Warning: Massive DC AU, Gore, Dark, Fast Paced, World Building
All of this is a work of fiction, and all characters aside from my own belong to their respective works. Any and all characters and settings are purely imaginative and don't correlate to real-life events.
Enjoy!
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Starline City, a cybertech and advanced science hub, was a city filled with unique landmarks and technology that outdid all nearby cities. It was located in New Jersey, near Gotham City and Blüdhaven, but just far enough from Metropolis, though not far enough to escape the news reports from any of them. The same could be said for Starline City itself.
At the far edges of the city stood a large mansion, closed off and well protected from prying eyes.
The place was known, respected, and feared by all. It was formerly the home of Emma Smith, a crude businesswoman with a cold, manipulative mind. The city and its people referred to her by her unofficial title when she wasn't present: the Queen of Tomorrow. She had the power to control the government; they were in her pocket because of her inventions and contracts. All that power was left to her daughter and, for a time, the maid.
Emma Smith ruled not just the government of the United States but the world and its politics. All the contracts remained within her daughter's possession, including control over the company at large. If Jane wanted to, she could instill martial law and make Starline City a better place, but that wasn't her style. She tended to restrict herself in that regard, playing by regulation and law in her civilian life but having no plans for inhibition in her vigilante role.
There wasn't any in-depth reason; on the surface, it was just that it wasn't fun and felt like a boring way of doing things. She didn't want her life to be filled with paperwork and orders. She wanted chaos, blood, and violence. She couldn't stand by and do nothing, even if that "nothing" meant making a change through her financial and political power.
Inside the large mansion with a beaming sun above, Jane sat in deep thought. The TV downstairs was on, and her enhanced senses picked up the sound loud and clear. Even as she planned to improve herself after feeling vulnerable in her last encounter with Hubert, her body had evolved to the point of perfect multitasking.
The TV reporters were recounting Jane's adventures from a few hours earlier. Their tone was filled with disgust; they reported that the number of deaths Jane had caused was in the hundreds. They described her as a murderous, lunatic criminal trying to take over the city while hiding her actions under the guise of a "hero." Their voices dripped with sarcasm at the word "hero," even showing a video of her at the bank and framing her as the instigator of the robbery.
Meanwhile, the city kept moving and thriving with its own ecosystem, indifferent to Jane's respite. Dirty, grey rats roamed the alleys and sewers, digging through trash for food. A small shop owner was neck-deep in debt, terrified that a loan shark would burst through his door and take his organs as payment.
Inside a middle-class three story apartment complex, a young boy was coughing up blood into his small, cold, trembling hands after his father had beaten him to instill his daily dose of "discipline." He had only a few hours to live at most due to his ruptured organs, while his clueless father was out committing crimes for the Moonlight Gang, and his mother was having an affair with the mailman in her bedroom.
While the bed rocked, its rhythm matched the undisciplined footsteps of her clueless husband. His boss was using the day to seize empty territories and take over drug routes to expand her influence and investments.
Crystal, the boss of the Moonlight gang, had complete confidence in her survival and kept a close eye on any Heretic activity as she planned the next steps for her empire.
There was something unnatural about her aura. She had the face and body of a supermodel and was recognized by a few, but underneath that was an immortal, calculating mind. The world didn't know why she had stopped modeling.
Maybe it was because she had met an old lady, the former leader of the Moonlight gang, who suspiciously dropped dead before her eyes, scaring her into a new career.
Strangely enough, the old lady's gang began following Crystal's orders exactly, almost as if she carried the old lady's spirit inside her.
While Crystal focused on growing her empire with ruthless efficiency in the Eddie district, a hero was making his way to the city to catch and unmask Heretic. His bat symbol on his chest marked his iconic identity as Batman.
He drove the Batmobile to Starline City and had reviewed everything about the case prior, everything about it deeply unsettled him. He had a grim expression and furrow brows through the drive.
At a police station on the corner of Brew 91 Street, a righteous and straight-laced detective was filling out reports, his mind haunted by the gruesome scenes of Heretic's murders.
Both of righteous individuals wanted Heretic brought to justice; in their eyes, all they saw was senseless murder and violence.
Amid the hero and detective's silent judgment, Jane focused on advancing her Demon Method to its fullest potential. She planned to unlock a new form of power, but realistically, it would take two weeks to fully develop. Even with her instant learning capabilities, her progression, though fast, relied heavily on time and diligence.
A little while later in her planning, Stella knocked on the door and entered, her face filled with solemn worry. Her heart had dropped earlier when she immediately lost contact with Jane, but she felt relief when she found her back home unharmed at the doorstep, though half naked.
"What happened?" Stella asked. She let her mistress rest for a time, and when she felt it was right to ask, she did. She wanted to know the events that had transpired earlier during her last fight with Hubert and his gang. She gleaned bits of details from her mistress but nothing substantial related to her half-naked state.
Jane let Stella's presence wash over her. The emotions that Stella felt were ignored by Jane as if invisible to her, such as the faint worried breath, racing heart, and solemn expression, all of which threatened to bring out her maternal instincts to ground Jane in order to protect her.
Stella knew that grounding an adult was foolish, especially one with a strong and stubborn spirit like her mother.
Jane didn't want to explain events in full. It was embarrassing, to say the least. All that talk about not dying seemed incredibly far-fetched. She had been countered by her own arrogance and paid the price with a deadly attack. Though healed from the injuries by her regeneration, it severely wounded her pride.
"Nothing serious, I swear." Jane paused for a split second and thought up an excuse. "My clothes caught fire, and I had to ditch them."
"Your clothes? Be honest with me. What happened?" Stella huffed, crossing her arms with a stern look.
"Fine." Jane leaned back against her chair, ignoring the papers on her desk that outlined a future plan of hers. She recounted the bitter event that hurt her pride from beginning to end. Even while her pride stung, Stella's sternness hurt more. Stella's face changed from stern to worried.
Without saying a word, she hugged Jane, who was surprised by the suddenness but accepted it without opposition.
"I'm okay," she reassured her, patting her back softly and feeling a bit awkward.
"I just… Please don't ever lie to me again. Please." Stella rasped, her voice cracking as she felt cold tears pass down her cheeks and onto Jane's shoulders.
Ignoring the cold sensation on her shoulders, Jane thought about what she was going to eat today. The entire atmosphere was completely lost on her, but it didn't stop her from patting Stella's back to reassure her, and she didn't find it a bother whatsoever.
While awkward, it didn't make it unpleasant for her. When Stella left the room, Jane went back to her plans resting on her desk. Looking over the map and a stack of drawings and text, she felt an idea form in her head.
"That could work." Jane smiled as she began to rewrite her plans from the start with a pen in hand, an idea slowly forming and solidifying into a proper existence.
A few hours had passed since Jane redesigned her plans, and the sun had set while the moon hung high.
The TV in the living room was faintly reporting a shadowy figure in Starline City taking down criminals left and right. One clip showed a person flying through the night sky. Reporters concluded it was Batman and believed he was on the prowl to take down Heretic. They made theories that she was an escaped mental patient from Arkham Asylum who had migrated to Starline City to cause havoc, and Batman was here to take her back.
Jane sat inside a training room, hooked up to orange wires attached to vehicle batteries, with a disapproving Stella in the background watching.
"This utter madness," Stella stated, shaking her head at Jane. Her heart was beating a mile a minute, and her palms were covered in sweat.
"Are you sure you won't die?" Stella asked, holding a remote in her hand, her thumb brushing against the green button, unsure of Jane's fate. The remote felt as heavy as a gun pointed at someone's head.
"Promise, mate," Jane winked with a playful smile, not noticing the internal conflict in Stella, but her actions brought her some comfort against the uncertainty dwelling within.
"Press it. I'm ready." Jane closed her eyes and sat cross-legged on a black rubber mat.
Electrical energy charged from the orange wires taped to her and that originated from the car batteries encircling her. The same batteries she had looted from her mother's collection of luxurious vehicles in the staggering, large garage.
The smell of burnt pork and chlorine settled subtly into the room. Blue sparks danced across her burning, fried skin, the muscles underneath twitching against her will. Her nervous system reacted to the flow instinctively as the electricity increased in magnitude every second.
The bioelectricity was growing, developing, and being unnaturally cultivated into a technique that should've taken weeks to complete. Her skin, muscles, bones, and nerves healed against every electrical burn, fighting back against the damage and keeping it to a minimum at all times.
Stella cringed, her teeth clenched and her face showing worry and empathy. Jane was unfazed and continued her work, eyes closed and mind focused. She managed the blue currents of energy within her spine, nerves, and neurons.
She expelled it outward and manipulated it like origami. They transformed into vibrant red constructs forming around her face, arms, and legs. She opened her eyes and felt the intense voltage surging through her body like caffeine.
She saw the world moving in slow motion but sensed danger nearby, as if the Grim Reaper had his scythe at her neck. She imagined the blade with an ominous glint reflecting the moonlight that penetrated the window of the training room. While a dark looming figure stood behind her, fully concealed by shadow making its features undetectable.
She scanned the area, her senses catching the slow cell movement of Stella and the shifting air around her, then extending beyond her 30-meter sensory limit to the whole mansion, but she couldn't find anything out of place. Learning her lesson from the previous encounter with Hubert, when he caged her with his air, and feeling something similar this time, she used her precognition and saw that thirty seconds from now her head would explode.
Her breath halted for a second, and her heart was racing a mile a minute, but she focused inward to find the problem. Using her senses to penetrate her own flesh, she saw that her brain was being overcharged with red electricity, increasing by the second. She immediately deactivated her technique; the constructs around her arms, legs, and mouth vanished, and the energy within her brain quieted down.
However, there were serious burns around her brain as a result, but they immediately healed afterward. Due to Jane forcing her progression with the Demon Method and unlocking a new technique called Divine Ogre Requiem, it came with the unfortunate side effect of damaging and overloading the brain with electricity, putting it at risk of exploding. She gauged the time she could use the ability without any problems to be five seconds at most, and no more.
If she exceeded that time limit, her brain would turn to ash immediately. Destroying her brain bypassed her regeneration, and the same applied if she was decapitated resulting in her fatal demise. She also analyzed the time it would take to master Divine Ogre Requiem and concluded it would take at least five or six days for full mastery instead of two weeks.
When she opened her eyes, she found the batteries completely drained and the wires on the ground burned by bioelectricity. Stella hadn't caught Jane's transformation but saw that her long sleeves were burned off, along with the boots on her feet. Jane leaned back in her seated position and saw that Stella was teary-eyed.
Jane ignored it and moved on to the next point of discussion.
"I'm glad you're okay." Stella was thankful for Jane's safety.
"Hm?" Jane tilted her head and shrugged it off.
"Change of plans, I'm not going out tonight," Jane said, watching as she danced the red electricity around her fingers, slowly mastering it with each subtle manifestation.
"Yes, wonderful, dinner then?" Stella, relieved, offered her mistress a meal.
Jane nodded and made her way to the bathroom to get washed and changed, her mind lingering on her mother's smile and Stella's teary eyes.
Jane's change of plans lifted the heavy stress from Stella's shoulders. She hummed her way to the kitchen, but not before cleaning up the training room of her mistress' "training equipment" and throwing it away. She would, of course, have to buy replacements and have someone install new batteries in the vehicles in the garage, but that was for a later date.
Meanwhile, outside the Smith residence, inside a small apartment complex near a café called Brig's Best, a woman with silver hair was walking down a flight of stairs into a room with four cracked walls and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.
She walked up to a woman tied to a brown wooden chair, tears rolling down her face and messing up her black mascara. She had haggard brown hair and was shivering not from the cold but from trepidation.
Crystal sang a tune, her scissors opening and closing in one hand while the other held the woman's chin, forcing her to face her torturer.
"Hold out your tongue~
It needs to be cut~
For it brought lies to my ears~
So let's cut off the member~
So the body won't go to hell~"
She rhymed chillingly, her eyes full of glee and her mind full of grotesque mutilation.
All that was heard were muffled screams behind two large men wearing black suits in front of a doorway that led to the apartment's basement. They didn't move or shiver at their boss's cruelty and, in fact, had small smirks on their faces.
With Jane taking a break, the city and its people didn't. Rats still roamed, searching for food. A young boy died from his father's beating, and a nearby shopkeeper was harvested for his organs, losing his life as well. Batman roamed the city, searching for evidence and fighting crime.
Meanwhile, the straight-laced detective died after getting shot in the head by his corrupt partner, who was discovered by his partner for taking bribes and was about to report it, but failed. The city, like its people, was indifferent to the suffering of others.