As the saying went, the bigger the ambition, the bigger the stage; the bigger the stage, the more mouths there were to devour the budget. The larger the operation, the easier it became to invent pretexts—not only to demand more funding, but also to make the money trail harder to investigate.
Bruce first buried Barbatos under all kinds of reports until he was thoroughly confused. Then, with an eighty-to-sixty advantage on our side, he stoked the ambitions of Barbatos and the Court of Owls. Finally, through a bewildering variety of complicated provisions and fabricated expenses, he diverted large amounts of dark energy elsewhere.
Some might have asked: Barbatos himself was the Source of Darkness. Dark energy was part of him, so how could he possibly not know where his own energy was going?
In reality, dark energy could not be recycled infinitely; it could be depleted. With a few operations to inflate the apparent losses, energy that had not actually been consumed could be quietly sent into a black box, making Barbatos believe the missing energy had been used up.
Speaking of black boxes, Constantine had to be mentioned. But sending energy to Constantine still carried risks, because who knew which wandering Constantine might crash into the Court of Owls? Bruce had chosen a safer method.
Earlier, in the newly merged city, he had encountered the Sorcerer Supreme Strange from that world. Bruce had told him then that, since they were not locals, the mages from the merged Earth were actually an even more discreet black box than Constantine.
And because 616 Old Earth had not brought its entire universe with it, the mages had effectively been cut off from the sources of their power. Aside from the energy they had stored, they could no longer acquire new energy to