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Dad Lore Chapter 10 - Blindsided
🕑 Added 2025-05-31 19:22:07 +0000 UTC[An unmarked island, the Northern Sea]
The aura that permeated the dark room was stifling and was only slightly abated by the two candlesticks that stood at the far end and casted down an orange glow that was slowly absorbed into the darkness that the Demon Head resided.
“Magic.” The aged voice of Ra’s al Ghul sounded out, making the two kneeling messengers shiver to their spine. “True. It will make a bit of a complication when facing off against him if he is backed by magic.”
“I believe my daughter, the mercenary, and Lady Shiva are enough for the Assassin, his bespoken legend notwithal.” He said to himself. “As for this group of likely sorcerers after them, maybe we can use them after all.”
The two kneeling messengers bowed even lower when they felt Ra’s gaze on them. “You will send a message to a certain warlock: The Demon intends to collect on his favor.”
The messenger on the left bowed even lower and silently retreated.
“The Bat has been very welcoming on the trail we’ve left him so far: lead him to the barn.” A second later and the other messenger was gone.
“The Bat, the Assassin, a lost child, my hunters, dark agents; I await the spectacle you will all play out for me.”
The candles flickered for a split second before they were snuffed out, leaving the Demon to mire in the foreboding darkness of his abode.
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.......
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As the days went by, Raven started feeling more anxious, something she was quick to tell Taro of, and the only inkling she had to why she was feeling this way was because of the ritual. The same ritual she was sure had done something to her, the very same thing she couldn’t find no matter how much she spent scouring every inch of her mind.
She grew increasingly anxious with every passing day they spent traveling that she could barely stay focused for more than a few hours at a time. And that wasn’t the worst of it all.
The thing that almost sent her spiralling? She was losing her nightmares.
“I have never lost a nightmare in a sleep, or fail to remember one after waking up. Never. Not since that day.” She said to Taro, projecting enough seriousness into her words that it almost broke her nonchalant facade.
The nightmares were a staple part of the cursed existence that was her life that suddenly starting to lose them for no particular reason rattled her something fierce.
“We’ll keep moving. Only stopping if we have to.” As if Raven’s warranted hysteria wasn’t enough problems on its own, Taro became increasingly certain that the League of Assassins were after them.
Hiding a micro mic inside the pancake staged scene had been the right choice. And it looked like even the Bat was on his trail.
How could a night gone wrong lead to all this?
They were slowly being edged into a corner and while their increasingly bad situation might seem like a series of bad coincidences, Taro would almost bet his moustache that someone was watching, and most likely influencing, this growing circle of conflict. And it wasn’t the outer-dimensional demon.
Raven’s anxiousness and the fact that the misdirecting trail he left behind to track their followers was quickly being stepped on. Something was correcting their path.
“What if we try to directly portal to their front gate?”
Raven thought for a moment and slowly shook her head. “There’s no guarantee that I can take us directly there. Somewhere close to it, maybe?”
“But right now, I don’t know why, but I feel like doing that would be a very bad move on my part.” Her mental defences were slowly becoming wobbly that she had to take more time than usual to fix them. “I think that using any powerful or particularly draining spell will put us at more risk.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it then. Driving all the way it is.”
She scrunched her brows at the thought of the distance they would have to travel, until an idea popped up in her head. “Why don’t we use a plane? Between you and me, we can sneak into the airport and on a plane without being discovered.”
Sadly the older man shook his head. “As long as we don’t know how they are keeping on our trail, getting on a plane is the worst thing to do.”
It took all of a second for the reason to come to Raven. “If they track us mid-flight, all they would have to do is find out where we’ll land and wait out an ambush.”
“Precisely.”
“I can throw up an anti-scrying spell, you know? In case they are tracking us with magical means, which I’m sure they are.”
Taro shot her a contemplating look to which she responded by summoning a book after reading a thoughtful question hovering in the outer shell of his mind.
“It won’t last for long. An hour or two, maybe three. I’ll have to do it multiple times a day but there’s a problem with doing it too frequently as they might start having an easier time reading through it the more I put it up.”
“We can lose them a far distance within an hour or two. Depends on when and how we do it.” He replied after thinking about it for a few seconds.
“That is if it works.” Raven couldn’t help but said, letting her negativity peek through.
“We lose nothing if it doesn’t work. And we gain a lot of time if it does.”
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........
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[Batman POV]
The Batman’s face was set in a frozen cold impassive expression as he rode the Batwing on autopilot.
His focus was completely taken by the pictures of very specific individuals that almost made a frown creep into his lips.
Deathstroke, Talia and Lady Shiva. Either one of them was enough to draw close most of his attention. The three of them working together? Now that was enough reason for him to worry.
The main question however remained: Who were they looking for?
“So you think those dark cultists are connected to whoever those three are hunting for?” Dick Grayson, the Nightwing, Batman and Bruce Wayne’s first son, asked as he leaned on the chair his mentor and father sat on.
“Batgirl and I found a few of them searching out the den of these Acolytes. What we got from there was what led us to that house.”
“Ah! The one that made you think that someone was already following the trail you just found.” He clicked his fingers, voice too jovial as if he was teasing the Batman.
“I wasn’t wrong.” Came the brisk reply.
“But you wish you were, don’t you?” Dick quipped back, his amusement slowly bleeding away as he stared at the picture of those three in particular.
Batman and the whole of the Dark Knight Family of Gotham had a lot of memorable history with each of them.
The easiest, and no less deadly, to deal with was Talia, and that was easily resolved by siccing Batman on her and letting them have another of their famous bouts of intense flirting, one that was mostly accompanied, or threatened by, sharp objects and near fatal wounds.
As for Deathstroke, that one was a bit more complicated but not to the point that Nightwing couldn’t contain. Keeping up with his estranged and unwanted uncle (as the man had once called himself after giving a more younger teenage Nightwing – then Robin – the worst beating of his lifetime. Batman had been furious) was a chore he never looked forward to.
The elephant in the group was the most problematic to deal with. Sandra Wu-San, or as she was more commonly known, Lady Shiba, was a foe that not even Nightwing, the first progeny of Batman, had a good chance of contending against, talk less of winning. And Dick wasn’t embarrassed to admit that she genuinely scared him. One just needs to fight with her daughter, his sister, for the fear factor to automatically set it.
A notification came from the interface at that moment.
[Incoming Call]
Batman accepted the call and an anxious voice battered the intercoms of the Batwing.
“I just heard from Alfred that you are going after Deathstroke, Talia, and that damned woman on your lonesome. What are you thinking? You couldn’t wait for one—”
“I am not alone, Oracle.” Batman calmly interjected Barbara’s frantic rant.
“Huh? What do you...”
“Sup, Babs.” Dick spoke out, cutting short the words Barbara was going to say and making her go silent for bit before they heard the loud relieved sigh she expunged from her lungs.
“Oh thank goodness you’re there, Dick.” Her breathing finally relaxed. “Do you know how worried Cass was when she heard you went alone? You almost made her cry! Dammit, Bruce!”
“...” Bruce opened his mouth to speak, mostly to give a reasonable and logical explanation, but he held himself.
“I will apologize when I get back.” He ended up saying. His choice of words had Dick smiling behind him. Only he and Alfred knew just how far Bruce had come in learning to care about how those under him, his children, felt.
He was still as rough as a sawblade around his edges, but it was a lot more manageable than what Dick was used to growing up.
“Don’t let him off that easily, Babs. If I didn’t sneak into the Batwing before he did, he would have left without telling me.”
Bruce levelled him his patented Batman Glare™ but he just grinned in return. Unfortunately for Bruce, Dick’s particular rebellious phase had made him immune to a lot of things Bruce did. He doubt any of his younger siblings could weather the Bat Glare as casually as he did.
They heard Barbara groan into something due to how her voice became muffled.
“Honestly, I can’t with you sometimes.” She finally said. “I’ll be in seat in a few minutes. Let me go and console Cass and assure her that you’ll be fine with Dick with you.”
The call ended with Dick chuckling behind Bruce who actually looked conflicted and unsure of what to do for a moment before he shook his head and refocused himself.
“What is it?” He asked, a tad bit harsher than he wanted to sound. In his defence, Dick’s snickering was becoming an irritating nuisance.
“Nothing. Might want to bring back a souvenir to appease her. An ornamental kunai or something like that. Trust me, she loves them.”
Bruce’s only reply was a grunt but that was enough to let Dick know that his words were taken under serious consideration.
“So back to this particular death squad... nah, not good enough.” Dick started as he took a seat besides Bruce. “You are rushing in blind, that is so unlike you, but not like I can’t understand what you are thinking. Anything that the League of Assassins have in common with a coven of fanatically deranged dark magic users, and even have Ra’s casually send out those three at once, does not bode well for Gotham. And isn’t that saying something?”
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..........
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On Taro and Raven's side, they were already two-thirds of the way through their journey and with every hour they drove, the pit in Raven’s stomach widened.
It got so bad that she had to slip into astral projection a couple of times because her physical body was just that uncomfortable.
“We can keep going for the next few hours or stop now, rest for a few hours, and spend the next twelve hours on the road.”
Raven levitated on her seat, just letting her magic flow at this point, doing everything she could to centre herself and her mind. It had been Taro’s idea for her to slip into her natural habitat.
“We’ll be putting ourselves at great risk if we rest now.” She pointed out. Wanting to do anything else but stop.
Taro sympathized with her, but going any further at full throttle would batter up their already tired bodies.
“We will be at a disadvantage if we push ourselves any more than we already have when they finally catch up to us.”
Raven bit the inside of her jaw all the while her face remained impassive. “We have to, don’t we?”
“Better be prepared than blindsided.”
“You’re the master assassin. Whatever you say.” She relented. Agreeing that she didn’t know better. Since teleportation was out of the way, they had no choice but to slow down and centre themselves. Just like Taro always says.
“There are a few motels thirty minutes from here. We’ll stay there for a few hours and leave after midnight.”
The sun was already taking its daily dip in the horizon when they arrived at the small town tucked away in the middle of nowhere.
For once Raven was glad that their pit stop was a quiet scant town with only a few hundred people.
Taro quickly found them a room at a motel that was uphill at the edge of the town.
“Good eye line.” Was his short reply at her silent question of why he had chosen the most awkwardly located motel.
They quickly relocated to the single room he paid for and Raven wasted no time making a beeline for the shower for a much needed bath. She came out a few minutes after she had gone in and sat cross-legged on the bed and swiftly slipped into a meditative trance.
She hovered slightly above the bed as a dark purple glow entranced about her. Three magic tomes appeared with their pages opened and started rotating around her.
Taro watched all this from the wooden chair he sat on. Even after all this while, Raven’s expression of magic fascinated him every time he saw it. Maybe because it was a magic unique to her alone.
Unlike other sorcerers who tapped from the same well of magic and used it in different ways, Raven’s source of magic and her expression of it was something only she had access to.
He stood up from the chair and walked towards the closed window, hiding his body behind the wall as he subtly peeked outside.
He maintained his vigil religiously for an hour while Raven kept up with her meditation, watching the whole town and keeping tabs on the houses people rushed to as well as the number of people that went into each house.
It was in his dedicated vigilance that made him frown as soon as he noticed something weird.
There were three buildings around the motel he and Raven were staying at, all of which were two bedrooms in accommodation. And yet he had counted a total of twelve people that walked into the three buildings and only two came out. Both of whom were currently making their way to the motel.
He looked at his watch and sighed. Raven had only rested for a little over an hour and half. Hopefully she’ll be able to sleep in the car.
He walked towards her and stood at the edge of the bed. Raven’s eyes opened, both glowing white with a haze of purple, and the magic glow around her faded away and she landed softly on the bed.
She immediately understood when she saw the look on Taro’s face. It was time to leave.
She did not utter a word of complaint. She dutifully sent her tome away and summoned her dark cloak to cover her body.
“Are they assassins?”
“No. Probably acolytes.” He held up a box cutter and gestured for Raven to follow. “One is at the back and the other is at the front. Ten more in the buildings surrounding the motel. We go through the back and pass by the building by the left. It will give us a better chance of escaping if they make us out.”
He always made sure to explain the reasoning behind his actions to Raven every time he made one, not just so she could understand better and synergize well with him, but also to teach her how to use her calm mind.
They had hardly crossed the door when Taro’s eyes contracted into thin pricks and Raven’s widened a tad bit.
The entire motel exploded in a gale of force and magic that instantly sent the town ahead into abject chaos.
The wave of dust and fire were blown away to reveal the unscathed form of Raven and Taro under the protection of a barrier Raven had put up the instant she sensed the violent build-up of magic around the motel.
“The others are attacking already.” She informed Taro just before she put down the barrier.
“Don’t stray too far or too near. Keep them at the edge of your range.”
A burst of air kicked up the dust around Raven only for her to realize that Taro was already gone, and the fact that the magic that was trickling up at the back of the now-destroyed motel suddenly disappeared told her exactly what just happened.
She couldn’t help but notice something strange about this group of people as she levitated. They were of the dark circle of magic, that she was sure of, but they lacked the usual stench and the repulsive feeling she got from the acolytes serving under Trigon.
“They are not acolytes.” She heard Taro say from below her as he kicked one of them and sent him flying over a dozen feet.
She sent off a few indiscriminate hexbolts and flew back to the ground. The plan was to escape, not fight them off, she reminded herself.
She landed beside Taro and staggered on her first step. Huh? She blinked confusedly and tried to take another step only to realize that her body felt numb.
Taro who was beside her instantly noticed when the air became imperceptibly denser.
“The League of Assassins.” He grumbled, greatly irritated, even as he started feeling the numbness creeping up his nerves.
He picked up Raven who was already paralyzed and passed out and tried to escape only for him to pause when he saw a missile blasting his way.
His legs were already heavy while the missile drew nearer until it entered casualty range and Taro could see exactly when a bullet hit the missile, but instead of the explosion of fire and force he expected, what bathed the full area was a green mist.
He was instantly paralyzed the moment the green mist touched his body, but he kept struggling. Even going as far as to force his system to start expunging whatever it was that had entered his body.
“Seriously, is he still awake? A herd of elephants would have been lights out in the first two seconds.” He heard someone say, a familiar voice. But it was the voice that replied that made him accept the deep slumber that clawed at it.
“Knock him out and tie him up, Slade. The poison is to be administered to him every sixty minutes. Talia will take care of the last surviving sorcerers. We leave immediately. Ra’s awaits this one’s return.”
Taro’s last thought came at the end of Lady Shiva’s words after his eyes finally couldn’t hold themselves apart.
Shit.
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Who invited Batman?
