The first sign they got that something was wrong was the weather going dark on a sunny day. It wasn't a blatant sign but the forecast did say sunny for the next two days.
Another was the air. It felt cold. Not the type that made you shiver but the one that let you know that it was cold. It was unsettling.
The shadows stretched and sprawled against each other. At this point it was obvious that something was wrong.
"The air is foul." Wonder Woman was the first one to voice her thoughts. She stood up with her arms hung tense above her hips.
"Yeah, no shit." Green Lantern snorted with his fist held ready, a green glow on the ring he wore.
They took a second to before looking at each other with the same realization. "The girl."
They broke into a sprint and that was when the shadows moved. Darkness and flesh, wraiths and demons crawled up from the shadows and attacked them.
"Real subtle, guys." Green flared and a sword was drawn.
"Foul demons. I'll send you back to your infernal depths."
Under her charge, the demons all met the same end, a swift end by her sword's edge, or either pommeled or eviscerated by Green Lantern's constructs. And neither were merciful.
An explosion rocked the building and they both looked up and frowned.
"Go on ahead! There are more coming from the outside!" Green Lantern shouted as he flew up to take care of the demons swarming them from the outside.
A demon jumped at her but a swift backhand saw it put down for good. She brandished her sword and ran through the halls, killing every demon she met but there never seemed to be an end to them.
At this rate they'll swallow the entire building before they could kill them all.
"Would you look at that? It has already started."
"John."
She looked at the trail of white ash left behind him with a raised brow.
"A little light truck, these buggers hate it all the same." He said before pulling out a cigarette and lighting it with his fingertips. "I dropped me lighter."
"What of the girl?" she asked.
"With goldy. I can feel them from here." He let out a puff with a hard expression marring his face. "Something's got him held up. Whatever it is, I can tell ya that it ain't pretty, princess."
"Then we better get moving." She stormed off, all righteous vengeance and heated steel.
Another explosion rocked the building but this one was different from the other ones, it felt like the whole building was rumbling.
They had to get to the girl, they both knew that, but having to fight an entire horde of demons in tight hallways was not necessarily hard but it was time consuming.
"We'll go outside and circle through." She didn't wait for him to speak before punching a hole through the wall and the one behind and stepping out into the open.
The demons prowling about sniffed her out immediately and pounced but all she gave was a cold snort before bifurcating the first three, kicking the fourth like a cannonball, grabbing the fifth and throwing at two demons coming from her side. She grabbed her sword and threw it after the fifth demon, grabbing her lasso loose as it pierced through all three and threw it to wrap around her sword's hilt and pulled it back to her hands.
She didn't stop and neither did Constantine who was constantly throwing out magic spells at the demons coming from her back.
The more they drew closer to Raven the bigger the horde of demons between them grew. Up above, the sky had started churning into something darker and ominous and letting out rumbles of thunder.
Then something, or rather someone, crashed in front of them.
"Flash!" Wonder Woman was surprised when she saw the scarlet speedster groaning as he stood up.
"Oh boy." Constantine cursed and immediately a golden matrix sprung up and hovered around his arm. "I wouldn't get close, princess."
His words stalled her and she paused to look at her teammate in confusion, confusion that cleared away when she felt a chill from him, the same that the demons carried with them. That and his skin had turned red and he had grown another pair of red eyes.
"Flash is gone—Trigon's filth is riding him like a cheap suit. And if that bastard's got his claws in the Scarlet Speedster, you can bet the rest of the League's on the menu. Bloody hell, we're not just fighting demons now—we're racing 'em."
He took a hard drag of his cigarette and exhaled through gritted teeth.
"Hope you've got a real clever plan, 'cause exorcising the Fastest Man Alive? That's a one-way ticket to getting your spine rearranged."
He pressed a hand on her back and muttered something that made his eyes glow for a bit before he stepped back. "Hopefully that keeps your noggin safe from their grubby hands."
"My thanks."
"I'll take a plan for dealing with speedy over there instead of the thanks if you don't mind."
The possessed speedster looked at them with a gnarly grin and then spoke, the voice a garbled drawl.
"Surrender, humans. His descent is near."
"Shitty timing there, gnarly." The smoke from his cigarette fell to the ground in a thick plume and formed a fog around his feet. "Last chance, fucker, let the red meatsuit go."
The possessed Flash cackled. "Make me."
Wonder Woman stepped in front of Constantine, face settled in a cold glare at the impunity of the demon who dared possessed her comrade.
It smirked, and in a flash it was gone. She turned around and her eyes widened in horror at the grinning demon who had run around her and attacked Constantine instead.
"Weak, just like the rest of your ilk."
It stood with one hand raised up and on that hand was Constantine, dead due to the hand that skewered his chest.
Its other hand whipped up and snatched the lasso from the air. It glanced at Wonder Woman with all four eyes and grinned darkly.
"Don't worry, I did not forget you." It tried yanking the rope but it didn't budge, tried again and failed again, so it snarled at her.
It swung its hand to the side to dispose of the corpse… only to frown when the hand refused to budge from its raised position.
"Like I said, shitty timing there, gnarly." Constantine's voice came from behind him as the man himself stepped out of a fog.
"You—"
"Vök lá." Constantine intoned and the body on the demon's hands glowed and exploded in a bright light that forced out the demon screaming. "Now princess."
SCHLICK.
Wonder woman's sword swiftly passed through the wraith's neck and killed it.
"Nifty trick, eh? It protects and also let's you punch the ghost fuckers, or stab in your case." Constantine smirked as he pointed at the sigil he gave her.
"It is." She agreed. "How did you know it would go after you in the first place?"
"They're creatures of magic, luv. They know how much it can bend you over."
"Argh, what the hell?"
"Glad to have you with us again, red." He spat out the cigarette while scratching his head. "Bullocks. We're up our arses in this bitch."
They knew what he was talking about. Just like the Flash, the other heroes might have been possessed.
"Before all that, we have to get the lass as far away from here as possible. If they get their hands on her then we might as well have tossed the ball to the other team."
The Flash stood up and cracked his neck and twisted his waist. "On it."
In a blur he was gone… and something exploded against the wall behind them.
To Constantine's and Wonder Woman's surprise, the Flash stood up from the rubble with a frown and a bruise on his face.
"Um, guys… we have a big problem. I mean the big problem."
He slowly hovered to the ground and Constantine couldn't help it and cursed loudly.
"Fucking hell! I ain't exactly feeling that optimism you yapped about, big blue."
"I'll hold him off so leave when you can." No one said a word against her as she stepped up to face Superman.
"I agree with you, luv, but we don't exactly have the time for a long drawn fight."
"Then you go, John." The Flash said. "We just have to hurt him enough to force out the demon, right? It shouldn't be that hard."
"Well, good luck. 'Cause you'll need it." The reluctant sorcerer said and slowly stepped away from them.
"Right," he muttered and readjusted his tie. "Time to go demon hunting."
.
....
.
Taro knew his intuition was right on the mark when he saw the storm cloud from far away. From the sky it looked like someone had covered that part of the city with a veil.
Magic.
He really wasn't built for this. Whatever cascade was going on between magic, demons and aliens had nothing to do with him. At the end of the day, he was just a simple Gotham store owner in an occasional battle against the red.
And yet here he was, diving his small borrowed plane directly into the eye of the storm.
The first image he saw was not one he liked. Because right there, down below, were the heroes fighting themselves. Two of them against one, he was hardly interested in any news concerning heroes and that vigilante counterpart, but it was hard not to know those exact three figures, especially the one with the red cape.
'Demon? No, possessed.' He inferred the moment he saw the red skin and four eyes. The whole place around them was crawling with demons and so with nowhere to land, he angled himself for an optimal point and jumped off the plane while sending it careening towards the possessed Superman.
He gave that location a wide berth and instead started looking for Raven. No doubt she'd be inside the building but that very same building was crawling with demons and probably possessed heroes.
Another explosion rocked the west wing of the building and something shot out of the smoke, and from the trail it looked like it flew towards where the speedster and the Amazonian were fighting Superman.
Despite knowing this was above his weight class, Taro ran inside the building with two daggers in hand. Daggers he had pilfered from a certain unruly child.
The storm outside was getting worse and that was not a good sign. He could even see hints of red seeping through the swirling clouds.
He made quick work of the demons he found, leaving a trail of fading ash and demon stink in his wake.
Three unsuspecting demons fell to quick stabs to the head but Taro was already gone before their bodies touched the ground.
'Their numbers are increasing.' He thought with a grimace. He won't be able to proceed as smoothly as before with the rate at which the demons were spawning.
'Great. Just what I needed.' He breathed out and stepped out from here he hid. If stealth no longer worked then he'll just have to fight his way through.
Nothing else mattered except getting to Raven, who he was sure lay ahead. With that single track mind, he broke into a sprint that left him as a blur. The slaughter began in earnest as Taro Sakamoto, well into his elderly years, once more breathed the essence of killing. Everything around him became a weapon, even the demons themselves.
Heads and limbs flew in the air as Taro weaved a path for himself in his one-track mind towards Raven. The demons, the explosions, the rumbling — none of them mattered to Taro. Unfortunately, no matter how he tried, it changed little. The demons poured out of the shadows and raced at him with maddened frenzy.
It was like swimming against the waves of the ocean. It was a suicide attempt.
He could see it in the way they circled him and held him up in one position. They herded him as he slaughtered them, happy to throw themselves to their death as long as he couldn't move any further.
Through it all, not once did the daggers in his hands waver. This was the most resolute he's been in his life and it was about someone else.
The sea had been about to swallow him when something tore a wave through them. Someone had landed beside him and had pushed back the demons with the air pressure.
They did not speak a word to the other, not even sharing a glance, before they began to systematically tear down the demons.
Taro in his haze saw something flicker in his vision and grabbed it. It was a rope. It would do.
He wrapped it around the hilt of one of the daggers and held the other in a reverse grip, and so began the symphony of stolen breaths.
With the rope in his hands, it was as if he gained multiple arms that he could use with the smoothest synchrony.
The rope and the knife were two weapons in his hands, and in the hands of a seasoned killer a single weapon could as well have the efficiency of five weapons, but they felt like ten as he entered the second tempo of his macabre dance.
Something flickered in the edge of his vision and his hands grabbed the person behind him and pulled them to his front, making them avoid two nasty lunges from the side and quickly made work of the demons before him.
The steam that wafted from his body had increased and as it did he was slowly losing his weight. The rope wrapped the heads of two demons and with a tug the knife tied to its end pierced through their heads and flew back to him.
He caught it and threw it at a group of demons. He snapped the rope as the dagger traveled and changed its path from a straight line to an arc that severed four heads, and with another snap it entered another arc that sent it to the side of the person beside him who grabbed it with ease, wrapped the rope around a demon's hand that was quickly lost as Taro drew back the rope.
The two of them had pruned the huge wave of demons into a trickling stream that also saw itself quickly drying up.
As they cleared the last of the demons, Taro heard something flying towards him and without looking away from his current target, caught whatever it was and threw it back in the direction it came from.
A second later he turned around and his eyes thinned behind his glasses when he saw two familiar figures.
Batman and Nightwing. Both possessed and walking towards them.
No second was spared as Taro made his move on them despite the shouts of the person behind him.
"Good, you're here. I was beginning to think you wouldn't make it. Now the reunion can properly proceed."
"Trigon." It was a soft mutter but the demon heard him and smirked and then his presence was gone from the possessed Batman.
"Hurry up. You don't want to miss this." Those words echoed faintly in the air but that didn't matter as Taro was already in front of the possessed heroes.
Batman engaged him while Nightwing flipped over them to Taro's back to lock him in a pinch, as if that would have mattered.
The rope he held, a soft tug, and it snaked in a wavy motion that wrapped around one of Nightwing's legs the moment he landed, while Batman who had attacked got his hands wrapped and harmlessly driven to the side.
The rope was pulled up and Nightwing lost his balance and fell. During their fall, Taro held the rope in the center of both tied ends and pulled harshly, causing the falling Batman and tripped Nightwing to collide with each other with enough force to knock them out. It turned out to be the right call as the wraiths that possessed them shivered out of their bodies only to be cut apart by a decisive blade.
With a few motions the rope untangled from the sleeping heroes and flew into Taro's hands. He looked around and saw not a demon in sight and that was when he turned around to get a look at the person who helped him manage the horde.
Wonder Woman. An Amazon. She had been fighting Superman when he arrived, he recalled.
"I would have my lasso back if you would." She said with a raised brow that was pointing at the rope in his hands.
He idly noted that the rope remained pristine despite the extensive use he had of it, and untied his dagger before giving it to her.
"Good rope." He said. He did not enjoy being in her presence. Knowing what he knew of her, the assassin in him required him to retreat from a foe he had little to no edge over.
"Thank you." She said and hung the lasso on her waist. "You use it well, better than any I've seen. You fight well too, better than most I've seen. What kind of warrior are you?"
"Not one. A hobby." He simply replied.
She crossed her hand under her chest and her brows raised higher, this time pointing at the figures of Batman and Nightwing.
"A hobby is not enough to bring those two to heel as quickly as you did and the way you did it."
Taro ignored her statement and instead asked. "Raven."
Recognition set in for Wonder Woman and the way she looked at him changed. "The girl. You were the one who gave her over to Batman."
"She's near," she finally said and bent down to shake her two comrades awake. "Batman—"
"Go." The man said not a second after opening his eyes. "We'll follow soon." He did not say anything about Taro's presence, almost outright ignored it.
Taro left as soon as the man had woken up but Wonder Woman caught up to him just before he reached the broken doors of a room and saw three people in it.
First was Raven, floating with malevolent magic thrumming around her. Floating opposite her was a man with a golden helmet clearly trying to suppress the magic from Raven from spilling. The last was a man, another sorcerer, with loose shirt and a coat, supporting the golden helm with a spell of his.
"Oh, lovely. Fashionably late—as usual. Hope you brought a damn mop, 'cause I've been knee-deep in hellfire holding this mess together while you lot were off polishing your capes."