Nightwing, sitting at the center, covered his eyes. Red Robin next to him sighed, and Red Hood silently folded his arms.
They watched Dr. Shiller pensively, using paint found within the supermarket, unthinkingly, drawing two enormous magic arrays on the must-pass routes of the two Batmans.
"What's the point of doing this?" Nightwing asked incredulously. "He was the first one to get the piece of totem pillar, and has a tremendous advantage in this game. He could have intercepted the second and the third person who grabbed the pieces of the totem pillar. Even if he himself couldn't attack, he could have called Hunter. What is he doing?"
"I heard Batman mention Professor Rodriguez." Red Robin tried to steer the conversation towards a more formal direction, saying, "Batman said he is highly learned in arcane studies and even held a professorship at a magic academy in their universe. Could it be that this magic array he drew is actually useful?"
Red Hood sighed heavily and said, "If that were true, hell would have frozen over. He's just a mad man, completely insane. He once caused the Joker…"
Red Hood glanced sideways at Jack nearby, then at the fully armed Batman, and ultimately didn't say what he was about to.
"What did he do to the Joker?"
In that moment when his deep voice rang out, almost everyone shivered. Red Hood cringed a little. For some reason, he felt that this question was directed specifically at him, even though Batman had not turned around.
Red Hood curled his mouth to one side and said nothing.
"Don't deviate from the topic. We're discussing right now why Dr. Shiller would draw this magic array. His actions cannot bring about substantial enough advantages to him." Nightwing shook his head again. "Even if he deceived Batman, so what? When the third piece of the totem pillar appears, the battle will inevitably become fierce. No one will bother studying the array."
"Then you don't understand Batman." Jack's measured voice, tinged with amusement, traveled over. He picked something from between his teeth and said, "Batman seeks only victory and efficient ways to achieve it."
"The conditions for victory were never stated in the rules, so there's a high probability that it's a linguistic trap. The designer of the game likes this kind of trick, I've noticed before," Jack voiced after a cold snort. "He wants to see the confusion and despair on everyone's face after fighting to the death and finding victory unreachable, but Batman certainly won't fall for his trick."
"Since defeating others doesn't necessarily mean winning, then there won't be a situation where the fight becomes intense as you described. Batman's focus is always on exploration, so any clues containing information will attract his attention."
At that point, Jack suddenly stopped. He turned his head to look at Batman nearby, as if waiting for him to speak.
But before Batman could say anything, Peter voiced out first.
"Based on my understanding of Dr. Shiller, this is likely just an appetizer. If he intends to engineer a deception, it must be multi-angle, all-round, a net that leaves the prey no place to hide or escape."
"Play it back." Another voice, equally low but with a touch of vicissitude, resonated. The whole projection room quieted down in an instant.
Everyone's gaze landed on the old man in the corner. But weirdly, no matter how they tried, they couldn't completely make out his face, their attention would be diverted the moment it was focused on him; as if he didn't actually exist there.
But soon, the backward flowing images on the screen drew their attention. While everyone else turned their gaze back to the screen, Batman's gaze lingered on the old man a bit longer, not shifting until the playback paused.
The screen rewound back to about ten minutes prior, right after Dr. Shiller had finished drawing the second magic array.
A shadow appeared at the corner of the wall. Just as everyone thought it was Bruce, Loki was the one to step into view.
The moment Dr. Shiller turned around and saw Loki, he dropped his arms to his sides, a smile played on his lips, and he said, "Didn't expect you to show up as well. How have you been lately?"
"I am still in the midst of reforming Asgard's internal affairs." Loki shrugged and said, "I was wondering if I'd bump into you in this game. Looks like we're really in sync."
Then, he looked up at the enormous magic array just finished by Dr. Shiller, a knowing smile emerged on his face, and he asked, "So who're you planning to trick this time?"
"Never mind this for now, are you in?"
Loki laughed, shook his head and said, "I don't come cheap, you know that."
"Can you be greedier than Nick?"
"You overestimate me."
The two laughed together. Loki walked over to Dr. Shiller, looking up at the huge magic array with him. Dr. Shiller said, "There's a pretty interesting guy in this game, but there might be more. Work together with me on my plan, we'll have quite a show."
"Of course, of course." Loki lowered his head, then nodded and laughed, "There's always fun wherever you're at, and I'm currently in a state of boring. Let's hear your plan."
Red Robin slapped his forehead.
"I knew it, there's no such coincidence." Nightwing stated in exasperation, "We just discovered a magic array and a wizard who could explain everything just happened to appear. It's as if this is all orchestrated."
"But I don't think Batman would be easily convinced," Red Robin hypothesized while stroking his chin, "This wizard named Loki is highly suspicious. Even if the Batman he meets is relatively young, he'd certainly be on the alert."
"That's not his target," Batman suddenly spoke out.
Several Robins all turn to look at him. From the beginning, they had found this uniquely dressed Batman intriguing, but they had also known that it was unlikely he would respond to their queries under normal circumstances.
That's why they remained silent observers, now that Batman had taken the initiative to speak up, they were finally allowed to ask their questions.
"What do you mean?"
"He had the wizard distract irrelevant parties." Batman's voice emitted from his face guard: "His target is the bat-suited Batman."
Along with Batman's voice, the screen's perspective switched to Batman in the game. He had arrived at the location of the second symbol and discovered a massive Magic Array.
But this time his attention wasn't solely on the array, but instead, he had noticed Loki and Bruce's footprints in the surroundings.
The collapsed building had left behind the best exhibitor of traces, sand and dust. Even though Bruce had done his best to erase his footprints, Batman still found a semi-palm print on the edge of the building.
It was easy to deduce Bruce's height and weight, but it would be impossible to guess his identity by one footprint alone. But Loki's footprints were a bit strange. They seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.
Batman searched around carefully and soon found that Loki's footprints appeared once, disappeared and then reappeared, with no walking trail in between, making it very abrupt.
This suggested that this person came here first, then flew away, and then came flying back. Why did he go back and forth like this?
Batman found a small pit next to one set of footprints. This pit was imprinted on the relatively moist earth, indicating it seemed to be the mark of a long pole or wand stuck to the ground, and the tail of the rod was decorated with exquisite patterns.
Batman knelt to the ground, carefully examining the patterns between the sand, and discovered they were distortions of a wave pattern, purely decorative and didn't hold any attacking functions.
This meant it was not a weapon used for stabbing, but rather a decorative prop. Thus, it was likely not a hunter's weapon distributed by the host and must have been a decoration that someone had brought in themselves.
But under the circumstances of having a camp, who would bring decorations in? Unless they had some other function.
Batman stood at the spot looking at where the footprints were. Soon, a vague shadow appeared in his field of view - a Mage dressed in a gorgeous robe, holding a wand, came here using Magic and left, then came back again.
Suddenly, Batman turned his head towards the large array drawn on the wall.
This time he went closer, examining all the text and symbols carefully, and finally found a rune that was a slightly different color from the others around the bottom, almost one meter and three centimeters off the ground.
Batman went over, gently touched the rune and saw the dark red pigment left on his hand. He understood that the runes on the wall had been tampered with.
Batman reached out to touch the other runes and found it useless. The patterns here were completely dry. Whether smudging it with his hand or scratching it with his fingers, none of it would come off, only the modified rune was still wet and bright.
So, Batman deduced that a Mage had come here and seen the array, altered one of the symbols in the array using Magic, and then revealed himself to the others who came after, pretending to know what he was doing and explained it to them, to achieve the effect of misleading them.
The modified array was no longer reliable, but Batman still noted down all the content on the array and remembered the position of the modified symbol, guessing where the Mage might have headed.
It appeared that the Mage could either fly or teleport, apart from a few footprints left here, there were no traces of other actions. But the person who came here after him was clearly neither capable of flying nor teleporting. Even though he had intentionally erased his own footprints, Batman still found some subtle traces.
Following the traces, the footprints disappeared about five or six hundred meters later. Batman guessed that it was very likely that the Mage had used Magick to take them away.
But suddenly, Batman heard a trace of movement across the narrow alleyway behind him, it sounded like a man's intermittent speech:
"Oh my God, Venom, I'm telling you again, as soon as we get to the business district up ahead, we'll find a storefront with chocolate, and you can eat all you want then, stop nagging me, I need to concentrate on the rules!"
"Alright, alright, I know you're an intelligent alien life-form, but that's no reason to attack my intelligence…"
Batman turned the corner and came face-to-face with a man, and there was just one.
The man across from him was startled as well, he stood by the wall, looking Batman up and down, and after a while, said: "Hello, are you also a participant this time?"
A series of information flashed through Batman's mind, and then he nodded and said: "Yes, I'm Batman."
"Um, I'm Eddie Brock, um... I'm a hunter, what about you?"
Batman frowned slightly. He could see that this man was barely trained to fight, he didn't look like he had any superpowers, he wasn't a genius with extraordinary intelligence, nor was he a billionaire, he seemed like an ordinary media worker.
Batman didn't think his teammate would let him be a hunter because he was virtually unable to fight, but judging from his demeanor and the fluency of his language, he was not lying.
And now there was only him, so what was that alien life form he called 'Venom'?