- Batman: "We won't lower ourselves to their level, it's something that you should understand by now."
Inquisitor: "I'm not lowering myself to their level because I am not killing random people in the streets for my own sick amusement. I feel no satisfaction, no pleasure, no exhilaration of any kind in any of my actions. Everything I have ever done, and ever will do, will be for mankind's continued survival and nothing less."
The Inquisitor
is a Warhammer 40,000/Young Justice (2010) Crossover by deathwing17. It is inspired by Lord-of-Change's story Death Korps of Justice, even borrowing a few scenes from it and having its protagonist make a brief cameo in the first chapter, as well as having the same premise. All of this was done with Lord-of-Change's permission, and he was so impressed by the story that he put it on his "Favorites" list and gave its protagonist a cameo in his story.
Anyway, like we said, the premise is the same: a servant of the Imperium - in this case a prodigal inquisitor-in-training named Dante - is sent to the YJ-'verse during a battle with the forces of Chaos and becomes a brutal vigilante before eventually (and reluctantly) joining the Team, but that's just the bare bones of this fic. As the author himself painstakingly emphasizes, this story is not a carbon copy of DKJ, and it lives up to that claim.
It is currently at 38 chapters.
This fanfic contains examples of:
- Admiring the Abomination: Downplayed. M'Gann is transfixed by Dante's brutal efficiency when sneak attacking Baliyan soldiers. It's an early sign that reading Dante's memories is starting to affect her.
- An Arm and a Leg: A flashback in Chapter 17 shows that Dante killed a daemon by blowing her limbs off with a lasgun.
- Anti-Hero: Dante, AKA "The Inquisitor".
- Aliens Are Bastards: Dante certainly believes so, for good reasons .
- Alone with the Psycho: Light-stooge Sebastian Ballesteros slowly starts to realize just what kind of ''hero'' Dante is when the Inquisitor starts his interrogation.
- Doctor Birch has a brief moment of this in chapter 38 during his first session with Dante.
- Asshole Victim: Shifter is such a wretched, sociopathic monster that, when Dante kills him, his teammates actually feel somewhat relieved that he's been sent to Hell where he belongs. If anything, the fact that they can't bring themselves to condemn Dante's actions disturbs them more than anything else.
- In general, Dante's "victims" have it coming.
- Awesome, but Impractical: A chainsaw is more powerful than a chainsword, but it's also heavy and can leave the wielder exhausted if they aren't burly, as Victor Zsasz finds out.
- Ax-Crazy: Victor Zsasz.
- Being Tortured Makes You Evil: Or it makes you a vengeful fanatic. Not the kind of evil that Dante's torturers were hoping for, though.
- Vanessa Kapatelis is treated similarly by Circe and the Light in an effort to turn her into a weapon against Wonder Woman. They succeed. for a time.
- Berserk Button: Shifter take Dante's mother's shape. The inquisitor's response? Incinerating him alive.
- Black-and-White Morality: The Justice League believes in this up to eleven. Reality is grey, as usual, but they simply refuse to accept that.
- Blatant Lies: During the AMAZO mission, Dante gives Aqualad a detonator to destroy the AMAZO parts in the event that they can't stop Ivo from obtaining them. When Ivo obtains them anyway, Dante demands to know why Aqualad didn't use the detonator, to which he responds that it was destroyed during the fight. It's much more likely that he just threw it away.
- Brain Washed And Crazy: Vanessa Kapatelis is captured by the Light and tortured by Circe into becoming the Silver Swan.
- Break the Haughty: The Shifter Arc does a number on the Team's ego, to the point that is takes a Rousing Speech from the Inquisitor to keep them from giving up.
- Broken Bird: Poison Ivy becomes this when she remembers the truth about her mother's murder and how her father covered it up. This and other revelations reduce her to an empty shell. A far cry from the confident and seductive villainess at the beginning.
- Later, poor Vanessa is repeatedly tortured by images of Wonder Woman murdering her.
- The Cameo: Krieg makes a brief appearance in the first chapter, escorting Dante to a meeting between inquisitor Monroe and other officers.
- Chainsaw Good: Chainsword, and most certainly good!
- Victor Zsasz uses a chainsaw in Chapter 13. See Awesome, but Impractical.
- Child Soldier: At the age of 10, Dante joined the Inquisition. The Justice League is horrified. Dante...not as much.
- The Chosen One: A flashback in Chapter 13 implies that the primary reason for destroying Dante's home and torturing him was to mold him into a champion of Chaos. Sure, they tortured a number of captured soldiers into serving Chaos, but Dante was a ten-year-old boy, so he must have been special. Unfortunately for them, he wouldn't break.
- Chronic Hero Syndrome: The Santa Prisca mission is ruined when members of the Team break off from the group to rescue a random woman of seemingly no strategic importance. Dante calls them out on their stupidity, but like idiots, they refuse to listen.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Dante, though unlike Keled, he attacks pressure points, preferring to break people's spines so that they are rendered permanently immobile below the neck.
- Dante was subjected to this by a group of Chaos cultists and daemons when he was a child. He weathered the torture and escaped.
- Combat Pragmatist: A fight is meant to be won, any and all methods are acceptable. This is a dogma Dante adheres to with extreme prejudice.
- Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: Subverted. Dante genuinely thanks M'gann for saving him from Scarecrow's fear toxin. Albeit, somewhat reluctantly but still.
- Conditioned to Accept Horror: Dante naturally. Past a certain point, the Team just grow to accept Dante's brutal methods. Which makes them even more horrified when Miss Martian starts behaving similarly.
- Corrupt the Cutie: There was a time when Dante Kellan was a nice, relatively normal boy living on an Agri-World with his mother. Then the Forces of Chaos came and destroyed everything...
- The Corruption: Zatara disregards Dante's warning and unknowingly starts to succumb to corruption after beginning to study the Warp.
- Played With regarding M'gann. Her meditation allows her to see Dante's memories, but it exposes her to 'Imperial Corruption', as one reviewer put it, making her more ruthless and zealous.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Dante slaughters the terrorists with no effort whatsoever.
- During a "friendly" spar, he defeats Troia effortlessly.
- Determinator: The term "give up" is not in Dante's vocabulary. Even as a child, his will was imperturbable.
- Did Not See That Coming: When the Team learns that Dante has kept a Kryptonite dagger in his arsenal with the intention of using it on Superboy should the clone ever go rogue, everyone, including Dante, is surprised when Superboy not only doesn't mind, but that he approves of it.
- Did Not Think This Through: The Justice League are hoping that being placed on the Team will cause Dante to soften up and become less xenophobic - an incredibly naive belief already, but what makes it worse is that they fail to take into account the utter incompetence of the group, which (rightly) disgusts him even more.
- Does Not Like Men: Troia, being an Amazon, is not too fond of her male teammates. Dante doesn't give a rat's ass.
- Driven to Suicide: Victor Zsasz swallows his tongue after Dante cripples him.
- Dumb Muscle: Superboy. He thoughtlessly charges into fights because he thinks being Superman's clone makes him invincible. Troia isn't much better, though she's at least smart enough not to separate herself from the group.
- Dying as Yourself: Dante attempts this when he believes he's been corrupted by Chaos while under Scarecrow's fear toxin. Thankfully, Miss Martian manages to save him.
- Expy: Shifter is pretty similar to Jigsaw, though without any of his redeeming qualities.
- Fantastic Racism: Dante hates aliens, telepaths, mutants, A.I.s, etc.
- Fate Worse than Death: Dante considers the reason behind his Freudian Excuse (see below) to be this.
- Victor Zsasz is subjected to one: his body is covered in corrosive chemicals, destroying his scars and making it impossible for him to make more. He begs for death, but Dante cripples him instead.
- Foil: Dante is one to Krieg.
- Krieg is a common footsoldier of the Imperial Guard, whereas Dante is an agent of The Inquisition.
- While not unintelligent, Krieg is more blunt and straigforward and Dante is a Manipulative Bastard.
- Krieg's and the Team's relationship falls apart whereas as the Team is slowly beginning to respect Dante as their leader.
- Krieg was raised from birth to be death seeking Child Soldier, while Dante Used to Be a Sweet Kid.
- Both practice Good Is Not Soft and Cold-Blooded Torture, but Krieg is very brutal, but less cunning, where Dante is more cunning, but less brutal.
- Krieg and Miss Martian each eventually start openly hating the other. Dante and M'gann are steadily beginning to respect each other.
- The above is best shown when the Imperium's boys are saved by Miss Martian : Krieg is an Ungrateful Bastard while Dante is genuinely thankful.
- Freudian Excuse: Dante lost everything and everyone he loved to the forces of Chaos when he was a small child. And then the same raiding party captured him and tried to make him a servant (and eventual champion) of Chaos via torture (which may have involved rape) for days on end before he narrowly managed to escape. He joined the Inquisition to get revenge, becoming the fanatic we all know and love in the process.
- The Fundamentalist: Dante is very religious towards the god-emperor.
- Good Is Not Nice: Dante is fairly reasonable as far as Inquisitors go, but he won't hesitate to use Cold-Blooded Torture if it means protecting humanity.
- Good Is Not Soft: M'gann is beginning to take this approach to crime fighting.
- Good Scars, Evil Scars: Dante's body is covered with scars, especially his face.
- Grudging "Thank You": After Miss Martian snaps him out of a fear toxin hallucination, Dante sincerely thanks her. He's even grateful enough to let her live after she admits that she witnessed many of his memories.
- Heroic Sacrifice: How Dante ended up in the YJ-'verse - by flying his ship into a Chaos portal in order to destroy it. It didn't kill him, though.
- Hypocrite: Troia calls Superboy a brute (which he is), but she certainly has no place to talk.
- If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: Deconstructed. See the quote at the top of the page.
- Ignored Expert: Dante warns/threatens Zatara to never talk of the Warp again after he starts asking about it. Zatara didn't listen...
- Internal Reveal: In Chapter 26, Dante reveals to Team the truth about his origins and why the 41st Millennium is such a Crapsack World.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: Played With. Though Victor Zsaz is referred to as a 'he', the narration constantly likens him to a wild animal rather than a person.
- Jerkass Gods: Dante's opinion of the Olympians. It's one of the reasons why he's so contemptuous of the Amazons.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Dante.
- His methods are more effective at putting criminals in their place.
- Criminals will rightly interpret any act of mercy on the heroes' part as a sign of weakness and brutally exploit it.
- He tries to stop the sidekicks from releasing Superboy, arguing that the clone was made by Cadmus, and thus would likely attack them if it got out. They don't listen, and pay dearly for it. Later, he urges the Justice League to have the clone destroyed (or, if not that, permanently incarcerated) because it could very well be a sleeper agent. They almost consider doing the latter, but ultimately refuse.
- His low opinion of the Team is perfectly justified: they are stupid, they are arrogant, and they never learn from their mistakes.
- When the Team is assigned to do a stealth mission, Dante argues that Kid Flash, Troia, and Superboy should be kept in reserve because none of them understand or appreciate stealth, preferring to just rush into the enemy ranks and smash everything in sight. Batman actually considers it, but the other League members outvote him, insisting that aforementioned sidekicks need firsthand experience. Sure enough, their arrogance and lack of subtlety plays a large part in screwing up the mission.
- The Justice League do coddle their sidekicks too much, and training them to be prepared for serious injuries is hardly a bad thing, since the likelihood of suffering such injuries in their line of work is incredibly high.
- Dante verbally tears into Red Arrow for the sloppy manner in which he conducted Dr. Roquette's rescue, particularly that he left her in an empty school building without giving her a way to contact him should her life be put in jeopardy. Even Green Arrow can't deny that Dante is 100% right.
- Dante is CONSTANTLY criticized for literally anything he does, but the rest of the "Team" is not. After some scolding (maybe) and a light chastisement (another maybe) they are almost immediately praised for their "determination to always do what they think is right" or a variation of those words. Obvious result: Since all of them, even if by sheer luck, managed to save the day and came back alive, they NEVER learn from their mistakes! And then, when they make the exact same mistakes but don't do as well this time, they won't stop complaining about the "undeserved" failure. When Dante says it was the Team's and the Justice League's fault that these glitches happened again, they berate him for "being too disrespectful and insensitive".
- When the characters ridiculously try to compare their own personal life experiences with the horrific events of Dante's life in his home universe, he immediately corrects them and points out that nothing they've gone through can compare to the horrors of his home universe. Even after knowing the details, they still try to do it. And maybe even scold him for thinking he is very special because of the pain of these events.
- Just a Kid: Despite claiming to avert this trope regarding Dante after he saved Gotham Academy, the Justice League still can't get it inside their heads - at least, not fully - that he is not a sad and lonely boy deep down; he is a horribly traumatized young man who suffered a terrifying fate that none of them could imagine or empathize withnote , and he turned that fear into cold, malicious rage that is only barely kept in check by an extremely disciplined and professional demeanor.
- Kill It with Fire : How Dante deals with Shifter.
- Lighter and Softer: This fanfic can be considered as such in comparison to its spiritual predecessor. Both Krieg and Dante hail from the same universe, so interactions with the Team are inevitably filled with tension due to
Values Dissonance. However, Krieg never bonded with the Team and the Justice League as a whole due to his blunt nature driving a wedge in interactions while Dante ends up being the Team’s leader and they became desensitized to his methods, with Miss Martian developing mutual respect with Dante while she and Krieg hate each other. The Justice League in this fanfic have also realized just how much they jumped the gun when dealing with Dante but not before receiving several scathing remarks about how they treated him while they continued to force their Thou Shalt Not Kill code into Krieg, further contributing to faltering interactions. - Mercy Kill: A flashback reveals that, while attacking a Chaos base, Dante comes upon a young child who had been brutally tortured by the cultists prior to his arrival. The child begs for death, so Dante gives it to him, though not before giving the kid some comforting words.
- Mind Rape: Dante's torturers were ordered not to leave any lasting physical damage, since their masters wanted to make him join their cause, but were given carte blanche to shatter his mind. They failed, but they came pretty damn close. M'gann does this to Scarecrow in chapter 36 after reading his mind and learning he was planning to go to Seattle and continue his fear toxin experiments on Dante.
- Murder by Inaction: Captain Marvel accuses Dante of this when he doesn't stop Amanda Waller's men from slaughtering a bunch of crooked auctioneers. Dante, resisting the urge to laugh, calls Marvel a hypocrite—as far as he's concerned, the Justice League get blood on their hands by letting super-villains kill people and then just throw them in jail.
- Neck Snap: A non-fatal example. Dante strikes criminals, Victor Zsasz, and later Jinx, in the neck in such a way that none of them will ever move again.
- Noodle Incident: During one of his rampages, the Joker apparently traveled to Hollywood and murdered Stephanie Meyer, the Jonas Brothers, and the Kardashians before being recaptured.
- No Sympathy: Sarah Cassidy bluntly informs Lois Lane that Dante's "victims" got what they deserved, and the media is only whining about it because they aren't looking at the bigger picture.
- No True Hero: The Justice League argues that a hero must never kill and always show leniency towards criminals. Dante scoffs at this, claiming that a true hero would stoop to anything to keep innocent people safe, and making sure that criminals don't escape from prison hardly puts you on their level.
- Not So Stoic: Make no mistake, Dante is a cold-blooded Anti-Hero, but he's not above feeling smug when Captain Marvel can't argue with his success training the Team. ( even if he disguise it as satisfaction about his weapons being clean ) Or terrified when confronted with a hallucination of the Daemonette from his childhood.
- Papa Wolf: Martian Manhunter does not take M'gann's transition from Naïve Newcomer to Good Is Not Soft well and immediately assumes the Inquisitor is somehow responsible. At one point, it takes Black Canary and Batman to keep J'onn and Dante from outright fighting.
- Passed-Over Promotion: The Justice League makes Aqualad leader of the Team despite his total lack of qualification. Dante deduces they didn't give him the position because they (rightly) feared he would whip the Team into shape and force them to employ more brutal - but effective - crime-fighting methods. After the Shifter arc, Aqualad gives the leadership of the team to Dante.
- Pet the Dog: Dante reluctantly, but genuinely, thanks M'gann for saving him from Scarecrow's fear toxin.
- A very, very, very , small part of Dante grows to respect the Team for taking their new training regime seriously after he becomes leader.
- Proud Warrior Race Girl: Troia.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Dante's opinion of the Team, and with good reason. Most of them are impulsive, arrogant, undisciplined brats who charge thoughtlessly into a bad situation. Even the relatively smarter ones (such as Aqualad and Robin) are prone to grabbing the Idiot Ball at the worst possible time. Their teamwork leaves a lot to be desired, and none of them ever learn from their mistakes.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: It's implied the daemon that tortured Dante took on his mother's appearance and molested him. Brrr...
- Another, arguably worse possibility is that the poor woman was tortured into embracing Chaos, after which she was ordered to rape Dante.
- Rape, Pillage, and Burn: Bialyan soldiers commit atrocities against civilians in Chapter 25. Most of the Team is horrified, but Dante, having witnessed far worse, is unflinching.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Inquisitor Elias Monroe, Dante's mentor, is not a nice man by any stretch of the imagination, but judging by Dante's internal monologues, he took his job seriously and wasn't a fanatic who arrested, tortured, and killed anyone who so much as looked at him wrong. While certainly willing to be ruthless, he took necessary steps to confirm whether or not his targets were actually guilty of heresy or some other crime, rather than just arrest them and torture them into confessing to whatever he wanted them to say.
- Dante himself proves to be this, much to the Team's surprise. He's patient and understanding at times and is better at maintaining order and command than Kaldur was around the same time in canon.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Dante often justifiably calls out both the Justice League and the Team for their actions, whether it be for their short-sightedness, moral absolutism, or extremist pacifism.
- M'gann calls out the Justice League for not bothering to try and understand where Dante is coming from regarding his past actions as a member of the Inquisition and makes it clear that the Imperium's extreme xenophobia is often justified.
- Doctor Birch does the same in Chapter 38 after only one session with the Inquisitor. See What the Hell, Hero? down below.
- Repressed Memories: It is revealed that Poison Ivy has them of her father murdering her mother for having an affair and covering it up as a child which severely damaged her mental state.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Martian Manhunter's immediate assumtion to M'gann's new approach to crime fighting is that the Inquisitor did something. The truth is more complicated than he realizes.
- Sadistic Choice: In Chapter 25, Shifter captures Psimon and gives the Team the option of either killing him or watch as he suffers a slow, agonizing death at Shifter's hands. Dante picks the former, seeing this as a Mercy Kill.
- In an earlier chapter, he gives Dante, Miss Martian and Troia the option to save eight years old Garfield Logan or to save a byalian commander who committed mass slaughters from being incinerated.Dante forces the girls to focus on saving Garfield. But they discover that Shifter never intended for them to save anyone : Garfield is handcuffed to the incinerator. Dante has to dislocate the boy's thumb to get him out of the handcuffs.
- Self-Made Orphan: It's implied several times that Dante had to kill his mother, and Chapter 25 confirms it.
- Sociopathic Soldier: Subverted. Dante and his mentor, Inquisitor Monroe, have done some pretty horrible things, but as stated by the latter, everything they do should never be enjoyed, only endured.
- Secret-Keeper: M'gann becomes one to Dante when she confesses to looking through his memories, now being the only other person to understand the true danger of Chaos. He does allow her to talk about the hostiles xenos, though.
- Smug Snake:
- Ivo.
- Kingman thinks that Bolt, Plastique, Solomon Grundy then Victor Zsasz can handle Dante. None of them can.
- Later, during his private auction, when one of his men ask if the inquisitor could be on their tracks, Kingman laughs it off, convinced he would know if that was the case. As he say this, Dante is in the warehouse, with Waller's men, freeing the prisonners who were to be sold. Kingman then perish in the explosion of the warehouse with his men and the crooked buyers.
- Sebastien Bellasteros is confident that Dante is just another 'gutless hero' and that he can handle being interrogated by him. It takes roughly 4 minutes ( at most ) before the Inquisitor has him singing like a canary.
- Smug Super: Superboy thinks that being a clone of Superman makes him invincible, and reacts with utter shock and outrage whenever he's proven wrong. Like when Black Canary effortlessly defeats him in a spar or when Dante last longer than he did against Canary. He gets better thanks to the Inquisitor... and Shifter.
- Stupid Good: The Team are morons, every damned one of them - well, except Dante.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Dante hates the Team with a burning passion, and with good reason.
- Thou Shalt Not Kill: Averted early on with Dante, who wipes out an entire terrorist gang. The Justice League later forces this trope upon him, much to his fury.
- Averted again when Miss Martian helps Dante kill Match.
- Training from Hell: What the Team thinks of training after Dante becomes leader. Dante thinks they're getting off light. They know better than to complain about it, though, lest Dante have them do something worse.
- Underestimating Badassery: Professor Ivo orders Amazo to ignore Dante and focus on the other members of the Team. This mistake costs him his tongue.
- Batman tries to compare the missions the Team will be going on to the ones Dante undertook when he was an inquisitor. Dante bluntly states that there is no comparison: his missions were overwhelmingly brutal, to the point of surviving for more than half a minute was considered an outright miracle.
- The Justice League underestimate Dante because of his age. They pay dearly for this, but still haven't learned.
- As of chapter 38, The Justice League have finally started to understand just how badly they've mishandled Dante after a brutal "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Doctor Birch, but by this point, not only has Dante established an alliance with Amanda Waller and A.R.G.U.S against both them and the Light, he's also forged one with Miss Martian against the threat of Chaos.
- Unskilled, but Strong: Troia, Superboy, and Kid Flash rely way too much on their super-powers, and it gets them into trouble.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Unlike Krieg, Dante had a relatively happy and normal childhood...before it was all taken away by Chaos.
- Villain with Good Publicity: How the Justice League views Dante's actions prior to his joining the Team (and one of the reasons why they put him on the Team in the first place). He starts his vigilante career by slaughtering a gang of terrorists that have taken a school hostage, then uses his subsequent popularity to prevent the Justice League from locking him up for doing so. Realizing how smart he is, they put him on the Team to keep a closer eye on him.
- Villain Respect: Downplayed as Dante is not as much as a villain as he is a Jerkass, but he genuinely compliments M'gann for stabbing a monstrous Superboy clone that was about to slaughter the whole team.
- Villainous Breakdown: The leader of the terrorists that go after Dante completely loses it after the boy wipes out all of his minions and holds him at gunpoint.
- Kingman has a brief one when he realized that his legs have been blow off in an explosion.
- Bellasteros impotently protests Dante's Cold-Blooded Torture during his interrogation by claiming 'heroes don't do this'. Too bad he didn't receive the memo : the inquisitor is not a hero.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Dr. Birch gives the Justice League a scathing "The Reason You Suck" Speech over how badly they've mishandled Dante, calling out their treatment of a war veteran and religious extremist as a troubled child and not going very far in trying to understand just why Dante is so loyal to the Imperium and the Inquisition.
- Would Hurt a Child: Dante has no compunction about killing children, though the only example we are shown was a Mercy Kill (see above).
