Author's Note:
After I don't know how long, I am back to writing this story.
I am watching the third season of Young Justice. I find it strange that one of Vandal Savage's daughters was considered the Goddess Ishtar.
To avoid problems, we can say that in this world, Savage's daughter was a female warrior so powerful that she was nicknamed Ishtar, who is a Goddess of War.
XXX
Story Arc: Wandering the World
Episode 1: The Goddess with the Punch Card (III)
Chapter 3: A sadistic and bipolar woman
Plot: Venus decides to make one last body before finishing the day's work, and she takes certain liberties to experiment and have fun at others' expense.
XXX
POV Narrator
Late at night, the sky over Indonesia was an expanse of black velvet, broken only by the silvery reflection of the ocean that stretched hundreds of kilometers from the coast of Jakarta.
Venus was floating in the void, suspended at the altitude of the clouds that drifted past her like wisps of white smoke. She sat with her legs crossed, floating in perfect balance as if she were sitting on the invisible floor of her living room.
"This is the last job for today, after which I can go back to the Temple," Venus murmured, lowering her eyelids and casting her bored gaze down at a tiny island lost among the dark waves.
The Goddess was able to be so efficient in her work shifts thanks to Revelation: an ability that acted as an absolute sixth sense, guiding her infallibly toward her targets. In short, Venus possessed an internal compass tuned to trouble; her divine faculties allowed her to receive sudden visions, flashes of the future that showed her a general picture of what was about to happen.
With the blank and resigned expression of a supermarket cashier forced to scan an old lady's endless groceries, the goddess with the long twintails raised her right hand. She closed her fingers, leaving her index finger and thumb taut, forming an imaginary gun that she aimed straight at the atoll below.
"It would be so easy... Just one shot and all my work for tonight will be over," Venus said to herself.
An inch from the tip of her fingers, the air vibrated, distorting from the sudden concentration of power. A sphere of purple energy ignited in the dark, sparkling with unstable discharges capable of triggering a lethal cataclysm. The purplish light illuminated her face, casting sharp shadows on her features.
"But easy does not mean right," Venus then declared, extinguishing the sphere with a blink of her eyes and mimicking the gesture of tucking the invisible gun into an invisible holster at her side.
"I have an idiot to kick if he doesn't cook a good enough meal for me, a little angel to spoon-feed under the covers, and beautiful girls to dream about," the Goddess commented. She straightened her legs and stretched her arms upward, letting a long yawn loosen her muscles that had grown numb from the high-altitude air.
'I hope I can dream of something beautiful tonight... Or at least that I can relive the happy memories of my mothers. A day at the hot springs with Raiden Mei, a walk through the streets of Uruk with Gudako and Mash, or maybe a date with Artoria in a nice little place in Fuyuki,' Venus thought, while a mischievous and wicked smile curved the corner of her mouth at the mere thought of the memory fragments that flowed through her mind every time she closed her eyes.
Kiana Kaslana's memories were a burning tangle of pure pain and immense love, where the brightest and warmest images remained inextricably linked to two girls in particular.
Ishtar's memories, on the other hand, were a far more chaotic labyrinth. Due to her divine nature, fragmented first as a Divine Spirit and then as a Pseudo-Servant, Ishtar had been torn from the Throne of Heroes and poured into the world an uncountable number of times. That chain of summons had generated a chronological paradox that was almost impossible to decipher; yet, the memories that shone with the most clarity and warmth always concerned a young Demi-Servant girl and the Last Master of Chaldea.
Ishtar, after all, had used Rin Tohsaka's body as her default vessel, ending up transforming the girl into a true subroutine of her own divine essence; a process that had inevitably woven their memories into a single, indissoluble bond.
Yet, for some mysterious reason that Venus still could not understand, the memories that visited her in her dreams did not belong to the Rin Tohsaka of a single timeline, but rather to a constellation of Rins from different universes.
The images flowed behind her eyelids like crazed slides: there was the Rin tragically relegated to the friendzone by Shirou for the rest of her days; there was the solitary, steel-willed Rin who had managed to save Sakura on her own, ending up weaving a complex history with Medusa; there was the academic and competitive Rin, who over time became Luvia's best friend and rival; the Rin who, against all logic, had summoned Artoria, ending up developing a colossal crush on the King of Knights; and, finally, the Rin trapped in Shirou's chaotic, immense, and almost unmanageable harem.
'I have to be damn careful around people with red hair, whether they are women or men... They are the weak point of every single string that makes up my soul. Murata Himeko, Gudako Fujimaru, Shirou Emiya... You have no idea what kind of devastating influence you have exerted on Kiana, Ishtar, and Rin,' Venus thought.
Her face, usually so detached and ironic, contorted into a grim and thoughtful expression, weighed down by the burden of three different existences pressing for space in her head.
Suddenly, the goddess with the twintails shook her head violently. Her long white pigtails whipped the night air with a sharp hiss, as she tried to physically drive away those intrusive thoughts before they could distract her from the mission.
"I definitely need to give EMIYA more kicks in the ass. After all, when all is said and done, he is nothing more than a grown-up and slightly less idiotic Shirou... But he is still an idiot who knows how to cook damn well! And he has such an obnoxiously cute smile that it makes me want to strangle him," Venus growled through her teeth.
As she uttered those words, her body temperature spiked out of frustration and the tips of her long pigtails caught fire, sizzling in the night air with small orange sparks.
"He is my dog! Stupid and adorable, fine, but still a dog! I am his mistress, the whole world is my personal backyard, and anyone who dares ruin what is mine will be harshly punished!" Venus declared at the top of her lungs.
At that point, her twintails literally burst into flames, turning into two crackling torches that lit up the surrounding void like day, while her more aggressive and tsundere side completely took over.
The word "stable" was definitely not the most suitable to describe Venus. When she lost herself too deeply in the memories inherited from her mothers, her psyche suffered an emotional short circuit that led her to react in the most unpredictable and chaotic ways possible.
Without adding anything else, Venus leaned forward. Her body cut through the air and dove into a high-speed plunge toward the island below, leaving behind a trail of heat and flames that ripped through the darkness of the night like a meteor.
XXX
Skimming the surface of the ocean, almost touching the water's edge with the tips of her bare feet, Venus made a swift gesture with her thumb, as if she were flicking an invisible lighter. Instantly, unnatural flames that defied every law of physics flared up directly upon the sea, fueled by her divine power instead of oxygen.
The goddess hurtled at high speed around the perimeter of the island, dragging that burning trail behind her. Once the perfect circle was complete, the barrier of fire sealed off the entire atoll, crushing any maritime escape route in its infancy.
"This is becoming my signature... the Ring of Flames," Venus commented, making an upward leap and stopping mid-air, her arms firmly crossed beneath her chest.
'Theatrical, it erases any doubt about my arrival and, above all, traps anyone who doesn't know how to fly,' the goddess with the twintails thought to herself, admiring her own geometric handiwork from above and calculating the tactical advantages of that showy move.
Strangely, after venting her energy by setting the water on fire, Venus seemed to have regained some emotional stability. Her mind was finally anchored to the objective reality of the mission, free from the tangle of memories that crowded her head; even her long pigtails had stopped burning, returning to normal.
She lifted her gaze toward the celestial vault, noticing the round silhouette of the full moon shining in a completely cloudless night.
'Right now, I really don't want an audience from above,' Venus reflected, mindful of the satellite images that the members of the Justice League had shown her some time ago to make her understand how the entire world was keeping an eye on her.
Without her making any visible movement, the atmospheric pressure plummeted. The wind suddenly changed direction, howling through the island's palm groves and dragging with it a thick blanket of dark clouds that, within a few moments, would completely shield the area from any prying eyes or orbiting satellites.
With the protected sky secured, the goddess lowered her gaze again, focusing her divine eyes on a specific panoramic point of the island.
"The heads of the drug cartels certainly indulge themselves in nice things," Venus commented in a low voice.
She began to float slowly toward the island's private pier, where about a dozen worn-out old fishing boats rocked, moored next to a huge, lavish, white luxury yacht.
On the wood and concrete dock, dozens of men were moving. They wore fishermen's clothes or grease-stained overalls, but at that moment, they were running from one side to another like headless chickens, clearly shocked and terrified by the ring of purple flames that was devouring the sea around them.
Suddenly, one of them looked up, catching the suspended figure of the girl. His eyes widened, he pointed at Venus with a trembling finger, and let out a coarse shout to warn his companions.
The effect was immediate: the "chickens" stopped running aimlessly and regained a semblance of criminal discipline. Some pulled out walkie-talkies, screaming hysterical orders into the microphone, while the majority pounced on wooden crates and oilcloth bags hidden on board, flinging them open to pull out assault rifles and handguns.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
The darkness of the night was pierced by the flashes of gunfire from the barrels of the weapons. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of bullets hissed through the air, hurtling in Venus's direction. Most of the shots missed completely, thanks to the lethal combination of pitch darkness, whipping wind, high distance, and the Goddess's slender frame; after all, those improvised marksmen were anything but professionals.
Those very few bullets that managed to intercept her trajectory, however, did not even touch her. They shattered with an electrical crackle against an electromagnetic barrier: an invisible bubble of energy that the Goddess kept constantly active around her body. The lead bullets deformed upon impact, instantly losing momentum and plummeting into the ocean below like tiny stones.
'If I ever had the slightest doubt that I had made a hasty judgment, well, now I've just received my confirmation,' Venus thought with absolute calm. By now, she was mathematically certain that those fake fishermen possessed far more automatic weapons than fishing rods.
At that exact instant, a beam of blinding light pierced the dark: someone on the pier had managed to turn on a powerful spotlight, framing Venus in full view. Immediately after, a violent metallic clank was heard. Someone had just fired... a harpoon?
The massive steel dart, a weapon designed to bring down whales, hurtled through the void, literally cutting the night air in two. Against a large cetacean or a normal human being, it would have been a lethal blow, capable of piercing flesh and bone, but against a deity...
Venus extended her right hand and stopped the harpoon mid-air, catching it by its steel shaft with disarming ease. She slowly brought it closer to her face to examine it under the light of the spotlight.
'A harpoon, seriously? What do they think, that I'm a white whale or that a stainless steel alloy is my weak point?' the girl thought. An amused smirk curved her lips, similar to that of a lion watching the desperate efforts of a blind mouse.
Wielding the massive iron dart as if it were a magic wand as light as a feather, Venus made a wide circular movement with her arm.
Instantly, the ocean responded to the Goddess's will. A mass of dark water rose from the seabed, turning into a violent wave that crashed like a sledgehammer against the dock. The fishing boats were brutally shaken, while dozens of men were overwhelmed by the liquid wall, ending up being thrown straight into the sea or rolling onto the concrete, smashing into the wooden crates.
To make the situation even more chaotic, the darkness took care of the rest: the faint silvery light of the full moon was definitively swallowed by the blanket of black clouds brought by the wind.
'It's my last job for tonight, I can even afford to play a little... Especially in a place this isolated, where there are no innocents around,' Venus reflected, as her predatory cat-like smirk widened immeasurably.
The goddess, magnanimous with the pure of heart but a ruthless punisher of sinners, raised the harpoon, aiming it straight at the celestial vault.
Above her head, a sphere of absolute black condensed, as small as a baseball but as dense and heavy as a micro-black hole. Suddenly, the laws of physics went wild: gravity around the pier was completely neutralized.
The wet fishing boats, the wooden debris, the crates, the millions of suspended water droplets, and the traffickers themselves lifted off the ground, beginning to float untidily in the void. It was a surreal, distorted scenario, worthy of an avant-garde expressionist painting.
'Not bad for a first attempt at large-scale gravitational manipulation,' Venus thought with self-satisfaction, floating motionless at the center of that primordial chaos that was defying one of the four fundamental forces of the universe.
The Goddess found it fucking hilarious to see how all those men, who until a moment prior were shooting at her, had turned into a handful of helpless balloons drifting in the wind, by now unable to distinguish even where the sky was and where the earth was.
'Let's check the boats' cargo,' Venus thought, flying close to one of the fishing boats floating inertly in zero gravity.
The white-haired goddess delivered a faint kick to the stern of the vessel; the push was enough to flip the hull with extreme ease, but she did not stop there. Wielding the harpoon as if it were a steel katana, Venus mimicked the fluid slash of a swordsman delivering a perfect horizontal cut.
The blow was not physical, but rather a literal spatial laceration. The hull of the fishing boat was cleanly separated into two sections, sliced by a line of distorted air. From the belly of the ship poured a cascade of objects that fell downward only for a few moments, before coming to a halt mid-air, ignoring the force of gravity in their turn.
Venus observed that suspended chaos: there were lots of knick-knacks and mountains of trash, but above all, there were dozens of wooden crates which, instead of containing fresh fish or seafood, harbored an outrageous amount of narcotics in every possible form, from bricks of powder to pills.
'Evidence found. Now I just have to track down the boss of this operation, send the report to the proper authorities, and then I can finally go back home,' the girl thought.
She turned around mid-air, having by now seen enough to confirm her suspicions, and her eyes immediately identified the man who, shortly before, had dared to shoot at her with the harpoon launcher.
'If the big boss stays hidden here for another five minutes, it won't change much,' Venus reflected, approaching the shooter at high speed, who realized in an instant that he was in monumental trouble.
The man opened his mouth wide, taking a breath to let out a desperate scream, but Venus had the slightest intention of listening to his clamor. Swift as lightning, she raised the fingers of her free hand, forming her usual imaginary gun, and snapped her thumb. The bullet of magical energy hit the target dead center, instantly freezing his lips and jaw, sealing his mouth shut under a thick layer of pale blue ice.
'At least my idiot has the decency to remain silent and face his punishment with dignity,' Venus thought with a small, nostalgic smile, remembering one of the very few good qualities of her dog.
Without a shred of hesitation, the goddess with the long twintails grabbed the criminal by his hair and, with a sharp flick of her wrist, sent him spinning wildly on his axis mid-air, making him rotate at the speed of a racing car's wheel.
'That idiot never leaves me in peace... He keeps tormenting my head,' the girl huffed to herself, before reaching out her hand, grabbing the criminal by his ankles, and abruptly halting his frantic rotation, leaving him suspended upside down.
It was at that moment that Venus noticed a conspicuous wet stain and a decidedly unpleasant odor coming from the pants of her prisoner, who was terrified to death by the experience.
With an expression of deep disgust stamped on her face, the Goddess immediately let go of her grip so as not to get dirty, took two steps back while floating in the void, and made a sharp thumbs-down gesture. Instantly, the effect of the gravitational bubble vanished for that man only: the criminal abruptly went back to being a victim of physics, plunging through the void and crashing straight into the dark water of the ocean with a loud splash.
The goddess with the twintails cast a final, quick glance at the gravitational chaos she had left behind, then her gaze settled on the luxury yacht: an imposing vessel with aerodynamic lines, sporting a gleaming white livery and pure gold trims.
In Venus's blue eyes, a spark of pure greed flashed. She flew like lightning until she brought herself exactly in front of the ship's bow, examining it up close and reaching the conclusion that it was the only thing of true value present on that remote atoll.
'Now this would make a perfect souvenir for my collection,' Venus thought.
She brought her hands together in front of her chest and then spread them apart with a sharp movement, as if she were flinging open invisible curtains. At her gesture, the fabric of reality tore with a crackle of energy, opening a dimensional portal so gigantic that it swallowed the yacht millimeter by millimeter, making it vanish into the void.
XXX
On the other side of the planet, in the Middle East, within the protected boundaries of what government agencies had dubbed the Blue Realm, a huge, white-and-gold luxury yacht materialized out of nowhere, landing heavily upon the desert sand. That inexplicable anomaly would drive the tracking systems of half the world's intelligence agencies insane, by now unable to handle Venus's divine whims.
Hearing the metallic roar of the impact, the two current inhabitants of the Temple of Ishtar came outside to check what was happening.
"This is a new one," Archer commented, crossing his arms. At that moment, he was wearing a bizarre kitchen apron with a stylized image of a woman walking a dog printed on it.
"Lord Archer... that is a decidedly big boat," Fern observed, her purple eyes widening. She had never seen a yacht in her life, coming from a desert nation far from the sea.
The girl took a step forward, strongly tempted to walk down the temple's majestic staircase to examine this absurd new attraction up close, but she preferred to remain disciplined at the Servant's side.
"Fern, I believe the best move is to go back to the kitchen and get back to work. Let's prepare dinner, an extra dessert, and maybe download the next season of that TV series the Master likes so much," Archer suggested. He had interpreted the appearance—or rather, the impulse theft—of the yacht as a clear sign that the Tsundere Goddess was in a terrible mood and needed to be humored.
"As you wish, Lord Archer! We will make a true feast to welcome Goddess Ishtar!" Fern exclaimed enthusiastically, her only desire being to do something pleasing for her benefactress.
'I wonder if this is what a wife feels like when her husband impulsively buys colossal, useless junk,' Archer thought to herself, massaging his temples. He could not find a single logical use for that compulsive purchase: they were living in the heart of the Blue Realm, surrounded by desert and miles away from the ocean.
'By now I am mathematically certain that my hair turned white because of Rin, and not from the prolonged use of Magecraft. This Master has the power to make me change my hair color a second time,' the heroic spirit sighed, turning on his heels to re-enter the Temple, followed closely by a smiling Fern.
XXX
Returning to Indonesia, Venus had by now left the pier behind. She flew straight toward the heart of the atoll; along her trajectory, her divine eyes identified vast cultivated fields as far as the eye could see, filled with plants destined for the production of narcotics. Further ahead, she spotted patrols of heavily armed men, who this time were not even pretending to be simple fishermen, and a column of sports cars speeding at full throttle precisely toward the gravitational anomaly at the pier, as if roaring engines could actually do something against a fundamental force of the universe.
'Setting fire to or instantly freezing these fields seems like a damn tempting idea... But every plant reduced to ash would be one less piece of evidence against them. Besides, these cockroaches might even find a way to escape my flames, but Indonesian law provides for the death penalty for drug trafficking,' Venus thought. A mischievous and cold smile curved her lips: she would gladly let the local authorities punish the criminals in an exemplary manner, limiting herself to giving them a decisive push in the right direction.
A few moments later, a lavish white marble villa appeared beneath the Goddess's eyes, protected by high stone perimeter walls and guarded by an impressive number of mercenaries armed to the teeth.
'The context varies, but the picture always remains bleakly the same: a fat, rich man hidden in his tiny artificial domain, protected by parasites who follow only the scent of money and nothing else,' Venus reflected. She extended her right arm forward, locking her fingers into her now-iconic gun pose.
"Humanity has forgotten that true power belongs solely to the heavens, and not to a handful of green paper," the Goddess of Finality solemnly proclaimed. In front of the tip of her index finger, a globe of pure energy began to condense, an unstable mass that sizzled, compressing with every fraction of a second.
"Unluckily for you, I am here to refresh your memory," Venus concluded. She snapped her thumb, releasing the devastating shot straight against the main entrance of the estate.
BOOM!
The monumental wrought-iron gate and the thick stone walls surrounding it were literally erased from existence in a fraction of a second. The explosion kicked up a titanic shockwave that gutted the ground, digging a huge, smoking crater as if the structure had been hit dead center by a ballistic missile. Instantly, all the mercenaries inside the property entered a state of total, desperate alert.
Observing that crazed anthill from above, overwhelmed by agitation and panic, Venus allowed a menacing and markedly sadistic smile to take over—a dark, fierce expression that no camera in the world had ever managed to capture and show to the general public.
The difference between the benevolent Goddess, who performed miraculous rescue, restoration, and healing operations for the pure of heart, and the ruthless Goddess, who descended from the heavens to punish criminality, was simply abyssal.
Venus placed a hand over her womb, caressing it gently, while behind her, the fabric of space tore open once again, giving birth to a portal with hazy edges of neon blue and purple.
"My little ones, go play... No killing, mind you, but you may have your fun," Venus whispered, delivering the directives in an almost maternal tone to her very own creations.
From the dimensional opening, dozens of artificial creatures began to swarm—alien constructs composed of a fusion of silicon and pure exotic energy. Those creatures summoned by the Goddess sported a smooth, stark white armor, veined with luminescent circuits that pulsed with a cold blue light; their silhouette vaguely recalled the aerodynamic shape of a species of metallic, lethal bees.
Venus gave one last, light pat to her womb, and at that signal, the entire swarm of Little Beasts dashed forward in unison, plunging straight toward the security guards entrenched along the perimeter of the estate.
Knowing she no longer had to worry about being disturbed or waste time dealing personally with every single armed criminal, Venus leaned forward. She descended from the sky, floating with elegance, aiming straight for the main entrance of the big boss's villa, while behind her echoed the first shrieks of terror from the mercenaries overwhelmed by the white and blue swarm.
XXX
Venus made her entrance into the main estate. The solid wood access door was barred from the inside, but a swift energy shot fired carelessly from the fingers of the goddess with the twintails proved to be, as always, an unbeatable universal key.
The heavy door collapsed backward like a single domino tile, and Venus advanced from the dense smoke of the explosion. The girl looked around to examine the environment: polished, elegant marble floors, designer paintings with gilded frames, refined antique furniture, and a majestic spiral staircase leading to the second floor. Right at the center of the ceiling towered an immense crystal chandelier that reflected the little remaining light.
'A drug lord with an unexpected good taste in interior design,' Venus thought, floating just a few centimeters off the ground, while her eyes remained literally glued to the thousand reflections of the crystal chandelier.
Perhaps it was a bizarre psychological residue inherited from Rin Tohsaka, but Venus possessed an innate and absolutely uncontrollable weakness for precious gems and anything that sparkled.
"Haaaaaa!" a female voice suddenly shrieked.
Venus snapped her head to the right and saw a beautiful, dark-skinned woman with short hair and an incredibly tight, midnight-blue dress, cowering in a corner out of sheer terror.
'Well, apparently his taste in women isn't trash either,' Venus thought to herself. She winked amusedly, giving a mischievous look to the stripper, and with a simple snap of her fingers, she opened a small dimensional portal right beneath the girl's feet. The rift swallowed her instantly, teleporting her safe and sound into the center of Jakarta, hundreds of kilometers away from that chaos.
At that exact instant, a grim and menacing middle-aged man rushed down the majestic staircase. He was wearing nothing but a pair of house slippers and a silk bathrobe, but he was clutching a threatening shotgun in his hands.
"Die, Quraci bitch!" the man exclaimed, blinded by rage, pulling the trigger and firing repeatedly in a desperate attempt to bring her down.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
The empty shells bounced onto the marble with a metallic clink until his ammunition ran out completely. The shots, however, turned out to be completely useless: Venus had not even moved a single millimeter. The rain of lead buckshot shattered helplessly against the surface of her electromagnetic bubble, falling to the floor like harmless hailstones.
"Shiiit!" the drug lord cursed. Realizing the absolute ineffectiveness of his weapon, he threw the shotgun onto the floor, turned on his heels, and beat a hasty retreat up the stairs.
'Now it's my turn,' Venus thought.
She raised her right index finger and fired a perfect Gandr: a bullet of dense, dark, and cursed energy that shot down the hallway and hit the fleeing target dead center on the back of his head. The impact instantly drained the man of all strength, causing him to lose consciousness before he could even realize it.
Without wasting any more time, Venus flew toward the second floor of the villa in search of the main office, the place where the servers and documents containing the incriminating evidence were kept. As she did so, she reached a hand back and used a fraction of her gravitational manipulation: the big shot's unconscious body lifted off the ground, floating docilely behind her like a macabre balloon hitched to an invisible string.
XXX
Venus flung open the private office door with a first, precise energy shot. Once inside, she fired a second warning shot straight against the back wall, blowing up a safe that—in an exquisitely cliché and comical fashion—was hidden right behind a large designer painting.
The steel vault harbored a latest-generation laptop, several bundles of confidential documents, a velvet box overflowing with rough diamonds, and a mountain of cash bricks bound with rubber bands.
'I'll leave half of the cash here for the local police, while the other half will go straight into the savings fund for Fern's well-being and education... Oh, and of course, the diamonds will end up straight in my personal treasury,' Venus reflected with a greedy smile.
She reached out a hand and opened a series of floating micro-dimensional portals next to her, tuned directly to the underground vaults of the Temple of Ishtar. With a lazy gesture of her fingers, she levitated the jewels and her share of the money into the spatial rifts, making them vanish into the Blue Realm.
Immediately after, the goddess brought herself to the exact center of the office and began floating in the air, assuming the lotus position, settling the laptop directly onto her lap.
For the next half hour, time seemed to split. Outside the estate, the Beasts of Ishtar continued to cheerfully "play" with the terrified cartels' mercenaries, sowing panic among the enemy lines without killing, but breaking bones indeed.
Inside, in the almost surreal silence of the room, Venus methodically analyzed the vast majority of the protected files: thanks to a touch of intuition and her millennia-old magical manipulation skills, she managed to bypass every firewall, unearthing all the access passwords of the criminal syndicate in a handful of minutes.
"Rosario Refra, fifty years old, lieutenant of the drug cartel, Sam Gor Syndicate... considered the most powerful and influential drug trafficking organization in all of Asia," Venus murmured, summarizing her findings out loud as the data scrolled across the screen. "A criminal organization born from the alliance of five different Chinese triads. It dominates the global traffic of methamphetamines, heroin, and ketamine throughout the Asia-Pacific region, including Indonesia, generating an estimated turnover in the tens of billions of dollars."
Releasing a long sigh, the girl massaged her forehead with the tips of her fingers. She felt exactly like a pastry chef suddenly forced to perform the task of an IT engineer.
'This is the reason why I vastly prefer search-and-rescue missions. There, everything is damn simple and clear: there is an imminent danger, there are people who desperately need help, I arrive and I rescue them. Linear,' Venus thought, while a small, genuine smile lit up her face, making her appreciate the value of her everyday work.
'But this stuff here has nothing simple about it. International criminal organizations, blackmail, extortion, corruption, and a tide of other bureaucratic absurdities suited only for a politician with decades of experience behind them,' she reflected, almost regretting, for a split second, not having resolved the entire matter with that single destructive energy shot she had hypothesized at the beginning.
"I will simply do what Kiana would have done: I'll pass the hot potato to someone who actually knows how to solve complicated things," Venus declared aloud.
She reached her hand toward Rosario Refra's desk and grabbed an anonymous-looking USB flash drive. Having connected the unit to the laptop, she started the full transfer of the entire database; once the download was finished, she pulled out the device and casually slipped it inside her bra, making sure it remained safe and in close contact with her skin.
After that, she extended her free hand toward the void and accumulated a fraction of exotic energy: in front of her materialized, out of thin air, a gray stone slab with a perfectly smooth surface.
'I'll carve a short accompanying letter onto it, ship this nice gift package to the proper authorities, and then finally I can go back home to change my clothes. Maybe tonight I'll opt for something a bit more special,' Venus planned to herself, as the idea of wearing a daring Shantae-style outfit—complete with harem pants, an embroidered top, and conspicuous golden ornaments—tickled her imagination.
After all, the Goddess remained a profoundly vain creature. Admiring herself in the mirror and studying how the exotic fabrics enhanced her curves brought her immense personal pleasure; especially if those highly provocative outfits succeeded in the impossible feat of shattering EMIYA's stoic and indifferent mask, or leaving little, innocent Fern completely speechless.
XXX
A few minutes later, the alarm systems of the Hall of Justice suddenly activated: someone had just penetrated inside the perimeter of their public base.
The first to arrive on the scene was Flash. Thanks to his lightning-fast reflexes, the speedster found himself in front of a decidedly bizarre sight: a semi-naked and unconscious middle-aged man in a bathrobe, a laptop, bundles of documents, several firearms, a crate overflowing with drug bricks, and, resting on top of the pile, a massive gray stone tablet.
"Okay... I expected to see something strange after the message we sent to Venus, but this beats all expectations," Flash murmured to himself as he examined the rock slab. One side was carved with the dense characters of ancient Babylonian cuneiform, while the other bore the same text translated into perfect modern English.
XXX
To the group of heroes who safeguard the well-being of humanity and planet Earth, known as the Justice League. I am the one you call Venus.
I have received your message. However, I am not yet entirely convinced by the idea of traveling to your fortress to parley with you; after all, I am a single person, while you are multiple individuals of colossal fame.
Despite this, when all is said and done, we share the exact same objective: to protect and help the innocent, and to harshly punish those who dare to harm them.
For this reason, I have decided to give you a gift and, at the same time, offer you an excellent opportunity to show me how you are able to handle the most complex situations.
If you are reading this message, it means you will have already found the man I delivered to you. His name is Rosario Refra, a lieutenant of the drug cartel that plagues Asia. Along with him, I have taken care to send you all the digital and paper evidence necessary to incriminate both him and his entire organization.
I am sincerely curious to see what you will do with the opportunity I have granted you.
XXX
Flash lowered the heavy stone tablet, after having completed the reading in the infinitesimal fraction of a tenth of a second.
"I'll definitely need to pass this news to Batman and Superman... But first it'll be better to throw this guy into a maximum-security cell and secure all this evidence," the fastest man alive said. An instant later, the superhero turned into a vivid scarlet streak, hurtling like lightning through the technological corridors of the Hall of Justice.
To be continued...
XXX
Author's Note:
I hope you liked the chapter.
In my head, there was a slightly darker idea to end this chapter, but I decided to keep everything clean and fun. And I believe I did the right thing.