Slade Unmasked

Settle in, little one. This story is about a very patient villain, and why patience is sometimes the most dangerous thing of all.

You have heard of villains who shout and announce themselves with grand speeches. Slade was not that kind of villain. Slade was the kind who had been watching the Teen Titans from before they moved into their tower — studying their patterns, cataloging their habits, learning the distance between their strengths and their habits. He had been doing this quietly, without any of them knowing, the way a chess player studies a board before making a move.

The trap he set on that Tuesday afternoon was elegant and invisible until it was already closing.

Jump City's power grid began failing — one neighborhood at a time, in a precise geometric pattern. Blink. Blink. Blink. Each outage was exactly a half mile from the last, in a shape that repeated itself across the map of the city. Robin saw it right away. He put his finger on the center of the pattern and looked at it for a long, quiet moment. The center was Titans Tower.

Three robotic sentinels had been placed in the subway tunnels beneath Jump City during the night. They were large machines, covered in Slade's orange-and-black insignia, each one built to disrupt power and communications within a half mile radius. When the Titans split to investigate the outages — which Slade had predicted they would do, which was in fact why he had designed the pattern that way — the sentinels activated. One by one, each Titan's communicator cut to static.

Cyborg found his sentinel in the East Side tunnels and fired his sonic cannon immediately. The blast hit the machine's armor — and was absorbed. The machine had been calibrated to match Cyborg's frequency exactly. For a split second, Victor Stone felt something he wasn't used to feeling in a fight: surprise. Then he shifted strategies, grabbed the sentinel's arm joints in both hands, and applied direct mechanical force until the motor housing cracked open. Victor Stone had built many machines himself, and he knew where every one of them was weakest.

Robin's sentinel was in the waterfront station, and Slade was there too — standing in the shadows of the upper platform, perfectly still, watching with the one visible eye behind his orange-and-black mask. Robin fought the sentinel hard and fast and precise the way Batman had taught him, and the machine met every move, deflected every strike, adapted and adapted and adapted. Partway through the fight, Robin understood what was happening. The sentinel wasn't trying to defeat him. It was recording him — every feint, every kick, every pattern. Slade was building a file. Robin fought the machine to a standstill and looked up at the platform where Slade had been standing. It was empty. Slade had already gone.

In the west tunnel, Starfire and Beast Boy took on the third sentinel as a pair, and they were not subtle about it. Beast Boy transformed into a massive ram and drove the machine repeatedly into the tunnel wall with a series of tremendous crashes that echoed all the way to the surface. When the casing cracked, Starfire raised both hands and sent a starbolt straight into the opening. The sentinel went dark.

When the five Titans reconnected at the tower, the city's power had returned. The three sentinels were offline. Slade had vanished completely, leaving behind no trace — except for one small thing. On Robin's windowsill, placed with perfect precision, was a single orange coin.

Robin stood in the mission room for a long time that evening, looking at the coin on the table in front of him. The attack hadn't been an attack at all. It had been a lesson — or rather, a class, with Slade as the student and the Titans as the subject. Everything they did under pressure, every choice and instinct and habit, had been observed and noted.

"He'll come again," said Raven's quiet voice from the doorway.

"I know," Robin said.

"Then we need to know ourselves better than he does," Raven said. She didn't say it like a warning. She said it like a fact — something that simply needed to be understood and acted upon. Then she returned to her room.

Robin picked up the orange coin and set it in the very center of the mission board, where he would see it every single day. A reminder that the best preparation for an enemy who watches you closely is to understand yourself more clearly than they ever could.

Sleep well, little hero. The patient ones are worth watching closely. But knowing yourself is always the stronger shield.