Walking across the plaza, now covered in greenish blood and littered with chunks of flesh, I casually kicked pieces of the monsters around purely out of boredom.
The sirens of police cars and ambulances were still wailing somewhere in the distance.
I had about a minute before a crowd of armed extras and cameramen arrived.
Perfect time to monetize the loot.
I mentally reached for the System interface, gathered the ten Silver Tickets I’d accumulated, and, with my usual force of will, compressed them into a single Gold Ticket.
I materialized it inside my utility pouch.
Then I snapped my fingers.
The ticket dissolved into golden dust, which formed a new entry before my eyes.
Name: Harmless
Type: Trait
Rarity: Rare
Description: Look at that adorable face!
How could anyone stay angry at you for long?
People are much more forgiving toward you.
This even works in court.
I froze as I stared at the description.
Then I looked at my Kevlar gloves, covered in someone else’s guts.
Then at the severed giant mutant arm lying in a pool of blood.
Useful, no question about it.
Especially for a two-meter-tall zombie vigilante carrying a gigantic sword and smelling like a slaughterhouse.
Hopefully the synergy fixes this.
As if the System had read my thoughts, the familiar red warning window appeared.
Warning!
Trait slot limit reached.
Maximum Traits: 5
Choose one of the following actions to resolve the conflict:
1.
Burn one existing trait.
2.
Burn the new trait.
3.
Fuse it with an existing trait.
Available synergy: Scavenger.
With Scavenger?
Seriously?
How the hell does having a cute face synergize with treasure hunting?
I rubbed my chin beneath the mask, genuinely puzzled.
The synergy made absolutely no logical sense, but at least it meant I wouldn’t have to burn one of my more useful traits.
Without thinking twice, I selected the third option.
The two traits merged, glowing with a soft light.
Name: Key to the Heart
Type: Trait
Rarity: Rare+
Description: You instinctively know the right words or actions needed to make almost anyone warm up to you.
This does not work on sworn enemies, people with ironclad willpower or principles, or psychopaths.
Ho-ho-ho…
I gave a satisfied little grunt.
Searching for physical loot evolved into searching for keys to people’s souls.
Ironic.
Very useful for manipulation.
Although that raises an interesting question.
What if I actually want to piss someone off until they’re foaming at the mouth?
Will my intuition point me toward their most painful psychological pressure points, or will the trait block aggressive behavior?
While I pondered this subtle psychological question, I noticed the first patrol cars pulling onto the plaza.
The silence of the morning was suddenly shattered by the crackle of the street speakers.
Apparently, the clown had finally recovered from the shock of watching his ultimate army get sliced into steaks in under a minute.
“So that’s not going to work!”
The Joker’s voice came through the speakers, furious and childish.
“The rules were different!”
“I’m willing to accept the loss of my monstrous beauties.
After all, science requires sacrifices!”
“But Eddie?!”
“Why do you need him, little mouse?”
“That’s just cruel!”
An exaggerated sob came through the speakers.
“Aw…
I can’t hear you.”
The clown instantly returned to his natural tone, an energetic and insane showman’s voice.
“But don’t worry!”
“Before our final surprise, you and I are definitely going to have a heart-to-heart!”
Final?
Already?
I narrowed my eyes.
“See you at Fox Park!”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha…”
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!
The speakers emitted an obnoxious tone and shut off.
The broadcast was over.
I stepped backward, merging with the dense shadow cast by an overturned ambulance, then silently teleported a few blocks toward Upper Gotham.
Final.
That word kept circling through my head.
Was this amateurish bullshit with all these challenges actually going to have a meaningful finale?
My inner pragmatist was screaming that something wasn’t right.
As far as I could tell, these idiots had only one logical option left.
Realize they were completely outmatched and simply run.
Pack their shit.
Leave town.
Or, at worst, crawl into some deep hole in Gotham and continue causing minor trouble.
But definitely not stage some grand “final battle” while continuing to burn through their precious resources.
I’d just eliminated seven, technically eight, bio-tanks.
That should have pushed them toward exactly that decision.
I’d expected the Monsters to be their farewell performance.
I hadn’t expected Joker to announce another challenge.
Instead, he was inviting me to Fox Park.
No.
Something doesn’t add up.
They should be shitting themselves right now.
I captured Nygma.
They know I can reach them now.
Luring me into an open park is stupid.
Which means they’ve got something hidden there that they’re absolutely confident in.
I emerged from the shadows into a dark, narrow alley between two brick buildings.
It reeked of urine and dampness.
There were no cameras here.
Perfect place for a negotiation.
I mentally reached into Void Shadow and pulled a living, incredibly pale Edward Nygma out of my pocket dimension.
The Riddler spilled onto the wet asphalt like a sack of potatoes.
He desperately gasped for air, his eyes darting wildly around the alley.
The disorientation caused by existing without gravity or any normal sense of time had clearly fucked with his brain.
He stared at me with pure animal terror and absolutely no understanding of what was happening.
Seventy percent should be enough for him.
I activated my Aura of Terror and directed a concentrated stream of it straight at Nygma.
The air in the alley instantly froze.
The shadows along the walls seemed to stretch.
I casually opened my hand.
The Dragon Slayer materialized from my inventory and crashed down with a terrifying metallic clang, embedding itself in the asphalt a couple of centimeters from Nygma’s boot.
The ground shook.
“So, Eddie.”
“Looks like we’ve finally met in person.”
I spoke calmly.
The smile beneath my mask could probably have rivaled Joker’s grin.
It was that wide and completely devoid of human warmth.
“I-I suppose we have,” Nygma stammered.
He went even paler.
His fists clenched until his knuckles turned white.
The Riddler was visibly trembling under my aura, but I had to give him credit.
He didn’t piss himself or pass out.
He was handling it better than most of Gotham’s street extras.
“I have one question for you, Eddie.”
“Not a riddle.”
“Just a question.”
I tilted my head.
“Where’s your base?”
“A-a bad question,” Nygma nervously swallowed.
He tensed.
His mind was desperately searching for an escape route.
He was about to bargain.
Build some complicated verbal argument.
Offer conditions.
Waste time.
But I didn’t have the time or patience for those games.
One short, blurred movement.
I didn’t even pull the sword completely out of the asphalt.
I simply yanked the handle toward myself, twisting the blade with a burst of kinetic force.
The black metal passed through flesh and bone with a wet crunch, encountering almost no resistance.
“A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A!”
Nygma’s scream was inhuman and piercing.
He collapsed onto his back, staring in animalistic horror at the place where his right leg had been only a second earlier.
Blood poured onto the filthy asphalt, soaking his green jacket.
Fragments of shattered femur protruded from the cleanly severed stump.
The sharp smell of iron instantly filled the air.
And then…
Shit.
Nygma had pissed himself from the shock.
Well, at least his heart didn’t give out immediately.
I lowered the Aura of Terror to fifty percent so he wouldn’t pass out permanently.
Feat Completed: Critically injure the Riddler and break his will.
Reward: 1 Silver Ticket.
Silver?
Seriously?
For an artistic amputation and the psychological destruction of a canon villain?
Cheap-ass System.
I crouched in front of the screaming man, bringing our faces to the same level.
Then I returned the enormous sword to my inventory.
My right hand, covered in an armored glove, clamped around the stump of his leg, firmly compressing the major arteries.
Nygma gasped and arched his back.
With my left hand, I pulled a bottle of Jäger-Fanta from my spatial inventory.
I ripped off the cap.
Then I grabbed the villain by the jaw and poured the herbal-smelling liquid straight down his throat.
Nygma choked and coughed, but he swallowed.
The magical soda immediately took effect.
His blood began thickening.
The worst of the shock receded, leaving behind only a dull throbbing pain and a clear enough mind to understand his situation.
He shouldn’t bleed to death within the next hour.
“Should I repeat the question, Eddie?”
My voice was flat and emotionless.
I stared into his wide, tear-filled eyes.
He finally understood the full scale of the shit he’d gotten himself into.
I wasn’t the Batman he knew.
I wasn’t going to play riddles.
“N-no!”
“I understand!”
“Davis Street, number twelve!”
“There’s an old sewer underneath it!”
“There’s a hidden bunker down there!”
“The code for the armored door is…”
He started desperately dumping information, speaking so quickly you’d think I was about to cut off his other leg.
I gently, almost affectionately, patted him on the cheek.
That stopped his pathetic rambling.
I didn’t care about the codes.
Why would I need passwords when I could simply kick through any door?
“You’ll live.”
“For now.”
I nodded.
The space beneath Nygma shimmered.
Then I simply dropped the bleeding, whimpering cripple back into Shadow Space.
If he figures out how to tie off the stump with pieces of his shirt while he’s floating around in zero gravity, good for him.
If not, well…
that’s one way to go.
I stood up and wiped the blood from my glove.
Then I left the alley, mentally reconstructing Gotham’s map.
Davis Street, 12.
That was roughly a mile to the left of Fox Park.
So I had an interesting dilemma.
Fox Park, where Joker had thoughtfully prepared some sort of deadly trap for me.
Or the secret bunker on Davis Street, where the people funding this entire shitshow might currently be sitting completely defenseless.
To be or not to be.
I slipped into the dense, tangible darkness of an alley and began jumping from one shadow to another.
Second.
Third.
Fifth.
With every silent spatial jump through the cold nothingness, I got closer to Fox Park.
At the same time, my route passed dangerously close to Davis Street.
No…
I’ll take a quick look anyway.
My inner curiosity won.
I abruptly changed direction.
My rational mind told me that the remaining members of the gang, having lost contact with Eddie and probably realizing I’d captured him, had already evacuated their base.
Logic screamed that these bastards couldn’t possibly have left without preparing one final gift for someone as smart, handsome, and difficult to kill as me.
But one thought kept scratching at the back of my skull.
What if?!
What if they’d relaxed?
What if they’d overestimated the Riddler’s ability to resist interrogation and assumed he’d stay silent for hours?
Maybe they had even decided Nygma was dead.
From the outside, falling into a Shadow Dimension did look pretty damn ominous.
Or maybe the simplest explanation was correct.
They hadn’t had enough time to pack their shit.
Tch.
I’m still an idiot.
I should have immediately interrogated Nygma for information, summoned the Archangel, and wiped out the entire group hiding inside the bunker.
Instead, I’d wasted seven to ten minutes on unnecessary movement.
In this insane world and its bizarre rules, that was an eternity.
I emerged into an alley beside the three-story building I’d been looking for.
I stopped.
Then I listened to my new, highly specific sense.
My sense of shadows.
About thirty meters below the old infrastructure, there really was a fortified bunker.
And inside the darkness, I could clearly sense three shadows belonging to living creatures.
Missed them.
I emerged from one of the shadows.
It was not Joker.
Not Crane.
Not even Bane.
I stepped into a dimly lit room directly behind a miserable man strapped to a steel chair.
Tears glistened in his terrified eyes.
A red plastic ball gag filled his mouth.
Two other unfortunate souls were positioned in the corners of the room in exactly the same condition.
The trembling trio formed a perfect equilateral triangle.
And directly in the center of that geometric formation, sitting on a lonely stool, was a military field telephone.
Its receiver had already been lifted.
A raspy, cracked laugh was coming through the speaker.
They had been waiting for me.
“As always, you refuse to follow the script, don’t you?”
Joker sighed dramatically, sounding deeply disappointed.
I slowly scanned the bunker.
Obviously, this had once been the Riddler’s hideout.
Traces of torn blueprints and green sticky notes were still visible on the walls.
Now…
Now nobody cared about this place.
Just like nobody cared about the three doomed men whose greasy jackets concealed suspiciously thick blocks of explosives tangled together with wires.
Bombs.
I would never stop saying it.
Primitive.
Vulgar.
“Script?”
“Brucie, I think you’re confusing me with your little extras.”
I snorted as I approached the phone.
An excellent opportunity to finally troll this clown directly.
“For a genius, you think way too conventionally.”
“Explosives.”
“Hostages.”
“Again.”
“Did your imagination die along with a couple of limbs?”
Joker’s voice was venomous.
His irritation was obvious even through the static.
The name “Bruce” was clearly a sore spot.
Perfect.
Keep digging.
“I just don’t like assholes, you know.”
I calmly emphasized every word.
“And your mother didn’t like them either, Brucie.”
“Probably why she’d rather die than watch the pathetic, chemically mutilated joke her son would become.”
“Y-you!”
Joker practically choked on the other end.
His laughter stopped.
“Shut up!”
“You’re talking complete nonsense!”
“Nonsense is your fucked-up daddy putting on your own costume so he can keep you out of the electric chair!”
“You put on my costume too!”
The clown shrieked in response, losing the last traces of his composure.
“Oh?”
“So you admit it’s your costume?”
“You’d better make up your mind about your orientation, dumbass.”
“Who are you today?”
“The mutilated Clown?”
“Or the failed Bat?”
“Maybe you secretly want to be both.”
“Ambitious.”
“My orientation is explosions!”
“And I’m tired of this empty…”
My instincts as a Higher Undead, already amplified by paranoia, suddenly screamed like an alarm.
I felt electricity racing through the wires beneath the floor.
I stepped backward and dropped into my own shadow a fraction of a second before the detonators attached to the hostages’ chests clicked.
I emerged on the surface in the cool morning air.
The ground beneath my feet shook.
The foundation of number twelve collapsed with a deep, heavy boom.
The building groaned and folded inward, sending a thick cloud of concrete dust and ash into the air.
The blast wave struck my back, sending my cape flying upward.
Feat Completed: Drive the Joker into a psychological frenzy by exploiting his trauma.
Reward: 1 Bronze Ticket.
Phew.
The suit survived.
I cautiously patted the armored plates, checking my equipment.
Internally, I grimaced.
As an undead creature, I could clearly sense the sudden extinguishing of roughly thirty lives beneath the rubble.
Not just the hostages.
Everyone inside the building.
“I’ll avenge you.”
I solemnly nodded toward the settling debris.
“Batman’s word.”
I snorted at my own cynicism and slipped into the shadows again.
Now my route was definitely leading to Fox Park.
There was no point expecting another heartfelt conversation with Joker under these circumstances.
But whatever his final surprise was, I wasn’t going to miss it.
And the most interesting thing is that I never got to say the best part.
I shook my head in irritation as I materialized beneath the thick shadow of a sprawling oak tree at the edge of Fox Park.
I surveyed the area.
Calling this place a “park” was generous.
It was essentially a gigantic open-air stadium designed for public events, surrounded only by a sparse ring of trees.
Flat.
Exposed.
Completely open.
It looked suspiciously like a classic gladiatorial arena.
The terrain had clearly been chosen for a reason.
Because of the location and the early hour, there wasn’t a single civilian around.
Only a few bored security guards stood near the far entrance, shifting from foot to foot.
They hadn’t noticed me yet.
“M-Mr.
Kirkman.”
Massive concert speakers positioned around the arena suddenly came alive.
The voice was hoarse, quiet, and obviously nervous.
“Could you please wait a couple of minutes?”
I raised an eyebrow beneath my mask.
Politeness?
From Gotham’s local psychopaths?
“Well, since you said the magic word, sure.”
I spoke loudly enough for the microphones to pick me up.
The guards near the entrance flinched at the speakers and reached for their holsters.
I casually snapped my fingers.
The shadows beneath their feet opened.
The entire security shift silently disappeared into Shadow Space without a single scream.
Let them sit there while the adults talked.
“And, by the way, who am I speaking with?”
I asked in a bored tone.
“You may know me as Scarecrow.”
My opponent answered politely, almost as though we were attending an academic conference.
“Ahhh, Johnny Boy.”
I smirked.
“Listen, tell Brucie he’s a pathetic little coward for being too scared to talk to me personally.”
“And tell him his mother was a…”
I didn’t get to finish.
A familiar pneumatic hiss tore through the silence.
Several suspicious cylinders flew toward me from the direction of the stands in a high arc.
My instincts reacted before my thoughts.
I didn’t bother dodging.
The two-meter-long Dragon Slayer materialized in my hand.
I swung the massive blade, using its broad surface to smack the incoming projectiles away like baseballs.
The cylinders detonated in midair with loud pops.
Gas grenades.
But instead of the expected green fear toxin or Joker’s purple laughing gas, I was engulfed by a thick white cloud.
I stood directly in the center of it.
The suddenness of it actually made me cough.
My Higher Undead receptors immediately analyzed the basic composition of the particles settling across my armor.
Concentrated garlic extract.
And finely powdered silver.
I froze.
Blink.
Of course, neither ingredient could do a damn thing to undead of my caliber.
But the sheer absurdity of the situation made me snort with laughter.
“You might as well have brought wooden stakes and a flask of holy water, you idiots!”
I dispersed the cloud with a swing of the massive blade.
The white smoke settled.
And I finally saw my opponents.
Five men stood at different points around the arena, slowly closing the circle.
All of them looked alike.
Hard faces.
Tactical armor concealed beneath dramatic, long leather coats.
One carried a heavy crossbow with a drum-fed magazine.
That kind of toy wasn’t designed for hunting deer.
The second had several rows of different grenades hanging from his tactical vest.
The third, for fuck’s sake, actually held a large flask filled with some kind of glowing liquid.
The final two men held…
Open books.
And I seriously doubted they were carrying Fifty Shades of Grey.
Monster hunters.
Mercenaries.
I doubt these guys are the grand finale prepared by that gang of losers.
I mentally snorted while carefully studying their figures.
Then I looked down.
In the pale morning light, everything was perfectly clear.
There were no shadows beneath the five men.
None.
Not even a hint.
Now that’s interesting.
So the old paranoid bastard actually hired professionals?
I gripped the sword’s handle with both hands.
Finally.
A real fight to start the morning.