Chapter 38: Tunnel Vision
The silence on the balcony was a physical weight, pressing down on my shoulders with more force than the gravity of a dozen moons. In the movies, these moments are filled with swelling orchestral strings and dramatic close-ups, but in reality, it just sounded like the low, mourning hum of wind through steel and the rhythmic clicking of a cooling engine from a drone somewhere below.
Superman didn’t descend like a man landing; he settled like a storm front. He stopped ten feet above the balcony floor, his red boots hanging motionless in the air. This wasn’t the Clark I knew. My Clark—the one I’d just started getting along with—carried himself with a sort of habitual apology for his own size.
This guy occupied every cubic inch of space as if he owned the concept of existence. He looked down at us, and for the first time in my life, I felt intimidated. Do you have any idea how rare that is for me? After everything I faced?
It was like the Fortune 500 CEO of Boss Battles just threw down the gauntlet.
His eyes drifted over me, dismissive of the platinum armor as if it were tin foil, and lingered briefly on Harley, who was currently trying to hide her half-inflated "balloon dog" behind her back with a look of genuine, wide-eyed terror. But then, his focus snapped to Kara.
The shift was visible. The absolute, granite stillness of his face fractured for a fraction of a second. His brow furrowed, a flicker of something raw and confused—recognition, hope, grief—passed through his blue eyes.
“Kara?” He spoke the name like it was a question. It was a soft, human sound, vibrating with a vulnerability that felt completely out of place in this graveyard city.
I felt Kara’s hand tighten in mine. Her breathing hitched, her heart rate spiking to a tempo I could feel through our joined palms. To her, this was the face of the family she’d spent her life searching for, even if the eyes were wrong.
I wanted to tell her to look away. To tell her that this wasn’t her real cousin, that this was just a version of him at his most broken, most shattered. But the words felt like lead in my mouth.
Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the humanity vanished. The High Councilor’s expression hardened into a mask of cold, imperial decree. The grief was cauterized by the absolute certainty of a tyrant.
“You are wearing the crest of my House,” he said, his voice now a flat, resonant baritone that seemed to vibrate through my very teeth. “And yet you stand with a criminal and an unidentified variable. I do not know how you survived the death of our world, or how you came to be in the company of these... things. But you will release the prisoner, you will kneel, and you will surrender to the custody of the Regime.”
It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t even a threat. It was a statement of fact, as if he were explaining the law of gravity to a falling stone.
“Surrender?” Kara’s voice was small at first, then it grew, edged with that sharp indignation I’d come to adore. She stepped forward, her cape snapping in the wind. “You speak of House El as if it is a cage! You have turned this world into a prison, cousin. I was raised by Brainiac to believe that order was the only path to peace, but even he understood that a soldier without a spirit is merely a drone. You have no spirit. You have only... shadows.”
The High Councilor didn’t flinch.
Much worse. His eyes began to glow, not with the warm, golden light of the sun, but with a searing, jagged red that looked like open wounds. “I have brought peace to a world that was screaming for it. If you will not listen to reason, you will listen to force. Surrender now, or I will ensure your first day on Earth is your last.”
Fuck me, that’s chilling.
I looked at him, and then I looked at the city. We were at the center of a spiderweb. High-altitude drones, orbital strikes, a god who could fly through my chest before I could blink—it was a bad neighborhood for a prolonged stay.
My Viltrumite cells were still a bit sluggish from the gas, and while I’m pretty confident in my own durability, some versions of Kal-El can bench-press the planet. I wasn’t in the mood to find out if this was one of them.
“Hey, Big Blue,” I said, stepping between him and Kara. I kept my voice casual, though my internal monologue was screaming at me to move. “I’m a big fan of the ’absolute authority’ look, really. Very cool. But we’ve actually got um… a thing. Bowling in a different dimension, you know how it is. It’s a very tight schedule.”
His eyes narrowed. The red glow intensified. “You are a variable, ’King.’ And variables are deleted.”
That’s a little less chilling.
“Actually,” I corrected him, my muscles coiling like high-tension springs, “I’m more of a plot twist.”
I didn’t punch him. Punching him would have been the start of a fight that ended with Metropolis being leveled, and I didn’t want that on my IMDb page. Instead, I reached deep into the well of my Viltrumite strength—the raw, biological power that didn’t care about red suns or magic.
I clapped.
I didn’t just bring my hands together; I slammed them with the force of two tectonic plates colliding at Mach 10. The resulting sonic boom didn’t just break the sound barrier; it shattered it. A physical wall of compressed air exploded outward in a 360-degree radius, a white ring of vapor that pulverized the balcony’s stone railing and sent a shockwave through the air that sounded like the world’s loudest thunderclap.
The High Councilor, with his super-sensitive hearing, was caught right in the epicenter. He recoiled, his hands flying to his ears as his equilibrium was momentarily scrambled by the sheer, violent volume of the sound. I knew the feeling.
It wouldn’t stop him for long—maybe three seconds—but in my world, three seconds is an eternity… that wasn’t a euphemism. Shut up. The point was, I bought us time.
And I didn’t waste so much as a second. I scooped Kara up with my left arm and snagged Harley by the back of her jester collar with my right. I went from zero to supersonic in a heartbeat, the friction of the air turning the atmosphere around us into a blurred, screaming tunnel of gray.
“Hold on!” I shouted, though the sound was lost in the roar of our flight.
I was aiming for the horizon, preparing to push through the clouds and find a way to ditch the inevitable pursuit, when I felt Harley squirming in my grip.
“Wait, wait! Don’t fly into the big scary laser!” she shrieked, her voice barely audible over the wind. She was fumbling with a small, brass-colored cube she’d pulled from her pocket—something she must have swiped from the Regime’s R&D lab while we were busy making our grand exit.
She slammed a button on the top of the cube.
PING.
The sound was tiny, but it cut through the roar of the wind like a bell. A geometric rift of white-hot light tore open in the air directly in front of us—a Boom Tube.
Behind us, I heard a roar of pure, unadulterated fury. I looked back and saw a twin beam of crimson heat vision lancing through the sky, vaporizing the clouds as it bore down on us. The High Councilor was already in pursuit, his face a mask of divine wrath as he closed the distance with terrifying speed.
“Go, go, go!” Harley yelled.
We dove into the white light just as the heat vision reached us. The last thing I felt was the searing heat of the lasers melting the very air where my heels had been a millisecond before. Then, the world turned into a silent, vibrating roar of mathematics and light.
Metropolis vanished. The god vanished.
We plummeted through the portal and hit something hard, cold, and smelling of damp limestone. I tumbled across the floor, skidding for ten feet before I managed to come to a stop, my armor sparks-showering against the ground.
I rolled onto my back, gasping for air that tasted like rain and old shadows. I looked up and saw the portal snap shut above us, leaving us in total, suffocating darkness.
“Everyone... alive?” I wheezed, my HUD flickering back to life.
“I am... intact,” Kara’s voice came from the darkness, sounding breathless and shaken. “But he… Kal-El... Luke, that was not my family. That was a monster.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, sitting up and feeling the ache in my ribs. “That could have gone better.”
And here I thought my family reunions sucked.
“I got us out!” Harley’s voice chirped from somewhere to my right, followed by the sound of her triumphantly blowing a raspberry. “All in a day’s work for the ’bringer of joy!’ Also, I think I broke a nail. This was a very stressful party.”
…
The transition was a violent oscillation of color and sound that made Kara’s teeth ache. One moment, the air was a searing inferno of Kal-El’s rage; the next, it was stagnant, thick with the smell of mildew and ancient, unwashed stones. Her boots hit the floor with a heavy thud, and she immediately felt the shift in pressure.
They were deep underground.
Kara didn’t let go of Luke’s hand. The warmth of him was the only thing anchoring her to reality after seeing that… that creature. Her cousin was a kind man who spoke of hope and showed her holograms of a beautiful, dead world. The man in the sky had been a monument of granite and fire, a conqueror dressed in the skin of her kin.
The "wrongness" of it felt like a physical sickness in her stomach.
“Welcome to Arkham!” Harley chirped, her voice echoing off the damp walls. She was already bouncing ahead, waving her little brass cube like a trophy. “Mind the slime, it’s mostly original. The Bat had to get creative once the Big Blue Boy Scout leaked his home address to the press. Nothing says ’safe house’ like a literal asylum for the criminally insane, right?”
Kara followed her, blue eyes scanning the darkness. This place was a labyrinth of iron bars and cracked tiles, illuminated only by the flickering orange glow of emergency lights. It reminded her too much of the lower decks of Brainiac’s command ship—places where things were stored and forgotten.
Luke walked beside her, his armor silent but his presence alert. Kara could feel his gaze moving, calculating the structural integrity of the tunnels, looking for exits. He didn’t speak, which was its own kind of comfort. He knew her heart was still racing at a speed that would have concerned a lesser physician.
“You mentioned this Batman is a strategist,” Kara whispered, her voice sounding harsh in the quiet. “But why dwell in a tomb? A warrior should stand in the light of the sun, or at least a well-lit tactical center.”
“The Bat doesn’t do ’well-lit,’ Kara,” Luke replied, his tone dry as bone. “He’s more of a ’brood in the corner until someone gets punched’ kind of guy. Just stay behind me if things get weird. He’s probably already decided how many pounds of pressure it takes to break my visor.”
They moved through a series of "funhouse" tunnels—narrow passages lined with distorted mirrors and peeling paint—before emerging into a massive sub-basement. It was filled with monitors, half-assembled machines, and a sense of cold, clinical paranoia.
“I brought ’em, Bats!” Harley shouted, her voice echoing into the rafters. “Fresh from the Spire! They’re inter-whatsit travelers! Very shiny, very strong, and only slightly grumpy!”
Silence followed. It was a heavy, suffocating silence that made the hair on Kara’s arms stand up. She felt the familiar hum of technology nearby—not the clean, crystalline tech of Krypton, but something jagged and defensive.
“Step away from the woman, Harley.”
The voice didn’t come from any one direction.
It was a low, gravelly rasp that seemed to bleed out of the shadows themselves. Kara squinted, her Kryptonian vision struggling with the localized interference being pumped into the air.
A figure resolved in the darkness above a central console. He didn’t have a cape of silver or armor of platinum. He was a silhouette of pointed ears and matte-black plating, looking more like a gargoyle than a man.
“Harley brings me two interdimensional travelers who just happened to break out of the highest security prison on the planet?” The Batman didn’t move. He sat there, a phantom in the gloom. “I’ve seen better traps from the Joker. And more convincing ones.”
“Hey! I worked hard on this trap! Er—rescue!” Harley pouted, crossing her arms.
Kara stepped forward, her cape rustling against the stone. She could feel the sensors tracking her—heat, radiation, mass. There was a faint, sickly green glow emanating from a device on his utility belt. Her skin crawled.
“We are not a trap,” Kara said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her soul. “I am Kara Zor-El. I have come from a world where my cousin does not look at his people as if they are ants to be stepped upon. We were brought here by accident, and we were imprisoned because your ’High Councilor’ fears what he does not control.”
“I don’t care who you claim to be,” Batman said, and Kara heard the faint click of a detonator being primed. “The man in the armor has a remote-linked explosive currently synced to the frequency of his internal HUD. If he moves faster than a human, the platinum casing won’t protect his head from the shaped charge I’ve just activated.”
Kara felt a surge of heat behind her eyes. He was threatening Luke. Her protective instinct flared, a white-hot spark that demanded she move, that she shield him, that she show this shadow-man what a daughter of Krypton was capable of.
“You threaten my partner?” Kara stepped closer, her fists clenching. “We have just escaped a god who wished to break our spirits. You are a man in a cave with a small green rock. Do not mistake my restraint for a lack of options.”
“Restraint is exactly what I’m looking for,” Batman countered, his voice unmoved by the threat. “Clark had restraint once. Now he has a throne. I don’t need more power in this city, Kara. I need a reason to believe you aren’t another pair of monsters sent to finish what he started.”
Luke let out a soft, amused huff next to her. He didn’t seem bothered by the threat of his head being turned into a firework.
“See? I told you,” Luke said, glancing at Kara. “He’s a delight at parties. Real ’glass half-empty’ energy.” He turned his reflective visor back toward the shadows. “Look, Bruce—I’m going to call you Bruce, because the gravel voice is a bit much for a Tuesday—we aren’t here for your war. But your Superman tried to put us in a cage, and I have a very strict ’no cages’ policy. So, we can keep measuring our, heh, gadgets, or you can tell us where the coffee is and we can talk about how to actually win this thing.”
Batman remained still, his white lenses fixed on them. Kara could feel the suspicion radiating off him like a cold draft. He didn’t trust them. He didn’t trust anything. He was a man who had seen his world burn and decided the only way to survive was to become the soot.
It was a sad way to live, Kara realized. Even Brainiac, in his cold calculation, had a goal. This man was just… waiting for the end.
“You talk like a man who hasn’t seen what he can do,” Batman said, the shadow of a cape shifting as he finally stood. “I’ve spent five years losing friends to the man you call ’cousin.’ Why should I believe you’re the wildcard that changes that?”
Kara looked at Luke, then back at the dark knight. “Because,” she said, her voice dropping to a low, earnest tone, “we are the only ones here who aren’t afraid of him.”
“There were many people who weren’t afraid of him.” Batman’s silhouette remained rigid, the white lenses of his cowl staring blank Kara as if she were an idiot. He’s the idiot. “Most of them are dead, now.”
The cold finality of his words struck a dissonant chord in Kara’s chest.
She felt Luke shift beside her, a subtle retreat that she recognized as him giving her the floor. He was stepping back into the shadows of the dialogue, letting her lead the diplomacy. It was a gesture of trust that warmed her even in this damp, sunless tomb.
Kara ignored the scanners humming nearby and the click of the detonator Batman held. She simply walked forward. Each footfall echoed against the cracked tiles of the asylum floor, a rhythmic, steady beat that ignored the radiation fields and the threats of shaped charges.
She stopped less than an arm’s length away from the Dark Knight, looking up at him with eyes that didn’t hold a shred of deception.
“The cousin I know is a man of love and compassion.” Kara said, her voice dropping into a soft, intensely earnest register. “When he showed me the Fortress of Solitude, he didn’t walk through it with cold pragmatism, but childlike wonder. He is no conqueror.”
And she would know. Because she was a conqueror.
Batman didn’t move, but Kara could see the way his gloved hand tightened almost imperceptibly. She leaned in closer, her brow furrowing with the weight of her conviction.
“In my world, Kal-El is what Luke calls a ’Boy Scout.’ He is earnest, he is kind, and he believes that everyone deserves a chance to do the right thing.” Kara shook her head, her cape fluttering behind her. “He would be ashamed of this version of himself.”
He did not even have the confidence to run the Daily Planet. Much less the actual planet.
“He would be horrified by the throne you say he sits upon.” Kara spat, glaring at the bat so hard, she’s surprised she didn’t incinerate him. “He taught me the value of truth, and justice.”
And also the “American Way” but Luke tells her that’s a “touchy subject.”
“My cousin is a hero. But you?” She scoffed. “You are the Warrior of the Night who has forgotten how to trust his own allies. You stare at us and see a threat because you have spent so long fighting a mirror of your friend that you have forgotten what the real man looks like.”
The silence that followed was different from the one that had greeted them.
It wasn’t just heavy; it was brittle. Kara’s blunt assessment seemed to strip away the layers of tactical armor Batman had cultivated over years of rebellion. For a heartbeat, she didn’t see a legendary strategist; she saw a man who was profoundly, devastatingly tired.
Batman looked away, his gaze falling to the flickering monitors of his console. He seemed to be weighing her words against the five years of blood and betrayal that had defined his current existence.
“Even if I believed you,” Batman said, his voice regaining its gravelly edge, “the logistics of your arrival don’t add up. My informants in the Regime labs reported Harley was captured. My people didn’t mount a rescue. The odds of an escape from the Spire are statistically negligible without external intervention.”
“Statistically what-now?” Harley popped up between them, her grin wide enough to show all her teeth. She pulled the brass cube from her pocket and tossed it into the air, catching it with a flourish. “No rescue needed, B-Man! I took a Mommy Box from the lab and used a boomtub to get us outta there!”
The silence returned, but this time it was punctuated by the sound of Batman’s jaw actually dropping. He stared at the Mother Box in Harley’s hand, his calculated composure vanishing in an instant.
“You used a what?” Batman demanded, his voice cracking just enough to betray his utter disbelief.
“A Mommy Box!” Harley repeated cheerfully, oblivious to the cosmic magnitude of her casual theft. “They had ’em sitting right there next to the weird glowy stuff. I figured it’d be a great party favor. Boom! We’re in Gotham!”
Kara looked at Luke, then back at the stunned Dark Knight. She didn’t understand why the box was so significant, but the look on Batman’s face told her that the "Bringer of Joy" had just handed the Insurgency something more valuable than she realized.
“Does this mean you will stop threatening to explode King?” Kara asked, her tone flat and expectant. “It is very difficult to have a productive dialogue when one is concerned about their partner’s structural integrity.”
“He’d just blow up my armor.” Luke assured her. “I’m basically invincible, remember? I just keep the self-destruct bomb in my armor out of spite, in case anyone ever tries to steal it. Sort of like those dye packs that go off when someone robs a bank.”
“That is very spiteful.” She hummed, before frowning. “Wait, why do we stop bank robberies then, if they can’t actually use the money they steal?”
“So that the money doesn’t get destroyed.” Luke explained.
“But if they don’t want to destroy the money, then why did they install dye packs?”
“So that the money doesn’t get stolen.”
“But it’s still getting stolen, right?”
“All the time.”
…
…
“… humans are so confusing.”
…
The conversation about the fiscal ethics of dye packs was cut short by a sound that didn’t belong in a basement: the screech of tearing metal coming from directly above us.
A proximity alarm wailed, a shrill, dying-animal sound that sent Batman into a blur of motion. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t hesitate. He just hit a sequence on his gauntlet that doused the lights and armed the room.
Apparently, the Regime had a "find my phone" feature for their Mother Boxes that we really should have expected to happen. Debugging that was officially moved to the top of the post-apocalypse to-do list.
“Perimeter’s gone,” Batman rasped, the shadows swallowing him whole. “They’re here.”
The ceiling didn’t just collapse; it vanished in a localized explosion of golden light and divine fury.
One moment there was a roof, and the next, there was a man in black and gold floating amidst the falling debris, his eyes crackling with the kind of lightning that usually starts religions. Behind him, Wonder Woman descended like a falling star, her shield catching the dim emergency light with a predatory glint.
“The High Councilor is merciful,” Black Adam boomed, his voice echoing through the hollowed-out asylum like a judge delivering a sentence. “He offers you one final chance to—"
I didn’t wait for the monologue. I was already flying, my Viltrumite cells finally shaking off the last of the toxin they had puffed into me, and screaming for a release. I hit Black Adam mid-sentence, my shoulder connecting with his chest with the weight of a freight train moving at Mach 2.
We broke through three more layers of Arkham’s foundations before we hit the open air of the Gotham night. I’ll never get tired of smashing through walls.
The rain was cold, but the lightning Adam unleashed was significantly colder.
Or was that overwhelming heat being mistaken for cold? Yeah. It was probably that.
It hit my chest plate with a discordant crack, sending a jolt through my nervous system that actually made my vision blur for a fraction of a second. Magic. I hated magic. It was the one thing that didn’t care how many push-ups I did.
“You are a bold child,” Adam snarled, his hand catching my throat as we tumbled through the ruins of a nearby warehouse. “But you are out of your depth.”
“I’ve been told I have a very deep ego,” I wheezed, grabbing his wrist and squeezing until the reinforced bracers began to groan. “It balances out.”
I threw a punch that would have leveled a skyscraper. He caught it. The shockwave shattered every window in a three-block radius. Below us, I could see the flash of blue and red—Kara. She was a blur of motion, her cape a streak of white against Diana’s bronze and red.
They were trading blows that sounded like artillery fire, the kind of combat Kara was literally designed for. She looked focused, lethal, and entirely too comfortable in a brawl of this magnitude.
I needed to end this. If Clark showed up while I was still playing footsie with the Egyptian God of Thunder, we were going to end up as a very expensive smear on the pavement.
“Hey, Adam!” I shouted over the roar of the rain. “You ever heard of terminal velocity?”
He didn’t answer. He just tried to cook my brain with another bolt of lightning. I took it, gritting my teeth until I tasted copper, and then I surged. I didn’t just fly; I ignited. I grabbed his cape and his belt, tucked my head, and drove us straight up.
One mile. Two miles. The air got thin, the Gotham skyline shrinking into a grid of orange sparks. Adam was clawing at my visor, his fingers leaving deep gouges in the platinum, but I wasn’t stopping. At ten miles up, where the stars start to look a little too close for comfort, I let go.
But first, I gave him a parting gift: a two-handed hammer-blow to the solar plexus fueled by eight years of hiding my true strength from my father. The impact sent him hurtling toward the stratosphere like a kicked pebble. He’d be back, but it’d take him at least three minutes to fight his way back through the atmosphere.
I dove back down, the air screaming against my armor until I slammed back into the Arkham ruins. Kara was standing over a cratered Wonder Woman, her chest heaving, her eyes still glowing with a faint, residual heat. Diana was down, but she was already stirring.
“Luke!” Kara called out, her voice sharp with urgency. “The portal! It will not activate!”
Batman was at the console, his fingers flying across the keys while Harley hit the Mother Box with a rubber mallet. It was a classic "high-tech meets low-tech" disaster.
“It’s locked!” Batman growled, the first sign of genuine frustration breaking through his mask. “The signature is encrypted. I can’t bypass the New God protocols without a terminal.”
“Let me see the shiny cube!” Harley snatched it back, shaking it next to her ear. “It’s like a crank-organ! You gotta tickle the tummy!”
“Harley, this isn’t a toy,” I said, landing beside them and checking my HUD. “We have about a hundred and twenty seconds before Big Blue realizes his friend is currently a satellite and comes down here to turn us into origami.”
Kara stepped up, her brow furrowed as she looked at the geometric patterns on the box.
She reached out, her fingers hovering over the shifting plates. “It is not a lock,” she murmured, her voice falling into that literal, earnest tone she got when she was analyzing tech. “It is a song. Brainiac taught us that the architecture of the New Gods is based on mathematical resonance. It does not want a password. It wants a harmony.”
“That is…” I gasped. “So stupid.”
“I didn’t design it.” Kara shrugged, indifferently. “But I think I can get it working.”
She pressed a sequence of plates—not with force, but with a rhythmic precision that made the box hum. The "ping" from before returned, but this time it grew into a low, vibrating chord. My God. It was like she was playing Simon on it.
“She’s doing it!” Harley squealed, clapping her hands. “The Mommy’s singing!”
The air in front of us began to tear, a familiar white-hot rift opening like a wound in the dark.
“Go,” Batman ordered, grabbing a handful of hard drives from his console. “I’ll trigger the collapse behind you. If they want this basement, they’re going to have to dig through five hundred tons of rubble.”
“You’re coming with us, right?” I asked, looking at the man who looked like he was ready to die in a hole just to spite his former friend. “And not just going to vanish the second we take our eyes off you.”
“No. Not yet.” Batman replied, his white lenses meeting my visor. “Go. I won’t ask you again.” He didn’t ask once. But whatever.
“Cryptic one liner. Cool.” I said, grabbing Kara’s hand and snagging Harley by her collar. “See you later, I guess?”
“Hmm.”
I’ll take that as a maybe.
We dove into the light just as a sonic boom rocked the foundations of the asylum. Above us, the sky turned a familiar, terrifying shade of crimson. The High Councilor had arrived, but we were already gone, vanishing into the roar of the boom tube and leaving the dark knight to his shadows.
…
The white-hot roar of the Boom Tube swallowed us just as the ceiling above the Batcave-lite disintegrated into a rain of pulverized concrete. I caught a final glimpse of a red-caped silhouette descending through the dust like an avenging meteor before the portal snapped shut, severing the connection with a sound like a closing vault.
The landing wasn’t a landing; it was a high-speed ejection. We tumbled out of the rift and onto a platform of rusted iron and slick, condensation-heavy stone. I managed to keep my feet, skidding to a halt while still clutching Harley’s collar. Kara landed beside me, her boots cracking the tiles, her head snapping back toward the space where the light had just been.
“Luke, the Bat!” Kara gasped, her hand reaching out as if she could pull the rift back open. “He remained behind! The High Councilor will—”
“Relax, Blondie! Batsy’s like a cockroach,” Harley interjected, brushing dust off her shoulders and adjusting her mallet. “Only with more angst and better gadgets. He wouldn’t miss a chance to be dramatic in a crumbling building… speak of the devil.”
The shadows at the far end of the platform shifted.
A tall, jagged silhouette detached itself from the darkness of a subway tunnel, stepping into the flickering amber light of a dying emergency lamp. Batman didn’t look like a man who had just escaped a god; he looked like a man who had simply stepped out for a coffee and found the weather mildly irritating.
He was already carrying the hard drives, his cape scorched but his posture as rigid as a tombstone.
“For the record, I didn’t vanish,” Batman declared, his voice cutting through the gloom.
“You stayed behind to play hero in a collapsing basement,” I said, crossing my arms. The platinum on my gauntlets was still cooling from the friction of the portal. “Kara thought you were a smudge on Clark’s boot.”
I mean, I didn’t. You know. Because he’s Batman. But an explanation would be nice.
“I installed a redundant relay into the Mother Box while you were arguing the merits of stopping bank robberies.” Batman said, his tone flat and utterly devoid of self-congratulation. “I didn’t need to be standing next to you to use the transit window.”
“Did you want to, though?”
“I triggered the charges to mask the energy signature, then jumped through the tube three seconds after you.” Batman expertly evaded answering my question, by continuing his explanation. “Then I redirected the exit coordinates while you were occupied with your... singing.”
He walked past us without a second glance, his boots echoing with a heavy, rhythmic thud that felt like a countdown.
“If I’d jumped with you, Superman’s x-ray vision would have caught where we were heading,” he added, not looking back. “The collapse created a thermal spike that blinded his senses long enough for us to get here unseen. This is a secondary staging area.”
I watched him approach a rusted terminal embedded in a junction box that looked older than my grandfather. He didn’t even wait to catch his breath; he just slotted a drive and started typing.
“So, you used yourself as a decoy for a three-second head start?” I muttered, following him into the guts of the station. “That is… so stupid. Why is everyone being so stupid, today?”
Batman didn’t look up.
“Keep an open mind.” He advised me, the blue light of the screen reflecting off his cowl. “In my experience, if it works, it works. Now focus. Adam and Diana will recover within the hour. The High Councilor will have the Spire on high alert, and every eye in the city will be on the watch for you.”
He paused, his fingers hovering over the keys as a map of the globe flickered to life, dotted with red Regime strongholds.
“We need to go back to ground,” Batman continued, his tone clinical and cold. “I have a safe house in the Diamond District with a dedicated satellite uplink. We can begin analyzing the Regime’s shifting patrol patterns, find a crack in the armor, and execute a surgical strike on their supply lines in six to eight months.”
I leaned against a salt-stained pillar and let out a long, slow breath. My armor was covered in Black Adam’s soot, my nervous system was still buzzing from the lightning, and my patience was officially at zero.
“Six to eight months?” I asked, my voice flat. “Bruce, I say this with all the respect due to a man who lives in a sewer: You’ve been playing defense for five years, and you’re losing. You’re waiting for him to make a mistake, but he’s not a man anymore. He’s a system. You ever hear the expression, ’too big to fail.’”
“That expression was famously wrong.” Batman stopped typing. The silence in the subway station was so thick you could hear the drip of a leaky pipe three platforms over.
He turned his head slowly, the white lenses of his cowl fixing on my visor.
“Let’s be clear. I’m the only reason there’s still an opposition to the system,” he said, his voice dropping to a dangerous, gravelly whisper. “I don’t take risks that end in mass graves.”
“Then don’t take risks, take the initiative,” I countered, stepping into his space. I didn’t care about the explosive he’d synced. He wasn’t going to use it, and we both knew it. “My race has a different philosophy for regime change. We don’t poke the hive; we crush the queen.”
Kara moved to my side.
She didn’t say a word, but the way she stood—shoulders back, chin tilted up, her ragged cape still smoldering at the edges—spoke volumes. Her eyes weren’t glowing yet, but there was a spark in them that hadn’t been there when we first landed in this nightmare. She was done mourning her cousin. She was ready to save him from himself.
“He thinks he’s invincible because everyone treats him like he is,” I continued. “You want to win? We stop hiding. No more basements. No more shadows.”
Batman stood up, his cape pooling around him like spilled ink. “What are you suggesting?”
“A total blitz,” I said. “The Hall of Justice. Tomorrow. We walk through the front door, we clear out the sycophants, and we force Clark to look us in the eye in front of the whole world. You show the people that their god can bleed, and the system collapses on its own.”
Batman looked at me, then at Kara, then back at his monitors. For the first time since we’d met, he wasn’t looking for a trap. He wasn’t looking for a reason to distrust the "unidentified variables." He was looking at the logistics. He was looking at the odds. He was looking for a win.
“It’s suicide,” Batman muttered, but he didn’t turn back to the terminal.
“Only if we lose,” I said, offering a dry, tired smirk behind my visor. “And I have a really good habit of not doing that.”
Kara’s hand found mine, her grip like iron. Even Harley was quiet for once, watching us with an uncharacteristically serious expression. The air in the subway station shifted, the stagnant smell of defeat replaced by the electric charge of a coming storm.
The Dark Knight finally gave a single, curt nod.
“Fine.”
Coming from him? That was a standing ovation. We were done playing by the Regime’s rules. It’s time they started playing by ours.