ch.21

I am back!

Like you guys no doubt noticed I am one week behind schedule. I will explain why in the afterword for those who are curious.

I know some of you are going to hate this interlude chapter but it has to happen to broaden the world, to show how Alexander's presence is changing things, and how the heroes and villains react to it. Some things you already knew were shown and said but some new information was also thrown in here and there.

>>>>(Watchtower, Justice League Headquarters)<<<<

"Sorry I'm late," Flash apologized as he ran into the room with a bowl of nachos in his hands, "there was a trio of murders in Central city. It was all hands on deck until we caught the culprit, including the forensics department."

A few of the Justice League members already there smiled at Flash's excuse and antics. For being the fastest man alive, there was hardly a time when he wasn't late to a meeting.

If it wasn't crucial to saving someone's life, Flash was always late, no matter how fast he was.

All the other Justice League members were already present.

Seated around the table were Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, Green Lantern(Hal Jordan), Shazam, Zatara, Red Tornado, Green Arrow, and Black Canary.

For the first time in a while, the whole Justice League rooster was in full attendance.

"So what have I missed," The Flash asked between bites of cheesy nachos chips.

"Nothing," Batman answered from his seat at the head of the table, "we were just about to start."

Right on cue, the lights in the room dimmed, and various hologram images popped up above the table.

Batman stood up and addressed everyone, "let's start today's meeting with the attack by the Gordanians."

A picture of the Gordanian battleship floating in the San Francisco sky appeared at the forefront of the images.

"19 hours ago, a battleship appeared a couple of miles above the San Francisco sky, without any satellites or the Watchtower scanners picking up on it," Batman turned to the Green Lantern in the room, "Hal, if you would."

Hal Jordan nodded and pointed his power ring at the center of the room. A green beam of Willpower left his power ring and shot to where he was pointing. Arriving at its destination, the beam transformed into a miniature solar system.

"This is the Vega Star System." Hal said, "the whole system is off-limits to the Green Lantern Corps, making it the best place to hide or settle down for criminals and empires who don't want to follow the laws the Guardians have set."

"I thought you guys patrolled the whole universe?" Shazam asked, confused.

Shazam wasn't the only one confused. The whole League was under the impression that the Green Lanterns guarded all the sectors of the universe.

"So did I," Hal replied, "until I tried finding out more about the Gordanians, that is."

"The act of searching through the Green Lantern archives for any mention of the Gordanians was enough to have me receive a call from the Guardians and have them question my motives. It was only after I told them about the attack on earth that the Guardians gave me permission to research the Vega Star System and its races. However, they made it clear that I was strictly forbidden from ever going or interfering with whatever is happening there."

Hal paused for a second to let that sink in before continuing his report.

"The Gordanians are a tyrannical race of slavers. Their whole economy revolves around ransacking planets and selling their population as slaves to the highest bidders." Hal Jordan grimaced as he said this.

"Why would the Guardians allow this," Wonder Woman asked the question on everyone's mind. Her face was set in a scowl.

"I don't know." Hal grumbled angrily, "all they told me is that there was a treaty in place, that when broken, would have disastrous consequences for the whole universe."

Hal turned back to Batman, "now, to answer your question on how one of the Gordanians battleships could just suddenly appear on earth without any of our scanners picking up on it."

The green lifelike image of the Vega Star System changed into a Gordanian battleship before focusing on the engine, "The Gordanians ships have the ability to slide into the background of the universe and warp around great distances in moments," Hal Jordan explained awkwardly. Not totally understanding the science behind it himself.

"Which is how they got all the way to earth without us noticing. It is also why they are so good at ransacking planets. Their way of travel is almost completely undetectable. They can attack a planet and be long gone with their captives before their targets can muster any worthwhile defense."

Aquaman spat out in disgust at the mention of how the Gordanian won their battles with surprise attacks.

"Their reason for coming to earth this time was to retrieve a prisoner, who escaped," Batman said, taking over again now that everyone knew the necessary information on their attackers.

"According to herself and the Green Lanterns records, this is Koriand'r, which means Starfire in English," a video of Starfire slamming her shackled hands on the pavement appeared, "Starfire is from Tamaran, a planet in the Vega Star System. To be more precise, she is the second princess of Tamaran and thus the second in line to the Tamaran throne."

"The information the team managed to gather from her is incomplete, but it's safe to assume that her planet got attacked by the Gordanians, and Starfire was taken as a slave."

Wonder Woman and Black canary grimaced at the thought of such a young girl becoming a slave. Who knew what kind of sick things had been done to her before she had managed to escape from her captors.

"So far, she has shown to have Super Strength, Enhanced Speed, Enhanced Durability, Flight, and the ability to shoot and enhance her hits with some kind of green energy."

"She has the whole package," Flash whistled, impressed.

"It is indeed an impressive array of abilities," Martian Manhunter agreed with Flash.

"She has also shown no problems in using that impressive array of abilities of hers to kill her enemies," Batman added while scowling.

"Which isn't all that surprising," Wonder Woman commented offhandedly.

Noticing the looks the rest of the League were giving her, Wonder Woman shrugged, "what?"

"The Gordanians attacked her planet, and no doubt killed a lot of people she cared about before taking her as a slave," Wonder Woman explained, "I would be more surprised if she didn't want to kill them after what she had been through."

Black Canary nodded along with Wonder Woman's reasoning. While as a hero, she couldn't condone the killing of another sentient being, as a therapist, she knew that after all the things Starfire had been through, her instincts would be screaming for the blood of the ones responsible for all the bad things that had happened to her.

"Killing is never the answer," Batman and Superman both said with finality.

Diana rolled her eyes but kept quiet.

Superman's and Batman's determination to remain true to their beliefs no matter what is what had drawn her to the group of Heroes in the first place when she arrived in man's world, but they could be frustratingly naive sometimes.

"Which brings us to the glaring monster in the room Alexander Xenakis and his shadow Cassandra Cain, or as they are known in the seedy underbelly of Asia Warlock and Orphan."

The hologram on the table changed once again, but this time to show security camera footage. The footage showed Alexander and Cassandra eating ice cream with no worries and Starfire's escape pod shooting over their heads before landing not far from them. Both of their faces showed absolutely no surprise at the arrival of the escape pod.

"It is not known if they knew that these events would occur beforehand somehow or if it was just a coincidence," the grainy security footage changed to Alexander touching and making Starfire's shackles disappear before she kissed him, "but they were just in the right place to help Starfire and win her trust."

"How could they possibly have known that Starfire was going to escape her captors and crashland on earth in that exact location?" Green Arrow asked incredulously.

Sometimes Batman paranoia was too much even for him.

"Unless they can see in the future, the odds of them calculating all that would happen without outside data from the Gordanians, Starfire's escape pod, and the ability to know what Starfire would do at any given moment, is minuscule." Red Tornado threw his own two cents in.

Batman nodded to let them know he acknowledged their opinions, but until he knew all of Alexander's and Cassandra's abilities, he wasn't going to dismiss any possibilities.

The grainy security footage changed into a much clearer video of Alexander, Cassandra, and Starfire fighting Gordanians soldiers.

"Where did you get this footage?" Superman asked, looking at the HD video in surprise.

"Robin's bodycam," Batman answered promptly before continuing, "as you can see Cassandra is the close combat specialist of the two, she always makes sure to stay in front of Alexander and protect him from danger while he attacks from afar."

"Which makes sense," Zatara, the League's only full member that used magic, interjected, "Alexander is after all a magic-user fighting up close is not really our expertise."

The rest of the members nodded at that. The first rule of fighting a pure magic-user is to get up close and personal with them and defeat them fast before they could get a spell off.

"I feel like I have seen Cassandra's fighting style before," Green Arrow stated, looking at the video closely.

"Everyone in the room, who has fought a high-level member of the League of Assassins at one point or another should recognize her fighting style," Batman replied drily.

In the video, Cassandra slapped a Gordanian staff weapon away from her face before hitting the Gordanian with a palm strike to the chest. The Gordanian spat out a mouthful of blood before falling unconscious.

"Wow!" "Cool!" Flash and Shazam exclaimed at the same time.

The rest of the League stayed quiet, however. That didn't seem like a hard hit. It was barely enough to defeat a normal human, but that one hit was enough to make an opponent as durable as a Gordanian spit out blood and fall unconscious.

Unlike the others, Batman recognized the attack he was looking at. The goal of the attack was to inject your KI in your opponent's chest and disturb their blood flow, which would stun them briefly, but he has never seen it used with that much power before.

And according to Robin, this was after Alexander told her to stop killing, before that she was killing Gordanians with each hit. Which meant that she had enough KI to pulp the insides of a Gordanian soldier with one hit.

If she was really David Cain's daughter, which it looked more and more like, he had to figure out what Alexander's connection to the League of Assassins was and whether he had enhanced them too like he did Cassandra.

"Do you think Alexander gave her abilities like he did the Hellions?" Aquaman asked.

"No doubt about it," Green Lantern answered, "there is no way a girl that small hits hard enough to get through a Gordanian's hard scales and injure his internal organs without some kind of superhuman ability."

Black Canary glared at Green Lantern. She was sure she could defeat a Gordanian soldier by just using her combat skills, maybe not with the ease that Cassandra did it with, but she could do it.

"Unfortunately, we have no records of the final fight of Alexander and Cassandra against their opponent, who, according to the team, looked awfully similar to the first Blue Beetle," Batman reported, "Alexander even called it Brown Beetle."

Batman mentally noted to pay a visit to Ted Kord and have a talk with him about the Scarab that gave the first Blue Beetle his powers. If it was really of alien origin, they needed to figure out what it was doing on earth and what its purpose was.

"How would he know what the alien was?"

"Maybe he used magic," Shazam suggested, thinking that it may be something like his own Wisdom of Solomon.

"I haven't seen the symbols Alexander uses in any of my texts. I have to do some research and see what I can find out," Zatara began, "other than that, what he has shown of his magic so far is in itself nothing special except for the ease he uses it with and the explosion he contained at the end, his shields are outstandingly sturdy."

"So I wasn't the only one," Shazam said quickly, wiping imaginary sweat off his brow, "everything I know about magic says that those symbols shouldn't be doing anything, except they clearly do."

Shazam let out a sigh of relief. For a moment, he was afraid that the Wisdom of Solomon was failing him.

Ignoring Shazam, for now, Wonder Woman latched onto what Zatara said about containing the explosion of the Gordanian battleship, "Do you think Alexander can be convinced to join us. He almost died trying to save San Francisco. He could have taken Cassandra and Starfire and just teleported to safety, but he stayed. If that isn't a mark of a hero, I don't know what is."

The others paused at that. They hadn't really thought about trying to bring Alexander to their side. Every time he was brought up in one of their meetings, it was to determine his threat level. At some point, they had just all anonymously decided that he was an enemy.

"Our numbers show that Macau has improved 1000 fold since he took control of it," Martian Manhunter offered after a while, "crime and poverty has gone down immeasurably because of the jobs and outreach programs his companies offer to the community."

"Alexander has opened orphanages around the whole city, so there are almost no more kids on the streets of Macau. And while the Hellions may not be what they say they are, they have saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives all over Asia," He paused to let that sink in for a moment before continuing, "Macau is currently the closest thing to heaven on earth."

"Who knew that the answer to peace was putting a 16-year-old gang leader in charge," Flash quipped when everyone stayed quiet.

"None of that changes that he is a dictator or that he deals in souls," Batman looked around the room for support, but all he saw were faces filled with doubt, "he may be doing a lot of good now, but we all know how he got his position, by eliminating all his opposition until there were none left."

"That is how more than half of the current world leaders got their positions," Wonder Woman grumbled softly, "and we still work with them."

"And we still don't know what he handed Luthor," Batman carried on acting like he hadn't heard Wonder Woman, "or what they are planning."

He turned to Martian Manhunter for answers.

"With Robin's permission, I used my Telepathy to view his memories of the meeting between Alexander and Luthor," Martian Manhunter explained to the others when they too looked at him.

"Why didn't he film the meeting with his bodycam?" Superman asked, interrupting Martian Manhunter.

"I only added that function to his suit after we realized it was better if we could see and dissect what he had witnessed in the meeting," Batman replied.

The other members nodded at that, Batman was always ready to patch up a weakness or flaw in himself and his sidekick, whether it was a flaw anyone else has noticed or not.

"Sorry for interrupting, please continue J'onn."

Martian Manhunter nodded and did just that, "the meeting itself wasn't long, and Robin was too high up to see what was exchanged between Alexander and Luthor, but he did hear them."

"According to Alexander, he was only there because of a deal he made with Klarion," A look of shock came over various members, "yes the same Klarion who the team had encountered at Fate's tower and who has killed Kent Nelson, the previous Fate."

"It appears that Lex and Klarion are working together, which means that they must be planning something big," Superman groaned out tiredly.

Everything that had anything to do with Lex Luthor was bad in his book as if cloning him wasn't bad enough now he was teaming up with a Chaos Lord of all things.

"What about Alexander?" Black Canary asked, "do you think he is also part of this, whatever this is."

"From the distaste he has shown Luthor during their meeting, and what the other members of the team said they saw, I'm pretty sure that he was there strictly to complete his contract," Martian Manhunter answered her, "but that doesn't change that he is in contact with Klarion, a Chaos Lord."

"So far, he has done nothing to make us believe he is planning something horrible. Let's just keep an eye on him, for now. And not give him a reason to become our enemy," Wonder Woman decided.

>>>>(The Light, Somewhere in the world)<<<<

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, 2 people could be seen standing in a cave.

The first person looked like a scraggy boy with his hair styled like devil horns, and the other looked like a muscular grown man with three scars across his face, making them look like a weird pair of father and son.

Around them were 5 whited out holograms in the form of humans.

"This attack of the Gordanians is going to affect our plans with the reach dramatically," One of the holograms voiced out, "the governments of earth aren't going to be happy to welcome any sort of alien ship without a lot of scrutiny after this disaster."

"There is nothing to worry about. We still have time to set things straight," Vandal Savage, The man with the three scars across his face, answered.

"How was the attack stopped?" A calm and controlled voice asked.

"The attack was stopped by our young heroes," one of the other holograms answered, "with a little help from Warlock and what should have been your shadow."

At the mention of Warlock's name, Klarion, the boy with his hair styled like devil horns, eyes caught fire from anger.

"The Reach isn't going to take the destruction of one of their Scarabs lying down," Another voice said, this time female.

"In all my years, I haven't met someone quite like Warlock," Vandal Savage said after a moment, "I have seen powers like his before, of course, but never in a mortal."

"He will only get stronger with time. By the time the Reach arrive on earth, they will hardly be a threat to him anymore."

"Was there anything done to the Starro sample we had contracted him to retrieve for us?" Vandal Savage asked suddenly.

"There is no sign of anyone having tampered with the Starro sample using technology," a voice with a french accent answered.

Vandal Savage waited for a moment when he still didn't hear anything, he turned to Klarion next to him.

"There is no sign of anyone having tampered with the stupid fish using magic," Klarion growled childishly after a moment.

"Are you sure?" the same female voice asked, cruel amusement creeping in her voice, "he tricked you once before, who is to say he couldn't do it again."

Klarion's skin became blue, his hair and eyes caught fire, and black-red magic started streaming out of his body, ready to burn the owner of the voice to a crisp. That she was half a world away not stopping him even for a second.

"Peace, old friend, I am sure she didn't mean it like that," Vandal Savage commented, putting his hand on Klarion's shoulder. His hand burned black from the magic streaming of Klarion before healing just as fast.

"Meow!" a ginger cat with black tiger stripes strolled curiously out from behind a boulder.

"You are a genius, Teekl!" slowly the magic around Klarion dissipated, and he went back to looking like a normal if weird kid, having already forgotten that he was about to kill someone, "if those Reach fellows can't take on Warlock by themselves, we just have to offer his body on a silver platter when they arrive. That way, they will trust us even more."

The holograms went silent before they all started bickering, some agreeing, some disagreeing.

Vandal Savage held his hand up for silence.

"Accepted, Warlock has had many chances to see the light, and he has refused each and every one. Keeping him around would be an unnecessary threat to our plans," Vandal Savage conceded after a moment of thought.

"Warlock will be removed from the board," Vandal Savage finished, his tone holding a deadly edge to it, "permanently!"

>>>><<<<

First of all, thanks for all the happy wishes, you guys.

Now for the explanation for why there was no chapter last week.

Unfortunately, the year started off on a bad start for me when my newly repaired laptop just gave up on me. According to the store, repairing it is a waste of money, something that would have been nice to know before I spent almost 300 bucks repairing it the first time but whatever.

Being the smart cookie that I am, I forgot to bring the usb where I store the backups of my files on and figured it wouldn't hurt to leave them on my laptop for a few days.

Long story short, I lost all the chapters and ideas for future chapters I had been working on and am now scurrying to rewrite them on my phone until I buy a new laptop(I'm broke).

To be honest, this happening just as the new year kicked off has sapped all of my motivation. That I'm currently dealing with RL problems with this whole lockdown situation also isn't helping. But I figure when I get through the chapters I have already written, I will get hit with a new wind.

For those willing to help you can help by either becoming a patron or donating whatever you can miss to my pay-pal to help me buy a new laptop. But only if you can truly miss it, with the lockdown I know that a lot of people are having money troubles, so am I.

My pay-pal is: www - pay-pal - me/HeavensMonarch