DC: All for One Chapter 17 — The Trinity (Patreon)

The corridor that led from the low-security block into the high-security ward was longer than the previous stretch had been. Ethan walked at the front of the group at an unhurried pace while Sofia stayed close behind his right shoulder. Mindy walked on his left with a noticeably different posture, her shoulders rolled back and her arms swinging loosely at her sides as she scanned every cell they passed with the open curiosity of someone visiting a zoo for the first time.

"So who the hell are you actually?" Mindy asked while she peered into the viewing slot of a cell as they walked past it. "Like I get the whole mysterious masked guy thing, very dramatic, real cool, I'll give you that. But seriously, what's your deal? Where'd you come from? How'd you get all those freaky powers? I've seen a lot of weird shit in my life and the stuff you pulled back there with the ice and the lasers and turning that creep Zsasz into wall paint, that was something else entirely."

Ethan kept walking without slowing his pace and didn't bother to turn his head toward her. "My origin is not something I will be sharing tonight," he said. "Perhaps in time, once trust has been established between us, I will explain more of where I came from and how I came to possess what I possess. For now it is enough that you understand I am capable of doing what I say I will do."

Mindy let out a short noise that wasn't quite a laugh. "Okay, fair enough, mystery man, keep your secrets," she said while she skipped a half-step to keep up with his pace. "But come on, throw me a bone here. Why Arkham? Why us? You said you picked us, so what was the criteria? And while we're on the subject, are you absolutely positively sure I can't just kill the Falcone bitch behind you right now and save us all the trouble? Because I'm telling you, that family is a goddamn cancer, and—"

"Don't call me that."

The voice came from behind Ethan with more ferocity than anyone in the group had heard from Sofia yet, including Ethan himself. "I am not a Falcone. I do not want anything to do with that name or the people who carry it. Use my first name or do not address me at all."

There was a moment of silence in the corridor before Mindy started to laugh. "Oh my god, she speaks!" Mindy said while she turned around and walked backwards for a few paces so she could look at Sofia directly. "She actually speaks! Here I was thinking you were some kind of mute zombie princess and you've just been waiting to pop off this whole time. Okay, okay, my bad, my apologies, your highness. Not a Falcone. Got it. You're just some random girl who happens to have the exact same face as the Falcone heiress and who was sitting in Arkham because of some completely unrelated reason that has nothing whatsoever to do with the crime family of the same name. Did I get all that right?"

Sofia's jaw tightened but she didn't respond, and Mindy took the silence as further encouragement.

"You know what, I respect the hustle," Mindy continued as she turned back around to walk forward again. "Disowning your whole bloodline because daddy was mean to you, that takes guts. Whatever helps you sleep at night, princess. I'll call you Sofia. Sofia Not-A-Falcone. Sofia Definitely-Not-Related-To-Carmine. Sofia—"

"Enough," Ethan said loud enough that Mindy actually shut her mouth mid-sentence and glanced up at him. He stopped walking and turned slightly to look at both of them. "Both of you will need to find a way to coexist," he said. "I did not pull either of you out of this place at random. I chose each of you carefully, and I did so because I believe that what each of you brings to what I am building is necessary."

"What I am building is going to change the shape of this world. The two of you, alongside Ivy once she joins us, will be the foundation of that. You will help me usher in something better than what currently exists, and you will both be remembered for the part you played in it. But none of that works if you spend the entire walk to the next cell trying to gut each other over a name."

Mindy chewed on the inside of her cheek for a second while she considered that. "Yeah, alright, fine," she said eventually with a shrug that was deliberately casual. "I'll lay off. For now. No promises if she pulls some shit later, but for the walk, sure, I can be a delight. Cross my heart."  She drew a quick X across her chest with one finger. 

Then she tilted her head sideways and looked up at Ethan with narrowed eyes. "I'll be straight with you though, masked man. I'm not exactly sold on you yet. The whole speech thing is real pretty and you've got the powers to back up the swagger, but I've heard pretty speeches from creeps before and it usually ends with someone trying to put a collar on me. So I'm going to reserve judgment for a bit. That said, as long as you're pointing me at criminals I get to put down, and as long as I get to keep doing what my dad started, I'm in. We can sort out the philosophical fine print later."

Sofia, for her part, didn't say anything at all. She just nodded, very slightly, when Ethan glanced toward her. Whatever motivation she had for being there did not extend much beyond getting out of the building and putting as many miles between herself and the Arkham gates as the night would allow.

With that dealt with they started walking again. The cells they passed grew louder the deeper they went into the high-security ward, and the occupants behind those reinforced doors began to take notice of the small procession moving past them. 

A man with a shaved head and a long pink scar that ran from his temple to his jaw pressed his face against the viewing slot of his cell and watched them go by without saying anything, 

A few cells further down a woman in a torn jumpsuit started giggling as they approached and continued giggling until they were well past her door, the sound following them down the corridor like a trailing thread.

"Oh that is interesting," a man's voice called out from a cell on the right. "A new face escorting two familiar ones. I would very much like to know what arrangement you have struck with our masked friend, ladies. Perhaps when you return, you might come and tell me about it."

Mindy flipped him off without breaking stride. 

"You are walking past my door right now, little man, I want you to know that I am memorizing the shape of you. Wherever you go after this, whatever name you wear, I will find you. I will find all three of you."

"This place is a goddamn carnival," Mindy muttered.

"It is a holding facility for the worst of the worst," Ethan said. "Yet for some reason they still pollute this city with their stink insstead of rotting in the ground."

Mindy snorted. "Yeah, scum... all of them."

They reached the end of the high-security corridor and turned a final corner, the cell they had been walking toward came into view at the far end of the next stretch. It was set apart from the others by a wider clearance on either side and by the additional layer of containment built into its frame, with what appeared to be a secondary set of sealed vents along the top edge that had been designed to scrub the air before it circulated back into the rest of the ward. 

Ethan stopped in front of it, raised one hand, and brought his fingertips together against the reinforced panel of the door before releasing a focused burst of wind that shattered the locking mechanis. The door itself buckled inward at the seam and then swung loose on its hinges, and Ethan pushed it the rest of the way open and stepped into the cell with Mindy and Sofia following at a slight distance behind him.

The cell was warmer than the corridor outside, noticeably so, and the air inside it carried a faint earthy quality. Pamela Isley sat cross-legged in the centre of the floor with her hands resting palms-up on her knees and her eyes closed. 

She did not move when the door broke. She did not move when the three of them stepped inside. One eye opened, slowly, and she regarded Ethan with a sleepy expression that didn't extend to the rest of her face.

"You are either very confident or very stupid," she said casually, "to walk into my cell carrying that many seeds in your pouch. I can feel them from here."

Ethan didn't move from where he stood. "I am, in possession of an intellect that exceeds yours by a measurable margin, though that's not unique to you," he said, and there was no boast in the way he said it, only the flat delivery of someone stating an observable fact. "I do not say that to provoke you and I do not say it to flatter myself. I say it because you should understand that I have considered every move you might make in response to my presence here, and I have already accounted for it."

Ivy's other eye opened. Both eyes settled on him fully now, the sleepy expression that had been in her face a moment ago was no longer there.

"I am here to free you from this cell tonight," Ethan continued. "And I am here to recruit you into the organisation I am building."

Ivy was quiet for a moment. Then she uncrossed her legs slowly and leaned back on her hands. "No," she said. "I am not interested. Get out of my cell before I impale you on those seeds you so generously brought to help me escape."

Ethan did not move. "What will you do," he said, "once you are out?"

Ivy's expression narrowed.

"Let me guess, you'll go back to whatever greenhouse or stretch of forest or abandoned lot you have claimed for yourself," he continued, "and you will spend the next several months building toward another grand action. You will attempt to save the planet. You will attempt to defend the Green from the people who are killing it. And you will fail. Again. The same way you have failed every time before. A hero will find you, undo what you have built, and put you back in a cell. And then the cycle will restart, and you will spend your life running the same loop until something finally kills you in the middle of one of its iterations."

Mindy let out a loud bark of laughter from behind him. "Damn," she said. "Brutal. Accurate, but brutal."

Ivy's jaw tightened and the seeds in the pouch at Ethan's hip burst open all at once, their casings splitting and tendrils of pale green growth erupting outward in a sudden rush, vines uncoiling and reaching toward Ethan's torso with the directed intent of something being aimed rather than something growing. 

They reached his suit and stopped.

The vines hovered against his body without piercing it, without coiling around it, without doing anything at all. They twitched a couple times and then settled into a kind of stillness against him while Ivy stared at them.

"What!" she said angrily. 

Ethan reached down with one hand and brushed his fingers along the length of the nearest vine, and as he did so the tendril responded to his touch by curling gently around his wrist in something that looked almost affectionate. A small flower bloomed near the base of it, white-petalled and unfurling at his command, and he stroked it once with his thumb before letting his hand fall back to his side.

"The Green will not attack one of its own," he said turning back towards her. 

Ivy was on her feet before the last word finished leaving his mouth. "How!!!" she said, the word coming out with enough force that Sofia took a half-step back behind Ethan's shoulder. "How do you have access to the green? How do you carry its signature? Who are you?"

"A question for another time," Ethan replied.

Ivy stared at him for a long second, her chest rising and falling more visibly than it had been a moment ago, and she opened her mouth to ask something else before he raised one hand to forestall her.

"First let me tell you about what I am building," he said. "I am going to change this world, Pamela. Not in the small insignificant way that the people in costumes change it from day to day, but actually change it. I am going to dismantle the corporations that have spent the last century treating the Green as a resource to be drained and the planet as a profit margin to be maximised. I am going to remove the people who built those corporations and the people who protect them, and I am going to restructure what comes after into something that does not repeat the same mistakes. The paradise you have spent your entire life trying to build, the world where the Green is allowed to flourish without being torn apart for someone else's quarterly returns, that world is what I am working toward. And if you join me, you will live to see it bloom."

Ivy stood very still while he spoke, and when he finished she didn't answer immediately. Her expression had shifted from anger into something more suspicious. "And what," she said slowly, "do you want from me in exchange for this paradise."

"You," Ethan said. "I want you. I want you to give yourself to this fully, heart and soul. I do not need followers. I do not need foot soldiers. I need comrades who share my goals and who can help me bring this new world into being, I need them to be in this with the entirety of what they are. That is what I am asking for."

Ivy's mouth twitched into something that wasn't quite a smile. "That is a beautiful speech," she said. "I have heard beautiful speeches before. The last man who gave me one of those was wearing a suit and carrying a contract from a pharmaceutical company. You will forgive me if I do not simply take you at your word."

"I anticipated that you would not," Ethan said, he then reached up and removed his helmet. The metal mask came away from his face with a soft hiss as the seal released, and he held it tucked under his left arm while he reached into the pouch at his hip with his right hand. What he withdrew was a small glass vial, no larger than his thumb, filled with a clear blue liquid. 

"This is a treatment I prepared before coming here tonight," he said as he held the vial up for her to see. "It is calibrated to your pheromones and poison specifically and is a cure to them. Use your pheromones on me. Ask me whether I am telling the truth. Ask me anything else you want to ask me. And when you are satisfied that I am being honest with you, give me the vial."

Ivy's eyebrows lifted and the guarded expression on her face slipped for a second into something closer to genuine surprise, she looked at the vial in his fingers and then at his face and then at the vial again.

"You came here prepared to do that?" she asked.

"I came here prepared to do whatever was necessary to convince you."

Mindy whistled from behind him. "Okay, no, hold on, hold on," she said. "I gotta call timeout for a second here. You're telling me that you are about to voluntarily let the world's most notorious plant lady criminal, who is famous, by the way, for using her freaky chemistry to make men do whatever she tells them, you are about to let her dose you up and put you on a leash because you think she's gonna play fair? That sounds like the single dumbest thing I have ever heard and I have heard some shit."

Sofia, beside her, didn't say anything but her hands had clasped tighter in front of her stomach and her eyes had moved up from the floor to Ethan's back. 

"Ivy is not a criminal," Ethan said without turning around to look at either of them. "Her crimes, such as they are, have been motivated entirely by her commitment to defending the environment from people who deserve far worse than what she has done to them. At most you could call her an eco terrorist."

"Pfft," Mindy muttered just loud enough to be audible. "Liberal yahoo. Whatever, your funeral, masked man."

Ivy's lips curved into the first real smile she had shown since they walked into her cell. "I will take your terms," she said as she uncrossed her arms and walked toward him, the green of her bare feet making no sound at all against the cell floor. She stopped directly in front of him and reached up with one hand to brush her fingertips along the line of his jaw before she leaned in and pressed her mouth against his.

The kiss lasted perhaps three seconds. She drew back, tilted her head slightly while she studied his face, and her smile faltered when she registered that his eyes were still focused, still alert, still entirely his own.

"Hm," she hummed.

She leaned back in and kissed him again, deeper this time, with one hand sliding to the back of his neck to hold him in place. When she pulled away the second time, his eyes had gone soft at the edges in a way that they had not been a moment earlier, and his shoulders had relaxed by a measurable degree.

"There we are," Ivy said quietly.

She stepped back and folded her arms. "Why did you come here tonight to free us."

"Because each of you offers something I require," Ethan said, his voice slightly slower than it had been a moment earlier but otherwise unchanged. "Sofia has the connections and the knowledge to create infrastructure I cannot easily build for myself. Mindy is a weapon already trained and motivated by a cause that aligns with the targets I intend to remove. You are the only person on this planet who can help nature heal which is a part of my plan for my Utopia. I freed you because I need you. All three of you."

Ivy tilted her head. "Do you truly care about nature."

"I understand nature more than I will ever understand humanity," Ethan answered.

Mindy laughed from behind him. "Oh my god, this guy is a freak," she said while she shook her head. "An actual freak. Lady, you found your soulmate. Congratulations. I want to be the maid of honour at the wedding."

Ivy ignored her completely. Her eyes had not moved from Ethan's face. "If I join you," she said, "do you intend to betray me. Now, or at any point in the future."

"I would sooner cut off my own arm," Ethan said, "than disregard the people who are helping me bring this new world into being."

That answer sat in the room for a long moment. Ivy's expression shifted through several things in quick succession, surprise and something behind the surprise, m she looked at him for several seconds longer before she finally exhaled and uncrossed her arms. "Give me the antidote," she said.

Ethan reached into the pouch and withdrew the vial. Ivy took it from his fingers and uncapped it and pressed it gently to his lips, he drank without resistance. After a moment he blinked, his shoulders straightening back into their previous posture, the edge leaving his eyes.

He hummed thoughtfully. "That was an interesting experience," he said, more to himself than to anyone in particular.

Ivy raised one eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

Ethan tilted his head slightly while he considered the question. "The hormonal imbalance produced by your pheromones increased my attraction to you to a level I have never previously experienced," he said. "I have, to be clear, never experienced attraction in the conventional sense at any point in my life prior to that moment. The closest comparison I can offer is that for the duration of the effect I was, for the first time, what I believe is colloquially referred to as horny. It was an interesting data point. I had not realised how much of that response was even theoretically available to my physiology."

There was a moment of silence in the cell.

"Oh my god," Mindy said. "TMI. TMI, dude. We did not need to know that. I did not need to know that. None of us needed to know that."

Sofia's eyes had gone slightly wider and her mouth had opened a fraction, though she didn't say anything. Whatever she had been expecting from the conversation, it had not been that.

Ivy, for her part, looked genuinely thrown for the first time since the conversation had begun. Her arms had fallen back to her sides and her lips had parted as though she meant to say something and then thought better of it.

Ethan, oblivious or indifferent to the reaction his comment had caused, lifted his helmet and slid it back over his head. The seal hissed softly as it engaged. "Now I shall ask again will you be joining me?" He asked.

Ivy collected herself with a small nod of her head. "Yes I believe I will," she said. "Lead the way."

The four of them moved toward the cell door, and as they stepped out into the corridor the sound of bootsteps was already echoing toward them from the far end of the ward. The reinforcements had arrived in force this time, several dozen guards in full riot gear filling the corridor in formation. 

"Down," one of the lead guards barked. "Down on the ground now, all of you, hands on your heads—"

Ethan walked toward them and fired a focused air burst at the centre of the shield wall that broke the formation apart and sent the front row tumbling backward into the men behind them. As they fell he was already moving, his arms stretching forward to grab two guards by the fronts of their vests and slam them sideways into the corridor walls hard enough to dent the panelling. 

He clicked his fingers at the second wave and the flashbang detonation dropped six men to the floor in unconscious heaps. He then swept his hand in an arc and a sheet of ice spread across the corridor floor that froze their legs and moved up their body until only their heads were visible. When he reached the last guard standing he simply placed a palm against the man's chestplate and flash froze him. 

Mindy let out a whistle. "Yeah, okay, you're hired."

Ethan was already walking past the bodies toward the row of cells that lined the next stretch of corridor. He fired a concentrated beam from his eyes at the lock of the first cell door, and the metal melted away in a hiss of vapour. He did the same to the second. The third. The fourth.

"Hey, hey, hey," Mindy said while she jogged a few steps to catch up to him. "What the hell are you doing, what the hell, why are you opening their cells, I thought we were getting out of here, I did not sign up to take a tour of every freak in this building—"

"I am freeing all of them," Ethan said without slowing.

"Yeah, I see that, I have eyes, but why?"

"They will be easier to kill," Ethan said as he melted the lock on the fifth cell, "if they are free and not at Arkham."

Mindy stopped walking for a second and stared at the back of his head. Then her face split into a slow grin. "Oh," she said. "Oh, okay. I see you. I see you." She caught back up to him with renewed enthusiasm. "Okay, but counter-proposal, why don't we just kill them all right now? They're sitting ducks, the cells are open, we could have a real productive evening here and clean out half of Gotham's most wanted in one go."

"It would draw too much attention," Ethan said. "If we eliminate every name in this building tonight, we accomplish two things that are bad for us. The first is that we remove every villain currently dividing the heroes' attention across the city. The second is that we would gain infamy as the people who slaughtered an asylum's worth of inmates, which is not the reputation I want attached to what I am building. It is far more useful to release them, let them resume their activities, and harvest them at our leisure once they have scattered and the heroes are exhausted from chasing them down again."

Mindy nodded slowly while she absorbed that. "That is some next-level evil chess, my dude," she said. "Yeah, okay, fine, let them out, we'll pick them off later. I can be patient. I can be very patient when it comes to criminal scum."

Ethan reached the end of the corridor where the high-security ward met the outer wall of the building. He stopped, raised both hands, and pressed his palms flat against the reinforced concrete in front of him.

The wall held for a fraction of a second before it didn't. A massive section of it blew outward in a tremendous CRUNCH of concrete and rebar and torn steel, the debris scattering across the asylum grounds beyond.

The villains whose cells he had opened were already moving toward the new exit. They poured through the opening and out onto the grounds, scattering into the dark in a dozen different directions.

Ethan watched them go for a moment, then turned to the three women beside him. "We will be taking another exit," he said before turning around and leaving.

The other three fell in behind him with Mindy at his left shoulder and Ivy a pace behind her, while Sofia trailed at the rear with her arms wrapped loosely around her middle. 

"The service tunnels I came in through run underneath the west side of the building," Ethan said as he led them around a corner and into a narrower corridor that branched off from the main ward. 

"They connect to the sewer infrastructure that runs beneath the Narrows, and from there we can surface anywhere between here and the edge of Robinson Park without being seen from the street. The other villains have taken the loud exit, which means the heroes who are about to arrive will be drawn toward the grounds and the outer perimeter in pursuit of them. We will be moving in the opposite direction, beneath all of it, while the attention above us moves outward."

"Smart," Mindy said with an approving nod. "I like the way you think. Let the freaks take the heat while we slip out the back."

They made it perhaps thirty yards further down the corridor before the sound of boots ahead of them announced a problem. Another squad of guards rounded the far corner, six of them this time, less heavily armoured than the riot unit that Ethan had dismantled earlier but still armed.

Before they could even lift their weapons Ethan moved, or to be more accurate. 

He blinked. 

The transition from standing still to being down the corridor happened so quickly that Sofia actually flinched backward at the sudden absence of him from her peripheral vision, and by the time the lead guard had finished shouting his second syllable Ethan was already inside the formation with them.

His arms had thickened visibly beneath the sleeves of his suit, as his muscles swelled and expanded past what it had been only seconds before, and when his right fist connected with the lead guard's chestplate the sound of the impact was not the meaty thud of a normal punch but something more like a car door being torn from its hinges. 

The guard was lifted off his feet entirely and travelled backward through the air for several yards before colliding with two of his colleagues and taking all three of them down.

Ethan was already moving to the second man by then, a short pivot on the ball of his left foot that brought him inside the guard's guard before the rifle could be properly aimed, and he drove his elbow into the side of the man's helmet and dropped the guard to his knees.

The third guard managed to fire a burst from his rifle that struck Ethan in the upper chest at point-blank range, and the rounds simply flattened against the reinforced fabric of the suit and the hardened skin beneath it before tumbling to the floor at Ethan's feet. 

Ethan caught the barrel of the weapon with one augmented hand, crushed the metal closed in his grip with no more effort than someone squeezing an empty soda can, then drove his other fist into the guard's stomach with enough force to fold the man in half and launch him back down the corridorm.

The last two guards tried to retreat. Ethan closed the distance to them in a single blink, grabbed them both by the fronts of their vests simultaneously, and slammed them together with a crunch that rang along the corridor walls before letting them drop to the floor in unconscious piles.

The entire engagement had taken perhaps eight seconds.

Ethan rolled his shoulders as the swelling in his arms receded back to their normal proportions, and turned to the three women behind him. "Keep moving," he said calmly. 

However before he could move something came whistling through the air toward the Ethan's skull.

He caught it between two fingers without breaking stride, the small black projectile stopping barely an inch from the side of his helmet, he held it up in front of his faceplate for a brief moment while he examined the familiar shape of it before he let his arm fall back to his side.

"Stop where you are."

The voice came from overhead, and a figure dropped from the rafters of the service corridor in a flip that brought him down onto the floor roughly fifteen feet ahead of where Ethan had stopped. 

It was none other than the Boy Wonder

Robin rose from his crouch with his staff already drawn, his eyes moved past Ethan to settle on the three women behind him. "Get back to your cells now," Robin said while he shifted his stance into a fighting posture. "I don't want to hurt any of you, but I will if you take another step toward that exit."

Ethan did not bother to turn around. "Ignore the child," he said to the others. "He is not worth the attention he is trying to demand."

Robin's jaw tightened visibly beneath the edge of his mask. "There's going to be a cell waiting for you right next to theirs by the time I'm done with you tonight."

Ethan tilted his head slightly and studied the young man for a moment. "And how," he said, "do you intend to manage that on your own."

"He isn't on his own." The second voice came from behind him.

Ethan didn't so much as turn his head, but his awareness shifted outward to map the corridor around him and he registered the two additional presences in the same instant they announced themselves.

Black Canary stepped out from a side corridor to his right and a heartbeat later, Wildcat moved into the corridor from the left.

"I see...," Ethan said with a hum. He then turned his head slightly to address the three women behind him. "I think perhaps the time has come for each of you to demonstrate what you are capable of. Mindy, the boy is yours. Ivy—" he reached to the pouch at his hip and unclipped it, tossing it backward over his shoulder without looking. "The woman in the fishnets is yours as well."

"And him?" Mindy asked while she cracked her knuckles and bounced on the balls of her feet in the direction of Robin.

"I'll take the older one," Ethan said. "Sofia. Stay out of the fighting entirely."

Sofia nodded without saying anything and retreated several paces back down the corridor to the recessed doorway of one of the empty cells they had already passed, where she pressed her back against the metal and made herself as small as she could manage.

Meanwhile Mindy was already moving. She launched herself toward Robin with a wild grin spreading across her face, her body twisting sideways through the air in a vault that carried her over the first sweep of his staff, and she landed in a crouch inside his guard before snapping her right leg upward in a kick aimed at the underside of his jaw.

Robin jerked his head back and the strike missed by a hair's breadth, and he spun the staff in a tight figure-eight that forced her to roll backward across the floor to avoid the return arc. She came up on her feet in a handspring, . "Oh, this is gonna be fun," Mindy said as she darted forward again. "You and me, Bat-boy, show me what you got."

Robin didn't answer. He met her rush with a short stab of the staff that she slapped aside with her forearm before hooking her leg behind his ankle and twisting, and for a second it looked as though she would take him to the floor before he reversed the motion with a grappling counter that sent her tumbling past him. 

She turned the fall into a forward roll, came up facing him again, and the two of them flowed into each other in a rapid, overlapping exchange of strikes that sent them moving down the corridor in.

A few yards away, the seeds from Ivy's pouch were already bursting. They erupted across the corridor floor in a carpet of green, vines thickening from sprouts to full growth in the space of two seconds and curling upward into the air around her.

Black Canary lunged toward her with a left hook that would have connected with most opponents, but the vines intercepted the blow before it landed and coiled around her wrist with a constricting grip that jerked her arm aside. She tore free and opened her mouth to scream but a thick lattice of ivy erupted from the floor beneath her feet, forcing her to leap backward to avoid being swallowed by it.

Wildcat, meanwhile, approached Ethan at a walking pace. The older man rolled his shoulders as he came closer. "You know what I like about people like you?" Wildcat said as he closed the distance. "The usual crop of thugs you run into on patrol, they go down in one or two, maybe three hits if they've been eating their vitamins. But a fella like you, with all the nice suit and the fancy mask and the trail of broken guards behind him? A fella like you usually has a little something to back it up. I'm almost hoping you do, because I'd hate to have come all the way out here tonight just to knock someone flat in under ten seconds."

Ethan considered the man in front of him for a moment. He could end this from a distance. He could release an air burst that would flatten the older man against the far wall before he ever got within striking range. He could fire a beam from his eyes that would cut him apart where he stood. He could extend his arm and grasp him by the throat from fifteen feet away and crush the breath out of him without ever moving from this spot.

But there would be nothing to be learned from any of those approaches, and there was something about the way Wildcat moved that made Ethan curious enough to want to see what the man could actually do.

He settled his weight onto the balls of his feet and raised his hands into a guard of his own. "Come on, I'm ready when you are."

Wildcat came in and launched a quick combination of a jab-cross-hook that flowed so smoothly into itself that it was almost impossible to distinguish the individual strikes. Ethan slipped the jab by rolling his head a fraction to the left, caught the cross on his forearm with a deflection that redirected the momentum sideways, and leaned back from the hook so that it passed an inch in front of his faceplate.

Wildcat didn't break rhythm. He followed immediately with a short uppercut aimed at the underside of Ethan's ribcage, but Ethan brought his elbow down to meet the rising fist and absorbed the impact on the point of the joint before pivoting his hips and throwing a counter of his own, a right straight that Wildcat slipped. 

They circled each other briefly. 

Ethan registered that the older man's footwork was much better than his own, that his angles were tighter, that his economy of motion had been refined to a degree that even he was in awe of it. This was going to require more attention than he had initially budgeted for it.

Wildcat came in again with a feinted jab that Ethan almost committed to defending. The real strike arrived as a looping hook from the opposite side that caught him on the side of the helmet with enough force to turn his head and make the world tilt sideways for a half-second. Ethan absorbed the impact, rolled his neck to settle it, and launched his own combination in response.

His left jab snapped out twice in rapid succession and both of them landed, the second one catching Wildcat on the cheek and opening a shallow cut beneath his eye, he then followed with a straight right that the older man slipped by a margin so narrow that Ethan felt the fabric of the mask brush his glove.

Wildcat grinned, the old man then came forward with a renewed aggression, throwing hooks to the body and then to the head in a rolling pattern that forced Ethan to give ground and circle, and for a full ten seconds of exchange neither man landed cleanly while both of them worked for the angle that would let them open the other up.

Ethan caught a body shot on his elbow and answered with a short right to Wildcat's solar plexus that doubled the older man forward, he followed immediately with a knee aimed at his face, but Wildcat turned his head and took the impact on the top of his skull instead of his nose, and answered the knee with a compact hook that detonated against Ethan's ribs with a force that Ethan felt even with his Durability power. 

Ethan circled backward and reassessed.

The man was good... no... he was excellent, in fact.  There was something genuinely enjoyable about the exchange in a way that he had not expected to encounter on this particular evening. But the fight was also beginning to take longer than it needed to, and Ethan had other matters to attend to before the night was over.

He decided he was done.

He closed the distance one more time with a short combination that Wildcat met confidently, slipping the first two and blocking the third. Ethan used the connection on the blocked strike to shift his weight and activate Muscle Augmentation.

The muscle in his right arm and shoulder swelled dramatically in the space of a single heartbeat, the fabric of his suit straining against the sudden expansion, and when he drove his right fist forward into Wildcat's chest the strike landed with a force that no one could defend against.

The impact lifted the older man clean off the ground and propelled him backward through the air like something fired from a catapult, his body tearing through the first wall of the corridor in a shower of concrete dust and twisted rebar, then through the second wall, then through the third, until he finally came to rest somewhere deep inside the building.

"Wildcat!"

Black Canary's head snapped around at the sound of the impact, her eyes widening as she tracked the path of destruction her partner's body had torn through the building,. She turned toward Ethan and Ivy with fury on her face and her hands came up to either side of her face as her mouth opened wide.

SCREEEEEEEECH

It rolled down the corridor in a visible wave of distorted air, an onslaught of such intensity that the walls on either side of her began cracking outward from the pressure and every loose object in the vicinity went airborne. Ivy was caught in the edge of it and thrown sideways into the coils of her own vines, which wrapped around her protectively to absorb the worst of the impact.

Mindy dove flat against the floor and covered her head with her arms. Sofia pressed herself harder into the recessed doorway and clapped her hands over her ears.

Ethan walked forward into the scream as if he were walking into a mild crosswind. The dampeners built into the helmet reduced the overwhelming sonic pressure to a muted hum at the edge of his awareness, a faint vibration that he could feel against the outside of the mask but which did not penetrate any further than that. He crossed half the distance between himself and Black Canary at a normal walking pace, and then he blinked.

The teleportation was not a graceful thing, it did a number on his stomach and caused quite a bit of nausea, but it was instantaneous. One moment he stood in the middle of the corridor, and the next he was directly in front of her, close enough to feel the vibration of the scream against his chestplate. His hand closed around her throat and lifted her off the ground.

The scream cut off abruptly as her airway was compressed.

She thrashed against his grip, both of her hands rising to claw at his wrist, and Ethan held her aloft with no more difficulty than he would have held a bag of groceries. 

The meta-gene inside her expressed pulsed and almost seemed to reach out for him. 

Who was he to deny it?

He placed his other hand flat against the front of her throat. What followed was a rough extraction that tore Black Canary's meta ability straight out of her body and drew it into his own. 

Black Canary's eyes went wide as the extraction began, the scream she produced then was not a sonic attack but a raw sound of pain that came tearing out of her as the gene that made her what she was began to get torn away. 

It took perhaps four seconds. When it was finished, he opened his hand and let her drop to the floor in a crumpled, gasping heap, he flicked his fingers causing a short burst of wind to sideways to send her tumbling several yards further down the corridor and out of the immediate fighting space. 

She was alive. 

She was conscious. 

But she was no longer a Canary.

Ethan straightened and turned back toward the main corridor when a wingding caught him in the shoulder before he had taken two steps.

The small projectile embedded itself in the reinforced fabric of his suit, Ethan looked down at it with a mild frown before he reached up and plucked it free, dropping it to the floor at his feet.

He raised his eyes and scanned the corridor for the source, and what he found was Robin standing over Mindy, who lay sprawled on her back on the floor with a split lip and a dazed expression, her chest rising and falling rapidly while she blinked up at the ceiling.

Ethan walked toward them.

"How did you lose? From what I read I expected your abilities to be beyond Robin," he said as he came to a stop a few paces from Robin, who had immediately moved into a defensive stance with his staff held horizontally across his body,

Mindy groaned from the floor. "Cut me some slack, boss," she said as she pushed herself up onto her elbows and spat a small amount of blood sideways. "Okay? I'm a little out of practice. Four years in a padded cell with nothing to fight but shadow-boxing does things to the reflexes. I'd have had him on a good day, I swear to god."

Ethan looked at Robin for a long moment. The young man had shifted his weight forward onto the balls of his feet and was clearly preparing for the second exchange of the evening. Ethan however was in the process of calculating which of his available options would be most efficient when the ceiling above them detonated.

BOOM

The concrete came apart in a violent spray of debris when an emerald green light flooded the corridor from above, and a figure descended through the opening. He was a man, tall and broad-shouldered, in a green and black uniform that hugged his frame, a domino mask covering the upper portion of his face, and a ring on his right hand that glowed green

Hal Jordan touched down in the middle of the corridor and dusted a piece of concrete off his shoulder in an almost theatrical motion.

"Alright, alright, what do we have here," Hal said while he looked around at the scene with an expression of bemusement. "Breakout in progress, plant lady on the loose, Canary on the floor, the old man buried in the drywall somewhere, and some guy in a fancy helmet standing in the middle of it. Oh, and hey, Robin, kid, good to see you, heard you were having a rough week. Don't worry, the cavalry has arrived, feel free to go grab a juice box or whatever, I got it from here."

Ethan didn't acknowledge him at all.

Instead he simply blinked across the intervening space and reappeared directly beside Mindy, he crouched down next to her with one hand extended toward her forehead.

"Change of plans," Ethan said to her quietly. "Deal with Robin. Once he is down, get Sofia and have her lead you and Ivy to the service tunnel entrance. I will handle the Green Lantern and meet you there."

Mindy looked at Robin, then at the glowing figure in green behind them, then back at Ethan. "Uh, boss," she said, "with all due respect, that's a big ask. The kid gloved me last round and I don't know if my head's on straight yet."

"You'll have a little help," Ethan said.

He placed his hand fully against the crown of her head.

A brief flash of blackish red light emerged from both of them. Mindy's eyes went wide and she made a small sound in her throat, when Ethan withdrew his hand and stood up. 

Mindy blinked several times in rapid succession. She raised one hand to her head and her fingers brushed against the pair of long, upright ears that had sprouted from the top of her skull and covered in a fine layer of pale fur that matched the hair on her head.

"What the fuck," Mindy said. "What the fuck did you do to me?"

"I gave you a gift," Ethan replied as he straightened. "Now go."

"I've got ears, what the shit—"

"Go!"

Mindy scrambled to her feet, and the moment her weight came onto her legs she felt the change in them, a coiled-spring tension in the musculature of her calves and thighs that had not been there a moment earlier, and her awareness of the space around her had sharpened to a degree that was actively disorienting. 

She could hear the heartbeat of every person in the corridor distinctly. She could feel the vibration of Hal Jordan's boots against the floor. She could tell, without looking, exactly where Robin was standing in relation to her and exactly how fast he would be able to close the distance between them if she didn't move first.

She lunged.

The lunge went very, very badly. Or, from a certain point of view, very, very well. Her legs fired her off the ground with such explosive force that she overshot Robin entirely, her body rocketing down the corridor past him and almost slamming face-first into the far wall before she managed to plant one foot against it at the last possible second and push off in a rebounding twist that sent her bouncing sideways into the opposite wall.

She landed in a crouch a yard from where she had started, her eyes wide and her ears twitching wildly, and a grin began to spread across her face that showed all of her teeth. "Oh," she said. "Oh, this is going to be so much fun." She bounced in place, experimentally, and her body cleared almost six feet of vertical height on nothing more than a casual hop. She bounced a second time, corrected for the overshoot, and then pushed off the floor toward Robin with a burst of the new power in her legs that carried her across the distance in a blur.

Her foot connected with Robin's chest and launched him backward into the corridor wall with an impact that cracked the concrete behind him and left him slumped, dazed, at the base of it. "Yeah," Mindy said, laughing as she rolled her shoulders. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is going to be great."

Hal, who had been watching the exchange with a slightly raised eyebrow, moved to intervene and extended his ring hand toward Mindy with a construct already forming at the tip, but he never got the chance to complete the action.

Ethan blinked in front of him and slammed his palm  into his chest from the side before Hal could register the movement. The air burst that released from it detonated at point-blank range with enough force to blow Hal clean off his feet and propel him up and out into the open air beyond the building entirely.

He tumbled end over end across the asylum grounds  before his ring activated and he came to a stop hovering some twenty feet above the lawn, when he looked back to the asylum he saw that Ethan was already in the air.

He had used Float to push himself up through the shattered opening in the ceiling that Hal had made on his entrance. "I am afraid," Ethan said, "that I cannot permit you to involve yourself."

Hal wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his wrist and studied him for a moment. "Okay," he said. "Okay, fair enough, introductions first, that's only polite. Who the hell are you?"

"My name," Ethan said, "is All for One."

Hal blinked and paused for a moment. Then he laughed, a bark of a laugh that cut across the open air between them. "All for One. That's your name. That's what you went with. All for One. Like the musketeers, but, you know, with less Frenchness. That's great. Absolutely great. You come up with it all by yourself?"

Ethan did not respond.

"Okay, well, cape names are a very personal journey, who am I to judge, I'm sure All for One speaks to you on a deep and meaningful level. Here's what's going to happen next, All for One. I'm going to knock you out of the sky, put you in a very comfortable cell with a nice view of a concrete wall, and then I'm going to go back inside and help my buddies clean up the rest of whatever the hell you started in there. Sound good? Great. Let's do it."

He thrust his ring hand forward and a green construct in the shape of an enormous fist materialised in the air between them and rocketed toward Ethan, the knuckles of it the size of a small car. Ethan simply dropped several feet in the air and let the fist pass harmlessly over his head before firing a lasers from his eyes and rocketing Hal back. 

Hal hissed through his teeth and circled sideways, a new construct flowered out from his ring in the shape of a massive twin-barrelled cannon that mounted itself across his right forearm and opened fire in a rapid burst of green energy projectiles. Ethan twisted in the air and weaved between the first three rounds, clicked his fingers with his free hand to release a flashbang that caught Hal flush in the faceplate and staggered him mid-firing, then he extended his arms forward and let them stretch toward the Lantern across the distance.

Hal recovered in time to see the stretched hands coming at him and he formed a green wall of light between himself and Ethan, Ethan's fingers slammed into the wall and curled around the top edge of it before he used it as an anchor to pull himself toward Hal through the air.

He came over the top of the wall with his legs tucked and his other arm already winding up for a strike, and he drove his fist into Hal with such power it launched him straight into the ground making a crater. Ethan wasn't done however as he froze the air around him creating dozens of ice spikes before firing them at Hal. 

Hal's eyes widened and he quickly banked hard to the left and fired a rope construct out from his other hand that wrapped around Ethan's leg and yanked him sideways; Hal kept spinning and spinning him going faster and faster, Ethan tumbled through the air in a disorienting spin before he managed to orient himself and expel a burst of air from his outstretched palm that counteracted his momentum and stabilised him.

The rope was still coiled around his leg so Hal yanked on it a second time, pulling Ethan toward him with enough force that the atmosphere whistled past the edges of Ethan's helmet, and as Ethan closed the distance at speed Hal formed an anvil construct in front of him that dropped out of the air at the exact instant Ethan arrived.

Ethan saw it coming and twisted his upper body in midair, angled himself sideways, and took the impact across his arms rather than full-on across his chest, but the force of it still drove the breath out of him and sent him rocketing toward the ground in a trajectory that slammed him into the asylum lawn hard enough to carve a shallow crater into the grass.

He pushed himself up out of the dirt with both hands, and the moment his palms came out of the soil he sent a wave of ice spreading outward across the ground in every direction, a rapidly freezing sheet of pale blue that climbed the walls of the asylum behind him and reached up through the air toward Hal in rising spikes.

Hal rose higher to avoid them, and Ethan took the opportunity to take a breath. He blinked, reappearing fifty feet up and to Hal's right, the Lantern's head snapped around in time to see him coming but not in time to prevent the next strike from landing. Ethan's fist, swelled again with the Muscle augmentation he had used on Wildcat, connected with the side of Hal's jaw in a savage hook that rang off the man's skull and sent him tumbling sideways through the air in a loose, uncontrolled spin.

Hal recovered midflight and formed a construct of a jet fighter around himself, which wrapped his body in a cockpit of solid green light before the engines at the back flared and hurled him forward with a violent acceleration that slammed the nose of the construct into Ethan's chest and drove him backward through the air for a hundred yards before they both came down into the side wall of the asylum in an impact that shook the foundations

They separated from the wall and came at each other again before either of them had fully stabilised.

Hal formed twin swords in his hands and came in slashing at his chest, and Ethan drew spikes of bone out of his forearms that hardened into rigid blades extending several past his fists and met the swords with a ringing clash. 

They exchanged a flurry of cuts and thrusts in rapid succession, the swords biting into the bone guards and the bone guards turning aside the swords, in the middle of the exchange Ethan caught one of the blades on his guard, let it slide down into a bind, and snapped the point of his other guard forward in a thrust that drove the bone spike deep into Hal's upper arm.

Hal screamed and broke away, clutching at the wound. 

The bone spike had embedded itself through the meat of his bicep and was protruding out the other side. 

Ethan was already bleeding from a cut along his ribs where one of the sword constructs had slipped past his guard, and another shallow slash ran across the side of his helmet where a second strike had come dangerously close

They drifted apart in the air for a moment, Hal was breathing hard while Ethan simply floated in front of him. 

Hal lifted his ring hand. The construct around his injured arm reshaped itself into a brace that stabilised the bone spike without pulling it free, his face twisted in a snarl of pain. "You son of a bitch," he said through his teeth. "You actually stabbed me. Do you know how long it's been since somebody got a hit like that on me? I'm gonna—"

Ethan clicked his fingers.

The flashbang that detonated between them was the most intense one he had produced all evening, a concussive burst of white light and overwhelming sound that filled the space between them in an expanding sphere and hit Hal square in the face at point-blank range. The Lantern jerked backward in the air with a cry as his concentration shattered, and the constructs around him began to flicker and destabilise.

Ethan did not wait to see whether he would recover.

He dropped down through the air to the ground, blinked across the lawn to the far side of the building. 

He tracked the progress of Mindy and Sofia and Ivy through the tunnels beneath him by using his expanded vision and he blinked twice more, each time cutting the distance to them in half, until he dropped down into the service tunnel directly behind them as they moved through the narrow passage toward the sewer junction.

Mindy whirled around with her ears flattened back against her skull and let out a loud breath. "Jesus, boss, warn a girl, I almost took your head off."

Ethan didn't respond to the comment. He looked at the three of them in sequence. "Let's move," he said.

(AN: Ethan had his officers and can now move onto the next stage of creating his organisation. Though what will the consequences of him stealing Black Canary's power and injuring Green Lantern.)

1) All for One

2) Hyperadrenal

3) Voice Imitation

4) Enhanced Agility

5) Regenerative Saliva 

6) Scent Masking

7) Mass Adjustment (Self)

9) Expanded Vision

10) Wall Crawling

12) Explosive body parts and fluids

13) Ice Manipulation

14) Laser Vision

15) Flashbang

16) Healing Touch

17) Bone Manipulation

18) Air Blast

19) Stretchy arms

20) Static Charge

21) Durable Skin

22) Plant Manipulation

23) Bunny Anatomy (Given to Mindy)

24) Blink

25) Muscle Augmentation