SIA 11

Lightning struck.

That was a statement that would’ve raised brows if it had been uttered anywhere else. If it had been seen by anybody who was not Slade Wilson, they would’ve most likely been distracted and frozen due to the sheer surprise of it.

They were still in the heart of winter. What dark clouds could be seen in the sky were because of the time, not because of any strange or freak thunderstorms that finally decided to bless the city with a shower. No, a single flash of white light tore across the sky, a forked bolt of lightning that split the clouds above the pier. And in that split second, as thunder cracked the heavens open, it struck the boy he had just killed.

The detonation that followed flung him flying away, head over heels, but Slade had been struck harder than this. This was all force and shrapnel, and his armor protected him from the latter, while the former was the main culprit in sending him flying. Still, even while spinning head over heels, he was not worried. He had survived worse things than being hit with the blowback of a lightning strike.

He landed back-first but was already rolling with the blow. A heartbeat later he was on his knees. His hands moved instinctively, unstrapping his guns, feeling the comfortable weight and heft of the two .44 Magnum caliber guns in his hand, before they snapped out and pointed the muzzles toward where the lightning had struck.

Where had once been the dead body of the boy he had killed, a mark that he entrusted to Rose alongside the circus parade the mobs had dropped on him, now lay something else. Slade’s single eye widened behind his mask as the boy’s body jerked violently from the force of the lightning strike. The pier had exploded with splinters and flame and in the middle of the crater formed from the strike, with the air filled with static and heat, a single heartbeat rang out. Ba-dump. The sound nearly deafened Slade. A split second after the strike, there was an explosion of energy. Energy so thick and dense, its utterly malicious and malevolent presence was given form.

Slade Wilson was no novice merc. He had seen enough. His thumbs instantly flicked the safety and his grip on the trigger pressed down, and burning lead began to fly out as the muzzle of the twin Desert Eagles spat death. The recoil of the guns was negated by his post-human strength. There was no need to brace or calculate for recoil. He held the guns straight and watched them empty their clips into the body, but before his very eyes, the visible miasma of energy obliterated the bullets before they could get to the boy.

A boy that was slowly rising to his feet, his arms pressed against the ground and lifting him up slowly. Slade blinked his one visible eye in realization, the boy was not just standing, he was growing. Slade's hyper-enhanced brain watched and processed everything happening in the span of what seemed like a split second.

The boy slowly rose through the haze, steam and that same malevolent energy pouring off him like the breath from the mouth of a raging beast. His frame expanded, bones cracking and elongating, joints realigning and snapping back into new sockets. Muscles swelling and surging beneath tightening skin. His arms, already monstrous, stretched out longer and thicker. His spine curved, and adjusted, like it was demanding more room to exist. His calves swelled, bunched up, and lifted the inhuman physique up.

By the time he stopped rising, Slade was no longer looking at a boy with awkward features and well-formed but gangly limbs. He was looking at a monster of a man that stood over seven feet tall, broad-chested, long-limbed, and solid like a carved monument. His body was thick and heavily packed with muscles while his unnatural pink hair was rough and spiked, and then came the markings.

They didn't appear all at once, instead, they bled out slowly. From beneath his eyes first. His skin, once pale and blood-slick, darkened as ink-black markings began to spread like fire racing across parchment. They traced up his spine, over his shoulders, beneath his eyes in jagged, symmetrical strokes. Black slashes. Then new ones appeared, coiling around his forearms and biceps. His neck. His ribs. The lines looked less like drawings and more like something that had been imprinted and branded upon him.

Then the pink-haired, four-armed monster tilted his head back as his eyes snapped open. A low chuckle of amusement was let out of inhuman lips, and then the voice followed.

"A true rebirth, and this time I didn't even have to mutilate my soul," a deep and amused voice muttered as his mark stared down at his hands.

There was a shiver in the air. Slade did not understand what was happening, not in the slightest. What he had originally mistaken as a simple mutant child, one that was a dime a dozen in the world was turning out to be something else. Something that might be above what he expected or planned for. Still, the monster was human. He might've miscalculated when it came to how powerful it was, but so what? A monster remained a monster, no matter how skilled or trained it was. It was quantifiable.

It could be explained and categorized. Its physical strength cataloged and prepared for. Slade had killed bigger monsters with these same tactics, and luckily for him, this time the monster was distracted. He moved slowly, his right arm slipping the gun back inside its holster, while his left dexterously performed a single-hand reload by ejecting the spent clip and slipping a new clip back by pressing it against his body.

His right arm reached out behind him and he moved to unsheathe his near-indestructible Prometheus swords when all of a sudden he lost sensation in that hand. He blinked his single eye in confusion before the sound of a drop of water hitting the ground forced him back into awareness. Had the thunderstorm and rain finally caught up with the lightning strike? He looked to the side where the water droplet continued to fall and stared wide-eyed in surprise at the blood dropping out of his cleanly cut bicep.

Then his eyes trailed down and he saw his arm, still gripping his unsheathed sword. The cut had been clean and fast. He had not expected or even seen it coming. It was only with the realization of a missing arm that the pain hit. Slade grunted as he stared daggers back at the only person who could've done this. The monster gave him a glance with its more monstrous pair of eyes, and then he spoke, his voice laced with cruelty and boredom.

"Wait your turn, you foolish maggot."

That was all the attention he was spared before those monstrous pair of eyes joined the more human pair to look down at his tattooed hands.

That was when Slade Wilson, the legendary mercenary known as Deathstroke, realized just how underprepared he was for this confrontation. He stared down at Rose where she lay unconscious with gritted teeth and a bloodshot eye. He needed to get out of here, regroup, and recoup his losses. That had not been a visible attack, there was no hint of technology, so judging by the energy and everything he had seen so far, this was most likely some form of magic.

His free hand gripped his injured arm tight to stop blood loss, and his mind went to work. He would have to find a magical practitioner, a trustworthy one that could negate whatever the monster was capable of. Then he would return. He glanced back at Rose, and his more strategic mind overwrote whatever twisted and dysfunctional love and fatherly instincts he had, discarding them, as he moved to run.

The moment he turned his head, he was greeted by a massive palm covering his face. The next instant he slammed into the ground so hard he could feel his mask shatter, followed by a massive spike of pain, then that was it. That was the last thing he felt before everything went blank.

x

Sukuna looked at the cavity in the ground where he had slammed the man's head into. All that remained of the man was pieces of the faceplate. His head had been crushed, leaving only strands of hair as well as pieces of bone, brain matter, blood, and a single reddened eye in his hands.

"Disappointing," he muttered to himself as he opened his palm and stared down at the contents. He had meant to simply subdue the man. Was he not at least a grade-one sorcerer? Considering the ability to sneak up on even his atrophied form, he had expected better from the man.

Well, it was no great loss, he decided with a shrug. There were other people present he could ask his questions. He straightened up, letting what remained of the man drip from his hand like pulp. The red-streaked eye squelched as it slipped between his fingers, landing with a wet splat in the cratered earth he and grinned upwards toward the blue-skinned child that called himself Klarion.

There was a moment of stillness. The pier still smoldered, the air still thick with ozone and copper. The scent of scorched sea salt mixed with the stink of human insides. The man’s corpse twitched, but it was just nerve endings. He wasn’t coming back. And Sukuna had lost interest in him. Instead, his attention was completely fixed skyward. “Klarion,” Sukuna called, tasting the name like a piece of meat. “You’ve been watching for long enough.”

Klarion hovered above the wreckage. He had shifted from his rather very relaxed and uncaring lounge to something more serious. He sat cross-legged with his cat between his legs, a cat that stared back intensely at Sukuna.

“Ohhh, I have! I must admit, I’ve been entertained,” Klarion replied with manic glee, clapping his hands. “It’s not every day someone cracks open like a thunderbird egg and spills out that.”

He gestured at Sukuna’s towering new form. Four heavily muscled arms, relaxed but poised; tattoos a dull aged black. That monstrous dual gaze, two human, two slitted and hungry as they stared back at him with something dark.

Amusement. That had not been present before.

“So you stayed there and watched your partners be slaughtered like sheep,” Sukuna said with deep, casual disdain. His voice rumbled like an avalanche behind a smirk.

Klarion’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, you’re wrong. They were not my partners. I hardly even knew them. It just made a more exciting visual to watch from above. I even had money on you to win. Ask Teekl over here.” He picked the cat up and gestured with it. The black feline gave its owner a condescending look, then gave Sukuna an amused look before going back to lick its paws, so Klarion dropped it.

“Anyway, you were dying. Dead. And poof!” He snapped his fingers. “Now you’re seven feet of angry muscle and murder ink! And you crushed Deathstroke’s head like an orange.”

Sukuna tilted his head, then reached down and wiped Slade’s blood across his chest like warpaint. “I thought he was stronger,” he said. “I'm not used to being wrong.”

Klarion tilted his head, his voice getting serious for the first time.

“You’re not like the others. Trigon’s get, I mean. I assumed you were one of them, but after this twisted… rebirth of yours, I’m not so sure anymore. This power you exude… it’s interesting. It’s not demonic energy, and not completely magic either, but fundamentally it is energy, and close enough to magic, I suppose. So riddle me this. What exactly are you?”

“Ryomen Sukuna,” he answered easily, then watched the blue-skinned thing’s face for any sign of a reaction, recognition. But there was none. It looked back at Sukuna in confusion, and that was enough to widen his grin.

"Has it truly been so long that you have forgotten my name?"

He had not had time to go through all the memories this new body previously held, but he had assumed he was simply on another continent, another country. However, he would’ve understood if no mundane man or woman recognized his name, but an obvious sorcerer to be this oblivious…

He began to walk, feeling his cursed energy flow roughly through his form. Even that had not settled, but it was enough for now. He stopped a few feet from Klarion, who now floated just out of reach.

“I’ve grown tired of looking up at you,” Sukuna said, his voice a low, scraping thing. “So I’ll only ask once: Drop.”

Klarion narrowed his eyes. “And if I say no?”

Sukuna’s grin split wider, all teeth and menace. He widened his stance, his feet scraping against the ground. “Then I will rip you from the sky, peel your skin off, and use it as a new coat.”

There was a long beat. A silence where not even the waves smashing against the destroyed pier could be heard. Then Klarion’s lips twitched.

“Oh my goodness, you’re so delightful,” the blue-skinned sorcerer let out with a chuckle. “Rude. Arrogant. Murderous. But oh so very delightful.”

Sukuna just stared, unmoving. The smile never left his face, but it didn’t reach his eyes. The slitted ones narrowed as he began to calculate the speed and trajectory needed. Let it not be said that he never kept to his words even without a binding vow to enforce them.

Klarion sighed dramatically.

“Fine, fine, fine. I can see you tensing and all ready to put your threat into action,” Klarion grumbled as he slowly drifted to the ground. The cloud dissipated beneath his feet, letting him drop, cat cradled in hand. This close, the height and body difference was more glaring. Klarion’s head barely went higher than his secondary mouth.

“I’m still not sure what exactly you are, but there is definitely some human there,” the sorcerer grumbled to himself.

Sukuna was instantly tempted to bury his fist into the sorcerer’s head, but restraint and self-control won over his murderous impulse. He didn’t know enough. Not nearly enough about anything. What memories he was rushing to access did not tell enough of a story and were too limited in scope to make any decision so soon. However, there was one decision he knew to take. A decision his pride demanded he took care of.

“The people that ordered my death?” he questioned, his arms folded around his chest.

“Maroni,” Klarion answered, walking around his still form and observing him. Sukuna’s brow lifted in question, so the obnoxious sorcerer continued.

“They run things around,” Klarion continued, spinning lazily. “Money, drugs, weapons, even some toys they stole from the League’s vault. But they’re ants dressed as lions. Pretenders with guns and no real understanding of what bleeds in Gotham’s roots.”

Sukuna rolled his neck in preparation and the bones cracked in response.

“Then I’ll start there.”

“You’ll make quite the mess,” Klarion giggled to himself in amusement. Sukuna stepped past him, the heat from his still-cooling form scorching the ground beneath him. He paused just before leaping away and looked back.

“I won’t ask again next time,” he said. “The next time you refuse me, I will kill you.”

Klarion’s grin sharpened, teeth too white, too pointed. “Oh, you will try but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Where?” he asked ignoring the reply. He had not bothered to specify a location but Klarion nodded all the same, features still that twisted mix of curiosity and amusement. Bat-like wings erupted from his back as he floated, then gave a parting word before speeding off. “Follow me.”

Sukuna gave the sorcerer a head start of a few seconds before disappearing in a blur of flesh and monstrous killing intent as he streaked across the city, The king of curses headed toward the heart of Gotham’s underworld with a wide grin on his face.

x

Somewhere not so far away, in a half frozen Laboratory with two giant technologically advanced cryogenic capsules holding a man and a woman, each suspended in ice. A girl with pale white hair and cold blue eyes turned away from the data pad in her hand and looked into the distance, confusion written on her face, and a whisper on her lips. “My Lord?!.”