DC: All for One Chapter 37 — Missing Weapon (Patreon)

The Watchtower's command centre was louder than it had been in months but none of the noise was good.

Batman stood at the central console, the holographic display in front of him showing a real-time map of the western hemisphere with search grids overlaid in blue and areas already cleared marked in red. Flash's voice came through the comms from ground level.

"I've covered the eastern seaboard twice in the last hour, nothing, no visual, no sogn at all, if she's down here she's either in the air or somewhere else completely. I'm expanding the search radius to the midwest but honestly Bruce if she doesn't want to be found I don't know how much good running laps is going to do."

"Keep looking," Batman said. "Expand to the Gulf states if the midwest comes up empty."

"Copy."

Batman turned to the secondary display where John Stewart's face was visible on a comm link. "I've been trying to get the ring to lock onto her Kryptonian DNA signature for the last forty minutes," John said, his jaw tight. "The problem is that her genome is a hybrid, it's not pure Kryptonian, so the ring keeps flagging false positives. I'm refining the parameters but I can't promise a timeline."

"Keep working on it," Batman said.

"Will do. Stewart out."

The command centre door opened and Robin and Batgirl walked in with Shazam a step behind them, they took one look at the displays and the tension in the room and Robin's face went serious immediately.

"What's going on?" Robin asked.

Batman didn't turn around. "There was an attack in Metropolis. Diana and I responded and Thalia followed us down without authorisation."

"She came down to Earth?" Batgirl said. "On her own?"

"She arrived during the fight and engaged one of the hostiles." Batman paused for exactly one second. "And then Diana shouted at her. Told her she didn't belong there. Told her she was reckless and dangerous and that the world didn't need another child in a cape. Thalia left and hasn't come back and she's disabled the tracker I placed on her."

Robin's mouth opened and then closed. "How did she know how to disable the tracker?"

"I don't know. She's been developing new abilities on a weekly basis. Enhanced hearing, heat vision, it's possible she developed some form of enhanced perception that let her detect the device." Batman finally turned to face them. "The point is she's gone and we need to find her before she ends up in a situation she can't handle alone."

Batgirl shook her head slowly. "Bruce, Thalia wouldn't just leave like that over one argument. She's had arguments with Diana before. She's had tantrums, she's thrown furniture, but she's never left the station. What was different about this one?"

Batman was quiet for a moment.

"Earlier today I spoke with Diana in the training room about Thalia's Earth visits being postponed again. The conversation became heated. Diana said things about Thalia that were, difficult to hear.... she said Thalia should never have been born. She said we should have destroyed her when we found her in the tank."

Batgirl's hand came up to her mouth.

"Thalia's hearing has been getting better," Batman continued. "It's possible, likely, that she heard the conversation from wherever she was on the station. And then when she came down to Metropolis to try and prove Diana wrong, to show that she could be a hero, Diana tore her apart in front of everyone instead."

"That's not right," Shazam said from behind them. "Thalia is one of the nicest people on this station. She's sweet and she's funny and she tries so hard all the time and Diana just, she just crushed her? For trying to help? That's messed up."

Robin shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. "Where's Diana now?"

"Looking for Thalia as well. Though not because she's concerned for her safety. She's concerned about what Thalia might do unsupervised on Earth."

"She should be taken off the search," Shazam said immediately. "If she finds Thalia first it's just going to make things worse. The last thing that kid needs right now is Diana showing up."

"I tried," Batman said. "She refused."

The room was quiet for a moment.

Batman turned to Batgirl. "Did Thalia ever tell you about specific places she wanted to go on Earth? Anywhere she mentioned wanting to visit, anywhere she talked about?"

Batgirl thought about the conversation in the cafeteria. About her saying with absolute certainty that when she was free she was going to find her father.

But she didn't say that.

"There are a few places we could try," she said instead. "She talked about wanting to see oceans. Mountains. Normal things. Places she'd read about."

"Go," Batman said. "All three of you. Check every location she's ever mentioned. Talk to everyone who's had contact with her on the station and find out if she said anything to them that she didn't say to us."

They nodded and headed for the teleporter.

_____________________________________

Raven opened her eyes and the first thing she registered was that she wasn't in pain.

No pain.

Her back, which had been torn open by her brother's blast in the intersection in Metropolis, didn't hurt. Her palms. The constant ache that had lived in her bones for the past three months from the accumulated damage of running and fighting and never healing properly, all of it was gone.

The second thing she registered hit her like a bucket of cold water and she sat bolt upright on the bed with her heart slamming against her ribs.

She had fallen asleep.

She didn't know for how long, she didn't know where she was, she didn't know how she had gotten here, all she knew was that she had been unconscious and that meant they could have found her and that meant—

She threw the blanket off and swung her legs over the side of the bed and tried to stand but the room spun violently and her knees gave out. Though she managed caught herself on the edge of a wooden table beside the bed.

"You should remain lying down."

A figure appeared in the doorway of the small room, wearing a long hooded coat that shadowed his face.

"You had serious injuries when I found you," he continued, stepping into the room. "Lacerations across your back, three cracked ribs, severe dehydration, and a level of exhaustion that should have put you in a hospital. I was able to heal the physical damage but I cannot heal exhaustion. Your body needs rest."

Raven's head was swimming and her words came out slurred and running together. "You don't, you don't understand, I have to, I have to leave, they'll be coming, they track me when I sleep, everyone here is in danger, everyone in this, wherever this is, they'll kill everyone to get to me, I have to go, I have to—"

"I brought you back to my home," the cloaked man said. "You're in a slum outside the city. Nobody knows you're here and nobody is coming."

"You don't UNDERSTAND—"

He produced a small syringe from inside his coat and stepped forward and before she could react he pressed it against her arm and depressed the plunger.

"I need you to—" Raven started, and then the sedative hit her bloodstream and the room went soft at the edges and her grip on the table loosened and her eyelids dropped. "You don't, they'll, my brothers are—"

She was asleep before she finished the sentence.

Ethan caught her before she fell and lifted her back onto the bed and laid her down and pulled the blanket up to her shoulders.

He stood beside the bed for a moment and looked at her.

The forced empathy was pressing against the walls he had built around it, pushing hard... what was coming off this girl was intense. Even dialled down to its lowest setting the sadness that radiated from her was so deep and so pervasive that it bled through his defences and settled into his own chest and he found himself feeling it too. Not the full force of it, not the drowning flood that the ability had subjected him to a year ago, but enough. Enough that when he looked at her face, at the dark circles under her eyes and the hollowness in her cheeks and the tension that was still there even in unconsciousness, he felt something that was close to grief.

Her grief. But also, somehow, his.

He looked at her hands. Her fingernails were bitten down to the tips and the skin around them was raw and picked at.

The cloak she wore was purple and it was the most expensive thing on her body by a wide margin, the fabric was torn and filthy now but the weave of it was too fine and too unusual to be anything she had purchased. Everything else she wore beneath it was cheap and mismatched, likely picked up from charity bins or garbage or wherever she could find it.

She was a runaway.

That much was obvious.

The gem in her forehead was strange.

Up close he could see that it was embedded in the skin.

It was clear she was powered. Whatever the gem was and wherever she came from and whatever had been chasing her, there was something inside this girl that went beyond normal human capability.

He looked at her face again.

She was young and she had been alone for a very long time.

He stood there and watched her sleep and the sadness coming off her pressed against his chest again. He wondered what had happened to her and who had done it and why nobody had helped her before now.

She shouldn't have to experience such sadness.

Hmm...

Strange...

That was new.

Even after a year of living with the [Forced Empathy] and learning to manage it and slowly developing something that felt like it might be the beginning of understanding, he still found himself surprised by the new feelings he could experience through it.

He turned away from the bed and walked through the main room of his shack to the small workspace he had set up in the corner near the window. A wooden table held a collection of equipment that would have looked primitive to anyone who knew what Ethan Kane had been capable of building in his previous life, a mortar and pestle, a small distillation apparatus assembled from salvaged glassware, a hand-cranked centrifuge that he had built from bicycle parts and a kitchen mixer motor, and rows of glass jars and bottles filled with herbs and compounds and solutions that he had prepared over the past several months.

"Time to get to work," he said to no one.

He pulled up the stool and sat down and began the morning batch.

The medicine he made was simple compared to what he was capable of. He could have built a pharmaceutical lab from scratch if he'd wanted to, could have synthesised compounds that were decades ahead of anything on the market.

But the people in the slum needed basic things, antibiotics for infections, anti-inflammatories for pain, antiparasitics for the intestinal problems that were endemic in communities without proper sanitation, and they needed them in large quantities. Of course he had [Healing Touch] but there were thousands upon thousands of people in this slum so he couldn't help everyone.

So he made medicine.

He grew the raw ingredients in a small garden behind the shack using his [Plant Manipulation] to accelerate the growth cycles and optimise the alkaloid content, he processed them by hand because the manual work gave him something to do with his hands while his mind worked on other things, and he distributed the finished products through a network of local women on the hillside and who he trusted to get the medicine to the people who needed it most.

He ground dried bark in the mortar and pestle for twenty minutes and then filtered the resulting powder through a series of cloth screens to remove the coarser particles, and then he added it to a solution of distilled water and ethanol that he had prepared the night before and sealed the mixture in a glass bottle and labelled it with a strip of tape on which he wrote the dosage instructions in Portuguese.

He did this fourteen more times for fourteen different preparations, and by the time he was finished the table was lined with bottles.

He cleaned his equipment and put everything away and then he did something that the person he had been a year ago would have found incomprehensible.

He sat down and engaged in his self appointed hobby.

He drew a picture.

The sketchbook was cheap, purchased from a stall in the market below for the equivalent of two dollars, and the pencils were the kind that schoolchildren used, but none of that mattered. He had started drawing three months ago on the advice of no one and for no reason that he could rationally justify.

The person who had nursed him back to health had kept a small watercolour set in his cell that he painted with everyday.

Ethan never really understood art, but the man had told him that "The greatest art leaves you suspended between emptiness and infinity, feeling nothing you can name and everything you cannot."

He couldn't paint.

He had discovered that immediately.

His hands, which could build a fusion reactor and perform microsurgery and assemble a suit of armour from raw materials, could not make a watercolour painting that looked like anything other than a mess. The disconnect between his technical precision and his complete inability to produce something that felt right on the page had been so frustrating that he had almost thrown the whole set against the wall.

Instead he had switched to pencil and started with the only thing he knew how to draw, the ants.

He drew them now, sitting cross-legged on the floor with the sketchbook on his knee, his pencil moving across the page in slow careful lines as he tried to capture the way a leaf-cutter held its cargo above its head while it walked, the angle of the mandibles, the bend in the legs, the sense of motion that made the tiny creature seem like the most important thing in the world while you were watching it.

The drawing was not good.

Though it was better than the first ones he had done, which had been barely recognisable as insects, but it was still stiff and mechanical in a way that he couldn't seem to get past.

He could render the ant accurately, every segment and joint in the correct proportion, but the drawing didn't feel alive.

It looked like a diagram.

It looked like something from a textbook rather than art, the difference between those two things was the thing he was trying to learn.

He worked on it for an hour and then he set the sketchbook aside and picked up a book.

This was the other thing he did now that would have baffled his former self.

He read fiction.

Not for information. Not for tactical advantage. Not to study human psychology or to extract data about social dynamics.

He read it because the old man had given him a book during his recovery, a paperback novel in Portuguese about a fisherman who went out to sea and caught a fish and fought with it for three days, Ethan had read it expecting to learn something useful but he didn't get anything from it. It was in his opinion a waste of time, yet the old man had said it was one of his favourite books.

"Books ask for nothing but your time, then return it as a life you never had the chance to live."

That's what he had said. Ethan wanted to understand... but he didn't. He hoped one day if he read enough that he would understand what he meant.

He had worked his way through the small collection of books that could be found in the slum, borrowed and traded and occasionally purchased from the market, and he read them slowly, much more slowly than he read anything technical, because he was trying not just to process the information but to feel whatever the author had intended him to feel.

It wasn't easy.

The book he was reading now was about a family in a small town and nothing happened in it. Nobody died. Nobody fought. Nobody saved the world. The characters simply lived their lives and talked to each other and had small disagreements and small reconciliations and ate dinner together and worried about things that didn't matter, the whole thing should have been boring to someone who had once tried to reshape the course of human civilisation.

It wasn't boring.

He couldn't figure out why.

He read for another hour and then he put the book down and walked to the window and stood there for a while watching the children playing in the alleyway below and then he went and checked on the ants and noted that the colony in the second terrarium had started a new tunnel branch that was heading in an unexpected direction. He crouched down and watched them work on it for twenty minutes, his chin on his fist.

The shouting started while he was still watching the ants.

It came from the bed in the other room, and by the time he got there she was already half off the mattress, her legs tangled in the blanket, her hands clawing at the sheet, her eyes open but unfocused and glazed from the sedative that was still working its way through her system.

"Have to, have to go, they're coming, can feel them, they're close, have to—"

She tried to stand but her legs folded beneath her though Ethan caught her before she hit the floor, one arm under her shoulders. She thrashed against his grip with a strength that was surprising for someone in her condition.

"Let go, have to run, you don't understand, they'll kill you, they'll kill everyone here, my brothers are, they're demons, they'll tear this place apart looking for me and everyone in it will die, I have to LEAVE—"

"Stop," Ethan said, and he lifted her and placed her back on the bed firmly. "You are exhausted. Your body has been running on nothing for weeks, the fact that you can even form sentences right now is remarkable. You are not going anywhere."

"You're going to die if I stay here," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word. "Everyone is going to die. They always find me. Every time I stop, every time I try to rest—"

"You are speaking erratically," Ethan said. "Explain the problem to me. I cannot help if I don't understand what we're dealing with."

Raven looked at him, at the shadowed face inside the hood, at the icy blue eyes that she could just barely make out, and something in her shifted. It was automatic, instinctive, the empath in her reaching out to read him, to check, to verify that the person in front of her was who he appeared to be and not one of her brothers wearing another face.

The moment her empathy touched him she recoiled.

Fear. Panic. Sadness. Despair. All of it pouring into her in a torrent that was so intense she gasped and pulled back, but it wasn't coming from him. It was coming through him. He was reflecting her own emotions back at her, amplified, as if he was a mirror that caught whatever she was feeling and bounced it back at twice the intensity.

"You can feel emotions," she said, and there was real shock in her voice. "You're an empath."

Ethan's eyebrows rose slightly. "I can. How did you know that?"

"Because I just tried to read you and instead of your feelings I got a tidal wave of my own reflected back at me." She stared at him.

BOOM

An explosion shook the shack.

The walls rattled and the glass jars on the worktable clinked together and a section of roof vibrated hard enough to work one of its nails loose. From outside came the sound of screaming, civilians, the people of the slums running and shouting.

Raven's face went white. "They're here."

Ethan straightened up and walked to the corner, picked up his long coat and pulled it on and then he picked up a wooden staff that was leaning against the wall beside the door. It was a simple thing but it meant a lot to him, his hand closed around it and he headed for the door.

"They'll kill you," Raven said from the bed trying to move again. "You don't understand what they are. They're not human, they're demons. The only reason I'm alive is because they need me alive. They have no restriction when it comes to everyone else. If you go out there they will tear you apart."

"You need rest," Ethan said from the doorway without turning around. "Once you've gotten your strength back you're free to leave. But right now you're still exhausted and you shouldn't be worrying about these people." He shifted the staff to his other hand. "I'll handle them."

"You don't—"

But he was already gone.

Ethan walked out of the shack and into the path that ran between the houses on this level of the hillside and he looked up.

Two figures hovered above the slum, their red skin being very identifiable, they were both looking down at the maze of buildings and paths below them with expressions of contempt and amusement. The larger one was close to eight feet tall with a massive frame and four eyes that glowed red and a sword strapped across his back that was nearly as long as Ethan was tall. The smaller one was closer to Ethan's height and leaner, his fingers ended in claws that clicked together in front of him as he scanned the rooftops.

"COME OUT, LITTLE SISTER!" the large one bellowed, his voice shaking the walls of the buildings beneath him. "WE KNOW YOU'RE HERE. COME OUT NOW AND NOBODY ELSE HAS TO GET HURT."

"ACTUALLY," the smaller one called down with a grin that showed too many teeth, "PEOPLE MIGHT GET HURT REGARDLESS. IT'S BEEN A LONG TRIP AND WE'RE FEELING CRANKY."

"TRUE," the large one agreed. "TELL YOU WHAT, SISTER, COME OUT IN THE NEXT TEN SECONDS AND WE'LL ONLY KILL HALF OF THEM." He looked down at the slum and laughed. "HONESTLY WE'D BE DOING THEM A FAVOUR. LOOK AT THIS PLACE."

The smaller one cackled and a ball of red energy formed in his palm and he lobbed it casually at a cluster of shacks three levels below, and the explosion blew two of them apart and sent debris raining across the paths and the screaming got louder.

Ethan watched this from the path below.

Then he teleported.

He appeared in the air between the two of them, twenty feet above the rooftops, his coat billowing in the updraft from the fires below, and both of them jerked backward in surprise at the sudden presence of a human being floating in their space.

"What the—" the large one started.

Ethan placed a hand on each of their chests.

And teleported again.

When the world reformed around them they were standing in a clearing in the jungle beyond the city limits, thick vegetation on all sides and the sounds of the slum completely gone.

The two siblings stumbled as the teleportation released them and they looked around at the jungle clearing and then at each other and then at Ethan standing between them with his staff held loosely at his side.

"WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?" the large one snarled, his four eyes narrowing. "You dare touch one of Trigon's sons? You dare put your mortal hands on us? Do you have any idea what we are?"

"I would appreciate it," Ethan said calmly, "if you would leave the city and not cause any more problems for the people living there."

The smaller one stared at him for a moment and then burst out laughing. "Oh, this is wonderful. A mortal in a bathrobe with a stick is asking us to leave nicely. Brother, are you hearing this?"

"I'm hearing it," the large one said, and he drew the sword from his back. "And I find it hilarious. Tell you what, little mortal, you have five seconds to tell us where our sister is before I split you open from crown to crotch and use your entrails to decorate the nearest tree."

"After that," the smaller one added, floating to Ethan's left and cracking his knuckles, "we'll go back to that shithole and burn every single building to the ground. And when our sister crawls out of the ashes we'll drag her home by her hair."

Ethan looked at the large one and then at the small one and his expression behind the hood didn't change. "I'm asking you nicely," he said. "Please leave."

The large one lunged.

He was fast for his size, the sword coming down in a diagonal slash that would have cut Ethan from shoulder to hip, but Ethan sidestepped it so cleanly that the blade passed through the space where his body had been without disturbing the fabric of his coat. The large one adjusted and swung again, a horizontal cut aimed at Ethan's midsection, and Ethan leaned backward just far enough that the blade passed an inch in front of his stomach.

The smaller one came from behind, both clawed hands reaching for Ethan's head, Ethan ducked under them and stepped sideways and the smaller one's momentum carried him directly into the path of his brother's next swing. The large one pulled the sword back just in time to avoid cutting his own sibling in half and the smaller one squawked and tumbled past.

"STAND STILL!" the large one roared, and he brought the sword down in a two-handed overhead chop that cratered the ground where Ethan had been standing a fraction of a second before. Ethan was now three feet to the left, his staff still held at his side, he hadn't moved fast, he had simply moved at exactly the right time.

The smaller one recovered and came at him from the left with a series of claw strikes that were fast and vicious and each one missed by the width of a hair as Ethan turned and tilted and leaned around them, the claws cutting air, and then the smaller one overcommitted on a lunge and Ethan simply stepped aside and let him go past and the smaller one ran directly into the flat of the large one's sword as the large one was mid-swing and the impact sent the smaller one tumbling across the clearing.

"STOP HITTING ME!" the smaller one screamed at his brother.

"THEN STOP GETTING IN MY WAY!" the large one screamed back.

Ethan stood between them with his staff at his side. "I really would prefer if you just left," he said.

"I'M GOING TO RIP YOUR ARMS OFF AND BEAT YOU TO DEATH WITH THEM!" the large one bellowed, and he charged again and this time the smaller one came from the opposite direction and they tried to pincer him.

Ethan raised the staff for the first time and caught the large one's sword on the shaft with a crack that echoed through the jungle. The blade bit into the wood a fraction of an inch and stopped dead and the large one's four eyes went wide with surprise.

Unbeknownst to the demon Ethan had used [Telekinesis] to enhance the staff making it extremely strong.

Ethan twisted the staff and redirected the sword sideways, the large one stumbled with it and the momentum carried his arm across his body and the smaller one, who had been coming in from behind, ran directly into his brother's elbow and went down.

The large one roared and ripped the sword free and came at him with a rapid series of cuts and thrusts and Ethan blocked every single one of them on the staff, he moved through the sequence without attacking back, simply deflecting, redirecting, guiding the blade away from himself and letting the large one exhaust his own energy.

The smaller one got up and fired a blast of red energy from both hands, Ethan stepped to the side and the blast hit the large one in the back and he went face first into the dirt.

"SERIOUSLY?!" the large one screamed from the ground.

"IT'S NOT MY FAULT, HE MOVED!"

They came at him together again and Ethan blocked the sword on the staff and then rotated the staff and caught the smaller one's clawed hand with the other end and pushed both of them apart simultaneously, the two siblings stumbling away from each other. The smaller one tried a flying kick and Ethan ducked under it and the foot connected with the large one's chin and rocked his head back.

"You should practice fighting together more, your coordination is suboptimal..." Ethan commented.

"SHUT UP, MORTAL!"

"WHEN WE CATCH YOU WE'RE GOING TO PULL YOUR INTESTINES OUT THROUGH YOUR MOUTH AND MAKE YOU EAT THEM!"

"THEN WE'RE GOING TO TAKE YOUR SKIN AND WEAR IT AS A HAT!"

"A hat?" the large one said, looking at his brother. "That's your big threat? A hat?"

"I was going for creative!"

"It's not creative, it's weird—"

"Both of you," Ethan said, and his voice was louder now. He held the staff horizontally in front of him with both hands. "Please. I am asking you nicely. Leave. Go home. Whatever quarrel you have with the girl you found, resolve it through some means other violence."

The large one looked at him and then at the smaller one and they both grinned.

"Mortal," the large one said, "you have made a very entertaining diversion. But we are the sons of Trigon. We are demons of the highest order. And no human, no matter how clever he is with a stick, is going to tell us what to do."

Both of their eyes began to glow.

Twin beams of red energy erupted from all eight eyes simultaneously and converged on Ethan's position and the blast that hit him was enormous, a column of hellfire that tore through the clearing and incinerated the trees behind where he had been standing in a swathe of destruction that went back fifty metres.

When the beams cut off and the smoke cleared Ethan was standing in the same spot with his coat burned away and his staff held across his body, his tank top scorched but his skin beneath it untouched.

He sighed.

"How did you do it old man..." he said quietly.

"You made it seem so easy."

He looked at the staff in his hands and then at the two demons standing in front of him with their mouths hanging open.

"I really did try to ask nicely," he said.

[Muscle Augmentation]

[Strength Enhancer]

[Telekinesis]

The changes happened in a second, his frame thickening with dense muscle, the telekinetic field wrapping around his body and the staff in a shell of invisible force, and when the large one charged at him again with the sword raised Ethan caught the blade on the staff and this time the sword shattered.

The pieces of the blade spun away into the jungle and the large one looked at the hilt in his hand with all four eyes wide and then Ethan hit him in the chest with the end of the staff and the telekinetic force behind the strike launched him backward through the clearing and through four trees and into a fifth that held.

The smaller one came from behind and Ethan spun the staff in a full circle and caught him across the jaw and the impact lifted him off the ground and sent him cartwheeling through the air. Before he landed Ethan teleported beside him and drove the staff into his stomach and redirected him downward into the earth, the ground cratering beneath him.

The large one pulled himself out of the tree and charged again, his fists wreathed in red energy. Ethan blocked the first punch on the staff and the second on his forearm and then he grabbed the large one by his horn and pulled his head down and drove his knee up into his face three times in rapid succession, each impact snapping his head back, and then he swept the staff across his legs and took his feet out from under him and the large one went down on his back.

The smaller one erupted from the crater and came flying at Ethan with both hands blazing but Ethan teleported behind him and drove the staff into the back of his head and he dropped and Ethan caught him by the collar and threw him into his brother who was just getting up and they collided and went down in a tangle of limbs.

They got up together and charged him together and Ethan blocked the large one's fist with the staff and the smaller one's claws with his open palm and he stood there holding both of them at bay with one hand on each, the three of them locked in place for a moment.

"This is not—" he said.

The large one spat in his face.

Ethan sighed again.

He released them both and moved. The staff was a blur, hitting the large one across the ribs and then the smaller one across the face and then back to the large one's knee which buckled and then the smaller one's stomach which folded him and then both of them at the same time as he swept the staff in a wide arc that caught them both across the chest and threw them in opposite directions.

He didn't let them recover. He teleported to the large one first and drove the staff into the pressure points of both of his shoulders in rapid succession, the telekinetic force behind each strike dislocating the joints, and then he hit both of his knees and they gave out and the large one collapsed onto his face unable to move his arms or legs.

He teleported to the smaller one and did the same thing, shoulder, shoulder, knee, knee, four strikes in less than a second, and the smaller one went down in the same position, face down, limbs useless.

Both of them lay on the jungle floor, paralysed, unable to fight, unable to flee.

Ethan stood between them and planted the staff in the dirt and crouched down beside the large one.

"Can you get home on your own?" he asked.

"WHEN I GET MY STRENGTH BACK I'M GOING TO FIND YOU AND RIP YOUR—"

"I'll take that as a no."

"—HEART OUT AND FEED IT TO THE DOGS AND THEN I'M GOING TO FIND THAT LITTLE VILLAGE AND BURN IT TO—"

Ethan scratched his chin for a moment, thinking. Then he grabbed both of them by the backs of their clothing and teleported.

They appeared beside a wide muddy river that wound through the jungle about a mile from where they had been fighting. The water was brown and slow-moving and the banks were thick with vegetation.

[Ice Manipulation]

A flat-bottomed boat of solid blue ice formed on the surface of the river, roughly ten feet long and three feet wide, and Ethan lifted both paralysed siblings and laid them inside it side by side, arranging them so they were looking up at the sky.

"The paralysis will wear off eventually," Ethan said, stepping back from the ice boat and giving it a gentle push into the current. "The ice should last for a while. I suggest you use that time to reconsider your priorities."

"I WILL FIND YOU!" the large one screamed from the boat as it drifted into the current. "I WILL FIND YOU AND I WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU LOVE!"

"YOU HAVEN'T HEARD THE LAST OF US, MORTAL!" the smaller one added. "WHEN FATHER HEARS ABOUT THIS HE'LL—"

"Goodbye," Ethan said, and he waved as the ice boat caught the current and began to drift downstream, the screaming and the threats getting fainter as the river carried them around a bend and out of sight.

He stood on the riverbank for a moment listening to the jungle sounds come back now that the fighting was done, and then he teleported back to his shack.

Raven was on the floor.

She had made it approximately four feet from the bed before her strength had given out and she was crawling toward the door with one arm extended, dragging herself across the wooden floorboards.

Ethan sighed and walked over and bent down and picked her up and carried her back to the bed and set her down for the third time.

"Rest," he said. "Once you've gotten your strength back you can leave. But right now you need to stay in this bed."

She looked up at him and her flat, guarded expression cracked slightly. "You should be dead. My brothers are, they're not, ordinary people can't fight them. How did you—"

"Don't worry about that," Ethan said. "Just focus on healing."

"What did you do to them."

"I got rid of them."

Raven stared at him. "You got rid of them?"

"Yes," Ethan confirmed.

Raven continued to stare at him with an expression that was equal parts disbelief and exhaustion. "They'll come back and they'll bring more of them and they'll—"

"Then I'll get rid of them again," Ethan said. "Now please go back to sleep..."

Raven opened her mouth and then closed it.

"I can't fall asleep," she said after a moment. "When I do my mental defences drop and they can track the signal my mind puts out. That's how they keep finding me. No matter where I run, no matter how far I go, the moment I fall asleep they lock on and they come."

Ethan nodded slowly and walked across the room to a wooden chest in the corner that he opened and began sorting through. The chest was full of objects that looked like the contents of an inventor's workshop, small metal devices and circuit boards and coils of wire and components that Raven couldn't identify.

Ethan pulled out a band of metal about an inch wide with a small electronic module attached to it, a simple circuit board with a tiny power cell and a series of micro-antennas soldered to the surface. He turned it over in his hands and checked the connections and then walked back to the bed.

"This should block the signal you're putting out," he said, holding it up. "It generates a localized interference pattern that disrupts outgoing psionic frequencies within a radius of approximately three metres from the wearer."

Raven's flat expression shifted into scepticism. "How. How would you even have something like that. And how would you know anything about psionic frequencies."

"My empathy ability has no off switch," Ethan said. "When I first acquired it, the input from everyone around me was so overwhelming that I couldn't sleep. So I built this to block my own ability. I don't need it anymore because I've developed better control, but the device still works."

"You built a psionic dampener," Raven said slowly.

"The principle is straightforward. Psionic energy operates on a specific frequency band. Interfere with that band and the signal can't propagate beyond the interference radius. It's not complicated."

"It's extremely complicated."

"It's science," Ethan said. He held the band out to her. "Put it on. If it works the way it did for me, you'll feel your empathic awareness go quiet. Which means the signal your brothers are tracking will go quiet too. And then you can sleep."

Raven looked at the device in his hand and then at his face and the scepticism was still there but underneath it was something else, the desperate hope that it would work.

She took it and placed it around her wrist.

The effect was immediate. Her empathic sense, which had been a constant background noise for as long as she could remember went silent. As if someone had flipped a switch and turned the entire emotional spectrum off.

She stared at the band on her wrist and then at Ethan. "That's not possible," she said, and for the first time since he had found her the flat monotone broke completely and there was genuine astonishment in her voice. "That shouldn't be possible. My empathy is innate, it's part of my nature, it's tied to my heritage, no technology should be able to—"

"And yet," Ethan said.

She looked at the band again and then back at him and then she lay down slowly on the bed, the pillow beneath her head, and she stared at the metal ceiling, and the silence inside her own head, the beautiful, impossible silence, was the most extraordinary thing she had experienced in years.

"You're free to rest now," Ethan said. "Take as long as you need. When you wake up, if the device has worked, your brothers won't know where you are. And if they come back anyway I'll deal with them."

Something that might have been the ghost of a smile crossed Raven's face. It was gone so fast that anyone else would have missed it.

She closed her eyes.

After a moment she opened them again. "What's your name?"

He paused for a second. "People call me Doctor around here, but my name is Ethan," he said.

She looked at him for a long moment and something moved behind her eyes. "I'm Raven," she said.

She closed her eyes again.

Within seconds her breathing had evened out and deepened and the tension drained from her face and her body relaxed into the mattress and she was asleep, truly asleep, for the first time in months.

Ethan stood beside the bed and watched her for a moment. Then he walked back to the corner and sat down in front of his terrariums and watched the ants.

(AN: So as you can see Ethan is quite a deal different than he was, why is that? Who could've had such a profound effect on him. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)