The silent alarm came through at 2:47 AM.
Shayera was still awake—had been for hours, running combat drills in her apartment with obsessive precision. Sleep felt like surrender lately, like giving Sophist time to plan while she rested.
She grabbed her communicator before the second pulse finished.
"Hawkgirl responding. What's the situation?"
The dispatcher's voice was tense. "Downtown office tower, Fletcher Building. Thirty-fourth floor sealed behind emergency shutters. No explosions, no visible damage, but first responders can't access it. Windows have gone opaque. Emergency overrides aren't responding."
Shayera was already moving, wings spreading as she launched from her balcony. "Occupancy?"
"Night shift. Approximately forty people. We're getting scattered communication but it's breaking up."
"I'm three minutes out."
She was there in ninety seconds.
The Fletcher Building stood like a glass-and-steel monument to corporate ambition, its modern façade reflecting the city lights. Thirty-four floors of office space, and floor thirty-four was dark.
Not just dark—*opaque*. The windows that should have shown interior lighting were completely black, like someone had painted them from the inside. Emergency vehicles surrounded the base, lights flashing uselessly.
Shayera landed near the incident commander, a fire captain who looked simultaneously relieved and worried to see her.
"Hawkgirl. Thank god. We can't get access—the shutters are reinforced steel, emergency stairs are locked, elevators are disabled—"
"I see it," Shayera interrupted, scanning the building. "What about building schematics?"
"Already pulled them. There's ventilation access through the roof, but it's—"
A voice cut through the night, amplified and clear.
Shayera's entire body went rigid.
"Good evening, Hawkgirl."
Sophist.
That fucking voice. Calm. Measured. Infuriatingly polite, like he was greeting her at a social function instead of holding forty people hostage.
She looked up. Found the source: speakers mounted on the building's exterior, hastily installed. Her hands clenched into fists.
"I was hoping you'd be prompt," Sophist continued, his tone carrying that professorial quality she'd learned to hate. "We have a time-sensitive situation. Would you mind looking at the display?"
The opaque windows on the thirty-fourth floor flickered. Text appeared, projected from inside:
**O₂: 18.2% (FALLING)**
**CH₄: 4.7% (RISING)**
**TIME: 18:34**
"Methane," the fire captain breathed. "Jesus Christ, he's flooding the floor with methane."
Shayera's jaw clenched so hard it hurt. Methane was odorless, invisible, and when mixed with the right oxygen concentration, explosively flammable.
More text appeared:
**CURRENT ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION UNSAFE FOR:**
**- OPEN FLAME**
**- ELECTRICAL SPARK**
**- KINETIC IMPACT ABOVE 2.3 JOULES**
"For those less technically inclined," Sophist said helpfully, "that means any sudden violence will turn that floor into a fireball. Your mace, for instance, generates approximately forty-seven joules on a casual swing. Please keep that in mind."
Shayera's hand had moved instinctively toward her weapon. She forced it to stop.
The windows shifted, showing internal camera feeds. Forty people, office workers in business casual, clustered together near the center of the floor. Some were sitting, breathing heavily. Others were helping colleagues who looked confused, disoriented.
Early hypoxia symptoms.
"They have approximately eighteen minutes before oxygen deprivation causes permanent brain damage," Sophist said conversationally. "Less if they panic and increase their respiration rate. I recommend you work efficiently."
Shayera's mind raced through options with brutal efficiency.
Smash through the windows? No—the impact would ignite the methane.
Force the shutters? Same problem.
Teleport inside? She didn't have teleportation. He did. That smug bastard could come and go as he pleased while she—
"You're calculating violence," Sophist observed. "I can practically hear the gears turning. How to break in, break me, break the scenario. But you can't, can you? Because this time, your strength is the liability."
The display changed. Complex equations scrolled across the opaque windows—air pressure calculations, gas diffusion rates, atmospheric composition formulas.
"I've prepared a puzzle for you," Sophist said. "Solve for the optimal ventilation rate to safely reduce methane concentration without causing—"
"Shut up," Shayera said.
"Excuse me?"
"I said shut up." She was scanning the building exterior, looking for ventilation access points. "This isn't a test. This is you wasting my time while people suffocate."
There was a pause. When Sophist spoke again, he sounded almost pleased.
"Observant. Yes, the math is somewhat... decorative. The real question is whether you can navigate the solution I've actually provided."
The camera feed zoomed in on something Shayera hadn't noticed before: a ventilation intake near the roof, barely visible against the building's facade.
Small. Narrow. Deliberately placed.
"One entrance," Sophist said. "Leading directly to the sealed floor. The duct is approximately fourteen inches in diameter. Quite tight, even for someone of your build."
Shayera stared at the intake, her stomach sinking as she understood.
"You'll need to crawl," Sophist continued. "In complete darkness. Through approximately sixty feet of ductwork. While the oxygen continues to drop. While your own lungs begin to burn from oxygen debt."
He paused, letting that sink in.
"One breath before you enter. No air supply inside. No margin for error. You rush, you create sparks from movement. You fail, they suffocate. You succeed..."
Another pause.
"Well. We'll see, won't we?"
Shayera flew to the roof without responding.
The intake was exactly where he'd indicated—a narrow opening that looked barely large enough for a child, let alone a full-grown Thanagarian warrior with wings.
The fire captain's voice crackled through her communicator. "Hawkgirl, we're working on getting cutting equipment up there—"
"No time," Shayera said flatly.
She examined the intake. The ductwork was standard commercial grade, which meant thin metal that could create sparks if struck wrong. The interior would be pitch black. The space would force her to move slowly, carefully, with her wings folded so tight they'd ache.
And she'd have to do it all on a single breath.
The timer on the building's display changed: **17:12**
Sophist's voice came through again, quieter now. "Before you enter, I'm going to do you a favor."
The air around the intake shimmered. Pure oxygen, vented briefly from inside.
Shayera understood the cruelty immediately.
He was giving her one chance to hyperventilate. To oxygenate her blood as much as possible. One breath of pure O₂ before she crawled into an environment that would try to kill her.
It wasn't kindness.
It was precision sadism. Giving her just enough to make success theoretically possible, so that if she failed, she'd know it was her limitation, not his scenario.
She wanted to refuse. Wanted to spit in his face and find another way.
But forty people were dying.
Shayera closed her eyes, forced her heart rate to slow. Thanagarian physiology was more efficient than human, but oxygen debt was oxygen debt. She had one shot at this.
She took three deep, controlled breaths of the pure oxygen.
Then she entered the duct.
The darkness was absolute.
Not dim. Not shadowed. Completely, utterly black. The kind of darkness that made you question whether your eyes were even open.
Shayera folded her wings as tight as they would go, feeling feathers compress painfully against her spine. The duct was exactly as narrow as Sophist had said—her shoulders scraped metal on both sides.
The air thinned almost immediately.
She moved forward, inch by careful inch. Her lungs already ached, her body screaming for her to breathe, to gasp, to take in air that wasn't there.
No.
Control.
She navigated by feel. By the way air moved against her compressed wings. By the subtle vibrations in the metal that told her which direction led forward.
Every second felt like Sophist was watching. Judging. Taking notes on her performance like she was a lab rat in his experiment.
Her vision started to blur at the edges—hypoxia setting in. Her body begged for speed. For violence. For the brutal, direct solutions she'd spent centuries perfecting.
Smash through. Break free. Kill the threat.
But she couldn't.
Not here.
Not when speed meant sparks. When violence meant death.
The oxygen debt built. Her muscles began to shake. Thanagarian physiology was fighting her, demanding air, demanding action, demanding something.
She denied all of it.
Not for Sophist.
Never for Sophist.
For the forty people who had no idea they were part of his sick lesson.
The crawl lasted ninety-seven seconds.
It felt like hours.
Shayera's lungs were burning, vision narrowing to a tunnel, body on the edge of unconscious shutdown when she finally felt the duct open into a larger space.
The sealed floor.
She kicked the vent cover—carefully, precisely, just enough force to dislodge it without creating sparks—and dropped into the room.
Gasped.
Air flooded her lungs. Not good air—still too much methane, not enough oxygen—but air. Breathable. Barely.
The office workers stared at her, some conscious enough to look relieved, others too far gone to care.
Shayera moved to the ventilation controls, hands shaking from oxygen deprivation. Found the override panel Sophist had left conveniently accessible.
Of course he had.
This was never about making it impossible. It was about making it hard. Making her suffer. Making her crawl and scrape and fight for every inch while he watched.
She activated the emergency vent cycle.
Fresh air began flooding in, slow but steady. The methane concentration started dropping. The oxygen percentage climbed.
The timer on the windows hit zero.
The shutters unlocked with a heavy thunk.
Civilians collapsed, some crying, some laughing with relief.
They survived.
She survived.
Sophist's voice cut through the chaos, satisfied and warm.
"Excellent work, Hawkgirl. See? You're entirely capable of restraint when properly motivated. That's growth. That's exactly the kind of development I'm—"
"You're a terrorist," Shayera interrupted, her voice raw from oxygen deprivation.
Silence.
"You're a sadist hiding cruelty behind theatrics. You don't teach. You torture. You don't build scenarios—you corner people and call it enlightenment."
She stood slowly, wings spreading despite the ache, despite the exhaustion.
"You want credit for something I did under duress. For something I would have done anyway because that's what heroes do. We save people. Not because some smug asshole in a top hat forces us to crawl through vents, but because it's right."
Another pause.
Then Sophist laughed. Soft. Almost genuine.
"Keep telling yourself that," he said. "But we both know you learned something tonight. Whether you want to admit it or not."
The connection cut.
Twenty minutes later, Shayera stood on the building's roof.
The civilians were being evacuated. EMTs were treating hypoxia symptoms. First responders were securing the scene, documenting evidence, doing all the things that came after someone like her prevented catastrophe.
She could barely stand.
Her wings shook with exhaustion. Her lungs ached with every breath. Her mace hung at her side, untouched, useless.
She didn't feel pride.
She felt used.
And the worst part—the part that made her want to scream—was that the lesson stuck.
She had learned something. About restraint. About patience. About the difference between strength and precision.
That made it worse.
Because she refused to let him claim credit for something he'd forced out of her. Refused to let him turn her survival into his victory.
The hatred crystallized into something colder. Sharper.
Next time, she wouldn't just stop the trap.
She'd stop him.
No more playing his game. No more scenarios. No more tests.
She would hunt Sophist down and end this, permanently.
Across the city, in a rented apartment scheduled for demolition, Mike sat in front of three monitors showing different angles of the Fletcher Building.
The Sophist costume was draped over a chair. The top hat sat on the table, slightly tilted.
He watched Hawkgirl on the roof, watched her struggle to stay upright, watched the exhaustion and rage war across her body language.
"You did well," he said quietly to the screen. "Better than I expected, actually."
He pulled up his notes, typing observations about her performance. Response time. Problem-solving approach. Emotional control under extreme duress.
The hatred she'd expressed didn't bother him.
He'd expected it.
Honestly, he'd wanted it.
Because hatred meant engagement. Meant she was thinking about him, planning for him, preparing for their next encounter.
Hatred meant she was predictable.
And predictability was something he could exploit.
Mike saved his notes and began sketching the next scenario.
Something that would push her further. Test different limits. Force growth in new directions.
He told himself it was necessary. That the cosmic entity's mission required this. That he was helping her become strong enough to face what was coming.
He didn't let himself acknowledge the other reason.
The one that whispered he enjoyed watching her rise to challenges. That he liked being the obstacle she defined herself against.
That somewhere in the planning and the manipulation and the careful orchestration of suffering, he'd started to see her as more than just a strategic asset.
Mike closed his laptop before that thought could fully form.
"Next time," he said to the empty apartment.
Outside, the city moved on, indifferent to his plans.
But Hawkgirl was out there, somewhere, sharpening herself against the memory of him.
And he was already planning how to test that edge.