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The Grail's Dark Knight - (Batman/Fate Zero)

Thread starter The-Honored-One Start date Dec 25, 2023 Tags fate series (nasuverse) fate/grand order (nasuverse) fate/zero (nasuverse) batman (dc comics) crossover

Which Command Seal do you prefer

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Votes: 0 0.0%

2

Votes: 4 14.3%

3

Votes: 21 75.0%

4

Votes: 3 10.7%

Total voters 28 Poll closed Feb 7, 2024.

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Threadmarks Chapter 19: Disengagement Is A Rare Skill

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The-Honored-One

Jan 31, 2025 Awarded 1

#9,901

The night was alive with chaos.

The river shimmered under the pale moonlight, its surface rippling as Saber's boots skimmed across the water, her golden blade gleaming with an otherworldly light.

Opposite her, Rider charged down the riverside road, his chariot pulled by the divine bulls of Zeus, crackling with arcs of lightning that lit up the darkened sky.

The air between them was a maelstrom of power, a clash of titans that seemed to bend reality itself.

Saber's expression was calm, her eyes sharp and focused, every movement precise and calculated.

Her blade, hummed with energy as she swung it in wide arcs, sending razor-sharp gusts of wind hurtling toward Rider. Each blast tore through the air, carving deep gashes into the ground and sending debris flying.

Yet Rider met her attacks with a booming laugh, his voice echoing like thunder. With a wave of his hand, bolts of lightning erupted from the heavens, intercepting Saber's wind blasts in midair.

The collisions sent shockwaves rippling outward, shattering windows and uprooting trees along the riverbank.

Waver Velvet, Rider's young Master, clung to the edge of the chariot, his face pale and his hands trembling.

The battle was overwhelming.

Each clash of lightning and wind felt like the end and the raw power on display was both awe-inspiring and terrifying. He could feel the heat of the lightning, the sting of the wind, and the oppressive weight of their combined mana pressing down on him.

His mind raced, struggling to comprehend the scale of the fight.

Saber's movements were fluid and relentless. She darted across the water, her blade a blur of golden light as she closed the distance between herself and Rider.

But her focus wasn't solely on her opponent.

Her sharp eyes flicked toward Waver, calculating and cold.

With a swift motion, she redirected one of her wind blasts, sending it slicing through the air toward Waver.

The attack was precise, aimed to kill.

Rider's laughter turned into a roar of defiance. "Not so fast, King of Knights!" He raised his hand, and another bolt of lightning streaked down from the sky, intercepting Saber's attack mere feet from Waver. The explosion of energy sent the young man tumbling backward, his ears ringing and his vision blurred. Rider's voice was firm, reassuring. "Stay close, boy! This is no place for hesitation!"

Saber didn't relent.

She pressed her advantage, her blade moving faster than the eye could follow. Each strike was a masterpiece of combat, a blend of skill and power that few could hope to match. Rider met her blows with equal ferocity, his sword clashing against Excalibur in a shower of sparks. The force of their collisions sent shockwaves rippling through the air, the ground trembling beneath their feet.

The river became a battlefield, the water churning and frothing as Saber's movements sent waves crashing against the shore. Rider's chariot left deep gouges in the road, the wheels sparking as they tore through the asphalt. The two Servants were evenly matched, their strengths and weaknesses playing off each other in a deadly dance. Saber's precision and discipline countered Rider's raw power and unpredictability, creating a stalemate that neither could easily break.

Waver struggled to his feet, his heart pounding in his chest. He could feel the heat of the battle, the intensity of their clash pressing down on him like a physical weight. His mind raced, trying to find a way to tip the scales in Rider's favor. But how could he, a mere human, hope to influence a battle between legends? The thought was paralyzing, but he forced himself to focus.

Saber cut through the chaos as swung her blade in a wide arc, sending another gust of wind hurtling toward him. Rider countered with a burst of lightning, the two forces colliding in a blinding explosion of light and sound.

Rider grinned, his eyes blazing with excitement.

He urged his chariot forward, the bulls snorting and stamping as they charged toward her. Saber stood her ground, her blade raised high, ready to meet his attack head-on.

The clash was monumental. Lightning and wind collided in a deafening roar, the force of the impact sending both Servants skidding backward. Saber's feet left trails in the water as she regained her balance, her expression as stoic as ever. Rider's chariot came to a halt, the wheels smoking and the bulls panting from the exertion. For a moment, there was silence, the air thick with tension.

The night was far from over.

The world narrowed to the thunder of his own heartbeat.

Waver's hands gripped the chariot's edge, knuckles bone-white, as the aftershock of Saber's near-fatal strike rattled his bones. His lungs burned; the air reeked of ozone and scorched earth.

Across the battlefield, Saber's gaze locked onto him again—cold, clinical, devoid of hesitation.

She wasn't just a knight. She was a storm, relentless and impersonal, carving through everything in her path.

She'd kill me without blinking, he realized. The terror curdled into something sharper, darker.

Hate.

He hated her.

Hated her perfection, her merciless efficiency, the way she turned war into a calculation.

But hatred alone wouldn't save him.

His mind clawed for clarity.

Think, Waver. You're a magus. Use what you have.

Rider's booming voice cut through the din. "Stay sharp, boy! The tide turns on a knife's edge!" Lightning split the sky, colliding with another of Saber's wind blasts. The shockwave whipped Waver's hair into his eyes, but this time, he didn't flinch. Saber danced across the water, Excalibur's golden arcs slicing the air, each strike forcing Rider to pivot the chariot harder. She was herding them—toward the bridge downstream.

A trap.

Waver's eyes darted. The river. The bridge's supports. Saber's footing on the water— A plan crystallized, reckless but razor-edged. "Rider!" he shouted, voice raw. 'The pylons! Strike the river under her!' He projected his plan through their link.

Rider's grin flashed wild. "HA! Bold words!" But he listened. With a roar, he yanked the reins, veering the chariot sideways. Divine bulls reared, hooves slamming the asphalt as Rider raised his sword.

Lightning surged—not at Saber, but at the river's surface where her mana rippled.

The water erupted. Superheated by Zeus's bolts, the river exploded into steam, a scalding geyser swallowing Saber whole.

For a heartbeat, she almost sank, water reclaiming its weight—and Rider struck.

His sword crashed against Excalibur, the impact shearing through the steam, hurling Saber backward into the bridge's stone pillar.

The structure groaned, cracks spiderwebbing up its base.

But victory was fleeting.

Saber twisted midair stabbing downward. A whirlwind erupted beneath her, propelling her upward just as Rider's chariot barreled past. Her retaliatory strike—a crescent of compressed wind—gouged a trench across the chariot's flank, sending one wheel spinning into the river. The bulls bellowed, sparks flying from their harnesses as Rider fought to steady the vehicle.

Waver clung to the shuddering chariot, blood trickling from his nose—the backlash of Rider's mana expenditure searing his circuits.

But Saber wasn't unscathed. Across the water, she knelt on a half-submerged boulder, Excalibur planted like a crutch. Her armor was scorched, blond hair plastered to her face, but her eyes still burned with icy resolve.

The bridge behind her creaked ominously.

"Enough," Saber murmured, more to herself than them. She stood, swaying slightly.

"Retreating, King of Knights?" Rider chuckled, though his breath came heavy. The chariot's remaining wheel smoked, its magic fraying.

"Strategic withdrawal." Her gaze flicked to the eastern horizon—where the first hints of dawn tinged the sky. "My Master's call … takes priority." Without another word, she leapt ashore, Excalibur's glow dimming as she vanished into the shadows of the city.

Rider exhaled, shoulders sagging. "A draw, then. How… unsatisfying." He turned to Waver, eyebrows raised. "But you, little Master—! That was an astounding strategy!"

Waver didn't answer.

His hands still shook, adrenaline ebbing to leave him hollow.

They'd survived.

Barely.

But as Rider urged the battered chariot away from the river, Waver glanced back at the shattered bridge, the scorched earth, the scars of their clash.

This is war, he thought, teeth gritted. Not a game. Not a lecture.

The distant wail of sirens—Fuyuki's authorities drawn by the destruction. Rider's chariot fades as he starts carrying Waver into the labyrinth of alleys as dawn breaks.

Both Servants withdraw to recover, their duel postponed but unresolved.

The water pressed against the Batmobile's hull like a living thing, groaning with the weight of the river. Inside, the dim glow of the cockpit's monitors cast jagged shadows across Kirei's face, etching lines of tension he usually kept buried. The hum of the life-support systems was a low, insistent drone, punctuated by the occasional creak of metal adjusting to the pressure. It felt less like a vehicle and more like a tomb—a tomb shared with a man whose presence was as unyielding as the depths around them.

Batman's voice cut through the silence, cold and precise. "The Holy Grail War ended the moment your peers realized their strongest Servant had put in effort ash." He didn't turn to face Kirei, his gaze fixed on a holographic map flickering above the dashboard. A red dot pulsed over the ruins of the docks. "A satellite strike. Clean. Efficient. Now they're scrambling. Hiding. Fear is the only language they understand."

Kirei's fingers twitched imperceptibly.

The near demise of nearly every Servant, reduced to a tactical footnote. "A bold claim," he said, tone smooth as oil. "Yet here we sit, submerged, while Saber stalks the streets. Hardly the posture of a victor."

"Saber's Master is reactive. Desperate." Batman's gloved hand swiped across the hologram, pulling up schematics of Fuyuki's leylines. "The Grail's a chalice built on blood—heroic spirits. Seven spirits, seven sacrifices. A ritual masquerading as a wish-granting device. But you already knew that." His cowl tilted slightly, the white lenses sharpening.

"And the Church's executor sits idle, you imply? A curious oversight."

"The Church sanctions this heresy." Batman's voice dropped lower, a blade honed to a monomolecular edge. "They bred you for service. A hound to cull the strays, never questioning why the slaughter feeds the very evil they claim to despise. Tell me, Father—do you feel their hypocrisy in your marrow? Or has the emptiness drowned even that?"

Kirei's composure cracked. A flicker of a snarl, swiftly smothered. "You presume much, for a man who hides behind gadgets and shadows."

"I observe." Batman turned fully now, the hologram's light carving his silhouette into something primordial. "You've spent a lifetime dissecting souls, searching for one as fractured as your own. The Grail won't answer your emptiness. It'll consume you in the end. Just like it consumed the Einzberns forb generations. Just like it'll consume Saber's Master in the end."

The air thickened. Kirei's throat tightened—not from fear, but from the dizzying thrill-

Batman leaned forward, the cowl's shadow deepening. "You want meaning? Help me dismantle this farce. As a man who's finally stopped lying to himself."

"Why?" The word escaped before he could cage it.

Batman said, slowly removing his glove. He extended his bare hand. Calloused. Human. "You're not a monster, Kotomine. You have just never had someone see your struggles and offer a hand."

The Batmobile shuddered, alarms blaring as Saber's mana spiked somewhere above. But Kirei didn't flinch. His hand hovered, suspended between instinct and revelation. The emptiness yawned, vast and eternal… and in its depths, a spark.

Not hope.

Anticipation.

He gripped Batman's hand. Cold. Steady. Alive.

"A temporary alliance," Kirei murmured, the ghost of a smile on his lips. "Nothing more."

Batman's grip tightened. "We'll see."

Then he felt it and then a flash and they were gone.

Outside, the river churned as the Batmobile's engines roared to life, cutting through the water like a blade. Above, dawn bled into the sky, staining the ruins of Fuyuki in hues of gold and ash.

The war wasn't over.

But the rules had just changed.

The Batmobile breaches the river's surface, its hull glistening under the rising sun, as police sirens wail in the distance. Kirei watches the city blur past.

The air above Fuyuki hummed with unseen currents, a tapestry of ley lines and human folly woven into the night. Gilgamesh leaned against the marble balustrade of the Tohsaka mansion's rooftop garden, a goblet of wine untouched in his hand. His eyes—crimson and half-lidded—scanned the city below, not with the desperation of a sentry, but the idle curiosity of a god thumbing through a picture book.

The weight of Sha Naqba Imuru pressed against his skull like a crown he refused to wear.

To see all threads of possibility, every permutation of this petty war… how droll.

Where was the thrill of the unknown? The sweet sting of surprise? He had long ago learned to let his vision blur at the edges, to let causality dance just beyond his grasp.

A king need not count the steps of ants to rule them.

Yet even restrained, fragments slipped through.

—Tokiomi in his workshop, sleeves rolled to the elbow, chanting over a gemstone as it pulsed like a trapped star—

—A satellite's silent gaze piercing the clouds, its targeting algorithms whispering his name—

—Kirei Kotomine—

Gilgamesh sipped his wine, letting the visions dissolve.

Modern humanity's stench clung to everything—not the honest sweat of laborers or the iron tang of conquest, but the acrid reek of abstraction.

Stock markets.

Nuclear codes.

And while there was "Heroes" of some quality, they who hid behind masks and gadgets rather than claiming their glory in the open.

Pathetic.

And yet…

And yet…

His gaze drifted downward through three floors of polished mahogany and reinforced concrete to where Tokiomi worked. The man knelt in a circle of crushed gemdust, sweat gleaming on his brow as he wove incantations into the air. Around him, half-formed golems of amethyst and jade twitched on the floor, their faceless heads turning toward their creator in jerky unison. Gilgamesh's lip curled.

Magecraft had dwindled to this?

But then Tokiomi laughed—a bright, unguarded sound—as a golem's arm shuddered into motion, lifting a silver dagger twice its size. The wraiths chained to the walls howled in their cages of enchanted glass, their anguish fueling the spellwork. There was no calculation in that laugh, no performative pride.

Only the raw, childlike joy of creation.

"Fascinating, isn't it?" Gilgamesh murmured to the night. "Even mongrels dig for bones if they believe there's marrow left."

He materialized in the workshop with a ripple of golden light, ignoring Tokiomi's startled flinch. A golem lunged at him on instinct; he vaporized it with a glance.

"Clumsy," he said, flicking a shard of topaz from his shoulder.

"But not entirely without merit. Your ancestors would weep to see their craft reduced to… this." He nudged a fallen golem's head with his boot. "And yet you persist. Why?"

Tokiomi rose, dusting gemdust from his hands. "To perfect what's been entrusted to me, King of Heroes. The Tohsaka legacy—"

"—is a footnote," Gilgamesh interrupted, circling the man like a hawk. "You chain wraiths as if they were lions, not gnats. You carve runes into baubles fit for a merchant's wife. Where is the ambition? The fire?" He paused, catching Tokiomi's reflection in a cage of thrashing spirits. The man's jaw was tight, but his eyes…

Ah, there.

A spark.

That was new for a timeline.

Tokiomi turned, and Gilgamesh saw it—the moment the scholar changed his approach . "You speak of ambition, yet you've seen my family's archives. The Greater Grail's design. What we've built here is not smallness. It's precision."

"Precision."Gilgamesh repeated the word as if tasting spoiled fruit. "A scalpel in the hand of a butcher. Let me show you ambition."

He snapped his fingers.

The workshop's walls dissolved into the shimmering gold of his treasury. Tokiomi staggered as the floor became a sea of gemstones—each worthy of a Noble Phantasm, each pulsing with the weight of millenia. Gilgamesh plucked a sapphire the size of a human heart from the air, its facets etched with cunieform before tossing it to Tokiomi.

Tokiomi hesitated, then went to work.

He worked until dawn. Tokiomi's golems became living storms of gemdust and spiritrons.

His bounded fields twisted into fractal patterns even Gilgamesh found… interesting.

The King of Heroes offered no praise, only barbed commentary, but his glass remained full, his smirk sharp.

The interruption came as Gilgamesh knew it would.

He didn't turn as Kirei entered the workshop. "How kind of you to finally join this farce."

Tokiomi stiffened, his latest golem—a thrashing thing of onyx and emerald—freezing mid-stride. "Kirei? What are you—"

"The Church burns," Kirei said, his voice smooth as a garrote wire. "And a player has entered the board. One who claims the war is already over."

Gilgamesh studied the priest's face, the shadows beneath his eyes. Ah, there it was—the stench of betrayal, not yet ripe but fermenting.

How delightful.

"Let them come," he said, swirling his wine. "Let them all come. This garden of fools could use pruning.

As Kirei bowed, a flicker of Sha Naqba Imuru showed Gilgamesh the threads ahead—a bat-shaped shadow, a chalice overflowing with lies, a priest's hands stained with purpose.

He let the vision fade, savoring the tang of anticipation.

The game, at last, might be worth playing.

The Batmobile's engine growled like a wounded beast as it tore through Fuyuki's labyrinthine streets, its matte-black hull shimmering under the sporadic glow of fractured streetlamps. Batman's hands gripped the wheel with surgical precision, every turn calculated to avoid the flashing red-blue kaleidoscope of police cruisers converging in his rear cameras.

The vehicle's AI flickered warnings across the dashboard—heat signatures detected, civilian vehicle approaching intersection.

His foot pressed the accelerator, the G-force slamming him into the seat as the car swerved into an alley barely wider than its frame. Metal screamed against brick, sparks cascading over the windshield.

Pain radiated through his ribs. Not the clean ache of a fresh fracture, but the molten grind of old injuries—staples threading his collarbone, ceramic implants fusing cracked bones—flaring under stress.

The real fire, though, burned inside.

A searing pressure beneath his sternum as if his bloodstream had been replaced with napalm.

He coughed, the taste of copper sharp on his tongue.

"You're pushing your luck," Da Vinci's voice chimed through the comm, playful yet edged. A hologram of her flickered above the dashboard, her Renaissance-era robes swapped for a mechanic's overalls, grease smudged on her cheek. "Even my genius can't help you if you keep treating your body like a rented mule."

"Prioritize the east tunnel," Batman rasped, ignoring her. The police scanner chattered—suspected gas leak.

He veered toward the river, the Batmobile's tires hydroplaning across rain-slick asphalt.

"Saber's Master will regroup. We need surveillance on Risei Kotomine before—"

A spasm cut him short.

His vision blurred, the cityscape fracturing into double exposure.

For a heartbeat, he wasn't in Fuyuki—he was in Gotham, Carmine Falcone's assassins cornering him in the alley behind Leslie's clinic.

Slade Wilson's sword grazing his aorta.

The smell of his own blood, hot and metallic, as he dragged himself to her door.

"Bruce." Da Vinci's tone sharpened. The hologram pixelated, her form glitching into static.

He held himself from scowling at the use of the name

"Your vitals are—"

"I'm fine." He wrenched the wheel left, the Batmobile mounting a curb to bypass a barricade. The chassis groaned, the left-side armor dented from Saber's last windblade.

Batman exhaled, slow and controlled.

The world around him blurred in streaks of shifting light and liquid shadow, his breath ragged but measured. He had come within a hair's breadth of death. Again. It had been too close.

Too slow.

Batman had spent a lifetime training, honing, breaking and rebuilding his body into something beyond the limits of normal men. He had once been at the pinnacle, a living weapon forged through discipline and sheer force of will. But time was a patient, insidious thing, one he had no defense against. Experience had made him sharper, more efficient—but the edge dulled when the flesh failed to match the mind's demands.

There had been a time when he would have avoided Saber's mana waves by a breadth wider, when he wouldn't have felt the deep ache in his bones from simply enduring the force of impact. If he had been younger, if he had this knowledge, this skill, but in the body he had twenty years ago…

Could have saved Jason.

The thought hit him like an unseen blow.

His grip on the steering tightened, white-knuckled. Would he have been able to reach Jason in time, to stop Joker from taking him apart piece by piece?

If he had been just a bit stronger, a bit faster…would Jason have lived?

He clenched his jaw, quashing the thought before it festered further. Regret was a useless indulgence. He was alive now, and he had a war to fight.

"You've reached your limits. Your skill has never been sharper, your knowledge never deeper—but the body lags behind. It's frustrating. Maddening, even. But I have a solution."

Batman exhaled through his nose, his eyes flicking to the rapidly depleting armor integrity readouts on the console. "I assume this isn't some simple reinforcement spell."

A soft laugh. "Hardly. It's… an older method. Older than most modern magecraft. It's akin to remastering an old technique by calling on echoes of the past. Every action, every lesson your body once held can be recalled, reawakened—by allowing your former selves to possess you."

He stiffened slightly. "Possession?"

"Not in the way you're thinking." There was no jest in her tone now. "It's communion. A synchronization with your own past, allowing muscle memory, reflexes, even physical capability to revert to their peak."

The idea had a weight to it, one that settled in his mind with dangerous temptation.

"If I use this," he asked, voice low, "I regain what I lost?"

"Yes."

"And the cost?"

A pause. "It isn't something to be taken lightly. The self is not meant to fracture across time—it is meant to move forward. This technique forces it to look back, to straddle what it was and what it is. The strain can break lesser minds."

"I am not a lesser mind."

"No, but even you are bound by what is human."

He inhaled, controlled, calculating. It wasn't a question of whether he wanted it. The answer to that was clear. But whether he could afford the consequences? That was another matter entirely.

The dashboard flickered, warning lights bleeding red. A sharp throb pulsed in his ribs, an unrelenting reminder of his own mortality.

"Think on it," Da Vinci said, her voice gentler now. "For now, you still have work to do."

He exhaled, nodding slightly even if she couldn't see him. The weight of exhaustion pressed on him, but he shoved it aside. He had survived. That was enough. For now.

Pain management was an old dance—bio-feedback routines, cortisol suppressors, prototype subdermal implants.

But the heat in his chest writhed, a living thing.

The Cave beneath Ryuodoo was now a mausoleum of stolen tech—Da Vinci's workshop.

She'd combined the Batmobile's cargo bay into a summoning circle, her latest sketches of "Noble Phantasm retrofit" blueprints strewn between WayneTech servers and half-dismantled drones.

Batman staggered from the vehicle, his cape heavy with rainwater.

The room tilted.

"Sit. Before you decorate my floor with internal organs," Da Vinci said, not looking up from a dismantled Greek fire contraption. Her hair was tied back with a screwdriver, fingers dancing over gears like a concert pianist. "Saber's sword output exceeded projections, yes? Let me guess—you overclocked the mana diffusion slots in the armor. Again."

"Necessary risk." He leaned against a workbench. "The Einzbern homunculus's energy signature nearly matches the Grail's patterns. If we can isolate the point—"

"Ah-ah." She flicked a screw at his head.

He caught it reflexively.

"First, the damage report. Your 'necessary risks' nearly melted the car's core. And you—don't think I didn't notice you rerouting the coolant systems to buffer the afterburners. Clever. Suicidal, but clever."

Batman peeled off his gauntlets. The skin beneath was red, veins blackened.

A flicker of movement—his hand shot out, seizing her wrist. For a heartbeat, they stood locked in a stalemate, her smirk never wavering. Then he released her, reaching into his belt for a blood-stabilizer vial.

"The police will trace the destruction," he said, injecting the serum into his neck. The fire in his veins dimmed, not extinguished. "We-we wait. If the Grail's corruption is accelerating, we need to—"

The floor buckled.

Or maybe it was his knees.

Da Vinci's voice warped, echoing as if underwater.

"—Bruce? Bruce!"

He registered the clatter of tools, her hands gripping his shoulders as the world tipped sideways. Leslie's voice overlapped hers—"You're not invincible, you stubborn fool"—and for a fractured moment, he was twenty-three again, bleeding out on her clinic floor.

Then darkness.

Last edited: Jan 31, 2025

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Threadmarks Chapter 20: Point of Contention New

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The-Honored-One

Feb 28, 2025

#11,856

The air in the caves beneath Ryuudou Temple throbbed with power, thick enough to taste—a metallic tang laced with ozone and the earthy musk of damp stone. The walls pulsed like living tissue, veined with luminous magic circuits that snaked across the rock in jagged, geometric patterns. They glowed a faint cobalt where they converged, intensifying to molten gold at intersections, as if the mountain's bones had been inlaid with celestial wiring.

Leylines, older than Fuyuki itself, radiated from the cavern's heart like spider silk, their threads humming with mana so dense it crystallized in the air like frost.

Da Vinci's workshop sat at the nexus of this primordial network, a collision of eras. The cavern's natural arches had been retrofitted with wrought-iron beams, their riveted joints supporting dangling Edison bulbs and neon tubing that bathed the space in a kaleidoscope of warm amber and cold blue. Shelves carved into the stone groaned under the weight of leather-bound grimoires, their pages bristling with sticky notes, while adjacent racks held rows of monitors, their green-tinted screens scrolling lines of code.

At the room's center stood a workbench forged from a reforged medieval anvil, its surface a mosaic of soldering irons, gemstone foci, and 0ther materials. Half-assembled automatons littered the area—a brass-and-cog golem with fiber-optic nerves, a winged drone modeled after her ornithopter sketches, its feathers replaced with carbon-fiber plating.

Above it all, holograms of the Grail's mana flow rotated lazily, their data superimposed over Da Vinci's own diagrams of Fuyuki's leylines, quill strokes blending into pixelated heat maps.

The walls themselves had become her canvas. Chalk equations spiraled around clusters of glowing circuits, intersecting with spray-painted Arphaxad code from Batman's databases.

A replica of Vitruvian Man sketched in glow-in-the-dark marker stretched across one stalactite, its proportions adjusted to map human nerve clusters onto Servant spiritual cores.

Nearby, a bubbling alembic distillery dripped glowing aqua vitae into a Mason jar.

But the true marvel was the ceiling. Da Vinci had etched a colossal summoning circle into the rock, its sigils hybridized with circuit board traces. At its center hung a Tesla coil modified with Vatican-exorcism wards, crackling with energy that danced in time to the Leylines' pulse.

The Leylines suddenly flared crimson, their hum rising to a shriek. Alarms blared as the holograms glitched, Vivaldi's concerto warping into static.

The Grail's pulse thrummed through the cavern walls, a rhythm Da Vinci could feel in her teeth. She leaned over a holographic projection of its core—a tangled knot of mana channels, corrupted veins blackened an untold amount of curses.

"Fascinating… and repulsive,"she murmured. Her fingers danced through the hologram, peeling back layers of the Grail's architecture.

Her work was elegant, a spider's web of loopholes—exploiting the Einzbern's rigidity, hijacking leyline nodes to reroute the wish-granting function.

Possible, Da Vinci mused. With the right adjustments, she could siphon the Grail's power into a vessel of her design, purify it through a Fibonacci sequence of bounded fields or enslave it and get it to do anything she wished.

But the cost…

She glanced at the alcove where Batman lay unconscious on a slab of reinforced steel.

Her lips thinned.

"Priorities, Leonardo,"she chided herself, snapping the hologram shut.

Bruce's body was a battlefield to her artist's eye, as she was cataloging the damage.

"Dio mio," she breathed.

Scars mapped his torso—jagged lines from knives, puckered bullet holes, burns that twisted like ivy.

But beneath the skin, it was worse.

The X-ray scans revealed a lattice of titanium rods bolted to his spine, ceramic staples suturing muscle to bone. A carbon-fiber mesh encased his ribs.

Even his skull had been reforged—tungsten plates fused.

She traced a scar along his collarbone, her touch feather-light as she finished her work based on a brand new technique she made.

Psychometry surgery… crude for now, but effective.

A desperate fix.

A Vitruvian Man sketches of ether hovered above his chest, aligning with his circuits.

In her era, they'd treated fever with leeches and called it science.

This… this was engineering.

The Grail's shadow loomed. Its corruption pulsed in time with Bruce's heartbeat, black tendrils creeping through the leyline feeds. Da Vinci glanced between her patient and the Tesla coil's flickering holograms.

The simplest way to end it was to destroy it and the theoretical gate to Akasha was meant to open and be done with it.

Easiest and one they had the power to do but required it to be opened and the risk…

Dismantle it. Sever the leylines, let Fuyuki's mana bleed back into the earth slowly over the years. Clean. Simple. But wasteful in action and impractical as may take twice as long as it took to build up to return it

Repurpose it. Excise/control the curse and use the Grail as it was meant to be—a crucible of hope.

Risky.

Tempting.

Bruce stirred, a low groan escaping him. His hand twitched toward a empty space for a belt of gadgets.

Then—

Da Vinci.

She peered into the past etched into his flesh.

A flash.

A gunshot.

The darkness ruptured into a single, perfect moment, burned into his memory with searing clarity.

The alley smelled of damp asphalt, iron, and the lingering perfume of his mother's lavender. He heard the crunch of broken pearls skittering against pavement.

Two flashes.

Two gunshots.

The warmth on his face wasn't his own.

A streak of red across his cheek—hot, wet, thick. The taste of copper on his tongue.

His father's skull cracking against the ground. The way his mother's fingers convulsed in empty air before falling still.

The darkness swallowed him again, but now it breathed.

"Bruce…"

The whisper slithered through the void, tendrils of sound curling into his ears, threading through his mind.

Then—

Fire.

Smoke.

A slave camp in the Gobi desert. A child's ribs stark against his skin, covered in bruises too old for his short years.

A warlord's blade glinting in torchlight, ready to sever fingers for a mistake in tallying stolen goods.

Blood mixed with mud, thick with the smell of iron and excrement.

The flick of a cigarette lighter—the reflection of flames in hollow eyes.

"Bruce…"

His name, again.

London.

A man cackling over a limp body in an alley, money stuffed into his pockets with the casual indifference of breathing. A woman curled around her daughter, shielding her from boots that did not stop.

"Please—she's only six—!"

Boots still fell.

"Bruce…"

Every city. Every crime. Every atrocity he had seen.

Gotham.

The sound of ribs snapping under his fist. The way a thug's nose crunched wetly, blood painting the pavement beneath them. The whisper of a trigger pull before he could intervene—another dead boy, another grieving mother.

A laughing mouth split open, red spreading wider, deeper, impossibly grotesque.

A crowbar dripping with blood, imagined in swinging down again.

Jason.

"Bruce…"

The voice was louder now, pressing into him, wrapping around the nightmares, threading through the agony.

Another flash of heat—this one different.

Not fire. Not fever.

Lightning.

A spark searing through his nervous system, dragging him from the void.

Her psychometric touch slipped beneath his scars, pried open the sutures of memory like pages of a ledger.

The fractures of his tibia—reminiscent of the pit fights in Thailand.

The deep gash along his side—Gotham docks, twelve years ago. A knife thrust by an assassin who had nearly punctured his liver, only deterred by the plating of his suit.

The knotted tissue around his left shoulder—torn from its socket in a battle with Croc, tendons shredded like old rope.

His skull—fissures running through the bone like fault lines from countless blows. Some concussive, some near-fatal.

His ribs—broken and mended too many times, threaded with surgical mesh and fragments of armor plating.

His knuckles—scarred from striking, from shattering against bone, from years of battering crime into submission.

Each injury cataloged. Each one traced with a delicate, knowing touch.

Da Vinci saw them not as wounds, but as equations, as problems to solve.

She set to work.

Bruce drifted on the edge of waking, the heat in his chest surging and ebbing in tandem with her hands moving over him. His body felt wrong—disjointed, distant. Muscles that should have ached felt foreign, numbed by something he did not understand.

The whispering continued, threading through the madness, grounding him.

The nightmares did not stop.

But the darkness began to recede.

Heat.

It was everywhere.

Not the crackling warmth of a fire or the sun's embrace through glass—no, this was something deeper. A suffocating inferno, rising from within. It had no source, no relief. Sweat beaded on his skin, but before it could cool him, it boiled. Steam curled off his arms, his chest, his face. It sizzled along the edges of his vision.

He was weightless, submerged in liquid flame. Every nerve flared in protest, muscles twitching, contracting, trying to move—but there was nowhere to go. His lungs screamed, his throat clenched shut against the heat threatening to sear him from the inside.

The darkness pressed in, thick as tar. It had no walls, no borders. Just the heat and the weight of unseen eyes.

A whisper.

"Bruce… Bruce… Bruce."

It came from everywhere and nowhere. Faint, just beyond hearing, slipping between layers of fever and memory.

A breath.

Gunfire.

BANG—!

The air cracked apart. Sound and silence collapsed into each other.

Blood.

He wasn't drowning in fire anymore. The world had shrunk down to an alleyway, rain spitting against wet pavement. His mother's hand was still clutching his, fingers trembling. The pearls had already fallen—scattered, forgotten, sinking into the gutter.

His father's body slumped forward, half a face left, blood painting the street.

His mother's scream was cut short.

BANG—!

The impact sent warm droplets against his cheek. A splatter of red and something thicker.

Brain matter.

He had been too shocked to move.

Too small. Too slow. Too weak.

"Bruce… Bruce…"

The voice rippled through the darkness. Familiar. Foreign.

Another memory forced itself upon him. He was older now. Kneeling in a squalid hovel, cradling a dying boy—his body skeletal, ribs pressing against dirt-streaked skin. The wounds weren't from bullets but starvation. Disease.

Across the world, justice was an illusion.

Another flash—he was waist-deep in a trench filled with corpses, hands tied, bruises forming around his throat where slavers had tried to break him.

Then again—dodging a machete in a jungle, the sweat in his eyes indistinguishable from the blood streaking down his temple.

A warehouse fire. A girl screaming inside.

A city street, a mother holding her child too tightly, shielding them from a monster in the night.

"Bruce."

The memories warped, turned in on themselves. His own body became one of the broken. The scars on his back split open. He felt the knife slip into his ribs again, the bullet tearing through his shoulder, the sensation of ribs cracking under impact.

Pain.

It had always been there.

It shaped him, sculpted him as surely as chisels shaped marble.

The voice wasn't just in his mind anymore. It was real.

A second presence. A featherlight touch against his temple, a whisper of fingers tracing over his battered frame.

Bruce's eyes snapped open.

The first thing he saw was her.

Leonardo da Vinci, the polymath, the artist, the enigmatic genius.

Her fingers hovered near his face, palm barely grazing his cheek in an uncharacteristic moment of hesitation.

He moved before thought could catch up.

A reflex.

His hand snapped up, closing around her wrist.

Her skin was warm, her pulse steady. She didn't flinch. Didn't recoil.

If she had been anyone else, the bones would have shattered. The force behind his grip was enough to splinter steel.

Servant. Genius. A legend given form.

And she was smiling.

"Ah, awake at last."

Bruce ignored the amusement lacing her tone, focusing instead on his own breathing—steadying it, measuring the heat still clinging to his skin. His body ached.. Less. And more. Not just from injury but from something deeper.

Da Vinci tilted her head, feigning innocence. "If you wanted to hold hands, detective, you could have just asked."

Bruce let go.

She chuckled softly, flexing her wrist before lowering it.

The tension lingered for a second longer before he broke it the only way he knew how. "Diagnosis."

The word had the intended effect.

Da Vinci's grin widened, and she adopted a mock-professional tone, tapping a finger against her chin. "Ah, where to start? Multiple healed fractures, a skeleton that looks like it was reforged in a medieval armory, inner scar tissue reminiscent of battlefields—oh, and a mild case of being human, which I imagine is quite frustrating for you."

Bruce gave her a flat look.

She waved a hand, stepping back slightly. "All in all, a fine mess, but nothing I couldn't fix. Though, if you were wondering what actually knocked you unconscious—" she made a dramatic pause "—overheating."

Bruce frowned. "Overheating?"

She nodded sagely. "Yes, you see, when a human body generates too much heat—"

"I know what overheating is," he interrupted, pushing himself up.

Or trying to.

Da Vinci pushed him back down.

Her hand landed against his chest, fingers deceptively delicate. There was no effort in the motion, yet he felt an immovable force pressing him back against the steel slab.

Bruce exhaled sharply through his nose. "Elaborate."

She tapped a finger against his sternum, thoughtful. "Simple. Magic circuits generate heat when used excessively. You should not be capable of running them at the efficiency you do, not without training or a proper lineage."

Bruce said nothing for a moment, "It's …only a rumor that my family descended from Gawain. A little family propaganda to make the Waynes seem even more illustrious."

He exhaled. "It's nothing."

"Mmm. Not quite. If you were a normal human who got random circuits of piss poor quality, the circuits would have burned you out long ago."

Bruce's expression didn't change.

Da Vinci leaned forward, eyes alight with curiosity. "You are quite the paradox, detective. A man without magecraft, yet one who commands it flawlessly."

He shifted against the slab, testing the weight of her palm still pressing him down. "It doesn't matter."

Da Vinci sighed. "You do realize your recklessness is going to kill you one day, yes?"

Bruce didn't hesitate.

"I've prepared for that."

She narrowed her eyes. "Have you? Or have you simply refused to acknowledge that there are limits to even your endurance?"

His voice was steady. "Obvious variations aside, there's only one human body. Bones, five major organs, 60,000 miles of blood vessels. All it takes is time. Days. Months. Years, spent memorizing the finite ways there are to hurt and break a man. Preparing for all of them. I've escaped from every conceivable deathtrap. Ten times. A dozen times. I can slow my breathing and metabolism to control panic and conserve air. Straightjackets are kindergarten. Locks, too. Bench pressing a pine coffin lid through 600 pounds of loose soil that's filling your mouth, crushing your lungs flat, and shredding your dehydrated muscles?"

His gaze was unwavering.

"That's harder. But far from impossible. The grave won't stop me."

"I chose this life. I know what I'm doing. And on any given day, I could stop doing it. Today however, isn't that day. And tomorrow won't be either."

"Of what use is a dream if not a blueprint for courageous action"

For once, Da Vinci didn't immediately respond.

She exhaled, shaking her head. "And yet, you still act as though your body is disposable."

Bruce remained silent.

He, then after he tried to get up, scowled. "Move."

"No."

"Da Vinci."

"No," she repeated, more firmly. "I have just put you back together, Bruce. I am not going to let you immediately tear yourself apart again."

His jaw tightened. "I don't have time for this."

"You never seem to do," she shot back, eyes flashing with something sharp. "That's the problem."

The room was silent for a moment, the air between them thick with an unspoken argument.

Then Bruce pulled out his arm form the tarp covering hm.

Da Vinci's eyes flicked downward. And then she froze.

The additional Command Seals, marked against his skin merged with his own.

Her gaze lifted back to his.

"We can dismantle the Grail," he said. "Now."

She didn't deny it. Didn't pretend to be surprised. Instead, she let out a slow breath, staring at the Command Seals as if she could see the possibilities they represented.

Then she spoke. "You do understand that I still need one more, right?"

Bruce's expression didn't change.

Da Vinci sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "I was going to amend that statement," she admitted. "Because I've found another way."

His voice was quiet, but heavy. "Why did you lie?"

Da Vinci exhaled, shaking her head. "You don't miss a thing, do you?"

His silence was answer enough.

She met his gaze again, this time with something more serious in her expression. "I needed an extra safety net."

Bruce said nothing, waiting.

"The Grail," she continued, "isn't just tainted—it's fundamentally compromised. Even if you destroy it, even if you wanted to repurpose its function, there's no guarantee that it wouldn't simply implode on itself. Or worse—warp into something even more dangerous."

She gestured to the Seals on his arm. "That's why I needed an extra pair. If we were going to subjugate whatever festers inside for a less destructive method, we need contingencies. Because if you had change your mind plan to take the Grail instead of destroying it outright, you're going to have every major player left in this war coming after you."

Bruce's gaze didn't waver. "I know."

Da Vinci studied him, something unreadable in her eyes. Then, after a moment, she sighed and smiled.

"Of course, you do," she muttered. "World's Greatest Detective, after all."

He didn't respond to the remark or ask how she knew that moniker. Instead, he sat up—this time without resistance.

"I'll scope out the city," he said. "In Morning."

Da Vinci arched a brow. "A compromise?"

He held her gaze. "A tactical decision."

She smirked. "If you say so."

And just like that, the tension eased— it still remained however.

A/N: Thought I should update and leave something for this month of relationships with a argument and a compromise.

Last edited: Feb 28, 2025

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The-Honored-One

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Beneath the Hyatt, in a vault warded with Enochian script, the Mana Engine stirred. Its crystalline core—a fossilized fairy heart—flared in pulses, casting eerie prisms of light against the reinforced stone. The air hummed with unseen forces, resonating in whispered tongues that slipped between the cracks of perception. Dreams of the Grail's nectar seeped through the hotel's bones, an intoxicating promise woven into the very foundation of the city. The walls wept oil-black resin, pooling like shadows given liquid form. Somewhere, a clock struck thirteen, its chime an intrusion upon the natural order, a sound that did not belong to this world but echoed from something beyond the veil of time itself.

And in the ruins of Fuyuki's church, Diarmuid knelt, his spear tracing the edge of a footprint left in molten stone. The air was thick with the acrid sting of burnt wiring and the coppery tang of old blood, a scent that clung to the debris like a ghost of violence past. Shattered pews lay in splintered heaps, and the fractured remnants of a stained-glass window bled color into the moonlight. No ordinary explosive could have wrought such devastation, no common arsonist could have left such precision in their wake. This was something else—something deliberate, something coldly calculated.

The Fuyuki Hyatt Hotel's penthouse suite was a gilded cage, and Kayneth El-Melloi Archibald loathed every inch of it.

Not because of the opulence—the floor-to-ceiling windows framing the city like a jeweler's display, the Italian marble floors polished to a mirror sheen, or even the grand piano that no one would dare play in his presence.

No, it was the insult.

The second-best floor.

The "premier suite" reserved for Bruce Wayne, a man who hadn't even bothered to grace this backwater with his presence.

Kayneth's lip curled as he paced past a vase of orchids worth more than the annual income of Fuyuki's average resident. The Grail War's indignities knew no bounds.

"Milord."

Diarmuid's voice cut through his seething. The Lancer stood at attention by the suite's double doors, his crimson spear slung across his back. "The Church's remains have been secured. The blast radius suggests high-grade explosives, but…" He hesitated, eyes narrowing. "There's residue. Not mundane. Magecraft."

Kayneth waved a hand. "Of course it was. Honor among thieves seems to be a fairy tale, even here in a tournament for mages." He stalked to the window, glaring down at the smoldering crater where Fuyuki's chapel once stood. The Church's neutrality had always been a farce—Kirei Kotomine's duplicity proved that—but its destruction was a brazen escalation. "Whoever did this lacks subtlety. Or patience."

A chuckle floated from the adjoining room. Sola-Ui Nuada-Re Sophia-Ri leaned against the doorway, her crimson nails tapping a staccato rhythm on her folded arms. "Or both. This reeks of desperation. Or perhaps… a distraction." Her gaze lingered on Diarmuid, hungry and calculating.

Kayneth's jaw tightened. Sola-Ui's fixation on his Servant was as transparent as it was tedious. "Your insight is as ever… enlightening, dear. But unless you've suddenly developed clairvoyance—"

"I've reviewed the leyline disruptions," she interrupted, sauntering into the room. Her heels clicked like a metronome. "The blast coincided with a surge from the Grail's vessel. Coincidence? Or catalyst?"

He stiffened.

"Irrelevant," he snapped. "Our needs remain taken care of by the spare Engines."

Sola-Ui's smile turned knife-sharp. "Ah, yes. Your… toys."

The insult hung in the air.

Kayneth's three Mana Engines—sculpted from the corpse of a Cornish fairy queen—were his family's former magnum opus, not that Sola-Ui's diluted bloodline could appreciate their elegance. Each Engine pulsed with primal mana, capable of leveling city blocks.

But they were alive, in a way. Kept in separate vaults beneath the hotel, their song seeped through the foundations, warping reality in their slumber. Last week, a maid had vanished near the east vault. They'd found her hours later, her body fused with a grandfather clock, still ticking.

"Send Lancer to the ruins," Kayneth ordered, turning from the window. "If the Church's archives survived, they may hold clues to Caster's identity."

Diarmuid bowed. "At once, milord."

As the Servant dissolved into spirit form, Sola-Ui stepped closer, her perfume cloying—jasmine and arsenic. "You're wasting him on errands. The full power of the Engines could end this war tonight."

"And risk them merging? Don't play naïve." Kayneth's hand flexed; Volumen Hydrargyrum coiled like a serpent. "The Engines crave the Grail. Unite them, and they'll hijack the ritual. We proceed as planned."

Her laugh was a bell toll. "Plans. Always plans. While that animal in the shadows picks us apart."

He seized her wrist, mercury tendrils biting into her skin. "Careful, Sola-Ui. Ambition without pedigree is… unseemly."

She didn't flinch. "Says the man hiding from a mortal in a rodent costume."

The scent of charred stone and scorched wood lingered in the air, mixing with the acrid tang of gunpowder. Waver Velvet stood outside the ruined Fuyuki Church, arms crossed as he surveyed the aftermath of the attack. The destruction was methodical—walls shattered in controlled detonations, windows blown out from concussive force, and debris scattered in a way that suggested precision rather than reckless magical devastation. There were barely traces of mana, no sigils burned into the ground, no lingering odic resonance from Magecraft.

"Whoever did this… they weren't a traditional Magus," Waver murmured, his voice tight with realization.

"Ah, so you noticed as well," Iskandar said, standing beside his Master, arms folded. "This was the work of someone who wages war without the power of sorcery."

Waver adjusted his glasses and frowned. "Which means it could only be one person."

A frown settled on Waver's face as he pulled out his notebook. "There was a case I read about once while researching modern Magecraft conflicts—one that involved non-magical warfare. In 1983, a corporate building in Gotham City was destroyed by an unknown assailant. Official reports called it an accident, but some theories in the Association suggested otherwise."

Iskandar raised an eyebrow. "And what makes you think it was the Magus Killer?"

"The scale of destruction, the precision, the fact that almost no magical traces were ever found despite the magnitude of the incident involving magi," Waver explained. "There were rumors that the target had been an underground Magus operation hiding within Wayne Enterprises. Some even speculated that an artifact was at stake."

Waver flipped through his notes. "There were also reports of someone matching his description fleeing Gotham shortly after the attack. No one could prove it was him, but if the Magus Killer was responsible for the Wayne Plaza bombing, then that means he's comfortable operating in areas where supernatural and mundane forces intersect."

Iskandar nodded, stroking his beard. "Then it stands to reason that he's involved in this War, either as a Master or as a contingency plan for another Master." His eyes gleamed with something akin to admiration. "A warrior who fights without Magecraft yet still triumphs… fascinating. I should like to meet him."

Waver felt a pit form in his stomach. "We need to be careful. If the Magus Killer is here, that means we're dealing with someone who doesn't fight fair. And if he's already attacked the Church, it means he's ahead of us."

Iskandar clapped a hand on Waver's shoulder. "Then we must even the playing field. And what better way than to find another great warrior to join our cause?"

Waver gave him a skeptical look. "And who would that be?"

Iskandar grinned. "The one who used me as a decoy"

Waver Velvet could only stare.

His brain outright rejected the words that had just left Rider's mouth, as if they had been spoken in an alien language. But no—he had understood them perfectly. They just didn't make any sense.

"You… want to recruit the Batman?" Waver repeated, blinking rapidly as though the act might help realign reality into something coherent.

"Exactly!" Rider grinned, utterly at ease, as if this were the most obvious conclusion in the world. He stood with arms akimbo, red cloak billowing slightly in the night breeze. "A warrior like that— though one who haunts the battlefield from the shadows—would make a fine addition to our army, don't you think?"

Waver sputtered, waving his hands wildly. "He's not a warrior! He's not a Servant! He's not even—" He stopped himself. That wasn't entirely accurate. "Okay, he's technically human, maybe but do you have any idea what you're even saying? The Batman, Rider! The same man that the entire Mage's Association quietly pretends doesn't exist because we have no way to explain how he does what he does!"

That, of course, only seemed to excite Rider further. The towering King of Conquerors stroked his beard in amusement, nodding as though Waver had just confirmed every suspicion he had.

"Ah, so he is that much of an enigma to your people. Excellent!"

"Not excellent!" Waver shouted, his voice cracking. "Terrible! Disastrous! The man has a standing kill order in half the criminal underworld that isnt scared of him and an unspoken hands-off policy from the Association because every attempt to study him has ended in complete failure!"

It was true. The Batman was a legend even among the students of the Clock Tower—not for what he was or did, but for what no one could properly determine about him.

He had no known Crest, no obvious magical use, and yet he moved like something that should not be bound by mortal limitations. Some theorized he was a defiant Dead Apostle who had found a way to resist bloodlust, while others whispered of an artificial homunculus made in an age beyond modern Thaumaturgy. But those were just theories.

The only facts known about the Batman were pieced together from conflicting and unreliable reports:

He operated in Gotham, a city that should, by all accounts, have collapsed decades ago from the misamangement of the 2nd Owners but hadn't—likely due to him.

He had no confirmed magecraft lineage, yet he routinely battled those who did.

He fought high level Dead Apostles, alchemists, and even some rogue Executors without ever being seen using a Mystery of his own.

Every attempt to track, record, or analyze him through magecraft had either failed outright or resulted in the tracking mage going missing for weeks. Upon return, they refused to speak about what had happened.

He had once worked with the Holy Church.

That last point was what made most mages pretend he wasn't real.

Waver had read the classified reports —or at least the few scraps available to students in the Tower archives.

Mages had debated that question for years, and no one had reached a satisfying conclusion. Some theorized he had employed Mystic Codes. Others suspected he was shielded by some unknown blessing. Some even believed the impossible—that Batman was simply that good.

Waver clenched his jaw. And now Rider—the man who had ridden a goddamn chariot into a battlefield just hours ago—wanted to recruit this madman.

"Rider," he began carefully, "this is not a good idea."

"Nonsense!" Rider clapped him on the back hard enough to rattle his ribs. "A warrior of such repute—one so feared that even your precious Association hesitates to cross him—why, that only makes him more valuable!"

"He's not feared, he's avoided," Waver groaned, rubbing his forehead. "The difference is important. No one wants to deal with Batman because he operates by entirely different focus unrelated to the pursuit of the Root even if he… skirts on the supernatural. He's not relatedby magecraft, by Association politics, by any of the things that keep our world running in an orderly way. And besides, even if he was the kind of person you could convince to join a cause—what makes you think he'd agree with you?"

Rider grinned broadly. "Because I am a King, boy!"

Waver gave him an unimpressed look. "That means nothing to someone like him."

That, at least, gave the Conqueror some pause. He frowned, stroking his beard in thought. "Hmph. You think he would not be drawn to the ideals of conquest?"

Waver let out a breath. "From what little we actually know about him? No. Not at all. He doesn't fight for personal glory. He doesn't fight to rule. He fights because…" He hesitated, then shook his head. "Honestly, I don't even know why he fights, but it's not for power. If anything, he's the type to oppose people who want to conquer the world. You'd probably just end up fighting him instead."

A low chuckle rumbled from Rider's throat. "So even I am just another would-be conqueror to him, then?"

"Most likely," Waver muttered. "If I had to guess, he probably deals with people like you on a weekly basis."

Rider burst into full, booming laughter. "Hah! That only makes me want to meet him more!"

Of course it did. Waver resisted the urge to scream into his hands.

"And just how do you plan to meet him?" he demanded. "You think he's just going to stroll onto the battlefield like a proper Heroic Spirit? He's probably already aware of the war, and if he's not interfering, it's because he doesn't want to."

"Oh, but he will," Rider said, eyes glinting with certainty. "A man like that does not stand idle when great battles are waged."

Waver hated how much that actually made sense.

Rider nodded to himself. "And if he will not come to us, then we shall go to him."

Waver groaned, already feeling the headache forming. "And how, exactly, do you expect to find him? Every mage who's tried has failed."

Rider's grin stretched wide. "Simple, boy! We will draw him out!"

That was somehow the worst possible answer.

"Please don't," Waver begged.

But it was already too late. Rider had made up his mind.

And Waver had a sinking feeling that before this war was over, he was going to wish he had never heard the name Batman.

The workshop beneath Ryuudou Temple was a fusion of magic and engineering so seamless it defied logic. An alchemical crucible disguised as a humble underground chamber, its walls pulsed with glowing circuits—sigils of ancient craft intertwined with the cold precision of modern machinery. Intricate thaumaturgical arrays ran through the floor, feeding energy into the chamber like a vast circulatory system, while brass-and-crystal mechanisms clicked and hummed with mechanical precision. This was a space where Renaissance ingenuity met the cutting edge of technology, where principles from the past and future coalesced into something greater.

And it was here that Bruce Wayne, clad in the remnants of his war-torn Batsuit, stood motionless as Leonardo da Vinci fussed over him.

The damage to his equipment was extensive but far from irreparable.

Da Vinci's workshop had already begun restoring what the world had tried to break. His cape lay suspended in the air, slowly reweaving itself as filaments of magical energy stitched through the fabric. His gauntlets and boots sat on an elevated dais, surrounded by shimmering sigils as the alchemical transmutation process reshaped fractured plating and repaired burned-out servos. Even the floor beneath him was repairing itself—shattered stone pulling together, cracks vanishing as though time itself had reversed.

Bruce observed the process, analytical even in stillness. Reinforcement magecraft applied on a structural level, restoring and refining at the same time. Combined with alchemy, it functioned like an advanced form of molecular realignment, returning matter to its peak condition.

Efficient.

Precise.

Practical.

"Handy trick," he muttered, watching the plates of his gauntlets seal together seamlessly.

Da Vinci grinned as she whirled around him, her violet cloak trailing behind her like a maestro orchestrating a symphony of machinery and mysticism. "Handy? My dear Bat, this is the pinnacle of applied thaumaturgy! The culmination of centuries of lost knowledge, the crossroads of art and science! And here you stand, arms crossed, treating it like a mere trick!"

Bruce exhaled, unimpressed. "Doesn't change the fact that it works."

Da Vinci scoffed. "Oh, it works, certainly. But why settle for mere restoration when we could improve? You're already clad in an armored second skin of marvelous ingenuity—why not elevate it to a masterpiece?"

She gestured grandly, and holographic schematics flickered into existence—arcane blueprints interwoven with modern diagnostics, all focused on his suit. "I've taken the liberty of devising several upgrades tailored to your… shall we say, particular methods."

Bruce glanced over the display, mind already dissecting each proposal with the cold efficiency of an engineer.

Da Vinci's eyes sparkled as she tapped the projection. "A kinetic neural accelerant! Modeled after my own theories of motion, of course. With this, you'll move at speeds imperceptible to the human eye in short bursts, your reflexes amplified to near-superhuman levels!"

Bruce frowned. "Overclocking my nervous system." He shifted his stance slightly, feeling the old ache in his left shoulder—a bullet wound from years past, long since healed but never forgotten. "What's the strain?"

Da Vinci twirled a finger. "A negligible biofeedback spike, perhaps a lingering sense of vertigo after extended use. Hardly worth concern for a man of your fortitude."

"Pass."

She blinked. "What?"

Bruce turned, already moving to examine his cowl's repaired optics. "Reliability trumps speed. I need my perception clear, not blurred by artificial stimulus. If my reaction time isn't fast enough, I adapt. Not augment."

Da Vinci huffed, but her excitement barely dimmed. "Fine, fine. But what of this?"

Bruce studied the proposed schematics, arms crossed.

"True invisibility," Da Vinci declared, practically bouncing on her heels. "A technique only theorized in your era, but with a little alchemical ingenuity—voilà! Step into the shadows, and even the keenest eye will be deceived."

"It drains power too quickly." Bruce's voice was even, his mind already calculating practical use cases. "Fine for evasion. Useless for prolonged engagements."

Da Vinci grinned. "Ah, but paired with your existing stealth training, it could render you a literal ghost. A nightmare unseen."

He considered it.

Unlike the reflex suite, this had merit.

His current stealth relied on darkness, cover, and misdirection. True optical camouflage could give him an advantage even against enemies capable of seeing through conventional means.

"Integrated, but secondary," he relented. "Manual activation only. No automatic triggers."

Da Vinci beamed. "Now we're talking!"

He only had to look to notice the improved grapple designs.

Bruce didn't even need to debate this one. "Approved."

"Ha! At last, enthusiasm!" Da Vinci clapped her hands. "And I assume you'll approve of this as well?"

Impact Boots & Servo-Muscle Assistance

It would enhance mobility, allowing for explosive jumps, limited gliding, and reduced fall impact.

Bruce flexed his fingers, remembering the times his landings had not gone as planned. His current suit allowed for controlled descents but nothing on this scale.

"Practical," he admitted. "So long as the power draw is minimal."

Da Vinci waved dismissively. "Easily accounted for. We can redistribute energy from redundant systems when necessary. A simple matter of engineering brilliance, which I just so happen to have in spades."

Bruce ignored her self-congratulation. "Then it stays."

Da Vinci crossed her arms, feigning exasperation. "You truly are the most frustrating of clients."

Bruce examined his newly restored gauntlet, flexing his fingers as the reinforced plating shifted smoothly over his knuckles. "Not here for customer service."

"And yet, here you stand, benefiting from my magnificence!"

He exhaled through his nose, unimpressed. But beneath the banter, a truth remained: the repairs were complete, his suit stronger than before. The workshop had restored more than just armor—it had sharpened his edge for the battles ahead.

Da Vinci, for all her flair, understood that.

As she leaned against a nearby worktable, smirking, she tilted her head curiously. "You never do stop, do you?"

Bruce met her gaze, his expression unreadable. "The enemy won't."

She studied him for a long moment, then sighed, shaking her head. "You're going to get yourself killed one day, Cavaliere Oscuro."

Bruce slid his baseball cap on back over his head, his voice calm.

"Not today."

Da Vinci pouted. "You are so frustrating."

Bruce allowed himself a faint smirk. "And yet, you keep offering."

Ryuudou Temple faded behind them as they walked into the heart of Fuyuki.

Bruce's attire was unremarkable—dark jeans, a fitted polo shirt, and a baseball cap that cast a shadow over his features. His presence was already muted by Da Vinci's mobile bounded fields, sowed into the fabric, reducing his magical signature to something indistinguishable from the crowd and actively hiding his presence while link it back to the cave for possible extraction.

Da Vinci, on the other hand—

"Are you sure this is necessary?" he asked, eyeing the oversized sunhat perched atop her head.

She twirled in her sundress, a radiant grin on her lips. "It's called fashion, Bruce. Besides, the best disguise is one that invites no suspicion! A dreary man in dark clothes traveling with a beautiful woman? Why, we are simply tourists!"

"You're drawing more attention."

She looped her arm through his, pulling him forward. "Oh, hush. The world is meant to be enjoyed."

They moved through the shopping district, Da Vinci marveling at every detail.

"Look at that!" She pointed to a vending machine. "An automaton that dispenses beverages! How utterly delightful!"

Bruce scanned the street. No threats. No tails. Just civilians going about their lives. He relaxed—just slightly.

"This!" She darted toward a taiyaki stall, purchasing a fish-shaped pastry. "Food in such whimsical shapes! Truly, humanity has progressed."

Bruce allowed her enthusiasm to wash over him. For all her genius, for all her Renaissance wisdom, she had never seen this world as it was now. It was rare to witness someone so brilliant become so fascinated by the mundane.

And despite himself—despite his ever-present wariness—he let her pull him into the moment.

A bookstore. A pachinko parlor. A purikura booth where she forced him to take a photo with a Godzilla cutout.

He was supposed to be scouting. But Da Vinci—she was something else entirely.

Then he felt it.

A shift.

A presence.

Bruce's instincts sharpened. His gaze flicked across the street—toward a man lying near the edge of an alley, of them.

He was already moving before he knew it.

A/N: Sorry for the late update

Last edited: Mar 26, 2025

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Threadmarks Chapter 22: Battle Ready Investigations New

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The-Honored-One

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From so high up, it almost looked beautiful.

One would think that things were slowing down based on the news reports.

The city hadn't grown quieter in Batman's absence. It had grown louder—not with screams, perhaps, but with the noise that comes when fear recedes.

For the last three months, the Batman had been silent.

There were no silent silhouettes on rooftops. No beaten gangs. The underworld had begun to whisper—a different kind of fear now, one uncertain and opportunistic.

Rumors bloomed like mold. That the Bat was dead. That he'd finally gone mad and left Gotham to rot.

That he'd become a ghost who watched but no longer intervened.

And yet, the city still remembered.

GCPD patrols doubled around old haunts. Criminals checked the corners of alleyways. The people of Gotham—its aching, hard-hearted people—still glanced at the sky on cloudy nights, hoping the clouds might part and reveal that old sigil carved in light.

But above it all, far above the grime and sirens, stood a lone figure—silent, steady—on the roof of the highest tower in GothCorp.

The wind was cruel this high up, licking across his suit and stirring the dark blue streaks that caught the city's faint light. Nightwing stood at the edge of the GothCorp skyscraper, boots nestled against a concrete gargoyle that had long since eroded into anonymity. It had once been a grotesque owl; now it looked more like a lump of stone staring into the void.

He sympathized.

Below, the city pulsed—alive, vibrant, and vulnerable.

He crouched and tapped the side of his mask. The heads-up display adjusted, scanning electromagnetic frequencies, infrared heat maps, and heartbeat echoes in a four-block radius. Everything looked normal. Normal by even other city standards. Which only made it worse.

His fingers absently traced the clasp of his utility bracer, ensuring its seals were still tight.

Three months.

Took 2 before Alfred called him.

So Dick Grayson, the first son of Batman, had returned.

Not as Robin.

But as Nightwing—unapologetically himself.

The city still needed watching until its guardian came home from his impromptu side hussle.

He shifted his gaze to below, its architecture still bearing the lingering scars of its original purpose. GothCorp had once been the jewel of Gotham's tech sector, a beacon of "ethical science" and "urban innovation." At least until its board of directors was exposed for nearly a decade of human experimentation, weapons trafficking and embezzlement.

The breaking point had come when the truth about Victor Fries had gone public.

The company had touted its cryogenic advancements as life-saving technology, pitching it to hospitals and battlefield medics alike. But in reality, its former CEO Ferris Boyle had greenlit illegal trials, most notably the one that turned Fries into the cold-hearted revenant known as Mr. Freeze.

Once a scientist with a dying wife and a dream, Fries had become a monster out of desperation—fueled by grief, betrayed by the same institution that had employed him.

Now Boyle was long arrested. GothCorp stocks plummeted. The building was sold to a shell company owned by Bruce and repurposed as a hub for climate tech and controlled cryo-storage. On paper, it was clean now.

The wind shifted, and Nightwing adjusted his stance, crouching low. He opened his left bracer with a hiss of compressed air and ran a final diagnostic.

[SENSORY & COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS: ONLINE]

Thermal…Check.

Night Vision was adjusted as Gotham's light pollution never quite banished the dark.

Telescope: He zoomed in on a GCPD blimp going past, tagging it with a green marker.

Batcomputer uplink... Connected.

Dick smiled. The old girl still responded to his clearance codes.

"Local networks scanned. No anomalies. Cross-reference with missing persons last 48 hours—filter by proximity."

He smirked even harder when he heard a synthesized voice of Barbara.

She seemed to be making her own mark on bruce's stuff.

The display is populated with flagged names. A couple teenagers. A private investigator. A parolee. All clustered within a two-mile radius.

He closed the bracer and stood, rolling his shoulders.

The suit was a second skin—sleek, dark, and flexible. Layers of titanium-carbon nanotube weave offered lightweight protection, capable of absorbing small arms fire and reducing concussive trauma. But more importantly, It didn't weigh him down. It flowed.

100,000V taser nodes were embedded in his chest and gloves. He hadn't needed them much but the last encounter with a juiced-up member of the False Face Society reminded him they weren't optional.

The internal temperature regulation system that kept his muscles limber, regardless of the high-altitude cold, seemed to be functioning well. Gotham could shift from arctic winds to sewer heat in ten minutes.

And beneath it all, synthetic muscle threading hummed with responsive feedback, increasing his reaction time and reinforcing his speed and strength.

While he didn't abuse it in fear of over relying on it, especially since Gotham had seemed to be showing few metahuman incidents since his return, he has honestly gotten too used to the supernatural.

Backpack Systems: Compact, Complete.

A faint click behind his shoulders confirmed his power cells were fully charged, supporting not just the HUD and suit systems, but his collapsible gliding wings.

They weren't meant for long-distance flight—just enough to cross rooftops or intercept a fleeing suspect mid-fall. They caught air like a circus net and folded with the precision of a magician's trick.

He hadn't flown with them in a while yet honestly.

They were mostly useful; in landing when he was thrown dozens of feet in the air from the likes of Cinderblock.

The right bracer deployed a line launcher with a satisfying click. Two anchor points shot out and latched onto a neighboring building. He hadn't needed to use it yet, but it felt good to know it was there.

The left housed his utility launcher—a Swiss Army miracle.

Smoke Pellets, Acid Capsules, Micro-Cameras and Tranq Darts loaded and ready.

All of it packed into a bracer no bigger than a thermos lid.

His fingers hovered over the selections.

He drew one of his Escrima sticks, its carbon fiber frame humming faintly with a 250,000V shock current. He twirled it through his fingers, muscle memory taking over.

The boots hissed with quiet calibration as he adjusted his footing. Friction generators along the soles could allow him to wall-run or cling for a brief moment before leaping off.

He grinned, remembering when Tim tried them and broke his nose against a billboard.

And Then—A Flicker.

Something moved. Down near the alley behind the Cryo Lab annex. A ripple of motion just barely visible through his telescopic feed.

He focused, toggling through heat and electromagnetic filters. There—a pulse. Not a person. A device. Someone was planting something under the old ice containment ducts.

He pulled his line launcher, braced his stance, and fired.

The line hissed, anchoring to the far wall. Nightwing swung down like a blue shadow across the skyline.

As he descended into the gloom, the city greeted him—not with silence, but with breathless tension.

As she perched on a fire escape above Park Row, squinting through cracked binoculars she thought back.

The first time she saw Batman, she was six. A shadow with fists, all growls. He may have saved her mom—but it was probably just the pawn shop owner.

But this guy?

Blue. Yellow. Black. Bright as a gas station sign. He leapt off the Monarch Theater's spire, free-falling like a comet, then—

—his grapple line caught a gargoyle. He swung into a corkscrew flip, landing on a thug's shoulders like it was a goddamn trampoline. Two kicks, a twirl, and three dealers were hogtied with their own belts.

"The hell?"she muttered. Batman would've vanished by now. But Blue? He tossed a wallet back to the old lady they'd mugged. "Ma'am, you've got a 9:15 bus. Run."

She'd heard the rumors.

Nightwing.

When he glanced up at her hiding spot, she froze. But he just… winked with a pose.

"Show-off," she whispered, blushing despite herself.

"10-31 at 4th and Grundy—assault in progress."Then, five seconds later: "Nevermind. It's… handled."

Renee's rookie partner, Alvarez, fresh from Chicago, gaped at the CCTV feed. "Is that—?"

"Nightwing," Renee said. Onscreen, he disarmed a meth-head with a escrima stick to the wrist, flipped the gun into a storm drain, and zip-tied the perp to a fire hydrant. "He's new here. Sorta."

"He's blue."

"And you're green. Shut up and drive."

Precise. Efficient. Last week, he'd dropped off a attempted human-trafficking ring's ledger, sticky notes highlighting key clauses.

Like Batman but… very bright.

"He's making us look bad," Alvarez grumbled.

"Good," Renee said. "Means we're finally catching up."

The wind rushed around him as he stared out over the glittering sprawl. His breath came even, measured even after the miles of searching . Muscles loose. Eyes sharp.

He was on another skyscraper and thought…

"All right… time for something a little stupid."

He threw himself backward.

No rope.

No glide wings.

No net.

Just air.

Gravity seized him instantly, tugging him down the side of the building with exhilarating ferocity. The city blurred—a kaleidoscope of steel and shadow. The wind roared in his ears, a rising crescendo that drowned out even his own heartbeat.

But he wasn't falling.

He was flying.

A canvas tent. The echo of applause. A father's firm hand on his shoulder. His mother's gentle smile before she soared on the trapeze.

"You're up, Richard," his father's voice. "Make it count."

And then, he was on the wire, launching into the air with the grace of a bird and the joy of a child who'd never known fear. The netting below never mattered. The fall was never the point. It was the flight.

The freedom.

A Grayson can fly.

The voice echoed through his mind now, buried beneath layers of trauma and training and scars.

But here—right now—it was true again.

Now, as the pavement rushed up to meet him, he grinned behind the mask and couldn't help but thank Vic and Kory was the tech as the suit listened the moment he twisted mid-air, angling his body as the wind tore past him, adjusting for a utility crane three stories down and a snap of the line launcher from his right bracer.

His boots angled—friction generators activating. Sparks flared against the edge of a steel beam as he ran across the vertical surface, body parallel to the ground for a heartbeat. He pushed off, tumbled mid-air, grabbed a flagpole, twisted himself in a corkscrew to absorb momentum, then used the pole like a slingshot.

The wings on his back unfurled in a whoosh—triangular glider panels sliding out as microthrusters hissed with a low hum, adjusting his angle. His fall slowed just enough to allow a final line-launch to a rooftop below.

He landed in a crouch—his shoulder only slightly protesting as the nanoweave suit compensated for the impact.

He noticed the movement on his next leap—four shadows on the rooftop ahead, clustered around a cornered victim. One of them raised a makeshift pipe.

Too late.

Nightwing's boot came down like a missile—his fall-turned-glide accelerating him just enough to turn a descent into a kinetic battering ram. The thug's shoulder crunched beneath his boot as he landed in a crouch, rolling smoothly into the next motion.

The second attacker screamed and swung the pipe, but Dick dipped under the arc in a dancer's twist, one leg snapping out to karate slam the man's shoulder down into the pavement with a vicious crack. The pipe clattered free.

He stepped on it.

Grabbed the second man by the jacket.

He chokeslammed him backward into the concrete, legs wrapped around the attacker's torso, using his own strength like a vice. Air whooshed from the man's lungs.

The third thug lunged.

Nightwing didn't look—just dragged the fallen man's limp body sideways, using his full weight as a tripping hazard.

The third one face-planted.

One more.

The last attacker hesitated.

Bad call.

Dick sprung up, used his sheer strength to donkey-kick the final one across the face, flipping mid-air off the impact. He side-slid down the slope, planted one hand on the ground, pushed into a one-handed handstand… then smoothly flipped upright with barely a tremor.

The victim, trembling and wide-eyed, backed into the wall.

Nightwing slowly extended a hand, voice gentle.

"Hey. It's okay now. You're safe."

The victim stared for a long moment before nodding, tears running quietly down their cheeks.

"Thank you…"

Dick nodded and looked around.

The four assailants groaned on the pavement, none moving.

Another corner of Gotham safe.

Another breath earned.

Another drop in the ocean.

Ten million people.

Every night.

He tapped the side of his mask.

"Nightwing to Oracle. Crime scene's clear. Victim's secure. Any word on the Night Market flare-up?"

"Already handled. Robin intervened two blocks east. He's fine. Something stirred the Nesters again."

"Great," he muttered. "Another party."

"You should rest," Oracle added gently. "You've been patrolling sixteen hours."

"I know."

He smiled faintly.

"But the sky's still open."

And a Grayson can fly.

Alfred Pennyworth stood in the shadowed alcove of the Batcave's training wing, a tray of Earl Grey and lemon shortbread forgotten in his hands. On the mats below, Dick Grayson moved—a blur of controlled chaos, his body arcing through a sequence of aerial flips so precise they seemed to defy the very concept of gravity.

Dick's training regimen was a relic of two worlds: the razor discipline of Master Bruce and the fluid showmanship of Haly's Circus. Where Bruce's movements were economical, all torque and calculation, Dick's were artistic. He vaulted over the mechanized practice dummies like they were partners in a choreographed routine, his escrima sticks humming as they struck pressure points with surgical accuracy.

"He's faster than Master Bruce was at that age," Alfred mused aloud, setting the tray aside.

The numbers confirmed it. The cave's biometric scanners tracked Dick's heart rate at a resting 28 BPM, his vertical leap clearing 15 feet without any enhancements. At twelve, he'd outpaced Olympic gymnasts in trials. At sixteen, he'd quietly withdrawn from regional tournaments after a judge noted his vault scores were "statistically implausible."

Alfred remembered the first time Dick had thrown a match.

Gotham Junior Gymnastics Finals. The boy had executed a triple backflip dismount so flawless the crowd erupted—only to "slip" on his final landing, dropping his score to silver. In the car afterward, Bruce had said nothing. Dick stared out the window, jaw tight, until Alfred broke the silence.

"You could've taken gold, Master Dick."

"I know," he'd replied, picking at the medal's ribbon. "But the other kid's mom looked really happy."

It became a pattern. Karate tournaments where he faked a stumble to let opponents lock in holds. Track meets where he slowed his sprint to a hair behind the leader. Each time, he'd shrug it off—"Didn't wanna show off"—but Alfred saw the frustration in the way he'd pummel the cave's punching bags afterward, knuckles splitting on the leather.

Now, as Dick transitioned into a series of knife-hand strikes, Alfred noted the micro-adjustments: the pulled punch that would've shattered a concrete block, the kick halted millimeters from a dummy's "throat." Control, not restraint. A lifetime of hiding in plain sight.

Honestly , he could see how Master Bruce said he was physically superior.

"Alfred!" Dick's voice snapped him back to the present. The young man stood at the edge of the mats, sweat-drenched but grinning. "You gonna critique my form or just lurk like a vampire?"

"Your pliés need work," Alfred deadpanned, offering the tea. "And you've over-rotated your aerial cartwheels by half a degree."

Dick laughed, swiping a shortbread. "Says the guy who thinks a 'burpee' is a type of fish."

Alfred allowed himself a smile before falling silent.

The Batcave was quiet in a way that only old earth and buried ghosts could allow. Machines whirred softly in the distance, ambient light from the far-off monitor arrays casting a pale glow against the stone and metal ribs of this subterranean titan. Miles of caverns stretched outward and downward beyond where the human eye could follow, reinforced with steel, concrete, and decades of meticulous paranoia.

For a long moment, neither man said a word.

Finally, Alfred broke the silence—not with the usual barbed wit, but with something hesitant, softer.

"Thank you," he said, voice low and strangely brittle. "For coming when I called."

Dick blinked. He folded the towel, set it on the bench beside him, and looked toward the main concourse of the Batcave.

He gave a small shrug, but it was deliberate.

"Took some vacation days," he said offhandedly. "Private investigator in Blüdhaven. Flexible schedule." A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Turns out, deadbeat dads and corporate corruption don't mind waiting for a week."

Alfred chuckled faintly, but the sound was brief.

"I didn't mean to imply obligation. I know things... haven't always been easy. Between the two of you."

Dick nodded, his expression thoughtful, but not bitter. "No," he said. "They haven't."

He turned toward the cave proper, walking slowly toward the ledge that overlooked the massive lower levels. Alfred followed at a distance, silent but attentive.

"You don't have to explain for him," Dick said finally, resting his arms on the metal guardrail. "I know why Bruce didn't call."

Alfred's mouth tightened.

"I suppose I always hope... perhaps foolishly... that some part of him still prioritizes the man over the mission."

"He does," Dick said, still facing the cave. "But not in ways most people can see. Or even live with."

Below them, the cave breathed. It wasn't the hiss of machinery or the distant rumble of turbines that gave it life—it was the sheer enormity of purpose.

The training wing alone spanned an acre of reinforced platforms, suspension harnesses, and automated targets. Robotic dummies on swiveling arms cycled through attacker patterns, their rubber-coated limbs capable of bone-breaking force. Gun turrets mounted with high-velocity rubber bullets tracked motions with infrared precision. There were grapple towers, rotating obstacle rigs, enemy simulators programmed with profiles of Gotham's worst.

"Bruce always said this place was built for us," Dick said, eyes scanning the facility. "Custom-designed training for each of us. You can tell."

Beyond the training wing were the wide-open sectors—the trophy hall housing the massive animatronic Tyrannosaurus from the Dinosaur exhibit Penguin desperately used as a last stand, the towering Lincoln penny , the overhauled vehicles resting in the rail network, built on loops and tramways that moved equipment and transports through multiple sub-levels of the cave.

There were labs, server rooms, evidence vaults. Rooms designed for nothing but pain tolerance testing. Isolation booths for dangerous artifacts. And still more levels.

"The infrastructure down here predates all of us according to what you guys told me," Dick said softly. "Before Bruce. Before Thomas. Maybe even before Gotham was Gotham."

Alfred joined him at the railing. "There are stories," he admitted. "Things Master Bruce never fully verified. Legends that say the cave was once the heart of a natural channel network built by an ancient civilization—'the Miagani People,' some called them. Early Gothamite settlers spoke of seeing lights down here. Machines that moved on their own. Songs in the dark."

Dick raised an eyebrow. "And how much of that is real?"

Alfred tilted his head slightly. "Enough that Master Bruce never dismissed it."

He gestured toward a branching tunnel lit with blue glyphs.

"You'll recall that Zatanna and Jason Blood laid protective enchantments through the deeper levels. Jason claimed the cave sits at a ley line junction. Said the energies needed containment. Zatanna warded the trophy rooms herself. Called it a 'precautionary sealing.'"

Dick chuckled.

There was a pause, then Dick's gaze dropped to the stone beneath their feet.

Dick continued. "You guys then told me how slaves brought in from the South worked down here in the 1700s, picking out limestone and iron for colonial families."

He exhaled.

"Then came the Waynes. In secret, they used the tunnels to move freed slaves north. An Underground Railroad station, beneath a house of gentry."

Alfred's expression was unreadable. "Solomon Wayne believed that nobility required action, not title."

"Same Solomon who stored black-powder weapons and WWI prototypes in here a hundred years later," Dick added.

"And commissioned American artillery testing," Alfred confirmed. "Some of the deeper levels still bear blast marks. And when Master Bruce took over..."

"He built a city under the city."

"He employed immigrants," Alfred said, quietly. "Men and women he met abroad—languages he spoke fluently, dialects he studied for years—so he could hire them without arousing suspicion. They thought they were working on a deep-storage military base. He paid them well. Protected them. Every structure here, every steel beam, every tile... built by families he later helped resettle safely."

Dick's eyes softened. "You really helped him do all that?"

Alfred smiled faintly. "Someone had to bring them tea."

Dick laughed, the sound echoing warmly through the cave.

But then he grew quiet again.

"I used to think Bruce built this place for control when I was angry," he said. "To oversee everything. Master the city. But that's not what it is."

"It's a home hidden from everyone but his family ."

Alfred turned.

"It took me years to understand why after so many years of forcing him to accept my help that he eventually tried to push me away so that he wouldn't see me possibly broken. It took Jason dying for me to find empathy."

"He thought he could never replace my father and that is why I was always his Ward… even though he was a second father to me all the same."

He looked to Alfred.

Alfred didn't speak. Not immediately. His voice, when it came, was thick.

"I worry, sometimes... that he doesn't know what he feels for you. For Tim. For all of them. I see you now, and I wonder if he ever saw you as clearly as you see him."

Dick didn't answer for a long time.

"I think he did," he said finally. "But he was afraid that if he ever said it out loud, it'd stop being true. Like... if he admitted we were family or he loved us, we'd stop."

"That sounds like a lonely way to live."

"It is," Dick said softly. "But it's also the only way he knows. Doesn't mean he doesn't love us. Just means he can't say it. Yet."

He looked out across the Batcave, eyes thoughtful.

"But I can. And I do. Even if he's not here."

Alfred reached for the tray, finally pouring a cup of tea and setting it beside Dick.

"I imagine," he said, "that if you had stayed here, instead of Blüdhaven—"

"I wouldn't be me," Dick finished. "And he wouldn't be him."

They stood in silence again, comforted by presence if not by answers.

"But a homecoming party wouldn't be too bad."

From deep below, the Batcomputer hummed. One of the lower monorail trams let out a distant metallic groan as it reset. And somewhere—possibly beyond even Bruce's knowledge—the ley lines murmured underfoot, stirring with energies ancient and unmapped.

Dick looked down at the glass casing of the giant penny, the faint reflection of himself staring back.

"I don't need him to say he's proud," he said. Alfred set a hand gently on his shoulder.

"He always was and still is, though."

He knew that.

He was only slightly annoyed that he felt some slight joy at hearing that and a bit disappointed in himself that he still wished to hear the man himself say it.

But he knew.

Maybe it was time to hit the hay and sleep on it.

Because if there is one thing he was sure o, no matter what Bruce said, three hours of sleep a day was insane

The purikura photo strip was still warm in Bruce's hand—Da Vinci's grinning face juxtaposed with his own stoic glare under a cartoon Godzilla crown—when the scent hit him. Copper. Bile. Blood.

His body moved before his mind processed it.

The man lay crumpled near the alley's mouth, limbs splayed at angles that suggested collapse, not sleep. Bruce catalogued details in milliseconds:

Breathing was shallow, erratic.

Clothing was a frayed tracksuit, no visible weapons.

Surroundings was filed with trash, with possible rats that either meant he was down too long or something wrong with his body they avoided it. Almost like a stage set for tragedy.

"Da Vinci," Bruce barked, already crouching to check the man's pulse.

Steady, but slow.

Too slow.

He almost recoiled when he felt something slither.

"Oh, wonderful! A damsel in distress!" Da Vinci trilled, though her eyes were narrowed as she scanned the alley's shadows. "Or a gentleman, rather!"

Bruce ignored her, fingers pressing beneath the man's jaw. Cold. Not hypothermia—unnatural cold, like meat left in a freezer. The skin was … mottling with faint black veins, pulsing faintly under the flicker of a streetlamp.

"Don't touch him yet," Bruce warned, but Da Vinci was already crouching, her holographic magecraft seemed materializing to scan the body.

Airway… Clear, but breath reeked of decayed myrrh.

…30 BPM. Cadaverous.

No defensive wounds, no dirt under nails. Only writhing.

Bruce's stomach turned and pulse matched the cadence of the stranger's failing heartbeat—a slow, stuttering thud that didn't belong in a living man.

He didn't know this man.

Had never seen his face.

But a familiar something in the sharp, sour twist of rot, something in the dissonance of life barely clinging to a ruined shell, began gnawing at the base of his skull.

A protective impulse honed from decades of dragging the half-dead out of gutters and alleyways. But now… Now that he was kneeling beside this particular stranger, that primal certainty was mutating into something else.

Da Vinci's scan flickered to life beside him, projection lines arching like silk threads over the man's torso. She moved fluidly, all efficiency and practiced speed—until she didn't.

Bruce noticed it first in the silence.

Da Vinci's usual cadence, even in the face of danger, was flippant, poetic. Whether discussing new discoveries or dismemberment, she filtered it through Renaissance levity and Mona Lisa smiles. But now her mouth had gone still, and the light in her eyes dimmed beneath furrowing brows.

"Da Vinci?" Bruce prompted, already pivoting to shield the body if necessary.

She didn't respond at first.

The mage-light in her palm trembled, a flicker of blue turning pale purple.

And then she whispered it, as if giving voice to a name that had clawed its way out of legend.

"…Makiri."

Bruce froze.

"…Say it again," Bruce said lowly.

Da Vinci blinked, as if her own words had startled her.

She snapped her fingers once, hard, dispersing the scan and summoning a field around the body. "Help me rotate him."

Bruce obeyed, moving to cradle the man's shoulders. The skin contact made him grimace. Bruce had handled corpses fresher and less grotesque than this.

"He's not dead, but his body is trying to be," Da Vinci muttered, pulling out a needle-like implement from the air. "Or something inside him is."

"You knew the name." Bruce's voice was calm, but tight. "Makiri. Who is that?"

Da Vinci didn't answer at first. She worked fast now, focused but visibly disturbed. Her hands glided along the stranger's chest as she injected a mana directly into the solar plexus.

And still… her smile didn't return.

Then she spoke.

Sakura sat curled in the corner of the Matou basement, arms hugging her knees, eyes fixed forward—dry, unfocused. The faint candlelight flickered across damp stone walls, casting shadows shaped like writhing things. She didn't blink. Didn't shiver. Even when the air turned cold enough to bite. It was safer not to.

Emotions made noise.

Noise drew attention.

And she had learned, long ago, that attention in this place meant pain.

A faint buzz flitted past her ear.

Her body flinched before her mind caught up. A small, automatic jerk—barely noticeable to an outsider. But her stomach dropped all the same. That sound. That sound.

She curled tighter.

Just a fly, she told herself. Just a fly. Not one of them.

But the buzzing stayed in her skin.

She'd taught herself not to cry. Not even to scream. Crying didn't help. Screaming made it worse. The worms had taken everything soft inside her and hollowed it out, left only an echo. She existed now behind a glass wall inside her mind. She could watch herself move, speak, smile when needed. But none of it was her.

She had buried that girl somewhere beneath the dirt. The one who still hoped. Who believed in birthdays. In kindness.

Kariya had tried to bring her back.

She remembered him, in flashes. A weak man. A kind one. Too kind for this place. He had promised her freedom once. Had whispered it like a fairy tale while trying not to cry in front of her.

"I'll save you, Sakura. I'll get you out."

But she had learned not to listen to promises. Especially not the ones made through blood.

"…Sakura…"

The name drifted from the man's lips like a ghost, voice hoarse and trembling under the weight of something unspoken, unfathomable.

"…I said I'd save you…"

Bruce froze.

"…Sakura…"

The third time it was said, it was quieter. Not weaker, but more reverent. A confession. A prayer.

Da Vinci glanced up from her holographic lattice of spellcraft.

"His circuits are active," she murmured. "Present but Raw. Untrained. It's like plugging a candle into a lightning grid—there's barely any insulation, no channels to properly shape the flow."

Bruce stood over the man's body, posture deceptively relaxed, arms folded, but his gaze was unblinking. Sharp. Watching for breath, pulse, twitches beneath the skin. The man's veins still crawled with unnatural blackness, the sluggish pulse of corrupted prana threading through capillaries like barbed wire.

"He's not a proper magus according to you," Bruce said. "No training. No defense. And he's been burning himself out. Could be the circuits were forcibly activated."

Da Vinci nodded. "Or artificially implanted. There are residues—foreign materials obviously. Messy."

Bruce frowned. "Can he even sustain a Servant?"

"Technically?" Da Vinci tilted her head. "Yes. Barely. But it wouldn't be stable. His energy output is erratic—he's not generating consistent magical output, it's all spikes and crashes…"

"…Berserker," Bruce finished.

It also explained the lack of rampages or the lack of manifestation depending on how long he was left out.

Da Vinci sighed. "It's not just likely. It's almost guaranteed. Just raw desperation."

"His condition?" Bruce asked.

Da Vinci paused, then lowered her hands. The spellwork dimmed.

"Terminal. His nervous system degrading is the least of his worries. But he's alive because some part of him refuses to let go."

Bruce glanced down again. The man's lips were still moving, though the words were quieter now. Just breath.

Sakura.

Bruce said nothing. But his mind was already whirling.

A dying man. No formal magecraft education. No family crest. No protection. Voluntarily seeking a Servant.

The question wasn't how he had survived this long.

It was why he had tried at all.

"He wasn't doing this for power or glory. It was a single name. One objective."

Da Vinci looked up at him. "Sakura."

Bruce nodded.

He couldn't save him beyond extending his life but that should be enough to piece together who and how.

And how he could save Sakura.

The night air over Fuyuki shimmered where his will stretched thin across the rooftops.

Invisible to the mundane world, a circuit of patrolling wraiths flowed like smoke between alleyways and powerlines, drifting across rivers and behind shrines, eyes aglow with ghostlight. They whispered in high-pitched clicks and hums, feeding him fractured impressions—thermal changes, spiritual pressure shifts, odd fluctuations of leylines disturbed like ripples through still water.

No one would approach without Tokiomi knowing.

Further in, golems stood like forgotten guardians amid manicured hedges and stone paths. Buried under layers of illusion and bounded fields, they wouldn't wake unless an intruder dared to step foot within the inner threshold.

Every ward had been reinforced. Every mana conduit traced and bolstered.

Still, it was not enough.

In his private chamber, Tokiomi paused before an ancient mirror. With measured breath, he reached for a crystal vial nestled in a hidden compartment of his sleeve. Inside glimmered a gem no larger than a plum seed—a prismatic tear, glowing faintly from within.

He pressed it between tongue and palate.

Mana rushed through his circuits like a thousand needles embedded deep in his marrow. His eyes shimmered violet for a heartbeat before fading back to human dullness.

Ten years of harvested energy.

A preparation for a battle not yet begun.

A war whose rules were changing.

Kirei's report back only hours earlier, face carved in marble, voice as unreadable as ever was something he keeps mentally repeating.

Tokiomi's study was silent, save for the rustle of vellum-thin pages and the soft clink of decanter glass against porcelain. A rich scent of incense and old wood curled in the air, grounding him in the tangible while his mind danced through webs of theory and implication. He sat alone beneath the high-arched ceiling of the Tōsaka estate's private archive, eyes narrowed, fingers steepled in thought.

A ledger hovered before him—an old-world fusion of paper and thaumaturgy, ink etched with slight threads of magical signature. The kind of document that required not just a password, but a bloodline to read. Beneath it, glowing faintly, were digital records decrypted and reconstructed from sealed real-estate databases, merged with dozens of brokerage aliases only a few would ever even suspect to trace.

Wayne Enterprises. Wayne Holdings. Wayne Foundation.

The numbers weren't random.

Bruce Wayne hadn't just bought property in Fuyuki City. He had curated a portfolio.

Vacant parcels of land near the Mion River. A neglected industrial estate by the northern forest. A condemned shrine ground west of the Ryuudou Temple complex—that one had nearly been repurchased by the Tōsaka family two years ago, only for the sale to be blocked at the last minute by an anonymous overseas bid.

He had dismissed it then.

He saw now what he hadn't wanted to.

Each of Wayne's acquisitions, every sliver of crumbling real estate and forgotten parcel of forest, sat atop a key intersection of Fuyuki's leylines.

And more than that—they formed a pattern.

It wasn't just landholding. It was a net. A precisely calculated energy grid, forming a lattice around the city's spiritual arteries like a spider preparing its web. Not to drain it, but to harness it. Shape it.

Tokiomi leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight.

This was beyond idle curiosity.

He looked up slowly, eyes finding the deep corner of the room gilded with gold leaf and ancient wine.

Gilgamesh lay languidly against a chaise upholstered in red Tyrian silk, goblet in hand, draped in ivory like some pagan idol at rest. His golden eyes glinted, narrowed slightly—not with malice, but amusement.

"You seem troubled."

Tokiomi did not rise to the bait.

"This Wayne…" he murmured, voice half to himself.

Gilgamesh tilted his head slightly, the smirk curling at the corner of his mouth like smoke from a slow-burning incense stick.

Tokiomi glanced at him, then back to the files, brow furrowing as he traced a faint overlay of leyline flow across a holographic map.

"There's more," he muttered. "These sites are interlinked by a form of thaumaturgical resonance I don't recognize. Almost ritualistic. Not native to Eastern mysticism, not entirely Western either. And there's a modulation running through it.."

Gilgamesh said nothing further. Just sipped his wine and let the silence press down, eyes half-lidded. He was watching now—not with the indifference of a bored immortal, but the vague interest of a lion observing a jackal sharpening its teeth.

Tokiomi stood abruptly.

He adjusted his tie, grabbed the enchanted briefcase of compiled records, and turned toward the door.

"Where do you go now?" Gilgamesh asked, not rising.

"To confirm the truth," Tokiomi said, eyes cold.

"And should he be more than a fool?" Gilgamesh's tone was faintly teasing. "Should your little bird find himself face to face with a hawk?"

Tokiomi didn't answer.

But he paused for half a beat before shutting the door behind him.

A/N: Bit of a long one. You can see why I cut a bit from Nightwing. Thought I should put a bit more detail so I split the chapter. Next is a continuation.

Last edited: Apr 17, 2025

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The-Honored-One

Apr 17, 2025

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