Well-bred to a fault, none of them charged in blind. Jonathan's super vision was being unreliable today, so Tim sent Beast Boy—in eagle form—ahead to scout.
"Looks normal. Refugees, armed men. Nothing different from what we already dealt with." Beast Boy circled back and reported.
Tim hesitated briefly, then committed to a direct assault anyway. Even if complications arose, he trusted his team to handle it. He gave the signal and led the charge.
One elbow to the jaw dropped a large guard. Cass, Bart Allen, and the rest moved in simultaneously. The camp's resistance was almost painfully weak.
Tim analyzed the engagement as he fought. Something felt wrong—but the enemies really were dropping, and they weren't faking it.
He could only conclude he was overthinking it.
"Weak. Whatever that legend was, it was almost certainly made up." Damian put down the last guard. The refugees fell to their knees all around him. He didn't like the atmosphere here—and suggested they keep moving.
None of the young heroes enjoyed having people kneel before them. They stepped out of the way.
At that moment, Tim noticed a middle-aged woman in the crowd watching him with a faint, unreadable smile.
Angular eyes. High cheekbones. Skin unusually taut for someone among these locals—she stood out immediately.
He'd barely started to call out a warning when the woman snapped a mask onto her face and tossed a smoke grenade. As she lunged forward, four more figures rose from the crowd, each pulling on their own masks and raising their arms.
The smoke came in thin as silk gauze—and inside it, countless wailing voices seemed to drift, ethereal and lethal.
Poison gas—Tim was about to shout it, and then his iron willpower simply ceased to exist. His mind blanked. He was on the ground. His last coherent thought before the darkness took him: What is that? How does it hit this hard?
He wasn't the only one. The Teen Titans and every ordinary person in the camp went down with him. On Cass, a flash of red light sparked—but it held for less than two seconds before she crumpled as well.
The only two exceptions were Damian and Raven. The long-range teleportation gems they carried triggered automatically, and both of them vanished in an instant.
The middle-aged woman had no way to pursue. She could only drive her fist into her palm in frustration—the smoke didn't play favorites; without her mask, she'd have gone down too.
She waited at length before triggering a mechanism on the far side of the camp, opening a passage that wound steeply downward. She called her people, and they hauled the incapacitated Teen Titans underground.
"Master Damian?"
"Master Damian—wake up."
Damian heard Alfred's voice through the dark. He couldn't have said how much time had passed before he forced his eyes open.
Back in the Batcave. Everything around him was familiar, insisting that what had just happened was a dream.
He forced his attention into focus, pulled it back to the present, and slowly suppressed the disorientation.
They'd been ambushed. Maybe the old man with the demon story had been part of it from the start.
Unforgivable. His jaw tightened. He reached up and touched his neck—the teleportation gem had crumbled to dust. That explained it.
"How long have I been here?"
"Thirteen minutes, Master Damian. Your teleportation deposited you just outside the entrance; I carried you in. Should I notify Master Bruce?"
"No." He didn't even pause. "I'll handle it."
Calling his father because he'd lost a fight? He would rather die than do that.
"Raven." If he'd been sent out, she likely had been too.
He used the Batcave's equipment to reach her. Sure enough—she was free. Raven's magical resistance was considerably higher than his; even after Alfred's injection cocktail, Damian was still foggy. Raven had already shaken it off entirely.
That said, the demon princess was furious. Being ambushed by the Stranger—she could stomach that; after all, she couldn't beat him. But those people—ordinary humans. If Damian hadn't called, she'd have gone back to kill her way through.
"Give me a minute. Come get me. We go together." Damian bit down on each word.
He disengaged the Batcave's anti-teleportation system. Raven arrived in moments, and they set out for the Sahara.
Alfred watched the two of them rush off and felt something he could only describe as a grandfather's satisfaction—fond, warm, quietly complete. As for Raven having seen the Batcave's layout: he couldn't have cared less.
The two returned to the camp. A faint haze still drifted through the air. They moved carefully.
"That smoke—can you analyze it?" Raven asked. In her experience, Damian was like his father: loved to study obscure things for reasons that only became apparent much later.
As it turned out, he actually could. "You know the Soul Sea Thea left on the New Continent? If I'm reading this right, that's the primary ingredient."
"What? How do they have that—she sealed that location."
Damian gave an uncomfortable laugh. "Might have been stolen before the seal went up. I heard several groups managed to visit the site before she locked it down."
He had no intention of mentioning that his own father had been the most thorough thief of the lot.
Moving on from that quickly, they pressed deeper into the camp.
For trained mages, preparation was all that separated them from any obstacle.
As Thea's two foremost students, their command of dark magic ran deep. The smoke was dangerous, but it was inert—and they were not. With no one watching, a gust spell scattered the remnants, and they began searching.
"Here." Damian found the mechanism, opened the hidden passage, and wrapped them both in an invisibility charm. They descended.
The passage wound and curved. To avoid triggering the floor mechanisms, they dissolved into shadow and drifted silently through.
As they moved, the scale of the underground base revealed itself.
Vast. Sprawling. Multiple connecting corridors running in every direction. But the walls and floors were worn with age—this place was entirely unconnected to Rao. No divine energy, no magical signature. Pure human construction—and someone had spent an incomprehensible amount of labor digging it out beneath the desert.
"Stop." Damian raised a hand, pointing at two guards on patrol in the distance.
Shaved heads. White robes. Shoulders down to the sleeves drenched in blood red. Technologically advanced firearms, carried with casual ease.
"I don't recognize them. They don't look military—should we grab one and ask?" Raven was visibly itching for it.
Damian studied them, then shook his head. "I recognize the robes. They're the Blood Brotherhood."
"They were once part of the League of Assassins. Their leader became obsessed with seeking out forbidden relics. My grandfather had them expelled. I didn't expect them to still be active after two hundred years."
"Forbidden relics?"
"The Spear of Destiny. The shroud. Judas's Oath." Damian said it the way you'd list items on a grocery list.