Chapter 96: 96

After Count Viper's defeat, Joseph returned to the real world. But something was wrong. His mind was under siege—an avalanche of thoughts, emotions, and psychic impressions crashing into him all at once. The overload brought splitting headaches, crushing mental fatigue, and confusion that worsened by the second. He was losing control. Bright yellow light pulsed around his body erratically as the Nova Force surged and flickered. Gravity warped around him, shifting in intensity, ripping through the basement and sending cracks through the walls and ceiling. Blood poured from his nose like a faucet. His body trembled violently. He was going to have a seizure soon. Or worse. 'I need to get rid of this now or I'll die.' Nova didn't understand psychic powers beyond what he'd seen from Martian Manhunter and his niece. He'd never trained for this. His thoughts were tangling, overlapping—on the edge of hallucination. They had fought in a mental plane. 'Maybe I can go back. Discharge it there.' He tried to will himself into the Astral Plane—nothing. Then into Dream State. It worked. Even here, he felt bloated. Weak. His thoughts slipped from his grasp. His logic frayed like old wire. Any second now, he'd mentally unravel. Desperate, he reached out and touched the nearest figure—the shifting voxel-shaped humanoid that represented Nova's avatar. His fingers pressed into its head and chest. Yellow light erupted from Joseph's mouth and eyes, streaming upward like divine fire. The avatar responded—its body glowing blue, light pouring from the same places, mirroring Joseph's agony. He pushed—pouring everything he could into the avatar, offloading the excess psychic energy until only the original amount remained. The light from both of them faded. Joseph gasped, head tilted upward. "...Fuck." He'd almost died there. Joseph looked down at Nova's avatar and observed if there was any change. "Nova?" he asked in hope, thinking that maybe the psychic energy could revive his dead AI. It was for naught. After a few minutes and observation and catching his breath, he willed himself out of Dream State. ** Joseph woke up, face-down in a warm puddle of his own blood—the aftermath of a nosebleed from psychic overload. His head still throbbed, the kind of splitting headache that felt like it was trying to crack open his skull. Mental fatigue hung over him like a weighted blanket. Bright yellow light pulsed around his body in unstable bursts. The Nova Force surged and flickered uncontrollably. Gravity twisted with each pulse, distorting the space around him. Cracks ran through the basement's walls and ceiling. The whole structure was on the verge of collapse. Joseph clenched his jaw and forced himself to wrest control back. The energy pulsing around him dimmed. The gravitational chaos stilled. The basement stabilized—barely. He rose slowly, surveying the wreckage. Dinosaur-like creatures lay in heaps, their mutated bodies torn in half, their lifeless forms sprawled across the floor. Count Viper's old vessel—his final body—was broken and still. Nova moved cautiously from corpse to corpse. Since absorbing psychic energy, he'd been able to hear nearby thoughts and which paired well with his ability to detect energy and feel bioelectric signatures. Silence. Emptiness. No voices. No energy. They were all dead. Good. He looked down at the blood he'd left on the floor. Without hesitation, he fired a thin beam from his eyes and vaporized it. The last thing he needed was someone using it to clone him—and then the League pressuring him to "accept" the clone as a son like they did with Superman and Superboy. Hell no. Now came the question of cleanup. If the building had been empty, Joseph would've flattened it—erase all evidence. But there were still people upstairs. And calling the League would be... a headache. He needed someone who specialized in situations like this. He needed someone who specialized in messes like this. Joseph pulled his comm from his belt—still intact, somehow. What were these suits made of?—and dialed Amanda Waller. "Nova," Waller answered smoothly. "To what do I owe the pleasure?" "There was a situation at Meta/Tech," Joseph said. "A man by the name of Etienne du Vipere was abducting metahumans. Genetic experiments. Turned them into monsters. I came to investigate. He tried to possess me with his psychic abilities. Failed. Died. So did the creatures." "I see. You want me to handle cleanup." "You did say it was part of your job." "I'm not complaining. We were planning to investigate him later this month anyway. You just expedited the process. A.R.G.U.S. agents will be there shortly." "Good. Also check the staff. I don't know who else was involved." "Understood. Always a pleasure, Nova." The line clicked off. Joseph exhaled and climbed the stairs, slipping out of the building unnoticed. ** | Gotham - August 18 Joseph spent the past week away from the Team, training and mastering his new psychic abilities. He wasn't sure what might happen if he interacted with the Martians while still acting as a psychic vacuum. Thankfully, by week's end, he'd gotten the hang of turning his telepathic hearing on and off. He mostly kept it off. Hearing so many voices gave him a headache. Kori had called earlier in the week, worried about his sudden disappearance. He reassured her it was just intense training—he didn't want to worry her with what had really happened. She filled him in on patrols in D.C. and a strange new mission the Team had taken. Captain Atom, trying to teach them about espionage, gave a dry lecture that bored most of them. To spice things up, he handed them a cold case from the Vietnam War: the apparent framing of Air Force Captain Nathaniel Adams, who'd been convicted in 1968 for the murder of General Clement Lemar. Atom had recently received intel suggesting Adams was innocent. Eager to ditch the lecture, the Team accepted the mission. They infiltrated the Pentagon, investigated key suspects, battled a Cambodian assassin, and presented their findings. Turns out, Adams had uncovered a smuggling ring and reported it to Lemar—who was secretly involved. Lemar, wanting to eliminate both Adams and the ring leader, Lt. Yarrow, orchestrated an ambush. But Adams survived and pulled Yarrow out, complicating Lemar's plan. To tie up loose ends, Yarrow manipulated Adams into confronting Lemar while drugged, and Sgt. Enos Polk, a member of the Military Police during the Vietnam war, used Adams's knife to kill Lemar—framing him. It had been a wild case, and while the Team got their hands dirty with Cold War secrets and conspiracies, Joseph had quietly learned to control his mind. He was ready to rejoin them.