Chapter 41 Lobotomize

The Watchtower - Orbit above Earth

The Watchtower's walls had never felt so cold. The hum of the facility, once a steady and comforting background noise, now seemed to echo the growing sense of unease that had overtaken the team. The crises unfolding on the ground were reaching a tipping point, and the League's response was scrambling to keep up. There were so many things happening at once, so many threats to address, so many new variables to account for.

Robin had not returned to his quarters. He was pacing the command center, his eyes scanning the screens of the tactical displays, trying to keep the information flowing, keep the chaos from overwhelming them. He was aware of the new reports flooding in, of the powers emerging from the rubble of the devastation.

Each new signal coming in made his heart beat faster.

Across the room, Batman and Superior Spider-Man were at the main terminal, analyzing data at an unnervingly fast rate. The two had worked together for a long time, but even they had to admit they were out of their depth now.

"Do we have any leads on the cause?" Batman asked, his voice steady despite the gravity of the situation.

"Yes," Otto replied, his fingers flying across the screen. "The energy released by the battle seems to have had a cascading effect, awakening latent metahuman abilities in individuals around the world. The explosion near Earth's atmosphere has triggered something in the genetic makeup of the population—what I call 'Quantum Evolutionary Triggers.' These are individuals who had the potential for power, but never exhibited it. Now, those abilities are manifesting in extreme ways."

"How many?" Batman asked.

"About two percent of the world's population," Otto answered. "That's roughly 160 million."

"160 million?" Robin echoed, disbelief thick in his voice. "And how many of them are actual threats?"

Otto adjusted his lenses, his face stoic. "Some of them will be uncontrollable. Especially those whose abilities involve force manipulation or mind-altering powers. But there is another problem—many of them are unaware of their powers and will need to be contained before they wreak havoc."

"We're too spread out," Robin said. "The League—"

"The League cannot handle this alone," Otto interrupted, his voice sharp and certain. "We need to mass-deploy containment and support androids—but the resources to manufacture them are reaching critical limits."

He turned to Batman, eyes gleaming behind red-tinted lenses.

"I can increase production," Otto declared. "I can build more androids to assist in identification, surveillance, and pacification of emerging metahumans. But the cost—material, energy, infrastructure—is immense. I propose we reclaim and repurpose an abandoned city. One already lost to catastrophe, depopulated and ignored.

"And what would you do with it?" Batman asked, watching him carefully.

Otto raised his hand, flicking his wrist. A holographic map of the world blinked into existence. Dozens of red markers pulsed across it—cities once filled with life, now empty due to nuclear fallout, pandemics, economic collapse, or superhuman conflict.

"We convert one of these locations into a central facility. A fortress. A factory. A campus. A surveillance hub." His tone was clinical, efficient. "We train the controllable, rehabilitate the unstable, and contain the dangerous. The OBLIVION PROTOCOL and ELEMENTIA will devour and repurpose the remaining structures, reformatting everything into what we need."

"That sounds like an occupation," Robin muttered.

Otto turned to him. "It's survival."

Batman stepped closer, scanning the map. "Governments won't like this. You'll be accused of annexing sovereign territory."

"Then involve them," Otto said, his tone pragmatic. "Not as partners, but as investors. I suggest we create a front—a unified coalition. Governments can assign liaisons, donate resources, and in return, they get monitored oversight. Controlled transparency. A seat at the table... but not control of it."

Batman remained silent. Thinking.

"We leverage fear," Otto continued. "They already know they can't contain this event. Offer them safety. Order. Framing the facility as a humanitarian solution allows us to operate openly while still maintaining superiority in decision-making."

"And if they push back?" Robin asked.

"They won't." Otto's voice was cold steel. "Because within weeks, spontaneous metahuman outbursts will begin destabilizing cities. Economies. Militaries. They will beg us to take control when their own borders start fracturing from within."

Batman's jaw clenched slightly. "What's the name of this facility?"

Otto turned to the map and tapped a location—Raventon, a once-bustling city, now a forgotten ghost town scorched by past metahuman warfare.

"The Justice Academy"

A pause. Then Batman spoke.

"Then we build it." He turned to Robin. "Start diplomatic outreach. I want feelers in the UN, the EU, and every major intelligence agency within the next 24 hours."

Robin nodded grimly. "I'll have Waller on the line within the hour. She won't like it—but she'll understand."

Otto nodded. "I'll begin drone reclamation of Raventon within twelve hours. My androids will establish a base perimeter, and ELEMENTIA will start processing raw materials for nanofabrication."

"What about the media?" Robin asked. "The public?"

Batman looked at Otto. "That's your job now. You're the face of this."

Otto's eyes gleamed. "Good. Then let them know: Order is coming."

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Location: Unknown

Buried deep beneath the Arctic ice cap, camouflaged by cloaking fields, magnetic distortion grids, and misdirection satellites.

Inside a facility more advanced than most nations' combined militaries, the Superior Spider-Man stood in silence. Before him, an enormous holographic globe rotated slowly, pulsing red in thousands of locations. Data streams, power fluctuation signatures, and bio-feedback spikes indicated metahuman awakenings—an explosion of evolution the world was not prepared for.

The walls of the room thrummed softly with life. Chrome-black spider-drones crawled across surfaces, interfacing with control panels, rerouting data, and filtering priority signals from the chaos of the outside world.

Otto's Four mechanical limbs hung like a crown around him, unmoving but always ready. His armor gleamed beneath the shifting lights, battle-hardened and redesigned with reactive plating, quantum processors, and a neuro-haptic link to OBLIVION PROTOCOL, which ran in the background like a god quietly watching all.

He turned his gaze to a holo-feed in the air, displaying the Justice League war room.

At the table sat Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Captain Atom, and several key members. They were all discussing the proposed "Justice Academy" strategy.

But Otto wasn't physically there.

Instead, what they saw was an Android replica—an absolutely perfect digital facsimile of the Superior Spider-Man, both in appearance and personality. Powered by a parallel AI derivative of Otto's mind, it was capable of autonomous strategic reasoning and communication. It had enough authority to act as Otto's extension, while the real one remained in the shadows—watching, refining, learning.

"Status?" Otto spoke aloud, his voice echoing slightly in the chamber.

From the ceiling, a voice responded."Metahuman emergence rate: 13.7% increase in the last seventy-two hours. Sixty-three recorded spontaneous power surges in urban environments. Sixteen cities are now classified as unstable."

"Break down categories," Otto ordered.

The globe shifted. Colored dots bloomed across the surface—green for latent, yellow for minor awakened, red for hostile or uncontrollable.

"Over a hundred individuals classified as Level-5 threats," the system reported. "Untrained. Emotional instability. Potential for catastrophic damage."

Otto nodded to himself, fingers tapping together. "And the governments?"

A spider-drone projected another feed—the United Nations.

Angry voices.

Political unrest.

Accusations of overreach. Demands for jurisdictional oversight.

"Pathetic," Otto spat, disgust curling his lip beneath the mask.

He turned from the monitor, his footsteps echoing across the cold steel floor as he approached the side wall—where a dozen android bodies stood in vertical pods. Blank faces. Armaments hidden beneath synthetic flesh. Each one intimately tethered to his neural network. Some were already active, embedded within cities, posing as civilians, emergency responders, or security forces. Quiet. Invisible. Watching.

Otto tapped a control console. A red light blinked above one of the larger pods.

Inside—a containment cocoon: its walls layered in psionic inhibitors, gravity dampeners, and dark-matter scramblers. A high-level isolation cell designed not just to restrain, but to suppress the unnatural.

Above the chamber, a designation glowed:

SUBJECT: SHADE

Superior Spider-Man stood before the containment pod, his fingers drumming against the reinforced glass as the machinery around him pulsed with clinical precision. The room was a temple of science, a place where limitations were dismantled and remade.

Inside the pod, Shade—the legendary Shadow Assassin—remained suspended in stasis, his body restrained by neurological dampeners that suppressed conscious thought, keeping his mind in an artificial coma.

But unconsciousness did not mean his power had been silenced.

The sensors flickered erratically as his very existence continued to reject the natural laws of physics. His shadow-based abilities were more than just metahuman physiology—they were something fundamental, something that even in absolute stillness, continued to resist full containment.

Otto observed this anomaly with clinical fascination.

"Light is bound by the laws of physics. But you… you are an aberration, a singularity. A living void that consumes illumination, not as an absence of photons, but as an existential negation of matter itself."

His mechanical arms extended, activating a series of surgical apparatuses.

The process was about to begin.

Step One: Cognitive Dismantling – The Lobotomy

A set of high-frequency neural scalpels descended, their edges honed to the width of a single atom. Unlike conventional medical tools, these instruments were designed for non-invasive cortical separation, allowing Otto to disconnect specific neural pathways while keeping essential biological functions intact.

The containment pod's restraints shifted as the top of Shade's skull was surgically opened, exposing the raw, pulsating neural tissue beneath. A precise lattice of OBLIVION nanites infiltrated his brain matter, mapping every synaptic connection, every neurological impulse that defined his abilities.

A normal human brain would be easy to dissect—thoughts, motor functions, memories, all mapped within the prefrontal cortex, limbic system, and cerebellum.

But Shade's brain was different.

His neural activity did not align with conventional patterns. There were gaps—pockets of nothingness—regions that defied all known medical and cognitive sciences. His brain wasn't just processing thought—it was housing something unnatural.

Something extra-dimensional.

Otto's lenses flickered.

"Ah. Now we are seeing the truth of you."

With an impulse, the nanites began severing redundant neurological pathways, slowly carving away at Shade's higher cognitive functions. His personality, his sense of self, his mind—it was being dismantled, piece by piece, like an obsolete machine stripped for its components.

He would not die. Not yet.

But he would never be the same.

Step Two: Molecular Analysis – The Dissection

As the lobotomy progressed, a secondary array of OBLIVION surgical tendrils extended from Otto's mechanical limbs, their tips glowing with microscopic energy scalpels designed to slice at a subatomic level.

Shade's body, despite being motionless, shuddered.

His muscles resisted the incisions—not through biological durability, but through something else.

The darkness that made up his being was not purely organic—it was integrated, woven into his cellular structure like an invasive parasite that had fused with its host.

"Your power is not simply genetic, nor is it derived from mere metahuman physiology." Otto's voice was a quiet murmur of discovery. "It is a symbiosis… or perhaps, an infection."

He adjusted his instruments.

If Shade's power could not be surgically extracted, then it had to be restructured.

The OBLIVION nanites surged into his bloodstream, flooding his body at a microscopic level. They weren't just scanning him now—they were actively rewriting his genetic matrix, converting his very essence into pure data.

Step Three: Power Assimilation – The Reconstruction

The nanites began to integrate, studying the way Shade's cells interacted with the unnatural darkness bound to him.

Then, something incredible happened.

The shadows that had always been bound to Shade reacted.

They moved. Not randomly, not chaotically—but as if they were alive.

Otto's lenses widened. "Fascinating. You are not a wielder of shadows. You are a conduit for something far more complex."

These weren't mere dark matter manipulations. This was something deeper, something that operated beyond conventional physics.

A parasitic force, tied to Shade's very essence.

And now, Otto was in control of it.

The nanites fully synchronized, and Otto's mechanical limbs twitched as his body shivered for a fraction of a second.

Then—he felt it.

A ripple of pure nothingness—the sensation of light ceasing to exist, not through obstruction, but through eradication.

A smirk curled beneath his mask.

"Now I understand."

He looked down at Shade's unmoving form.

"You were merely a vessel. A host to something greater than yourself."

The process was complete.

Shade was now nothing more than a hollowed-out husk, his mind erased, his abilities extracted, his purpose repurposed for something superior.

Superior Spider-Man took a slow step back, flexing his fingers. The shadows responded.

"This power will no longer belong to a simple assassin. It will no longer waste itself on hired killings and petty vendettas."

He raised a hand, and the darkness around him coiled, bent, obeyed.

"Now, it belongs to me."

A/N:I'd like to thank the novel Villain Retirement for inspiring the idea of lobotomization in this chapter. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend checking it out!

[POWER STONE]