The subterranean air beneath the H.I.V.E. Academy was thick, stagnant, and fouled by the unmistakable coppery stench of blood, sex, and burning incense.
Donna walked two paces behind Talia and Lady Shiva, her enhanced Amazonian senses strained to their absolute limits. If the upper floors of the mountain fortress were a masterpiece of civilized Swiss refinement, the lowest sublevel, this so-called VIP Red Room, was a descent into pure, unadulterated madness and depravity.
The hallway was wide, illuminated only by recessed crimson lighting that cast long, grotesque shadows across the polished black stone floor. Through soundproofed observation windows reinforced with electro-conductive mesh, the depravities of the global elite played out like a living nightmare.
In one private suite, masked patrons in bespoke suits and evening gowns lounged on velvet couches, sipping champagne while warm, arterial blood was pumped through an overhead chandelier, raining down over a pair of writhing bodies in a sadistic parody of ritual purification.
Further down the hall, behind another reinforced glass partition, two aristocratic women in revealing silk gowns held remote detonators, forcing two terrified teenage boys to bludgeon one another with heavy lead pipes. Whenever either boy hesitated or lowered his guard, a high-voltage pulse from the metallic collar around his neck dropped him to his knees, screaming in agony.
Donna's hands curled into trembling fists at her sides, her knuckles turning bone-white.
From an adjoining antechamber came the muted, desperate sounds of struggle, muffled sobs, sharp slaps, and the low, guttural laughter of older men.
Donna took a sharp step toward the door, her jaw locked, but Talia's slender arm snapped out, blocking her path with the flat of a sheathed scabbard.
"Do not look in there, child," Talia said, her voice smooth, icy, and entirely devoid of emotion. "It is where the world's most powerful figures indulge their sickest appetites on what little innocence remains in this generation. If you breach that door now, the security grid locks down, the neuro-toxin vents open, and every captive in this facility is liquidated before you can take three breaths."
"They're children, Talia," Donna hissed, her voice vibrating with barely restrained fury. "How can you walk past this? How can anyone let this exist?"
"Because the world is a diseased organism," Lady Shiva replied calmly, not even breaking her stride. She moved with an eerie, predatory silence.
"The League of Assassins seeks to cauterize the rot through total purges. The Church of Blood simply monetizes it. Stay focused on the objective, girl. Indulge your moral outrage after the heads have rolled."
The corridor opened into a massive, cavernous amphitheater. Tiered balcony seating looked down into two sunken fighting pits separated by ten-foot-tall electrified barriers.
Donna's breath caught in her throat.
In the left arena, surrounded by four older adolescent gladiators armed with machetes and shock pikes, was a young girl. She couldn't have been more than ten or eleven years old. Jet-black hair hung loosely around a pale, sharp-featured face, framing eyes that were pitch-black and horrifyingly hollow.
She was barefoot, dressed in a blood-spattered black clothes, holding a single, unadorned short blade.
The violence that happened next was not an athletic contest; it was an execution, and it was executed with horrifying perfection.
A boy lunged with a machete. The young girl didn't block; she shifted her weight three inches to the left, letting the blade slice through empty air before driving her palm violently upward into the boy's elbow, snapping the joint backward with a sickening crack. In the same fluid, unbroken motion, she spun behind him, driving the point of her blade through his subclavicular artery, pivoting off his falling corpse to plant a spinning heel kick into the throat of the second assailant.
The crowd in the balconies cheered, raising crystal flutes of champagne.
Donna stared, her heart aching. The girl's face was completely detached, void of malice, joy, or rage. It was the face of a child who had been broken so profoundly that her consciousness had retreated into the furthest dark corner of her mind, leaving only an instinctual killing machine behind.
"Look at her," Donna whispered, horrified. "She isn't even scared. She's completely dissociated."
"David Cain's crowning achievement," Shiva murmured, her sharp eyes narrowing with a cold, terrifying intensity. "A creature stripped of language, forged only in the grammar of violence."
A deafening roar suddenly shook the chamber from the right arena.
Donna snapped her head to the side.
In the second pit, a teenage girl with short, untamed blonde hair was fighting for her life against a massive, bio-engineered monstrosity. The beast looked like an armored gorilla spliced with deep-sea horrors, its hide covered in thick chitinous plates, its back bristling with six thick, writhing black tentacles tipped with barbed talons.
The blonde girl moved with incredible superhuman speed and strength, dodging a sweep of the creature's claws and catching one of its heavy tentacles with both hands. Arcs of golden-white electricity crackled across her skin as she braced her boots against the stone floor, muscles straining as she prepared to rip the appendage clean from its socket.
"Come on, you ugly piece of shit!" the blonde snarled, her voice raw with exhaustion and defiance.
Before she could leverage her strength, a second tentacle whipped out from the creature's blind spot, striking her across the ribs with the force of a freight train.
The girl slammed violently into the reinforced stone wall of the pit, the impact creating a spiderweb of cracks in the masonry. She dropped to her knees, gasping for air, clutching her bruised ribs as blood trickled from the corner of her mouth.
The beast stepped forward, its tentacles snaking along the ground, pinning her wrists and ankles against the stone one by one.
Overhead, the arena announcer's voice boomed through the loudspeakers, thick with sadistic amusement:
"Well, ladies and gentlemen, look at that! Big Terry is in the middle of his seasonal heat, and it appears he's selected our little lightning rod as the incubator for his next clutch of eggs! Place your bets now, let's see how many eggs Big Terry Lays in her, and if she survives!"
The crowd erupted into raucous laughter and cheers.
The beast's central appendage rose, its barbed tip descending toward the pinned girl's chest.
"No!" Donna yelled, lunging toward the edge of the pit.
Before Donna could leap the railing, two blinding crimson streaks tore through the smoky air of the amphitheater with the hum of high-frequency plasma.
SHING-SHING.
Two razor-sharp energy projectiles shaped like stylized crimson 'X's severed the creature's forward tentacles in a shower of black, acidic ichor. The beast shrieked in agony, flailing wildly as its severed limbs bled and dissolved on the stone floor.
Donna didn't hesitate. She vaulted over the railing, dropping twenty feet into the pit with an earth-shattering thud.
She severing the remaining tentacles pinning the girl with her bar hands. Stepping over the wounded beast, Donna brought her heeled foot down with devastating force, crushing the creature's skull into the arena floor and silencing it permanently.
Donna knelt beside the blonde girl, gathering her trembling, bruised frame into her arms. "I've got you, sister. You're safe now."
The blonde girl blinked her hazy blue eyes, looking up at Donna through a curtain of blood and sweat. Her lips parted, her voice barely a whisper. "Cass... save... Cass..."
Her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed into unconsciousness.
Above the pit, the sound of automatic gunfire suddenly erupted across the upper balcony.
Talia drew a long, curved Damascus steel blade from beneath her green evening gown, the high slit in the fabric flowing with lethal elegance as she stepped toward the panic-stricken security guards.
"Go retrieve the child, Shiva," Talia commanded smoothly, deflecting three incoming rounds with her blade before stepping into the throat of the nearest marksman. "I shall handle the vermin."
Lady Shiva vaulted the barrier, landing silently in the center of the left arena.
The young Asian girl stood motionless over the corpses of her opponents, her black eyes instantly tracking Shiva's entrance. Her grip shifted on the short sword, her knees bending slightly as her gaze scanned Shiva from head to toe, reading the subtle shifts in her center of gravity, the alignment of her hips, the tension in her neck.
"Well, well," Shiva said softly, walking forward with measured, unhurried steps. "Look at what David did. I gave him a daughter, and he turned her into a broken weapon. I can see it in your eyes, little one... you are already mapping my vital points, calculating my trajectory, looking for the opening that will end my life."
Shiva paused five paces away, her head tilting slightly. "Tell me, girl. Can you speak?"
The girl's throat tightened. A guttural, strained sound escaped her lips, raw and unpracticed, like stones scraping against one another.
"Cass... andra..." she choked out, her brow furrowing in deep, agonizing concentration. "Name... Cassandra... Not... broken."
Shiva's gaze softened by a fraction of a millimeter, the closest the world's deadliest martial artist would ever come to showing grief. "I know your name, child. Who do you think gave it to you? Look at you... you cannot even speak your own mother's tongue. He trained your brain to interpret body language so perfectly that he stole your voice in the process. Such a shortsighted, arrogant fool. How he ever managed to steal and hide you from me for this long will remain his final mystery."
Cassandra's eyes widened with sudden, profound shock as the realization hit her mind.
Mother.
In that split-second lapse of concentration, Shiva moved.
She closed the distance in the blink of an eye. Her palm struck Cassandra's center of mass, displacing her breath, followed instantaneously by a sharp, precise nerve strike to the side of the girl's neck.
Cassandra went completely limp before her blade could hit the floor.
Shiva caught her effortlessly, slinging the girl's frail, light frame over her shoulder. "Gods... you are like parchment and bone. David will pay for every ounce of flesh he took from you."
"Don't worry about that, Lady Shiva," a harsh, mechanized voice called out from the arena entrance.
"I already took care of the invoice."
Shiva turned slowly.
Standing at the rim of the pit was a tall, broad-shouldered man clad in reinforced carbon-plated armor, black tactical cargo pants, steel-toed combat boots, and a worn brown leather jacket. Clamped over his face was a smooth, crimson helmet with glowing white optical lenses .
In his left hand, dangling by the hair, was the severed, bloody head of David Cain.
"Jason," Shiva observed, her tone cool despite the gruesome spectacle. "I see you made it down here. And you brought a souvenir."
"He was in my way so I killed him," Red Hood replied, casually tossing David Cain's head down into the dirt at Shiva's feet " Dind't expect to see you here, but I figured I pay my respects and see if you would like confirmation."
Shiva looked down at the dead man's face, her expression unreadable. "You shouldn't have, Jason. I had intended to spend several days removing his limbs and skin, one joint and muscle at a time."
"Sorry to ruin your weekend, my Lady," Jason grunted, adjusting the tactical harness over his chest. "He was in my way. Besides, I came with a friend to help out another friend."
"Another friend?" Shiva asked, raising an eyebrow.
Jason gestured behind him.
Above them, on the high ornamental molding of the VIP balcony, Red X stood crouched like a gargoyle. His suit tattered caped billowed, as he twirled an a blade between his fingers. Below him, corrupt diplomats, corporate executives, and human traffickers were screaming in blind panic, scrambling toward the heavy blast doors at the far end of the hall.
"Not today, you fat, degenerate shits," Red X mocked, his voice heavily modulated.
He pressed a button on his utility gauntlet.
BOOM.
A series of shaped explosive charges detonated along the archway of the main exit, bringing down several tons of granite and completely sealing off the tunnel.
Red X dropped from the ceiling, landing squarely in front of the trapped patrons with a untraceable teleportation. As twin X shaped blades extended from his gloves with a metallic snap.
"You all thought you could come down here, buy and torture kids, and just catch a private flight back to Geneva scot-free?" Red X growled, stepping toward the quivering crowd. "No chance in hell. I want my pound of flesh from every single one of you."
The crowd screamed, men in bespoke tuxedoes dropping to their knees and begging for mercy.
"Hey, X!" Jason yelled up from the pit. "Keep enough of them breathing! Some of these bastards are foreign ambassadors and ministers. My friend and Batman need leverage to drag their governments through the mud before we lock them in a dark hole forever!"
Red X paused, tilting his masked head back toward Jason. "Fine! But they're losing at least a limb or three for the inconvenience!"
Jason shook his head, turning back to Shiva. "Is that the girl?"
"It is," Shiva said quietly, adjusting Cassandra on her shoulder. "My daughter. David broke her foundation, but she possesses limitless potential. I will rebuild her properly."
"Right," Jason muttered. "Because League of Assassins parenting has such a great track record."
Before Shiva could respond, Talia stepped up to the edge of the pit, flicking the blood from her blade with a single, sharp snap of her wrist. She looked stunning, unbothered, and utterly lethal, not a single drop of crimson staining her green gown.
"Jason, darling," Talia said, her voice smooth and maternal. "Could you be a dear and locate my children? Damian and Athanasia are on this sublevel. They are twins, they have my complexion and your father's handsome looks. You truly cannot miss them. I believe they are attempting to assassinate the Headmaster or secure the lower vaults. If you find them, please direct them my way."
Jason stiffened, his white optical lenses widening beneath his crimson helmet. "Your... what? And they look like who?!"
Before Talia could elaborate, Donna's secure comm unit crackled to life, burning through the static of the local jammers with high-frequency encryption.
A familiar voice cut through the channel, strong, authoritative, and completely focused:
"This is Superior to all Titans and League assets. Secure comms are fully restored. Operational parameters have shifted: lock down the entire mountain. No one leaves. Titans, your primary objective is the extraction and stabilization of all student captives in the lower wings. League ground units, breach the mountain perimeter from the primary landing strip and burrow down into the lower substructure. That is where their primary command node is located."
From the high-altitude feed, Batman's deep, baritone growl echoed over the link: "Understood. League strike team... move in."
H.I.V.E. Academy — Executive Private Annex
Queen Bee stood in front of the antique wall mirror, smoothing down the front of her black silk blouse with slow. She leaned forward, checking her lipstick, before reaching down to gather her black lace panties and sheer stockings, pulling them up her long, dark legs with an easy, satisfied smirk playing at the corners of her lips.
I stood across the room, rolling my shoulders as I finished speaking into my wrist communicator.
With a sharp flex of my tactile telekinesis, I focused a localized burst of kinetic force beneath the band of the red bio-dampener around my left wrist.
SNAP.
The bracelet shattered into four jagged pieces, clattering harmlessly against the mahogany floorboards.
Queen Bee paused, turning her head slightly to look at the broken pieces with genuine fascination in her blue-gray eyes. "Well now... so the dampener was a complete failure from the start."
"Pretty much," I said, rotating my wrist. "Not because of my mixed Olympian and Viltrumite blood. Right before the guards put it on, I wrapped a millimeter-thin barrier of tactile telekinesis around my skin. The sensors never even touched my biological field I just mimic it with my powers. The only thing that actually hit me was your pollen, and that was just because it hijacked my Viltrumite pheromones."
"Good to know," she purred, walking over to the glass coffee table. She reached down, delicately picking up the sealed, collection of filled condoms containing my genetic material, slipping them into a concealed pocket inside her tailored jacket.
She walked past me toward the massive mahogany grimoire bookcase on the far wall. Without a second of hesitation, she pulled the third crimson leather book forward.
A heavy mechanical clunk echoed through the room, and the bookshelf slid smoothly aside to reveal the reinforced elevator shaft glowing with deep red lights.
"There you go, handsome," Queen Bee said, gesturing toward the shaft. "This lift descends straight to Sebastian's private subterranean sanctum. That is where you will find your little half-demon friend, Raven."
I narrowed my eyes at her, crossing my arms over my chest. "Hold on. Why are you helping me? Five minutes ago you were riding me like there was no tomorrow and talking about using my genetics for your cabal."
She stretched her arms above her head, her blouse pulling tight against her chest as she let out a soft, tired sigh. "Because I have despised this assignment since the moment it was assigned me to it. The Church of Blood is crude, messy, and fundamentally undisciplined. But for the greater good, one must occasionally get one's hands filthy."
"The greater good?" I repeated, my voice dropping an octave, cold and lethal. "You let this place operate. You let these sick bastards torture, condition, and traffic children, Queen. Don't talk to me about the greater good."
Queen Bee's smile faded, replaced by an expression that was ancient, calculating, and colder than the Swiss winter outside. "I know precisely what goes on here, Caius Dawn. My associates and I are well aware of the depravities of Brother Blood and the corrupt parasites who fund him. We simply allow them to run their course until their utility expires. We trust you and your little League friends to eradicate this particular pestilence and deliver the High Priest to his divine judgment."
"How much does the Light know about that?" I demanded. "And what are you planning?"
"Just know this, Caius," she said, stepping toward the door to the main executive lounge as the sound of chaotic combat began vibrating through the walls. "We have monitored your development since you were a child. We have grand designs for you. In time, the all will be revealed to you as the curtain is pulled back. And the Shadows serve the Light, and the Light serves the preservation and ascension of humanity."
She looked back over her shoulder, offering me a slow, predatory wink. "Oh... and you were magnificent lay, darling. I haven't climaxed that hard or that many times in a decade. Consider this a personal bonus."
She threw the double doors open.
The main executive lounge was in absolute chaos.
Headmistress Good was no longer a prim, tweed-jacketed academic dean. She had expanded into a towering, seven-foot-tall behemoth of pure muscle, an Amazonian-proportioned warrior with severe, weathered facial features and a cruel, jagged grin. She moved with terrifying, brutal agility, currently lifting Conner by his jacket and hurling him clean through a solid oak support pillar, while Dick was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with four physically enhanced guards wielding shock batons.
My jaw dropped.
Holy shit.
That's Granny Goodness. And she's... weirdly jacked and terrifying. And I might have taken one for the team if this didn't happen.
Queen Bee pulled a small, remote from her pocket and pressed the central node.
BEEP.
Instantly, the dampener bracelets locking Conner's and Wally's powers hissed and popped off their wrists.
Conner rose from the shattered drywall, his eyes igniting with a furious, incandescent crimson glow as he cracked his knuckles. "Finally. My turn."
Beside the wet bar, Wally began vibrating at high frequency, blue-white static crackling across his civilian suit as a cocky smirk spread across his face. "Oh, you are all so remarkably screwed."
Granny Goodness froze, her wild eyes snapping toward Queen Bee in the doorway. "Queen! You treacherous, sniveling bitch! I will have your skin for this!"
Queen Bee pressed a secondary switch on her console, her lips curling into a look of sheer, unadulterated disgust. "I have hated your intolerable screeching since the day we met, you Apokoliptian hag."
BOOM.
A deafening, acoustic thunderclap tore through the center of the lounge as a glowing, geometric vortex of pure spatial energy tore open directly behind Goodness. The gravitational pull of the Boom Tube was instantaneous, wrapping around Granny's massive frame and dragging her backward into the cosmic rift.
"Curse you, Queen!" Goodness roared, her voice swallowed by the vortex as the portal snapped shut with a violent crack of displaced air.
My eyes widened. "A Boom Tube? Where did she get Apokoliptian technology?!"
Queen Bee turned back to us, stepping toward the hallway. "Go now, Caius, and fair warning. Raven is in an extraordinarily fragile state. She has withdrawn deep into the recesses of her own psyche, but she has been subjected to relentless sensory overload, neural shocks, and my specialized psycho-active pollen. She is hyper-sensitive, and dangerously volatile. Ensure you are the first face she sees when she awakens, and you calm her down or she may very well tear this mountain in half with you all in it."
"You're not going anywhere, Queen," I said, taking a step toward her. "Wally, grab her!"
Wally leaned forward, ready to break the sound barrier.
Queen Bee didn't flinch. She met my eyes, her voice dropping into a rhythmic, melodic whisper:
"Twilight song. The cradle falls. The silver bell rings thrice."
The words struck my auditory cortex like a physical hammer.
Instantly, the world completely dissolved.
My vision went pitch-black. A profound, crushing numbness seized my entire central nervous system, freezing my muscles, my breath, and my tactile telekinesis in a single fraction of a second. I was trapped inside my own skull, screaming into an endless, soundless void.
GASP.
A searing, pungent chemical odor violently invaded my nasal passages, burning my lungs and shocking my brain back into reality.
I doubled over, coughing violently as my vision blurred and reformed.
"Breathe, Caius! Breathe!" Dick's voice barked.
I blinked through watering eyes. Dick was standing over me in his full Nightwing suit, holding a crushed smelling-salt capsule in his gloved fingers. Beside him, Conner had a hand braced against my shoulder, his face pale with concern, while Wally stood near the doorway, scanning the empty hall at superspeed.
"What... what the hell was that?" I wheezed, rubbing my temples as a dull, throbbing ache pulsed behind my eyes.
"She used a vocal hypnotic trigger," Dick said, his jaw tight, his voice deadly serious. "The moment she spoke that phrase, you completely shut down. Your eyes went glassy, your heart rate dropped to twelve beats per minute, and you froze like a statue. She said if she wanted to she could say other phrases that would set you loose on the world."
Conner looked at me, his fists clenched. "Caius... she wasn't lieing. I was listening to her heartbeat the entire time. It was steady. Calm. Like Batman's when he's holding all the cards. She knew your real name, she knew who we were, and she had that trigger ready."
The cold realization hit me like a bucket of ice water.
A sleeper trigger, and possibly alot more!
When did they put a mental override in my head? Was it during the two months I was comatose in the hospital after the Mark fight? Or was it earlier? or after?
"Dammit," I hissed, slamming my fist into the floorboards, splintering the hardwood. "They got inside my head."
Dick placed a firm hand on my shoulder, forcing me to look him in the eye. "We will figure that out later, Caius. Bruce, J'onn, and Zatanna will tear your mind apart layer by layer until we purge whatever they put in you. But right now, we have a mission to finish. There are hundreds of kids in this facility, the mountain is in chaos, and Raven is down in that pit."
I took a deep, steadying breath, forcing the panic down into a cold, locked box in my chest.
"You're right," I said, rising to my feet. "Mission first."
I pressed the face of my metallic watch.
With a soft, pneumatic hiss, liquid black and crimson nanites poured over my skin, forming my sleek, tight reinforced Superior bodysuit. With the stylized Viltrumite crest settled over my chest in bold crimson, my hood sitting on my shoulder , and on my arm snapping into place as my tactical HUD synchronized with the League frequency.
"Let's go get our girl back," I said, stepping into the red elevator shaft.
Headmaster's Office
Bumblebee hovered near the edge of Sebastian Blud's desk, her utility gauntlet glowing as she monitored the different area's of the school.
The office door suddenly open.
Karen instantly expanded back to full size, dropping into a defensive combat stance, her bio-stingers crackling with yellow bio-electricity. "Freeze!"
Queen Bee strolled into the office, carrying a sleek, reinforced titanium briefcase. She didn't look at all surprised to see Karen. In fact, she looked faintly amused.
"Oh, put those toys away, darling," Queen Bee said smoothly, waving a dismissive hand. "I am merely here to collect a few things and finishing my job before this entire mountain collapses under the weight of the Justice League's self-righteousness."
"Why shouldn't I drop you right now?" Karen challenged, her eyes narrowing behind her visor.
"Because your friends in the lower pits need your data more than you need to engage in a messy, pointless brawl with me," Queen Bee replied.
She walked straight to the ornate brass grimoire shelf behind the desk. With practiced familiarity, she pulled three specific volumes forward in a precise sequence.
A soft hiss of compressed nitrogen escaped as the false back of the bookcase slid open, revealing a temperature-controlled cryogenic vault.
Inside were dozens of glowing, pressurized bio-containment bags filled with blood.
Karen gasped, her stomach turning. "Is that...?"
"Metahuman and divine blood samples," Queen Bee said casually, unlatching her briefcase and swiftly loading several labeled vials into the padded interior. "Collected over decades from the prodigies who passed through these halls. A shame to leave such exquisite research to be incinerated. But I have my orders."
She shut the briefcase with a crisp click, pulling another small remote from her pocket.
She turned back to Karen, her blue-gray eyes raking over the younger woman with genuine appreciation. "You have talent, Karen Beecher. Exceptional intellect, remarkable courage, and an absolute refusal to bow. You and I are extraordinarily alike."
"I am nothing like you, and how do you know my name?" Karen spat.
Queen Bee smiled, stepping toward the center of the room as she pressed the remote. "You could be. Come work for me. I can teach you how to unlock your true potential, how to wield power, how to make the lesser men of this world bend to your will. A queen requires worthy protégées."
Karen scoffed, raising her chin with complete confidence. "No thanks. I'm already a queen. I see her every morning when I look in the mirror."
Queen Bee's smile widened, genuine amusement sparkling in her eyes. "We shall see, darling. After all... there can only ever be one true queen in a hive."
BOOM.
A spatial vortex tore open behind her, and Queen Bee stepped backward into the glowing portal, vanishing into the spatial slipstream before the rift snapped shut, leaving the office silent once more.
Subterranean Level 0 — The Blood Sanctum
The elevator doors chimed and slid open.
Sebastian Blud strode out into the cavernous, vaulted laboratory, his phone pressed firmly against his ear as alarms wailed across the red-lit ceiling.
"What is the meaning of this?!" Blud barked into the receiver. "Did the Sandsmark girl break her neural inhibitors again?!"
"No, High Priest!" the panicked voice of a senior technician screamed over the static. "It's Red X! And Talia al Ghul, Lady Shiva, and the Red Hood! They breached the Red Room, they're slaughtering our security details and executing the donors!"
Blud's knuckles turned white around the phone. "Where is David Cain? Where is Headmistress Good?!"
"Cain is dead, sir! The man in the red helmet severed his head! And Goodness vanished, we have multiple Boom Tube signatures detected in the executive wing! And the Justice League has deployed tactical airships, and they're boring through the mountain's outer shell!"
Blud let out a guttural roar of pure, demonic rage.
He hurled the phone against the far wall, shattering the device into hundreds of pieces. His nearly feral handsome, aristocratic features twisted hideously, his glacial blue eyes turning a visceral, blood-soaked crimson, his canines extending into jagged fangs, and thick, black, pulsating veins bulging across his pale neck and temples.
"QUEEN, YOU TREACHEROUS BITCH!" Blud screamed, his voice reverberating through the cavern like the roar of a wounded beast. "HOW DARE YOU AND THE LIGHT BETRAY ME NOW! WHEN I AM ON THE VERY PRECIPICE OF DIVINE ASCENSION!"
Blud reached up, tearing his tailored coat and dress shirt down the middle, ripping the expensive fabric away to expose his broad, heavily muscled body.
He turned toward the center of the laboratory.
Suspended inside a spherical occult containment rig was Raven.
She was dressed in a thin, translucent crimson gown that draped loosely over her frail, pale frame. Her long, raven-black hair hung limply over her shoulders, her skin sickly pale. Heavy mechanical restraints locked her wrists and ankles to the ritual frame, while thick cables snaked into the base of her skull, pumping low-frequency white noise and high-voltage neural dampening currents directly into her brainstem.
Her head hung forward, her eyes rolled back into her head, her body trembling with continuous, feverish shivers as she remained trapped in the deepest, most agonizing layer of her own subconscious mind.
Blud stepped toward the console, his eyes blazing with fanatical madness.
He reached into a sterile tray, picking up a glass syringe filled with a dark, swirling crimson serum laced with concentrated occult catalysts.
"I wanted Dawn's and Sandsmark divine blood's to ready my vessel," Blud hissed, his breath coming in hot, ragged gasps as he approached the suspended girl. "I wanted their Olympian spark to ensure I could absorb Trigon's cosmic malice without my flesh being turned to ash. But you will have to be enough."
He raised the syringe, the heavy needle glistening under the harsh red spotlights.
"One injection directly into your body," Blud whispered, a mad grin stretching across his monstrous face. "It will spike your adrenaline greatly and with the aphrodisiac's affects you will be in blinding heat. I will rip your consciousness out of hiding, and force the gateway open as I penetrate you, and fill you will my seed. I will tell you to let your emotions flood and as you reach climax with your broken mind I will tell you to let your father in. When the Lord of the Eight Hells peers through your flesh, I will drain your blood, siphon his power, and claim dominion over this miserable realm!"
He raised his arm to plunge the needle into her heart.
SWISH-SWISH-SWISH.
From the pitch-black shadows of the high ventilation ceiling, four razor-sharp shurikens and two steel-weighted kunai whistled through the air with pinpoint accuracy.
The blades struck Blud across the shoulder, forearm, and chest.
Blud stumbled backward, his thick skin deflecting the worst of the impact, but the force of the strike shattered the glass syringe in his hand, spilling the dark ritual serum across the floor.
Blud snarled, ripping a steel kunai from his shoulder and whirling around toward the darkness. "Who dares?!"
From the shadows atop the central generator housing, two figures dropped silently to the floor.
Damian stepped forward, a gleaming katana held in a low, two-handed guard, his eyes burning with cold, patrician disdain.
Beside him, Athanasia matched his stance, her jet-black hair tied back into a high combat ponytail, her shaved temples gleaming under the red lights as she twirled two matching combat daggers between her fingers.
"Sister," Damian said, his voice flat, icy, and sharp enough to cut glass. "Would you mind assisting me in disposing of this pathetic, overgrown garbage?"
"With absolute pleasure, dear Brother," Athanasia purred, her lips curving into a predatory smirk. "He has been on my list for six months. And now... I finally have the authorization to spill his entrails across his own floor."
Blud's eyes narrowed into slits of pure, homicidal fury. "Mr. and Ms. Wayne. I do not know how you escaped your quarters, but I assure you... neither of you will leave this mountain alive."
"Not if we carve the heart from your chest first," Damian declared.
With a unified, blinding burst of lethal speed, Damian and Athanasia lunged forward, their blades flashing in the crimson light as Blud roared, throwing his fist forward as the three collided in an explosion of steel and blood.