James turned.
Zatanna Zatara stood with her back against the column she'd been defending, breathing with the careful deliberateness of someone managing exertion through discipline alone. Her coat was ruined. Her hat had somehow survived intact. She was looking at him with dark eyes that were doing a great deal of quiet, rapid work behind a surface of general composure.
He looked at her. She looked at him.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Then Zatanna said, "You hit a Class Seven entity with your fist."
"Several times," James said.
"And it worked."
"Apparently."
She pushed off the column and stood properly upright. Her gaze moved to his gauntlets. "Ferrous alloy in the composite?"
"Steel framework under the plating." James turned one hand over, examining the gauntlets himself. "I didn't plan for it to be relevant tonight. It just was."
Zatanna looked around the chamber. At the six points where the entities had stood before she'd sent them back. At the scorched stone near the entrance. At the inert circles on the floor, dead and ordinary-looking now, just carved stone.
"Most non-magical combatants would have been useless in here," she said. Not flattery. An honest assessment delivered with the same neutrality she'd probably apply to any other piece of field data.
"Most combatants don't end up in a demon catacomb at three in the morning."
"Fair point." She was quiet for a beat, then said, "How did you receive my distress call? I pushed the signal outward broadly, hoping to intersect with anyone carrying active comms in the area. Batman acknowledged it briefly and said someone closer was already responding."
"Lucky timing," James said.
He left it there. The real answer, the Apokoliptian energy acting as a conductor, the AEGIS detection, the specific chain of events that had put him in range to receive a mystical transmission on an encrypted military frequency, was not something he intended to place in the hands of someone he'd met fifteen minutes ago, however impressive those fifteen minutes had been.
Zatanna accepted the non-answer without pressing it. She struck him as someone who understood the value of not asking questions you weren't entitled to yet.
"The Church of Blood," James said, moving the conversation to more useful ground. "Is tonight a one-time operation?"
"No." She looked at the inert circles with something flat behind her eyes. "They've been active for centuries. They'll rebuild and try again. Tonight's ritual was more advanced than their usual work. Someone gave them significantly elevated resources."
James crouched beside one of the carved circles. His enhanced vision traced the symbols carefully, committing every detail to memory without drawing attention to how precisely he was doing it.
"They'll need time to regroup," Zatanna continued. "Weeks, minimum. Possibly months depending on what the cult lost tonight in terms of personnel and prepared materials."
James stood. "Then tonight bought some room."
"Some." She watched him with that quiet cataloguing quality. Not suspicious. More like someone filing things away in real time. "You're not what I expected Gotham's second vigilante to be."
"What did you expect?"
"Someone trying to be Batman. Or trying very hard not to be Batman. Either direction." She tilted her head slightly. "You don't feel like either one."
James said nothing to that. It wasn't a question.
Zatanna seemed to decide something. She reached into what remained of her coat's inner pocket and produced a small card, slightly scorched at one corner, with a handwritten phone number on it. Held it out.
"In case tonight repeats itself," she said. "Or something adjacent to it."
James took the card. "And if you need backup again?"
She looked at him steadily. "Do you have a number?"
He pulled a secondary communicator from his belt. A spare unit. Held it out.
She took it. Turned it over. Read nothing on the outside that told her anything useful, because James had deliberately kept the external markings minimal.
"Encrypted?" she asked.
"Reliable," James said, which answered the question and also didn't.
The corner of her mouth moved. "Sovereign."
"That's the name."
"Zatanna." She pocketed the unit. "I suspect we'll be in contact."
"I suspect the same."
They moved toward the tunnel entrance together. James swept the passage ahead with his senses without making the act visible, checking corners and distances and the quality of the silence, everything clear, no cultists waiting, no residual signatures worth concern.
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