Chapter 303: Collared Lies Part 2

The shrinking dome caused by the explosion made Superman alter his flight. He stopped at a distance, also hovering above the ocean as he looked towards where the island once was. Taking a moment to reflect, he flew directly over, as if hoping there were any signs of life. 

His x-ray vision scanned the area where the steaming hot water could be seen, but he could see nothing—not even figures of fish.

As for Batman, he didn't have the luxury of paying attention to the explosion, as the shockwave that followed it was so furious that it caused his jet to nearly plummet into the water below. Thankfully, he got control right at the last moment and prevented it from doing so. 

Once the chaos in close vicinity slightly subsided, he had the jet stalling in the air, hovering in place before opening the cockpit and climbing out, standing atop it as he looked back at where the island once was. Using the features of the visor, he zoomed on the area and also tried to detect life, but nothing; even the signals from the drones that had been present at the scene vanished.

Not one to settle on the loss while many things were still unanswered, he immediately turned to his comms. "Alfred, can you pick up the last images the drones recorded before the explosion occurred?" he asked. 

"Anything else?"

Batman continued, "go through the international database of missing children. The first time I had a drone flying there, I had it scan some of the faces. Tell me if you get any matches."

After saying this, Batman turned his attention over toward Kara and found that Arias was nowhere to be seen. Only then did it strike him that the way the explosion occurred was incredibly familiar.

Seeing Batman look her way, Kara flew over in a slow and very emotionally stricken motion. The moment she got close to the jet, Batman walked over and asked, "Where's Arias?"

"Gone. He had me fooled. He's the one behind this," Kara flatly replied, looking at the incredible evidence present, that indeed seemed to be the case. But Batman knew better than to take what was happening in front of his eyes as the solid truth, especially when dealing with Arias, who had an incredibly peculiar way of thinking and executing his plans. 

So despite all his senses telling him that Arias was the one behind this, he held onto the one vital component missing to implicate him—motive.

For Arias to truly own such a weapon, then why was he coming to the island with a jet and Kara, if he was only going to let the collars go off anyway? Why act innocent when you know you're about to do something incredibly horrific, which you would've done either way, without the attention? 

One could argue it was a message to the league, but for me, that's too weak a message.

For every conclusion Batman tried to reach, something simply just didn't add up. On the surface, though, he simply said to Kara, "I wouldn't be so sure." 

"That was the same attack that killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers."

"Exactly," Batman nodded. 'Clearly, Apokoliptian technology,' he thought.

As Batman thought of Arias, another conclusion dawned on him.

If Arias really did have such a weapon, why not use it against the other warring states? Instead, he used it only on the USA. 

On paper, they were truly in an advantageous position with a superpowerful weapon. However, aside from the footage of the attacks, Markovia showed no real evidence that it was them behind it—no weapon tests performed on their own land, no generals aware of the operation, and no records of anyone with Markovian relations near the sites during the attack.

This gave Batman another conclusion—that Arias truly wasn't the one responsible for this, and what he meant by the situation being advantageous to him was that even though he wasn't the one behind it, he knew those that were. He didn't act on it and instead used the situation to his advantage, lying about Markovia possessing a powerful weapon which they didn't, so he could use it to shift the tide of world war to Markovia's absolute advantage. 

This was an incredibly bold conclusion to reach, but Batman felt he had enough weakly supported evidence to sustain it in the same way he had enough evidence to support other suspicions.

Unfortunately, the island was gone, and so was the hard evidence. He could only hope the last footage captured by the drone and the facial recognition could shed more light on what was going on. 

Kara, having no idea how deeply Batman was already thinking over the situation, instead drew her own conclusion from what she observed—that Arias was indeed responsible.

As for Superman, he simply stayed hovering above the steaming hot water of the ocean, which was now slowly cooling, and hovered with his fists closed, looking down at the water as it warbled due to the waves of the ocean. 

He began to think back to the scared faces of the children whose last moments he had seen—the total likely numbering well over a hundred. In war, this may seem small, but to someone who witnessed emotion and fear in person and was helpless to stop it, the loss struck far much deeper. The worst part of it all, he was yet to know who was responsible. His biggest suspect being Arias, whom he currently couldn't touch.

…

Meanwhile, Arias had returned to the lone private airport he had first set off from in Markovia and returned to his vehicle, driving back into the city and the castle like nothing had even occurred. As he arrived back, he found crowds of media below the hill on which the castle was built.

"Tara must be home," Arias mused, driving forward smoothly before then catching the attention of the media as they began to frantically take photos and deal questions as the vehicle was allowed entry past the gate. 

In the quiet ride as it ascended the hill before entering another gate to get onto the castle grounds, he could indeed see a group of vehicles upfront. His attention settled on the large SUV behind Tara's main vehicle.

'She's finally back from the front lines,' Arias thought as the door propped open, and Diana's intimidating figure popped out. 

She was scanning the area, and her gaze soon settled on Arias. She then broke into a friendly smile and waved.

"Friend Arias, I have returned with a great many tales of battle."