Mesa City Desert — Today
Luthor's facility resembled a military compound more than it did a place for research. Armored jeeps on patrol. Guard towers. Barbed wire and heavy metal.
Worst of all was the lead lining throughout the structure, which negated Power Girl's intrusive vision, and the network firewalls that for the time being left Cyborg's hacking facilities cold.
A pair of stealth drones, designed by Cyborg and Batman, performed routine sweeps of the facility, but in spite of their keen programming had detected next to nothing.
From rocky concealment in the desert hills Batman peered through digital surveillance lenses. Though he was several miles north of the research building, he couldn't shake the feeling that somehow the structure was watching him.
It was a monstrous place. High-tech and eerily frigid. Perfect, reflective platinum in an ocean of orange desolation. If secrecy had been his aim, then Luthor had spent his money well.
“Cyborg, this is Leader,” Steve's voice sounded over the encrypted comm signal. “we're now two hours in. Request sitrep.”
Cyborg and Batman had been tasked with surveillance and intelligence gathering. Storm with obfuscation. Her powers cast a bed of gray over the scarred and sandy earth, further masking the drones and making the burning desert all the more tolerable.
Power Girl flew close air support, while Flash ran patrols on the ground. Their primary task was to ensure that the team wasn't in any way detected or flanked.
Steve controlled the operation from a static position adjacent to Batman's. At a moment's notice he and She-Hulk could get to their vehicle and provide backup to any teammate who'd been compromised. In theory.
“Cyborg to Leader,” the technopath responded, “Luthor's pitching a shutout at present. I need more time to bypass his firewalls.”
“How much time?” Steve questioned.
“I'd expect another 28 minutes. But I've been known to exceed expectations.”
A series of beeps rang out over the comm.
“Getting something now,” Cyborg declared. “Drone B is transmitting a sensor reading. It picked up an emission of some sort, near the facility's core.”
“Emission?” Steve asked. “You mean some sort of chemical?”
“Hang on,” was the response, followed by a few tense seconds. Silence.
“Whoa,” Cyborg uttered.
And then in a heartbeat the comm link shorted out.
Batman immediately checked the radar setup to his right, which charted the positions of his teammates and the drones. Static. The screen was mauled with fuzz. Then his satellite link to the Batcave fizzled.
All long-range electronics had gone dark.
He decided he would attempt once to restart the equipment before hustling to his Batcycle and abandoning his position. As he did so, he tried the backup frequencies on his comm link. Cold silence on each.
A sense of growing unease tickled him. Not just a feeling of being watched. A feeling of being hunted. Seconds ago he had been tethered to six of the nation's greatest defenders. Now he was helpless to locate or reach them. He was alone.
A distant rustling swept up the hills. The feint clicking of displaced rocks and dead brush. Movement. The sense of unease ballooned into red-hot peril.
Batman sprinted towards the Batcycle, concealed near a trail leading down the hill formation. The vehicle was a desperate twenty yards away.
Then a shadow eclipsed his bike, a mammoth leaping figure. The rugged mass plunged into rock and grit directly in front of the bike's frame. A bloodthirsty animal of a man, with thick, vascular muscle. Clawed digits. A necklace of bones and teeth leading to a scruffy mane. The fanged smile of a psychopath.
Batman identified the fiend an instant before the digital reading from his suit flashed to life. A line of text underlined the killer in his cowl's optics. Victor Creed. Codename: Sabretooth.
“Morning,” the mutant hissed.
Instantly Batman deployed smoke pellets before dashing to higher ground. The surface around him erupted in clustered black puffs.
“Don't need to see ya', rodent,” Sabretooth bragged. “Can smell ya' just fine.”
Batman was aware of the mutant's heightened senses. In truth, the smoke served as an attempt to signal any of the other team members. Peripherally the coarse vapors might also keep Sabretooth from perfectly navigating the hilly terrain.
Batman scaled an uneven rock slope, his assailant piercing rapidly through the black fog. Climbing with ferocious glee. Closing in.
With slick accuracy Batman flung a batarang downwards, its angular wing snagging Sabretooth's macabre necklace. As the fiend swatted at the device, its core glowed red and ruptured, a high explosive charge.
The booming gust propelled the brute, roaring and singed, into a harsh descent along sand and jagged, jutting stones. Batman surged up the hill with all of his power, knowing that his survival hinged upon maintaining distance with the monster at all costs.
He huffed, hoisting his torso over a knobby ridge and clearing it. He raced upon flat terrain, his mind cycling through a dozen possibilities. Sabretooth had somehow slipped through Flash's patrol sweeps, that much was clear.
Within a few seconds the brute hurdled into view behind him. Swinging from his waist, the fiend hurled a weighty stone slab, which smashed into Batman's ribcage. The bruising blow stripped the air from his lungs, and he collapsed out of his sprint. A half-second later the spearing sensation of pain plunged into his side.
Batman willed himself to stand, swinging to face his foe, who was now upon him and firing high with a clawed slice. He crouched, narrowly eluding the attack before swiveling out at an angle to create precious space.
Sabretooth repeated the motion a second time, prompting Batman to again crouch. But this slice had been merely a feint, reeling the vigilante into position for a mighty upward knee, which drove into his sternum with a sledgehammer's authority.
Stumbling backwards and flaring with soreness, Batman projected his left arm forth and loosed from his gauntlet gusts of mucky foam. The clumped matter coated Sabretooth's stocky legs and a single arm. The mutant launched his free arm, thudding against Batman's raised guard and nearly dislocating his shoulder.
Abruptly, the hardening foam coagulated into a rigid substance akin to cement, pinning Sabretooth's arm to his ribcage and locking his legs in place.
“You're an idiot if you think this'll hold,” Sabretooth barked.
Wincing, Batman hobbled uphill. His pseudo-sanctuary came into view, the mouth of a desert cave.
With a growl Sabretooth violently extended his limbs, bursting out of the crumbling plaster. He hacked away at the remaining bits of hardened foam, freeing himself.
Immediately a .338 Lapua rifle round sailed through the side of the mutant's bulky neck. He clutched at the wound, his trachea and central nervous system disrupted, vision blackening. He slumped to the sand.
From their sniper's nest roughly 2,000 yards away, She-Hulk watched the target fall.
“Hit,” she uttered, lowering her surveillance lenses. “Wow.”
Steve breathed heavy, mildly stunned that he'd actually made the shot. The sniper rifle had been brought along almost on a whim. It had more than proven its accuracy and worth.
“He's not out of the woods yet,” Steve claimed. “Let's get on the road.”
“Aye aye,” she hooted.
The two rushed towards their hovercraft.
Within a matter of moments Sabretooth stirred. The damaged flesh of his neck reformed and congealed, his mutant healing factor sprouting new muscle and organ tissue. Rising to his knees, he glanced at Batman, who vanished from sight and into the cave's entrance.
Sabretooth sprang to pursue, bounding like a predatory cat into the cave.
“You're running out of tricks, rodent!” Sabretooth howled to his prey.
A meek clanging sounded beneath him, followed by the sudden eruption of a flashbang grenade. It dispersed an instant wave of burning light and sonic shock, which tore into his enhanced senses, stunning him. He snarled, dizzied and aching.
His bloodlust doubling, he sprang through the dim cave interior. Clearing several yards with each pounce. With vicious speed he met Batman and tackled him, hammering down with fists, claws. Biting at the vigilante's available throat.
Batman weaved and caught strikes on the blades of his gauntlets, avoiding the lethal blows by a hair, but still absorbing punishment. With a split second to spare he shifted from the onslaught, flipped a switch on his belt, then returned to his guard.
A uniquely high-pitched sonic chirp shot out through the cave, inaudible to the human ear, but perceptible to something else.
Sabretooth slashed into Batman's suit, shredding away a layer of body armor. Then his senses alerted him to something in the cave. A whirring bluster, heightening in intensity.
“One rodent leads to another,” the fiend lamented.
In a flash the bluster swept in, like a whirlwind, a black cloud of shrieking, flapping bats, by the hundreds and hundreds. The roused fliers swarmed the two combatants, gripping and pecking, like a thousand bee stings, causing Sabretooth for a second to flail and cover up.
Batman seized the moment, sliding out from beneath the fiend and crawling free of the winged storm. Sabretooth remained disoriented, his senses blaring, his husky frame cocooned in the shrill frenzy.
The vigilante sprinted with all he had left, clearing the cave and returning to sunlight.
A short burst of static sounded on his comm link.
“I've got our gear back up and running,” Cyborg declared via transmission.
“Excellent,” Steve replied over the comm. “All suits, form on Batman's position immediately.”
A minute later, the seven members of the Justice League gathered on the hill and surrounded Batman.
“What happened to you?” Flash blurted out, observing his teammate's scarred suit.
“Sabretooth,” Batman explained, motioning toward the cave. “He snuck past you, kid.”
“That jerk!” Flash exclaimed. “I'll handle him—“
“Negative,” Steve interrupted. “We've been compromised, it's time to relocate and reassess the situation.”
“Might be too late for that,” Cyborg lamented, glancing up at the sky.
Hundreds of yards above the League hovered an impressive helmeted being. Adorned in an emerald green tunic and lavender plates of armor, the royal garb of some foreign time.
The being separated his palms, and a luminescent green orb took form between them. A glowing cybernetic device. He cast the device downward, and as it fell it grew in size and complexity. A futuristic bomb, gaining mass and burning with energy. Rapidly crashing down upon the League.
“All suits, evac!” Steve commanded.
They burst into action, She-Hulk clutching Steve by the waist and leaping emphatically from the hill formation. Flash took hold of Batman and zipped down at a demoniac pace. Power Girl gripped both Cyborg and Storm by the arm and rocketed away like a missile loosed from its rail.
The orb smashed into the hill formation and detonated. A hellish white-green explosion boomed, deafening, horrific, like an atomic blast. The hills that stood disintegrating, crumbling, a gargantuan crater carving into them.
The team settled on the desert floor, having barely cleared the staggering blast wave. They were now withstanding a giant rain of consequential dust and debris.
Flash vibrated his arms at intense speeds, creating fanning cyclones to redirect the volleys. Storm assisted with shoving winds, and Power Girl let out a massive exhale, forcing back the tremendous chunks of rock and grit.
It took a couple of minutes for the devastation to grow tame, the quaking earth to settle. In that time the team had retreated further from the blast radius, and had checked each other for injuries.
“What now, Captain?” Storm asked.
Steve looked up to the distant being, who was now lowering himself gradually towards the surface.
A tinge of unease tickled Steve's solar plexus. If the floating assailant was who Steve suspected he was, the League would need to fashion a magnificent distraction before realizing any chance of escape.
There was no time to collect his thoughts. A grouping of radiant silhouettes emerged before the seven, materializing into the forms of four individuals.
One was an old man, ghostly and grim, encased in a technological cryo-suit, a transparent dome and pair of red goggles shielding him from the heat of the desert. He bore a sizable cryogenic rifle, connected by conduits to a generator at the aft of his suit.
Batman recognized him immediately. The scientist Victor Fries. A perennial foe, the Gotham City nightmare known appropriately as Mr. Freeze.
Next was a physical specimen, an ox of a woman, with copper, shoulder-length hair and pitiless green eyes. She donned a gold and black athletic jumpsuit, with leopard print accentuating her boots, collar and gloves.
Doria Zuel was her name. Standing nearly seven feet tall, threatening at any moment to sprout and expand further. To become the towering menace Giganta.
The third individual was the reappearing Sabretooth, showing neither signs of exhaustion nor of injury. Wearing a sadistic grin. He must have somehow been teleported from the cave before the bomb's detonation.
Standing before the villains was a fourth adversary, sheathed in a menacing jade battle suit. A hulking mechanical marvel, coated with substantial layers of metallic plating. Seemingly impervious.
His hairless head poked out from the suit, his chin raised. The furrowed creases on his forehead complimenting his stony gaze. His entire face a physical expression of cold intellect and disdainful superiority.
“Lex Luthor,” Steve uttered grimly.
“But not just me, Captain,” Lex answered, motioning to his accompaniment. “The gang's all here.”
The hovering man finally touched down, taking up position by Luthor's side. He resembled some kind of sinister robot, an expressionless blue mask veiling his true appearance. Even his eyes were shrouded, empty white orbs, which gleamed with ruinous intent.
His bizarre belt and gauntlets buzzed and blinked with intricate bits of technology, compact devices, foreign to any contemporary inhabitant of Earth. The man, along with his tools, belonged somewhere else, thousands of years beyond the current date.
He stood with poise, planting his boots into the earth as if the terrain belonged to him. Like he had done so many times before, on countless other worlds. For he was a natural dictator. For he was Kang the Conqueror.
“What is all of this?” Steve demanded.
“I might ask you the same,” Lex countered. “You and your friends are trespassing. Outright spying. On my property.”
“We have questions for you, regarding the incident in Gotham five days ago.”
“Your nerve appalls me,” Lex scowled. “Why should I oblige you, your band of infiltrators?”
“Because you'll end up flattened if you don't,” Power Girl fumed.
“Kara,” Steve interjected, attempting to reel her in. Lighting a fuse was not in the team's best interest, not with Luthor and Kang staring them down.
“I was hoping the Kryptonian might speak up,” Lex grinned. “A shame she never has, nor will, have anything of value to contribute to a dialogue.”
“But this isn't a dialogue, Luthor,” Batman spoke. “This is your idea of playing with your food.”
“What a crass insinuation,” Lex returned.
“Admit it,” Batman continued. “You wanted the Justice League to come here. You've been studying us. The breach at Blackgate brought us out in the open, and you learned from a distance what we're capable of.”
“It would seem that years of detective work has made you paranoid,” Lex answered.
“I'm face to face with super-powered murderers, a time-traveling autocrat and the most calculating nemesis Superman ever had, who looks like he's suited up for a global war. I'd say my paranoia is justified.”
Lex chuckled softly to himself. “Perhaps it is,” he muttered callously.
“I'll ask one last time,” Steve offered. “What is the meaning of this? Why have you affiliated yourself with Kang, with Sabretooth?”
“No mention of me?” Giganta groaned. “I'm insulted.”
Lex inhaled. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. We are your opposite, Captain. An Injustice League, destined to expose America's corruption. To extirpate the world's greatest superpower, to maim and enslave its protectors. To break you.”
Steve shuddered, then immediately calcified his will. Seizing the initiative would be key, as would neutralizing the enemy's most significant threat.
“All suits, attack!” He howled. “Focus fire on Kang!”
“Which one is Kang?” Flash puzzled.
At once the League took up a blitzing combat formation, Power Girl, Storm and Cyborg elevating skyward while She-Hulk and Flash burst down the middle. Batman and Steve shuffled outward to either flank, looking to pincer their target.
“As it has always been,” Kang sighed, his voice a synthesized baritone. “A visionary challenged by primitive fools.”
A spherical transparent force screen took shape around Kang, fending off Flash's blistering flurry of strikes.
“Hacks!” Flash complained.
Concurrently the despot glanced at Storm, loosing optic beams, royal yellow, wrought with concussive force and intense heat. The javelins struck her torso and she moaned, impelled backwards several yards. She crashed.
Mid-sprint, She-Hulk caught a thick blueish beam from Mr. Freeze's rifle. The cryogenic surge bloomed into jagged formations of ice, encasing the brawny woman's legs and trunk in glacial inertia, painful and yet simultaneously numbing.
Flash darted in chaotic patterns as Kang blasted away at him with a cutting edge particle gun.
“Bypass his shield!” Steve ordered. “Target around it!”
Power Girl and Cyborg swooped in above Kang, Cyborg's mechanical arm transmuting into a bulky plasma cannon. Power Girl's eyes ignited and the two let out thick waves of red. An awesome, sustained bombardment.
The projected blaze struck the earth surrounding Kang's force screen. It drilled through the surface, mauling and shifting the terrain.
The violent desert convulsions upset his balance and threw his concentration. His defensive screen cut out for a moment and he tumbled into a shallow chasm, trapped there by broken earth.
“No!” Lex exclaimed. “Irksome roaches!”
With that the shoulder plates on Lex's battle suit were shed, revealing a pair of weapon pods. A salvo of miniature rockets flung from them, a dozen streaking munitions, barreling after Power Girl and Cyborg.
Steve noted Lex's infuriated response. It was as if something dear to him had just been threatened. Perhaps Kang was more than an ultra-powerful ally. Perhaps Lex needed him to realize a key objective.
“Flash, assist She-Hulk,” Steve commanded, already lobbing his vibranium shield with the power and technical perfection of an Olympic discus competitor.
The weapon spiraled at Luthor, but was seized in midair by a beam from Freeze's rifle. The now frozen shield stalled and sank, bearing extra weight and mass.
The two fliers weaved and maneuvered to shake Lex's rockets, but were each tagged by a few of the detonating seekers. The explosions were acutely loud, shuddering, disorienting, but caused no significant harm.
Reaching his ally, Flash vibrated the crystalline chunks at screaming speeds. The ice around She-Hulk melted and steamed until she was liberated.
Mr. Freeze discharged cryogenic beams at Steve, who performed a ceaseless series of gymnastic leaps, tumbles and sidesteps to shake them. The air around Steve grew acerbically frigid, and his lungs inflamed as if prodded by needles.
Freeze's attention was too diverted to sight the small projectile that sailed in and stabbed into the chest plate of his suit. The slight impact prompted him to look down at the black device now fixed to him. Bat-shaped.
The high explosive batarang blew, its jarring eruption flinging Freeze like a soft-bodied rag doll across a ten yard stretch of desert.
Abruptly, Lex fired a repulsor ray from his palm. The stream of red-gold fury punched into Steve's sternum and he collapsed to his knees. Steve clutched at his wound, his flesh blistered, bones throbbing.
“You submit so easily?” Lex taunted.
He was answered by Power Girl, who lanced in like a bullet train, then shifted her hips to drive a thunderous roundhouse kick into his suit's midsection. Lex didn't budge.
“Not good enough,” he bragged.
“Isolate him, Kara!” Steve shouted.
Shaking off her bewilderment, Power Girl pressed against Lex, clasping her arms below his. Having hooked his limbs, she shot upwards, lifting him with her at vicious speeds. They sprang up through a cloud bed and out of sight.
Batman found himself in Sabretooth's clutches, wrapped from behind in a strangling body lock. The brute's arms knotted around his abdomen, stealing his air, his bones and organs feeling like they would burst from the pressure.
“Gonna finish what I started, rodent,” Sabretooth hissed.
He tensed, compressing Batman's torso further, but was disrupted by a stream of red-hot plasma. The energy blast slammed into his lower spine, a sensation of shock branding his nervous system. It was enough of a jolt to loosen his grip, thus freeing the vigilante.
Cyborg steadied his weapon, preparing for a second blast.
“Hold your fire,” She-Hulk demanded, shaking off the chill and numbness in her muscles. “This fur ball is mine.”
She leaped into range, parrying away Sabretooth's slashing arm. As the brute reactively pounced forward, bearing his teeth and fixating on her neck, she caught him in the solar plexus with a devastating short uppercut.
He wheezed, stunned by the sheer power of her intercepting strike, his organs temporarily displaced, the neighboring ribs lighting up with tremulous inflammation.
Their mutual momentum drove them into a close-range clinch, and Sabretooth clawed and bit at her with animal fervor. She clamped the aft of his skull with both arms, a double collar tie hold, limiting his movement and offense, her outrageous strength unshakable.
Pressing her hips forward and elevating her heels, she increased the leverage of the hold. After swatting his protesting arm downward she swiped into his jaw with a crushing elbow strike.
The fulminant wallop nearly claimed Sabretooth's consciousness. It splintered his jaw, displaced teeth. He backed off, his legs buckling.
As She-Hulk stepped in with a straight punch, he chopped back at her with a well-timed counter. Their attacks made simultaneous contact, hers shattering his nose, his raking over her eyes with thick talons.
She veered off to an angle, shaking her head, temporarily sightless. As the cuts stung at her senses, she could do little more than keep mobile and raise her arms defensively.
“I hope there's more where this comes from,” Sabretooth growled, tasting her plasma on his claws.
“Hate to disappoint you,” She-Hulk spat, angling towards the position of Sabretooth's voice.
She swung her arms outward, then fiercely thwacked her palms together. The thunderclap launched a booming wave that overtook him, its sonic crack hammering at his hearing and its sheer force ramming him like a speeding bus. He flew backwards a great distance.
Having nearly gone unnoticed by the combatants, Giganta let out a sigh. It resembled an exclamation of relief more than anything.
“Finally,” she exclaimed, “I get you all to myself.”
With that her entire figure swelled, enlarging in uniform proportion, extending to a height of 10 yards, 25, and in seconds she stretched up beyond 50. Each member of the heroic League gazed up at her with distressed awe.
“Not solely to yourself,” a haunting voice announced.
Kang. He rose up from beneath the ground, his armor and gadgetry pristine, undamaged.
“Could this get any worse for us?” Flash grumbled.
“Please don't ask,” She-Hulk responded.
“Gonna need my shield, Flash,” Steve implored.
“You most certainly are,” Kang boasted.
Without pause a weapon warped in, seemingly from the aether, in a flash of purple-blue light and vapor. It settled in Kang's hand, a complex and peculiar sidearm, then acquired concurrent target locks on each of the six heroes.
Kang flipped a switch and the gun projected forth six streaks of concentrated energy. The bursts sailed out in several directions, blasting five of the team members, making contact at the center of mass and knocking the targets down.
Flash, however, remained unscathed, having reverberated his molecular makeup to the point of intangibility. The gun blast had simply passed through him.
With a mountainous boot Giganta stomped down at the fallen five, a dreadful descent, like a failing airplane, committed to mashing the paltry adversaries.
Flash strained with all of his effort to dash in and pull each of his friends clear of the collision. Just before the crushing blow, he lugged the last of the team, Batman, away from the red zone.
Giganta's boot smashed into the earth with the impact of a meteorite, blasting a crater into the desert floor and flooding the terrain with tremors. Though the six had eluded the gargantuan smash, they were still nearly felled by its quaking echoes.
The team regained their footing and took up formation. Flash whizzed out and back in red blurs, returning with Steve's shield, the ice once blanketing it liquified.
“I feel like I'm picking up a lot of slack today,” Flash remarked, handing over the shield.
“We gotta do something about her,” Batman insisted, eyeing the building-sized Giganta.
“I can keep her occupied,” Cyborg offered.
“Be careful,” Steve answered.
“Victor,” Batman declared to Cyborg sternly. “I need you to engage the Ladybird protocols.”
Cyborg sobered. “Are you sure?”
“The Injustice League isn't leaving us much choice,” was Batman's stark response.
“What are you two talking about?” Steve puzzled.
“There's no more time,” Batman declared.
Cyborg nodded, and took to the skies. His neural network humming with activity as he did.
“What are the Ladybird protocols?” Steve asked. “Tell me, now.”
“A safeguard,” Batman answered. Just pray that it works.”
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