The mountain fortress never slept.
Even in the dead of night, torchlight flickered across stone, footsteps echoed through corridors, and unseen eyes followed every movement.
Jason Todd felt every one of them.
He walked the halls with purpose, but measured steps. Never hurried. Never idle. Just enough to appear focused, but not enough to raise alarms.
Because the League was watching now.
They didn't speak openly. They wouldn't dare—not with Talia's protection lingering over him. But Jason saw it.
A pause in conversation when he entered a room.
An extra set of footsteps behind him that vanished when he turned.
The careful way training partners "missed" obvious openings during sparring.
They weren't testing him anymore.
They were hunting certainty.
In the shadows of his quarters, Jason ran a scan over the walls—detecting slight irregularities in the airflow behind a brick. A pinhole mic. Standard League surveillance. Sloppy.
He disabled it quietly, rewired it to replay static from a previous day's training log, and reset it without a trace.
He didn't need them hearing what he was planning.
Because he had begun digging.
The Forbidden Vault
The League kept its secrets deep—beneath the fortress, through locked corridors and sealed archives guarded by old blood oaths and encrypted glyphs. But Jason didn't need keys.
He had math.
He had algorithms.
He had memory.
Late at night, he mapped shift rotations, guard patrol paths, and biometric access layers. He cracked centuries-old lock codes not with brute force, but by pattern recognition and simulated probability collapse.
And when he reached the vault, he found truth.
Records of League activities stretching back centuries. Names erased from history. Missions the world was never meant to know.
And among them: data on Ra's' "resurrection projects."
He learned the truth of others who had returned from the Pit—and how most of them fractured. Became unstable. Dangerous. Disposable.
Jason paused on a page marked only with the glyph for "Weapon Unfinished."
It wasn't about him directly. But it might as well have been.
That night, he sat alone in his chamber, the wind curling against the open balcony. Below, the valley was wrapped in cloud.
He stared at a blank piece of paper.
Slowly, with precise lines, he sketched a symbol.
A helmet. A crimson hood.
A faceless thing — not born of vengeance, but of independence.
I am not your weapon.
He folded the paper and burned it in a candle's flame.
Talia Calls
The next morning, Talia summoned him again.
"I hear the instructors are... uneasy," she said.
Jason gave no reaction. "They should be."
"You've changed," she said. "But they don't know how. And that frightens them."
"Do you fear me too?"
Talia smiled. "I respect the unknown. And I trust that you are still mine."
Jason stepped closer, gaze steady. "No one owns me."
A pause.
Then her voice softened. "Not even yourself, Jason. Not yet. You are still becoming."
Meanwhile, in the Halls
A pair of assassins whispered quietly in the shadows of the training yard.
"He doesn't sleep," one said.
"He doesn't speak unless he must," said the other.
"And when he does... he sounds like he knows how we'll respond before we even do."
They didn't see the small surveillance drone watching them—no larger than a beetle, tucked into a rafter beam above.
Jason's voice played from a remote terminal later that night, repeating their words back to him.
Good. Let them speak. Let them fear.
Closing Image:
Jason stands beneath the stars, high atop the mountain temple, alone.
The wind tugs at his cloak, his silhouette outlined against the moon.
He pulls a small, black case from a stone alcove. Inside: a prototype helmet. Smooth. Unmarked. Red.
He doesn't put it on.
Not yet.
But he stares into it—and sees not the League's weapon.
He sees a man who chooses his own war.