A random rooftop on a random Gotham high-rise, blasted by icy winds, turned out to be the perfect place to catch my breath and process everything that had just happened.
Below me, police sirens wailed through a maze of neon signs and rain-soaked alleys.
Up here, high above the streets, there was relative peace and quiet.
The confrontation with the ARGUS operatives and Batman had honestly been painfully boring and predictable.
Calling it a fight would have been generous.
It was more like beating up helpless children while systematically violating the laws of physics.
They literally couldn’t do anything to me.
I’m not a speedster.
I don’t have access to the Speed Force.
But they simply couldn’t keep up with my speed, boosted by oxygen and steroids.
I’m no Doomsday when it comes to durability, either, but the bullets from their assault rifles that occasionally found their mark simply sank into my dead flesh, reinforced by dark magic, without causing any meaningful damage.
And I’m not the Joker, either.
I don’t get off on pointless slaughtering of disposable extras.
That was actually the only reason I hadn’t killed anyone.
If I have the tactical or logical option to avoid killing relatively normal people who are simply following orders, I try not to do it.
Especially because, in the reality of the Chaos Gacha, pacifism can sometimes pay better than bloodlust.
In this particular case, for not killing an armed squad, I received a Silver Ticket.
If I’d chopped them into pieces with my enormous sword, the System probably wouldn’t have even bothered giving me a Bronze Ticket, considering the ridiculous difference in our strength.
For defeating, or rather humiliating, all the operatives, I received Gold.
And for defeating Batman, all it took was one perfectly calculated strike that broke through his armor.
For that, I received an entire Platinum Ticket.
In the last case, the “first encounter” factor with a key hero had clearly played a role.
If I’d killed him there on the Depot rooftop, I probably could have scored a Diamond Ticket, maybe even a Legendary one.
Purely for eliminating one of the foundational pillars of this universe.
BUT.
There was always that infamous “but.”
Who would generate content for me after that?
Who would lead the League, throw obstacles in my path, and trigger global events in the future?
Keeping Batman alive, despite my skepticism and disgust toward the hypocrite, was nothing more than a long-term investment.
It’s more profitable to milk a cow than slaughter it on the first day.
After that, I simply…
Ran away.
That earned me another Silver Ticket.
On the way, I jumped into some random alley and ran into a local thug.
I had to rob him, sorry, buddy, nothing personal, so I could get rid of my acid-burned rags and change into something less conspicuous.
Now I was wearing a pair of completely inconspicuous baggy jeans, painfully tight sneakers, and a dark hoodie with a deep hood that hid my pale, earless face.
But the most important trophy was, naturally, the smartphone.
For that little bit of street robbery, the Gacha reluctantly tossed me a Bronze Ticket.
So, in total, for one short fight and escape:
One Bronze Ticket.
Two Silver Tickets.
One Gold Ticket.
One Platinum Ticket.
The bank balance was growing.
But I couldn’t care less about the Tickets themselves right now.
First things first.
I settled down on the edge of the roof, fully aware that I was still being watched by whatever global surveillance systems this world had.
In a world like this, it seemed like every second person had access to one.
I needed to figure out what was wrong with this particular universe.
Information was currency.
And information was worth more than Platinum.
I unlocked the stolen phone and dove into the internet.
That’s how I ended up on the forum:
FOJ.com.
The brainchild of Victor Stone, better known as Cyborg of the Justice League.
It turned out to be surprisingly entertaining.
Both the forum and the League’s official website became excellent sources of lore.
Nothing was ever stated directly.
There were no sensational headlines revealing secret identities.
But by comparing the local news with my meta-knowledge of the DC multiverse, I managed to put the pieces together.
Batman here was Thomas Wayne.
The conclusion was almost painfully obvious.
Simply because he was alive in this version of reality.
And also…
“The Joker is Bruce Wayne.”
The puzzle snapped into place with a deafening click when I stumbled across an archived article about a tragic incident at the Wayne manufacturing plant two years ago.
“Death of Empire Heir Bruce Wayne Following Accidental Fall Into Vat of Active Chemicals.”
There were, naturally, very few details.
The official story was an industrial accident.
But I could make an educated guess.
At the time, Bruce had been Batman, while the “classic” Joker had been operating in Gotham.
Then some ridiculous chain of absurd coincidences happened, something involving a fight on elevated platforms, perhaps, and…
The previous Joker died.
But the DC Universe doesn’t tolerate empty spaces.
It swallowed Bruce, dissolved him in acid, and spat him back out to replace the dead psychopath.
And Thomas, driven insane by grief, put on the mantle of the Bat in order to…
Save his son?
Or maybe Bruce himself killed the previous Joker and went insane from the toxins?
If that was the case, things became even darker and more surreal.
“Everything is perfectly in line with this sick universe,” I muttered, staring at the smartphone screen.
Now the reason the current Batman was so fanatically obsessed with keeping the Joker alive became crystal clear.
Why he refused to let anyone kill him.
Why he sent Superman after anyone who tried.
He wasn’t simply a hypocrite and an asshole in Kevlar, although he certainly wasn’t innocent of that.
He was simply the winner of the Father of the Year award.
First place from the bottom, obviously.
Protecting a monster who kills hundreds of people because he’s your precious little boy.
Romantic enough to make me puke.
But this discovery also meant something extremely important to me.
This reality was one of those conceptual versions where Batman and the Joker were destined to coexist forever.
Two sides of the same chain.
And what did that mean for my personal system of measurement?
TICKETS!
If I killed this Bruce-Joker, another one would immediately take his place.
The universe would twist itself inside out to create a replacement, probably even more deranged, insane, and powerful than the last.
I suspected the same thing would happen with Batman-Thomas.
An infinite generator of high-level opponents.
It would be pretty damn fun to see how far I could push them toward their strongest, most twisted forms.
“The Batman Who Laughs…”
I imagined what might emerge in this universe because of my interference.
A chthonic monster powerful enough to erase, rewrite, and distort entire multiversal clusters through the sheer force of its diseased mind.
I couldn’t help smiling in anticipation.
For a moment, it felt like the dead blood in my veins began pulsing faster.
A Divine Ticket.
The ultimate, absolute goal of most of my “runs.”
The mythical artifact of the System.
A Ticket that almost always produced an ultimate ability or item capable of breaking the very laws of existence.
A skill or item that could place you above the gods.
Getting one was insanely difficult.
Often, it was simply impossible through ordinary survival.
You had to accomplish something completely beyond the boundaries of sanity.
A feat that would irrevocably break the backbone of an entire world.
Ideally, it would even crack neighboring universes. The source of this chapter is g.com.
The Batman Who Laughs…
Defeating something like that could absolutely be worth a Divine Ticket.
That creature was Chthonic with a capital C.
A monster that, according to the comics, required a team consisting of a Golden Age version of Wonder Woman and the peak Justice League to defeat.
That roster even included Superman Prime, who could casually spin entire galaxies around one…
Ahem.
One finger.
“I’m getting ahead of myself, skinning a mad god before I’ve even killed it,” I muttered, forcibly cutting off the train of thought.
For now, I had to deal with my current problems in Gotham.
And since I’d already thought about the Justice League, I needed to assess the pieces on the board.
I switched to the superhero syndicate’s official page.
Yes.
They already existed in this world.
They functioned as a full, if somewhat dysfunctional, team.
The current roster was surprisingly small.
Only six members:
Batman.
Superman.
Wonder Woman.
Cyborg.
The Flash.
Aquaman.
They didn’t have their famous orbital headquarters yet.
No Watchtower.
They only had something called the Hall of Justice in Metropolis.
And judging by the activity logs, it functioned more like a museum than an actual headquarters.
Practically nobody from the League spent any significant amount of time there.
Batman was permanently stuck in Gotham, playing family therapist with maniacs.
Flash was running around Central City.
Aquaman was splashing around Atlantis.
In other words, the League was still in a very early, uncoordinated stage.
Hell, what else could you call it when their main roster didn’t even have Green Lantern or Martian Manhunter yet?
That could only mean one thing.
The major cosmic arc hadn’t happened yet.
“That’s good.”
“That’s fucking excellent.”
I shut off the smartphone screen and slipped it into the pocket of my hoodie.
“I’ve got time to farm stats and prepare for Darkseid’s arrival.”
Sure, I probably wouldn’t get a Divine Ticket simply for beating the ruler of Apokolips.
The scale wasn’t quite there, even though Darkseid was also conceptual Chthonic material.
But Legendary or Mythic loot for kicking his ass?
The System would definitely give me something.
And that was already a pretty substantial investment.
Either way, right now I needed to stop wasting time on pointless reflection and focus on my next steps.
Priority number one: solve the Joker problem.
And this time, there would be no theatrical pauses or heart-to-heart conversations.
I wasn’t going to make that rookie mistake again.
No more games with the “favorite of the plot.”
The next time that green-haired bastard came within my reach, I’d simply cut his head off.
No foreplay.
Next came the other inhabitants of this local freak show.
Riddler.
Penguin.
Scarecrow.
Mr.
Freeze.
Two-Face.
Poison Ivy.
Bane.
Catwoman.
Killer Croc.
I now had rock-solid confirmation from the forum that all nine of them were alive and well.
And, most hilariously, they escaped Arkham with such regularity that they might as well have been following a schedule.
The local prison system was nothing more than a revolving door for psychopaths.
One interesting fact caught my attention.
Harley Quinn had disappeared without a trace approximately two years ago.
Roughly around the same time Bruce Wayne had officially died in that vat of acid.
That was yet another substantial piece of evidence supporting my theory about whose face was hiding beneath the clown makeup in this reality.
And the classic psychos weren’t even the biggest problem.
There were entire organizations operating in Gotham.
The Court of Owls, deeply rooted in the city’s architecture and elite.
Ra’s al Ghul’s League of Assassins.
High-priced freelance killers like Deathstroke.
And, of course, Gotham’s traditional mafia, so deeply intertwined with City Hall and the police that it was impossible to tell where the law ended and extortion began.
“There’s definitely plenty of room to work.”
I placed the stolen smartphone on the parapet.
This city was basically an all-you-can-eat buffet for someone whose goal was to generate Chaos.
A System window immediately flashed at the edge of my vision.
Feat Completed: Acquire more information about the world’s structure and lore.
Reward: 1 Silver Ticket.
Small, but nice.
Following the intuitive sensations at the edge of my consciousness, I mentally reviewed my spatial pockets.
Four Bronze Tickets.
Five Silver Tickets.
And two higher-tier Tickets.
I wasn’t going to touch the Bronze and Silver junk yet.
I didn’t need any more Curses right now.
But the heavy artillery?
That needed to be deployed.
With a small exertion of will, I materialized the Gold and Platinum rectangles in reality.
Following the traditional procedure, I decided to start with Gold.
The cardboard tore in half with a distinctive crack.
Name:
The Risen
Type:
Trait
Rarity:
Elite
Description:
Every time a negative effect, Curse, excluding System Curses, or physical limitation is inflicted upon you, your base attributes and magical resistance increase proportionally.
The more penalties and debuffs you receive, the stronger and more durable The Risen becomes.
I didn’t even have time to celebrate what was, without exaggeration, an absolutely phenomenal survival Trait.
The Gacha screen flashed.
The text changed to a red notification.
Apparently, this was another balance adjustment introduced in version 13 of the System.
Attention!
Maximum number of Trait slots reached.
Maximum: 5.
You may choose one of the following options to resolve the conflict:
1.
Burn one of your existing Traits and free the slot for the new one.
2.
Burn the new Trait and receive compensation in the form of a lower-rarity Ticket, Silver.
3.
Create a Synergy with one of your existing Traits.
Five Traits.
I slowly exhaled.
This was…
Normal.
Even expected.
Whatever the hell the entity on the other side was, it couldn’t allow me to stack passive abilities forever until I turned into some invincible meatball.
That would get boring pretty damn fast.
But the interesting part was the third option.
Synergy.
In my previous lives, I’d only encountered this mechanic as a separate, extremely rare option, and even then it had been fairly limited.
Now they’d integrated it directly into the System’s core as a full-fledged mechanic.
Naturally, I didn’t even consider the first two options.
“Synergy.”
I made the choice mentally.
Synergy available with the following Traits:
Earth Resistance, Rare
Dread Knight, Elite
The System, as usual, provided absolutely no information about what would come out of the fusion.
A cat in a bag.
But if I applied basic logic, the concept of The Risen, an entity that grew stronger through pain and debuffs, fit perfectly with the foundation of an undead Dread Knight.
“So I’m building a hardcore super-undead build.”
I gave an ironic snort and confirmed my choice.
Something inside my body audibly clicked.
My ash-gray skin darkened for an instant.
Inside my chest, where my heart had once beaten, a tight, icy knot of concentrated energy formed.
Name:
Risen Nightmare Knight
Type:
Trait, Fusion
Rarity:
Elite+
Description:
You are now a Nightmare Knight, an entity that appears in the stickiest nightmares of its enemies!
Every negative effect placed upon you, every artificial restriction, every missed attack that breaks your bones!
All of it only makes you stronger, feeding your dark essence.
Note: You remain vulnerable to abilities and magic based on Light and Holiness.
Did this fusion make me stronger than someone like Superman?
Or even put me on equal footing with him in raw power?
Three times no.
I still had a hell of a lot of work to do before reaching that level.
But I’d successfully climbed another invisible step on the ladder of survival.
And that was enough to make me happy.
At the same time, I pragmatically noted that the other categories, skills, abilities, items, familiars, and so on, probably had slot limits too.
It was also slightly annoying to realize that Synergy could only be activated when a new item dropped, rather than whenever I wanted.
“Whatever.
Can’t complain, considering how quickly I’m progressing here and how ridiculously well everything is going.”
I reined in my greed.
And things really were going very, very well.
An order of magnitude better than eighty percent of my previous runs.
Well…
At least the ones I could still remember.
Only a few hours had passed since I arrived at the Joker’s arena, and I could already rate myself at a solid Level 4 on my personal ten-point power scale.
A scale where 1 represented a trained civilian with a pistol and brass knuckles.
And 10 represented that same fucking entity that casually sent me into these “adventures,” effortlessly twisting multidimensional realities and erasing worlds, sometimes with my own help, purely for entertainment.
My peak within a single run was always Level 9.
That’s the point where I became too powerful, broke the local plot, and started getting bored.
That’s usually when the entity pressed the Reset button and sterilized my memories.
Sometimes fragments of experience survived.
But most of the time, I suspected the hard drive was formatted completely.
“Still, now isn’t the time for existential depression.”
I pushed those dark thoughts aside and tore the Platinum Ticket apart with a sharp movement of my fingers.
Name:
Archangel, StarCraft
Type:
Item
Rarity:
Elite
Description:
A unique, massively enlarged and modified version of the Terran Dominion’s Viking walker.
Equipped with powerful twin weapon systems.
Capable of carpet bombing and launching massive missile barrages against both aerial and ground targets.
Equipped with plasma deflector shields and a hyperdrive capable of suborbital jumps.
Controlled by an autonomous onboard AI.
Maintenance:
In the event of critical damage, automatic restoration within the inventory requires between one and three days.
If the hull is completely destroyed, restoration requires one week.
I froze.
I read the description twice.
A military mech the size of a respectable five-story building, capable of transforming into an atmospheric fighter at any moment and carrying enough firepower to turn Gotham into a crater?
Hell yes.
Objectively speaking, against my personal benchmark for danger in this world, namely Superman, the Archangel would accomplish absolutely nothing in a direct confrontation.
Clark would punch straight through it like aluminum foil or melt the reactor with his heat vision.
But this machine wasn’t designed for dueling Kryptonians.
Its purpose was much broader.
And far more destructive.
I already knew exactly where I was going to direct all that firepower in the near future.
“Excellent.”
“First, I’ll deal with the current problems in Gotham, build up my resources, and then I’ll follow my standard strategy.”
I nodded to myself with satisfaction.
After storing the nonexistent mech controls in my inventory, I approached the edge of the parapet and straightened to my full height.
Another gust of damp night air slapped against my face.
The image of my dark superiority was slightly ruined by the complete absence of ears.
The phantom sensations were still there.
I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt deeper over my head to hide my disfigured profile.
Then I raised my boot and crushed the stolen smartphone beneath my heel, reducing it to a pile of plastic fragments and shattered microchips.
I shifted my weight forward, preparing to silently drop into the dark alley below.
Then I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.
On the roof of a neighboring, lower building, barely twenty meters away, a figure smoothly stepped out from behind a rooftop structure.
Leather jacket.
Heavy combat boots.
Tactical harness with pistols.
And…
A dull red helmet reflecting the distant glow of Gotham’s neon signs.
A System notification appeared.
Feat Completed: Encounter Red Hood for the first time.
Reward: 1 Bronze Ticket.
I froze at the edge of the roof, tilting my hooded head slightly.
“Jason Todd himself?”
“Well, well.
What an interesting encounter.”
I studied the young man’s stance.
His hands were lowered, but relaxed only enough to allow him to draw his weapons in a fraction of a second.
“Interesting…”
“What does this dead Robin want from me at this hour?”