Location: Undisclosed Underground Chamber, Gotham City – beneath the old Kane Warehouse
Beneath Gotham's bones, where candlelight dances along ancient brickwork and silence reigns with eerie reverence, the Court of Owls gathers.
Tonight was not just another gathering. It was an Event.
The Grandmaster of the Court sat at the head of the long, owl-carved obsidian table. Cloaked in ceremonial ivory robes stitched with feathers plucked from extinct breeds, the Elders watched in solemn judgment. The amphitheater beneath their chamber, dubbed The Hollow Nest, stirred with activity — potential assets, each bound in chains laced with nullifying sigils, knelt before masked handlers.
These were not ordinary slaves. They were Metahumans.
Each one had been carefully plucked from the chaos above — survivors of the recent cataclysm that awakened latent powers in 2% of the population. The Court, with its centuries-old surveillance roots and operatives disguised as government agents and social workers, had taken full advantage of the confusion.
A flick of the Grandmaster's fingers. The ritual began.
From the shadows, an Archivist stepped forward and read the profiles of each captive.
A boy who could steal memories by touch.
A girl who sang vibrations that shattered bone.
A twin pair whose shadows moved independent of their bodies.
And then… Subject No. 12.
The chamber fell into complete silence as the Talons themselves appeared, their presence chilling, their blades humming with the essence of cold steel and death.
Subject No. 12 — Amadeo Graves. A gaunt, pale teenager no older than sixteen, his black veins pulsing with necrotic energy. His eyes, entirely white, did not blink, even as the handlers dragged him forward.
"Power classification: Type-Z Omega. Necrokinetic. Can reanimate and control the deceased within a thirty-meter radius. Conscious control improves with familiarity to corpse. Former grave robber.
The Elders murmured.
One of the Talons stepped forward. A relic of the 1800s, his armor was rusted but his movements graceful. With a theatrical flick of his clawed finger, a body was wheeled into the chamber — a recently deceased soldier from one of the failed rebellions against the Court.
The Grandmaster spoke, voice low and ancient: "Show us your worth, boy."
Amadeo's lips curled into a small smile, revealing sharpened teeth. The chains fell away, whether through design or power was unclear. His hands extended, and shadows coiled around the corpse.
The body convulsed.
Cracks echoed like gunfire as the bones reknit. The corpse stood — not mindless, but poised, weapon in hand. Its eyes glowed with dim blue fire.
The Talons stepped forward again — this time, bowing.
For the first time in centuries, the Talons would have a Necromancer among them — a forger of soldiers who would never disobey, never die, and never stop. An army not made from flesh, but from memory and rot.
The Grandmaster turned to the rest of the Council.
"The world above burns in chaos. Heroes grieve. Nations fracture. And what do we do?"
He raised a goblet of wine the color of old blood.
"We recruit."
All around him, the Court of Owls toasted.
As Amadeo watched from the center of the room, a Talon approached him and knelt. Without a word, the corpse he'd reanimated followed suit.
A new song echoed within the Hollow Nest — not of hymns or worship, but of bones clicking into place, of coffins cracking open in distant vaults.
The Choir of the Dead had begun to sing.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Location: The Hollow Nest – Strategic Chamber, Gotham City
Days had passed since Amadeo Graves earned his place among the Talons.
The Court had not been idle.
Within the deepest chamber of The Hollow Nest — deeper still than the arena, beyond the ossuary vaults and tomb libraries — the Grandmaster sat with the Inner Circle, the Elders robed in darker shades of ivory and slate. Ancient chandeliers of bone and brass dangled overhead, their flames eerily still, as if afraid to flicker and disturb the silence that had become their sanctum.
Here, in this sanctum of strategy, the true architects of Gotham's underworld whispered of empire, death, and evolution.
A massive map of the world — carved into obsidian, veins of glowing quartz tracing ley lines and metahuman awakenings — pulsed softly in the center of the table.
The Grandmaster leaned forward, fingers steepled, mask etched with a sigil that hadn't been seen since the founding of Rome.
"We stand on the cusp of a new age," he said quietly, "and while fools in capes mourn their cities, while mortals scramble to understand their new abilities... we shape the battlefield."
One Elder, Lady Myrrha, Keeper of the Gray Feathers, nodded, her voice reedy and thin like papyrus. "The Justice Academy Network. Twelve sites globally. One already operational in Raventon. A response to the metahuman awakening. A fortress hidden in pedagogy."
Another Elder, whose identity was obscured even to his peers, chimed in. "They are raising heroes. Training young minds to resist our influence."
"They are training soldiers," the Grandmaster corrected. "Idealists. Children shaped into weapons for the world above."
He turned his head slightly, and an illusion shimmered to life above the table — a hazy projection of Amadeo Graves, his necrotic aura manifesting like tendrils of smoke coiling into skeletal limbs.
"What we have… is a counterweight. No — a solution."
Lord Vern, the Biological Engineer of the Court, tapped a hidden rune. A series of sigil-covered tomes floated in mid-air, opening simultaneously. Pages flipped until they settled on ancient diagrams, mixed with modern metagene analysis.
"Amadeo's gifts are just the seed," Vern began. "Necrokinetics are rare — Type-Z Omega is rarer still. But he is only sixteen. His neuro-spectral capacity is underdeveloped. His reanimation radius is thirty meters, but this limitation is not magical... it's psychological."
Lady Myrrha leaned forward. "And your proposal?"
"A system of augmentation. Arcano-biological grafts. Sigilic neural expansion. If we interface his nervous system with the remains of past Talons and warriors — preserve their memories as tactical imprints — we can create a living archive of martial perfection. Imagine Amadeo commanding the battlefield with centuries of military knowledge — not as a general, but as a hive-mind conductor."
The Grandmaster's fingers flexed in approval.
"But it must be gradual," he said. "Overexposure would shatter his mind. Begin with one Talon. Someone ancient… yet loyal."
"No one is loyal," murmured a voice from the shadows. It was Archivist Vulk, always watching.
A moment of tense silence passed.
The Grandmaster broke it with a nod. "Then we make him dependent. Feed him our victories. Cloak his enemies in shadow. Control his tether to power — he is a godling in chains, and we hold the key."
He gestured toward the global map again.
"Deploy our agents to infiltrate the Academy's satellite programs. Corrupt a few candidates. Leak some useful 'gifts' — cursed artifacts, perhaps. Let their vaults swell. And when the time comes…"
A new figure appeared beside Amadeo's projection — a tall, shadowy silhouette with glowing sigils orbiting its skull.
"…we send Amadeo into their ranks. As a defector. As a refugee. As a reformed villain seeking purpose."
Whispers erupted from the Elders, some intrigued, some fascinated.
"You would have him walk among them?" Lady Myrrha spat. "What if he turns? What if he sees the light?"
"He won't," the Grandmaster said coldly. "Because we will be the ones to show it to him. Piece by piece, we become his truth."
The lights dimmed. The illusion faded.
The Grandmaster stood.
"Prepare the Trial of Talon's Bone. Let him bond with the memories of Servus Nocturne — the Talon who felled the Triad of Iron without a single word spoken."
"And if he fails?" asked Vern.
The Grandmaster smiled.
"Then we bury him with the rest."
He raised his goblet again.
"To the Choir of the Dead. May its song reach the stars."
All around him, the Court of Owls toasted once more — not with celebration, but with intent.
Far above, where heroes mourned and chaos reigned, the Court had begun to plan.
And deep below, Amadeo Graves sat in meditation… as ancient Talon bones were wheeled into his chamber.
The past would rise again — and it would march at his command.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Blood spread like spider webs across the polished marble floor, streaking across the carved owl sigils as the darkness thickened. A Court of Owls member convulsed midair, impaled through the chest by writhing black tendrils. His mask cracked as he choked on his own blood, limbs twitching as the tendrils slowly retracted.
Silence reigned, broken only by the hum of something living in the shadows.
From the dark void between pillars emerged Superior Spider-Man, no longer a man of metal or flesh, but a silhouette of sentient darkness — a complete humanoid being composed of pure shadow. No seams, no joints — just shifting black matter, textured like oil over void. His eyes glowed faintly, white and inhuman, scanning, calculating.
Only two Court members remained — one Elder, aged and cloaked in ceremonial feathers, and a mid-tier handler now frozen in pure dread. Talons were absent, no guards remained. This was a private sanctum — and now, a sealed tomb.
"Where is the central base?" the voice that spoke wasn't vocal — it vibrated, fractured through the walls of the room, as if whispered from every crack in the stone.
When no answer came, Superior Spider-Man raised one hand — and the darkness split apart.
A swarm of OBLIVION PROTOCOL nanites surged from his palm like a living mist of metallic dust, shimmering faintly with hints of crimson and deep violet. They flowed with terrifying purpose toward the captured Court member, wrapping around his skull like a silken cocoon.
"Do not worry," Superior Spider-Man said. "This is not torture. This is science."
The nanites burrowed into the man's temporal lobes, threading through his cerebral cortex and invading the hippocampus, where memories formed and consolidated. The process was not messy — it was precise. Thousands of microscopic machines dissected his synaptic pathways in real time, harvesting neuroelectric impulses as they fired.
The man screamed, not in pain — the nanites had already silenced his pain receptors — but in terror, as his mind became a holographic projection under Superior Spider-Man's control. On the chamber wall behind them, flickering like a corrupted film, his memories began to play.
— a mountainside facility in Switzerland, buried within an avalanche-sealed bunker.
— genetically altered Talons placed in stasis, hidden from even the Grandmaster.
— a vault beneath the Vatican with relics older than Gotham itself.
— Undisclosed Underground Chamber, Gotham City
Superior Spider-Man observed all of it — his glowing eyes scanning every second.
The swarm of nanites continued their work, spreading through the man's prefrontal cortex, decoding intention, fear, even the sequence of passwords and retina-based security keys embedded into the base's biometric locks.
The process lasted exactly 11.3 seconds.
When it finished, the nanites retracted, folding back into the Superior Spider-Man's palm like smoke slipping into a sealed vial. The Court member's body dropped to the floor, lifeless, not because he had been killed — but because his brain was hollow, stripped down to a perfect neurological shell. A puppet without data.
"I have what I came for," he said flatly.
The room reeked of blood and neurostatic discharge.
The Elder gasped, one trembling hand raised in a futile warding gesture, while the remaining handler collapsed to his knees, clutching the sides of his mask as if sheer desperation could shield his mind.
Superior Spider-Man's gaze shifted — not with emotion, but with algorithmic judgment.
Two anomalies remained.
Two unnecessary variables.
"Resistance is not courage," he said as he raised both hands. "It is statistical noise."
With that, the OBLIVION PROTOCOLnanites surged again — this time not as a swarm, but as jets of liquidized black mist, propelled forward with the precision of surgical injectors. The tendrils didn't impale this time. They infiltrated.
One stream entered the handler through the nasal cavity, threading upward past the olfactory bulb, invading the frontal sinus, before puncturing the cribriform plate — a thin bone separating the brain from the nasal passage. Another slipped through the ear canal, bypassing the tympanic membrane and slithering through the cochlear duct, before coiling upward into the vestibulocochlear nerve, using it like a dark wire straight into the brainstem.
The last stream entered the Elder's mouth, coating the tongue, seeping down the pharynx, then rapidly climbing through the Eustachian tubes and into the inner skull, where they spread like a black bloom.
The results were immediate.
Both bodies locked rigid — tonic phase of seizure.
Then the clonic phase began — violent, uncontrollable spasms as the nanites erased the interior architecture of the skull from within. Neural tissue dissolved. Synaptic junctions disintegrated. The nanites weren't harvesting this time — they were eradicating every trace of cognitive structure, turning living tissue into liquefied slurry in seconds.
A faint whine echoed through the room — the sound of cellular membranes collapsing all at once, a molecular scream muffled by skull and flesh.
Then silence.
The handler collapsed face-first with a sickening wet thud, his mask still intact — but everything beneath had been reduced to a pulpy void. The Elder's eyes rolled back, mouth frozen mid-syllable, before he too fell backward like a felled statue, feathered cloak fluttering uselessly behind him.
Their bodies lay still. No blood pooled. There was no mess.
Because there was nothing left inside to bleed.
"OBLIVION PROTOCOL: Primary Extraction Complete. Data Reconstructed. Subject: GLOBAL OWL NEST COORDINATES – VERIFIED."