DC: All for One Chapter 21 — A Business in Death (Patreon)

Deathstroke walked toward Ethan with his broadsword resting against his shoulder and his single eye fixed on the young man standing by the window. The crowd had pressed itself against the walls of the ballroom in a panicked crush, and the space between Slade and Ethan had cleared as though an invisible hand had swept it clean.

Ethan stood with his hands at his sides and an expression on his face that was, if anything, mildly curious. 

"You don't seem particularly alarmed, Mister Kane," Slade observed as he closed the distance at a walking pace, his boots crunching softly over the broken glass that had scattered across the marble from the skylight breach above. "Most people tend to at least flinch when they see me. It's one of the small pleasures of the job. Is that bravery on your part, or are you just too young and too stupid to know what's standing in front of you?"

Ethan let out a small shrug. "I can't imagine Death being any different than life..." he replied. 

Slade chuckled. "How morbid!" 

"I'm guessing this is the work of the five families, though it easily could've been any number of people in here," Ethan speculated. 

Slade's visible eye narrowed by a fraction. "It doesn't matter who hired me. None of that changes the outcome. You're going to die tonight, knowing who ordered it won't bring you any comfort, take my word for it."

"And what," Ethan said, his gaze shifting past Slade's shoulder toward the far side of the ballroom, "do you plan to do about her?"

Wonder Woman was flying towards them. 

She had shed the midnight blue gown somewhere in after the breach and was now in her hero outfit. She was flying across at a speed most would find hard to track with her fist drawn back and ready to slam into him. She made it perhaps fifteen feet before something hit her from the side at full speed.

Cheetah came out of the crowd in a blur and her hand closed around Wonder Woman's ankle mid-stride with a grip that would have severed a normal human's foot at the joint. She used Diana's own forward momentum against her, redirecting the Amazon's mass in a whipping arc that tore her sideways hauling her by the leg in a wide circle before releasing her in a throw that sent the Princess of Themyscira into the far wall of the ballroom with a crash that cratered the walls three inches deep and brought a cascade of marble raining down around her shoulders.

The screaming in the room, which had been subsiding as the initial shock wore off, surged back to full volume.

But Slade laughed. "Did you think I would walk into a room with the Amazon and not bring something to keep her busy? I've fought Diana before, kid. She's strong. But she's also predictable, and predictability is the only weakness that matters in my line of work."

Meanwhile across the ballroom, Oliver Queen had already moved. He had shed his jacket somewhere in the first seconds of the breach and had moved into a backroom where he changed into his Green Arrow costume, when he came out he was nocking his first arrow and firing it at KGbeast who had turned towards him and growled. 

The arrow hit his frame and did nothing but piss him off, and the massive Russian closed the distance with a speed that his bulk should not have allowed, his dinner-plate hand reaching for Oliver's throat, and Oliver was forced to abandon his second shot and throw himself sideways under a table. He came up on the other side with the bow already drawn and released in a single motion, and the arrow took KGBeast in the meat of his right shoulder and sank to the fletching. The big man looked down at it with the mild interest of and kept coming. 

Oliver swore under his breath and drew another arrow and started moving, leading KGBeast away from the cluster of civilians who were still trying to reach the exits.

"Seems like you're all out of friends, kid," Slade said as he raised his pistol and levelled it at the centre of Ethan's chest. "Time's up."

BANG

The gunshot came from behind him and struck the back plate of Slade's shoulder armour with a ping and a spark that flared briefly against the surface of the plating before dying. The bullet flattened on impact and tumbled harmlessly to the floor, but the sound of it made Slade turn his head with mild irritation. 

Standing maybe thirty feet behind him was someone Ethan had not expected to be here. Renee Montoya stood twenty feet behind him in a dark evening dress with a service pistol held in both hands. Her eyes were locked on the gap between Slade's helmet and his collar plating and she fired twice more. Both rounds struck Slade's torso armour and accomplished nothing beyond confirming that the armour was everything it suggested, but the shots forced Slade to turn his attention away from Ethan and toward the new threat.

"How unexpected," Ethan murmured from behind him.

Slade raised his own weapon and returned fire in a three-round burst that chewed through the edge of the marble column Renee threw herself behind, stone fragments spraying across her bare shoulders and the exposed skin of her back as she pressed herself against the cover and ejected the spent magazine from the pistol and slammed a fresh one home.

Ravager broke from her position beside the fountain where the first guests had been corralled and moved toward Renee's column with her twin katanas drawn, circling wide to flank from the blind side. She was perhaps three strides from the column when she snapped backward at the waist in a motion so fast that it looked like it was done at super speeds. A moment later  awingding passed through the space her head had occupied a half-second before and embedded itself in the far wall with a thud.

Robin descended from the level above in a glide, his cape spreading behind him as he came down, and led with a flying kick that Ravager blocked on her crossed forearms. The impact drove her backward several feet she reset her stance and came at him immediately with a slashing combination from both blades that Robin deflected off his staff in a rapid series of swwings that echoed across the ballroom.

The two of them locked into a fast exchange that carried them away from the column and toward the centre of the room, staff against twin katanas. Robin was superior when it came to speed, but it seemed Ravager eas able to close that gap when it came to skill or perhaps something else, as she always seemed to know where to dodge and none of his feints ever worked on her. 

Ethan watched all of this. 

He had not moved from his position by the window and his arms were still at his sides. He made no effort to run nor did he try to get involved. Though after a moment he walked over to the window and opened it. He then gestured to Sofia. "Here go back to the safe house, I don't want you to get caught in the crossfire."

Sofia hesitated for a moment before she nodded and with Ethan's help she stepped out of the window and outside. Though before she left she turned towards him and kissed him on the cheek. "Be careful, I'll see you later," she said before leaving. 

After that he closed the window and turned back around, taking in the ballroom again. The heroes seemed to be doing well enough against their opponents, even Green Arrow seemed to be a superior combatant when it came to KGbeast. 

Renee however was running out of room. She may have been a skilled fighter and experienced in firearms but none of that even came close to putting her in the same level as Deathstroke.

Slade had identified her cover and had managed to close the distance between them, he used his blade to slash Renee's gun in half. His second swing would've taken her head off had she not rolled backwards snd grabbed a butter knife from the ground and thrown it at him. Slade cut the butter knife in half and merely chuckled as he looked at her.  

Renee glared at him before she raised her fists.

Slade actually paused and looked at the woman standing in front of him in a torn evening dress with her bare hands up in a boxing guard, and his single eye blinked once behind the mask. 

"Really?" he said.

Renee came at him.

She threw tight, a jab-cross-hook sequence that was aimed at the gaps in his armour and his face. Slade absorbed all of it and answered with a backhand that connected with the side of her head and sent her staggering sideways into the table, where she caught herself on the edge of the polished wood and spat blood onto the marble and came back at him with an elbow strike aimed at the hinge of his jaw that he caught and redirected into a hip throw that put her on the floor with enough force to crack the tile beneath her.

She got up.

He put her down again with a front kick to the sternum that launched her backward across the marble and left her gasping on her back with the breath driven entirely out of her body.

She got up again.

Slade tilted his head. "I'll give you this much," he said as he drew the katana from the sheath on his back and held it at his side. "You don't stop. I respect that. I've worked with soldiers who had less fight in them than you do, and most of them were twice your size and carrying better weapons. But the respect doesn't change reality. Commitment without capability is just a slower way to die."

He raised the katana.

BANG

Another gunshot cracked across the ballroom and entered the back of Slade's right knee through the half-inch gap between the upper and lower segments of his leg armour, the narrow seam where the joint housing met the greave, a target so small that hitting it from across a ballroom floor at that distance required either extraordinary luck or the kind of marksmanship that most military snipers would have considered lucky.

Slade grunted and his leg buckled but he caught himself and straightened and turned, slowly, to face the direction the shot had come from.

Ethan stood by the window holding a pistol he had taken from the unconscious security guard nearest to him. The barrel was still raised and a curl of smoke drifted from the muzzle. He lowered the weapon and set it on the windowsill beside him and gave Slade a little smirk.

Slade Wilson looked at the young man across the length of the ruined ballroom. The professional composure that had carried him through every contract for the last three decades was gone from his face. "Boy," Slade said quietly. "You are going to wish you hadn't done that."

He raised his pistol and pulled the trigger, but the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. He looked at the weapon in his hand with a flicker of irritation, and then he tossed it aside and shifted the katana to a two-handed grip.

He crossed the ballroom in a dead sprint that consumed the distance between them in seconds, his wounded leg barely affecting his speed, the katana was already moving as he closed the final yards.

Ethan did not move as he came, he didn't raise his hands nor did he even try and defend himself in anyway whatsoever. He stood by the window with his arms at his sides and watched Deathstroke come.

Slade's free hand closed around Ethan's throat and lifted him off the ground and pinned him against the behind him, and the reinforced glass spiderwebbed from the force of the impact in a radiating pattern that spread from the point of contact between Ethan's shoulders and the pane. Slade held him there with one hand, the fingers digging into the soft tissue on either side of the trachea.

"Contract complete," Slade growled with a wild grin on his face. 

He cut Ethan's throat.

The blade opened the skin from just below the left ear to the base of the right collarbone in a single diagonal stroke that parted everything in its path, the blood that followed the blade came in an arterial spray that painted Slade's armour and the front of his body in a pulsing wash of red. 

The sound Ethan made as his hands came up to clutch at the wound was wet and choking, the sound of a man trying to breathe. 

Slade held him up and watched him bleed and he started laughing loudly. "Oooo we have a gusher," Slade said. "Everyone looks surprised when it happens to them, most people don't think death can touch them, but it always does... sooner or later." He opened his hand and Ethan dropped.

The young man hit the marble floor in a crumpled heap, his hands pressed against the ruin of his throat, his body curling inward around the wound as the pool beneath him spread across the marble.

Slade turned away from him and adjusted the katana in his grip, looking across the ballroom toward where Robin and Ravager were still engaged.

"Rose," he called out. "Finish with the boy. We're done here. Contract's complete."

He took one step toward the centre of the room.

Wonder Woman's fist connected with the side of his skull with a force that would have killed an unaugmented human being instantly.

The impact launched Slade off his feet and sent him cartwheeling through the air across the full width of the dance floor, his limbs trailing behind him like a rag doll's, he hit the ground on the far side and skidded another fifteen feet across the marble before he came to rest against the base of a toppled column. Diana was on him before his momentum had fully arrested, her hand closing around the front of his armour and hauling him upright with one arm.

Cheetah lay unconscious against the far wall behind her, half-buried in the rubble of the section of ballroom wall that Diana had ultimately put her through. 

Slade drew a combat knife from a concealed sheath on his thigh and drove it toward Diana's throat in a strike that took less than a second to execute. However Diana caught his wrist without looking at it, her fingers closing around the joint with a pressure that made the bones beneath them creak audibly, and she twisted until the knife clattered from his grip. 

Then she headbutted him and split his mask the rest of the way down its centre seam and the two halves fell away from his face and revealed the scarred, weathered features beneath, and Slade staggered backward with blood running from a cut above his eyebrow and his vision swimming.

Diana pressed forwar and threw a combination that Slade managed, barely, to block the first two strikes of before the third, a straight right hand thrown with the full rotation of her hips and shoulders behind it, broke through his guard and connected with his solar plexus. 

The force of it bent him double and drove the air from his lungs, and she followed immediately with an uppercut that lifted him off his feet for the second time in ten seconds.

She caught him at the apex of the lift and grabbed him by the ankle and swung him in a devastating arc that built momentum with each degree of rotation, and then she released him. He flew across the ballroom and hit the centre of the dance floor hard enough to crater the marble.

Ravager landed beside him two seconds later, thrown by Robin with a hip toss that had used her own momentum against her, and she hit the ground hard and rolled twice before she came to rest beside her father.

Diana walked toward them, her hair had come loose from its sweep and a line of blood ran along her jaw where Cheetah had gotten her. She looked down at the two assassins with an expression that clearly communicated she was not happy.

"Who hired you," she said.

Slade pushed himself up onto one knee. Blood was running freely from the cut above his eye and the wound in the back of his knee had reopened during the beating and left a spreading dark stain on the marble beneath him. He blinked until his vision cleared and then he looked up at the Amazon standing over him and shifted his weight into a fighting stance. 

"You know I won't answer that question, why even bother asking," Slade replied as he got his katana ready. 

However before Diana could continue the battle the  building started to shake. The first tremor ran through the floor and climbed the walls and rattled what remained of the chandeliers on their chains, and a fine rain of plaster dust began to drift down from the ceiling above. A second tremor followed, stronger than the first, and a crack opened in the load-bearing wall nearest to the main entrance that ran from floor to ceiling in a jagged diagonal line.

Platforms of crackling blackish red energy materialised in the air behind the three assassins. Slade did not hesitate. He grabbed Ravager by the back of her armour and hauled her to her feet and the two of them leapt onto the nearest platform, which began to rise immediately toward the shattered skylight above. KGBeast, bleeding from half a dozen arrow wounds, disengaged from Oliver with a final backhanded blow that sent the archer tumbling across the floor, and he jumped onto the second platform and ascended after them.

The platforms accelerated through the opening in the ceiling and disappeared into the night sky above the hotel, just as the building shook a third time only this time it was a lot worse and the structural integrity of the building started to fail.  "The building is coming down!" Oliver shouted from the far side of the room where he was pulling two civilians out from under an overturned table. 

"Everyone out now! Move!" Wonder Woman shouted. 

Robin landed on the main floor and his eyes swept the room as he tried to find anyone that might've been trapped or hurt. He found Ethan Kane lay on the floor by the window in a spreading pool of blood that had reached three feet in diameter, his hands still pressed against his throat, his body motionless except for the smal movements of his chest and arms. 

Robin looked at him.

He looked at the pool of blood and the pale face above it and the hands that were no longer pressing with any real force against the wound. He looked at the young man who had shot Batman in the head and put him in a coma and who had kidnapped both him and renee and who had humiliated Robin himself on two separate occasions and who was now dying on the floor of a charity gala.

For two seconds, maybe three, Robin did not move toward him.

Diana's hand closed around Robin's shoulder from behind. "Everyone out," she said. "Now."

She didn't hesitate however, she crossed the floor to the window and swept Ethan's body off the marble with one arm, cradling him against her side as she turned toward the main entrance. Robin grabbed Renee, who was struggling to push herself upright from where Slade's last strike had put her on the floor, and he pulled her arm across his shoulders and took her weight and started moving. Oliver had two civilians under each arm and was already disappearing through the emergency exit at the far end of the room.

They cleared the building with perhaps thirty seconds to spare. The Crowne-Berkshire Hotel collapsed behind them in a roaring avalanche that sent a cloud of white dust billowing across the avenue in every direction. The sound of it was audible across the river, and the ground shook beneath the feet of the emergency crews who had already begun arriving from the east.

Ethan was placed on a gurney and loaded into the first ambulance that reached the scene, and the paramedics worked on him and started trying to stop the bleeding. Luckily for Ethan it seemed the bleeding was worse than it looked and in general he hadn't lsot too much blood. He was still taken int he ambulance to the hospital however where he could be properly treated.

Robin stood on the sidewalk and watched the ambulance pull away from the curb. Renee stood beside him. Her evening dress was torn at the shoulder and the blood from a shallow cut on her forehead had run down the side of her face.

Robin didn't move for a long time. They had gone to the gala tonight to try snd see if Ethan would give up any more information even if inadvertently. But tonight all they had gotten was less evidence that Ethan was All for One. In fact if they had not already seen his face before they would start to question whether it was true. 

"He didn't fight back," he said.

Renee looked at him.

"Deathstroke walked across the room picked him up wnd cut his throat. And Kane didn't fight back. He didn't raise his hands. He didn't try to run. He didn't do anything. He just stood there and let it happen."

Robin was having trouble trying to decipher just what possible benefit would Ethan have gotten from letting it happen. His secret identity couldn't have been so precious he would die over it. But it just didn't make sense. Someone had hired Deathstroke to kill him snd Ethan practically let it happen. It was only through luck and the fact multiple heroes were there tonight that he didn't die. 

Renee was quiet for a moment while she processed that, turning it over against the version of Ethan Kane that lived in her head. "Ethan is a crafty motherfucker, there isn't one doubt in my mind that he's not in that ambulance because he wants to be." 

The ambulance turned a corner and disappeared into the Gotham night, its sirens fading into the background noise. Renee wiped the blood from her forehead and turned away. She needed to go scope out the crime scene maybe find out just what the hell Ethan's motives were. 

_____________________________________

Meanwhile on a building three miles from the hotel, deep in the warehouse district along the river. The energy platforms deposited their passengers on the roof before the constructs dissolved beneath their feet, Slade dropped the last two feet to the concrete and landed before he straightened and surveyed the rooftop.

KGBeast rolled his massive neck and flexed his hands and looked at the skyline. "Boring job," he said in his thick accent. "Hope employer gives us proper targets next time. Something worth getting out of bed for."

"I'm afraid there won't be a next time." The voice came from the darkness at the far end of the rooftop.

All three of them turned at once. Slade's hand went to the katana on his back and drew it in a single fluid motion. Ravager's twin blades appeared in her hands and she dropped into a fighting stance. KGBeast simply turned his body toward the sound and waited. 

The figure that stepped out of the shadows was wearing a metal mask that covered his entire face and a dark suit that fit him perfectly. He walked into the dim light that bled up from the street below and stopped ten feet from the three assassins and clasped his hands loosely behind his back.

All for One.

Slade's grip on the katana relaxed and he stood straight. "There you are," Slade said. "I've been wondering when you'd show up. I assume you watched the whole thing from somewhere comfortable."

All for One did not respond to that.

"The Kane kid is dead," Slade continued. "Cut his throat from ear to collarbone. He was gone before he hit the floor, or close enough that it doesn't matter. Blood's still on my armour if you need verification, though I'd appreciate not having to stand here while you swab me."

"Now let's talk payment, you owe me the second half of my fee. The complete file on the Mikuru serum. Those were the terms and the job is done. I'd like to settle up and go home, because I have a bullet in my leg that I'd like to have removed."

All for One was still silent.

Eventually the silence started to make them all uncomfortable. Especially Slade, usually he could read people really well but not this man. Whoever was behind that mask had no tells at all, it was like there was no one standing in front of him, just an empty fucking suit. Every instinct inside him told him to unload his pistol in them and take the loss, but the rewards were simply too good to pass up on. 

"I must apologise," All for One said. "But this is where we part ways." The lasers fired from his eyes before any of the three had time to process the sentence.

The twin beams struck KGBeast in the centre of his chest and burned through the armour plating as though it were paper and continued through the muscle and bone beneath it in a sustained burst that lasted perhaps two seconds, the massive Russian looked down at the cauterised hole that had appeared in his torso with an expression of mild surprisebefore his legs gave out beneath him and he collapsed sideways onto the concrete and the light went out of his eyes.

Slade moved. Even injured and having been tossed around by Wonder Woman Slade Wilson was one of the fastest non powered human beings on the planet, his katana left its resting position and traced a killing arc toward All for One's throat.

He made it only one step, before all the blood that was on his armour exploded. The explosion consumed Slade's upper body in a blast that tore the armour apart at its seams and took most of what was beneath it with it. The right side of his torso disintegrated. His sword arm separated from his body at the shoulder and spun across the rooftop. His remaining leg buckled and what was left of him was launched backward across the concrete and came to rest in a smouldering heap that bore very little resemblance to the man who was known as the greatest assassin in the world.

What remained of Deathstroke twitched. 

Then went still.

"EEAAAAHHHHHHYY!!!" Rsvager let loose a blood curdling scream and she came at All for One with both katanas raised and her father's blood still wet on her mask The blades came down in a scissoring cross-cut aimed at his neck that would have decapitated a normal man, they deflected off All for One who then caught her by the throat.

His hand closed around her neck with an ease that made the motion look almost gentle, and he lifted her off the ground and held her there, the katanas fell from her fingers and clattered against the concrete on either side of them. She kicked at his body and clawed at his wrist trying to get free but failing miserably. 

"I've wanted to taste this ever since I first saw you..." All for One almost growled as he placed his other hand flat against the centre of her chest.

He felt inside her and looked for where the meta ability called to him. Once he found it he wasted no time in ripping it out of her body. Rose arched backward in his grip and the scream she produced was different from the one she had made for her father, this one was pure animalistic pain. She tried to resist him but she couldn't and All for One ripped the ability out of her and consumed it. 

When he was done he held her for a moment longer. She hung from his hand with her eyes fluttering shut, her breathing had become shallow and irregular. "I'm ... going... kill..."

He twisted his hand wnd her neck snapped with a crack. He then opened his fingers and let her fall and hit the ground unceremoniously.

He then dusted his hands together in a gesture that was almost absent-minded and extended one palm toward the remains and a sustained jet of flame erupted from it, white-hot at the core and tapering to orange at the edges, the fire consumed what was left of Slade Wilson and Rose Wilson and Anatoli Knyazev with a thoroughness that was closer to cremation than destruction. The concrete beneath the bodies blackened and cracked from the heat, and the air above the rooftop shimmered, and after perhaps a few minutes seconds there was nothing left except a scorched patch of stone and the faint acrid smell of carbon.

He watched the last of the embers fade.

'Time to check up on the others...' he thought to himself before he rose into the air, once he was high enough he locked north west across the city and blinked across it several times before arriving on a different rooftop six blocks to the north, higher up, with a view of the Gotham skyline that stretched from the financial district in the east to the dark sprawl of the Narrows in the west. 

On this building two women were waiting for him.

Artemis stood on the left side of the roof in dark tactical gear with her hair tied back and a compound bow slung across her shoulders. 

Cheshire stood on the right in her distinctive green and white mask with her arms folded and one hip cocked slightly to the side. 

All for One reached up and disengaged the seal on his helmet and lifted it from his head, and Ethan Kane's face emerged. "Report," he said.

Artemis stepped forward. "All primary targets eliminated. Carmine and Alberto Falcone were intercepted in their vehicle after they departed the gala the rest of them were easy to dispose of as they ran out of the Gala."

She paused.

"Roman Sionis did not attend tonight we tried to question one of the families but we ran out of time. We don't know where he is."

Ethan was quiet for a moment and looked out over the city, the expression on his face was thoughtful rather than frustrated.

"That's fine," he said. "Roman is the smartest of them. I would have been surprised if he hadn't built an exit for himself. He'll go to ground somewhere outside the city, somewhere with enough infrastructure to sustain his operation remotely but enough distance to make a direct strike impractical. We'll find him when it's convenient."

He looked at Artemis, then at Cheshire.

"Good work," he said. "Both of you."

He then turned toward the city.

In one night he had eliminated the heads of every major crime family in Gotham. He had removed the most dangerous assassins within reach and he had established himself, in the eyes of every camera and every witness and every news outlet in the city, as the victim of the very violence he had orchestrated, a young philanthropist whose throat had been cut on live television while he attended a charity gala. The sympathy that would flow from that image alone was worth more than any advertising campaign the Future Foundation could have purchased.

And the power vacuum left by the simultaneous decapitation of the five families would be filled by exactly one organisation.

His.

Now all that remained was to clean up the pieces and begin the next phase.

Ethan smiled.

(AN: Ethan hired Deathstroke to kill himself, pulling the ol Goku. But yeah he also did it to take advantage of the fact that the heads of the five families were in one place. Old blood still believe in rules and guests rights and that ol shit. Ethan will Grant no such mercies. Anyway what will our heroes do now when Gotham is full of saviours.)