The stats did not lie, which was one of the things Maxwell had come to appreciate about the system. It had no investment in flattering him and no interest in softening the gap between where he was and where he needed to be. Numbers were numbers.
Progress was progress. And by the end of the third week, the numbers had moved.
Strength: thirty-six. Agility: thirty-five.
Endurance: thirty-four. Precision climbed fastest of all — thirty-eight, built on the combination of firearms practice and the fine motor discipline that the Meridian job had demanded. Constitution lagged slightly behind the rest at thirty-two, which the system had flagged with the neutral commentary of a coach who had noticed something and expected the athlete to handle it. He had added weighted carries to his morning runs and stopped complaining about the stairs.
He was becoming something. He could feel it in the way his body processed information — faster, more automatic, the area awareness skill running like a background process that occasionally surfaced something useful before his conscious attention had gotten there. He moved differently in rooms. He had noticed Torrance noticing.
The god's message arrived on a Tuesday morning while he was eating breakfast, which was the kind of timing that suggested either genuine coincidence or a cosmic entity with a flair for the mundane.
────────────────────────────────────────
✉ MESSAGE RECEIVED
Ho ho ho.
The past few weeks have been quite
interesting. More of the same, please.
I have a reward for you.
Consider it an investment in continued
entertainment value.
With love,
Your Beloved God of Entertainment ♥
────────────────────────────────────────
Maxwell read it with the specific expression he had developed for the god's communications — a controlled neutrality that he maintained with considerable effort while his internal monologue produced commentary that would have filled several pages if he had chosen to write it down.
He did not write it down. He had learned that articulating his feelings about the god in any permanent format felt too much like giving it the satisfaction of a documented reaction, and he was not prepared to provide that.
He ate his breakfast. He trained. He thought about revenge in the patient, methodical way he thought about all problems that required capabilities he did not yet have.
Three days later, an envelope arrived from Rena.
— ✦ —
The assignment was, of all the things Maxwell had anticipated, not this.
Metropolis. LexCorp headquarters. A device held in the research division on the thirty-fourth floor, described in the briefing with the careful vagueness of someone who understood what it was and had decided that Maxwell did not need to. Retrieval only — no secondary objectives, no collateral instructions. Bring it back intact.
Maxwell set the briefing down and sat with it for a moment.
Metropolis. Not Gotham, with its familiar dysfunction and its navigable shadows, but Metropolis — the city that worked, the city of glass and ambition and a Superman who was not a rumor but a fact, who flew over its skyline with the comfortable authority of someone who had decided this was his city and had been right about it for long enough that nobody seriously argued otherwise anymore.
He thought about Superman briefly and in the specific context of whether a man breaking into LexCorp was likely to attract the attention of the city's primary protector. The answer, if he was fast enough and quiet enough, was probably not. Superman responded to large-scale threats. A single operative moving through a building in the middle of the night was, by that metric, below the threshold. Probably.
He was still working through the geometry of it when the system chimed.
────────────────────────────────────────
⚠ MISSION DETECTED
Client : [REDACTED]
Objective : Asset retrieval, LexCorp R&D
Floor 34, Metropolis
Dispatching reward from [REDACTED]...
A vehicle has been prepared for your use.
Location: East End Docks, Bay 7.
Note: The donor requests you drive it
with some enthusiasm.
────────────────────────────────────────
Maxwell looked at the last line for a long moment.
"Drive it with some enthusiasm."
He closed the panel and went to the docks.
Bay 7 was at the eastern end of the pier, away from the active freight operations, in the section that the East End's informal economy used for things that didn't require paperwork. The bay doors were closed and locked with a combination that the system had apparently forwarded to him at some point because it appeared in his vision when he reached for the panel, which he was choosing not to examine too carefully in terms of its implications about the god's access to his interface.
He opened the doors.
The car sat in the middle of the bay under a single work light, and Maxwell stood in the doorway and looked at it for a moment with the expression of someone who had not been expecting this and was recalibrating accordingly.
All black. A Dodge Challenger, but modified in ways that the standard model's designers had not contemplated — the body sitting lower, the exhaust configuration suggesting an engine that had been considerably rethought, the tires wider and the profile somehow quieter than a car this size had any business being. It was the kind of vehicle that communicated a specific and considered set of values: power, restraint, the willingness to be very fast when the situation required it and perfectly still when it didn't.
He walked around it once. He crouched and looked at the undercarriage. He opened the driver's door and sat in the seat and put his hands on the wheel and felt the driving skill do something in the architecture of his instincts — a settling, a recognition, the wheel's weight and geometry becoming immediately legible in a way that had nothing to do with the two weeks he'd spent in his previous life driving a departmental sedan with unreliable heating.
He started the engine.
It was quiet. Profoundly, almost unnervingly quiet for something that moved the air the way it did when he pressed the accelerator experimentally in the empty bay. The god had excellent taste in gifts, which Maxwell resented as an additional grievance on a list that was already substantial.
He drove out of the bay and pointed the car toward Metropolis.
— ✦ —
The drive took three hours.
He used the time the way he used most unstructured time — thinking, planning, running through variables and contingencies until the plan had enough depth that improvisation, when it became necessary, would have something to improvise against. The briefing had given him the floor plan, the security rotation schedule, and the entry point. It had not given him a great deal about what the device actually was, which was the kind of information gap that had caused him problems before.
He thought about LexCorp. In the comics, Lex Luthor's research division was a place where the categories of dangerous and experimental overlapped so completely that distinguishing between them required specialized knowledge. Whatever was on the thirty-fourth floor was there because Luthor wanted it there, which meant it was either valuable, dangerous, or both. The briefing's vagueness on this point was not accidental.
He thought about Lex Luthor himself, which was a line of thought he spent approximately forty kilometers on and then set aside, because thinking about Lex Luthor in the context of a job Lex Luthor did not know was coming was a recursive loop that produced anxiety without producing information, and anxiety without information was just noise.
He arrived at the outskirts of Metropolis at eleven forty-seven.
The city was different from Gotham in ways that were immediately and physically apparent. The scale was comparable, but where Gotham's mass felt compressed and layered, Metropolis spread with the confident horizontality of a city that had decided it deserved the space it occupied.
The buildings were glass and steel rather than gothic stone, the streets lit with the clean efficiency of infrastructure that was maintained rather than merely endured. It looked, from the elevated approach road, like a city that had been designed by someone who expected things to work.
Maxwell found a parking structure four blocks from the LexCorp tower and left the Challenger on the second level, backing it into a corner position with the nose toward the exit. Old habit. The driving skill had opinions about exit positioning that aligned precisely with his own instincts, which he was still finding slightly uncanny.
He checked his gear. The suit, the watch, the weapons seated correctly. Area awareness running at its quiet, persistent baseline. He looked up at the LexCorp tower — forty floors of glass and light against Metropolis' night sky, the LexCorp logo marking its summit with the specific confidence of a man who had decided his name deserved to be visible from space.
He thought: I really hope Lex Luthor doesn't come after me for this.
Then he went.
— ✦ —
The service entrance on the tower's north face was the entry point the briefing had identified, accessible via a maintenance access road that ran between the LexCorp building and its neighbor. The security camera covering it operated on a ninety-second rotation with a fourteen-second blind spot at the far left of its sweep — the briefing had been thorough on this point, which suggested either excellent intelligence work or someone inside LexCorp who had reasons of their own to want the thirty-fourth floor's contents disturbed.
Maxwell moved through the blind spot at twelve-nineteen and was inside in four seconds.
The building's interior had the after-hours quality of a large corporate space emptied of its daytime population: the hum of climate control, the ambient light of emergency systems and server indicators, the particular silence of a space designed for hundreds of people currently housing seven. The security rotation had six guards on active patrol and one on the lobby desk, their positions tracked by the briefing's schedule and updated in real time by the area awareness skill, which was doing something Maxwell hadn't fully tested before — mapping the building's layout against the thermal signatures of movement, flagging each guard as a colored indicator in his peripheral vision.
He stood in the service corridor for a moment and simply watched the indicators move.
Green for stationary. Amber for moving away. Red for moving toward. Currently: three green, three amber, one red.
The red one was on his floor, moving east toward the stairwell he needed.
He waited.
Forty seconds later, the indicator shifted to amber. Maxwell moved.
He took the stairwell to the twenty-second floor and switched to the elevator shaft access — a maintenance ladder running inside a shaft adjacent to the primary lifts, the kind of infrastructure that existed in every large building and that most security protocols forgot to account for because most people didn't think of it as a route.
Maxwell had a different definition of route.
Twelve floors of ladder in the dark, the suit's fabric managing the exertion, the watch's timer marking his pace against the schedule.
Thirty-fourth floor. He came out of the maintenance access into a corridor that was different in character from the floors below — cleaner, more controlled, the kind of institutional quiet that came with proximity to something important. The security here was heavier: two guards on a fixed post outside a set of reinforced doors, the kind of post that didn't rotate because it wasn't supposed to be unoccupied.
He studied them from the corridor's shadow for ninety seconds.
They were good. Better than the Coventry security, better than Meridian's detail. They stood with the relaxed attentiveness of professionals who had learned to stay sharp during quiet hours because they understood that quiet hours were exactly when things happened. Their communication was minimal and efficient. They were not going to have a convenient simultaneous blindspot.
Maxwell thought about the problem for thirty seconds.
Then he went back to the maintenance corridor, found the electrical panel for the thirty-fourth floor, and introduced it briefly to the EMP unit he had rebuilt since the Coventry job with considerably better housing and a more reliable yield.
The floor's lighting dropped to emergency levels. Red-tinted, low, the kind of light that turned a familiar space into a place that required active navigation.
Both guards moved toward the electrical panel.
Maxwell moved toward the reinforced doors.
The lock had switched to manual backup when the power dropped, which was standard emergency protocol and which the briefing had anticipated. The bypass tool took eleven seconds. The door opened.
The lab was dark except for the equipment's own indicator lights — a constellation of green and blue and amber in the red-tinged space, workstations and containment units and things Maxwell did not have the specialization to immediately identify. He moved through it by the layout the briefing had provided, navigating toward the northeastern corner where the target was stored.
The device was in a containment case approximately the size of a hardback novel, sealed with a biometric lock that the briefing had provided a bypass sequence for. Maxwell pressed the sequence. The case opened. Inside, nested in foam, was a piece of technology whose exact function he could not determine from its appearance and whose importance was communicated entirely by the quality of its containment.
He pocketed it. He turned toward the door.
The alarm system, which had apparently been running on a separate power circuit from the main lighting, chose this moment to have an opinion about the situation.
Every alarm in the building had an opinion simultaneously.
— ✦ —
Maxwell was out of the lab and moving before the sound had fully registered, because the alarm was information and information required a response and the response was already predetermined: get to the stairwell, get below the cordon before it established, get out.
He made it to the stairwell.
The first four guards came up it.
They came fast and organized, the way LexCorp security moved when the alarm was active — two in front, two behind, the formation of people who had drilled this scenario and trusted their drilling. Maxwell had approximately two seconds before they had eyes on him and approximately one second of decision before that.
He used both.
He went down instead of up, into the ascending column of guards rather than away from it, which was the last thing the formation was built to handle. The area awareness flagged their positions in real time and he moved between them the way water moved through gaps — not by force but by reading the geometry. The first guard's grab found his jacket and he turned into it rather than away from it, using the grip as a pivot, the Krav Maga set converting the man's momentum into a controlled fall down the stairwell that temporarily occupied the second guard's attention. His elbow found the third man's sternum. His foot found the fourth man's knee at an angle that the knee did not appreciate.
He was past them and descending before any of them had fully processed what had happened.
Twenty-eighth floor. The door burst open and three more came through it, and these ones had their weapons drawn, which changed the geometry entirely. Maxwell was already below the door's threshold when the first shot hit the stairwell wall where he had been, and he came up from the crouch with one of the H&K's in hand, suppressed, the discipline of the weapon handling skill making the draw clean and the aim immediate.
Two shots. Two guards down, not dead — he had shifted his aim at the last moment, a decision his body made slightly ahead of his conscious mind, the aim points dropping to non-fatal locations with the precision the skill provided. The third guard dove behind the door frame.
Maxwell kept moving.
Twenty-second floor. Twelve guards in the corridor, which was a number the briefing had not mentioned and which the area awareness was now displaying as a spreading constellation of red indicators that covered the route to the elevator shaft access. They had anticipated his exit strategy. Someone had been thinking.
He stopped in the stairwell and thought for approximately four seconds.
Twelve guards between him and the elevator shaft. The stairwell below would have more — the alarm had been active long enough for the lobby contingency to be deploying upward. Going forward meant going through the twelve. Going down meant a gauntlet he couldn't count yet. Going back up meant cornering himself.
He went through the twelve.
What followed was the longest ninety seconds of Maxwell Connor's life in Gotham, and he had had some long ninety seconds.
The corridor was wide enough for two abreast and narrow enough that flanking was limited, which was both a problem and a solution — they couldn't surround him if he controlled the space, and he controlled the space by moving through it at a pace and in a direction that the twelve guards, however well-trained, had not fully anticipated. The area awareness ran at maximum, the red indicators flowing like a live map, and he moved between them with the specific, improvised economy of someone who was spending capabilities he had spent six months building and finding, for the first time, that they were sufficient.
Not easy. Not glamorous. A guard's baton found his left shoulder and the impact was real and immediate and would produce another spectacular bruise. He went into a wall once, absorbed it, pushed back off it. He took a grab to the collar that he couldn't fully escape and had to spend two seconds and more energy than he wanted to convert into a throw that put the grabbing guard into two of his colleagues.
But he moved. He moved through them the way the John Wick knowledge suggested movement was possible — not by being invulnerable but by being relentlessly forward, by treating every guard as a obstacle with a specific solution rather than a threat to be feared, by refusing to stop when stopping was the only thing that would actually stop him.
By the time he reached the elevator shaft access on the far side of the corridor, eight of the twelve were on the floor. Four had made the professionally correct decision to let him go and report his direction rather than continue the engagement.
He went down the shaft.
Lobby level. Six guards plus the desk officer, all of them between him and the service entrance. He came out of the maintenance access running, the second H&K joining the first, and what he did through the lobby was not something he would have been able to describe in detail afterward because his conscious mind was largely a passenger for the fourteen seconds it took. The area awareness and the weapon handling and the martial arts and the accumulated six months of becoming something did the work, and when he came through the service entrance door into the cold Metropolis night he was breathing hard and his left shoulder was singing and the device was still in his pocket and he had left approximately forty guards incapacitated behind him, none of them permanently.
He walked to the parking structure.
He did not run. Running was for people who had already been seen.
— ✦ —
He was three steps from the Challenger when the lights came on.
Not the parking structure's lights — those had been on. These were different: focused, directional, the kind of illumination that was chosen rather than ambient. They came from four points simultaneously, flooding the Challenger's parking space and the area around it with the flat, overexposed brightness of a space that was being deliberately revealed.
Maxwell stopped.
He did a count as he stopped, because counting was what he did when the situation changed faster than the plan: six guards in new positions, fanning the illuminated space. Weapons visible. Body language that said trained, disciplined, and specifically arranged rather than responding.
They had been here before he arrived. Someone had projected his exit.
At the center of the illuminated space, between Maxwell and his car, stood a man.
Lex Luthor in person had a quality that his public image — the interviews, the press statements, the curated projection of controlled genius — only partially communicated. He was tall, immaculately composed, wearing a suit that cost more than Maxwell's monthly rent with the casual indifference of someone for whom cost had stopped being a consideration so long ago that he had forgotten it was one. His head was shaved smooth. His eyes were the color of cold water and they moved across Maxwell with the specific, assessing intelligence of a man who processed people the way other people processed data — rapidly, without sentiment, arriving at conclusions and updating them in real time.
He looked at Maxwell for a moment. Then, with the unhurried deliberateness of a man who understood that he controlled the pace of this conversation, he spoke.
"You have got guts," Luthor said. His voice was even, almost conversational, carrying no anger and no alarm. "To steal from me."
Maxwell said nothing. He was doing his own counting: six guards, the spacing between them, the angles, what the area awareness was telling him about the exit options from his current position. The picture was not encouraging. He had two weapons and a left shoulder that had opinions, and the six guards were between him and the one route out.
Luthor tilted his head slightly, the way intelligent people did when they were processing something that had surprised them at the level of category rather than detail.
"My security is among the best available," he continued. "The team on the thirty-fourth floor specifically. I selected them personally." A pause that held no particular emotional weight. "You went through sixty of them."
Still Maxwell said nothing.
"You deserve to die for this," Luthor said, with the calm of someone stating a fact rather than making a threat. "The violation alone would justify it, regardless of what you took." He looked at the parking space around them — not nervously, but with the proprietorial attention of a man inventorying a space he had arranged. "But you are quite the operative. Sixty security personnel and you are standing here intact, which is not a thing most people could do."
He reached into his jacket pocket and produced nothing — the gesture was one of settling, a preparation to speak rather than an action. His eyes returned to Maxwell's.
"I have an offer," Luthor said. "Three assignments. You complete them to my satisfaction and the matter of tonight is… resolved. The device remains wherever it's going, because I'm curious who sent you and this is a more efficient way to find out than attempting to extract the information, which would be tedious for both of us." He let a half-beat pass. "Decline, and the people behind me have instructions."
More security arrived at the parking structure's entrance. Maxwell heard them without looking — the area awareness providing the count without requiring his eyes to move. Eight additional. Bringing the total to fourteen, plus Luthor, in a space with one confirmed exit.
Maxwell looked at Lex Luthor.
He thought about the three contracts it had taken to reach Level 3. He thought about Carver in a corridor and the Bat-Signal over Gotham and a god watching all of it with a chipped-tooth smile and finding it adequately diverting.
He thought about what three assignments for Lex Luthor would cost and what they might open.
He was still thinking when the system chimed.
────────────────────────────────────────
⚠ EXTRA MISSION DETECTED
WORKING FOR LEX
Objective : Complete Lex Luthor's three
assigned missions.
Reward : CHANCE TO MEET RA'S AL GHUL
Status : PENDING YOUR RESPONSE
Note: Ra's al Ghul does not come to you.
This is the path that leads to him.
Note 2: Lex Luthor is watching you stand
here silently. He finds it
interesting. That is not always
a safe thing to be.
────────────────────────────────────────
Maxwell read the notes. Both of them. He lingered on the second one for a moment with the expression he reserved for the system when it was being the god and not bothering to announce the transition.
Ra's al Ghul. The Level 4 main quest. The next rung of a ladder that ended somewhere Maxwell was not yet capable of imagining clearly but that pointed, however indirectly, toward home.
Three missions for Lex Luthor. Against the alternative, which was fourteen guards and a parking structure in Metropolis and an outcome the system apparently didn't feel the need to spell out.
Maxwell looked at Luthor, who was watching him with the patient, curious attention of a man who had made an offer and understood that the silence was the decision being made rather than the refusal of it.
"Three missions," Maxwell said. His voice came out level, which he considered a personal achievement given the shoulder.
The corner of Luthor's mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. It was the expression of a man who had calculated an outcome and found the calculation confirmed.
"Three missions," he agreed.
He turned and walked toward the parking structure's entrance, the fourteen guards rearranging themselves around his departure with the choreographed efficiency of a security detail that had practiced this. He paused at the edge of the illuminated space and looked back.
"You'll be contacted," he said. "Don't leave Metropolis."
Then he was gone, and the lights remained, and Maxwell stood alone in the middle of the parking structure with a stolen device in his pocket, a bruised shoulder, and the specific feeling of a man who had gone to steal something from one of the most dangerous people in the DC universe and had come out of it with a job offer.
He got in the Challenger.
He sat in the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel and stared at the parking structure wall for approximately thirty seconds.
Then, because there was nothing else to do and the god was presumably watching and he had decided a long time ago that giving it the satisfaction of visible despair was not something he was prepared to do, he started the engine and drove.
Somewhere in whatever space the Entertainment God occupied, Maxwell was fairly certain he could hear something that sounded like applause.
He turned up the car's audio system to drown it out.
It didn't help.