The cycle was the only truth left. Wake, heal, weaken, dress. The flood of divine energy was no longer a relief, just a biological process I was forced to undergo. The mending of my flesh, the sealing of my wounds, was like a janitor cleaning a slaughterhouse floor before the next day’s butchery. The subsequent severing of that power was a familiar, cold plunge. I was an empty cup, filled and emptied by the same cruel hand, over and over.

I no longer fought when they brought the costume. The cheap pleather of the boots felt like a second skin. The plastic belt was a familiar weight. The dead rope of the lasso, the tin tiara—they were my uniform. My job was to bleed, and this was the uniform for my work. My mind, once a fortress of strategy and hope, was now a quiet, gray plain. There was no rage left, no despair, only the serene, hollow acceptance of my function.

The Architect appeared on a large monitor, not from within the facility, but from somewhere… luxurious. He was no longer in his severe suit. He wore a plush silk robe, a glass of amber liquid in his hand. Behind him, through a panoramic window, was a turquoise sea and a pristine white-sand beach.

“Greetings, my asset,” he slurred, a smug, self-satisfied smile on his face. “I do apologize for not being there in person, but the sunsets from my private island in the Maldives are simply too exquisite to miss. Your last encounter with the Grapple-Gangs of Blüdhaven was wildly profitable. It just paid for a new yacht. I believe I’ll name it ‘The Diana’.”

He took a slow sip. “The world loves a tragedy, my dear. And you are the greatest tragedy ever told. A goddess brought low, bleeding for the amusement of the highest bidder. It’s poetry.”

My face remained placid. His flaunting, his wealth, his words—they were stones dropped into a bottomless well. They simply vanished inside my emptiness.

“But business is business,” he continued, his tone shifting. “And tonight’s client has paid a premium for a truly… transformative experience. Prepare the asset.”

The gate opened. A figure in a fully enclosed, corrosion-proof environmental suit waddled in. He was bulky, not with muscle, but with tanks and tubing. A heavy backpack fed hoses into two nozzle-like guns mounted on his gauntlets. Green, viscous liquid bubbled inside the transparent canisters. This was Caustic.

The drones took their positions. The show began.

I stood in the center of the room, my posture straight, my expression vacant. I was ready.

Caustic didn’t bother with preamble. He raised his left arm and fired. A thick jet of green acid shot through the air. I didn’t even try to dodge. The stream hit my right leg. The replica boot sizzled, melted, and dissolved into black slag in less than a second. Then the acid touched my skin.

There are no words in any language for that kind of pain. It was not a cut, or a burn, or a break. It was the pain of unmaking. I watched, with detached horror, as my own flesh blackened, blistered, and then began to liquefy, sloughing off the bone in smoking, gelatinous clumps. A scream, primal and inhuman, tore through my quiet acceptance. My body still knew how to feel, even if my soul had given up.

I fell, clutching the ruin of my leg. He fired again. A splash caught my shoulder and chest. The fake eagle emblem on my breastplate dissolved, and the acid ate into my flesh beneath, the pain so immense it felt like my entire nervous system was on fire. He walked closer, a methodical exterminator. He kicked me onto my back and aimed downwards.

“They want to see your face,” he rasped through his suit’s vocoder.

The stream of acid hit the left side of my face. The world became a universe of white-hot, sizzling agony. The pain was absolute, eclipsing thought, memory, everything. I felt the skin of my cheek and brow melt away. The horrifying sizzle was next to my ear. My left eye burst in a flash of searing light and then darkness. Tears from my remaining eye streamed down my face, mixing with the blood from my ravaged skin and the clear, horrifying fluid weeping from my dissolving tissues.

My body convulsed on the floor, a ruined thing twitching in a puddle of gore and chemical waste. I was beautiful, they once said. The ‘face of a goddess’. Now, half of it was a crater of smoking, bubbling ruin. Through the one eye I had left, I watched as Caustic, his work complete, turned and exited the chamber.

The pain was everything. It was the air I breathed, the world I saw. And in the center of that fire, the Architect’s voice returned, soft and intimate from the speaker above.

“Magnificent,” he whispered. “A true masterpiece of deconstruction. The market will go wild.”

I lay there, broken beyond any hope of repair, my life-fluids pooling on the floor.

“You must be wondering what the point of all this is,” he said, his voice turning philosophical again. “The yachts, the islands… they are merely perks. The real profit, my dear Diana, was the seed money. All the capital I have raised, all the technology I have perfected by testing it on you, was for a singular purpose.”

He paused, letting the silence hang in the air, thick with the smell of my own dissolving flesh.

“It was to build a trap not for an Amazon, but for a Kryptonian. All this money you have made for me will fund the acquisition of my next asset.”

A new monitor flickered to life. It didn’t show my broken form or his island paradise. It showed a live feed of a young woman with a familiar red ‘S’ on her chest, smiling as she helped rescue a cat from a tree in National City. Kara. My friend. Young, bright, hopeful Kara.

“She’ll be here soon,” the Architect’s voice whispered, a final blade twisting in what was left of my heart. “And you’ll have a front-row seat. You will watch as I do this to her. Day after day. You won’t be alone anymore.”

And in that moment, I found it. A place beyond acceptance. A hell deeper than any poet could imagine. The quiet, gray plain of my mind was set ablaze. Not with hope, not with defiance, but with a new, infinite agony. The agony of being a helpless witness. My one remaining eye stared at Kara’s smiling face on the screen, and for the first time in a long time, I began to scream. And I knew, with a certainty that burned hotter than the acid eating my bones, that I would never, ever stop.