James crossed the distance to Old Gotham in under four minutes at full enhanced speed.
The catacombs beneath this section of the city were older than Gotham itself by most historical accounts, networks of stone tunnels and chambers that successive generations had built over and around and eventually decided to simply forget.
The Church of Blood was a name James recognized with immediate cold clarity. A cult that survived centuries by hiding in civilizational gaps, drawing power from summoning entities that had no business existing in this dimensional plane.
Actual demons. Not metahumans. Not alien technology. Something magical and dimensional that didn't care about enhanced strength or reaction speed or tactical AI analysis.
James grappled between rooftops and ran the problem through his enhanced intellect honestly. He'd prepared for physical threats. Biological threats. Technological threats. He had countermeasures for toxins, mind control frequencies, electromagnetic weapons, and high-caliber ballistics.
He had no established countermeasure for entities from another dimension. He'd known this gap existed in his preparation and had intended to address it once he made proper contact with the magical community.
Zatanna, apparently, had decided to accelerate that timeline on his behalf.
He landed at the surface entrance, a rusted iron door set into the base of an old church foundation on a street that nobody walked at this hour.
The door hung open at a wrong angle, forced from inside or outside, impossible to tell which without investigation he didn't have time for.
Scorch marks blackened the stone around the frame in patterns that didn't look like fire damage. They looked like something had pressed through the doorway that the doorway hadn't been designed to accommodate.
"AEGIS, environmental analysis."
"Multiple unknown energy signatures below. Pattern does not match Apokoliptian technology, any terrestrial power source, or any previously catalogued energy type in database. Closest theoretical analogue: dimensional bleed. Energy from an adjacent plane of existence bleeding through an unstable opening into this one. Structural integrity of local reality in immediate vicinity is within normal parameters but reading as marginally stressed."
James absorbed that. "Marginally stressed."
"I recognize this is not a reassuring assessment."
"No. It really isn't."
He descended.
The tunnel sloped downward through old stone, and every ten feet the temperature dropped another degree for no reason his enhanced senses could attribute to air flow or depth.
Actual torches burned in iron wall brackets that couldn't have been there an hour ago. Placed deliberately. This space had been prepared and consecrated for something specific over an extended period of time.
The sounds reached him before the chamber did. His enhanced hearing cut through stone and distance without effort.
Chanting, deep and rhythmic, from multiple voices in a language AEGIS flagged as containing no identifiable linguistic root.
Underneath the chanting, impact sounds, something heavy striking stone. And underneath that, a woman's voice, clipped and precise, speaking words in reversed cadence.
Backward speech. Zatanna's spell-casting methodology. Even from a tunnel away, James recognized it from everything he'd ever read or seen about her in his original world.
She was still fighting. That was good.
But the sounds beneath her spells were getting louder, not quieter. Whatever she was holding back was still growing.
James moved faster. He passed two unconscious cultists slumped against the tunnel wall, faces slack, thoroughly out of the fight.
Passed a door blown entirely off its hinges, the wood reduced to radiating splinters like something inside had rapidly expanded. Stepped through the destroyed frame.
The chamber beyond was enormous, far larger than the tunnel approach should have allowed, either a natural cavern beneath the city or a space that had been altered by something other than construction tools over decades of use.
Stone columns rose into shadow thirty feet overhead. Concentric circles were carved into the floor, dense with symbols that James's enhanced vision registered oddly, the way certain wavelengths register on the edge of perception rather than cleanly within it.
At the center of the outermost circle, Zatanna Zatara stood with her back against a column.
Read more chapters, days ahead of Webnovel Updates on Patreon marvelstark