's impenetrable calm. "That 'shopkeeper'... that 'shopkeeper' is the universe's information broker. He is the consultant. Got a problem with an Archangel? A Primordial Demon stole your soul? A Lord of Chaos turned your cat into a puzzle?"
Zatanna flinched slightly at the strange specificity of that last phrase, but John didn't notice.
"What do you do?" he continued, voice dropping to an intense, conspiratorial whisper. "You call Urahara. If you can even find him, which is nearly impossible! And if he decides your problem is 'interesting' enough, he helps you!"
"He doesn't take sides, Batman! Do you understand that? He doesn't care about good or evil! He doesn't give a shit if the world burns, as long as the 'story' is good! He only cares about the mystery and his payment!"
"Payment?" asked Batman, his voice dangerously low.
"And it's not money, you idiot!" sneered John. "It's favors! That's his price! A favor! Sounds cheap, right? 'Sure, Mr. Urahara, save me from the demon, I'll owe you one.' But do you know what that means?"
"It means that for the last two thousand years, this... shopkeeper... has been traveling, solving the impossible problems of the most powerful beings in existence! And he's been collecting! He's been building a network of debts so vast, so bloody vast, that the concept of 'power' doesn't make sense to him anymore! You don't know who doesn't owe him a favor anymore!"
John's voice was now barely a croak of terror.
"I'm talking about gods, Batman! I'm talking about Kings of Hell! I'm talking about Lords of Order and Chaos! I'm talking about beings neither you nor I can name, who sleep in the dark and who, if this bastard in a hat calls them, are forced to wake up and pay their bloody bill!"
The silence that followed this revelation was deafening.
Zatanna was pale as a ghost, processing the enormity of what John was implying. This man wasn't a player in the game of magic; he was the casino.
Batman remained motionless, his face an impenetrable mask. He had come looking for a weapon. He had found a nuclear power.
Urahara Kisuke, having decided his original tea was ruined by the commotion, finally stood up. He went to the teapot, calmly emptied it into a bowl, and began brewing a fresh infusion.
"A very passionate description, Constantine-san," he said quietly, his back to them as he measured the tea leaves. "Though a bit melodramatic. I am simply a businessman."
He turned, gray eyes passing over the terrified John and the shocked Zatanna, and landed firmly on the only man making the decisions.
"Now," said Urahara, his voice returning to that of the cheerful shopkeeper. "Are you going to order something, or are you just here to drip rainwater in my entryway? Tatami is very sensitive to humidity, you know."
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Mike.
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