DC: All for One Chapter 33 — You Could Never Win (Patreon)

Robin and Batgirl made it four blocks from the tower before Robin's legs gave out.

He didn't fall so much as fold, sliding down the brick wall of the alley they'd ducked into until he was sitting on the wet ground with his knees pulled up and the data drive still clutched in his fist so tight his knuckles had gone white. 

Batgirl slid down beside him, both of them breathing hard, the sound of sirens and the distant crackle of gunfire still rolling across the city behind them.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

"We left them," Robin said finally. "We just left them there. Diana. Oliver. Hit-Girl. Artemis. We ran and we left them fighting him alone."

"We didn't have a choice," Batgirl said, but even she could hear how hollow it sounded coming out of her own mouth.

"We always have a choice." Robin's hands were shaking now, the drive rattling faintly against his palm. "And tonight I chose to run. I've spent my whole life being told that's not who we are. That's not what Bruce trained me for. He trained me to stand and fight, not to leave people behind because a mission mattered more."

"They told us to go," Batgirl said, and her voice cracked on the last word. "They knew this was risky... if we had stayed behind then their sacrifice would've been worth nothing."

"I know that." Robin pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "I know that and it doesn't make it feel any less like I just watched my friends probably die so I could save my own skin."

Batgirl reached over and took his wrist and pulled his hand away from his face, and she held onto it. "Listen to me. If we go back there right now, if we turn around this second, everything they just did means nothing. Everyone Ethan's already killed, everyone he's going to kill if Phase Two goes live, all of it happens anyway, except now the one thing that might actually stop him is sitting in a smoking crater with the rest of us instead of in Dorado's hands. We can't fall apart right now. For the sake of our friends we have to move, and we have to get this to the doctor, and then, then, we can fall apart. Okay?"

Robin sat there for a moment with his jaw clenched, and then he nodded and pushed himself back up the wall onto his feet, and he held a hand down to help her up.

"Okay," he said. "Let's go."

They moved through the city carefully, sticking to the alleys and the gaps between drone patrol routes, it took them the better part of an hour to work their way back across Gotham to the laundromat, and when they came down into the atrium, every face in the room turned toward them at once, and every face fell the moment they saw who was missing.

"Where's everyone else," Renee said, already on her feet.

Robin didn't answer right away, he crossed the room and set the data drive down on the central table in front of Detective Chimp, his hand lingering on it for a second before he let go, and only then did he look up.

"We left before we saw but the others are likely dead or captured," he said. "He... absorbed Shazam somehow." His voice caught. "The way he does with powers, except it wasn't just the power, it was them, it was everything they were, and they're just, they're inside him now. Gone. Shazam too. And Cyborg, he tore Cyborg apart with his bare hands."

The room went completely silent.

Batgirl finished it for himn. "We can only hope the others are alive... but—" she cut herself off and turned away. 

Mira, curled on the couch, sat bolt upright, her face going grey, one hand pressed against her chest as if something had physically hit her.

Dr Dorado sat down slowly in the nearest chair, his hands trembling as he reached for the drive on the table, he stared at it for a moment before he picked it up.

"Five," Wildcat said quietly, from where he'd been leaning against the wall. "Five of them. In one night."

"Was it worth it," Black Mask said blankly. "Five people, two of them among the strongest beings on this planet gone and we don't even know if what's on that drive is going to work."

"Don't," Renee said sharply, turning on him. "Don't you dare stand there and ask that question like you have any right to."

"I have every right," Black Mask said. "I lost men too, in case anyone's forgotten, men who trusted me to get them home. I'm not trying to be cruel, Detective, I'm asking because someone needs to question whether this plan isn't gonna end up with us all dead."

"They chose to go tonight," Batgirl said. "Nobody made that choice for them. Oliver chose to stay and fight so we could get out. They knew exactly what they were risking and they did it anyway because they believed in what we're trying to do here, so don't you dare reduce that, don't you dare make it sound like a trade we forced on them."

"I'm not reducing anything," Black Mask said. "I'm asking whether it meant something. If that drive doesn't work, if Dorado's gun doesn't do what he thinks it'll do, then they didn't choose a sacrifice, they chose a waste, and I think we owe it to them to actually ask the question instead of just assuming the answer because it's easier to live with."

"That's enough," Jim Gordon said, standing up from where he'd been sitting near the wall. "Standing here tearing each other apart isn't going to bring any of them back and it isn't going to tell us whether the weapon works. So both of you, stand down."

Nobody moved for a moment. 

Then Black Mask inclined his head slightly and stepped back, and Batgirl's shoulders dropped an inch, the fight going out of her, replaced by something closer to grief.

"I think," Detective Chimp said, "that we've been avoiding a conversation for a long time now, and I think tonight has made it impossible to avoid any longer." 

He looked up and around the room, at all of them, heroes and villains and cops and a scientist and a girl who was shaking on the couch. "We cannot beat Ethan Kane by being heroes. I don't say that lightly and I don't say it to insult anyone's principles. But heroism, as it's traditionally understood, the code, the restraint, the belief that there's always another way, that a fight can be won without losing everything to win it, that framework was built to defeat men. Criminals. Even other metahumans, given enough teamwork and enough time. It was never built to defeat something like him. He has already proven that he will do anything. Kill anyone. Sacrifice any number of innocent lives. Use the people closest to him as tools and discard them the moment they stop being useful. He does not fight within a code, which means every one of us who does is fighting with one hand behind our backs."

"So what are you saying," Robin said. "That we become him? That we start lying and manipulating and killing to win?"

"No," Chimp said. "I'm saying that winning this is going to require choices that will not feel like heroism while you're making them. That is what it costs to fight something like this and win. Not villainy. But a willingness to do whatever the moment requires, however ugly, however far from the code you were raised on, because the alternative is losing, and losing means the whole world ends up wearing a collar that Ethan can tighten whenever he pleases."

He set the drive down gently on the table in front of Dr Dorado.

"If we are going to beat him," Chimp said, "every single person in this room is going to have to be willing to sacrifice anything. Not just their lives but their principles, their comfort. I am asking because I believe, I truly believe, it is the only way any of us walk out of this with a world worth living in."

Robin's fists clenched at his sides, his eyes wet and furious at the same time, but he didn't say anything for a moment.

Around the room, one by one, the others started to nod. Black Mask first, then the Penguin, then Wildcat with a grim set to his mouth, Catwoman inclining her head from where she sat perched on a crate.

Robin looked at all of them, and then at Batgirl, and then down at his own shaking hands.

"Fine," he said quietly. "Fine. Whatever it takes."

At that moment Selina's phone buzzed in her pocket.

She was leaning against the wall near the supply crates, half in shadow, and nobody noticed when she glanced at the screen and her face went through something complicated before it settled into nothing at all. She pushed off the wall and walked toward the stairs without looking at anyone. "I need some air," she said to no one in particular, and then climbed the steps and disappeared through the door at the top and was gone.

Nobody paid much attention. 

They had other things on their minds.

Dr Dorado had cleared a section of the central table and laid the weapon down on it and was working the data drive into the calibration port on the side, even though he was still visibly shaken by what Robin and Batgirl had told them all.

Mira drifted over to where Robin and Batgirl had sat down at one of the folding tables, Robin slumped forward with his elbows on his knees and his head hanging between his shoulders, Batgirl sitting upright beside him with her hands clasped in her lap and her eyes fixed on a point on the wall that she wasn't seeing.

"Hey," Mira said quietly as she lowered herself into the chair across from them slowly. "I'm really sorry about your friends. I didn't know them well, I mean I barely talked to any of them, but they all seemed like really good people, I know that doesn't help but I wanted to say it anyway."

Batgirl looked at her and managed a small nod. "Thank you, Mira."

Robin didn't look up.

Mira sat there for a moment and then she leaned forward and rested her chin on her folded arms on the table. "Can I say something that might piss you off?" she asked.

Robin still didn't move.

"I'm gonna say it anyway," she said. "I think what the detective said back there was wrong. About how you can't win as heroes and you have to throw all of it away and become something else. I don't think that's true."

Robin let out a dark chuckle that had no warmth in it. "And what would you know about it," he said without lifting his head. "You've been asleep on a couch for most of this. You don't fight, you don't help, you don't do anything except get high and pass out. Four of the best people I've ever known just died trying to stop him and you're sitting here telling me how heroism works like you've read a book about it."

"Robin!" Batgirl snapped.

"No it's okay," Mira said with a smile. "He's right that I don't help much. But I know what it looks like when someone loses who they are, because I've done it, I've been doing it every single day for years, drowning myself in whatever I can find because it's the only way to make the noise stop. And what I've learned from being at the bottom for as long as I have is that the bottom doesn't last forever. In every story the hero hits a low point. Everybody hits rock bottom eventually. But the best part about the bottom is that there's only one direction left to go."

"That's naive," Robin said.

"Maybe," Mira said. "But I have to believe that things are gonna get better because if I don't then what's the point of any of it? I mean I don't want to be like this forever." She let out a small self-deprecating laugh. "Nobody grows up dreaming of being a junkie. I'm still here because I still think there's something worth getting to on the other side of all this. If I threw that away I might as well stop breathing."

Robin was quiet for a long time after that. His head came up slowly and he looked at her, really looked at her for the first time, and something shifted behind his eyes. He had spent weeks writing her off as dead weight, categorising her the way he categorised everything these days, useful or useless, asset or liability, and it occurred to him, sitting there in that basement, that he had been doing exactly what Ethan would have done.

Ethan would have killed Mira.

He would have looked at her and seen the drugs in her veins and he would have sorted her into the pile of people who weren't worth saving, the pile he had already killed a million of, and he wouldn't have thought twice about it. 

He wouldn't have seen the person underneath. 

He wouldn't have cared about her enough to try.

"I'm sorry," Robin said quietly. "I've been an asshole to you since you got here and you didn't deserve any of it."

Mira waved a hand. "Don't worry about it. I've been called way worse by way less interesting people. We're good."

Robin almost smiled.

ALARM

Then the alarms went off.

Every light in the atrium flashed red and a siren began to wail and one of Black Mask's men came sprinting down the corridor from the upper level. "SAVIOURS!" he screamed. "They're right on top of us, they found us, they're already breaching the—"

BOOOOOOM

The ceiling exploded.

A column of force tore down through the concrete and steel above them and blew the roof of the atrium wide open, chunks of debris raining down across the room, and every person in the space was thrown off their feet by the shockwave. The weapon skidded across the floor and Dr Dorado lunged for it and caught it by the barrel before it could disappear into the rubble.

A moment later All for One descended through the hole he had made.

He floated down into the atrium with golden lightning crawling across his body and behind him through the shattered ceiling the night sky was full of drones and the sound of boots and breaking doors as Saviours poured into the building from every entrance.

Detective Chimp was on his feet in an instant, his eyes fixed on the figure floating above them, and for the first time since Renee had known him his composure cracked. "How..." he said. "how could you possibly—"

All for One landed softly on the rubble-strewn floor and looked around the ruined atrium with an expression of mild amusement. "So this is where your little task force relocated to," he said. "What a shame. I thought the Tin Roof Club had a certain charm to it."

Every hero in the room went cold at the same time.

The Tin Roof Club. 

He knew about the Tin Roof Club. 

He'd known about them the entire time. From the very beginning, from the first night they'd gathered in Selina's basement, he had known.

"No..." Detective Chimp whispered as realisation dawned on him. 

A moment later the side door opened and a dozen Saviours filed in with their weapons raised, and walking behind them, her eyes fixed on the ground and her arms wrapped tight around her own body, was Selina.

Robin figured it out a half-second after the chimp did, and the sound that came out of him was something between a scream and a sob. "YOU!" he roared, straining against the invisible force that was keeping him pinned to the ground. "HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? AFTER EVERYTHING HE'S DONE? YOU SOLD US OUT TO HIM? YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ON OUR SIDE, SELINA!"

Selina didn't look at him, her eyes stayed on the floor and her fingers dug into her own arms hard enough to leave marks.

"Don't judge her," Ethan said calmly, cutting through Robin's screaming. "She recognised the futility of your little group long before any of you did, and she made the rational choice to embrace the winning side. I don't hold that against her. In fact, I find it rather commendable. Survival instinct is an underappreciated quality in people."

He smiled.

"And for that loyalty, she will be rewarded."

He raised one hand and gave a signal, and a pair of Saviours came through the side door pushing a medical bed on wheels. The monitors attached to it beeped softly, and the man lying on it was motionless beneath a white sheet.

Bruce Wayne.

Robin made a sound like he'd been stabbed and Batgirl's hands flew to her mouth and every hero in the room started shouting all at once, pulling against whatever invisible force was holding them down, thrashing and screaming.

"DON'T TOUCH HIM!" Robin screamed. "GET AWAY FROM HIM, IF YOU LAY ONE FINGER ON HIM I SWEAR TO GOD—"

"LEAVE HIM ALONE!" Batgirl screamed. "ETHAN, PLEASE, WHATEVER YOU'RE GOING TO DO, DON'T—"

All for One ignored all of them. 

He walked to the bed and looked down at Bruce's unconscious face for a moment, studying it, and then he reached down and placed his hand gently on the side of Bruce's head.

[Healing Touch]

A warm golden light spread from his palm across Bruce's face and down through his body, the monitors spiked, his heart rate climbing, the brain activity readings that had been flat for months suddenly flooding with signal, and the bruises around his eyes faded and the colour returned to his skin.

Bruce Wayne's eyes opened.

He saw the ceiling first, then the lights, then the face hovering above him, and recognition hit him like a truck and he swung, his fist coming up off the bed in a straight right that connected with Ethan's jaw and did absolutely nothing, like hitting a wall, and the shock of the impact ran back up his arm and he pulled it back clutching his knuckles.

"BRUCE!" Robin shouted.

"BRUCE!" Batgirl screamed.

Bruce tried to sit up, tried to swing again, but Ethan touched his chest with one finger.

[Crystal Manipulation]

Crystal grew from the point of contact and spread across Bruce's lower body and arms in seconds, locking him to the bed in a shell of mineral that held him as firmly as any restraint, leaving only his head and shoulders free.

Selina was already at his side, her hands on his face, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Bruce, Bruce, you're awake, you're awake, oh god, you're awake, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry for all of it, I didn't have a choice, he said he would heal you if I helped him and I couldn't, I couldn't watch you die in that bed, I couldn't—"

Bruce looked at her and something moved across his face that was too complicated to read, anger and love and confusion and grief all at once, he couldn't reach for her because his arms were encased in crystal, so he just looked at her and didn't say anything.

Ethan turned away from the bed and faced the room.

"You see," he said, spreading his hands. "This is what is earned by loyalty. Selina came to me and she was honest, and in exchange I gave her the only thing she truly wanted in this world. Why fight when all that earns is death? Why resist when submission brings you everything you ever wished for?"

He looked around the room at all of them, the heroes pinned to the floor, the villains on their knees.

"The offer is open," he said. "To all of you just kneel to me. Accept me. And I will provide for you the way I have provided for everyone who has come to my side. A place. A purpose. A life in the world I am building. All you have to do is kneel."

The villains knelt first.

Black Mask went down on one knee without hesitation, his head bowed, and the Penguin followed a moment later, grunting as his knees hit the concrete. Their remaining men followed suit, one by one, heads bowing in a wave that spread across the room.

The heroes didn't move.

Renee stayed on her feet. 

Jim stayed on his feet. 

Robin and Batgirl stayed down because the telekinesis was holding them but their heads were up and their eyes were burning. Black Canary stayed standing with her chin raised. Dr Dorado clutched the weapon to his chest and did not kneel. Mira, swaying slightly where she stood, did not kneel.

Ethan looked at the kneeling villains for a moment. Then he raised one hand and gave a small gesture.

The Saviours opened fire.

Every kneeling figure in the room jerked and fell as the rounds tore through them, Black Mask pitching forward onto his face with three holes in his back, the Penguin toppling sideways, their men dropping one after another in a cascade of gunfire that lasted perhaps four seconds and then stopped.

"WHAT THE HELL!" Renee screamed.

"ETHAN," Bruce snarled from the bed, his face twisted with rage. "They surrendered, they KNELT, you told them to kneel and then you murdered them—"

"As if I would ever let a villain into my new world," Ethan said, turning back to him. "They were vermin. Every single one of them. Scum who would have sold me out the instant it suited them, the same way they sold out everyone who ever trusted them. I would sooner burn the world than share it with people like that." He smiled. "But the offer remains open for the rest of you. Genuinely. I have no desire to kill heroes."

He looked at Detective Chimp.

"Apart from you," he said.

Detective Chimp looked up at him from where he stood, barely three feet tall, surrounded by the bodies of the men who had knelt, and he straightened his jacket. "I'm flattered," he said.

"You should be," Ethan replied. "In another life you would have been the kind of mind I would have recruited. But you're too dangerous to leave alive. I cannot have you interfering in the world I'm building."

Detective Chimp adjusted his cap. "Before you kill me," he said, "indulge me in one question. How close were we? Really?"

Ethan was quiet for a moment, and then he held out his hand and the weapon that Dr Dorado was clutching flew from the doctor's arms and into Ethan's grip. He held it up and examined it, turning it over, studying the coils and the components.

"This was clever," Ethan said. "The theory is sound. Dr Dorado's understanding of the meta-gene cascade is, I'll admit, remarkably close to accurate, and if you had been able to fire this weapon at me with the correct calibration data loaded into it, there is a very real chance it would have worked."

He closed his fist around it and the weapon crumpled like tinfoil, the components shattering, the coils snapping, and he dropped the twisted remains on the floor.

"Unfortunately," he said, "I have been one step ahead of you the entire time."

"It seems so," Detective Chimp said quietly.

Ethan raised his hand, the fingers glowing with fire, and drew it back to end the chimp's life.

"ROBIN."

Bruce's voice cut across the room and Robin's head snapped toward the bed.

Bruce looked at him across thr atrium, his body locked in crystal from the chest down. 

"Tango-lima-seven-bravo-echo-niner-four-lima-charlie."

Robin's eyes widened.

Bruce locked eyes with him. "I know you'll do what's right," he said.

Then he spat something from his mouth.

The tiny capsule hit the floor and detonated into a cloud of thick white smoke that filled the entire atrium in less than a second, and the room dissolved into chaos. Black Canary moved first, throwing herself at the nearest Saviour and tearing the rifle from his hands before driving the stock into his face. Renee grabbed a fallen weapon and opened up on the line of Saviours coming through the side door. Jim Gordon, picked up a chunk of concrete the size of his fist and cracked it across the skull of the guard who'd been holding him and took the man's sidearm and started firing. Wildcat charged into the smoke with his fists up and started dropping Saviours.

Meanwhile Detective Chimp was already moving. He bounced off Ethan's body, using him as a springboard, the momentum carrying him up to a metal pipe that ran along the ceiling, and he swung from it and landed beside Robin and Batgirl and Dr Dorado. He bit his own wrist, hard enough to draw blood, and dropped to his knees and started smearing the blood across the concrete floor in precise symbols, curves and lines and patterns that glowed faintly as his fingers traced them.

"This is an everywhere portal, I've used my own life force to limit the places it will take you to Gotham. When it opens you take the doctor and you go through it and you don't look back."

"We can't leave everyone else—" Batgirl started.

"You have no choice," Chimp said. "The doctor is the most important person in the world right now. He is the only person alive who understands how to rebuild the weapon. If he dies, it's over. Everything is over. You protect him at any cost."

The smoke was already clearing.

Ethan swept his hand and the remaining white cloud blasted away in every direction, revealing the atrium in full, the dead villains on the floor, the Saviours regrouping, and the small knot of people huddled around a glowing circle on the ground.

"That was a cunning ploy," Ethan said. "But it doesn't matter." He turned and crossed the room in two steps and drove his arm through Wildcat's chest from behind, the old fighter's eyes going wide as the fist emerged from the front of his ribcage, and Ethan pulled it free and let the body drop.

Black Canary screamed and charged at him, but Mira threw herself between them, swinging a folding chair that she'd grabbed off the floor with both hands, the chair connected with the side of Ethan's head and shattered into pieces and did nothing at all.

"No!" Dr Dorado shouted from across the room.

Ethan looked at the girl standing in front of him, the remains of the chair hanging from her hands, and his nostrils flared as he drew in a breath. "Who are you?" he asked.

Mira didn't answer. 

Her entire body was trembling so badly she could barely stand but she didn't move.

"I can smell the trash you've put in your veins," he said, leaning closer with a sneer on his face. "The chemical residue is all through your system. But underneath that, underneath all the poison you've poured into yourself, I can see it. A meta-gene. You have an ability hiding in there somewhere."

"I can't wait to taste it..."

He reached his hand toward her chest.

BOOM

An energy blast caught Ethan square in the torso and hurled him backward across the atrium, his body slamming into the far wall hard enough to crack the concrete.

 Dr Dorado stood where he'd been with a compact energy weapon in both hands, something small and powerful that he'd had hidden inside his jacket the entire time, smoke curling from its barrel.

"RUN!" Dorado screamed, and he grabbed Mira by the arm and they sprinted toward the portal, the glowing circle on the floor now fully open and shimmering with light, and Dorado shoved Mira through it and she disappeared.

"Go!" Chimp shouted at Robin and Batgirl. "NOW!"

Robin and Batgirl threw themselves through the portal, the light swallowing them, and Chimp turned and grabbed Dorado's arm and they both stepped toward the opening.

[Rivets]

The black spines shot across the room and punched through both of them before they could cross the threshold, two through Chimp's back and one through his shoulder, three through Dorado's torso and one through his leg, pinning both of them in place a foot from the portal's edge.

Robin, on the other side, saw them stuck there and lunged back toward the light to grab them, but Batgirl caught him around the waist and hauled him backward with both arms. "NO," she screamed. "Robin, NO, you can't, if you go back through—"

"I'M NOT LEAVING THEM!" Robin roared, thrashing against her grip.

Chimp, pinned to the floor by the spines, looked at the portal and then at the doctor beside him. Dorado was coughing blood, the spines through his chest having found something vital, and his hands were pressed against the wounds.

"I can't get them free," Chimp said quietly. He looked through the portal at Robin's face on the other side. 

"It's up to you now..."

Then he raised his bloody hand and closed the portal.

On this side of the vanished portal, in the ruined atrium, Ethan peeled himself off the wall where the energy blast had thrown him and dusted the concrete dust from his shoulders and walked across the room to where the chimp and the doctor lay pinned to the floor.

He reached down and picked up Dr Dorado by the front of his coat and lifted him off the rivets, the spines sliding free of his body with wet sounds, and Dorado gasped and clutched at his wounds and looked up at Ethan's face through blurring vision.

"You created something remarkable," Ethan said. "In another world I would have hired you." He tightened his grip and Dorado's coat tore. "But this is not that world."

He killed the doctor quickly and when it was done he dropped what was left and turned to Detective Chimp.

The chimp was still alive, lying on the floor with the rivets through him, and he was looking up at Ethan with an expression that was, remarkably, something close to peace. "It was a good try," Chimp said. "For what it's worth."

Ethan picked him up by the neck, and the small body dangled in his grip, the deerstalker cap falling off and tumbling to the floor.

"For what it's worth," Ethan said, "you were the most interesting opponent I've ever faced. More interesting than Batman. More interesting than Superman. You had no powers, no abilities, no divine gifts. You were just intelligent. And you nearly beat me with nothing but that."

"Nearly," Chimp agreed.

Ethan tore his head from his body and dropped both pieces to the floor.

The screams that followed came from everywhere at once. Selina screamed and doubled over and Renee screamed and Jim Gordon roared and Black Canary collapsed to her knees.

"MONSTER!" Renee screamed, tears streaming down her face. "YOU'RE A FUCKING MONSTER!"

"You're insane," Jim said, his voice shaking. "You're completely insane, you murdered them all, they were trying to HELP PEOPLE—"

Ethan gestured with one hand and the Saviours dragged them all away, Jim and Renee and Black Canary, pulling them toward the exits by their arms, and Selina too, kicking and screaming.

"LET GO OF ME!" Selina shrieked, clawing at the hands holding her. "I DID EVERYTHING YOU ASKED! I GAVE YOU EVERYTHING! I BETRAYED THEM FOR YOU!"

"And I healed your lover," Ethan said, turning to look at her as she was dragged past. "Did I not? I kept my end of the bargain. You should be grateful."

"DON'T YOU TOUCH HIM!" Selina screamed, straining toward the bed where Bruce lay encased in crystal. "DON'T YOU GO NEAR HIM, I'LL KILL YOU, I SWEAR TO GOD I'LL—"

The door closed behind her and the screaming faded into the corridors.

"Don't worry, Selina," Ethan said quietly, walking toward the bed. "I won't hurt him."

He stopped beside the bed and looked down at Bruce's face.

"We're family, after all," Ethan said. "Funny isn't it? As it turns out I am part of the Kane family, the same family your mother came from. That makes both of us first cousins Bruce."

Bruce stared at him and didn't speak.

"When I put that bullet in your head at the harbour," Ethan continued, "I felt something I didn't understand at the time. An emptiness. A dissatisfaction that didn't match the victory. I'd won, I'd removed the greatest obstacle to my plan, and yet there was no pleasure in it. None. And I couldn't figure out why until much later."

He leaned closer.

"It was because you made my life thrilling, Bruce. You gave me something to push against. Something worthy of my attention. And killing you took that away from me, and the absence of it was worse than any enemy could have been."

He straightened up.

"So I'm not going to kill you. Not this time. I'm going to let you live, and I'm going to let you watch. Every stage of what comes next, every step of the new world being built, you're going to see it all, from a front-row seat, and you're going to understand that everything you spent your life fighting for was always going to end this way. With me."

He turned to the Saviour commander standing by the door. "Take him to the holding level and make sure he watches everything."

"Yes sir."

"And the others who escaped? Robin, Batgirl? Should we pursue?"

Ethan considered it for a moment. "No," he said. "They're a non-issue. Two children and a junkie with no resources, no weapons, no allies, and no way to rebuild what I just destroyed. They'll run and they'll hide and eventually they'll be found, but there's no urgency in it. Let them live with the knowledge of how completely they've failed."

He walked toward the hole in the ceiling and floated upward through it, rising into the night sky above the city.

"Now that the last of the opposition has been removed," he said to himself, "it's time for the plan to move forward. Soon, All for One will be defeated. And Ethan Kane will be remembered as a hero forever."

Below him, Gotham lay dark and broken and entirely his.

(AN: So here we have it, all for one has destroyed Task Force K and destroyed the weapon that was going to beat him. Now the only people left to confront him are Robin and Batgirl. Anyway hope you enjoyed the chapter.)