Life sucked, at least mine did, but not sticking out would be a pretty big slap in the face to the reason I still had mine, well a bigger slap in the face, so I was pretty much obligated to suck it up and stick it out. Still, that didn't mean I had to be particularly happy about it.
I ducked under the very sharp, blade of a sword and slid under the assassin who'd swung it, coming up with a round house kick that knocked him into an approaching group of his friends. They went down like a stack of dominoes, giving me enough time to slip past the ornate archway behind them and keep up my mad dash though the heavily guarded fortress I'd gotten myself caught in.
That, right there was one major reason life sucked. I went through some trauma, made some – well not bad per say, but morally questionable – choices, then decided to take a break from the whole costumed-whatever thing to figure it all out and get myself back on some sort of track. It took only a year for things to go to hell after that, and maybe it's a little arrogant of me to think the whole thing is because I took my little break, but I've never been known for being humble, and come on, can you really blame me?
A shuriken flew right by my face and nicked the fabric of the stolen league of shadows mask covering my face as I ran. When they're getting curb stomped by Batman it's easy to forget just how well trained these guys are, when you're alone, surrounded and haven't been in a real fight for over a year you remember real fast.
I turned a corner and almost got a barrage of throwing knives to my face, falling into a cartwheel to get out of the way, I crashed through a surprisingly unlocked wooden door and onto an overhanging platform. The cartwheel turned into a flip onto the railing and up to a higher balcony, knocking away another group of assassins, landing with a flourish, and taking a quick bow.
Peering over the railing a got a look at the groaning pile of human flesh and frowned.
"Come on, no one's enjoying the show?" I chuckled and opened the door behind me, then promptly slammed it in the faces of fresh pursuers hard enough that I'm sure I gave the guys at the front concussions. I flipped onto a cable and ran across the line to the other side of huge, assassin packed room below.
Really, I could get paid for pulling of tricks like that and all those guys did was throw knives at me, how's that for a tough crowd? I would have done a few flips on my way to the other side, maybe win them over, but gunfire joined the sound of footsteps and I had to make it snappy.
A literal 'league of assassins' and Talia is the only one Ras thinks to give a gun to? Having to pick the lock of a door in the short period of time it would take for her to reload wasn't really the time to be jinxing things, but how did the league last that long with that kind of leadership. I didn't get the door open fast enough and one of Talia's bullets managed to clip my shoulder before I managed to slam it shut behind me.
Seconds later I was under fire again, I came to a hallway lined with tall stained glass windows that tinted the little light coming through a epileptic array of colors. The loud stomping of approaching assassins that really could have been silent as mice didn't do anything to put me at ease no matter how pretty it was.
The only exit that wasn't running into the small army coming at me and dying was a steel reinforced door with keypad. I wasted a precious half-minute getting the thing open before the sickly green light that poured out of the stairway into what could have been a literal hell to move never going down there to the very top of my priorities list.
Dying? Okay, not great but okay. Dying right next to a Lazarus Pit? Nope.
The red-robed men climbing that creepy staircase towards me only solidified that plan. I backed up as the hallway filled with assassins, luckily too many of them for any kind of ranged attack to be effective, but also an excessive amount to fight. I heard the very distinctive tapping of Talia's footsteps and took the only out I could get.
The sound of shattering glass accompanied my tumble out the window and into the sunny day outside. I had only a moment to savor Talia's shocked face and think that escaped like this usually worked better at night before I hit the frigid waters and survival was the only thing I could afford to think of.
It was night when I finally pulled my tired, sore body onto a sandy beach and I wasn't nearly as happy about that as I should have been. The tiny bit of cover darkness provided really didn't help with the muscle fatigue cold and salt water put on me, only adding to the – I don't want to say agony, but the sluggishly bleeding shoulder wound really, really hurt.
The weight of the water soaking into the heavy suit only made moving feel like more of an impossible task, so I just laid still while rivulets of the salty liquid ran off me. The mask was sticking to my face, making pulling in the oxygen my lungs were craving a hundred times harder so I mustered the strength to pull it off before a fell into a state just enough to notice if someone tried to kill me.
Hours later a barely audible clicking had me cracking open my eyes. In the early morning light a saw a crab scuttling towards me. A wave washed over it, and it hunkered down moving again. It raised a claw near myself and I flicked it away.
"Don't even think about it." I rolled onto my back with a huff, squinting at the sky before pulling myself up off the ground.
.
.
.
The whole trip had been beyond pointless. I fell into bed as soon as I got back to my shabby safe house without bothering to change out of the bodysuit. As much as I wanted to wash off the sand and salt, taking some time to relax my tense body was just too much to pass up. So I pulled the scratchy pillow that you could have convinced me was the softest thing in the world over my face and tried to shut down my mind.
'This is what trying to play the hero gets you.'
An incessant beeping kept me from relaxing completely though and I reached over to the nightstand to pick up the offending device. The alert was for a break in at one of my other safe houses. I don't believe in signs, or fate or whatever, but I do believe that some things just can't be coincidences.
According to the device in my hand it was about time I checked in on those little heroes in Jump. 'I'll leave in the tomorrow.' I rolled over, a yawn on my lips and ready to sleep the day away. My door blew off its hinges and I leaped off the bed, tossed it over and ducked down behind it while bullets pummeled the steel frame. 'Or I can just go now.'
I sighed while slipping the mask back on, and for the second time in as many days, I was leaping out of a shattered window, ticked off assassins hot on my trail.
.
.
.
The Jump City safe house was in about as good a shape as I expected when I had to climb in through the window didn't make me any happier to see it in shambles. After trekking all across Europe too loose the league, maybe I was just hoping I'd be able to get a little bit of a break.
The robot commando – stupid name – took long enough to actually notice me that I could pry open the loose tiles under where the bed had been and grab a black case. Then it spun and pelted me with laser blasts. Better by far than bullets at least. I made my escape through yet another window – if windows were mirrors then I'd be cursed with bad luck until forever at the rate I'd been going the past few weeks.
Jump was way cleaner than most of the other places I'd been hiding, and the alleys weren't nearly as cluttered, so hiding should have been a lot harder than it was, but Slade's tinker toys weren't nearly as persistent as Ras's assassins.
When I was a safe distance away I caught a bus and reveled in the relative safety of public transport as I sank into the padded seat and rested my head against the cool glass of the window. Even if they figured out where I was, it was unlikely they'd follow me to Jump.
I'd made up my mind to stay on the bus until the last stop and catch up on a little bit of sleep when spotted someone vaguely familiar at one of the stops, someone who really shouldn't have been there and was out of site before I really had a good look at him.
Tired enough that I was close to tears at the knowledge that I'd miss another chance to rest, I dragged myself out of the comfy seat and stepped off the bus.
I picked the darkest, scariest – really not that scary, I mean this was Jump City – alley to turn into. I jammed my hands into my jean pockets and turned towards the source of the sensation prickly at the back of my mind.
"Okay Mini Slade, you can come on out now." I said, not bothering to keep the exhaustion from my voice.
The kid, now decked out in his black and orange bodysuit slipped out of the shadows, his mouth twisted a little in what might have been confusion as he studied me, really it was obvious who he worked for.
"You're smaller than I expected, Slade know you're off your leash?" I asked.
He looked at me for a second longer then turned and left without a word.
"Little weirdo." I scoffed. I'd taken about two steps when another robot commando rushed up to me. By that point I'd had about as much of running for my life as I could take, I took an X shaped blade from the case at my side and spun, slicing deep enough into the robots neck that I severed pretty much everything linking its processor to the rest of its body. "Not the time."
It crashed to the ground and I knelt down, breaking open it's torso to reach in and remove a palm-sized component. League was one thing, I got myself into that, but I wasn't in the mood to deal with Slade too.
.
.
.
I was extra careful getting to my next safe house, this one nice and close to the docks with a lovely view of the Titan's Tower.
I hooked the memory bank I'd gotten off the robot into a closed system and read the read outs with only a vague interest as I finally took the time to see to my shoulder wound properly.
Robin, what was it about Slade's sick little obsession with the kid that he just couldn't let go? I chewed on a sandwich and kept reading. I felt just bad enough for the Boy Wonder that I considered heading to the tower and warning him about the robots programmed with his kill orders.
Still not bad enough to actually do it though, besides, the last time I was in that tower wasn't something I thought either of us wanted to deal with. Still, didn't mean I wouldn't tell at all, I'd just do it a way that I could get some fun out of it.
Spinning my chair to another screen, I shopped around for any interesting merchandise moving into the city.
A week ago there'd been a shipment of Xenothuim that would have been perfect for my big comeback, but I'd been held up in Spain while someone else had gone and blown it up, seriously, who did that to something so valuable? A few more clicks told me Chang was in prison, and that meant his fully stocked lab was easy pickings.
I stopped by the lab on my midnight grocery run. To say the place was a mess would have been a massive understatement. Broken glass and machinery littered the ground along with puddles of some strong smelling chemicals. There were even some splotches of dried blood that I stepped gingerly over as I made my way to the back.
There were no traces of xenothium, at least not where anyone would care to look. You steal from a guy often enough and he gets sneaky, so you get sneakier. Chang had been trying and failing to hide his stashes of the stuff from me as long as I'd had the suit.
Whistling a pop song, I pulled one hand out of my pocket and reached behind a computer monitor to yank out an engraved cylinder. I went back to the overturned throne-like chair and inserted the cylinder into a slot neat the armrests.
One side of the radiation proof chair slid open and the dark lab was bathed in dim red light. "Beautiful." I smirked and collected my prize.