Disclaimer: I do not own anything in this story. Worm is the property of Wildbow. I do not intend to offend anyone and only wish to entertain readers.
Note: Bonus points for those who understand the meaning of the title.
Interlude Chapter
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(Ironclad POV)
She woke up to a fluorescent ceiling and someone's shoes creaking on linoleum.
Ironclad's first coherent thought was that the light was wrong; it flickered when she blinked, like an imperfect cage. Her second was that her face hurt — not from bruises but from the memory of impact anchoring itself in muscle and bone. The third was that the word assassin sat, very politely, on the edge of her mind and would not go away.
"Status?" a voice asked. Dry, neutral. PRT debrief. She tried to turn her head. The effort made her jaw ache.
"Concussion," she said. Her own voice sounded distantly like it belonged to someone else. "No fractures I can feel. Convoy?"
Silence. Her eyes found a television on the opposite wall, muted; a ribbon of static crawled across it. She remembered, in pieces: the transport van, the sound of an explosion at the periphery that had flipped the truck, the smell — smoke and something that burned deep and sweet — and the way the cuffs on Teacher had been bulky, overbuilt, a tinker's overcompensation for a brute's tendency to shrug restraints off. She remembered making a wall. She remembered the wall being there and him not touching it.
"You saw the footage?" the voice asked.
Ironclad's mouth made the motions of a laugh and nothing came out. The memory of the van, the way the interior went dark from a grenade and then full of motion and noise that wasn't a sound so much as a punctuation, replayed itself. There had been a figure: black, angular in the places she expected soft fabric. A bat symbol, her brain supplied, the shape an odd cultural echo that meant nothing until everything. The man moved like someone used to the cracks between things — the edges of light and eye, the places a line-of-sight power reached for and failed to hold.
She had projected cages that sealed like shells, compartments of hard light that were pressure-sealed and airtight. Line of sight. That single clause had been the hinge of the night.
"He dodged," she said finally. "Not just dodged. He—" She stopped. The verb available in the memory was danced, which made her want to throw something. He had rolled and thrown weight; he'd applied force precisely where it interrupted her construct's projection. He had used low, brutal contact and left no marks on the troopers beyond the stunned faces of people who had been hit without being permanently harmed. Teacher… she could not think about Teacher. The room shifted.
The PRT had already started the narratives. She could sense them: the tight blue line of paperwork, the cautious language meant for public consumption, the parts that would be redacted in the name of security. Teacher had been a problem for the Protectorate in more ways than the media could show. He had been something the public needed to feel like they could see being punished. They had put him in cuffs and a straitjacket and scheduled him to be relocated to a place the public imagined as permanent.
And then an unknown moved through protocol like a scalpel through gauze.
"You made mistakes," someone said outside the room. It was almost supportive. "What would you have done differently?"
Ironclad thought of a dozen tactical answers, of automatic failsafes and redundant projection angles and Convoy's aerial response time. She thought, too, of the way the man used smoke and noise — an old trick, theatrical, but effective — while she tried to hold onto the edges of him. She had felt, odd as it was to admit, deceived. Her constructs had the rough, certain weight of law; they were the sort of things meant to be trusted. A line-of-sight power could be countered by a mirror, by a flash, by someone who could interfere with visual input. But none of those things had been elegantly applied. It had been improvisation of a kind that made the training manuals uncomfortable.
"He was deliberate," she said. "Not a breaker. Not a brute. A mover with tricks. He planned the chaos, then used it like cover." She could hear herself thinking about it aloud. After a while the words stopped being abstract and started being a map: smoke grenade, low-profile diversion, hand-to-hand to knock iron and laser aside, a teleport to leave before Convoy could marshal rotating constructs and tinker tech. That last part was the worst to not have an answer for. He'd been gone when the aerial units responded.
There were other problems. Public perception was one. A man in a mask taking a prisoner and killing him — the specifics of Teacher's wound were going to be parsed into thousand different ideological knives — slid into the spaces between hero worship and vigilantism. The Protectorate could spin arrests and logistics. The public would prefer a story with a villain put behind glass. A masked man who punched a hole through a man didn't fit nicely into either ledger.
"You think he'll come back?" the voice asked.
Ironclad's eyes closed against the light and then opened. She imagined the city like the inside of a dome: light bouncing, rumors ricocheting. She imagined a symbol that could be painted overnight on alley brick and get added to a bulletin board at a café. New capes would look at him and decide. Old ones would measure him against the standard set by the Protectorate and either file him away as a novelty or a threat.
"You don't get to pick who becomes an idea," she said. It was something her mentor had told her once in another life, when she'd been smaller and less certain that containment was the only way to fix things. Containment could box a person, but not the idea of them.
The PRT's angle would be to present it as an isolated incident — one man, rogue, neutralized or cornered, the Protectorate had it under control. Their operative toward the media would be a gentle correction: we are grateful for citizens, we do not condone extrajudicial measures, blah, blah. It would be fine. For a time.
Ironclad thought of the battleground she'd made of a van, of the faces of the troopers who had been downed and then looked at her as if she could have done better. She thought of Convoy, quiet as always, and how his constructs had not been enough without the right call order and the right prediction. She thought, finally, of the man in black.
He'd come in the night with the wrong kind of certainty and the right kind of showmanship. He'd pulled off something that would make worse people braver and better people afraid. That was the difference between an event and a precedent.
"Write it down," she told the ceiling. "Make the files. Mark him as unknown. And make sure the Birdcage transports get a new protocol."
Someone outside the door made noise — a soft, bureaucratic rustle. Ironclad let out a breath that might have been a laugh if she had been able to find one that didn't sound hollow.
The room settled. A nurse closed a chart. The lights hummed. Somewhere, far off, the city kept being the city: sirens, traffic, a kid dropping a bag of chips and swearing. Ideas, she thought — heroes, villains, the spaces between — were fragile things made of gossip and myth. They were hard to cage.
And that man, whoever he was, had stepped into one.
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Chapter Seven of the Batman Zero Year Arc is finished! I'm sorry for the slow update, but I promise I won't drop. This is my first interlude chapter. I might do another one who knows. Hope you enjoyed it!
I'm also planning on another novel. So wish me luck.
I also did this on my phone, Lol.