Infinity Island
June 27, 8:58
Two Ra's al Ghuls.
I whipped my head between the one on the ground and the one rising out of the pit and stepped back, hand resting my gun. My confusion deepened further when the new Ra's arms began to melt and drip like wax.
Its facial features and the rest of its body followed suit. When it fully left the pit and stood on the edge of the coffin, what little pale skin remained turned into brown sludge and dripped down as well.
The mud creature looked around, ignoring me. While it did so, the dripping earth that constituted its form stopped flowing downward and rebounded, coalescing together. It shifted like clay being molded with invisible hands and an imperfect duplicate of Talia took the monster's place.
Imperfect because some parts were mud and others were skin. It descended the steps, leaving a trail of wet earth before it clutched its head as though in agony.
It lost control of itself and consequently the transformation, the slim form of Talia coming undone.
Having put distance between myself and this mud monster, I changed the designation I had in mind for it to Clayface when it ballooned and grew into the recognizable monster Batman routinely had to deal with.
'How the hell is Clayface here?'
"TAAALLLLIIIAAAAA!!!!" the monster spread his arms wide and screamed.
'That's how.'
"TAALLIIAAA!!" He shouted again and turned around in my direction. "WHERE IS TAALLIIAA!!" he bellowed again, trudging in my direction. Splotches of mud went flying, joining with his large footsteps to ruin the picture perfect room I came to find.
Memories of Clayface and the methods to defeat him flashed through my mind, and I settled on the one readily available to me. I left my gun in its holster and raised my hand in the earthen monstrosity's direction.
Thin arcs of blue electricity began to dance over my hand, more and more joining with each passing millisecond. Keeping the arcs tightly under control, I let them gather into a nearly indistinguishable mass of energy before jutting my hand forward.
A stream of pure energy twice the width of my hand crossed the distance like a laser and pierced Clayface in the chest. It burrowed into him before spreading all over his form, erratic blue lines arcing all over him.
He stopped in his tracks and screamed, his gigantic body sagging to the floor. Seeing no need to magnify the voltage or current, I maintained the steady stream until he turned into a steaming puddle that hugged the floor like a carpet.
The air in the chamber stunk of ozone and wet earth, its nature as an enclosed space not helping the situation. Taking a few steps back to avoid stepping into the puddle, I waved the space in front of me to disperse the steam, contemplating how to deal with him.
A beep came from my watch and I put him out of mind briefly. I checked the notification and found that Ra's mind had been fully mapped. Good. It was time for the next step.
But first, I had to deal with this monster. Couldn't let him recover and mess things up. He'd already disrupted things enough as is.
"Mike, prepare a cryo grenade and send it over."
"Preparing now."
"Thanks."
We were still ironing the kinks out, but the grenade should be enough for what I had in mind. I couldn't deploy it here though. It might freeze everything over, including me and the pit. For now, the taser rounds would have to do.
Quickly calibrating the ones in my gun to go off only when specific conditions were met, I fired two of them into the puddle and put him out of mind for the time being.
If he moved even an inch, one of the rounds would unleash its payload. Since they were brute rated, I had no worries that he'd be able to overcome them. In the unlikelihood that he did, Spider Sense and my lightning implants would be waiting.
Specific Immunity and Diplomatic Immunity both took me off guard when I first got them, especially the first one. I had a suit with an inbuilt forcefield, that was also immune to EMPs, and resistant to electric shocks.
My innate durability hadn't even entered the equation. So why did I have to fear electricity? And what was the point in making me immune to it?
Suffice to say, the momentary bout of reduced intelligence didn't last when I started to consider possible uses for the ability. That is how I ended up with my first cybernetic implants.
Tiny contraptions I'd injected into various points in my body, each packed to the brim with almost every technological advancement in my arsenal. It was honestly a bit trippy, knowing I packed enough energy to power multiple cities.
Of course, fielding that power came with its own issues. I was immune to electricity, not its byproducts. The most destructive being heat. I was more resistant than most due to my mutate status, but too much would cook even me.
A workaround was already being designed, but for now, this would be enough.
Ra's was still under, but I didn't know if he'd stay that way when I tossed him into the pit. Common sense dictated that if the pit could restore the dead to life, heal any illness, and repair the most grievous of wounds, sedatives weren't going to fare any better.
And so with the gun in hand, I lifted Ra's with a single arm and lowered him into the pit, gently, so as to not cause a splash. It took mere seconds for it to do its magic.
The defeated Demon's Head broke through the green surface with a splash, spraying the restorative liquid everywhere. The waters rolled down his hair, face, beard and chest. He screamed and launched himself at me, earning himself three to the chest.
With a smooth side step, I moved out of the way and his lunge brought him to the floor, hard. Checking my watch to ascertain the state of the Soulkiller nanites, I said out loud, "Are you just gonna stand there and watch?"
"What I do is my business, Spider," answered Talia before climbing down the stairs to join me in the chamber.
"Sure," I looked up from the watch and waved in her father's direction. "Are you gonna kill him?"
"Will it even matter?"
"You can't kill him, can you?"
She said nothing and looked away from me, gun coming free. She pointed it straight at him and a muffled but fairly loud click went off in the enclosed space. Just when I thought she was done, a few more went off until I was certain Ra's was deader than dead.
"Well," I looked up from the bloody scene on the tiled floor to Talia. "Color me surprised."
A scoff was all I got before she turned around to leave.
"Did you kill everyone? And also, care to explain how Clayface got here?"
"Clayface? Is that what that is?" she paused, eyeing the puddle with an over the shoulder look. "And how come you don't know?" she asked and fully turned around. "I thought you knew everything."
"Not everything. Now are you gonna answer or…"
No answer. She gave the puddle a glance that was a bit too long and finally left. Not too bothered, I focused on what I came here to do originally. Dropping Ra's in the pit had cleared the nanites from his system, meaning I had to dose him again.
No biggie. I had more than enough samples to burn. First however, I had to make sure his brain was whole. Carefully avoiding the blood, I saw electrical sparks arc over Clayface in the corner of my eyes.
Pausing just in case of any mishap, I waited until the mud stopped bubbling. When it finally calmed down, I picked up and lowered Ra's into the pit again and we did the previous song and dance.
Only this time, he seemed more mindless and berserk than before. None of that mattered where the almighty taser rounds were concerned. He fell to them just like the first three and received another cranial injection of Soulkiller.
We were going to repeat this until I obtained all his memories, corrected every error in his copied experiences, fixed any gaps, and ironed out every kink so Soulkiller could become the perfect tool.
When I finished with him, Ubu and Sensei would come next. It didn't matter if Talia had killed them, with a simple dip into the miracle juice, they'd contribute their knowledge and lives to this project.
Huh, now that I think about it. Talia must've known I'd resurrect her father even if she killed him. No wonder she did it so easily. She knew he'd be back. That woman loved her father too much to be the one to permanently end his life.
A daddy's girl through and through.
.
.
.
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Shanan, Tibet
June 29, 17:32
Even though I didn't regret the inhuman things I did to Ra's and his cronies, some part of me felt guilty—both about how I found doing it so easy and what little sleep I lost over it.
I thought putting the absolutely worst people through the absolute worst(as they rightly deserved) would come with no baggage. I was wrong.
In the past two days I'd found myself losing time to random mental tangents, each trying to make sense of what my actions meant about me as a person. None of them went far. I knew who I was and that was that.
If a smidgen of guilt over killing people, one of whom had cheated death multiple times and hadn't learned any proper lessons over his undeserved, long life was all I had to deal with, then so be it.
Besides, I had to get used to taking lives anyway. Now that I had a clear path to making Shield a reality, getting used to terminating those who were harmful to the ecosystem of Earth and existence as a whole was the right thing to do.
Speaking of Shield, Felicity during one of our conversations asked to know more about the organization. Naturally, my somewhat unhealthy fixation on them became quickly apparent and she made an offhand suggestion about making it a subsidiary of our company.
She cited the ones we already had on the works; Rath Healthcare, Rath Waste Management, and Apex Technologies, saying that adding one focused purely on security/private military wouldn't be out of the question.
What followed of course was a barrage of the largest kisses I'd ever planted on her cheeks and lips. Offering her profuse thanks afterward, I rushed to the cave and got started on it with Mike.
While she prepared things on her end, Mike and I did the relevant research. I had already been planning to create a separate hero agency that would cater to the needs of heroes and operatives. Hiring them, training them, and offering all kinds of support.
It had just never occurred to me to make it corporate. "Isn't something like that against the law?" is a question anyone with a healthy amount of skepticism would ask.
Turns out that it wasn't!
Mike confirmed as much and showed me the relevant laws. All this time I could've started Shield—no, no, I couldn't think like that. Approaching the League had given me so much, and denying it would be the height of hypocrisy.
I couldn't change the past, but the future was all mine. With every barrier to achieving my goal out of the way, I set about to do the actual creation, and boy did I realise I was in over my head.
There were many things to consider, but after minutes of intense rumination that left me with a slight headache, I settled on searching for recruits. Infrastructure and resources were all easily solvable.
Same for location and training, especially after my recent foray to Infinity Island.
This wasn't to say finding Shield's first agents was a walk in the park. It only became that way when I restricted my criteria to the one Coulson used when putting together his team in the Agents of Shield show.
There were two Specialists on his team, May and Ward. They were the ones with the skills to thrive in any environment and handle the meat of most missions.
After them came the Fitz Simmons, the nerds, their main fields being Engineering and Biochem respectively. Daisy completed the ensemble as the team's Analyst, obtaining and collating information pertaining to missions and/or targets.
Narrowing my search to this criteria helped a lot, and I managed to pen down a long list of names we were definitely taking a closer look at later. One of those names was John Economos, and what I recalled about him made me do the deep dive into him personally.
What I found was promising, and it improved my mood even further. Nothing could possibly happen to ruin the day.
Boy was I wrong.
Still in the process of indexing Ra's al Ghul's memories, Mike was only supposed to let me know when he was done or when he came across something that needed my attention.
Well, in response to my bold claim that nothing bad could possibly happen, fate did its thing and one thing led to another, and now, I stood in a monastery in the cold climate of Tibet, fuming with impotent rage.
Chest rising and blood racing, I looked around the large room, ignoring the beaten, unconscious ninjas around me. In the recesses of Ra's mind, Mike had uncovered information about a bodyguard being bred and trained for him.
Why a bodyguard needed to be the best killer there ever was made some sense, that I could admit. You could protect your charge from any attempt to end their life if you knew all the possible ways to end a life.
This was Batman's logic for learning how to kill and not using it. But could someone explain to me the person being trained needed to have their vocal cords permanently damaged? What the fuck was wrong with people? Seriously.
Was there some stupid/evil inducing gas going around affecting these villains or something? What could possibly possess a mother to do this to her own daughter?
She was going to give me an answer. That much I was certain of. If she was anything like her comic book counterpart, beating it straight out of her might not work. Soulkiller would be the way to go.
Before I could do that however, I needed to find her.
Free to roam the monastery now that those she'd left behind had fallen to my electrified fists and kicks, I located a few locks of her hair and that of her daughter's.
The chants of Faust's strongest tracking spell waited at the edge of my lips while I generated a holographic map of the Earth. Magical energy was the last part of the equation. It joined when the worlds flowed and covered the hairs in my grip in a blue glow.
A spot on the map gained a persistent red dot and I enlarged it with a thought.
"Prague."
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