There was a police cruiser parked at the edge of the yard, abandoned in the chaos, driver's door still hanging open.
I didn't think about it too long. I got in, checked the ignition — keys still in it, because whoever had been driving it had more pressing concerns than vehicle security — and started the engine. The radio was alive with overlapping transmissions, voices cutting over each other, the GCPD dispatch trying to manage a situation that was well outside the category of manageable. I turned the volume down and pulled out of the yard through the open gate.
Behind me, Blackgate was still in the process of emptying itself. Ahead, the road to the city.
I drove.
The smoke was worse up close.
I could see it properly now from the elevated approach road — not one or two columns but a continuous dark band sitting over the city's eastern districts, the kind of coverage that meant multiple simultaneous events rather than a single incident. The glow underneath it pulsed at irregular intervals. Explosions, or something close enough to count.
This was it. The first Darkseid invasion. The event I'd read about in the comic runs, the one that every subsequent DC story referenced as the moment things changed, the catalyst that forced a collection of individuals who had various reasons not to trust each other into a room together and kept them there until they figured out cooperation.
The Justice League creation was accelerated because of this.
Which meant this was exactly where I needed to be.
Ra's al Ghul's instructions had been clear enough: build a reputation, join the team. The team didn't exist yet. This was the event that boosted it's creation. If I wanted to be in the room when it happened, I needed to be part of the reason the room existed.
Simple in theory.
I pulled over.
The thing about the comics is that they don't really communicate scale.
You read about parademons and your brain files them as a threat category — dangerous, numerous, Darkseid's shock troops, handled by Superman and Wonder Woman and the rest of the Justice League in the source material. The League handled them. That was the story. You don't spend a lot of time thinking about what handling them would actually look like from ground level, from the perspective of a person without a cape or a power ring or the ability to lift a tank.
I'd seen them in the Blackgate yard. Up close. Moving.
The comics didn't do them justice. That was the honest assessment. They were wrong in the way that things were wrong when the reality of them outpaced the two-dimensional version — larger than the page suggested, faster than anything that size had any right to be, and carrying a quality that I was going to call presence for lack of a better word. The feeling of standing near something that existed in a completely different threat tier from anything I'd trained to handle.
I was a hitman. A very good one, by current standards. I had Gold-tier martial arts, advanced weapons handling, League of Shadows training, a full year of operational experience in one of the hardest cities on earth.
Against a parademon, any of that was approximately a polite suggestion.
I sat in the cruiser and looked at the burning city and thought about what I could actually contribute to an alien invasion.
I checked the system shop.
Suits. Weapons. Tactical accessories. The Nine Lives skill still sitting at 2,400 SC, still out of reach. Nothing with the word alien-capable anywhere in the description. Nothing that changed the fundamental math of a human operative against extraterrestrial shock troops.
I closed the panel.
There was another way. The system's progression path, the level structure, the skill unlocks that hadn't arrived yet. There were things higher up the tree that would change what I was capable of in a way the current loadout didn't. But getting there took time — months, probably. Maybe longer. And the invasion was happening now, today, outside this cruiser window.
I looked left. The road back to Gotham. Familiar ground, manageable threats, the kind of situation I'd learned to operate in. The sensible option.
I looked right. The highway toward Metropolis. Where the real fight was. Where the heroes were, and whoever else had shown up. Where the event that created the Justice League was unfolding in real time.
Also where Lex Luthor was.
That last part sat in my head for a moment. Luthor, who had shot me in the back in his own office and had me dumped in a harbor. Luthor, whose building I had robbed, whose cousin I had killed, whose files I had delivered. Going back to Metropolis meant that problem was back on the table.
I sat at the crossroads and thought about it.
I thought about Ra's al Ghul's instruction. I thought about Constantine somewhere in the DC universe and the path to him running through the League. I thought about the Entertainment God watching this specific moment with its chipped-tooth smile and waiting to see which way I turned.
I thought about what Batman was doing right now, in Metropolis, with whatever he'd brought to an alien invasion. Batman, who had no powers either. Who showed up anyway. Who made himself useful with what he had rather than waiting until he had more.
I checked the cruiser's glove box. A service weapon, still holstered, left behind in the evacuation along with everything else. I took it. Checked the load. Fifteen rounds, full magazine. Not much against a parademon. Better than nothing.
I took a breath.
Started the engine.
The thing about impossible situations is that they're only impossible until they aren't.
I'd thought fighting thirty-six Court assassins was impossible. I'd thought surviving Talon was impossible. I'd thought walking out of a military installation with every alarm going was impossible. Impossible kept turning out to be a category that had more flexibility in it than the word suggested, provided you were willing to pay the cost of the flexibility.
I couldn't fight parademons. Not head-on, not the way the others would.
But I could do other things. I could move fast through a chaotic environment. I could identify priority targets and access points and the kind of tactical vulnerabilities that didn't show up on a superpowered scan but were visible to someone who'd spent years learning how to read the geometry of a fight. I could keep people alive who would otherwise not survive the next five minutes. I could be useful in the spaces the big players weren't covering, which in any large-scale battle were numerous.
Batman had shown up to an alien invasion with gadgets and a cape and the specific audacity of a man who had decided that not having powers was not the same as not being able to help.
I had a stolen cruiser, a service weapon, League of Shadows training, and a god who wanted entertainment.
I pressed the accelerator.
The cruiser pulled onto the Metropolis highway and I drove into the burning distance with the city getting larger in the windscreen and the smoke getting thicker and the radio transmissions getting more desperate, and somewhere ahead of me the most important battle in DC history was happening without me.
I thought: that bastard wants action.
I thought: fine.
I kept driving.