Notes: The medic-nin standards listed below are direct quotes from the Naruto manga.
The medic-nin discipline's only equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath was Tsunade's brainchild. Like all aspiring students, Kei memorized the precepts at the beginning of her training. Yamaguchi-sensei's caustic, backhanded tutelage didn't suit her, but she remembered a few things even now. Being idly shuffled out the door of her apprenticeship and replaced by Rin didn't make the words vanish.
The first clause went, "No medic ninja shall ever stop medical treatment until the lives of their party members have come to an end."
The second clause was, " No medic ninja shall ever stand on the front lines."
The third clause read, "No medic ninja shall ever die until they are the last of their platoon."
The fourth, and final, listed the sole exception. "Only those medic ninja who have mastered the Strength of a Hundred Technique of the ninja art Creation Rebirth are permitted to discard the above-mentioned laws."
With the way that Tsunade wrote those rules, the only medic who could go around breaking them at a whim was her. Being the only medically-inclined person in Konoha capable of knocking the Hokage Monument's four faces off the cliff with one hand, it made sense. Rin told Kei once—more like once a month—that she was aiming for Tsunade's level of strength, but until then, the teachings were ironclad.
Kei wasn't a medic-nin anymore. Had never really gotten that far. And her only official teammate was her little brother.
A medic wouldn't have a pretty solid litany of increasingly nonsensical cursing playing in her head as she rolled Robin onto his side. It was hard not to think that way, because the brightly-colored Bat brat had clearly done it to prevent Kei from getting hit with whatever Assassin-made hell juice was loaded into the darts. And in return, Robin was well on his way to an overdose.
And her brother was on the roof, fighting. Fighting what, Kei couldn't see. Not with her chakra coils still screaming at her fourteen hours into the aftermath of the experiment gone sideways. After avoiding all conflict until they were boxed in. She'd fucked up and now people were paying for it.
No time for that now.
After confirming that Robin wasn't getting up anytime soon—both through chakra-based scanning and by pinching his arm a few times—she took his in-ear comm unit and stuck it into her own.
"—Robin? Come in, Robin—"
"Genbu here. Robin's down." Kei interrupted in English, even as she scooped Robin off the floor into a bridal carry. If she had access to Katsuyu, she'd have immediately stuck the mobile med-pack onto her patient and carried on. As it was, she had to keep track of his vitals personally. "We're under attack by the League of Assassins."
"Can you get somewhere secure?" Oracle asked, all business.
Technically, yes. Kei could pick up her brother and Body Flicker all the way across the island and ditch all the people here to suffer death by off-brand ninja plotting and also fire. A horrible way to go. So she said, "No. They can track me and leaving Robin behind is not an option."
"Redirecting Nightwing your way." Something clicked on her end of the line. "Handing you off to maintain team cohesion. Stay on the line, Genbu."
"Acknowledged," Kei said, and shot out the window. Kei was careful to tuck Robin's head against her shoulder as she climbed for the roof faster than a shadow. Hopefully, the Bats were in the habit of using vehicles instead of just parkour to get around in a real emergency.
And up here was less of a death trap. Hayate couldn't be cornered in a city and rooftops spoiling sightlines were fine, compared to being stuck in a compromised safehouse.
"This is A," said a digitally scrubbed voice in Kei's ear. She was still pretty sure that was a British accent. Good to have confirmation Alfred Pennyworth was still kicking. "I will be your primary contact for the purposes of coordinating with Nightwing. Please contact me for any information that may make your operation smoother."
"Acknowledged," Kei repeated, "but for now I mostly need to concentrate." Even in her weakened state, Body Flicker still worked just fine. And Isobu could lean over her figurative shoulder to fire potshots at whoever he deemed a target anyway.
"Of course, Genbu. I will remain available."
There were only three black-clad assassins arrayed against Hayate, and two were already down despite their height and reach advantages. From the intermittent lights that cut through smoke, there was a faint pattern of goopy smudges across the rooftop. And then Hayate kicked his remaining opponent in the crotch—his foot sparking white on impact, so it'd work even on a Zetsu—and cut their head off when they bent double.
Kei stopped the rolling head with one boot. It was already squelching out of its disguise by then, oozing. "I stand by my earlier statement, Suzaku."
Hayate snorted. "Sure, whatever."
Kei reflexively twisted a hand a few degrees, fingers curling behind Robin's shoulders, and a ten-meter wall of water popped into existence with Isobu's chakra backing it. The next two tranquilizer dart shots—or bullets—were sucked into the mass without hurting anyone.
Hayate didn't even bother to pay attention to that. Instead, as one of the downed men attempted to claw upright amid the sudden onslaught of noise, Hayate located the center of his back and stabbed downward hard enough to punch straight through until he hit the roof tar. Jerking his sword free sideways resulted in a spray of off-white slime. There was no more crawling after that.
Well, this is going to be fun to justify on a recording. Robin's mask had a camera in it, and Kei hadn't ever gotten around to asking how to turn it off. There was also a decent chance it had a taser to prevent any attempts to figure that out, given how viciously Bats defended their identities.
There was only one assassin left, spread-eagled on the ground and still twitching through the aftershocks of one of Hayate's lightning punches. One of the dart guns lay discarded near him, looking like Hayate had literally disarmed the owner. He'd die in minutes and Kei couldn't muster the urge to apply a tourniquet.
Even if she did, his boss would probably just execute him anyway for failing. Maybe by letting a Zetsu break his neck and eat him.
"Well, so much for sending a messenger," Kei said mildly as she dropped far enough to lower Robin safely to the ground. She had to look around for a clean spot, propping his head up a little with a bit of loose cardboard folded into a pathetic pillow. There weren't exactly a ton of options.
The head by her boot-tip was still oozing.
"Still sends a message," Hayate replied. His mask tilted her way as he flicked fluids off his sword. "Are you going to do something with that?"
Probably meant the head. Kei angled Robin's head and the relevant mask-mounted camera away from the carnage, then stepped around him to pick up the result of Hayate's strength and speed advantage. After pulling the balaclava off the head, Kei noted the surprised expression on that slack, unmoving face. It was already half-melted back to Zetsu baseline.
Well, it wouldn't stay that way for long.
Ah, I see the shape of your plan. Isobu said in a faint whisper. It sounded a little like a crocodile hiss. Allow me to help.
Thank goodness for Isobu. The ice-cold thoughts crashing through her mind were sometimes like being kicked in the shin, but this one helped her focus.
Kei channeled power into her hand, sending black lines of densely-packed fūinjutsu looping around the bare skin at the speed of breaking glass. Her first love in the art had no competition. It hardly took any chakra these days.
Her other hand opened a hole in the water shield, just wide enough for the payload.
This should be interesting.
Another dart whipped past her shirt as Kei stood, aimed, and shotputted the head at full strength straight at the shooter through the gap she'd made. Going by the shift of shadows, the Zetsu clones were prepared to make a leap, despite the shield, and the projectile caught them by surprise. Maybe their sniper friend, too.
BOOM!
Kei never felt a burning need to add Fire Release ninjutsu to her arsenal, and she didn't now.
Correct, said Isobu.
Hayate let out a low whistle. "So, did that—"
It was out of Hayate's range, and Kei's mask didn't have any useful technology in it for nighttime shenanigans, so all Kei said was, "Probably."
But rather than relying on that, she swept her free hand out again and coiled the water shield into a javelin, then kept shaping it and adding water until she had a decently-sized Water Dragon Bullet ready for its debut.
As Isobu launched the ninjutsu for the next roof, Kei made a gesture in Hayate's view: the Snake hand seal.
The Water Dragon Bullet flowed around brick at the speed of a raging river, three shapes were caught up in the current because Kei's macabre bomb had been too high-powered to dodge. To the sound of ringing fire alarms and screams, the dragon carried the other half of the assault team into Kei and Hayate's waiting arms. They whirled overhead, almost like the result of walking through one of those underwater viewing tunnels.
And if they got any bright ideas about fighting afterward, Hayate trailed a sparking hand along the dragon's underside. Lightning leapt up from his fingers and latched onto the men inside.
Then Kei dropped them down to the roof like stunned fish, tossing the remainder of the dragon back into water vapor for the moment.
"Got any wire?" Kei asked Hayate, looking at the sodden, shuddering targets for any sign of coordination. The first man to try and find his feet would be the first one Kei cut into more pieces.
Hayate was already unspooling one of his wristbands. Without a further word to her, he trussed up the only human of the bunch at the elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles tightly enough that the wire would cut into flesh. Then he dumped the twitching man a safe distance from Robin. While there was a decent chance that Dart Guy II would pop some false tooth and poison himself like some of Kei's earlier attackers, Kei didn't tell Hayate to reach into his mouth and fix that. He'd done enough just binding the enemy.
He didn't bother to do the same with the Zetsu. His chakra twisted in utter revulsion at just being so close to them. Even if Kei ordered him to, Hayate wouldn't help them at all. Except maybe up into the mouth of a wood chipper or something.
"Oneesan…"
"Got it." Kei drew her own sword and cut their heads off to save him any time spent on an internal struggle. Then she cleaned her sword with the reflexive, smooth detachment of a task done too many times.
Hayate mimed throwing up, because he was a middle schooler in all but career choice.
Honestly, she could have done the same thing with her bare hand and a ninjutsu, but the physicality of beheading a Zetsu clone was better. More real. It felt final. The syrupy mass of inhuman innards strewn across the ground could, in the right circumstances, be comforting.
More useful was a new data point: The Zetsu, once roused to attack, stood out because no one else had chakra signatures outside of her and Hayate. That was probably the only upside to fighting them in Gotham. Once she managed to sort through the absolute tar pit of other sensory data this cursed city brought to the table—and the muffling effect of Isobu's chakra against hers—they stood out like stars.
Small victories. One thing at a time. Kei thought it more as the start of a mantra than anything. Deep breath and then go.
Kei turned to her brother and said, "Grab Robin. We need to be on the ground level to deal with the fire, and he's smaller."
"All right." Hayate manipulated Robin's limbs until he got the older boy into a fireman's carry. At least, Kei was pretty sure Robin was older in addition to being taller. It had never exactly come up. Hayate shifted his weight a little to be sure his burden was settled, then hopped up to the edge. "Race you to the bottom?"
"You'll win anyway." Kei wasn't nearly as concerned with getting her passenger down uninjured, so she just grabbed the back of the man's assassin uniform and was briefly tempted to just drop him to the asphalt like an egg in a physics experiment. Instead, Kei hefted him under one arm like a sack of murderous potatoes. "Come on. We've got work to do."
"ETA on Nightwing?" Genbu's voice asked, in English. While the earpieces used by Bats and Birds alike were only sensitive within about eight inches, to keep from picking up too much interference, Dick could hear the stress in her tone. And the sound of something rushing past her head. "Could use some backup with a stun baton."
"Nightwing will arrive momentarily," replied Alfred's voice through the Batcomputer synthesizer. "Three minutes or less, Genbu."
"Guess we'll have to do something until then." Genbu made a sharp whistle that pierced through the road noise, then shouted to someone else, "Get the hell away from the command car!"
The only reason Dick could even hear them was down to the quality of the comm link in his ear tucked safely under his motorcycle helmet. Even then, it was half-drowned out by the hammering of his heart against his ribs. Ever since Oracle passed on the message that Tim was down—with no further details—cold sweat stuck his hair to his face and neck and fear coiled in his gut.
It was a familiar feeling. Bone-deep dread had lived deep in the marrow of Dick's bones since his parents' deaths, since coming back from a Titans mission in space and realizing his first little brother was gone, since life seemed so determined to burn down around him. Sometimes it was a lurching fear of failing and falling and being the one left alone, staring at the shattered pieces of his life. Sometimes it was a creeping thing, slithering in his ear and whispering softly. And sometimes it was a shrieking, wailing, screaming alarm that yanked on his spine and sent everything spinning.
"Starting to think I'm not going to have enough hands here, Agent A," Genbu hissed over the line.
"And you will have one more set."
"Acknowledged."
Two minutes was agony. Dick revved his bike still faster, weaving through the streets in the direction of a growing column of black smoke, lit by amber street lamps.
Come on, come on, come on—
"Suzaku, get out of here! I can't fight with you here. Tsuruya, just go!" Genbu snarled in Japanese. The sound of explosives rang in both Dick's comm link and in his actual ears, though the sound of screaming metal was purely through Genbu's side of the line. In English, the next line was, "Stay behind the line if you don't want to die. Yes, you too!"
"Assistance is inbound, Genbu. Less than one minute remaining until arrival," said Alfred in a tone as calm as steel.
"Not—sure—how useful anyone'll be." Genbu's side of the link was punctuated by the sound of something collapsing. "There's a lot of attackers and they're playing for keeps."
"How many?" Dick asked, as clearly as he could without using his hands.
There wasn't an immediate response.
In the hollow left by that sudden fear, something flew low and fast in the darkness above the nearest rooftops, leaving a tearing gale in its wake. Too quiet to be a helicopter, too low to be a plane—but big. Dick caught a glimpse of black-edged white wings before the shape was just gone.
But he didn't have time to worry about that. Car alarms screamed as the ground shook up ahead. Windows lit up everywhere. Even so, Dick kept his motorcycle headed straight for trouble.
Blowing through a red light this late at night was quick, easy, and put Dick right where he needed to be in order to hide the Wingcycle in an alleyway. Ripped his helmet off and sat it on the seat. From there, locking the bike into security mode—a free taser shot for any would-be thief—was the last thing he needed to do before taking to the rooftops.
"Genbu, status update," Dick barked into his comm link again. His grapple gun arm was perfectly steady even as adrenaline streaked through his entire body.
"Ambush," Genbu bit out. Her voice was even harsher, more guttural than it had been before. "Unknown number of hostiles, thirty-something civilians, twenty-five emergency responders. The street is collapsing."
Dick's stomach dropped further toward his toes with each word. The way gravity let him go as his grapple gun's anchor caught didn't help.
And the scene he arrived at, fifteen seconds later, was a disaster zone. Automatically, Dick filed away details as though the crime scene wasn't still in motion in front of him. He didn't descend from the rooftops, instead opting for a stealthy scouting approach.
"Collapsed," Dick corrected, trying to decide where to intervene first from a rooftop vantage point. Where to start? "Agent A, this is an all-call situation."
Midnight mist swirled around everything here, despite the impending rain—something that always characterized Genbu's fights. The evening's forecast would only help. She was using it as much as a way to control the battlefield as a reservoir for her water-based attacks.
And this time, it didn't hide a thing.
A sinkhole twenty feet deep and some eighty feet across had opened in the middle of the street in front of the apartment building, sending civilians scattering, discharging municipal water into the gap, and swallowing a fire truck for good measure. The building itself was smoldering and cloaked in velvety black smoke up the back, where water had a harder time reaching, and the other three emergency response vehicles—fire and EMS—had been trapped on the other side of the street when the ground gave out beneath the third. The ladder truck was one of the vehicles too far away to help. Uniformed firefighters were scattered around, confronted with the immense task and sometimes yelling into radios.
The command vehicles were contained under a strange, wavering bubble the size of a circus tent. The one in the pit wasn't covered, and uniformed bodies were tossed here and there around the crater and inside of it. Dick wasn't close enough to see what had killed them, but no one was moving in there. Not even screaming.
And there was absolutely screaming.
The civilians—twenty of thirty-four—were mostly cordoned into a second iridescent bubble in a nearby parking lot, shivering in their nightclothes and clutching any of their belongings or pets that they'd managed to save from the fire. There were people standing on cars and others leaning out of windows, trying to get fresh air on the unburned side of the building.
People clawed at the edges of the bubble, trying to escape, while others huddled as far toward the middle as possible. Others still were trying to get in.
And there were bodies strewn across the ground like broken dolls. Many of them looked like they'd been trying to run for the bubble. Or else been cut down just in front of it.
Static popped in his ear. Dick pressed a hand over his comm, debating whether or not to pluck out the earpiece, but the sound ended immediately. "Agent A?"
"Genbu appears to have lost her connection. I will see if I can reestablish it, but proceed with extreme caution."
Right, Genbu borrowed Tim's earpiece almost ten minutes ago. God only knew what she'd done with the replacement Babs sent to the apartment. Tim's communication equipment wasn't rated for Aquaman or other superhumanly durable fighters because it didn't have to be. And it looked like Genbu and Suzaku's habit of accidentally breaking technology they borrowed was a family trait. Their timing couldn't have been worse.
Genbu wasn't in sight—and then she was. The air cracked when she appeared on the cab of the toppled fire truck, amid a half-dozen workers still trying to climb their way out.
Dick automatically reached for the comm link Genbu couldn't hear anymore. "Genbu, wait—"
Down in the pit, Genbu gestured once with her sword used as a pointer, seemed to say something, and then slammed bodily into a man wearing a fireman's gear and launched him into the hood of a parked car. Several civilians screamed and emergency responders swore amid the immediate wail of the car alarm.
Fuck. Dick let himself feel that rush of horror just for an instant, then clamped down on the distracting emotion and brought it to heel. This needs to stop.
The black blur stilled for an instant, landing atop the same parked car and killing the alarm on impact. Dick caught a glimpse of Genbu's white mask amid the clingy haze, and then she was gone again. The man she'd struck didn't move—she must have broken all of his bones—but a thin wail started up from someone nearby. A sound of pure terror.
Dick gripped his escrima sticks hard enough to feel the texture through his gloves. No, this needed careful handling.
Genbu popped up again ten yards away, kicking a woman in a pink dressing robe into the barrier's shimmering wall. When she bounced off, Genbu whipped her sword around so quickly that Dick couldn't see the blade, but the woman fell in two pieces.
Dick remembered thinking that, if he had to, he'd bring Genbu down to prevent any deaths during that violent second meeting. Now, he didn't know if he could.
Genbu glanced at her former neighbors—and current captives—with what looked like complete apathy before vanishing again. If she said anything, Dick couldn't hear her.
Fuck.
As Dick kept trying to make his way stealthily to ground level, League assassins rushed out of the mist like this was a numbers game. Mostly identifiable by their equipment, they chased after Genbu as she appeared. And fired at her when she ripped components off cars and random street debris and used them as vicious projectiles in return. And along the way blocked those familiar dart shots by using other assassins as intermittent human shields, with the ease of long familiarity or just incredible perceptive powers.
Someone screamed in League tongue, or at least something like it, and then they weren't.
"Nightwing," Alfred's voice said quietly, "I request a status update, if it is safe to do so."
"Half the civilians are casualties. Same ratio among emergency workers. I don't have eyes on Robin or Suzaku." Dick slipped down a fire escape like a shadow. Alfred deserved as much information as he could handle. He'd been running comms for them since before Dick picked out his first domino mask. "Genbu is going off the rails."
Alfred didn't curse, but there was a faint intake of breath as the world's steadiest man took in the information and recalculated their options. The faintest sound of clicking buttons eased through the connection. "Based on her capabilities, I expect the utmost caution from you."
"You know me, Agent A. Safety first."
"Of course." There was no bite to that tone, but Dick heard the gentle judgment anyway. Someone had to go around worrying for the Bats. "Expect backup within ten minutes."
Forever in a firefight, but a comfort all the same. There were ways to buy time.
Dick made it to the alley's crackled asphalt without making a sound. With a silent sigh, he unholstered both escrima sticks and stalked forward, toward the scene of ongoing, unrestrained violence. If no one else could make Genbu stop, it was Dick's responsibility by default. No one else had a chance in hell.
Visible only by the interplay of light and dark—street lights and the bubble traps and cell phone lights—Genbu fought the ninjas. And for the most part, she killed them. Maybe one guy who got backhanded into a municipal fire hydrant could survive the way his spine folded. Sure, the one who tumbled the length of the remaining street like a kicked ball would probably just be in utter agony from road rash. But more than half the time, she looped back around and drove her katana through her opponents' bodies in a succession of killing strokes. Heads fell. Bodies split open.
Dick shot out of the alleyway to escape the path of a car sent spinning across the sidewalk, flipping over the hood with barely four inches of clearance. Exposed, his entire body briefly tensed on landing in anticipation of pain when Genbu's masked eyes caught his. Noted the sparks arcing across the end of his escrima sticks.
Nothing.
Genbu, despite her inhuman speed and their relative proximity, just impaled someone else on the point of her sword. One among dozens. Then kicked the man into the pit, bowling over someone else who'd been climbing out.
"Genbu—" No, swallow it down. She'd already turned to handle some other opponent with a scimitar. She wasn't listening.
Then I'll have to make you.
Voices above him, from the open windows occupied by spectators. Dick glanced up automatically, once he was sure Genbu and her many, many dance partners couldn't get a clear line of sight on him.
"Nightwing—"
"Please, you have to help—"
People, leaning out the windows and making Dick wish he could magically rip the hundred-foot ladder off the truck in the crater and actually help the occupants evacuate. He could climb and try to pry people free by hand, but—not quickly. And not without putting himself in the crosshairs of anybody with processing power left to shoot a gun while Genbu was mauling them.
One of said gunmen was bounced off a barrier like a tennis ball.
Dick caught the first person dressed like a discount League ninja under the chin with his escrima. Their head whipped to one side exactly as expected and they collapsed into a twitching heap, and then Dick moved on to the next.
Genbu undoubtedly spotted his progression down one end of her ongoing battle, but didn't snap at him. Instead, as she whirled past with a crack of displaced air, her voice slithered through the space between them. "Y'know, I take back what I said earlier."
At least she wasn't "checking" his work and going back for kills on downed opponents. Hell, maybe she'd turned down the lethality once he entered the fight.
"Can't take a few zingers?" Dick responded automatically, methodically making his way through anyone who so much as jerked their gaze in Genbu's direction. That instant of distraction was all it took to get a clean hit.
And five people were down in a handful of seconds. Even outnumbered twenty to one, they were cleaning house.
Lightning cracked overhead and the skies opened up the evening's festivities with a cold November rain, just to make things that much more miserable. Dick had to shut down his escrima sticks' taser function to avoid shocking himself.
Water whirled out of the broken main and out of the sky, weaving a hundred narrow strands together to form a—
"Water Dragon Bullet!" Genbu shouted in Japanese. As she flung an arm out as a signal, a gold-eyed beast made of water whipped across the battlefield and curved high, scattering some of the ninja from fear alone.
"Not the way street-cleaning worked in my day, but I like your style," Dick commented, and drove his escrima straight into a ninja's solar plexus.
Separate from the dragon, Genbu shot past Dick and slammed one of her League targets into the road, driving a divot into the asphalt. "You're not effective."
"Oh, I think I'm batting—a hundred," Dick replied, slamming his escrima straight into another ninja-alike's face. They toppled like a felled tree right over the end of a ladder bent by the earlier stages of the battle.
Genbu ignored the quip. Already turning away, she just said, "Your guy got up again."
Dick judo-tossed the guy on reflex alone, when he tried to grab for Dick's neck despite the voltage unloaded into him not thirty seconds ago. He was careful enough to avoid slamming his opponent head-first into anything, even working at speed.
Something gave when he did that, under his fingers. Dick's glove came back…white? Streaked with some color that didn't show up properly in the amber light of street lamps. Nothing about the man he'd just tossed indicated that his body was covered with—caulk? White glue? What the actual fuck was this?
"Down!" was Genbu's version of a warning.
Hair standing on end, Dick threw himself behind a neglected municipal tree just as a pair of throwing knives—probably poisoned—flew through the space his head used to be. And when he rechecked the length of his escrima, sticky material clung to the taser's business end.
Genbu kicked a ninja into a telephone pole. The noise didn't sound human at all. Not—not even like bones breaking, and Dick was very familiar with that sound by now.
And the man he'd tossed got up again, heaving himself up as though the worst Dick had done was trip him.
"Someone's a glutton for punishment," Dick muttered. He checked the rain again—held in check by the dragon sucking up all the water around it—and the settings on his escrima. The voltage should have put anyone down for the count, even if the amps were comparatively risk-free. "Hey, Pajama Sam—"
The man turned toward Dick, teeth bared and bared and bared. The right half of his face was gone, exposing the teeth, mandible, and sinus on one side, all amid rippling white flesh that sagged down toward the sidewalk. It took that dorky head wrapping League ninjas favored with it.
Shapeshifters.
Suddenly, all the uneven, jagged pieces of this fight started to slide into a different puzzle entirely.
"Give me your face!" the alien(?) howled in Japanese, lunging for Dick's throat with hands outstretched. "I need it!"
This time, Dick cracked him full-bore in the throat with the escrima set to max charge. And when the target didn't immediately fall twitching to the ground, instead of withdrawing, Dick swung again and drove the taser end into what turned out to be a facsimile of flesh. It caved under the pressure like a ripe tomato.
The thing fell only after Dick yanked the weapon free. White slime spurted out of the sucking chest wound. And even then, it kept wriggling like a half-crushed bug.
This was what Genbu was aiming for the entire time?
And then four more were headed his way. The people in the apartments overhead, spotting them first, gave the game away.
"No more tricks!" one of them moaned. "This one is human."
"So hungry! Haven't eaten anything in so long—"
"That's the only one she won't kill—"
"Y'know, there's some great plastic surgeons out here," Dick said, almost perfectly conversational even as he ducked and weaved through the crowd of enemies. "But I left the business cards in my other suit! Back off and no one has to join Twitchy on the ground here."
"Get him!"
Fighting four men at once was already a breeze for a Bat. Fighting four aliens with unknown capabilities was somewhat less so, but he had this.
And then one of them folded in half with the sound of frantic gagging.
The clearest comparison in Dick's entire career was Clayface. Once, he'd seen the Rogue dive into a landscaping company's back lot and come up with twice his original mass, then rip off a chunk of his body to form a lesser copy that didn't last two hours before collapsing into inanimate mud. This ninja flexed their whole frame like a frog and horked a nigh-identical League assassin directly out of their torso.
Self-duplicating what-the-fuck-was-thats. And going by the number of people-shaped attackers, they'd been spawning. They'd formed a whole hive waiting for Genbu to finally venture out, and when she hadn't, they'd burned her nest.
The three—now four—other creatures in front of him started making the same noise. The one on the ground did, too.
And the same sound rose from the sinkhole, multiplied dozens of times over.
Dick threw himself over a car just as two of the new duplicates slammed into its driver-side door, still grasping for him with five arms between them. And he threw down a smoke pellet to get some actual breathing room for a head count.
The street was full of black-clad shapes. Some of them even had masks on, rather than exposing half-melted faces.
Dick took a second to consider angles, the likelihood of being boxed in, and took off at a sprint. A baker's dozen of murderous clones chased him like hellhounds or robots—without a single thought to personal safety. And they definitely didn't look both ways before crossing the street.
Water cascaded down as the dragon threw its bulk at the conga line of pursuers. Three enemies were crushed immediately. On the second pass, directed by Genbu as though her katana was a conductor's baton, the dragon writhed until a tendril as thin as a razor scythed through the air at knee height.
Dick executed a forward flip right over it, hardly missing a beat when his feet touched ground again.
His opponents weren't so quick and lost a smattering of limbs immediately. Feet, legs below the knee, and a badly-placed forearm.
A split second later, the flashbangs Dick tossed during the brief window of opportunity hit them in their very unhappy, smearing faces. It was loud as hell, of course, but Dick was far enough away that his ears only protested for an instant.
Splugch.
Neither pain nor lack of limbs seemed to affect the enemy much. One of them spawned two more shins and feet from one knee and tried to run on the forked thing afterward.
Dick dodged and immediately brought his escrima down on the creature as it passed, frowning at the lack of proper impact. Sure, he hit them and they clearly couldn't shake off the voltage, but the effects lasted barely a measurable fraction of the time that they would on a human—or even most aliens.
"Feed me!" the crowd screamed in a cacophony of dissonant voices.
If there were ten chasing Dick now, over toppled cars and ruined streets, an entire mosh pit howled for Genbu's hands and blood and death. She still did that speedster here-now-there-now thing, but red energy—as thin as smoke—coiled around her body, leaving the air with an entirely different texture than the metahumans Dick knew. And he'd never seen one of them with a katana. Crouched atop a pile of broken road, she brandished the sword in a clear taunt.
The next creatures to leap at her shattered. Or, at least, fell to the ground in some fifty pieces.
And Dick fought off half a dozen more of the grabby-handed jerks, staining his hands and forearms with white residue that had the approximate consistency of wallpaper paste.
Genbu vanished again. The rain cracked like a series of fireworks with the speed air rushed in to replace her.
Would've been more helpful if she knew some convenient, comically effective weakness that would shut them all down. Besides feeding them through a woodchipper. Maybe a convenient button on their torsos or something, with a big Z to mark the spot.
"Oh fuck this," came Genbu's voice from behind Dick's new vantage point.
Something metal slammed into the concrete at his feet with a screech. The ground lit up in a roughly circular geometric design, about ten feet in diameter. Golden light pooled there for a split second before it ballooned out, flowing over and around Dick's exact position until he was encased by the same kind of barrier bubble as everyone else. Without thinking, he struck the barrier with one of his escrima.
It made a noise like hitting the side of a car, which was certainly part of tonight's soundtrack . Zapping it made no difference. Something in Dick's comm link popped, but it wasn't accompanied by any kind of burning or shrieking that usually went hand in hand with destruction.
Dick stared directly into Genbu's masked face as she stepped back, unable to shake the sensation of ice forming in his veins. "Genbu, what the hell? Turtling isn't my style."
"Zetsu might get weaker as they clone themselves," Genbu said, as red mist wafted off her with increased intensity, "but it's gradual enough that you might get mobbed to death. Can't let that happen." She turned away. "Sorry about this, Nightwing."
The creatures in the sinkhole were climbing out. More worryingly, the ones outside of it were rushing in. The noises were the kind of horrible, organic-sounding squelching that would haunt Dick's nightmares.
"Ah, shit," said Genbu. The reddish aura around her snapped into solidity, or at least jelly consistency. Murder-jelly. "That's a fusion."
A white hand clutched at the edge of the pit, as wide across as a dining room table. Based on the screaming faces at the "knuckles" and the noise of disgust Genbu made, it was comprised of two off-white, half-transformed clones smashed together until they fused and formed fingers. Genbu was gone before the next hand reached the lip and the entire abomination hauled itself out.
"Yeah, I'd call that a fusion," Dick said. He'd shifted his weight back like he could still run, but his elbow hit the barrier and there still wasn't any give.
Which left Dick trapped in a magical Zorb.
"Come and get me, you tofu toy soldiers!" Genbu yelled at the giant in Japanese, her voice ringing from not just her actual location but from a roof, and from an alleyway. What the hell? "Or aren't you hungry anymore?!"
It stood on feet made of more bodies, with enough of them piled into its calves and thighs to let it easily loom over the street. Unlike the hands, the body was striped with what had to be the remnants of disguises—ninja-black false cloth and the remnants of someone's bathrobe, among other examples—and woven into a whole that was just made of more clones. Dozens of them folded together to make the torso alone. And all of the faces of the creatures were visible, muttering to themselves in soft voices that didn't make it through the barrier.
The main silver lining here was that there was nothing in the way of exposed organs. Or bones. Dick was deliberately not thinking of any other possibilities.
Already some forty feet away at a trot, Genbu vanished ahead of the first attack—a massive hammer-blow that widened the crater by buckling all the layers of streetside construction underneath it. While the body-of-bodies glanced around for its target and civilians cowered in terror, behind bubbles or windows, the water dragon above him started to lose cohesion and flow downward in unhappy ribbons.
And when the creature tried to smash its way out, like a child toying with a sprinkler system, all of its body-fingers were sliced apart on contact. White liquid splattered across the scene. The dragon was already turning into a nightmarish cage.
Genbu's commentary was no more helpful. She'd gone on to insult the monster in increasingly vicious terms.
Dick glanced at his feet as the creature roared, taking a chance. While the facsimile of blood dripped down the barrier, unable to get through, he knelt on the spot and ran a finger down the handle of the angular kunai knife that Genbu planted through the road. Even if the lighting wasn't terrible, Dick couldn't have read the characters there. His Japanese wasn't that good.
He took a picture of it instead. "Agent A, can you hear me?"
In his ear was only static. There was no sign that anyone was even trying to tap out Morse code on a different line.
"Shit."
Unable to run due to the obvious magic problem, Dick stared up as the giant clawed after Genbu—and its fingers' flailing arms and legs did so with no grace whatsoever. Nothing about this body moved alone. While that was true of humans too, the constant writhing was more akin to a sackful of snakes. Its huge shape bowed over the red-hot beacon in the dark that was Genbu. It tried to corner her against its body with wriggling hands.
"Feed us, feed us—" the monster wailed.
Red light flared and stabbed outward from Genbu's aura, solid as her sword. The creature's collective abdomen imploded under a tentacle-strike. Gummy flesh sloughed off into the sinkhole as Genbu ripped her way free.
But even so, she didn't flee. Her short bursts of speed kept up, but the monster didn't feel the need to actually get out of the sinkhole to chase her. No, it just smashed the fire truck in the pit to pieces under its weight and crushed anyone who might still have survived this long.
Red and blue lights from approaching squad cars. And Dick couldn't warn them off without some kind of signal getting through this fucking bubble.
Water surged out of the air—more than there should have been, even in a rainstorm—and started to cordon off the area. The aquarium view managed to avoid the civilian and emergency responder-occupied barriers, but half of Dick's particular tailor-made prison was wedged on the inside of the wall. Just by looking up, he could see the wall quickly thicken over his head until it was a foot-wide construct. On one side, the city. On the inside, Genbu and the murderous mass of howling clones.
They squared off like two angry titans.
Dick avoided saying anything to them, but the inside of his chest was a furious drumbeat. He slammed his fist against the wall, just to see if it'd give, and it didn't. It just clanked. Dammit, dammit, dammit—
And just under the sound of two monsters deciding to kill each other with as much viscera as possible, a familiar voice said, "Nightwing?"
Dick turned immediately at the sound. Tucking one escrima away, he pressed his empty hand against the unyielding wall.
Tim matched his handprint, curling his gloved fingers with the faintest scrape against the barrier after a few shaky seconds. Tiny twitches in his expression, in time with the sound of heavy impacts and both Genbu and the creature screaming at each other, gave away how much he could see of the fight past Dick's shoulder. But he was upright, apparently uninjured, and was already looking for a solution. Dick didn't care about the screaming by comparison.
Dick's heart hadn't returned to his chest cavity since that first report from Alfred: "Robin down." It was terrible of him, but Tim was here. The most important thing.
"We have to get you out," Tim said, and went for his utility belt with one hand. His other one groped for what was probably his bo staff and didn't find it. Dick recognized the look of frustration from many a long night. "How did this even happen?"
"Turns out Genbu's a bit touchy," Dick quipped back, relieved. Something exploded behind him, which he ignored. With the water wall in place, none of the battle backwash appeared to be getting far enough to harm anyone—anyone else, at least. Everyone in here was already dead, or locked up. Or currently in the middle of two superpowered combatants and out of Dick's reach. "Anyway, don't try to use explosives on it. I like my organs where they are."
"As opposed to…" Tim waved vaguely at the street. Bits of the various dead clones were still strewn everywhere. "Yeah, I think we can improve on that."
Dick nodded, bracing himself against the sound of something being crushed behind him. "Always striving for perfection, that's us."
"Yep," said Tim, and bowed his head toward the problem. Little white streaks stood out on the knuckles of his gloves, like he'd been fighting the clones too. Another smear ran across his cheek.
A shape loomed out of the alleyway behind Tim and Dick tensed up immediately. For a second, he saw Genbu, but the frame was too tall and the mask only vaguely similar under that black hood. Instead of the spiny mask Genbu used—and the one she still wore, even while fighting the monster in the middle of the water-dominated pit—this figure's mask was longer in the muzzle and marked with long blue streaks that ran from under the eyes toward the outer edges. The protrusions on top looked almost like horns.
"Robin, behind you," Dick hissed at him. When Tim didn't respond immediately—too caught up in studying the barrier—Dick punched right where his nose would've been otherwise. "Robin!"
Tim's head jerked up as he caught Dick's expression, and he whirled on the spot empty-handed.
The figure had reached back like a man assisting a passenger out of an invisible car, and a second person phased into view from the gloved hand, to an arm, to a body. This new arrival also wore a white mask, but there were red stripes and marks around the eyes and two pointed ears at the upper edge. Another hood, though this one was attached to a cloak instead of a long coat. They stepped forward and to the side, mask pointed directly at Tim and utterly silent.
A third masked figure stepped through thin air and into view. This one also wore a cloak, but was a full foot shorter than the other two. It looked vaguely like a bird with a blunt beak. Someone had drawn a green blob atop the nose and two more on each cheek, though those were squared-off nearer the beak.
They fanned out around Tim, two strides away. Red Mask and Blue Mask boxed him in while Green Mask kept back a little, the light spot of their mask half-disappearing as they turned their head each way.
Blue Mask finally said, in a voice swung low with malice, "You know, I don't really think there's a good way for you to lie your way out of this one. Laying a finger on someone Kei's protecting? I'm amazed she didn't already cut you in half."
Tim splayed out his hands in a calming motion, but didn't go for his gauntlet computer and a translation option. At the same time, he didn't drop the birdarang, which Red Mask tracked in a predatory manner. Probably a decent call.
It didn't make the three hostiles back down. Shit.
"Leave him alone," Dick snapped. He didn't punch his side of the barrier, but it was a close thing.
Blue Mask glanced at him. "Yeah, not exactly taking advice from someone stuck in a babysitting barrier."
Dammit, no— Dick drew a breath. Different angle. "If you're with Genbu—"
Solid noise rose in a scream, like a thousand chittering birds crammed into a split second and overwhelming any human ears. It cut through even the cacophony of Genbu and the monster's ongoing attempts to beat each other to death. Then white light, blinding enough that Dick's mask needed a second to slam sun shading down over his view.
A hand pressed flat against the barrier, wreathed in the remnants of white lightning. When his vision was less crammed with black spots, Dick met Red Mask's gaze, mask to mask, some six inches away.
Tim made a noise. It wasn't a word. Nothing could speak with a whole fucking arm shoved straight through their chest and out their back. All of his limbs had gone instantly slack. The only thing keeping him from slipping to the ground in a heap was the hand.
Because Tim had been impaled.
When Dick was trapped, when he couldn't reach his little brother, so he just—died. There was no fight.
No.
Dick's hand flexed against the barrier as though he could claw his way out. He tried. Tim's name barely stayed tucked inside his mouth. His entire brain was full of nothing but no no no no NO—
Red Mask wrenched their arm free and let Tim's body slump to the ground. Dick missed whatever they said, but the other two masked figures were gone when he looked again. And up, because he'd slid to his knees without realizing it. Maybe to get closer to Tim, after—
"—Get up," was what Dick heard. Red Mask tapped a hand against the barrier like they were just knocking on a window, as though they hadn't killed Dick's baby brother in front of him.
Dick reared back in rage, abruptly furious enough with that impassive face to beat his knuckles bloody trying to get out. Anything—
Red Mask laid his hand flat on the barrier, dead-center in Dick's field of view.
And the sticky print on the barrier was white. Red Mask's glove was smeared with the stuff all the way to the middle of their forearm.
The realization doused that raging internal flame in ice water. Dick's gaze darted down to the fake Tim, which was already losing color like the other clone-creatures. And the massive hole through center mass made the body start to collapse under its own weight. There were no visible bones or organs; it looked like spongy off-white goop all the way through.
"It was a Zetsu clone," Red Mask said as Dick took deliberately measured breaths, "in case you didn't know."
"I get that," Dick told them. But holy fucking shit. His heart couldn't take much more of this. Even if he was on his way back to baseline, the imagery would stay in his head forever. He knew it already. "But couldn't you have done that any other way?"
Red Mask shrugged. "Maybe."
Don't give me that shit, Dick thought immediately. But instead of saying so to Red Mask's face, he wrestled the warring horror and relief down and said, "Do you have a way to let me out of here?"
Red Mask nodded. But, instead of immediately doing that, they got to their feet and drew the katana strapped to their back. The air cracked as they disappeared, exactly like Genbu kept doing.
Dick turned away from the imposter Tim with the chill still clinging to his ribs. That still left him with the fight to watch. Helplessly.
This was some unnamed circle of hell. Helpless, just like—
Falling, falling, falling—
Genbu finally landed in plain view of Dick's shimmery prison and startled him out of the spiral.
The red aura around her was intense enough to make out three glowing tentacles and a spike-lined shell that confirmed the demon turtle's influence. Fear washed over him, too sharp to be his. And beside Genbu was Blue Mask, kneeling closer to both belligerents than any unpowered human would ever dare.
Branches exploded upward and outward from the point Blue Mask touched. More vigorous but less spiky than Poison Ivy's preferred pets, they lashed the big Zetsu fusion monster with a dozen entangling lines and dragged its head down. Its warped, uncanny and toothless face was a sight at close range, close enough that Dick could have reached out and touched it.
Overhead, the water wall had formed a ceiling.
"Got 'em," said Blue Mask, keeping their right hand down as the attack tree continued to pin the monster in place. "So, fire or no?"
Genbu shook her head. "There's probably a gas main around here."
"A what?"
Genbu ignored the question and grabbed the monster by its face. Or rather, by the tangle of limbs that probably made up an eyebrow and another that could've been the opposing cheekbone. The red energy around her flared up in a bubbling mass, and then it started to pour into the white-blooded creature. Blue-purple light grew in a dozen places along that strange light, like champagne bubbles, and quickly swelled to the size of basketballs as more power surged. Some of the body parts she touched started to turn black on contact as the magic found purchase in very creepy flesh.
"Oh, I get it now. Guess you've had practice," Blue Mask mused.
"Sure," said Genbu.
And then BANG. Each of the glowing spheres drilled further into the monster before they detonated, one after another. But it wasn't a matter of a fireball—it was more like the monster had been forced to swallow fifty scuba tanks and set those off. An explosive decompression that shredded and pulped everything it touched.
A couple of legs stood there, wavering, and fell. Red Mask appeared and perforated any intact clone left.
With the sound of continuous splatter, paste and goop rained down for a solid few seconds. Like bird shit. Water followed, no longer being yanked up into the air, and then the rain had a chance to wash the bits of monster into the sinkhole.
"Somehow it's worse than when Nagato-senpai did this. There's so much pulp." Blue Mask shuddered as white fluid refused to fully rinse off their coat. "Kei, hit me."
A water blast promptly smacked them in the back and commenced scrubbing. Using one hand for that left Genbu free to plant a hand on Dick's barrier for balance, heedless of Blue Mask's whining.
"Friends of yours?" Dick asked, astounded that his voice could still sound so casual. This entire night could go to hell.
"Teammates," was the quiet reply. Her head rose so that her mask's lenses met Dick's masked eyes, like she was trying to convey a degree of earnestness that barely ever lasted. Still, she tried. "I sent Robin off with my brother. I didn't want to give that away before."
Dick kind of appreciated it, even if he was pretty sure he wanted to punch all three of her friends. It could wait until he saw Tim again. The real Tim. "Where'd they go, then?"
Genbu hesitated.
Red Mask was suddenly there and said, "Let him out first."
"But—"
"It's an outside conversation." That was a command tone if Dick had ever heard one. While it wasn't low enough to compare to Batman's growl, Red Mask got Genbu's shoulders to bow.
Genbu curled her fingers, twisting her hand palm-up. The imbedded kunai ripped out of the ground and into her grasp as though on a fishhook, and the barrier bubble dissolved into golden mist.
Dick took a few exploratory steps, just to be sure the prison was gone. Then he took another careful breath. "Okay. So. Where the hell is Robin."
Genbu sighed. "Knowing my brother? They're both with Red Hood."
Crime Alley, then. The shouting Dick wanted to do was a long night away. Professionalism demanded no less. There were sirens a lot closer than the next fucking island. Prioritizing now. "Can you reliably find all of the disguised clone-things?"
Honestly, Dick suspected that when GCPD went over this crime scene, they'd find Genbu hadn't killed a single actual human. Someone who clung as hard as she had to the Bats' no-killing rule until now wouldn't have been less than precise with her moves once she started to skirt the edges. And fuck if Genbu hadn't decided to blow the gates off their hinges.
Genbu nodded this time. She gestured to Blue Mask and Red Mask with her retrieved kunai. "And so can they."
"What's he saying?" Blue Mask asked. Then a thought bonked him in the head, given how he jolted to attention. "Oh, and hi! I'm—"
"—Seiryū."
Blue Mask paused, a little stumped. "…I guess. Why?"
Genbu indicated her own mask. "We have a theme going. I'm Genbu here."
"Well, I guess I do like blue. Yeah, let's go with Seiryū." Blue Mask was officially redubbed something less likely to get him shot by Black Mask's goons for intellectual property theft. "Guess that makes him Byakko." He jabbed a finger at the newly-dubbed Byakko, and his friend slapped his hand away to continue cleaning his sword.
"And Green Mask?" Dick prompted. "I'm Nightwing, by the way."
"She can be what she wants, I guess?" Seiryū looked around, attention fully elsewhere already. "Oh, man. I didn't realize how badly this place was busted up. Okay, so we need to get the scene sorted out and kill the Zetsu clones, right? They stand out way more than they do at home! Should be easy."
Genbu muttered something under her breath as Seiryū slung an arm thoughtlessly over her shoulders. Jamming an elbow into his ribs, she just said, "We're at your disposal, Nightwing."
While Byakko leveled a stare at Dick for longer than was perhaps helpful, he bowed when the other two did. Dick got the strongest impression yet that Genbu was a ringleader to this particular group of teenage hellions, even if she didn't have command. The boys(?) deferred to her at least a little.
"Better late than never." Speaking of, Green Mask had already started climbing the building and assisting people off balconies. As the scene was finally backlit by squad car lights, he added, "And better get to work. Let me do the talking."
"Magnificent," was the quiet, almost uncannily calm assessment as the footage filtered back through the drone camera. It had lasted long enough to be useful. Ra's al Ghul, the Demon's Head, turned to his cloaked conspirator and let his tone become harsher. More declarative. "But the abomination is uncontrollable in her current state. Retrieve the other one so we may yet bring her properly to heel."
Several dark-clad shapes amid the League's held court bowed, rose, and left.
"By your leave, my lord," said the white-faced Zetsu. Its single eye darted off into the middle distance. "And then—"
"And only then you may have your wish. Dismissed."
Notes:
1. When Tim passed out last chapter, 75% of the tactical acumen in that room became suddenly unavailable.
2. Dick made the Power Rangers joke in his head that Kei's been avoiding for a while now. Anyone else remember Z-Putties?
3. Kei's list of active techniques for this chapter: V1 chakra cloak, Hidden Mist, her original security seals, those darn exploding seals, Genma's barrier seals (designed for a potential Kei-and-Isobu freakout), water clones (providing mist from the roofs), Water Dragon Bullet, Water Wall, and more than a few uses of Body Flicker and Tailed Beast Rasengan.
4. If you think that the rest of Team Minato is gonna get in trouble for jumping the gun and rushing to Gotham when it looked like Kei was cornered, you're correct. But here they are anyway, ready to kick ass and totally forget about names!