DC: All for One Chapter 31 — Wayne Tower (Patreon)

The moment the lights went out across Gotham and the emergency generators kicked in on the buildings around them, Hit-Girl, Green Arrow, Robin and Batgirl moved from the hidden spot they'd been watching from on the rooftop of the building next to Wayne Tower. They'd been crouched there for almost an hour, waiting for the signal, and when the blackout hit and they watched a figure smash through a window on the upper floors and shoot off toward the harbour, Hit-Girl was the first one on her feet.

"That's him," she said, her ears twitching as she tracked the shape disappearing into the dark sky. "That's our window. Come on."

She led them along the edge of the rooftop until they reached the section closest to Wayne Tower, and she pointed across the gap toward a wide balcony that wrapped around the entire building on the twentieth floor. "That's our way in," she said.

Green Arrow looked across the distance and then down at the street far below and then back at her. "There's a couple dozen guards posted on that balcony," he said. "I counted at least twenty from up here before the lights went out. That's not exactly a quiet way in."

"They won't be there for long," Hit-Girl said. "Ethan likely put the building into lockdown before he flew off, which means every one of those guards is about to get pulled inside to reinforce the interior. Give it thirty seconds."

Sure enough, down below, the guards on the balcony started moving in pairs toward the interior doors, shouting to each other over the sound of the alarms that had started blaring through the tower.

"See," Hit-Girl said. "Told you. Now we just gotta grapple across. Or, you know." She flexed her legs and without any more warning than that she launched herself off the edge of the roof and sailed across the gap in a single leap, her boots hitting the balcony railing and her body rolling forward into a crouch on the other side.

"Show off," Green Arrow muttered, and he raised his bow and fired a grapple arrow across the gap, the line catching on the railing, and he swung across with Robin and Batgirl right behind him, all three of them using their own lines and landing quietly on the balcony a few seconds after Hit-Girl.

She was already crouched by a side door, waving them over, and they moved low and fast across the balcony floor and pressed themselves against the wall beside her.

They waited.

They waited longer.

Robin's patience ran out first. "This is taking too long," he whispered. "You think your contact bailed on us? We need another way in if this door isn't opening."

Hit-Girl shot him a look. "Would you relax? This isn't a drive-thru window, Bird Boy, it takes time to get a door open without tripping every alarm in the building. Chill out and let her work."

"Don't call me Bird Boy."

"I'll call you whatever I want."

"You want to see what happens if you keep pushing me—"

"I'll beat you worse than I did at the asylum," Hit-Girl snapped, leaning in close enough that her nose was almost touching his. "You remember that, right? Because I remember it real clear."

Batgirl grabbed Robin's shoulder and Green Arrow put a hand against both their chests and shoved them apart. "Both of you, knock it off," Green Arrow hissed. "We are on the side of a building twenty floors up in the middle of an active infiltration, this is not the time. Remember why we're here."

Robin exhaled through his nose and stepped back, and Hit-Girl huffed and crossed her arms but said nothing else.

A moment later the door clicked and a voice came through a small gap. "Get in, now."

All four of them slipped through the door in a rush, and it shut and locked behind them, and when they turned to see who had let them in Robin's face went hard with something close to fury.

"You," he said.

The woman standing in front of them was someone that they all recognised but not in a good way. She was dressed in dark tactical gear with her bow slung across her back and it was none other than one of Ethan's most trusted advisors. 

Artemis.

Every one of them in Task Force K knew exactly who she was. She had been one of the few consistent presences in Ethan's life going back before the Creedence incident, one of his closest companions through everything, and that history was exactly why it was so hard to believe she'd turn on him.

"What is this," Robin said, backing up a step and reaching for his sticks. "Is this a trap? Did you sell us out?"

Batgirl's hand went to her belt too. "You're supposed to be one of his people. You've been at his side since the beginning, since before any of this started. Why should we believe a single word out of your mouth?"

Hit-Girl stepped between them. "Hey, back off, she's the one who's been feeding me every scrap of intel that's kept me alive for the last month. Without her I'd have been caught or dead three times over by now."

"That doesn't mean anything," Robin said. "She could be feeding you just enough to earn our trust so she can hand us over all at once."

Artemis cut in before it could go further. "Ethan is a monster," she said. "What he's doing, what he's already done, he's nothing like the person I fell in love with. I wanted to build a better world with him. I believed, with everything I had, that he could actually do it, that all the death was worth it because something good would come out the other side." Her jaw tightened. "And then he killed Superman and hundreds of thousands of people. And I finally understood that he never wanted a better world... he just wanted one made in his own image."

She looked around at all of them. "I'm not going to betray you. I'm doing it because I can't stand by and watch him finish what he's started."

"She's telling the truth," Hit-Girl said. 

Robin and Batgirl exchanged a look, still unconvinced, but Green Arrow stepped forward and put a hand on both their shoulders. "Listen this has to be good enough," he said. "We don't have a choice here." 

He looked at each of them in turn. "I need you both to understand something. This is our last shot at beating him. So no matter what happens in this building tonight, the priority is getting that DNA sample back to base. Even if some of us don't make it out. Understood?"

There was a pause, and then, one by one, they nodded.

"Agreed," Robin said finally.

Artemis let out a breath. "Follow me," she said. "This exit connects directly to a private elevator that runs up to the penthouse. The lab is close to there, just down the hall from his personal quarters."

"Well," Green Arrow said as they started moving, "that sounds almost too easy."

They reached the elevator and Artemis keyed in a code and the doors slid open, and all four of them stepped inside, and the car began to rise, and for a moment it actually did feel almost too easy.

Then it jolted to a stop somewhere around the fiftieth floor.

Green Arrow slammed the button panel again and again and nothing happened, and he swore under his breath. "This thing's dead."

"What's going on," Robin said, looking at Artemis.

"I don't know," she said, and there was real confusion in her voice. "This elevator is supposed to be the one exception during lockdown, it's on its own isolated circuit specifically so Ethan can always move freely through the building no matter what."

"Well it clearly isn't working right now," Hit-Girl said.

"Screw this," Green Arrow said, and he pulled an arrow from his quiver and jammed it into the seam of the doors and then he twisted it and the shaft split in half with a small click and pried the doors apart. 

Hit-Girl stared at it. "Why do you even have an arrow that does that?"

"Handy when you get a flat tire," Green Arrow said, shrugging.

"Let's stay on track," Robin said, already helping to force the gap wider, and one by one they slipped out through the opening onto the fiftieth floor.

Robin turned to Artemis. "We need another route."

Artemis paused for a second trying to think.

"Any time now," Robin said turning his head to her.

"Don't rush me," Artemis snapped, rounding on him. "I'm trying to remember which corridors have people there, so unless you want to walk us straight into a patrol, give me a second."

Robin held his hands up and backed off.

"Stairwell," Artemis said after a moment. "It's our best option from here and just a few corridors over."

"Let's go," Green Arrow said, and they moved toward the stairwell door, but the second they rounded the corner into the connecting corridor gunfire opened up on them from both sides.

Green Arrow dropped and rolled across the floor to cover behind a support column, and Batgirl threw herself the other way, sliding behind a cabinet, bullets chewing through the drywall above her head.

"Dammit," Robin said from where he'd pressed himself flat against the wall. "I knew this was a trap."

"It's not," Artemis said, her voice climbing with panic as she ducked beside him. "I swear to you, I have no idea what's going on, this wasn't part of anything I set up."

"Doesn't matter right now," Green Arrow called over the gunfire. "We need to get through that corridor either way, so everybody get ready to move." He looked at Hit-Girl, Robin, and Batgirl. "Artemis and I will lay down cover, you three get in close and finish it. Go on my signal."

They nodded, and Green Arrow and Artemis leaned out from cover together and unloaded a rapid volley of arrows down the corridor, forcing the line of Saviours to duck back behind their barricades, and in the gap while they were reloading Green Arrow fired a pair of crowd control arrows that burst on impact into a thick cloud of gas.

"NOW!" he shouted.

Hit-Girl came around the corner first, her legs launching her the length of the corridor in a single bound that carried her over the barricade, and she landed in the middle of the coughing Saviours and went to work immediately, a boot to one man's throat that dropped him gagging to the floor, a spinning elbow that cracked a second one's jaw sideways. 

Robin and Batgirl were right behind her, Robin's escrima sticks sweeping the legs out from under a third guard while Batgirl put two more down with a batarang to the head and a knee to the stomach.

The Saviours who could still see through the gas tried to fight back, one of them swinging a rifle stock at Hit-Girl's head, but she ducked under it and drove her fist into his gut hard enough to lift him off his feet, then grabbed his collar and threw him into two of his own men. Robin caught a baton strike on his forearm and answered with a strike of his own across the attacker's temple that dropped him instantly, and Batgirl vaulted over the barricade and landed a flying kick into the chest of the last man standing, sending him sprawling backward into a wall.

Within twenty seconds the corridor was littered with unconscious bodies and the gas was starting to clear. Hit-Girl cracked her knuckles and grinned through the haze. "That's what I'm talking about."

They pushed forward, stepping over the fallen guards, and made it to the stairwell door, but the second it swung open it wasn't a stairwell that greeted them.

A huge man filled the doorway from frame to frame, and before any of them could react he drove a kick into Green Arrow's chest that sent him flying backward down the length of the corridor, his bow skidding away from him across the floor. In the same motion he reached out with one massive hand, grabbed Batgirl by the front of her suit, and slammed her against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster before throwing her back the way she'd come.

"Who the hell is that," Robin said, scrambling back.

"Okoye," Artemis said, already reaching for an arrow. "He's Ethan's driver and personal bodyguard."

Okoye rolled his shoulders and looked at Artemis with an expression that carried real disappointment in it. "I already knew Hit-Girl was a traitor," he said. "That did not surprise me. But you, Artemis. Boss loved you. This one makes me sad."

"Ethan is a monster, Okoye," Artemis said, backing up a step with her bow half-raised. "He doesn't love anyone all he does is use people."

"Boss took me in when no one else would," Okoye said. "He gave me a place. Gave me purpose. Gave me power." His frame started to shift, the muscles across his back and shoulders swelling grotesquely, a thick grey hide spreading up his neck, and a horn began to push its way up through the bone of his forehead. "I won't let you hurt him."

"Shit," Green Arrow said, pushing himself up off the floor and wiping blood from his lip. "Artemis, is he as strong as he looks?"

"Stronger," Artemis said grimly. "Ethan gave him a shapeshifting ability. He can turn into a rhino, or something in between, and it makes him almost impossible to hurt."

"Great," Green Arrow muttered.

Hit-Girl stepped forward, cracking her neck side to side. "You all go on without me," she said. "I've got this ugly cow all to myself." She didn't wait for an answer. She launched herself at Okoye's transformed body, her boot connecting with the side of his jaw in a kick that would have shattered a normal man's skull, and when he barely staggered she used the momentum to spring off the wall and come at him again, a second kick landing square in his chest, and then a third off the opposite wall that caught him across the back of the head.

While Okoye turned his full attention on her, roaring and swinging one massive fist that she ducked under, the rest of them slipped past him along the far wall and into the stairwell, where they ran taking the stairs two and three at a time all the way up to the penthouse level.

At the top there was a reinforced security door, and Robin pulled a small device from his belt that Cyborg had given him before they'd left, pressing it against the panel beside the door, and after a few seconds of static the lock disengaged with a click.

They slipped through into a hallway.

"Where's the lab," Green Arrow asked, catching his breath.

Artemis pointed down the corridor. "This way, past his private—"

"AHHHHHH!!!!" A scream cut through the hallway from a room off to the side.

One they all recognised instantly.

Robin turned to Artemis with a pale face. "Is that—"

Artemis nodded. "He keeps Wonder Woman locked in his room. Tied to the floor with her own lasso."

"We have to help her," Batgirl said immediately.

"Agreed," Robin said.

"No," Green Arrow said, holding up a hand. "We can't risk the time. We have one job here, and it's the DNA sample, and we don't know what Ethan's rigged up in that room, could be traps, could be a dozen guards, we don't know."

Robin and Batgirl both started to argue but Green Arrow cut them off. "I'll go get her. You three keep moving, get into that lab, get the DNA, and be ready to leave the second I'm back with her."

There was a moment of silence and then all of them nodded.

Green Arrow moved carefully toward the door the scream had come from, checking the frame and the floor for anything that looked like a trigger before he pushed it open and slipped inside.

Diana was on the floor in the centre of the room, bound at the wrists and ankles and across her torso by the golden coils of her own lasso, looped through an anchor drilled into the concrete. She looked worn in a way Green Arrow had never seen on her before, her hair matted, dark circles under her eyes, but the moment she saw him her whole body went rigid with disbelief.

"Oliver?" she said, her voice cracking.

He moved toward her carefully, scanning the room one more time before he knelt beside her. "Hey," he said. "Easy. I'm here."

"How," she said. "How are you here, how did you get past—"

"We've got a plan to take Ethan down," Green Arrow said. "For real this time. Right now Shazam and Cyborg are out at the power station keeping him busy while the rest of us get what we need from his lab."

Diana's eyes flared with urgency. "Then untie me. Quickly. I can help, I can fight alongside you—"

"I can't do that," Green Arrow said, and he saw the fury flash across her face before he kept going. "Diana, listen to me, we have a real shot at ending this for good, but it only works if we stick to the plan exactly as it's laid out. If you go charging in there right now, if anything goes wrong, it could blow the whole thing."

She strained against the lasso, clearly fighting every instinct in her body, and then, slowly, the tension eased and she let out a breath. "You're right," she said. "But we cannot leave the others in this building. J'onn, Arthur, wherever he's keeping them, we need to find them and get them out."

"Then let's go find them but we have to be ready to go with or without them," Green Arrow said, already working at the knots on the lasso.

...

Robin, Batgirl and Artemis pushed through the door into the laboratory and stopped just inside it, and for a moment none of them said anything.

The room was enormous and lined wall to wall with equipment that none of them, even batgirl, fully understood, sealed cabinets glowing with internal light, tanks of fluid with things floating in them, benches covered in tools and vials and half-assembled machinery, and monitors on every surface displaying readouts and molecular models that scrolled and rotated. 

"Have you ever been in here before?" Robin asked, looking around slowly.

"A while back," Artemis said, her eyes moving across the room. "But not like this. Not when it was, this. He's built all of this since he took the tower. When I saw it last it was just a workshop."

"What is he doing in here," Batgirl said quietly, and there was as much awe as fear in her voice as she turned in a slow circle taking it all in.

She drifted toward the far end of the lab and then stopped dead, her hand coming up to the glass of a large chamber filled with amber fluid. "Robin," she said. "Come look at this."

Robin and Artemis crossed the room to her, and the three of them looked into the tank at the small curled shape floating inside it, unmistakably a developing foetus suspended in the glowing solution.

"What is that," Batgirl said.

Robin looked at the terminal mounted in front of the chamber and pulled the hacking device Cyborg had given him from his belt, pushing it into the port beneath the screen. After a few seconds of static the terminal unlocked and a file opened across the display.

Project Rebirth.

"It's called Project Rebirth," Robin said. He started reading, scrolling through the file, and the further he read the more the colour drained out of his face.

"What is it," Artemis said. "Robin, what does it say."

Robin didn't answer for a moment, then he swallowed and started to explain. "Ethan knows his body has limits. He's figured out that the problem with absorbing all these powers is in the DNA itself. He believes human DNA is too weak to hold everything he's taking, that eventually it's going to break down completely no matter what he does." He kept reading. "So he built this. A body. A combination of different DNA, Kryptonian, Amazonian, others, engineered from the ground up to be strong enough to hold everything he has and more. He wants to make a new body powerful enough for himself to live in."

"That's insane," Artemis said, staring at the foetus. "How would he even, how does he transfer himself into it?"

"It doesn't say," Robin said.

Batgirl leaned in closer to the screen and her brow furrowed. "It's interesting, though," she said.

"What is," Robin asked.

"It doesn't mention anything about the vestiges," Batgirl said. "Nothing at all. That's the whole thing Dr Dorado said would cause the instability, the accumulated consciousnesses, the fragments of every person he's taken from. If Ethan's building a whole new body specifically because his current one is breaking down, why isn't there a single note about the exact thing that's supposed to be breaking it?"

Robin frowned and ran a general search through the terminal, pulling up everything the system had cross-referenced under stability and degradation, and after a moment he found it. "He knows about them," he said. "The vestiges. He's aware they're there. But he doesn't think they're a real problem. He's got them logged as, he calls them a minor irritant. He thinks they'll fade on their own over time once his DNA fully integrates everything."

"What are you two even talking about," Artemis said. "Vestiges of what?"

"It's not important right now," Batgirl said, straightening up as she put a hand on Robin's shoulder. "We need the data on his DNA and we need it before he gets back."

Robin nodded and pulled the device back out of the terminal. "You're right. Come on, there'll be a research station somewhere in here."

He and Batgirl moved off toward the central bank of terminals to search for the genetic data, leaving Artemis standing near the tank.

Artemis stayed where she was for a moment, and then something pulled at her, the memory of a word she'd heard from Ethan during the meeting, and she turned to a nearby terminal and started working through it, searching for anything labelled Phase Two. She'd heard him mention it, she'd never known what it meant, and something in her had never stopped wanting to know.

She found it.

She read it once. 

Then she read it again to make sure she'd understood it correctly.

Then she stepped back from the terminal and covered her mouth with one hand.

"Artemis?" Batgirl looked up from across the room and came over quickly. "Hey. Are you okay?"

Artemis couldn't speak for a moment, her eyes fixed on the screen, and then she forced herself to breathe and get the words out. "The nanovirus," she said. "The one he put in the drug supply. The one that killed all those people during the fight with Superman."

Robin's head came up and he crossed the room fast. "What about it?"

Artemis paused, her hand still half over her mouth, and then she said it. "He's insane. He's actually lost his mind."

Batgirl leaned in and read the screen, and her whole body went still. "Oh my god," she said.

Robin pushed in beside them and read it for himself.

Phase Two: airborne nanovirus. Global dispersal. Self-replicating. Satellite-linked activation. Estimated saturation of world population within eight months.

"He wants to make it airborne," Robin said. "The drug supply was just the trial run. Phase two spreads it through the air, across the entire planet, into everyone. And once it's in everyone he can activate it whenever he wants through a satellite link."

"Total control," Batgirl said quietly. "Everyone on Earth carrying it in their blood. Obey him, or he pushes a button and you die in agony like the people in the streets did."

Robin's fists clenched at his sides until his knuckles cracked. "This is how he builds his utopia," he said. "He doesn't convince anyone. He doesn't win anyone over. Everyone on the planet either obeys him or they die. That's the whole plan. That's what all of this has been for."

He turned and looked around the lab, at the tank and the terminals and the machines. "We have to destroy this place."

"Agreed," Batgirl and Artemis said at the same time.

Batgirl looked at Robin. "Do you have the DNA sample yet?"

Robin held up a small data drive. "Got it. It's the most recent genome scan he has."

"Okay," Batgirl said. "Then we start planting charges."

They started moving through the lab, pulling the compact charges from their belts and pressing them against the key equipment, the tank, the central computer banks, the fabrication units, and Artemis paused halfway through with a charge in her hand.

"What about the people in the building," she said. "There are Saviours all over these floors, there's staff, there's—"

"There's only enough charge here to take out this room, maybe this floor at most," Batgirl said. "The people below us will be fine."

Artemis hesitated for another second, then nodded and pressed her charge against the base of the fabrication unit.

They were most of the way through when the whole building lurched.

A tremor rolled through the floor and knocked all three of them off their feet, the charges scattering, the equipment rattling on the benches, and from somewhere far outside the tower came a sound that reached them even through a hundred floors of concrete and steel.

SHAZAM

It was so loud that all three of them clapped their hands over their ears, the word rolling across the entire city like a thunderclap that went on and on.

Artemis, thrown backward by the tremor, fell against the wall and her elbow came down on a control panel, and a section of the far wall split open, a heavy shutter grinding upward to reveal the sealed chamber behind it and the circular track inside it and the man running on it.

Flash nearly tripped up when he saw who was on the other side. "What," he said, his chest heaving. "What the hell, who, what are you doing here?"

The three of them scrambled up off the floor, equally stunned, and Batgirl was the first to find her voice. "Flash? Flash, oh my god, what, why are you in there, what did he do to you?"

"Ethan's been using me to power the lab," Barry said between breaths, his legs never stopping, the treadmill dragging his stride onward whether he wanted it or not. "The Speed Force. He's got me hooked into the whole building, I've been running for I don't even know how long, days, it feels like years, he's using it to run all of this."

Robin was already moving toward the chamber, scanning the frame of it, looking for a seam, a panel, a lock. "There has to be a way to get you out of there. Hold on. Just hold on, I'll find it."

"Don't," Barry said sharply. "Robin, stop, it's no use. The whole thing is wired to his voice and his retina. Any attempt to open it that isn't him blows the entire room, me included. He built it that way on purpose. You can't get me out."

"There has to be a way," Batgirl said, her voice cracking. "We're not just going to leave you—"

"Why are you even here," Barry cut in. "All of you. What's the play, what's the mission, tell me fast."

Robin turned back to the chamber. "We have a weapon. Something that can actually beat him, take his powers away for good. But we needed a recent sample of his DNA to make it work."

"Do you have it," Barry said.

Robin held up the drive.

Barry's whole face changed. "Then get the hell out of here," he said, and there was nothing but iron in his voice now. "Right now. You have what you came for, so go, get out of this building, get that thing to wherever it needs to be. Don't waste another second on me."

"Barry—"

"GO," Barry shouted. "Please. I'm begging you. Don't let all of this be for nothing, don't let them, don't let Hal and Clark, don't let any of it be for nothing. You get out of here and you finish this. That's how you help me. That's the only way you help me."

Robin and Batgirl stood frozen, neither of them willing to move, and it was Artemis who stepped forward and grabbed both of them by the arms. "He's right," she said. "We have to go. We can't do anything for him right now and if we stay we lose everything. We have to go."

The building shook again, harder this time, and Barry roared at them over the noise. "GO! NOW!"

They ran.

They tore out of the lab and back through the penthouse, Robin gripping the data drive so hard the edges bit into his palm, and they burst out into the main penthouse level only to run straight into the middle of a war.

Okoye was in the centre of the room, and he was enormous now, a towering rhino-man hybrid over twelve feet tall, grey hide like armour plating and a horn the length of a sword jutting from his skull, he was fighting Green Arrow, Hit-Girl and Diana all at once. He was losing, slowly, worn down by the three of them, but he was putting up a monstrous fight, every swing of his massive arms cratering the walls and floor, and Diana had a fresh gash across her shoulder and Green Arrow was bleeding from a cut over his eye and Hit-Girl was limping on one leg.

"I WILL NOT FAIL HIM," Okoye bellowed, swinging a fist that Diana ducked under. "I WILL NOT BETRAY THE BOSS, NOT LIKE YOU, NOT LIKE ANY OF YOU!"

Green Arrow rolled beneath a stomp and put three arrows into the soft tissue at the back of Okoye's knee, and the huge man buckled, and Hit-Girl launched off the wall and drove both feet into the side of his head, staggering him sideways, and then Diana stepped in, planted herself, and delivered an uppercut that connected with the underside of his jaw with a sound like a car crash.

Okoye lifted off his feet and came down flat on his back, the whole floor shuddering with the impact, and he lay there, his transformed body slowly shrinking back toward human as his consciousness slipped away.

For a moment they all just stood there breathing hard.

Green Arrow spotted the three of them coming out of the penthouse and straightened up, wiping the blood from his eye. "Tell me you got it," he said.

Robin held up the drive and nodded.

"Then let's not stick around to celebrate," Green Arrow said, gesturing toward the exit. "Come on, we get out the way we came, we get to the roof, we go. Move."

But Batgirl and Artemis and Hit-Girl weren't moving.

They were staring past him, out through the tall floor-to-ceiling windows that wrapped around the penthouse, their faces frozen, and Green Arrow turned to follow their eyes.

Outside, level with the penthouse floor, a hundred stories up in the open night air, Ethan floated in the darkness with lightning dancing across the surface of his entire body.

(AN: So looks like our heroes have been caught in the act and Ethan who might've died last chapter is back but how? Anyway hope you enjoyed.)