The battle ended the way the comics had always described it: decisively, loudly, and with Darkseid retreating through a boom tube that left a scar in the air for about thirty seconds before closing like a wound.
Maxwell watched the closing from a rooftop three blocks from the main combat zone, which was as close as he'd managed to get without being relocated to a civilian shelter again. The heroes had won. The sky above Metropolis was returning, slowly, to something that resembled its normal color. Below in the streets, the long, complicated business of aftermath was beginning.
He stayed in Metropolis for the rest of the day.
Not for the battle. The battle was finished. He stayed for the opportunity that large-scale events created in their wake, which was the presence of things in places they wouldn't normally be, left by parties who were no longer in a position to object.
Parademons, it turned out, left bodies. Quite a lot of them, scattered across the city in the locations where the League's members had concentrated their efforts. The bodies were being cordoned off by emergency services, catalogued, and presumably directed toward whatever federal agency had jurisdiction over extraterrestrial remains in the DC universe. Maxwell moved through the perimeter of several cordons with the practiced ease of a man who had spent years learning how to be in places he wasn't supposed to be, and extracted what he could before the cataloguers finished their initial sweep.
Wing membranes, primarily. Several sections of carapace from the torso and shoulder regions. A component he couldn't immediately identify from what appeared to be some kind of built-in weapon system on one of the larger specimens. He put all of it in the cruiser's trunk, wrapped in the emergency blanket he'd found in the boot, and told himself he'd figure out what it was worth later.
Alien technology from the first Darkseid invasion, collected from the source. The black market exchange panel would have opinions about that.
He drove out of Metropolis as the morning news crews were arriving.
The highway back to Gotham had the specific quality of a road the morning after something large — lighter than usual, the ordinary traffic replaced by emergency vehicles moving in the opposite direction, the radio carrying the first wave of coverage as the networks assembled their understanding of what had happened overnight.
Maxwell drove with the window down, the cool morning air doing useful work on the accumulated fatigue of the past twenty-four hours, and listened to fragments of broadcast without paying close attention to any of them. Heroes. Invasion. Retreat. The words that would define the event for anyone who hadn't been standing in an alley getting sent to a shelter by the Flash.
His phone buzzed on the passenger seat.
He glanced at it. A banking alert, the kind that accompanied a transaction of significant size. He picked it up at the next straight section of road.
Five hundred million dollars. Transferred. Sitting in an account he'd set up specifically for things that couldn't be traced back to Maxwell Connor without considerable effort.
He set the phone down.
Stared at the road ahead for a moment.
Then he smiled. Not a large expression — just the corner of his mouth, the specific satisfaction of a man who had been shot in the back, thrown in a harbor, spent seven weeks in Blackgate, and had just extracted five hundred million dollars from the person responsible for all three of those things.
The morning felt marginally better.
Then the system chimed.
────────────────────────────────────────
✉ MESSAGE RECEIVED
Hahahaha.
You're funny. I asked for action,
not a comedy special.
You really thought you could fight
aliens head-on. With a service weapon.
That you stole from a police cruiser.
During an alien invasion.
You are one hell of a case,
Maxwell Connor.
That said — the Luthor scene.
The bullet past the cheek.
The furniture afterwards.
Chef's kiss.
For the entertainment provided,
I've decided to upgrade your system.
Consider it a performance bonus.
With love,
The God of Entertainment
(Yes, I'm adding 'The F***ing'
back. It felt right.)
────────────────────────────────────────
Maxwell read it.
He read the parenthetical twice.
Then he put the phone back on the passenger seat, because he was driving and the god's communications, however irritating, did not constitute a reason to rear-end a news van on the Metropolis highway.
He opened the system panel instead, which he could read through the glasses without taking his eyes off the road, and checked the upgrade.
────────────────────────────────────────
─ SYSTEM UPGRADE APPLIED ────────────────
New feature: EXCHANGE PANEL
Convert real-world items to System
Coins (SC) or direct item trades.
Rate calculated by rarity and
system relevance of submitted item.
New feature: EXPANDED SHOP
Additional inventory unlocked.
Includes: alien tech, occult items,
enhanced gear, and specialty skills.
New items flagged for review.
────────────────────────────────────────
He navigated to the shop.
The inventory had expanded considerably. New weapons with specifications that made the previous loadout look like the starter equipment it had been. Tactical gear with properties that the old suit hadn't offered. A section he hadn't seen before labeled simply TECH, which contained items whose descriptions suggested origin points well outside anything human manufacturing had produced. He scrolled through it with the focused attention of a man making a shopping list, noting prices, comparing to his current balance, building the order of acquisition in his head.
Most of it was expensive. Some of it was very expensive. A few items were listed at prices that suggested the system had an optimistic assessment of what he'd be earning in the near future.
Then he found it.
Halfway down the specialty section, between a skill called Phantom Step and something called Void Resistance, sitting in a display frame that the system had apparently decided warranted slightly more prominence than the items around it.
────────────────────────────────────────
─ FEATURED ITEM ────────────────────────
SUPERNATURAL ORB
Tier: Legendary
Cost: 20,000 SC
Description:
A concentrated vessel of supernatural
potential. Upon activation, grants the
user supernatural abilities aligned
with their innate affinity.
Affinity is determined by the user's
history, psychology, and the nature
of their accumulated experience.
Results are permanent and cannot
be reversed.
Note: Affinity cannot be predicted
in advance. The orb gives what
the user is, not what they want.
Current SC balance: 2,140
Remaining cost: 17,860 SC
────────────────────────────────────────
Maxwell read the description twice. Then the note at the bottom, once more.
"The orb gives what the user is, not what they want."
He sat with that for a moment, one hand on the wheel, the Gotham highway beginning to appear on the signs overhead, the morning traffic starting to thicken as he got closer to the city.
Supernatural abilities. In the DC universe, that opened a specific door. Not the Justice League — he was still working on that, still building the reputation, still waiting for the formation to stabilize into something joinable. But there was another team. Less formal, more occult, the collection of DC's supernatural and mystical heroes who operated in the spaces the main League didn't fully cover.
The Justice League Dark.
Constantine was in that circle.
Maxwell closed the shop panel. Opened the exchange panel. Looked at the alien components in the trunk through the rearview mirror, calculating their likely conversion value. Added the number to his current balance and the gap to 20,000 SC.
Still a long way off. But a shorter long way than it had been yesterday.
He filed the orb under the category of objectives and returned his attention to the road.
The Gotham skyline was appearing on the horizon, grey and familiar, the towers doing their usual impression of a city that had survived everything and expected to survive whatever came next. He'd been gone for — he counted backward — longer than he'd planned, which was becoming a pattern. Left for Metropolis for a heist, ended up in an alien invasion and a harbor and seven weeks in Blackgate.
He was going back with alien components in his trunk, five hundred million dollars in an account, a system upgrade, and a new objective that involved acquiring supernatural powers through an item whose outcome he couldn't predict in advance.
The god had called him one hell of a case.
Maxwell thought that was probably fair.
He drove toward Gotham.