Chương 22: This One, I Know

Kaelvorn looked at Dick Grayson's easy grin and, without really thinking about it, rubbed the golden apple in his pocket with one hand. The faint chill of it against his fingers reminded him what his actual priority was right now. Finding a magician who could actually help. Neon light bled into pooled rainwater in broken patches of color across the street, and every inch of this city carried its own low, restless hum of something dirty underneath.

Gotham genuinely wasn't a place an outsider like him was going to figure out easily on his own.

"Appreciate you helping out with this, Mr. Grayson." Kaelvorn kept his tone politely measured. Knowing when to lean on someone else's strength was just efficient. Especially when that someone happened to be one of the people Batman trusted most, and a Gotham native who actually knew the ground. Dick waved that off, hung his helmet on the handlebars, and leaned back against the bike with a grin.

"Just Dick's fine.

'Mr. Grayson' makes me feel old. Batman sent me your way, so just walk me through what you've got. Every back alley, every dead end in this city, there's not much I don't know." Kaelvorn nodded and laid out the thin file Batman had given him. Dick's brow ticked up at the words gray-robed figure, and as Kaelvorn filled in a few more details, understanding settled over his face. He tapped the motorcycle seat with two fingers.

"I know her. Genuine one-off, even by Gotham standards." He looked up at Kaelvorn, something amused in his voice.

"Batman's had eyes on her for almost a year now. Hasn't gotten a single clean shot of her face."

"You've got to understand, even someone like Catwoman, who can stroll right up to the Batcave's front door and walk away clean, Batman can track her down easy. This gray-robed girl, though? She's basically melted into Gotham's shadows. Nobody can pin her down." He paused, his voice softening a little, glancing toward a beggar curled up by a trash can on the corner.

"Honestly, I don't think there's much worth watching her for anyway."

"This whole city's basically a stagnant pool of filth, crawling with people who kill and steal and burn things down for fun. She just steals bread and milk to get by, and hands food off to homeless people who are about to starve..." There was an honesty to how he said it, none of Batman's usual extreme caution or need for control in it. Just a kind of street-honed clarity underneath. Kaelvorn could hear the sympathy sitting in Dick's voice.

"I'm not looking for her for any bad reason. I've got a problem right now, and she might be able to help."

"Got it. Don't worry, I've got this." Dick patted his own chest, and something sharper crept into his eyes, the easy charm from a second ago sliding into the more competent, focused version of him. Nightwing showing through.

"If she's regularly feeding beggars, she's not straying far from the old district's slums."

"Gotham's homeless population runs its own little network. That's our way in. But she only comes out at night, so we should get ready to stake this out properly." If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. The next three days, Gotham's darkness became their best cover.

Dick moved Kaelvorn through back alleys and across rooftops in the old district, working his own connections down at street level, and eventually pulled a lead on the gray-robed woman's recent movements out of an old homeless man. She usually surfaced around midnight, favoring the area near bakeries and grocery stores, vanishing back into the alleys the second she'd gotten what she needed. And, without fail, she left half a loaf of bread behind for the old beggar posted on the corner.

The first night's stakeout had them on a bakery rooftop until dawn, and all they got for it was a few scattering rats and the distant wail of a siren. The second night, they switched positions, hiding behind a stack of shipping containers near the grocery store, and all they caught was one nervous-looking petty thief, who Dick subdued in about three seconds and dropped off at the front steps of GCPD.

Then, on the third night, right after midnight struck across Gotham, a faint ripple drifted through the air on the wind. Maybe it was from spending the last few days in close proximity to top-tier magic users like Eris and Doctor Fate, but Kaelvorn's body had apparently learned to recognize the specific signature of magic itself.

"That's her." Viltrumite senses locked onto the source of the ripple instantly. Not far off, at the mouth of an alley, a slight figure in gray robes was tiptoeing out through a broken storefront window. She had a few bags of cheap crackers and milk cradled against her chest, moving with a lightness close to a feather on the wind.

"Steady. Take it slow." Dick's voice dropped low, one hand raised, signaling Kaelvorn to hold. He slipped quietly toward the other end of the alley himself, working to box her in from both sides. His movement was clean and fluid, clearly the work of someone who'd spent years operating in the dark. Even threading a few complicated acrobatic dodges around obstacles, he made no sound at all. But the gray-robed figure seemed to catch something wrong.

Her whole body froze, arms tightening reflexively around the food in her hands. She didn't turn around. A faint purple magical glow bloomed around her instantly, complex runes starting to surface on the ground beneath her feet. She was clearly gearing up to teleport out.

"Don't let her get away!" Dick barked it out and burst into a sprint, lunging straight at her. But he was a half-second too slow. The purple glow flared, and the woman's shape had already gone transparent. Dick face-planted hard, spat, and pushed himself back up off the ground.

"Magical teleport! Now I get why Batman couldn't crack this one." Kaelvorn, meanwhile, had gone still where he stood, eyes narrowing slightly, like he was reading something in the air itself.

"No. That's not a teleport." A second later he spun around fast, locking onto a specific direction in the dark.

"It's just a short-range blink under stealth. I can still feel exactly where she is." He left a thoroughly confused Dick standing there and took off, power erupting under his skin all at once, his body collapsing into a blurred smear of motion, a low hum of broken sound trailing behind him through the alley as he cracked the sound barrier. His speed was way past anything Dick had braced for.

Within the blink of an eye, he'd already closed the gap on the gray-robed figure, who'd fled several hundred meters into the dark. Dick's jaw dropped. He knew Viltrumites had superpowers. Batman's file had covered that much. But Kaelvorn hadn't shown him a shred of it across three whole days, and Dick genuinely hadn't expected him to be this strong. Feeling the delayed gust of wind hit his face, Dick muttered to himself.

"Is Viltrum some distant cousin species to Krypton or something?" He watched Kaelvorn's shape shrink into the distance and jogged a couple steps after him out of pure reflex. Two steps in, he lost track of both of them completely.

"Superpowers. Genuinely no fun at all." In the dark, Kaelvorn closed the distance fast and reached out, fingers catching the hem of the gray-robed woman's cloak with total precision. The fabric was coarse, damp with night dew, but the instant he made contact, a sharp jolt of magical backlash ran up through his fingers, a strange, unfamiliar sting that made him instinctively add a little more force to his grip. The pull snapped her blink short, and in the stumble that followed, most of her hood got yanked back.

The second the fabric slipped, Kaelvorn recognized exactly who this girl was. Unlike Dick, some grown man he barely knew, this one was... way too familiar. Silver-blue hair clung to her cheeks, her skin pale to the point of near-transparency, tinted with something faintly violet underneath. A red gem, cut like a diamond, sat set into her forehead. Raven.

Right now, all she was doing was surviving alone in Gotham's dark, scraping by on stolen food, and quietly feeding whoever else out there was as homeless as she was. But the instant Raven actually got a clear look at Kaelvorn's face, whatever calm had been sitting in her eyes snapped into something sharp, a thick wave of fury and defensive readiness rolling through her pupils, her voice coming out with a young, clear edge and cold, flat rejection underneath it.

"Trigon's lackey! You actually dared to follow me into the mortal realm!" Kaelvorn blinked, a genuinely blank look crossing his face. Who's Trigon again?..... +40 advanced chapters on Patreon [email protected] /YATOOOO