Silk and Steel
The next two weeks passed in disciplined silence deep within the League's stronghold.
Damian made good on his word.
Training Cheshire
Cheshire's first days with the Sube Sube no Mi were disorienting.
Her body no longer obeyed friction the way it once had. Stone floors felt like polished ice. Walls offered no resistance. A single careless step sent her sliding several meters before she could stop herself.
Damian watched calmly.
"You fight close," he said. "Knives. Pressure points. Momentum. This power doesn't change that—it amplifies it."
Training began brutally.
Damian forced her to relearn balance from the ground up—combat rolls without traction, lunges that would overshoot if misjudged, throws that now sent her gliding past opponents like a living blade. Every mistake was punished. Every correction refined.
By the fifth day, something clicked.
Cheshire stopped fighting the power.
She let herself slide.
She discovered she could reduce friction selectively—feet slick, hands normal—allowing explosive acceleration followed by pinpoint strikes. She learned to skim across surfaces at impossible speeds, knives flashing as she passed, never lingering long enough to be hit.
By the end of the first week, even veteran assassins struggled to track her movements.
By the end of the second, they couldn't touch her at all.
The Unexpected Change
The Devil Fruit worked quietly, relentlessly.
Scars faded first.
Old knife marks. Bullet grazes. Burns she'd earned over decades of bloodshed—smoothed away as if they had never existed. Her skin became flawless, almost unreal, as though violence itself could no longer leave a mark.
Then came the physical refinement.
Any excess weight slipped away naturally, leaving her body honed, efficient, lethal. She didn't train harder for it—it simply happened. The fruit reshaped her into the ideal version of what she already was.
Cheshire noticed the stares.
She didn't care.
For the first time in her life, she felt untouchable—not emotionally, but physically. A predator no longer bound by the rules of contact.
She laughed once after dodging an entire squad without a single hit.
Damian allowed himself a small, satisfied nod.
Damian's Work
While Cheshire mastered her power, Damian worked in parallel.
Using cyberpunk schematics provided by the system—and refined by his own genius—he built a long-range encrypted signal network, unlike anything on Earth.
No satellites.
No conventional frequencies.
No magic.
A hybrid system—quantum-layered pulses riding dead-spectrum noise, paired with living encryption algorithms that rewrote themselves every transmission.
Unhackable.
Untraceable.
Invisible.
The League would never again rely on compromised channels.
Not the Light.
Not the Justice League.
Not gods.
Not governments.
Only Damian and those he trusted could activate it.
Ra's al Ghul noticed the change immediately.
For the first time in centuries, the League felt… secure.
A Quiet Moment
On the final night, Damian stood on a balcony overlooking the mountains.
Talia joined him.
"You're leaving again," she said, not asking.
"Yes."
She studied him—longer than she usually allowed herself to. Not the boy she had trained. Not the weapon she had sharpened.
Her son.
Damian spoke first.
"Next time," he said quietly, "I'll find a Devil Fruit suited for you."
Talia froze.
"…You don't need to—"
"I want to," he interrupted. "But only one that fits how you fight. Power wasted is unacceptable."
For a moment, the Demon's Daughter said nothing.
Then she smiled—small, real, unguarded.
"I'll hold you to that," she said.
Departure
At dawn, Damian mounted Toothless.
The dragon rumbled softly, wings unfolding as mist rolled through the pass.
Assassins watched in silence as he rose into the air—some with awe, some with fear of what the son of the Batman and the grandson of Ra's al Ghul will find or invent that will reshape the meaning of word assassin