DC: All for One Chapter 26 — The Symbol of Hope (Patreon)

Superman stood at a podium that had been set up on the steps of Gotham City Hall with the GCPD emblem mounted on the front of it and every major news outlet in the eastern seaboard arranged in rows before him. "Thank you all for coming," he said, his voice carrying across the steps and down to the street without any help from the microphone. "I'll keep this brief because there is work to be done."

He paused and looked across the assembled press.

"For the past seven months an organisation calling itself the Saviours has been operating in Gotham City outside the boundaries of the law. They have positioned themselves as a community protection force, they have cultivated public support through acts of charity and visible policing, and they have used that goodwill as cover for criminal activity including the large-scale distribution of narcotics across multiple neighbourhoods."

......

Three miles south of City Hall, in the Narrows, Wonder Woman came through the front door of a converted laundromat on Twelfth Street that had been operating as a Saviour distribution point. 

The door came off its hinges and she was inside before the first of the six men in the back room had time to reach for a weapon, her hand closing around the nearest man's wrist and twisting the pistol out of his grip while she kicked the table he had been sitting behind hard enough to pin the two men on the other side against the wall. 

The packages of product that had been laid out across the table scattered in every direction as the wood splintered and she moved through the room knocking each of them out and putting them on the floor with a speed that made the whole thing look choreographed. 

A few tried to run away but they didn't make it. She caught the first one by the collar and pulled him backward off his feet and the second one ran into the door only to find that Robin was already coming inside and slammed his boot into the man sending him into the wall. 

"Six inside," Diana said as Robin zip-tied the last man's wrists. "There are many bricks of product on the table I suspect there will be more somewhere."

"I'll clear the basement," Robin said, already moving toward the stairs.

.....

"Regardless of the intentions behind the Saviours' actions," Superman continued from the podium, "and I want to be clear that I am not here to question the sincerity of anyone who joined this organisation believing they were helping their community, the fact remains that the distribution of controlled substances is a crime. The intimidation of civilians is a crime. The operation of a paramilitary force outside the authority of law enforcement is a crime. These activities cannot be permitted to continue simply because the people engaged in them have also done good work in other areas."

"We have allowed a dangerous narrative to take root," Superman said, his hands resting calmly on the edges of the podium. "The narrative that we must tolerate a lesser evil to combat a greater one. I am here to tell you that the line does not shift because the world grows darker. To those who wear the badge of the Saviours, hear me clearly: your operations in this city are over. Regardless of what you believe your mission to be, I will not allow crime to go unpunished, and I will absolutely not allow you to run these streets freely."

.....

In the East End, Batgirl dropped from the fire escape of a tenement building onto the shoulders of a Saviour who had been standing guard outside a corner store that was being used as a front for street-level dealing, her legs wrapping around his neck and her weight pulling him sideways off balance before she twisted and drove him face-first into the pavement. His partner spun toward her reaching for the weapon on his hip but she was already throwing a batarang, the batarang catching him across the knuckles and sending the pistol skittering under a parked car before she closed the distance and put him down with a knee to the midsection and an elbow to the back of the head.

She looked up and saw three more Saviours coming out of the store at a run, two of them armed, and she pulled her grapple gun and fired it at the awning above the door. The line went taut and she swung forward feet first, both boots connecting with the lead man's chest and sending him backward into the other two, all three of them going down in a pile in the doorway.

Inside the store, behind the counter and through a door that had been hidden behind a shelving unit, she found forty-three individually wrapped packages of the product stacked in crates alongside a ledger that documented distribution routes and quantities in handwriting that she photographed from every angle before she called it in.

......

"You may have noticed that I have been here for a while, well if you had bothered to look up you'd have seen me," Superman said, "I have been working alongside the Gotham City Police Department, the Justice League, and the local vigilante community to dismantle the Saviours' criminal operations and to ensure that the individuals responsible for organising and directing those operations are held accountable under the law."

A reporter raised her hand. "Superman, are you saying you're moving to Gotham? Permanently?"

"I am saying that I will be present in Gotham for as long as it takes to address this situation. I am not replacing the GCPD, I am not replacing any of the people who have been fighting to protect this city. I am here to support them and to provide the resources that the scale of this problem requires."

....

Superman floated above the industrial district where the Future Foundation had all their factories.  He had been scanning the industrial district from four thousand feet, his vision cutting through rooftops and walls and floor panels, moving block by block across the compound that the Saviours had been operating out of for months. The lead shielding that lined the warehouses told him something important was down there even if it didn't tell him what specifically. 

A few weeks ago he wouldn't dare invade a persons privacy this way but... not anymore. 

He flew down at super speed checking every warehouse in the district. 

Warehouse seven contained approximately two hundred kilograms of cocaine in sealed containers stacked on industrial shelving. Warehouse twelve held nearly three times that amount in heroin, packaged and labelled and organised with the efficiency of a legitimate pharmaceutical operation. Warehouse four held a chemical processing setup that included equipment he recognised from STAR Labs catalogues as being capable of molecular-level compound modification.

He landed in front of warehouse seven first, tore the door off its track with one hand, walked inside, and began carrying the containers out four at a time, stacking them on the loading dock where GCPD officers were waiting with evidence trucks.

The Saviours who had been guarding the warehouses scattered when they saw him coming. Most of them dropped their weapons and ran. The few who tried to stand their ground found themselves gently moved aside, Superman's hands on their shoulders guiding them toward the GCPD officers who were waiting with handcuffs.

It took him four hours to clear the surface-level warehouses. Every container, every package, every piece of equipment, every document and ledger and record he could find, all of it loaded into evidence trucks and driven to the GCPD central precinct where it was logged and catalogued and stored in the evidence room that had to be expanded twice over the course of the night to accommodate the volume.

.....

"I also want to address the Future Foundation directly," Superman said from the podium. "The Foundation has done meaningful work in this community and I want to acknowledge that. The food banks, the medical centres, the employment programmes, these are real contributions that have improved peopls lives. But there are serious questions that need to be answered about the relationship between the Foundation and the Saviours, about the origin of the Foundation's funding, and about the role that Foundation infrastructure has played in facilitating the distribution of narcotics in this city."

He looked directly into the nearest camera.

"The Future Foundation's warehouses in the industrial district have been shut down pending investigation. The products and materials found on those premises are now in GCPD custody. The individuals detained during this operation will be processed through the justice system with full respect for their rights and due process, and any evidence that connects the Foundation's leadership to criminal activity will be pursued through the appropriate legal channels."

"I hope the saviours who've been arrested choose to cooperate... I know many of you are veterans that have served this country and want to do so again."

"Don't let one man's ambitions ruin your life..."

"Thank you."

.....

By the end of the first month Superman had personally shut down fourteen Saviour distribution points across the Narrows and the East End, confiscated enough product to fill the GCPD evidence room three times over, and detained over two hundred individuals who had been operating as street-level dealers or armed guards for the organisation. 

In hindsight they never really stood a chance once Superman got serious. The moment he arrived in Gotham he simply stood vigil over the city constantly scanning for any sign of saviour activity. When he saw anything that looked like any kind of drug deal or anything else he would fly down and deal with them in only a matter of seconds. 

Before the saviours finally figured out what was happening it was too late and Superman had truly started dismantling their street operations. 

Ethan was not arrested as there was no direct evidence linking him personally to the drug operation, a lot of the warehouses he used to store drugs were abandoned and he could not be held liable for what criminals did in his properties without his permission.

But the Future Foundation's warehouses were sealed. Its operations in the industrial district were frozen. Its public image, which had been carefully constructed over the course of this year, was now the subject of daily news segments.

The only saving grace was that superman had not been able to find Sanctuary, so for now it remained as the last hideout for the saviours as well as Ethan. 

But everything above it was gone.

In one month of action Superman had dismantled more of Ethan's infrastructure than the combined efforts of the GCPD, Robin, Batgirl, and the entire Gotham vigilante community had managed in over six months. He had done it without warrants for most of it, operating in a grey area of the law that civil liberties groups were already beginning to question and that Ethan's legal team was preparing to challenge, but the product was confiscated and the distribution network was broken and the public narrative had shifted from Ethan Kane the saviour to Ethan Kane the suspect.

_____________________________________

The Tin Roof Club had never been this loud, at least not since Selina had closed it to the public and turned it into the most unlikely headquarters in Gotham's history. 

Music was playing from a speaker, something old that Renee had put on, there were takeout containers spread across every surface in the basement alongside bottles of beer and a bottle of something more expensive that Victor had brought with him when he'd shown up an hour ago with a grin on his face and a six-pack in each hand.

"I'm just saying," Victor said from the chair he had pulled up to the table where the detective board still covered the wall behind him, "that when Robin called me and said he needed help with a piece of tech I did not expect to end up dismantling a criminal empire. I thought it was going to be a Tuesday afternoon thing. Pop the case open, poke around, go home. Instead I'm in a basement in Gotham drinking cheap beer with a chimpanzee."

The mood in the room was lighter than it had been since the task force had been formed, lighter than any of them had felt in months, and the reason for it was simple. 

They were winning.

A month ago Superman had walked into this basement carrying a stack of documents from Lois Lane's investigation and everything had changed. The evidence from Metropolis, the eyewitness account of Ethan stealing meta abilities, the hospital security footage, the forum connections, all of it had given them the thread they needed to start pulling, and once they started pulling the whole thing began to come apart.

The message board had been the key. 

Lois had identified the forum where Metropolis meta-humans had been targeted, Detective Chimp had known that Ethan would've only had access to one convenient computer at that time which was the lab at Gotham Academy. 

When Barbara had gone and acquired it, they saw that there was absolutely nothing to suggest Ethan had used it, at least on the surface level. Cyborg however was able to reconstruct the cached data layer by layer and what he found was not a student browsing a message board but a custom-built script, a sophisticated piece of code that had been running quietly in the background for months, crawling social media platforms and forums and medical databases for specific keywords related to meta-human abilities. 

The script would flag posts, catalogue the users, cross-reference their locations, and compile dossiers on potential targets that it stored in an encrypted partition on the Academy's server that nobody had known existed.

Cyborg had also recovered something else from that computer, something that Ethan had clearly never intended anyone to find. A DNA test. His own, run using the Academy lab's genetic sequencing equipment. The results were still stored in the encrypted partition alongside everything else, and while none of them fully understood what the test had been looking for or what the results meant, Detective Chimp had flagged it as potentially significant and sent it along to a contact of his for analysis.

Between the script, the search history, the forum connections, and the Metropolis evidence, Task Force K now had a documented trail that connected Ethan Kane to the systematic targeting and assault of meta-humans across two cities, which linked him to his All for One persona. 

Combined with the drug seizures Superman had made from the Future Foundation warehouses and the financial records that Barbara had been piecing together for weeks, the case was building into something that even a bought DA would struggle to make disappear.

Robin was leaning against the wall near the board with a cola in his hand that he had been nursing for the better part of an hour, and at some point during Victor's story about the time he accidentally hacked a training simulation and made all the combat dummies attack Beast Boy instead of the designated target, the corner of Robin's mouth had turned upward in something that was not quite a smile but was closer to one than anyone in the room had seen from him in a very long time.

Barbara was laughing at something Victor had said and even Robin's almost-smile widened by a fraction when she snorted mid-laugh and immediately covered her mouth with her hand and turned red.

The only person not at the table was Selina, who had left a note on the bar upstairs that read 'Have to handle something.'

The other person not celebrating was Detective Chimp.

He was sitting on the desk in the back office cross-legged with his tea beside him and his pipe tucked into his breast pocket and a stack of papers in his lap that he was reading. 

Eventually Barbara noticed him through the open doorway after her laughter had subsided and she excused herself from the table and walked over and leaned against the doorframe.

"Everything okay in here?" she asked.

Chimp looked up from the papers and smiled. "Everything is wonderful, Miss Gordon. Truly. The progress we've made in the last month has been remarkable and I'm very pleased with where things stand."

"Then why are you in here reading instead of out there celebrating with the rest of us?"

Chimp set the papers down on the desk beside his tea and scratched his chin with one finger. "I've been going through some of the materials that Gotham Academy provided us," he said after a moment. "Academic papers, all of them authored by Ethan during his time as a student. Some of them are quite extraordinary, the paper on synthetic nootropics alone would be publishable in a peer-reviewed journal, and the biochemistry paper he did on mitochondrial stress responses is years ahead of anything I've seen from graduate-level researchers, let alone a teenager."

Barbara's expression changed as he spoke, something shifting behind her eyes that softened the lines around them and pulled the lightness out of her face. She walked into the office and sat down on the chair beside the desk and was quiet for a moment. "He really was one of the smartest people I've ever met," she said sadly. "When we used to work together in that lab he would explain things to me that I couldn't even conceptualise and he made it seem so simple. Like the answers were just sitting there waiting for someone to pick them up and he couldn't understand why nobody had done it yet."

She looked at the papers on the desk and then at her hands in her lap. "It feels like such a waste," she said. "All that potential. All that ability. He could have done anything, he could have changed the world in so many ways and instead he's out there doing so much damage and all I can think about is how different it could have been."

Detective Chimp looked at her with a sympathetic expression. "You're the only person in this room who had any kind of personal relationship with him," he said. "You knew him before the mask, before All for One. It's entirely understandable that even after everything that's happened you would feel some measure of regret about what might have been."

Barbara nodded slowly. "Sometimes I wonder if I could have changed any of it. If I'd said something different, or done something differently, or just been more, I don't know, more present. Maybe I could have stopped him from going down this path. Maybe if I'd noticed what was happening sooner—"

"That way of thinking will eat you alive if you let it," Detective Chimp interrupted. "I have lived a very long time, Miss Gordon, longer than you might guess from looking at me, and I have watched a great many people destroy themselves by replaying the past and imagining they could have changed it. The truth, which is never comfortable but is always true, is that Ethan Kane made his choices and those choices were his own. You did not make them for him and you could not have unmade them. The only thing you have any control over is what you do now."

Barbara looked at him and the tightness around her eyes loosened slightly. "Thank you," she said quietly.

They sat in silence for a moment before Barbara glanced at the papers again. "Why are you going through his old work anyway? What are you hoping to find?"

"A clue," Chimp said, picking the papers back up. "Something that might tell us what he plans to do next. A pattern in his thinking, a thread of logic that connects the academic work to the operational work, anything that might give us an indication of direction."

Barbara tilted her head. "The Saviours have been pretty much dismantled at this point, at least the street-level operations. Superman cleared out the warehouses, the distribution network is broken, the dealers have scattered. Whatever Ethan was planning, surely it can't work now, right?"

Chimp tapped his finger against his chin and looked at the papers without reading them. "One can only hope that's the case," he said. "But I still have a feeling that things aren't over yet. There are pieces of this that we haven't accounted for, questions we haven't answered. We know the phone sends a signal but not to what and until we do I am not comfortable assuming that dismantling the surface operation has neutralised the deeper plan."

His phone buzzed on the desk beside his tea and he picked it up and looked at the screen.

Barbara glanced at the phone and her brow furrowed. "Is that a Future Phone?"

Chimp laughed. "It's still a perfectly good phone, Miss Gordon. Say what you will about the man who built it but the hardware is exceptional." He caught her expression and waved a hand. "Don't worry, I had Victor strip it down and remove anything suspicious. No trackers, no bugs, no emitters. It's perfectly fine now, just a very well-made phone."

He read the message on the screen and his eyebrows rose slightly. "Interesting," he murmured.

"What is it?"

"Someone I've been trying to get in contact with for quite some time now," Chimp said, turning the phone so she could see the name on the screen. "Dr Eduardo Dorado. He is the foremost authority on meta-human research in the world. Arguably the only real authority on it, his work on the meta-gene is years ahead of anyone else in the field. One of his published papers was actually among the files recovered from the Gotham Academy lab computer, which tells us that Ethan was studying his research closely."

"Why did it take him so long to get back to you?" Barbara asked.

"He wasn't interested at first. Dr Dorado is a very private man who does not enjoy being contacted by strangers, even strangers with impressive credentials and excellent taste in clothing. But when I sent him the data from Ethan's DNA test it seems that got his attention rather quickly."

Barbara put the pieces together and leaned forward. "You're trying to find a way to take away Ethan's powers."

"If it's possible," Chimp said, his voice dropping slightly. "Ethan possesses the ability to steal meta-human abilities and add them to his own arsenal permanently. Every powered individual he encounters is a potential upgrade to his capabilities. I know a great many meta-humans around the world who could level cities if not entire countries, and if Ethan were to ever get his hands on any of them then I shudder to think what he would become."

Barbara shivered, he was already terrifyingly powerful and the idea of him acquiring more terrifying abilities on top of what he already carried was something she did not want to think about. "What did Dr. Dorado say?" she asked.

Chimp turned the phone back toward her so she could read the message on the screen.

Dr. Dorado: We need to meet.

BOOM

Barbara opened her mouth to respond when the building shook. A loud concussive boom that hit the walls of the basement and rattled the bottles on the shelves behind the bar and knocked Chimp's tea off the desk and sent it shattering on the floor.

"What the hell was that?" Renee said, already on her feet with her hand on her weapon.

Robin had his mask on before the echo had finished bouncing off the walls and was moving toward the stairs. Barbara was right behind him pulling her cowl over her head as she ran. Victor's arm had shifted into its combat configuration and Detective Chimp was already pocketing his phone and following them up the stairs.

They came out through the back door and into the alley and then out onto the street where they finally saw the commotion. 

People were screaming.

Not everyonee, maybe less than half the people on the street, but the ones who were screaming were screaming in a way that made them all stop in their tracks. 

Dozens upon dozens of people were screaming and clawing at their skin. It wasn't just any scream it was a full blood curdling scream that sent them crashing to the ground and bashing their heads against the ground. 

A woman in a business suit had dropped to her knees on the sidewalk twenty feet from the door, her briefcase spilled open beside her, her hands clutching her stomach as she rocked back and forth and screamed through her teeth. 

A man across the street was on his back on the pavement convulsing, his body arching and his heels slamming against the concrete. 

A teenager who had been walking with headphones on was curled in a ball against a lamppost, shaking, his phone lying on the ground beside him still playing music into the open air.

Others were standing around them looking confused and frightened, reaching down to help but not knowing what to do because there was nothing visible happening to any of them, no wounds, no blood, no attacker, just people in sudden terrible pain for no reason anyone could see.

"What is this?" Renee said, her gun drawn but pointed at nothing.

Robin's comms crackled.

"Robin, this is Wonder Woman." Diana's voice came through. "I'm in the Narrows, there are thousands of civilians down in a four-block radius, all of them in extreme pain but I am unable to discover why, I need assistance."

Before Robin could respond another voice cut in. "This is Wildcat, I'm in the East End, people are dropping like flies and screaming and I can't find what's doing it, there's nothing here, please send assistance or a wizard or some shit!"

Then another. "Black Canary reporting from the harbour district, it's happening here too, dozens of people, maybe more, all of them on the ground, I've got a man who's bleeding from his nose and ears and I don't know why, someone tell me what's going on."

Then Superman cut in on the comms. "This is Superman. I'm above the city. I can see it everywhere. Every district. Every neighbourhood. Thousands of people, possibly tens of tbousands, all experiencing simultaneous onset of severe pain, I'm going to try—UHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"

Robins eyes widened and he pressed his hand to his ear. "Superman?!" He shouted. "Superman come in!?"

"Robin look!" Barbara pointed out as they watched Superman falling from the sky and landing down somewhere in the financial district. 

"What happened?!" Renee said in a slight panic. 

"There is someone up there," Victor said as he used his cybernetic eye to zoom in on the location superman had fallen from. As he zoomed in he saw a figure dressed in black with a metallic helmet across his face. 

Victors eyes widened as he recognised the person. 

"All for One... he's here...."

___________________________________

Superman floated above the skyline of Gotham, his heart beating so fast it felt like it was going to rip straight out of his chest. His head whipped around as he looked across the city, and at this moment he could see and hear all of it, every street and every rooftop and every window from the Narrows to the harbor, but the only thing taking over his senses was the screaming. 

Thousands upon thousands of people were screaming in pain, dropping to their knees in crosswalks and curling up on the floors of restaurants and clawing at their own arms in the middle of busy sidewalks, and the only common link between them was that they were being attacked by what seemed to be some invisible force.

'Just what is happening?' Superman thought in a panic. He swept his vision through every spectrum he had, layer after layer peeling back before his eyes, and he found nothing, after that he tried all of his other senses yet it was the same result. No gas drifting through the streets, no contaminane, no deadly radiation anywhere in the city that didn't belong there. The only thing out of the ordinary was a strange type of radio wave pulsing out of everyone's phones.

He pressed two fingers to the comm in his ear. "This is Superman, I'm above the city and I can see thousands of people, possibly tens of thousands, all experiencing simultaneous onset of severe pain. I'm going to try—"

BOOM

Something hit him from behind making Superman scream in pain as the sky spun around him and he dropped, plummeting through a rooftop water tower and into the roof of a building in the financial district, the impact driving him through tar and gravel and into the concrete deck beneath.

He shook his head blinking the static out of his vision while bracing one palm against the broken rooftop and pushing himself up onto one knee. When he lifted his head and looked up through the settling dust, he saw a figure descending toward the building through the smoke-stained air. 

"Ethan Kane," Superman said, gritting his teeth as he rose to his full height, rolling his shoulder where the blast had landed. "Are you the one responsible for all of this?"

"Hello, Superman." The voice that came out warped slightly at the edges by the modulator. "If you mean the current state of the city, then I'm afraid you've misread the situation. The only person responsible for that is you."

Superman launched off the roof and the air cracked open behind him like a thunderclap, his fist already drawn back past his shoulder as he closed the distance in a fraction of a heartbeat, fully intending to end this fight before it could even begin. 

However the eye holes of All for one's mask flared red, and twin beams of intense heat vision slammed into his chest mid-flight.

Superman yelled as the beams caught him and shoved him backward through the air, the heat washing up over his body. He turned his head against it and brought both hands up with his palms open before leaning his entire body weight into the torrent. 

Then his own eyes began to glow and he roared and answered with his own heat vision, the beam tearing out of him and crashing into All For One's head-on. 

The two streams ground against each other above the center of the rooftop, the point where they met swelling from red to orange to a furious blinding white, the air around it rippling and warping, loose gravel softening into beads of glass, and then the whole thing reached critical mass and detonated, the explosion ripping the entire top floor off the building and hurling fire and shattered concrete out in every direction over the streets below.

Superman came flying through the heart of the smoke with his fist drawn back and threw the punch with everything behind it, the kind of blow that had cratered mountainsides and put gods on their backs.

Yet All For One's hand came up and caught it.

The shockwave of the catch blasted the smoke away from them and the sheer force of it drove All For One backward through the open air his fingers locked tight around Superman's fist the entire way, until the two of them finally drifted to a stop high above the gutted, burning building.

"Surprised, Superman?" All For One asked, and he turned the captured fist slightly in his grip. "I'm sure you must be. You've spent so many years being worshipped by these people that I wouldn't be surprised if you've started to believe the mythology yourself. No doubt you look at a human being and you see something small and fragile and fundamentally beneath you."

"That's not true..." Superman growled. 

"It must be very comfortable up there, being adored by creatures you consider inferior," All for One continued. 

"Shut up!" Superman shouted as he snapped his head forward and headbutted him square in the faceplate, the crack of the impact echoing off the towers below, and as the grip on his fist loosened he seized All For One's forearm with both hands, hauled him off balance, and spun, dragging him through a full rotation and then a second one, the air howling around them both, before releasing him and hurling him across the skyline like a stone from a sling. 

All For One went tumbling end over end above the rooftops, and Superman shot after him immediately, the boom of his acceleration shattering windows down the entire length of the block.

Then the tumbling figure simply wasn't there anymore.

All For One blinked back into existence directly behind him his arm rising with his palm open, he then fired a blast of compressed air into the center of Superman's back. The impact landed like a freight train hitting at full speed, and Superman was launched away across the city, flipping helplessly end over end through the night sky with the lights of Gotham wheeling around him.

He flipped a dozen times more before he caught himself, his arms spreading wide as he killed his momentum and righted his body in the air. As the ringing in his ears faded he realized that his comm had been chattering at him this entire time, half a dozen voices stacked on top of one another and growing louder by the second, he pressed his fingers to his ear and let the channel connect.

"Superman, do you read? We can see All for One. Do you need backup? We can have people to you in minutes."

"No." Superman kept his eyes fixed on the dark figure drifting toward him across the gap between buildings. "I'll handle Ethan myself. Listen to me, the people down there are still suffering and we still don't know what's causing it or what it's doing to them. That's the priority. Get them help, get medical teams moving, figure out how to help them. I'll deal with All for One."

"So self-sacrificing. Such a hero." All For One drifted to a stop in front of him. "Superman, the leader of the Justice League. Self-proclaimed savior of planet Earth. Tell me, did you even hesitate before turning them away, or does the martyrdom just come naturally?"

"Whatever you're doing to these people, you're going to stop it." Superman's fists curled tight at his sides. "Right now! They have nothing to do with whatever problem you have with us, do you understand that? There are children down there screaming, Ethan. Or I swear to you, I will tear that mask off your face and drag what's left of you to the Watchtower in pieces."

"There it is, there is the anger." All For One tilted his head slowly, and there was something almost amused in his voice. "Tell me something, Superman. Do you hate me? I can hear how fast your heart is beating, I can see how hard you're clenching your fists." He let the question hang in the air between them for a long moment. "No matter, whatever it is you're feeling right now, I promise you, it could never compare to the hatred I have for you."

"For what you've done to me..."

(FLASHBACK)

The trees inside Sanctuary never lost their leaves, their canopies was always the warm gold of the late afternoon sun, because Ethan had designed them that way and maintained it all through his [Plant Manipulation] ability. Yet the trees now looked colourless and dying. 

Ethan sat at the base of one of those trees, and he had not moved in three days.

It was the second week since Superman had come to Gotham, and in those two weeks the alien had accomplished what Batman, the GCPD, and three separate federal task forces had failed to accomplish in an entire year. 

When Ethan played with them there were rules... rules that he knew they would follow. Rules that he would follow. That was what made the game interesting. 

But Superman did not play by those rules.  

He didn't investigate. He didn't build cases or follow money or flip informants. He simply used enhanced hearing and vision and burst through the doors without any warrant or any warning. Warehouses that had operated for months under flawless cover were torn open in the middle of the night with their contents catalogued by sunrise. Shipments vanished off the docks between one patrol shift and the next. Safe houses were found empty and peeled open like cardboard boxes, their occupants already sitting in federal holding before anyone could reach a lawyer. 

The network Ethan had spent a year building, layer by careful layer, contingency stacked upon contingency, every thread of it run through cutouts and dead drops and people who didn't know who they truly worked for, was being pulled apart by a creature who simply ignored the laws of man and did what he wanted and no one could do anything about it because he was essentially a God. 

There was no countermove for that. 

There was no out-planning someone who could move faster than sound and hear a whisper in a city. 

In the end all Ethan could do was pull everyone underground into Sanctuary and sit in the dark of his own making while everything he had built was taken away before his very eyes by a damn alien whose only redeeming quality was that he could punch very hard.

While Ethan sat there in silence all the others could do was watch him from the path. 

"Three days," Sophia said quietly, her arms crossed tight over her chest, her thumb working back and forth against the fabric of her sleeve in the same small spot over and over. "He hasn't eaten anything for three days. I don't think he's slept either, he just sits there and stares at nothing."

"The grass is dead," Mindy said. She was standing half behind Artemis, peering around her arm toward the brown circle as if getting a clearer view of it might explain it. "Grass doesn't just die like that, you know... it's kinda creeping me out."

"I tried to bring him food yesterday." Ivy replied. "I got maybe ten feet away from him and my skin started crawling, I don't think anyone should get close to him until he's dealt with whatever problems he has."

"Whatever problems?" Sofia narrowed her eyes at Ivy. "How do you expect him to act?!" 

Artemis hadn't taken her eyes off him the entire conversation. "He's losing the city," she said. "He's watching a year of his life die in real time and there is nothing he can do about it except sit there and watch it happen."

"So what do we do, then?" Sophia turned to face the rest of them. "Because we can't just keep standing here counting the days go by. Somebody has to talk to him. He listens to us, he has always listened to us, even at his worst, so if we just go to him together and—"

BOOM

The entire area around Ethan in a ten metre radius exploded and Ethan came up off the ground screaming. The sound that tore out of him was nothing any of them had ever heard from him before, it was almost like he was having a tantrum.

He ran over to the tree his fist already slamming into the trunk, then again and again, destroying the entire tree with his fists and shaking the entirety of sanctuary. "A YEAR," he screamed, and the lights overhead flared so bright that Mindy cried out and threw her arm across her eyes. "A YEAR OF MY LIFE, AND HE UNDOES IT IN TWO WEEKS, AND FOR WHAT? FOR WHAT?" Another blow landed and the tree groaned and listed sideways, its roots tearing up out of the soil in long ropes of earth. "HE DOESN'T EVEN LOOK AT US. HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT WE BUILT HERE, HE DOESN'T KNOW WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE OR WHAT I'VE GIVEN THEM, HE JUST FLIES OVER THE CITY AND TAKES WHATEVER HE WANTS BECAUSE NOBODY CAN STOP HIM, BECAUSE NOBODY HAS EVER STOPPED HIM, THAT SMILING, PREENING, SANCTIMONIOUS ALIEN BASTARD!"

The dead circle in the grass widened while they watched it. All four of them stepped backward without any of them deciding to.

Ethan stood there over the ruined tree with his chest heaving and his hands trembling at his sides, splinters buried in knuckles that were already sealing themselves closed, and for a moment nobody moved and nobody breathed. 

Then his head came up, and there was a light in his eyes that hadn't been there for three days, that hadn't been there ever, and he walked straight through the middle of all four of them without a single word and headed for his lab.

He didn't come out for weeks.

He didn't ban them from coming in so they could see him the entire time and what they saw over those six days none of them ever fully understood. 

Ethan worked like he was possessed, it was both beautiful and horrifying. It was as if he poured every ounce of his hatred and anger into his work. 

He stripped his suit down to its skeleton on the very first night, separating every plate and every fiber and laying all of it out across four tables, and then he began rebuilding it from the inside out. He pulled equipment out of deep storage that none of them had ever seen him touch before, vials of silvery suspension fluid, and he stood at the fabricator for nineteen hours straight without sitting down, programming nanite colonies, billions upon billions of machines each one smaller than a blood cell, teaching them to behave like living tissue. 

He wove them through the suit's underlayer one stratum at a time, and then he tested it, slicing a finished piece of fabric open with a plasma cutter and standing over it with his face inches from the wound while the breach sealed itself in under four seconds, the nanites swarming the cut like platelets rushing to a wound, knitting the carbon lattice back together strand by strand. 

He cut the suit, burned the suit and shot the suit, over and over, and every single time it healed faster than the time before, and every single time, he smiled.

That was the part Artemis remembered most afterward. 

The laughing. 

Ethan had always worked in silence but the man in the lab that week talked to himself constantly, narrating his own breakthroughs in a rapid mutter that broke at irregular intervals into laughter, his hands never once stopping, one of them sketching schematics into the air while the other soldered, solving problems in single hours that he had shelved for months, because suddenly the solutions were simply there, hanging in front of him, obvious, as if the hatred had burned away some fog he had been living inside his entire life without ever knowing it. 

He rebuilt the suit's artificial musculature with reactive fiber that returned force instead of merely absorbing it. He restructured the helmet entirely, gave the mask its smooth black faceplate, and rerouted every sensor system through triple redundancy. And on the fifth day, he went to his vault and he came back out holding the belt he had taken from the Court of Owls, he spent eleven hours integrating it into the suit's core. When he powered the assembly on for the first time, the entire suit lifted off the table and hung there in the air, gravity sliding off of it like water off glass, and Ethan stood looking at the thing he had made and laughed until he had to grip the edge of the table to stay on his feet.

Ethan in those weeks poured every single ounce of his being into destroying Superman. 

(FLASHBACK END)

"I had never experienced hatred like that in my entire life," All For One said. "Anger, certainly. Frustration, disappointment, contempt, I had known all of those before in small doses. But hatred, real hatred, the kind that sits in the center of your chest and rewires everything around it, that was new to me. You gave me that, Superman. In all my life, you are the only one who ever has, not even my parents had that honour." He spread his hands slowly. "But in fairness, I should also thank you, because if it wasn't for you, I would never have broken through. I would never have evolved into something better.

"You see, it was because of you that I finally understood that I couldn't save Gotham. Not the way I had been trying to. The people of this city are simply too stupid, too ungrateful, too fickle to be saved by my generosity. I gave them medicine when their hospitals turned them away. I gave them housing, protection, work, dignity, everything this city has spent a century refusing them, and the moment you arrived in their sky they forgot every bit of it and turned against me."

"Just look at them..." He gestured down at the burning streets without ever taking his gaze off Superman. "Even now, even screaming, look at how they look at you...Their symbol of hope.... I came to understand that I couldn't hope to replace that, not even if I gave these people everything.

"So I realized what I actually needed to do was become a symbol myself.

"A Symbol of Fear."

"The city will watch as I kill their symbol of hope. All of them, every screen in Gotham, watching live as the strongest hero in their world dies in front of them."

"After that fear will pour into the space where their hope used to live. And then, when the city is drowning in that fear, when they are desperate for anyone at all to deliver them from it, Ethan Kane will rise up and do what their precious Justice League could not. Ethan Kane can truly replace you as the symbol of hope, when he kills 'All For One.'" The last two words came with his fingers curling slowly into quotation marks in the air between them.

"It's a good plan," Superman said. He rolled his shoulders back. "But you're missing one part of it."

"And what part is that?" All For One asked.

"Thinking you can defeat me." Superman raised his fists.

"Oh, I'm quite confident in my ability to defeat you, Superman." All For One brought his own hands up slowly in front of his chest. "You see, it wasn't only my craftsmanship that was brought to new levels by my hatred for you.

"But my power itself.

"[Mass Adjustment]"

"[Bone Manipulation]"

"[Muscle Augmentation]"

"[Muscle Rewriting]"

"[Strength Enhancer]"

"[Durable Skin]"

"[Overclock]"

"[Multiplier x4]"

Mass poured into his frame, his silhouette swelling while the suit's nanite weave stretched and reknit itself in real time to contain him, his bones audibly thickened and lengthened beneath the surface, his shoulders spreading wider and wider, and then the muscle came, slab upon dense slab of it piling onto his arms and chest and back in inhuman proportions.

Soon the thing floating in front of Superman stood eight feet tall, a monolith of muscle and power with a red glow behind the mask's eye holes.

"Watch, Gotham," All For One bellowed, his voice rolling out across the screaming city like thunder off the bay. "Watch as I show everyone the end of their symbol of hope!"

(AN: I was considering making it longer but next chapter is going to be long enough and it fits better if the chapter ends here. Anyway hope you enjoyed this.)