As the seventh inning stretch neared between the Gotham Knights and the Central City Diamonds, I felt an incredible mix of emotions.
Anxious. Even with increased police and security presence from our prior warnings, there were still a few thousand fans. If things went down the way we expected, evacuations would be complex. What favors the League must have pulled behind the scenes to allow the city to host the event at all, I wasn't sure.
Ecstatic. This was my chance to prove to Bruce Wayne that I was worthy of notice. Who wouldn't be incredibly excited at the prospect? While I had no right to think my intervention to save him would be necessary – Batman could save himself from some would be biker gang with alien tech – he likely could not intervene without risking his cover being blown.
Angry. Not at the situation, not at the other sidekicks, but at the risks involved. This was not some damn comic where people would magically survive if their alien tech aimed toward the crowd. As someone who has witnessed alien tech in the wrong hands? As someone who lost their damn mother to it? It was a hard pill to swallow that the others were willing to try this method at all.
I watched the game from the nosebleeds – I had a good view of the giant screen and good overwatch over the most likely entrances for this gang. I had my speed to fly down and intercept anything that might be too dangerous – the second something was off, I could be there in mere moments. I was not Flash fast on the ground, or even Flash fast in the atmosphere, but I was convinced I could get there in a relative time to Kid Flash.
The redhead was waiting outside the stadium, ready to intercept if they tried to get away or if they tried to interrupt the game in biker style. Either way, he could be there in moments too to assist. The kid was far too excited at the prospect of working without Barry Allen breathing down his neck, which he'd all but said over the radio ear bud in my ear a couple dozen times.
Meanwhile, I knew what Robin was planning but not where he was. Which was mildly frustrating to make a plan around, but he swore he could easily hijack the security of the stadium, alert the attendees to escape, and signal to the police to begin the evacuation – hopefully before any shooting began.
All in all, it was a decent enough plan.
"Gabriel," I spoke into the Plumber badge, "Why is the Flash not here? Superman could be here in seconds, the Lanterns too."
I had not been privy to the conversations Robin had with his mentor about the response from the Justice League. The Boy Wonder had assured me that the heroes were involved, but they were not here. Things were… not adding up, to say the least. About this event, about the sidekicks, about what they were doing about me. I'd expected to see one of the damn Greens by now.
"I don't know, but I don't like it," the man answered, voice buzzing through the computer. "It's almost like they wanted this to happen."
I rolled my eyes. "Of course they did – Bruce Wayne is practically bait-"
"No, no," Gabriel assured. "You."
My heart skipped a beat.
"They're testing me."
"Maybe, maybe not. It's important to impress, regardless."
Hmmm.
Had I already failed in Batman's eyes? In the League's eyes? Maybe I shouldn't have insisted on the police presence – would it impress more that I helped the other two sidekicks handle this ourselves? Or less because it would show reckless disregard for the civilians involved?
They were already doing that by allowing the event to happen at all.
…
Or maybe they didn't have the influence the comics and cartoons wanted you to believe they did.
My thoughts halted as the crowd erupted into shouts of applause and cheered. A pinch hitter smashed a homerun, sending the Stars into a narrow lead as three passed home-plate. The thunderous noise masked my nervousness, and I readied myself for the end of the inning.
We were convinced this was where and when it would happen. Mere minutes from now, they'd make their move and challenge the stadium's security. Parade themselves out, grab Wayne during his speech, and then leave when none could put the force to stop 'em.
So when Bruce Wayne walked out onto the field to make his big announcement, I gripped the concrete and held back the pull, ready to leap into the fray at a moment's notice.
The man was tall, broad-shouldered, and every woman's dream. With a jawline that could cut glass and a posture that suggested confidence but a false buzz of inebriation, his behavior befit the playboy he masked himself to be. He wore more casual clothing than I'd expected, a white button up that was open to show the top of his chest and black slacks for a matching suit jacket that likely was worth more money than a year of car payments.
Alongside him were his own security detail, entirely unnecessary, as he paraded toward the announcer for the afternoon's affair, a young city councilor who likely wanted to end the night in Wayne's bed. She introduced him to stunning applause, and the folks around me whispered salacious rumors about his torrid affairs.
"Good afternoon, Central City!" He shouted into the mic with the cadence of a rock star. The crowd went nuts. "You might be wondering why I've come here today, so far from my old haunts in Gotham." Giggles all around. "If you've paid attention to the news, you may have seen the rumors. I am here to confirm them, and more!"
I hadn't seen the rumors, but from the reaction, some must have.
"Wayne Corporation will break ground on a new industrial facility here in February!" Excited cheers abound, and he listed off potential job numbers in the thousands. "To celebrate that and to inject some good into the community, I will be donating five million dollars to S.T.A.R. Labs, leading scientific researchers across the nation and the real stars in Central City. I hear their biggest projects may soon impact the community at large, and it is my honor to-"
An alarm blared, and an evacuation order scrawled across the every electronic screen display throughout the arena. "This is not a drill. CCPD emergency evacuation is in effect. Follow the nearest exit protocols and keep your heads down!"
I became concrete immediately, the buzz of the material running through my ears, across the skin. I could feel the energy coursing through it, vibrations from the sounds of thousands of fans moving in confusion. Police and security started to escort people to safety, and tense guns rose into the air, just as ready as I was to intercept.
A trio of motorbikes burst through a set of exterior doors, leading toward the tunnels for the backstage areas of the venue. Each held a female rider of a different colored leather outfit – red, blue, and yellow. They cut through the grass, ruining the field, and each immediately tossed something into the air behind them.
The tossed packages expanded a mere moment later, even as the Wayne security detail engaged with gunfire and to get their boss to safety. There were dozens of yards between them and the safety of the venue, and they had nothing in their loadout that could compete with the alien tech.
A trio of drones, each at least two stories tall, assembled out of their tossed packages. They matched the color of their riders, and they were brimming with the kind of energy most human tech could not possibly match. Tendrils of appendages stretched from their main bodies, holding what might be blasters and blades and other implements. Bullets ricocheted off of their armor uselessly, and I didn't wait to move.
A concrete-covered fist struck the azure armored drone a half-second later, leaving barely a dent. The machine responded with a cord wrapped around my midsection to try to toss me, but I zapped it away with a neural shock blast from my eyes and then readied for their next counter attack.
"Mr. Wayne! Get to safety!"
I didn't wait for a response, snapping my arms in front of my head to disperse a superheated plasma blast from the yellow drone. Fuckkk that hurt. I lost sight of the red one, but could hear it moving somewhere behind me, getting into position.
"Look, Rojo! The idiot actually showed!" the woman in yellow shouted.
The one in red, helmet covering most of her face, leveraged a pistol in one hand and a crowbar in the other. She turned to her compatriot with a glimmer of a smile on her face. "Guess they were right! Fuckin' fantastic. Let's get 'im!"
I tilted my head in Bruce's direction, and the man hesitated as his detail pulled him closer to safety. They'd turned their attention to me, which was what I'd wanted, but they were outright ignoring him. When the blue-leather-clad woman readied her pistol and fired, it was toward me, not him.
I was the target.
Me.
This… This was strange.
CENTRAL CITY
JUNE 16, 16:29 UTC -5
TEAM YEAR ZERO
Robin navigated through the throng of fleeing crowd members in a way only one trained by Hailey's Circus could – the Grayson way. He balanced across makeshift paths over their heads, zipping from line to line from his grappeler. It was easy to avoid notice for the most part while people were running for their lives, and Robin moved as swiftly as he could so that his presence did not distract anyone from getting to safety.
When he emerged into the heart of the arena, climbing atop one of the stands near the home dugout, he surveyed the ongoing battle with surprise. Wally zipped to and fro, engaging not with the enemy but with carrying people who were unfortunate enough to have not fled on sight out of harm's way. Dick knew that tired him out more than usual running would, but he would recover. The yellow blur on the ground was faster than the golden brown blur in the air, as Cassian tried to aerial dodge three powerful alien drones.
Dick would have to check the Batcomputer, but he didn't recognize this Intergang tech. It was either not used often or was new, and that worried him. What else could they have? These things were bad enough, and this new teen cape had done little permanent damage to any of them.
On the plus side, his mentor was out of sight. "Robin to Batman – are you safe?"
Instead of the usual response, the voice of the playboy came over the feed. "That was insane, huh? Good thing you all moved as quickly as you did. Let's get to a place to hide this out."
Bruce wasn't alone, not able to talk directly to Robin.
But he was safe.
Robin watched the battle unfold for a few more seconds, trying to ascertain weaknesses or exploits he may utilize. The biggest weakness in this plan were not the drones, but were instead the bikers. The trio of woman fired potshots toward the police, hiding behind makeshift cover and the smoke and dirt clouds left in the wake of the alien tech. Cassian had, intentionally or no, pulled the killer robots away from the bikers, and Robin had an opening.
He grappled toward the electronic scoreboard, hook catching in the glass, and yanked his body across the field. He flipped toward them, tucking his head and limbs to be a smaller target in case they fired on him before he got into position, and landed among them.
"Hey, chicas! You got a permit to own those things?"
As the nearest one – the woman in blue – wheeled on him, he was already in motion. An arm gripped her wrist and twisted the gun into the air, where it fired harmlessly. He kicked upwards in nearly the same moment, his knee impacting with the underside of her chin. She went skittering several feet and then fell onto her back.
A crowbar hit him square on the shoulder, a maneuver that would have instead hit his head had he not ducked. Wincing, Robin tossed an explosive disc to create some distance, the device popping with non-lethal force at the ground beneath the red-clad woman's feet. He back-flipped onto the pitcher's mound, eyes flickering upward to see a Cassian coated in the same metal as the yellow drone.
His totally-not-heat-vision erupted from his eyes in a crackle of green light. It did some damage to the carapace of these drones, but nothing debilitating yet. Robin made a move toward his belt to help Cassian, but instead had to drop a smoke pellet, flipping away from the gunfire where he once stood.
"Looks like the Golden Whelp has friends," the woman in red teased, lazily brandishing a gun in hand while the other brushed off singed areas where the exploding disc had ruined her clothing. "Asshat thinks that will help."
Robin would normally quip back – against gangsters and thugs, the stakes were low enough he could afford to be more unserious. But this had all become real rather fast, and while those drones dealt with Cassian, Robin could be a target of one of their weapons at any time.
Instead, the Boy Wonder grappled toward one of the camera wires above them, dangled from it, and then tossed three electric discs toward the fray. Two aimed true and channeled the yellow and blue woman with all the power of a Tazer, while the third impacted toward its real destination: the engine block of the nearest discarded bike.
The result was explosive, spreading debris, smoke, and heat throughout the field. One of their easy methods of escape down. The reaction from the trio? Two were too busy convulsing, while the red-themed biker cursed at the destruction of her ride.
Robin, crouched atop the wire, surveyed the carnage and grimaced when the blue drone twisted its attention toward him. He tossed one of his biggest ordinances toward the robot and dove toward the ground in the same moment, not waiting to see if the explosion did any damage at all. The smoke clouded its sensors long enough to give him an opening, and he pressed a finger toward his communicator.
"KF, any chance we can whip up an EMP?!"
It was their best shot to take them down before they could do more damage, but setting one up might be beyond their capability.
"Doubt it, Rob, unless you got something in your belt that I don't know about?"
Robin laughed – there was always some tool, device, or machine that only he would know he had. A convenient electromagnetic pulse field generator was not in his repertoire.
Cassian interrupted even as he took the brunt of a saw blade to the metallic face and ignored a cut to his cheek. "I can't- g-get a clean shot. Can keep 'em busy!"
Kid Flash zipped across the pitcher's mound and disarmed each of the three women in but a moment's notice. He stopped to celebrate, stopped to gloat, and Robin saw it coming. A plasma bolt struck the speedster's arm, singed armor and flesh, and his best friend flew back and landed in a heap six yards away, guns scattering to the ground.
"You can't win!" Cassian shouted toward the women, the two struck by his electric discs starting to recover, climbing to their knees. "You're about three minutes away from the police intervening en masse, cutting off your exits. I doubt you'll be able to take me down, capture me, kill me, whatever you wanted to do to me, and also avoid prison. I don't know what Intergang wanted with you, but this was a failure on all damned accounts."
Robin had to agree, though he only just connected the dots that they were not after Bruce at all. It was all a ploy to get to Cassian. What did Intergang want with this kid?
The drones continued their onslaught, and it was surprising just how tough Cassian was. Bruises, burns, and more were visible beneath fragments of his metallic armor that had broken away, so he was not impervious to harm. Robin supposed someone like Superman would be having a cakewalk with these things, but Cassian's powers did not seem to have the same benefits. Either way, he had yet to go down, had yet to slow, had yet to show signs of weakness.
"Fly one of them out of here!" Kid Flash shouted.
"And leave the other two to deal with you?"
"We can handle it!" Robin agreed, ready to face the odds. He'd faced worse.
Cassian looked uncertain, but when the yellow drone tried to blast him with a cryo-gun, the kid grimaced and then launched himself fully toward the drone's segmented mid-section. A blast of green light from his eyes burned away one of the drone's appendages before it could strike him, and then he flew.
Nowhere nearly as quickly as they'd seen him fly, but the boy dragged the robot through the air as high as he could manage, as fast as he could manage. Robin lost track quickly, because he had to turn his attention back toward the remaining drones. They'd turned back to fire their laser rifles toward the two sidekicks, and the boy realized that they had a true fight on their hands.
CENTRAL CITY
JUNE 16, 16:41 UTC -5
TEAM YEAR ZERO
I did not stop until upper atmospheric ice started to coat the metallic carapace of the insect-like drone's armor, until it started to coat my own metallic armor. I pulled to gain more, to reshape the holes in my defenses, and I was convinced that in a battle of attrition, I'd win.
But I needed a decisive move.
And that was a smart one – Kid Flash had a good mind for it, and I hadn't considered this. Time would tell if it was the right decision, because I really hated the idea of leaving two teenagers alone to fight super robots. As storied as the pair were in the comics, those were real kids. Almost as much a child soldier as I had been, at least physically. I couldn't assume anything about their backgrounds, about what they had or hadn't done for their respective mentors. For all I knew, I'd fly down there, and Robin would be dead.
The feeling left a pit in my stomach that I couldn't focus on at all.
The killer robot continued to try to kill me, and I'd destroyed two of its appendages already. With the added frost building on its body, I released another burst of light from my eyes. I had enough energy in me for maybe two more of those shots, or one more big shot, and it would have to fucking count. When the smoke settled, I'd bored a small hole through to its internal mechanisms, in time to pass through the final cloud layer.
"I don't know if you're alive in there, or just a drone," I muttered, "but I can't be bothered to give a shit right now."
I reached back and slammed a metallic fist through to its interior mechanisms. Gyros, power cores, wires, pistons, and complex alien hardware I couldn't begin to understand? All were crushed in a matter of moments, and the sweet sound of its failing power systems and eventual fall through the air was as relieving as it was tiring.
I pulled on the largest pieces and tossed them higher, higher, higher, hoping to at least clear the city when it eventually fell back to the earth. Wherever it landed was in the universe's hands now, and if I'd had the true time, I'd finish the flight into space and leave it in the debris cluster.
With a snapping of my speed into overdrive, I careened back toward the Earth, back toward Central City down below, and arrived mere moments later in a flurry of dust. I flipped mid-air, bleeding some momentum but not all of it, and ended my movement with a powerful stomping kick into the blue drone's central apparatus. It exploded into pieces, showering the baseball field and the nearest empty stands with debris.
Kid Flash spun Robin out of the way of the red robot's attack, and the latter threw some kind of explosive that did no damage to its back. A mere distraction, most likely. The red-hued biker, seeing my return and the destruction of the blue drone, raced toward the red robot and shouted, "Carry me out of here!"
It was desperation.
Pathetic, really, because I'd proven already that I could keep up. Hell, Kid Flash could keep up with it on the ground.
I aimed my neural shock blasts, pouring the last of my reserves, into the drone. The armored exterior crumpled under the green energy's assault, melted into a hunk of useless armor. The biker – Rojo, I thought – did not have time to stop her dash toward the machine and was mere inches away when one of Robin's explosive discs struck a power core. The whole drone exploded into smithereens and fire.
I hadn't intended that. Hadn't expected that, and perhaps I'd managed to hit a weaker spot this time. An unlucky chain reaction that showered her with shrapnel, cutting and burning through her clothing, and leaving her in a smoking crater where the machine once stood.
"She has a pulse," Kid Flash confirmed after he raced over to check on her.
"Good work, dude," Robin muttered, eyes glancing toward the three downed women. "They're about to have a lengthy stay in Iron Heights."
…
They deserved something worse than that.
"Yeah, sure," I said noncommittally, mind ablaze with frustration about this whole situation, about what it meant, about why Intergang wanted me. The only place with answers might be back in New York, because clearly I'd pissed them off something fierce for them to give this much of a crap. "I'd better get going. It was nice meeting you-"
"You can't just leave," Kid Flash declared.
"Our mentors are going to want to meet you," Robin added. "And there's a chance the threat isn't over. Might be more of the gang out there."
"And there might be more of those drones on my home turf," I answered simply. "They were after me, not Bruce Wayne. There's bound to be trouble brewing, and if they were willing to send three bikers with three super-tech drones in an asinine plan like this, there could be far worse waiting out there."
Robin considered the point for a moment, a contemplative look on his face beneath his domino mask. "Maybe, maybe not, but that's what the League is for. Even if the villains are down for the count, there're investigations to be done, conversations to have. This will lead to information that can help you. Throwing all that away right now feels like the wrong move."
I relented the point.
Not because I necessarily agreed with him fully, but because I made this bed.
I had wanted the League's attention. I had wanted to prove useful to them, to meet the sidekicks, to create an in for further discussions. To prove my problems were worth devoting time and effort to, even a half a universe away. Osmos V wasn't safe from the Reach. Earth wasn't safe from the Reach. Hell, nowhere was safe from plenty of alien empires that undoubtedly existed. The Plumbers, the Green Lantern Corps – if they weren't going to properly police warfaring intergalactic powers, the Justice League could help.
Well, I succeeded. I got the League's attention. They allowed this to happen, allowed the three sidekicks to handle this situation ourselves. Bruce Wayne was literally right there, and he didn't suit up to stop the bikers before they could even create their stupid scheme.
I had been both the bait and had been tested at the same time.
I was the center of attention between two opposing forces.
"Fine," I muttered as the police began to address clean-up, began to handle the aftermath, began to escort the women and any other injured victims to recieve medical attention. I had several cuts, bruises, burns and more, but I could settle with the pain for now. "I want to meet them."
And I did.
Just maybe not while I had a nervous pit in my stomach.