Rain hammered against the Gotham docks, a steady rhythm that drowned out the noise of the city beyond. Shipping containers stretched like metal canyons, their surfaces slick with grime and old gang tags. The air was heavy with salt and oil, the water below black and still — too still.
Then came movement.
Aqualad surged from the shadows, his tattoos glowing faintly as he swept both hands forward. Water from a puddle at his feet rose, solidifying into twin blades that shimmered in the dim light. Two smugglers shouted in surprise and fired. The bullets struck the blades — and hissed away into steam. Aqualad was already upon them, disarming one, sweeping the other's legs out with a clean, precise motion.
"Two down," he murmured into his comm. "Robin, your quadrant?"
From a catwalk above, Robin's voice crackled through. "Almost wrapped up. Dock three is clear — but there's still movement near the Odessa containers. Hold your position until I say go."
Aqualad gave a small nod, even though Robin couldn't see him.
Below, a blur of red and yellow zipped between trucks, Kid Flash. "Wrapped up dock four! Man, these guys are slow. Seriously, do they practice moving in slow motion or is it just a Gotham thing?"
"Focus," Aqualad said, voice firm but even. "We're not here for jokes."
Artemis rolled her eyes from her perch behind a shipping crate. "He's not wrong though. Half of these guys are half-asleep." She drew her bow, nocked an arrow, and fired — the shaft burying itself into the wall just above a smuggler's shoulder. He looked up in confusion right before she fired another, this one snapping a gas canister at his feet. "And now they're all asleep," she muttered as the tranquilizer fog spread.
Robin dropped down from the catwalk, landing silently beside the rest of the team. His cape rippled slightly in the rain. "Nice work. But we're not done. There's another truck loading up two docks over — Odessa's emblem on the doors."
"Odessa?" Artemis frowned. "You mean the Russian family?"
"Yeah," Robin replied, checking his holo display. "They've been moving weapons through here, disguised as medical shipments. The docks are basically theirs right now."
Aqualad stepped forward, water still coiling around his arms like ribbons. "Then we neutralize this route as well. Quietly."
Robin nodded. "Right. Disable the guards, tag the shipment, leave the rest for the police."
They moved like clockwork — silent, efficient. Artemis picked off lookouts from high ground; Aqualad flooded a loading ramp to disable an engine; Kid Flash blurred in and out, zip-tying unconscious men faster than they could blink. Robin vaulted onto a truck's cab, smashed through the window, and yanked the driver out with a grapnel line, tossing him into the mud.
"Shipment secured," Robin said over the comms. "Police can trace it once we upload the location."
"GCPD won't be happy we're on their turf again," Artemis muttered.
"Better us than them," Robin said. "Odessa's people don't take prisoners."
As the last of the smugglers were tied up, the team regrouped under the awning of a cargo crane. Steam drifted from Aqualad's tattoos; Kid Flash paced, restless energy crackling around him.
Aqualad looked toward the looming warehouse just beyond the dock — the one with extra guards, heavier guns, and the faint glow of floodlights behind its steel gates. "Robin," he said quietly, "that is Odessa's base, yes?"
Robin followed his gaze and nodded once. "Yeah. One of them, anyway. We're not going near it tonight. We're staying clear — Batman's orders."
Aqualad inclined his head respectfully. "Understood. Then what is our next target?"
There was a pause, a faint hiss of static in the comms as lightning flashed far over the bay.
"We move east," Robin said finally. "The lower gangs are still feeding Odessa's operation. We take them out next. Keep it clean, keep it fast."
Kid Flash gave a low whistle as they began to move out. "Man… Gotham's crazy. Feels like every street has a war brewing."
Robin's expression darkened beneath the mask. "That's because it does."
***
While Young Justice moved like a surgical strike among the shipping crates, a second wave of violence bloomed down the pier — smaller, sharper, and woven from a completely different cloth.
A cluster of figures in dark coats slipped out from the alleys and the shadow of a rusted gantry, faces half-hidden by scarves and hood-rims. They moved fast and low, elbows tucked, boots whispering over wet concrete. No one called them heroes; this was a ragged handful of the Underpass, arming themselves with what the city would call trash—hand-rolled molotovs, scavenged flash-bangs, a few military-surplus grenade blanks that spit fire but didn't carry the kind of ordinance real soldiers used. Their mission was noise, not annihilation.
From the rooftops and crane booms, lookouts gave the nods: three fingers, then two — the signal to split and sow the night.
The first two ran to the edge of Odessa's closest dock lane. They lobbed a pair of glass bottles that shattered against stacked palettes; flames climbed instantly, licking at tarps and a pallet of paper crates. The fire caught, smoke boiling up in a thick black column that swallowed the nearest floodlights.
Another group moved like ghosts to a line of parked vans. One man popped the rear door, shoved in a flash-bang, and ducked away. It exploded with a concussive crack and a bloom of white noise. Men on the ground cursed, staggered, grabbed mouths as the smoke hit.
Perched in the latticework of a crane, two others opened up with short bursts—snap-shots meant to terrify rather than kill—sending spray of tracer rounds into the container stacks. The bullets pinged off metal and sent Odessa's dockhands diving for cover. A guard on the gate, startled and uncoordinated, fired blindly; the bullet tore a ragged line into a nearby truck's side.
"Make it loud. Make it messy!" a voice hissed through an earpiece. Then the runners were gone—slipping back into the folds of the port like water. No lingering. No clean-up. Just smoke, heat, and the immediate panic of men whose perfect order had been punctured.
Odessa's men scrambled. Their radios screamed orders. Floodlights snapped to life, strobing over the pier and turning sky into a wash of white. A truck door slammed; boots crunched; men rushed toward the flare points. In the chaos a siren began to wail somewhere down the dock road.
That was the point. The Underpass wasn't trying to hold ground — they wanted a distraction so huge it would pull law enforcement, and anyone who answered the city's call to tidy up, away from the docks where the real problem — the heavily guarded warehouse — sat, just out of reach. If Batman's allies were nearby and watching for smoke and gunfire, they'd be drawn to the chaos; if the GCPD moved in force, Odessa's longshore pipeline might be exposed.
From a safe distance a pair of snipers in the Underpass watched the domino line fall. Their rifles were silent, like scalpel handles; their job was only to keep watch. If Odessa's men attempted to chase the arsonists into the alleys, the snipers would mark escape routes and relay them back to the teams underground.
As the first responders hit the pier red and blue bathing the shipping crates in a frantic strobe — the Underpass teams peeled away. They melted into backing alleys, down service stairs, and into maintenance hatches that fed the railway tunnels. The smell of burned plastic and diesel followed them like a memory.
A distant camera drone pivoted toward the commotion, fed the live feed to someone listening in the dark, and Robin's voice cut over the comm: "We just got smoke on the south perimeter. All units, converge — possible Odessa hotspot. Aqualad, head that way."
The plan had done its job: the docks were alight, Odessa's men rattled and scattered, and the city's attention was being directed exactly where the Underpass needed it to be. In the muddy alleyways behind the warehouses, the Underpass exhaled, checked their wounded, and prepared to move again.
***
The call came in on a low channel—one of those tidy, no-frills pings Nolan kept for exactly this kind of signal.
"Boss," a voice crackled, half-laughing, half-breathless. "We lit the pier up nice. Odessa's got heads spinning. They're pouring units to patch holes. You got the south hot."
"Good," Nolan said, flat and quick. "Lay low. Find a hole. Don't stick your neck out tonight. Pull back to pre-planned points and wait for orders."
"Copy that. Good luck boss," he answered. The line went quiet.
Nolan let the receiver hang in his hand a second, then rolled his shoulders and looked at the room. The boxcar command center hummed around him—maps, feeds, far-too-bright laptop screens, whiteboard routes crudely drawn in marker. Naima's webcam flickered where she stood at the rail node, voice steady as steel through the comm.
"All right," Nolan said, and the switch clicked. "War is a go. We take the Whispers tonight—no half measures. Full sweep. Everyone knows their exits and rally points. We flip every node, secure every cache. Move fast, take care."
He didn't wait for the echo of agreement. He stood, the motion practiced, smooth. The theater mask — the pale, ridiculous little thing that had become whole identities — went on like snapping a second face into place. The suit felt different in its cut and weight now, the lining heavy with hidden pockets and the faint, metallic rattle of equipment. He checked the pistol tucked at his hip, the comm at his ear, the small vial cases sewn into the lapel. Then he moved.
Naima's voice cut in, clipped and efficient. "We've got cameras looped. Two teams on the east rail are green, Marcy's convoy is three minutes out to the west. When you breach, we'll blackout the section cams for thirty seconds. That window is yours."
"Perfect." Nolan's fingers brushed the map, fingertips tracing the red line that marked Whisper control
Vey switched seamlessly in place before heading out. Leading a team a vial slipped in his palm, cracking it vey lifted his mask and inhaled fear gripped every fiber of his being as his heart raced thrumming in his chest.
But it soon passed eerily fast and Vey saw colors once more.
He led his team through several service tunnels before they finally approached their attack point.
Vey focused on blue as he glanced at the whispers guarding the gateway.
One of the men started crying instantly before raising his gun and whimpering, "I didn't mean to." Over and over
Bang.
"Go time." Naima said, "Everyone is in positions move move move!"
Move they did Vey led his team straight through, bullets cracking through the air.
The Underpass fighters surged forward. Muzzle flashes strobed the tunnel in bursts of orange and white, momentarily revealing faces twisted in effort and fear. One of the Whisper defenders leaned too far out of cover and caught a round to the shoulder, spinning and crashing into a stack of old rail ties. Another went down screaming, leg shattered, blood pooling dark beneath him.
Vey didn't flinch. He moved through it like a phantom, barking quick orders and signaling for the flanking team. His voice was calm, but his eyes—behind the tinted lenses—were alive with that eerie blue gleam from the gas he'd inhaled earlier.
He saw everything.
Every motion. Every twitch. Every tiny hesitation that would become a weakness.
"Grenade out!" someone shouted.
A dull clink hit the floor, followed by a roar that shook the ground. Dust rained from the ceiling. A few men hit the dirt, covering their heads as the tunnel filled with acrid smoke.
Vey used the moment. He charged through, low and fast, and cracked a Whisper gunman across the jaw with his sidearm. The man's mask shattered, and Vey drove a knee into his chest before firing into his ribs point-blank. The man's body folded with a wet crunch.
"Left flank clear!" A voice called out.
Naima's voice cut through the comms again. "We're seeing movement on the north access tunnel. They're regrouping!"
"Head them off!" Vey ordered before inflicting as many as possible with shades of blue and red
Unfortunately because he couldn't focus intently on too many at once the potency was diminished.
"Boss! THE FUCKING BAT IS HERE!" Naima yelled through the mic