I drove into Metropolis with a plan.
The plan was: find the fight, be useful, contribute something meaningful to the battle against an alien invasion force, and maybe get noticed by the right people in the process.
The plan lasted about four minutes.
I parked the cruiser three blocks from the main combat zone, which I could identify by the noise and the column of purple-green energy overhead that hadn't been there the last time I visited. I checked the service weapon. Fifteen rounds. I reminded myself of what I'd thought in the cruiser: Batman had shown up with gadgets and audacity. I had the same energy. Roughly.
I rounded the corner and came face to face with a parademon.
Up close they were even worse than at the Blackgate yard.
This one was maybe eight feet tall, grey-skinned, built like something that had been designed by someone who thought anatomy was a set of suggestions rather than rules. Its face was not a face so much as a collection of features arranged in the general location where a face would be on a human. It smelled wrong. It moved wrong. It made a sound that I was choosing not to try to describe and pointed something at me that I was choosing not to examine too closely.
I shot it.
Six times.
The rounds hit. I could see them hit. The parademon looked at me with the expression of something that had been inconvenienced rather than damaged, and then it swung one arm in a backhand that I ducked under on pure instinct and that would have taken my head off on contact.
I ducked. I rolled. I came up running.
This was, I want to be clear, a tactical repositioning.
The next three minutes were the most professionally humbling of my life.
And I had once been knocked into a wall by a man with hardened knuckles in an East End alley and been too broke to afford the follow-up medical care.
The parademon followed me. They were faster than they looked, which was saying something given that they already looked fast. I tried the H&K — I'd retrieved it from my gear at some point during the Blackgate escape, muscle memory more than planning — and the rounds did about the same amount of work as the service weapon, which was to say they made the parademon mildly irritated.
I tried the knife. The knife was not a meaningful contribution to this engagement.
I tried the martial arts. The League had given me an excellent foundation for fighting humans, and peak-human opponents like Talon and Deathstroke, and in a pinch sixty Court assassins. The League had not, as it turned out, included a curriculum for something that was eight feet tall and made of different physics.
I got picked up. By the collar. Off the ground.
I want to be very clear about this because I think it's important for the record: I was picked up off the ground by a parademon. I was approximately eighteen inches in the air. The parademon was looking at me with what I can only describe as mild curiosity, the way you might look at an insect you'd found on your arm.
A second parademon arrived. They appeared to be discussing me. Or at least making sounds at each other while both looking in my direction, which I was choosing to interpret as discussion rather than the alternative.
I was running out of ideas.
Then something red and gold went past me at a speed I didn't have the processing power to track, and both parademons were on the other side of the street, and I was on the ground.
I sat up.
The Flash was standing in front of me, and by standing I mean he was in the particular slightly-vibrating stillness of someone who was being still by choice rather than necessity. He looked at me. He looked at the parademons he'd just relocated. He looked back at me.
"Hey, buddy," he said, with the specific gentle energy of someone talking to a civilian who had made a very understandable but very poor decision. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," I said.
"Cool, cool." He glanced back at the parademons, who were getting up in the way that parademons got up, which was with complete disregard for how hard they'd landed. "So here's the thing. This area is a little—" he gestured at the general ongoing catastrophe around us — "active, right now. There's a shelter two blocks east, they've got it set up for civilians. I'm going to need you to head there."
He was looking at me with the earnest, slightly urgent expression of a man who was in the middle of six things simultaneously and needed this particular thing resolved.
"I'm not a civilian," I said.
"Right, right, of course." He nodded with the energy of someone who had heard this before. "But for safety purposes, the shelter is really the —" The two parademons had gotten up and were now heading back toward us with renewed purpose. The Flash looked at them. Looked at me. "Two blocks east! Stay low!"
He was gone before the sentence finished.
The parademons were also gone a moment later, relocated again to somewhere that wasn't here.
The street was empty.
I stood alone in a Metropolis street during an alien invasion, having just been told to go to the civilian shelter by the Flash, who had mistaken me for a regular person who had wandered into a warzone by accident.
I picked up the service weapon from where it had fallen when I'd been lifted off the ground.
I went to find an alley.
I sat with my back against the wall and my knees up and thought about my life.
In both of them. The one on Earth and the one here.
I'd been a cop. A functional, competent one. I'd been trained by Ra's al Ghul. I'd survived Talon, Deathstroke in a sparring context, Red Hood, sixty Court assassins, a military installation, and Lex Luthor's harbor. I had Gold-tier martial arts and advanced weapons handling and the area awareness skill running at all times and stats in the sixties across every category.
A parademon had picked me up like a cat toy.
The Flash had sent me to the civilian shelter.
I had never in either of my lives felt so entirely, comprehensively, categorically useless.
The battle was audible from the alley — the sounds of it carrying over the rooftops, periodic booms and the screech of something moving at velocity and the specific quality of noise that very large things made when they met other very large things. Somewhere in that, Superman was probably doing something that would end up in a history book. Wonder Woman. Batman, making himself useful with gadgets and audacity in the way I had told myself I was also going to do.
I had been picked up by a parademon.
I leaned my head back against the wall.
Ra's al Ghul had told me to join the Justice League. The Justice League was forming, right now, a few blocks from this alley, in the course of an event that I had contributed absolutely nothing to. The path to Constantine ran through the League. The path home ran through Constantine. And I was sitting in an alley in Metropolis having been classified as a civilian by the fastest man alive.
I thought about what I could actually do. Right now. Today. With what I had.
I couldn't fight parademons. That was established. I couldn't contribute to a superhuman battle in any meaningful military sense. The system had nothing in the shop that changed those facts. The only thing that changed those facts was time and progression, and time and progression were not available in the next forty minutes.
But I was in Metropolis.
I looked up at the skyline through the alley's narrow frame. The smoke. The distant sounds of an invasion being handled by people far above my current weight class. And rising above all of it, glass and steel and the name on the sign visible even through the haze:
LexCorp.
I stood up.
Brushed off my jacket, which had not had a good few months.
Thought: if I can't be useful in the battle, I can at least collect what I'm owed.
The LexCorp building had evacuated most of its staff.
An alien invasion was apparently sufficient motivation to interrupt the workday, which I noted as something Metropolis had over Gotham — in Gotham, people developed a higher threshold before they considered an event worth leaving the office for. The lobby was empty, the security desk abandoned, the turnstiles unlocked in the same way that everything in the city had unlocked itself in the past hour.
I took the elevator to forty-two.
The executive floor was quiet. The sound-dampened walls and the thick carpet doing the same work they always did, absorbing whatever the building around them was generating. The double doors at the end of the corridor were closed.
I'd dealt with those doors before.
The security on this floor had been minimal — skeleton staff, two guards who had been watching the invasion from the window rather than the corridor when I came through, which was a professional failure I'd taken advantage of with the efficiency of someone who'd spent the last year learning how to move through spaces quietly. They were zip-tied to their chairs now with their own equipment, which I felt was tidier than the alternatives.
I opened the doors.
Lex Luthor was at the window.
Of course he was. The man treated the window the way other people treated a throne — the natural position from which to observe events and formulate opinions about them. He was in a suit, because Lex Luthor was always in a suit, and he was monologuing to himself in the way that men of considerable intelligence sometimes did when they believed they were alone, his voice low and measured, something about the nature of the public's relationship with extraordinary individuals.
I closed the doors behind me.
He turned at the sound.
The sequence of expressions that crossed Lex Luthor's face in the following two seconds was, I thought, the most entertainment I'd gotten out of the day so far.
First: the neutral assessment of someone identifying an unexpected presence.
Second: recognition, the specific widening that accompanied placing a face.
Third: something that was not quite fear but was adjacent to it, the body's honest response to seeing a person it had last seen being disposed of.
Fourth: the rapid, controlled reassertion of composure, the face settling back into the expression of a man who had decided not to be rattled.
He pressed a button on his desk.
"Good to see you, Luthor," I said.
"You—" He stopped. Started again. "How did you get in here." It came out as a statement rather than a question, because Lex Luthor didn't ask questions he wasn't prepared for the answer to, and this was a question he wasn't prepared for.
"Don't bother with the button," I said. "Your security's been dealt with." I walked toward the desk at the pace of someone who wasn't worried about the button or what it connected to. "I believe I'm owed some compensation for the events of our last meeting."
The composure reasserted itself fully. His jaw set. The thing behind his eyes went from rattled to cold in the space of a breath. "Compensated." He said the word like he was examining it for structural defects. "You have the nerve to come here during an alien invasion, to my office, and request compensation. After stealing from me."
"We had a deal," I said. "I completed three missions. You shot me in the back and had me put in a harbor." I reached the edge of the desk. "That's not honoring a deal."
I took out the service weapon and placed it on the desk between us, my hand resting on it.
Luthor looked at the gun. Looked at me. Did the calculation that Lex Luthor always did, the rapid assessment of variables and outcomes.
"You can't shoot me," he said. "Do you have any idea what —"
I picked up the gun and fired.
The round went past his left cheek close enough that he felt the air of it. It hit the window behind him — the bulletproof glass taking it without breaking, the round leaving a white impact star in the surface. Luthor went very still.
"Don't test me, Lex," I said. I kept my voice level. "I've had a difficult few months."
The silence held for three seconds.
"What do you want," he said. Flat. The voice of someone who had moved past the principle of the thing into the practical assessment.
"Five hundred million dollars," I said.
The composure cracked. Just slightly. Just for a moment. "Are you—"
I fired again. The wall this time, six inches from his shoulder.
Luthor closed his mouth. He breathed through his nose. He looked at the gun, at the window, at me, and performed the calculation one more time with the new variables included.
"Fine," he said. Each letter of the word carrying the weight of a man who was not finished with this situation but was choosing a different timeline for the continuation.
"You'll receive the transfer. By tomorrow."
"Good doing business, Mr. Luthor," I said.
I put the weapon away. I turned and walked toward the doors.
At the threshold I stopped. Looked back. He was still behind the desk, standing very straight, his composure fully restored and his eyes carrying an expression I recognized from the last time I'd been in this office — the look of a man filing something for later.
"Try anything funny this time," I said, "and Metropolis will be mourning its favorite son."
I left.
I heard something crash.
Then something else.
Then the specific acoustic pattern of a man destroying his own office furniture at considerable personal expense.
The elevator was still working. I took it down to the lobby, walked through the empty security desk, and stepped out into the Metropolis afternoon, where in the middle distance the invasion was apparently still being handled by people significantly more capable than me.
Behind me, through forty-two floors of LexCorp's sound-dampened constructionruiser. I got in. I sat for a moment.
The sounds of the battle were winding down somewhere in the direction of the city center. I'd missed the whole thing, which was the honest summary of my contribution to the first Darkseid invasion.
I started the car.
At least the god was getting something out of the day.