'Trapped Inside Reality's Maze'
A/N: And to return briefly to the time between chapter one and chapter thirty-nine…
Grayson crouched in his hiding place, waiting. Waiting for his enemy to appear—knowing he would. Knowing the resources he had left behind were enough for the man who had trained him to make his escape, at least from the cell if not from the building. Knowing that, much as he wished it otherwise, Bruce Wayne would not sit cowering within his prison from the threat of his former servant, stooping from the sky to rend at him.
It had been three hours. It might be another three, or thirty-three, before his prey emerged.
He was prepared to wait.
The Crucible had been built to be inescapable, perched three-quarters of the way up a canyon wall, on a broad lip of cliff many would have refused to call more than a particularly deep ledge, with the red stone vaulting upward behind it and dropping away before. Deliveries and departures took place only by helicopter. This remoteness had not, of course, much inconvenienced the Ultraman during his first breakout, and in his second, several years later, unable to free himself from the power-suppressing cuffs he had used them to catch the skids of a departing helicopter, swung himself up into the cockpit, successfully fought the pilot for possession, and once again flown away.
Everyone had been very impressed. Let it not be said the Kryptonian had been no more than his freakish genetics and the power of a yellow sun.
Now Richard Grayson clung to the stone, fifty feet up. He was screened from easy view from the prison below by a narrow ledge of his own, and fixed to the wall above it by deeply-sunk pitons so he could lean out without concern for balance.
From this vantage point, he could watch almost the entire perimeter. There was no helicopter in residence. Even if Owlman escaped the prison through the small section of wall blocked by the angle, he could only then move away from the building without entering Grayson's field of vision by going straight over the edge at one specific point, in which scenario he would trigger the motion sensors left there against just such an eventuality.
Unless the foundations the government had sunk into the stone led into hidden tunnels that curved out and away to ground level—unlikely, in an installation constructed specifically for inaccessibility; both Luthor and the architect whose occasional forays into vigilantism went under the name of Life Ward had consulted on the initial construction, and they were neither of them idiots or cowards—Owlman was not getting away from him.
Though oh, he hoped he tried.
As the fourth hour drew near its close and dawn approached, the canyon echoed with a sound like muffled thunder. A wall near the lip of the canyon had burst outward, sending debris and dust raining down over the edge. It would seem that the Owl had discarded subtlety entirely.
Grayson dropped, jumpline paying out behind him at nearly terminal velocity before it started to slow him, just in time to keep his legs from shattering when he reached the roof, and the minor damage he did incur on impact melted away even as he ran to intercept. The knife in his hand seemed to have its own heartbeat. Never had he ached like this to shed blood.
He reached the edge of the roof, and looked down on the familiar profile through the settling dust. Leapt, a one-handed vault that sent him swinging feetfirst toward his target, and watched the man who had made himself into the essence of fear, who had graven the image of his power into Grayson as into a block of wood, watched him realize too late even to turn around in time to matter. He wore no armor now, bore no better weapon than cudgel stolen from some guard; he was at the mercy which he had done everything in his power to train out of being—
And then, Grayson thought there had been another explosion, for he was thrown back by a force that shattered every bone in his right arm and reverberated across his whole body, and slammed him into the ground with rib-splintering force.
But there had been no sound, and all the impact had been at that one point of incredible agony just below his elbow, and when he opened his eyes there was no sign of further destruction, and Owlman was still standing where he had been in the moment of his attack, undisturbed.
With another.
The figure looming above him through the dust, standing at Owlman's right hand, bore familiar chiseled features and artfully tousled hair that should be, that everyone knew to be, a long way from here, trapped in a cage in the heart of a grim red sun, under the guardianship of the alien organization that called itself the Golden Lights. Even if he had escaped so quickly and returned to Earth, what would he have been doing inside the Crucible, on this night of all nights?
"How?" Grayson asked, through lungs that could barely inflate, half the ribs around them snapped apart. One of the dependencies he had never been able to lose was that on oxygen.
The impossible figure seemed to understand or, if he misunderstood, still answered the question he'd meant. "Ultraman's clone," he sneered. "I heard you coming when you were still halfway up the cliff."
Clone, Grayson thought, and that much made sense even if little else did. As the dust began to settle he could see the figure was smaller than it should be, the lines of the face softer. Uncompleted clone, no less. He had sensation in his fingers again, and reached through the undifferentiated agony of his arm to twitch them, wondering where his weapon had fallen. His left arm was broken in only three places, but it was trapped under him.
A bare foot landed on the digits with the force of an avalanche. "Don't even think about it."
"Boy," Owlman's voice was as cool as ever, but lacked the hardness Grayson remembered from reprimands in his Talon days. "You're wasting time."
"Sorry." The clone glanced back down at Grayson, gave a little twitch to his shoulders, and then drew back one bare foot in a lazy kick that sent Grayson sailing out over the abyss, unable to even try to save himself, with even his functioning muscles tugging at bones too fractured to move as they should.
"And that," he heard Wayne add, still without enough cold menace, "was even more wasteful."
Grayson knew without elaboration that he meant they should have relieved him of his equipment first. As he fell, he had long seconds to watch the escaping duo, the clone with his enhanced strength of arm sending a cable liberated from somewhere within the prison complex whirring across the hundred foot span of the canyon, biting deep into the stone on the far side with some affixed blade.
The clone was the first onto the wire, swinging hand over hand up the steep incline. Once he reached the far side, braced his feet against the cliff wall, and launched himself the rest of the way up to ground level in one long, powerful jump, Richard watched the distant figure he had come to kill bend to follow. Hand over hand along the wire, to where the clone was waiting with another rope to haul him up.
No one had come from the prison to recapture them. Grayson found this disappointing.
Then the ground hit, and he knew nothing for a long time.
A/N: I mentioned the Crucible is in Colorado, right? ^^ No specific real canyon is intended. I couldn't find the perfect one, and decided that given how many made-up cities and countries we're working with here, I can make up a canyon. It's a good bit smaller than the Grand Canyon, but still on the intimidatingly large end of the spectrum.
Life Ward, btw, is the moderately obscure Superman villain Deathtrap, aka security consultant Carl Draper; I feel like he'd attain more prominence as a specialist in locking up Ultraman. He may or may not be the mascot of his own security company.
