Chapter 12 — Demon of Gotham, Part 12
---
Ben's pen moved across the notebook page in small, careful lines, the kind of writing he kept deliberately compact so nobody reading over his shoulder could parse it quickly.
---Wildmutt — Field Notes.
Initial assessment was wrong. Dismissed it early because of the obvious limitations — no eyes, no voice, no ranged capability. But being it changes the read entirely. The sensory range is unlike anything else in the roster. Smell, vibration, electromagnetic signatures — all of it feeds in simultaneously and the brain just processes it, like it was always supposed to work that way. Not a fighter's form. Not built for it. But for search, for tracking, for navigating environments where sight would be useless anyway — it might be the most practical thing I have.
Cross it with Big Chill. Intangibility plus that sensory range — walls, floors, rubble, it wouldn't matter. Could locate a survivor in a collapsed building faster than any rescue team working with conventional equipment. The combination hasn't been tested under controlled conditions. Range limits on the sensory input are still unclear, and I don't know yet how interference — crowds, industrial noise, chemical smells — degrades the signal. Further field work needed before I can draw any real conclusions. -----
Mr. Burke's voice carried from the front of the room in the even, practiced tone of a man who had learned that the most effective way to command attention was to never raise his voice. Ben heard the words without fully processing them, the way background noise becomes invisible when you're focused on something else. Around him, thirty students occupied the room in the usual morning arrangement of the half-attentive and the completely elsewhere.
He turned to a fresh section of the page.
The chalk tapped against the board.
Ben's pen stopped.
He looked up.
Burke had written on the board in large, rigid cursive letters: CLOSED-LOOP ECOSYSTEM LAB. He adjusted his glasses and looked across the room with the expression of a man who found the first day of semester no less interesting than any other.
"I'm well aware it's the first day back," he said, "but in this room, we don't waste time. Before the bell rings, you'll have your first major assignment, your first lab partner, and your first deadline."
He turned back to face them and began to pace.
"For the next sixty days, you and an assigned partner will be constructing a closed terrarium. You'll provide the soil, the flora, the filtration, and the micro-fauna. Then you'll seal it. From that point forward, your creation must sustain itself entirely — no outside input, no corrections, nothing. If your engineering is precise, the water cycle stabilizes, the oxygen balances, and life continues. If your measurements are sloppy, you'll be looking at a jar of black mold by week four." He paused at the end of a row, letting that image sit for a moment. "I don't give passing grades to dead worlds."
He moved toward the back of the room, a stack of stapled packets in hand, and set one down on the table directly in front of Ben.
Ben looked at the packet. Then at the board. Sixty days. Bi-weekly data logging. Continuous monitoring.
He thought about his training schedule and felt something behind his sternum that was close to genuine despair.
"This project cannot be completed alone, and it cannot be done overnight," Burke continued, stopping near their row. "Look at the person sitting next to you. That is your partner for the next two months. Your success — and your grade — is entirely tethered to theirs."
Ben's head came up.
He stared at the front of the room for a moment, processing the particular injustice of it, and then turned to his left with the resignation of someone who has already decided the situation is bad and is simply confirming it.
The girl sitting next to him had dark red hair pulled back in a low ponytail, a few loose strands falling across her face. Light brown eyes. A sharp, angular face that was currently wearing the expression of someone who had also just been told the terms and was also deciding how she felt about it. She looked at him. Raised one hand in a small, slightly uncertain wave.
Ben raised his hand back. Turned away.
The bell rang.
---
Washington D.C. ran on the particular energy of a city that housed power without quite being powerful itself — all infrastructure and implication, the buildings arranged to communicate authority rather than exercise it. ARGUS occupied a structure that understood this completely. From the street it presented as a government facility of the unremarkable kind, the sort of building that discourages curiosity through sheer architectural tedium. Reinforced blast walls behind a conventional facade, biometric scanners disguised as standard security checkpoints, the subterranean levels accessible only to people who already knew they existed.
Inside, in the Red Room, alien technology sat in containment tubes under lights that made everything look slightly unreal. In the Black Room, artifacts that had no business existing in the same building as filing cabinets waited in the dark behind heavy shielding and multiple redundant locks.
Out front, three people waited.
Rick Flag stood with his arms folded, watching the street with the alert, unhurried attention of someone who processes threat assessments automatically and doesn't need to think about it. His blond hair was short and neat, his light beard trimmed, his tactical gear worn with the ease of a second skin. He'd been special forces long enough that the alertness wasn't performance anymore — it was just how he stood.
Beside him, Helena Cross had her arms crossed and her weight on one hip, which was her standard posture when she was waiting for something that was already taking too long. The scar on her left cheek caught the morning light in a thin pale line, a remnant of the Metropolis evacuation when her unit had been deployed in the early hours of the invasion and things had gone badly in the way things went badly in those first hours. She was looking at the road with an expression that made no attempt to disguise its opinion.
Against the wall, Lt. Steel sat on the ground with his back to the building and an army knife moving between his fingers in a slow, rotating pattern that looked casual and wasn't. His buzzcut was sharp, the long scar along his face settled into the same stillness as the rest of him. His eyes were focused on a middle distance that had nothing to do with the street in front of him.
"Why do we even bother waiting for her," Helena said. It wasn't really a question. "She's always late. Half the time she acts like this is entertainment."
"Waller picked her herself," Flag said, not looking over. "Her skills are real. That's what matters."
Helena exhaled through her nose and said nothing else.
Steel kept moving the knife.
The sound came before she was visible — a high, clean engine note rising above the street noise, the kind a bike makes when it's being ridden by someone who is comfortable going faster than traffic. The motorcycle came into view a moment later, matte black, a Kawasaki Ninja H2 Carbon that cost more than most people made in two years and moved like it knew it. It cut through the last stretch of road and came to a stop in front of them with a precision that was either very practiced or showing off, and with Joey it was probably both.
She pulled off her helmet with one hand. The maroon hair underneath had held its shape. She looked at the three of them with black lipstick curving into a smile that made her look like she'd just arrived at a party rather than an ARGUS briefing.
"Did you wait long?"
Flag turned and walked toward the building entrance without answering.
Helena followed without looking at her. Steel rose from the ground in one motion, pocketed the knife, and fell into step. Joey watched Flag's back for a moment with the particular amusement of someone who finds stonewalling genuinely funny, then slung her helmet under her arm and followed.
The four of them moved through the entrance in a loose line, each falling into step with the practiced spacing of people who had trained for different things and arrived at the same result — the kind of people who didn't bump into each other in corridors and didn't need to be told where to stand.
The Null Division have been assembled.
( Null division characters.
Lt steel - from Ben 10 universe.
Joey ( Rojo) - from Ben 10 universe.
Rick Flag Jr - from DC universe.
Helena cross - ( OC, created character)