Unknown Coordinates. Deep in the Hindu Kush.
The air was thin here—sharper than breath, older than time.
A fire crackled inside a stone chamber carved from mountain bone. Its heat did not reach the man seated before it.
Ra's al Ghul stared into the flames, unmoving.
A scroll lay opened beside him. Ink not yet dry. Words written in code, but the message was clear enough.
Talia.
Dead.
By his hand.
He had read it once.
He did not read it again.
The fire hissed, the wind howled beyond the cliff's edge, and the world seemed to hold its breath.
"The Pit gives, and the Pit takes," Ra's murmured, voice like sand through silk. "But you, yalghadr... you took what was never yours to command."
He stood.
Slow. Measured.
Then he turned—to a nearby apprentice, waiting in the shadows.
"Summon the Shadow Council. From Alexandria, from Kyoto, from beneath the ice in Novaya Zemlya. All of them."
The apprentice blinked. "Master, shall I tell them the Demon's Heir—"
"Tell them nothing," Ra's said. His voice could freeze rivers.
"Let them feel the silence first. Let it speak for her."
"And then let them wonder what I will do."
He walked into the cold without cloak or weapon, only a whisper carried by the wind behind him:
"Jason Todd..."
Gotham City. The Cave.
Rain rattled against the stone exterior of Wayne Manor, but deep beneath the earth, the noise couldn't reach the man seated in front of the main console.
Bruce Wayne narrowed his eyes.
Lines of data crawled across the screen. Satellite intercepts. Foreign intelligence leaks. Interpol traffic. Classified League encryption patterns.
Every thread pointed to the same thing:
Nanda Parbat. Breach. Uprising. Leadership terminated.
But no signature.
No demands.
No traceable aftermath.
Just silence—and the disappearance of several senior League operatives, as if they'd evaporated in a single night.
"This doesn't make sense," Bruce said, more to himself than to Alfred, who stood quietly behind him.
"I assume you mean besides the sudden power vacuum in one of the deadliest organizations on Earth?" Alfred asked dryly.
Bruce didn't respond. He adjusted the display, isolating a blurry image from a low-altitude drone feed near the Tibetan border.
A figure in red. Masked. Cloaked. Leading a column of armed League assassins into the mountains.
Unidentifiable. But familiar.
Painfully so.
The angle. The stance. The silence. The way he moved as though he wasn't part of the world around him—but above it.
It twisted something in Bruce's chest.
"No confirmation yet," he said.
"But you suspect."
"I know, Alfred."
He didn't say the name. He didn't have to.
But in his mind, it rang like thunder:
Jason.
It couldn't be. Not truly. Jason Todd was reckless. Angry. Broken.
This was different.
This was strategy.
Precision.
Purpose.
And that was what scared him.
"He wouldn't have killed Talia," Bruce said, trying to convince himself. "He wouldn't kill in cold blood."
"He's died once," Alfred replied, softly. "That kind of thing changes the definition of cold."
Bruce stood abruptly. Pushed away from the console. Walked toward the training ring—anything to burn the edge off the rising certainty.
But he could still see the image in his mind.
A red helmet, unmarked.
A figure standing atop a fortress.
The League of Assassins behind him. And not a single blade raised in protest.
Elsewhere, in Gotham's Criminal Underworld
They didn't know what had changed. Only that something had.
Six gun-runners had been found strung up in a warehouse in Burnley—alive, barely, but every bone in one man's hand had been broken, one at a time. No signs of forced entry. No security footage.
Three corrupt GCPD officers disappeared mid-shift. No ransom. No demands. Just gone.
And in the Iceberg Lounge, Penguin lit a cigar with trembling fingers, watching grainy footage of a man in red walking across a rooftop in the Narrows.
He moved like someone who wasn't afraid of consequences.
"Red Hood's back," he whispered, barely audible.
"But he's... different."
Back in the Cave
Bruce stood in front of the Robin memorial.
The glass case hadn't changed.
But Bruce had.
He stared at the empty eyes of the mask inside it—green, soft, the kind of mask worn by a boy who still believed in happy endings.
"If it's you," he said, voice low, "then you're not just back."
"You're declaring war."
And that meant one thing.
He would have to follow.