The council chamber was thick with the heady perfume of victory.
Twelve vampires lounged comfortably around the old oak table, all posturing comfortably and revealing the satisfaction they couldn't hide despite practicing such restraint for centuries. The candles burned in their familiar patterns, their shadows flitting over the familiar stone walls. But the conversation, tonight, was different in one crucial way.
Tonight, they had blood although nobody died but that doesn't mean they didn't injure them and got to fight after centuries of restraint.
"All targets obtained," Marcus announced, his voice short and clipped. "I took out Supergirl and Wonder Girl with in six seconds of engagement. Both are contained in reinforced cells with magic and red sun technology below the eastern wing."
"Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Robin, and Robin secured in the northern cells," Friedrich added. "The Bat family was stronger than expected, especially Nightwing, but they're all contained."
"Kid Flash is in stasis," Elaine reported. "We can't keep him in standard containment because he's linked to the Speed Force. We had to use the runic cage method - blood magic dampeners reinforced with temporal anchors. He won't be going anywhere."
The reports came in from the others around the table. Arsenal. Aqualad. Mary Marvel. Beast Boy. Raven. Starfire. One by one, the protégés of the Justice League's inner sanctum were accounted for. Captured. Contained. Leverage.
"And nobody followed?"
The man seated at the head of the table turned to the thirteenth seat at the table, where a new occupant was already present. Tall. Six feet, perhaps, though there was no way to tell in the dim candlelight. Dark clothing that devoured rather than reflected the flames. And where a face should have been -
Nothing.
Smooth skin stretched from jaw to crown, unbroken by the interruption of eyes, nose, or anything else save the mouth. And that, actually, would have been a disappointment to see, because it was moving in the correct position and using the correct musculature to form words, but it would have been so much easier to pretend that this was some trick of shadow and perception
The mouth smiled.
"Of course we made sure," Marcus said. "Standard counter-surveillance procedures were taken for all target acquisitions. Psychic dampeners during transport. Random transits through alternate locations prior to delivery. Nobody followed. Nobody could have followed."
"Interesting."
The faceless man (for it was a he judging from he voice tone) leaned back in his chair. His fingers, which went unnoticed as the man was perched under the table, had a faint glow of the red light of blood magic. Patterns of runes ran invisible lines connecting his joints, holding the magic in an unnatural way for even these old vampires experience.
The man flexed his fingers experimentally and sent out a pulse of crimson light with them. Algorithms of complex incantations worked in his head, twisting the magic into a design with a purpose. A spell. A powerful spell most likely, but one that the vampires had never encountered because it was new, and this man was patient, and no one was paying attention to the ground at that moment.
"Was this necessary?"
The question was posed by Mei, the small unobtrusive intelligence expert stationed near the end of the table. Her voice had the carefully balanced neutrality of the dangerous questions she was used to asking in dangerous places.
The man turned his head towards her. Again, the lack of discernable facial features made him an uncomfortable study, because the movement of the bones underneath the skin didn't have the same effect as the movement of the features. But the movement had meaning in its own way, which was unfortunate for the man, because his mouth was now smiling in a particularly infuriating manner.
"Was what necessary?"
"The kidnapping, the assault on the League protégés. You've forced their hand -"
"We've obtained leverage." The man's mouth moved, each painstakingly formed word imbued with the weight of a life spent in politics and manipulation. "The initial plan was simply to use the protégés as leverage to halt the investigation. That would have bought us time and that time was needed. If we could converted the wealthy and powerful to our side even if by force we could have won easily without drawing a single blood. The league wouldn't do anything or to be specific they can't do anything"
"And what if the league didn't follow this?" David asked.
"Purging" the man's mouth moved forming the hated word with an unpleasant familiarity. "If the League after we converted them decides to stop the vampire conspiracy, they will need to take out at least hundreds of powerful individuals we've already converted and thousands we could have converted. If they take out senators, billionaires, celebrities, and politicians, they'll immediately become enemies of the entire planet which they don't want to become. Even besides that those people won't go down without a fight. Although I doubt they can give the heavy hitters of the league much trouble they can at least cause a rift to form among the league because those wealthy people have normal people under them and those normal people need to be killed to get to them and even if they don't kill those people some won't play by the rules and might just use those normal people as hostage. It would have been total chaos"
The man's mouth curled upward in what might have been a sneer. "Now that would hurt. Given their usual methods, they would never do that."
Another vanpire asked. "Why not?"
"Because it goes against everything they stand for," the faceless vampire said. "The League prides itself on operating within the system rather than outside of it. They would not purge an entire system unless it was beyond saving. And they would never do something so extreme as to turn every potential ally into an enemy, simply to get rid of a few vampires."
"Right," Marcus said. "The whole hostage situation was just the beginning. You wanted the League to leave you alone while you finished converting everyone of consequence."
"Precisely," the vampire said. "Once we had enough of the influential figures turned, the League would be too afraid to interfere, knowing that taking them out would require killing hundreds of other powerful individuals. The League would be forced to admit defeat, because they had no option but to let us create a permanent power source."
"You said 'was'," Friedrich stated. "Past tense."
"That's because right now, the initial plan isn't -"
A sound like tearing paper filled the chamber.
There was no warning to it. There wasn't even a sound, a light, or even a pressure change in the air. One moment the side of the thirteenth seat was empty. The next there was a man standing there. Not a vampire. Not anything that could be explained by this chamber's occupants' understanding of the world. Superman. Sun of Tomorrow. Whatever he preferred to be called, he was faster than these vampires' instincts could compensate for.
The Man of Steel's hand closed around the faceless man's throat before anyone could react. Calloused fingers, capable of crushing diamonds, made contact with the pale flesh, and not much else really since Clark's grip was tight enough that the skin strained slightly under his fingers.
The vampires roared, leaping to their feet, fangs bared, claws extended, but something in Superman's stance stopped them. It wasn't the pure power radiating from Clark's body, though that certainly played a part. It was the silent look in his eyes, the grim finality in his posture.
"SIT. DOWN."
They did.
Beneath the table, the faceless man's fingers continued his miniscule movements. The spell he was weaving, the reason he had given up his plan, reached its climax, and then suddenly all of the candles went out, all at once, and the mansion itself along with its occupants vanished, leaving behind only a cave
The faceless man did not struggle against Superman's grip. Did not try to pull away. Simply hung there, suspended in the Man of Steel's grasp, like a marionette whose strings had already been severed.
"You can do whatever you want to this body, Superman."
The words left the man's mouth with unsettling ease. With the comfort of a man who had already accepted his fate and was waiting only for the executioner to arrive. "This isn't my primary vessel. It's a clone. Created just a day ago specifically if things go wrong in this mission. A decoy," the man's mouth curled into a sad smile. "But if you destroy it—if you do anything rash—you will never get those protégés back."
Clark's grip tightened imperceptibly. His jaw set. Behind the pleasant mask of the Man of Steel, his expression darkened.
"Where are they?"
"Safe," the faceless man said. "For now. Their safety depends entirely on -"
Golden light bloomed in the cave
Dr. Fate stood in the center of the chamber, his presence announced by the ankh symbols blazing in the air around him. The candlelight did not seem to touch him, but more importantly, he stood in the space previously occupied by the mansion the vampires had vanished into with him.
Behind and to either side of him floated the unconscious forms of the kidnapped League protégés. Supergirl, Wonder Girl, Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Robin, Robin, Kid Flash, Arsenal, Aqualad, Mary Marvel, Beast Boy, Raven, and Starfire. All of them, unconscious but alive. All of them, free.
Superman stared at the floating bodies. So did the faceless man.
"The teleportation magic your people used to get the hostages was impressive," Dr. Fate said. "But impressive doesn't cut it when I'm watching. When your 'mansion' tried to teleport itself and its occupants to another location, I was there to stop them. I pulled the hostages out of the teleportation stream before they could arrive at their destination."
"You -" the faceless man began
"I was watching very closely," Superman said, his voice not giving away the fact that he was having a private conversation with Bruce. "From the moment your people launched their attack, we knew you were going to try something like this. We allowed it to happen."
The faceless man's mouth worked silently for a moment, calculating. Then he laughed. The sound was unexpected, coming from an inhuman face, but that was the least of what was surprising about it.
It was a good laugh, in an unexpectedly amusing situation.
"Looks like I got played. Well played," the faceless man said. "What do you want to ask me about first, Superman? The names of your enemies? The locations of your enemies? How many enemies you're going to have to kill before you take down the one responsible for this?"
"Who are you? Who sent you?" Superman asked instead.
"Easy now," the faceless man said. "You're asking the wrong person. I'm just a clone, after all. And the host body is dissolving, so I suggest you ask whatever questions you want to ask while I still have the presence of mind to answer them," the man's mouth moved, revealing a neat set of teeth that Clark somehow wished weren't there. "Besides, you're not a person I wish to see dead or harmed in anyway after all"
The man's body began to dissolve. It was not an immediate or violent process, but Clark could see individual molecules of flesh and blood and bone separating and falling to the floor of the cave. The man's fingers, still glowing faintly with the magic of the incantation he was weaving, were the last to disappear. The mouth stayed a smile, even as it bones disappeared, revealing the vacant space of the mouth beneath where the flesh had been.
"You saved the pawns," the man said, his body now little more than a skeleton with a smiling mouth. "But it doesn't matter. As long as you don't find me quickly I will win"
Then he was gone. A stain on the cave floor, that faded nearly immediately, leaving behind nothing. No body. No indication he had been there at all.
The cave was now empty besides him and Fate
During the short struggle, the twelve vampires at the table had vanished. The entire facility, in fact, had disappeared. Only the old table and the candles remained, a testament that this place had been.
Dr. Fate stepped forward, his gleaming armor catching the dying candlelight.
"I cannot pinpoint the exact location the mansion's inhabitants teleported to," the Lord of Order said. "The spell they used was reinforced with concealment enchantments. It would take time to track them, time I don't suspect we have."
"But you retrieved them," Superman said, gesturing to the unconscious young heroes floating beside Fate. "You got them all back."
"I did," Fate said. "They're unharmed, though they've been sedated with supernatural substances. I already took care of them. They should require only some medical care when they awaken. The most injured one will be able to perform normally in a week at most. Nothing serious happened to them."
Clark exhaled. The tension in his shoulders eased, if only slightly. "Thank you."
"No need," Fate said. "Taking care of this sort of thing is my Job"
The man snapped his fingers. The stain on the cave floor was gathered up by golden light and placed inside the ankh-shaped container that appeared around Fate's head.
"I'll contact you when I have an answer," Fate said. "In the meantime, Superman, be aware that the person who created that clone knew what he was doing. He was prepared for you to interfere."
"Noted."
Fate vanished, the ankh symbols fading with him. Only the candles remained, burning in the quiet cave.
Superman's earpiece crackled.
"Clark." Batman's voice. Tight. Controlled. Urgent. "Status report."
"Hostages retrieved. All protégés are accounted for. Dr. Fate pulled them out of the teleportation stream just before the vampire council vanished. The clone at the head of the table dissolved before I could get any useful information. The council escaped - Fate couldn't trace the teleportation.
"Understood. Bring the protégés to coordinates I'm sending now. Immediately.
"Bruce, where-"
"Now, Clark. The structural integrity of the council's underground facility is failing. Fate's interference caused the teleportation field to destabilize. You have approximately four minutes before the ceiling collapses."
As if to prove the point, the cave groaned. Cracks formed in the ceiling, and dust rained down upon the unconscious protégés' heads.
"Did Fate mention that?" Clark asked.
"He did," Superman said. "He said his spell would only hold -"
"It will hold as long as it has to," Batman interrupted. "Move."
Dr. Fate's voice echoed in the cave one final time before fading away, carried off into wherever Lords of Order went when they weren't in this realm. "The structural integrity spell will hold long enough for you to get out. Do not linger."
Clark didn't need to be told twice.
He gathered the unconscious heroes - the thirteen of them, because he'd had to count carefully and painfully to make sure there was an even thirteen - and moved toward the exit. The corridors beyond were already cracking and buckling, but he didn't slow down. He didn't give himself the luxury of looking back.
The end of the corridor opened into the mouth of a mountain-shaped structure. More accurately, it was a portal, and the end of the mountain that wasn't the one Clark was currently exiting was the other side of the portal. A beam of golden light outlined the opening, and inside the passage, Clark could see the outlines of a facility. Another mountain facility, smaller but otherwise identical to the one he now had to evacuate.
Clark carried the thirteen beds through the portal and into the medical wing of this new mountain facility. He laid them out on the beds and performed a fast once-over to make sure the vitals were stable. Breathing. Heart rate. Pulse. All normal.
Then he activated the stealth equipment that Batman had had custom-built. Invisibility fields turned the beds, their occupants, and Clark himself invisible to anything short of a direct physical inspection.
Clark gathered the beds - there were thirteen of them, after all - and moved back toward the portal.
The coordinates Batman had given him lead to a mountain.
The mountain the league wasn't based in. A mountain. In a different range. On a different continent.
Clark landed at the given coordinates carrying thirteen invisible beds and was greeted with a rock face that was indistinguishable with any other rock face. Nothing to mark it as special. Nothing to mark it at all really save the fact that it was in the middle of a mountain range and the three seconds he had to wait before the rock face shimmered and a door appeared in the middle of it.
The door was made of reinforced metal, an odd choice for a mountain in the middle of a desert, but the biometric scanner in the middle of the door confirmed that this was, indeed, a Bat-creation.
The door opened
Clark turned off the invisibility fields and lead the unconscious protégés inside. The facility was smaller than the one in the main mountain, but no less impressive. A compact operations center complete with monitors, workstations, and most intriguing of all, medical pods lining one of the walls.
Batman was waiting for him in the center of the room, flanked by a wall of monitors displaying a mixture of news channels and mission related surveillance feeds. Several monitors were closed off, but the ones Clark could see were a mix of civilian and mission related.
Clark set the last bed down and straightened. "How many secret bases do you have?"
"Many," Batman said.
"That's not an answer."
"It is to you," Batman said. "Put the protégés in the healing pods along the eastern wall. Kryptonian regeneration technology modified for humans and metahumans. They should wake up within twenty-four hours at most."
Clark moved the unconscious heroes into the pods one by one, each pod hissing as it sealed and the interior lighting up with the cool blue-white of active healing technology. Vital sign monitors appeared at the top of each pod displaying heart rates, neural activity, and other indicators that the heroes were indeed alive, and more importantly recovering.
Thirteen pods. Thirteen sleeping heroes. Thirteen lives Clark had risked in the past forty-eight hours.
"They're secure," Clark said.
"Good," Batman said. "You know what this attack at them implies."
"Just when we happen to go on a mission while keeping our robot double active the porteges get attacked." Batman moved to the nearest monitor and brought up a new set of feeds. "Moreover The coordinated attack on the protégés required specific intelligence. Patrol routes. Schedules. Vulnerability assessments. The kind of information that isn't publicly available."
"This plan was made to draw out the hidden enemy you suspected and given this attack it's all but confirmed."
The words hung un spoken in the air between them, but Clark didn't need to have it said. He already knew what the implication was.
"Who do you Suspect"Right now? Everyone. The hidden person might not be a vampire themselves - could be a thrall, a compromised human, a blackmailed asset or someone they themselves don't know of. But someone with enough access to know where our protégés would be and when they would be vulnerable."
Clark regarded the monitors, noting which channels had been turned off and which had been left on. News reports played on the nearest monitor, the camera alternating between shots of cities reacting to the attacks on the protégés and shots of the replica robots patrolling their assigned routes.
"Bring up the robot cameras," Clark said.
"The ones that went with the League team?"
Batman's fingers danced across the keyboard
"I was about to take control of them anyway. Their autonomous programming has been managing the mission so far, but given the security breach, I need direct oversight."
"Clark."
"What?"
"Get a chair. Sit down. You've been operating at full capacity for hours. Even Kryptonians need to rest occasionally."
"I told you to stop hovering behind me like a nervous parent at a school play. It's distracting. Sit."
Clark grabbed up a chair from the corner of the facility. He sighed in exasperation with the chair's size, not really a big seat due to the fact that apparently Batman didn't have furniture for Kryptonian proportions in his secret secondaries mountain bases. He sat down anyway.
"Ready?" Batman asked.
"Ready."
Batman activated the feed.
The screen resolved in the interior of the Batwing Mark VII.
The aircraft had landed, past the cockpit windows a world, an impossible landscape stretched back to horizons on either side, an azure sky that wasn't quite the correct color, air that shimmered with residual energy, and in the center of the camera's gaze, a sight that stole the breath from Clark's lungs as Batman's would have done in his current vessel.
A pyramid.
Huge, ancient thing built from stone that swallowed the ambient light instead of reflecting it, surfaces carved with pictographs and patterns that seem to flow towards a single point at the apex of the structure in meaningless yet mesmerizing patterns. It loomed over the ground in the center of the field of view like a monument to something older than man.
The medallion in the glass case in the cockpit glowed with amber light that burned through the camera's sensors, pulsing in unison with the strange energy rolling off the pyramid like static electricity.
The League members exited the aircraft in formation, their movements precise, their behavior a perfect mimicry of their heroes.
Nobody in the team knew that Superman and Batman were just robot replicas
Not even Ethan could probably tell from his Evil Detection courtesy to Dr Fate lending some things to mask Superman's aura of hope that Ethan could feel.
"Everyone alright?" the Batman replica asked though it was the real Batman speaking now
Nods from the gathered team. Wonder Woman adjusted her sword grip. The Superman replica swept the horizon with eyes that could not see in multiple spectrums but did it anyway just in case. Flash vibrated subtly to check for any issue with the Space sorrunding them
Ethan stood apart from the group, his head cocked back toward the pyramid, his brow furrowed in deep concentration.
The Batman replica turned to it. "Ethan. Can you use your ability on this pyramid?"
Ethan nodded he but the moment he did, he forcefully stopped it
His breathing quickened his posture shifted and hands flew to his chest in a display of respiratory distress.
In the mountain facility observing the feed, Clark leaned forward.
"Something's wrong with Ethan"
Clark's voice was sharp, "Look at the readings my replica is sensing from Ethan."
Batman observed.
"The pyramid is active," Batman said, "Whatever's inside it is generating outputs that seems to have triggered Ethan somehow."
On the screen the League was surrounding the Ethan. The Superman replica put a hand on the Ethan shoulder with worry.
The Ethan stood straight, he started breathing normally.
"I'm okay," he said the words though his voice seemed to have a hard time coming out "I felt... a massive presence. Huge. Dwarfing anything I've encountered with this ability. She's in there. The Queen is definitely in there."
"Then we proceed," the Batman replica decided.
The team moved toward the pyramid. Up close, it was even more impressive then from afar, carvings covered every square meter, shifting symbols that seemed to shift if you stare at them long enough, patterns that resolved into images that dissolved into more abstract forms, some suggesting complex mathematical equations that even Flash would take time to process, others rendered in the style of battles, migrations, ceremonies, all in a style predating every known human artistic tradition.
"Over here!" Flash called "I found an entrance!"
The team gathered around the way Flash was, a portion of the pyramid's base that had been sculpted into an archway, big enough to allow even the Aquaman to pass through without ducking, wide enough for three to pass abreast. Beyond the threshold, darkness stretched back into the interior of the structure, the kind of darkness that hadn't seen the sun in centuries.
"Nobody break anything," the Superman replica warned, its behavioral algorithms feeding the right caution into its voice "We don't know what kind of defenses this place has. If the queen has been sleeping here for two hundred and thirty years, there could be traps, wards or automated defenses in place to protect her. We go slow, we go careful."
Nods from the team. The formation tightened, with the Superman replica taking point as natural due to being the most durable, the Batman replica bringing up the rear.
They approached the entrance. The Superman replica raised one foot to cross the threshold-
Them Ethan stopped moving.
Every other memebrr continued forward for a fraction of a second but Ethan stopped
In the mountain facility, Clark and Bruce watched the Ethan stand motionless at the entrance to the pyramid.
On screen Ethan raised a hand.
Every League members stopped. The gesture was small, a palm held outward, fingers spread, but its meaning was unmistakable.
Wait.
In the mountain facility, Batman and Superman watched the member stand frozen at the threshold of an ancient pyramid, somewhere in a dimension that shouldn't exist, guided by a medallion that pulsed with the heartbeat of a sleeping queen.
"Something's not right about this place," Ethan murmured. "Although my evil detection detects evil but it doesn't always relies on a race to be detected as Evil"
"What are you trying to say?" Flash asked
"What I mean to say is that even Humans light up like bulbs for me if they commit evil just like Vampires and during my activity in Metropolis I used that ability more than once to detect many criminals and subdued them but the evil I am feeling from this place is too much. Although the vampire queen is a vampire and should light up too but given all the things she did before and given all the history both Wonder woman, Batman and my Brother found this might as well very much be a trap since she should not be radiating this amount of Evil and her body might be hiding somewhere else. Remember even Wonder womans mother did not want to give us that thing that would lead us here for some reason but she did because she thought it was necessary. She might have not known this or she might have known it but didn't say for some reason or the Queen herself made that key to act as bait"
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A/N: Something unnatural happened with one character. What do you think it is?
T/L: Damn it. I couldn't trick pro into giving me power stones. Curse your luck. I wanted to trick you into giving me power stones by disguising as my brother but it seems it didn't work. Anyway to rest of you. Give me power stones