Merpha couldn't help the crazed, breathless laugh that escaped her lips.
She paced frantically from one end of the study to the other, her boots clicking sharply against the marble floor. Books were clutched so tightly to her chest that her knuckles were white and bloodless. She dropped a heavy, leather-bound volume without a second thought, the pages fluttering like the wings of a dying bird, before diving toward a nearby shelf to grab two more. She flipped through them with a hungry intensity, her eyes darting across ancient runes, complex diagrams, and arcane notes that didn't exist in her home reality.
"This is heaven," she breathed, her voice a mix of awe and pure, unadulterated mania. "Yes. This has to be heaven."
There was no other logical explanation for the bounty laid out before her. She had to be dead, or perhaps caught in a particularly vivid fever dream. For how else could she explain this joy that threatened to burst out of her.
To Merpha, a woman who had spent her life scraping for crumbs of power under the thumb of others, this was a banquet that seemed to have no end.
"Attacking that meeting was definitely the greatest decision we've ever made!" she squeal-laughed, spinning in place until her skirts flared.
She wasn't wrong. Because of that single choice, she was here now, serving Kenji, and that brought her here to another world, another freaking world for god sake, she was here, walking through a graveyard of a world different from hers, and was now gaining the power she had long dreamt of.
She was gaining power simply by killing a few lowly vampires. When they had first been "enslaved" by Kenji, she had felt like her life was over. She had expected humiliation. She had expected the end. Then baam, surprise bitches.
Now here she was.
'Fuck being a slave.' If she'd known this was the price of admission to ultimate knowledge and power, she'd have knelt and begged for the collar months ago. The power flowing through her veins was intoxicating, gaining power like this was like a drug that made the very idea of her old life seem like a faded, pathetic memory.
Their master had sent her and the other magicians out with clear instructions to locate magical spots, hidden places, and gather everything. And why would they hesitate? They were plundering the magic that no one else in their world had ever seen before. After seeing some of the things in these books, she knew that there were things in here that even the Great Satans or the leaders of the Grigori and other pantheons in their own world would kill to possess.
"Look—look—LOOK!"
Katie's shout snapped Merpha out of her reverie. She turned to see the girl rushing forward, clutching a tome bound in weathered, dark leather that hummed with a sickly green light. Behind her, Mary looked up from her own research, her eyes wide with a hunger that mirrored Merpha's own.
"Rituals," Katie panted, shoving the book under their noses. "Power amplification arrays that use the planet's own magnetic field as a focal point. spells that can be cast with little to no magic at all and still retain the power of ultimate class!"
Merpha felt her breath hitch as she scanned the diagrams. Truly. Heaven. She sighed dreamily, a look of pure, twisted adoration for their absent master crossing her face.
"Oh, if only he weren't so damn loyal," she whispered with a playful pout. If Kenji wasn't so devoted to his wife, Merpha would have happily used every charm, every forbidden aphrodisiac, and every ounce of her cunning to ride him straight into the godhood they were currently looting. Alas, the man only had eyes for one woman, a fact that was known to all of them despite only having known the man for a short while. It was as annoying as it was impressive, most men in the supernatural had multiple women, to have only one was impressive in its own way.
Alas, it made his power feel all the more unattainable, and therefore, all the more alluring.
"Grab everything," Merpha ordered, her tone snapping. "We need to move. The shadows in this city have a way of biting back if you stay in one spot for too long."
They had been hopping through the ruins like ghosts, using high-tier detection spells to sniff out even the smallest piece of magic. Most places were easy pickings, the owners were either immature, not having enough power to protect their items, or it was just a piece of magic item. Others, however, were nightmares that required every ounce of their combined wit to survive.
One such location was an apartment of one named Zatara Giovanni. From the things they had found around the home, it had nearly been their tomb.
The home was warded tighter than a vault, with back-masking spells that turned their own power against them, and nearly killing them when they had tried to brute force it.
Merpha grimaced at the memory of the near-misses. They had managed to snag a few artifacts that rivaled low-Tier Sacred Gears, amulets that could stop time for a heartbeat, rings that could swallow magic, before the house itself tried to kill them.
They had fled like jilted lovers, looking back at the building with a mix of longing and terror.
"Let's go," she said softly. The other two girls packed the last of the scrolls into their spatial bags, and with a ripple of teleportation circles, the trio vanished into the grey Gotham mist.
Blüdhaven
Nightwing was not having a good day.
The Vampire King let out a guttural, inhuman roar, his vocal cords vibrating with a power that shook the very foundation of his throne room. He hurled his heavy, reinforced chair into the concrete wall. The impact left a massive, spider-webbing crack in the stone, dust raining down from the ceiling.
His men were dying. He wouldn't have cared much about the lower vampires, the fooders were the ones being killed, but it wasn't just them, but his elites too. The generals. The ones he had personally turned.
At first, he had assumed it was the dregs of the Justice League playing at guerrilla warfare. But this didn't feel like the resistance. Lower vampires were being cleared out like vermin in entire sectors, and every time his scouts found the source, they found nothing but ash.
Still, even then, he had not been all that upset to be honest, but then it happened.
Diana died.
The moment Wonder Woman, one of his strongest assets, had fallen, something in Dick Grayson's mind finally snapped. He screamed again, his claws digging deep into the mahogany of his desk, carving jagged furrows into the wood.
He had sent out dozens of vampires to comb the city of Gotham and report back to him immediately.
The Reports brought news of human magicians who seemed to be roaming the areas, killing his men and ransacking homes.
He had tried to catch them, but it seemed they were always ready to feel in the slightest trouble.
He had even sent Clark. Even Superman, fast as he was, seemed to not be able to catch them. Every time the Man of Steel closed in, some kind of blinding would slow and hold him just seconds long enough for the intruders to vanish into thin air. It was a cat-and-mouse game where the mouse had teeth long enough to bite the cat's head off if it wasn't careful.
It was driving him to the brink of madness. He had no proper magic users left to counter this, too. He had turned Zatanna early in the war, only for that meddling fool Doctor Fate to incinerate her to prevent the vampires from using her power. The rest of the mystical community, the Swamp Things, the Constantine, Raven, had either been slaughtered or had crawled into holes so deep he couldn't find them.
Nightwing forced himself to breathe, his chest heaving, his fangs bared. 'No matter.'
The plan was still on track. He had a weapon. A secret tucked away that would end this war. All he had to do was wait for them to come to him.
And they would come. He knew the minds of his enemies better than they knew themselves, and he knew they would come to him. Why? Because of their leader, because of Barbara.
She had a soft heart, even when she hated him, but that heart was exactly why she would be the one to lead the charge. She would want his head on a pike more than anyone else, especially after he had taken her world from her, her life.
"Come to me, Babs," he whispered into the dark, a twisted, fang-filled smile stretching across his face. "I'm waiting."
Gotham
Barbara Gordon wanted to scream.
She had done everything in her power to keep these "outsiders", Sora and his strange team, away from the true location of the resistance. She had stayed behind in Gotham, leading other missions and doing anything to keep them from discovering the Bottled City.
But her fellow heroes didn't seem to care about what they might be risking here.
All of them are too tired. Too willing to trust anyone who could swing a sword or offer a glimmer of hope. Weeks had passed, and she still felt like she was sleeping in a room full of vipers.
She really just couldn't trust them.
And now, the Atom had mentioned that Kenji was here in the heart of their last sanctuary. It was a little surprising.....okay, a lot surprising that the man who had traded blows with Superman, Shazam, and Wonder Woman had made it out alive.
She clenched her fists until her knuckles popped, her eyes fixed on the flickering holographic projection of Ray Palmer. The resistance was gathered in a tense semi-circle by his side, and by hers were her team and Sora, Erza, and Vandalieu, who sat off to the side, looking entirely too comfortable for her liking.
"We should disperse the smog first," Atom was saying, his voice tight with a hope that Barbara found dangerously naive. "We have Supergirl now. If we get the sun back, even for an hour, the war is over. The vampires burn, she can do her Kryptonian thing, and we win. Simple."
"I disagree," Barbara snapped, her voice cutting through the room like a cold blade. "As long as Dick Grayson is breathing, the sun doesn't matter. He'll find a way to blot it out again. We focus on the smog, and we leave ourselves open to his attacks."
She glanced at Kenji. He was watching her from the projection, his eyes seemed to make her skin crawl.
"The King has to fall first if we want to win this war," Barbara said, her resolve hardening into something cold and unbreakable.
And if she had to be the one to put the stake through his heart herself, then so be it.
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