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"Everyone is a Slave to Something."
- Askeladd, (Vinland Saga)
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<(Bruce Wayne POV)>
"They're planning to do what?" I said, my expression tightening into a grimace as the details sank in.
The entire plan was... idiotic. Who in their right mind would go to this extent just to get an entire city high? Sure, the narcotic might be potent, but basic chemical and biological sciences state that hallucinogens—no matter how powerful—don't linger in the human body for long. There would be casualties, yes, and a wave of chemically induced chaos in the streets, but nothing that would leave any lasting mark. Besides, I had some serious doubts about how effective the drug would be once it was diluted in that much water. Chances were that by the time it reached public systems for general use and consumption, filtration alone would probably destroy most of its impact.
A scheme like this might've passed for a back-alley gang operation, but to hear that this was the endgame—crafted by some of the most dangerous criminals on the planet—was embarrassing. If they'd used a potent enough toxin instead, the results would've been far more devastating. But this? This felt like a bad parodical joke, staged by someone with an extremely poor sense of humor, for the sole purpose of messing with me.
'I swear, sometimes I really do forget that this is based on a comic book world where even heroes and villains sometimes prefer to celebrate Christmas together. Their sense of logic is more warped than Slaanesh's gender in Warhammer 40K.' I sighed.
"These idiots are just wasting time. Instead of using the chaos to run, they're busy cobbling together some half-baked drug bomb." A bald man in standard inmate garb muttered as he passed by me, clicking his tongue in frustration. He wore a pair of round black glasses, held a lit cigar in one hand, and a compact submachine gun in the other. Judging by the slouch in his walk, guard duty wasn't exactly thrilling him. "They don't understand that everything is a loop and all this is pointless."
There was nothing particularly striking about him—just another psychotic face similar to the crowd I'd steamrolled through to get here. Except one detail stood out. Tattooed across the top of his head were the first twelve Roman numerals, each one paired with the first three letters of its corresponding month inked beneath.
Naturally, he didn't notice me—my suit's cloaking still held. He walked right by without a hitch, and I figured I could stick around to gather more intel, maybe even get into the warden's room and quietly secure the remote before taking care of the rest of them. But the second the bald man passed me, he clicked his tongue once again. "The seasons don't seem to be in my favor much this year," he said, casually flicking his half-burned cigar behind him. The ember struck my invisible chestplate, flaring on contact and curling smoke around me, just enough to reveal my presence to the man.
"What the... DEMON!" the man shouted like an idiot before firing his submachine gun in my direction, instantly alerting every other criminal in this wing to my position.
*Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta*
Naturally, the barrage forced my cloaking system offline. While my armor can shrug off most ballistic and energy impacts, it's the internal tech that's more vulnerable—precision systems that don't handle sustained kinetic stress well. A constant stream of 5.7x28mm rounds, for instance, isn't going to pierce the outer shell, but it can throw off internal functions. Even my body isn't immune to that kind of force.
Think of it like this—wrap a watermelon in a reinforced steel sphere, and then slam it against the pavement over and over. The shell might stay intact, but the inside? It'll turn to pulp. Pressure transfers, no matter what. While the shell can absorb and redistribute some of the force throughout itself, it doesn't cancel it entirely. Some of it WILL get leaked into the inner soft contents.
Vibranium is the only known material that I know of that outright denies this rule. It might not be the most durable material, but it is the perfect conductor of energy that can absorb much more force than any other known fictional metals, and thus can potentially protect its wielder from even nuclear explosions without any major adverse effects. However, since I still can't make it artificially yet, I can only grit my teeth and curse my bad luck.
"Tch." This time, it was my turn to click my tongue as I sent the man flying with a low-powered repulsor blast from my palm. 'Hope that shattered every rib he's got,' I thought, already turning my attention to the swarm of armed inmates converging on my position.
I pulled a couple of smoke pellet bombs from my belt and hurled them at the ground. Bursting open on impact, they flooded the corridor with a dense cloud of smoke laced with tear gas. Inmates staggered, hacking up their lungs and clawing at their burning, streaming eyes.
Without pausing for breath, I lunged at the nearest inmate and drove my fist into his face. He dropped like a sack of bricks as his blood sprayed across the wall due to the force of my punch.
I pivoted, sweeping my leg low to hook another inmate behind the knees, sending him crashing into a third goon just as he raised his rifle. Bullets sprayed wild as the gun slipped from the man's grip, stitching sparks off the concrete walls. I caught the barrel midair and slammed it across the owner's jaw, bending the metal gun like tin foil.
Two more inmates lunged at me from either side, brandishing huge machetes. I ducked beneath a swipe aimed at my neck, twisted the attacker's wrist until his bone snapped, and drove an elbow into his temple. His eyes rolled back as he collapsed.
The other came at me screaming, his blade aimed at my throat. I let him close the gap before launching a palm strike into his sternum, lifting him off his feet. He sailed backward through the smoke, crashed into a row of metal lockers, and lay still.
The tear gas still hung heavy in the air, muffling shouts and coughs as another pair rushed me, trying to flank me from the rear. I feinted left, then reversed, grabbing one by the collar and hurling him into his partner. Both tumbled over each other in a tangled mess. I stomped once—hard—on the floor beside their heads. The shockwave alone was enough to rattle their skulls and left them groaning, half-conscious.
Another thug, much bigger than the rest, roared as he barreled through the smoke like a charging bull. I stood my ground, calculating the angle at which he was rushing towards me. At the last moment, I sidestepped before seizing his arm and flipping him overhead. His back hit the ground with a teeth-rattling SMACK that literally resulted in spider-web-like cracks being formed on the floor.
An uncomfortable silence descended over the corridor as the most dangerous inmates and criminals in Gotham lay sprawling and moaning in front of me, while the ones still further away stood shaking with an unsure look on their faces.
"If you get back in your cells right now and lock the gates from the inside, I won't break your bones. As long as you keep your noses clean, maybe you'll even see parole someday. But if I have to fight you… I'll make damn sure none of you can stand up straight ever again." I issued the threat as I pressed my boot down onto the hand of one of the unconscious attackers, the bones beneath it snapping with a sharp crack.
The guy under my foot, according to Cortana's scan, was an infamous murderer named Kira who liked severing women's hands after he killed them. So crushing his hand into a bloody, cluttered mess of bone shards and tangled blood vessels under the weight of my own body and armor didn't exactly feel too wrong to me.
"…You know what? I'm gonna cut the mustard and head back to my cell. No point hanging around and letting karma catch up to me, right?" one of the thugs stammered, forcing out a nervous laugh as he started inching away… though I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why he was clutching a giant bottle of hot sauce like it was the deadliest weapon in the world.
"…" The rest of the inmates, watching him back off unscathed, seemed to falter as well. One by one, they too lowered their guns to the ground and began quietly retreating alongside him. I had no doubt they'd convinced themselves I was some kind of supernatural demon of vengeance—and that my warning wasn't an empty threat like they had heard all their lives, but an ominous fact they'd rather not test.
"No more hiding," I declared as the plasma blaster on my shoulder pivoted toward the thick metal door leading into the warden's office and fired, blasting the door clean off its hinges with a single shot.
Inside, the office was far larger—and far more extravagant—than any warden's office had a right to be. It looked less like a correctional facility and more like the penthouse suite of a five-star hotel. However, the first thing that hit me as I stepped in wasn't its utter luxuriousness but the bodies of dozens of scientists still in their lab coats, sprawled across the floor near a large table, their blood pooling around scattered machine parts of various shapes and sizes.
Nearby, a balding, overweight older man in glasses was tied up and unconscious on a leather sofa. He was bleeding from the side of his head, but still breathing. That had to be Quincy Sharp—the notoriously corrupt warden of this asylum. He was… an interesting case.
From everything Cortana had dug up online about him, it was clear that for all his nefarious deeds, Sharp hadn't originally started out crooked. Once upon a time, he'd genuinely cared about keeping Gotham's worst criminals locked away. But lately, he'd been trying to run for mayor—a move that demanded serious money. That's likely what pushed him into taking bribes and cutting deals. It wouldn't surprise me if he'd had a hand in this prison break, too. Possibility was that either the criminals turned on him… or he tried to back out of the deal when he saw how serious the prison break was going to be and what the criminals were actually planning once they took control of the asylum—and now he was paying the price.
"Ahhh, da infamous Dark Knight, huh? Finally, we meet, see? Name's Scarface — da guy who's gonna run dis whole stinkin' Gotham underworld, very soon? And lemme tell ya somethin', Bats — I oughta thank ya for waltzin' in here all on yer lonesome. Puttin' ya in da ground's gonna score me serious street rep, see? Just da kinda boost my little operation's been waitin' for!" Two figures emerged into my line of sight. One was Arnold Wesker—an inmate on the slightly older side, clutching a sinister-looking wooden puppet that looked like it had come straight out of an R. L. Stine horror story. However, as unsettling as the dummy and its handler were, my focus was instead fixed on the man beside him.
Because that other guy was wielding the biggest oversized sickle I had ever seen in my life, his body swollen with inhuman muscle as thick veins snaked over every inch of his skin. He stood at least one and a half times my own height—and at six feet two, I was not exactly small. But next to me, he looked like a damn giant.
"Heh! I can tell ya got yer peepers all glued ta my loyal muscle over there. Well, feast yer eyes, pal — dat's Sickle, da finest friggin' Monster Man ever put together, courtesy o' one o' my smartest associates, see?" The puppet declared, its voice practically vibrating with twisted delight, but still careful enough not to drop the name of the mad scientist behind his creation.
"He's been turned inta da ultimate freakin' predator, built fer one thing and one thing only — takin' you down, Bats. A perfect friggin' executioner, forged ta reap da life o' Gotham's very own Vengeance, see?"
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