The living bait dressed as Scarecrow didn’t make the first move.
The figure simply stood at the edge of the parapet, staring at me through the fogged lenses of its respirator.
Apparently, the privilege of opening this particular game had generously been left to me.
I wasn’t about to refuse.
A brief mental command, and two skeletal mages silently emerged from the nearest shadows, one wielding the element of air, the other water.
Their empty eye sockets glowed faintly.
A second later, a double hemispherical elemental barrier closed around the motionless fake Scarecrow.
A dense layer of water was compressed between the crushing forces of hurricane-strength wind.
Just to be safe, I immediately fired several thick strands of shadow chains from beneath my feet.
They wrapped tightly around the figure, completely immobilizing the puppet.
“Unfortunately…
he wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway.”
I grimaced as the living mannequin inside the elemental sphere exploded into pieces with a sickening, wet crunch.
No resistance.
No magic.
Just a detonator inside his chest and a kilogram of explosives that had turned a human being into bloody paste mixed with scraps of cheap burlap.
The space inside the elemental sphere instantly filled with thick, impenetrable green gas.
The toxin settled heavily, trying to seep through the barriers, but the swirling winds created by my air mage kept the filth securely trapped inside.
Whatever script I’d just activated, nobody had planned on having a civilized conversation with me.
The poor bastard who’d been blown apart was only the starting gun.
“And a distraction for the other expendable soldiers.”
I calmly shifted my gaze toward the facade of West Hospital.
Around a dozen windows on different floors suddenly shattered with dull pops.
Familiar green gas poured outside in thick, lazy clouds.
The trap was practically foolproof.
It didn’t matter how I chose to enter the building.
Through the main entrance, the ventilation system, or the roof.
I would inevitably run into one of these walking bombs.
The death of one would trigger a chain reaction among the others.
Panic erupted below.
A hospital was a closed ecosystem packed with sick, vulnerable people.
And now someone had injected that ecosystem with pure, concentrated nightmare.
The morning silence was shattered by the first screams.
Not ordinary screams of fear.
These were hoarse, animalistic cries of terror that tore at the throat.
People began pouring through the main entrance.
Some ran blindly, tripping and crashing onto the asphalt.
Others clawed at their own faces until they bled, desperately trying to brush away invisible spiders.
Someone was screaming over the illusion of a dead child.
Someone else was apparently seeing the Joker and was shrieking his name in absolute hysteria.
“Heh-heh-heh-heh-ha!
So, how do you like our little surprise, mouse?!”
The street speakers mounted on poles around the hospital suddenly came alive.
The voice was distorted by static, but I’d recognize that cracked, hysterical tone anywhere.
Madness mixed with childish excitement.
Bruce Wayne.
The local Joker.
One-eyed, one-armed, completely unhinged, and dear old Daddy Batman’s favorite little son.
“Speak of the devil.”
I lazily snapped my fingers, recalling the skeletons.
There was no point keeping the gas trapped on the roof anymore.
Hell had already opened a local branch downstairs.
The green cloud above the parapet slowly began drifting downward.
“Although you don’t have to bother answering!” the clown cheerfully continued, obviously enjoying the sound of his own voice.
There was no two-way communication between us.
The usual comic-book logic was functioning perfectly, but I had to give this gang of cripples credit.
Their organizational skills were impressive.
Coordinating the destruction of multiple bridges, taking over the Opera House, mining the library, and now launching a chemical attack on a hospital.
Eddie and Bruce had clearly gone way above their usual level.
“Especially since this is nowhere near the main surprise!” Joker shrieked happily.
Something heavy crashed in the background.
“Of course.”
I stated the obvious dryly while watching the crowd below scramble in every direction.
I couldn’t help the civilians already poisoned by the fear gas.
My undead physiology made me immune, but I had no way to heal the minds of other people.
All I could do was hope that, as far as I knew, most versions of Scarecrow’s toxins eventually worked their way out of the body, leaving behind nothing more than a stutter and a couple of lifelong phobias.
“But if fear, panic, and meaningless human suffering aren’t the main surprise, then what is?!”
Joker paused theatrically, gasping into the microphone.
“Why, something unique, of course!”
“Or rather…
someone!”
“Release the Kraken!”
“Or whatever they call it in those boring books of yours!”
As if responding to his command, the hospital’s main entrance was simply blown outward.
The massive doors tore free with a metallic screech and flew a dozen meters across the street, crushing a parked ambulance and several unlucky civilians who happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Something emerged from the hole.
Something that had to squeeze through the doorway just to fit.
I narrowed my eyes.
I had no emotions to speak of anymore, but pure aesthetic disgust still managed to stir somewhere in the back of my mind.
It was a mountain of meat.
Four meters of swollen, bulging muscle that looked ready to burst from internal pressure.
Its entire body was covered in thick, pulsing purple and neon-green veins.
But its size wasn’t even the most disturbing thing about it.
The crown jewel of this chemical abomination was its head.
It was unnaturally small for a body that enormous, almost as if someone had crudely sewn the head of a crying infant onto the torso of an overinflated bodybuilder.
Its face was smeared with careless white makeup.
The corners of its mouth had been sliced all the way to its ears, creating the classic Joker grin.
Saliva mixed with blood poured from the ragged wounds.
The monster wasn’t roaring with rage.
Its tiny, bulging eyes were filled with concentrated, undiluted terror.
Apparently, the Scarecrow toxin flooding the hospital was affecting it too, driving an already mutilated mind completely insane.
It was grotesque.
Ridiculous.
Pathetic.
And dangerous.
Not to me, obviously.
One unfortunate guy in a hospital orderly’s uniform had terrible luck.
While fleeing from his hallucinations, he tripped and curled into a fetal position directly in the path of the walking meat tank.
The monster didn’t even notice him.
One enormous foot came down on the man.
There was a sound like an overripe, rotten watermelon bursting open.
Blood sprayed in every direction, staining the asphalt.
“Heavy.
Strong.
And completely stupid.”
I calmly assessed the threat.
“Allow me to introduce you!”
Joker’s voice continued blaring from the speakers, drowning out the screams and crunching bones.
“The Beast!”
“A real Beast, desperately missing his Beauty!”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
“Finally, something that might actually make me sweat?”
I muttered.
I launched myself forward.
One sharp leap from the roof.
The wind screamed past my ears.
While still airborne, I extended my arms.
Thick black chains erupted from the shadow beneath the giant, twisting like enraged snakes.
They slammed into the monster’s swollen flesh with metallic clangs, wrapping around its tree-trunk arms and neck.
I pulled.
The massive creature, weighing at least half a ton, staggered as my momentum knocked it off balance.
With a strained roar, it toppled sideways.
“The recipe is simple.”
I maintained control of the bastard thrashing against the chains.
“Bane’s serum to inflate the muscles.”
“Then Joker dumped some experimental chemical crap on top to increase aggression.”
“And finally, Crane’s toxin to make sure it doesn’t think, but simply tears apart everything it sees because it’s terrified.” Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
A chemical time bomb.
And there was no way I could leave it on the ground among civilians.
I continued falling.
Only about ten meters remained before I hit the ground.
“Archangel!”
I mentally shouted the command.
Space distorted beneath me, vomiting the massive futuristic fighter from its pocket dimension.
I landed heavily on the armored hull.
Immediately synchronizing my shadow bindings with the ship’s armor, I transformed the chains into a reliable tow cable.
“Up.”
The Archangel’s engines roared to life, scorching the asphalt beneath its thrusters.
The fighter shot vertically into Gotham’s night sky, dragging the monster behind it as the creature writhed helplessly at the end of the chains.
The acceleration slammed me against the armor, but undead bodies don’t feel pain.
We broke through the lower cloud layer in seconds.
The city buildings became a blurred gray smear far below.
Two kilometers.
Enough.
I released the shadow chains.
Without anything holding it up, the monster flailed its enormous arms helplessly as it began falling into the abyss.
“Fire all weapons.”
I gave the fighter’s control system the command.
The Archangel responded instantly.
Twin turrets rotated with a shriek, unleashing a barrage of precision armor-piercing missiles into the falling mountain of meat.
A flash.
A fireball blossomed above Gotham, instantly annihilating the chemically enhanced flesh into ash and tiny fragments.
The shockwave didn’t even rock the fighter.
The explosion had been powerful.
A full-scale high-explosive detonation.
If that thing had exploded on the ground, it probably wouldn’t have destroyed the entire hospital, but it could easily have vaporized a couple dozen civilians and brought down the facade.
A living dirty bomb.
“How convenient that I expected exactly this from them.”
I smirked as the burning scraps of meat dissolved into the thin air.
A translucent System window immediately appeared before my eyes, confirming my thoughts.
Feat Completed: Defeat the “Beast” without allowing it to detonate near a civilian structure.
Reward: 1 Gold Ticket.
“Gold.”
“For a disposable enemy, not even an independent villain, just a chemically pumped-up punching bag.”
“Worth it.”
“I love being Batman.”
I mentally recalled the Archangel into my inventory and allowed myself to enter free fall, spreading my arms like the wings of a bat.
The wind hammered my face and whipped my cape behind me.
While falling, I materialized the freshly acquired Gold Ticket.
Without wasting any time, I tore it apart with my usual snap of the fingers.
Golden dust scattered through the air, forming a new item description.
Name: Any Vehicle Voucher
Type: Item
Rarity: Rare
Description: You may exchange this voucher at any time for any ordinary vehicle available in your world, from a hypercar to a private yacht.
The vehicle will be teleported directly to you, and all necessary legal and bureaucratic formalities will be automatically completed.
I skimmed the description while rapidly approaching the ground.
“Not particularly useful right now.”
“But…
it won’t hurt to have.”
“Eventually I’ll get tired of stealing Batmobiles and just order myself a brand-new Bugatti.”
A heavy impact against the cracked asphalt in front of the hospital sent a cloud of concrete dust into the air.
I landed on my feet without the slightest damage to my joints, absorbing the enormous kinetic force of the fall.
My Higher Undead body hummed with accumulated energy, like an overloaded capacitor.
I stood motionless inside the cloud of dust, waiting for the next move from this gang of lunatics.
So far, they’d been doing a surprisingly good job as suppliers of Chaos Tickets.
I could only hope their creativity hadn’t already run dry.
“Well, that’s no fun!”
Joker’s voice came through the street speakers again.
He sounded like a child whose favorite toy had just been taken away.
There was genuine disappointment in his voice after my easy victory over the mutant.
“I didn’t even get a chance to open my popcorn!”
“Although, all right.
I expected something like this.”
“Either way, that was only the warm-up!”
Another massive figure appeared through the wide opening where the hospital doors had once been.
The same bulky body.
The same pulsating green and purple veins.
Another chemical monster.
It lumbered into the street, thick toxic saliva dripping from its chin.
Then another squeezed through behind it, ducking so it wouldn’t knock down what remained of the doorway.
Then another.
And another.
“Seven oversized slabs of meat.”
I mentally counted them as the line of giants assembled before me, each one grunting and driven mad by fear and rage.
I even felt a brief, almost respectful sense of surprise.
The scale of this gang of losers was genuinely impressive.
Organizing this many events in a single night, then producing an entire batch of powerful bio-tanks enhanced with some unique serum…
That required enormous resources, logistics, and some seriously impressive planning.
Against me, these creatures were about as threatening as a mosquito to an elephant.
They were just walking bags of experience.
But an ordinary Batman without superpowers?
They would tear him apart.
There wouldn’t even be enough left to leave a wet spot on the asphalt.
I grinned beneath my mask.
I didn’t charge directly into the crowd near the entrance.
Instead, I slowly backed away, drawing them farther from the hospital facade and any potential survivors still trapped inside.
When these things inevitably exploded into pieces, I’d rather have the acid spray and shockwaves hit an empty parking lot than the hospital’s load-bearing walls.
The creatures took the bait.
They charged me with deep, guttural roars, their heavy footsteps shaking the ground.
Enough distance.
I snapped my fingers.
A massive, crude slab of black iron dropped heavily into my hand.
The Dragon Slayer.
“Let’s dance.”
I threw the words into the empty air.
I inhaled.
The Breathing Technique filled my dead body with supernatural lightness.
I shot forward faster than an ordinary human eye could register.
The meat grinder began.
Shadow chains erupted beneath the monsters, locking around the ankles of the first two.
Their momentum sent them crashing onto the asphalt, breaking bones as they fell.
One swing of the greatsword, and the massive head of the first giant went tumbling across the pavement before crashing against a fire hydrant.
I didn’t even stop.
I ducked beneath the third monster’s massive fist, letting the punch sail over my head.
I shifted my weight and poured all the kinetic energy I’d accumulated earlier into a devastating spinning kick from my taekwondo arsenal.
Enhanced by my physiology and stored energy, the strike simply tore the monster’s leg off at the knee.
The creature collapsed sideways.
The Dragon Slayer immediately plunged into its chest.
Blood erupted across the asphalt.
I moved like a perfectly lubricated machine.
No mercy.
No compassion.
No attempts to “harmlessly neutralize” anything.
The chains restrained.
The sword cut.
Kinetic energy tore flesh apart.
It took me less than a minute to transform the spacious parking lot in front of the hospital into a bloody, smoking battlefield covered in enormous chunks of severed flesh, bones, and the foul chemical stench produced by Gotham’s shadowy geniuses.
The monsters didn’t even have time to detonate.
I was cutting them apart faster than the triggers inside their mutilated bodies could activate.
I shook the thick green blood from the blade, returned the Dragon Slayer to my inventory, and cracked my neck.
“Batman doesn’t kill, they said.”
I nodded to myself with satisfaction as I surveyed the massacre.
“But no…”
“Batman kills.”
A familiar System window appeared before my eyes.
Feat Completed: Defeat the “Beast Army” without causing excessive casualties.
Reward: 1 Gold Ticket.
“An army?”
“There were only seven of them.”
“System, you’re being awfully generous with the praise today.”
Still, there was no reason to refuse free Gold.
While Joker suspiciously remained silent on his microphones, presumably trying to process the fact that his ultimate biological weapon had just been sliced into steaks in sixty seconds, I reached into my utility pouch.
I materialized the Gold Ticket and immediately activated it with my usual rip.
Golden dust formed into text.
Name: Antigravity
Type: Ability
Rarity: Elite
Description: Allows you to completely eliminate the effects of gravity on a target or area within your line of sight, causing objects to behave as though they are in absolute zero gravity.
You may also invert gravity, causing targets to “fall” into the sky at tremendous speed.
“Tch…”
“Another ability.”
I clicked my tongue in irritation.
The skill was fucking amazing, no question about that.
Sending Thomas’s Batman flying into the stratosphere would be stylish as hell.
But I already knew what the next System message would say.
The red warning window appeared almost immediately.
Warning!
Ability slot limit reached.
Maximum Ability Slots: 3
Choose one of the following actions to resolve the conflict:
1.
Burn one of your existing abilities.
2.
Burn the newly acquired ability.
3.
Fuse it with one of your existing abilities.
Available synergy: Shadow Binding.
“Well, at least synergy is available.”
“Same choice as always.”
I mentally selected the third option.
The Elite ability immediately merged with my shadow ability.
Energy swirled into a dense vortex.
Then the System produced a result that made me mentally freeze for a second.
It was…
Not at all what I’d expected.
Name: Void Shadow
Type: Ability
Rarity: Epic
Description: Your control over shadows has reached a new level, reinforced by spatial and gravitational manipulation.
Any shadow can now function as a two-way portal for you.
You can instantly travel between shadows within your line of sight.
Key Skill: You can force the shadow of a target to “open” and forcibly drag an opponent into your personal Shadow Space, a pocket dimension of pure darkness where gravity obeys your will and time flows subjectively.
Escaping this dimension without your permission is extremely difficult.
The stronger the opponent, the more energy you must expend to keep them inside.
“Jackpot.”
“Holy fucking jackpot!”
An Epic ability created through the synergy of a Rare+ and an Elite ability!
Had the System broken?
No.
As a true min-maxing nerd, I quickly analyzed the probabilities.
This was a hidden mechanic.
If I performed two consecutive synergies using the same base slot, the chance of success and rarity advancement increased dramatically.
First, I’d fused the Shadow Mark and Shadow Chains into Shadow Binding.
Now I’d added spatial and gravitational manipulation to it.
And the result was my own personal pocket Gulag.
Literal ultimate crowd control.
Unlike the old shadow chains, holding Superman would no longer be limited to a pathetic couple of seconds.
If I could catch Clark and drag him into the Shadow Space, where there was no yellow sunlight and gravity itself could break his bones at my command…
That completely changed the rules of the game.
“And all of this became possible because I am…”
I nodded proudly, overwhelmed by my own superiority.
“Batman.”
My thoughts about the kind of power that the local inhabitants of Bat-infested caves could only dream about were interrupted by a soft System chime.
Another window appeared.
The text made me stop.
Feat Completed: Force the Riddler to obsess over the puzzle involving the “Unliftable Stone.”
Reward: 1 Silver Ticket.
I blinked.
Then read it again.
“No fucking way.”
“That idiot actually fell for it?!”
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
The bait I’d left behind purely for fun, just to mess with him, back at the first destroyed bridge.
I’d expected to kill Nygma long before he ever reached the stone.
And it worked.
The supposed genius of logic was standing there right now, seriously trying to solve the paradox of a System item.
“Eddie, Eddie…”
“What the hell are you doing?”
I shook my head in disappointment.
I made a massive leap.
Then, without abandoning my tradition of excessive theatrics, I summoned the Archangel in midair.
The fighter shot toward the first bridge like a blurred streak.
The journey took only a few seconds.
I recalled the fighter and dropped like a stone, merging with the dense shadows beneath the bridge supports.
Chaos reigned below.
A crowd of police officers.
Fire trucks.
Flashing lights.
Paramedics running around.
The blast site had been cordoned off.
And right there, behind the yellow tape, beside my ordinary, completely unremarkable boulder, a middle-aged man was crouching.
He wore a baggy emergency responder uniform, the kind of disguise nobody would pay much attention to.
He shone a flashlight at the stone while muttering frantically under his breath.
Every so often, he tried to move it.
The stone even obediently pretended to shift slightly, as if it might give way any second.
I silently stepped out of the shadows directly behind him.
“Not working, Eddie?”
The man jumped as though he’d been electrocuted.
He slowly turned his head.
His face, twisted with concentration, displayed a mixture of shock, disbelief, and complete confusion over how I’d managed to appear here when I’d been on the other side of the city only seconds ago.
He opened his mouth to shout something.
I simply snapped my fingers.
Void Shadow activated without any flashy effects.
Nygma’s own shadow, cast across the asphalt, suddenly became completely black, three-dimensional, and liquid.
It opened beneath him like a mouth without teeth.
The Riddler dropped into it instantly without making a sound, as if he’d fallen through thin ice.
The shadow closed immediately, leaving nothing but ordinary asphalt behind.
I felt a faint pulse of energy inside me.
My Shadow Prison had just received its first resident.
Eddie was now suspended somewhere in absolute darkness, without gravity, alone with his thoughts.
An ideal place for solving riddles.
A second later, I stepped into my own shadow and used it as a portal.
I emerged on the nearest rooftop, summoned the Archangel, and returned to the hospital.
Below me, people were still running around.
Ambulance sirens continued screaming through the streets.
The show was still going.
Even though one of its directors had just been removed from the board.
A familiar System window flashed before my eyes.
Feat Completed: Capture the Riddler alive.
Reward: 1 Silver Ticket.
“Oh.”
“That’s ten Silver Tickets already…”
I calculated mentally, waiting for Joker’s next move.