Smoke rises from the ground, a metallic boot shining with a cold light steps in a puddle, one step heavy, the next light.
Thin rain flutters against the cracked brick wall. Fingers grazed on the wall clutching the fissures, swiftly followed by the leaning of a sturdy arm, the Arkham Knight gasping in pain.
He slowly squats down, pulling back his fractured right arm. The half-face guard and chest plate were now absent, with violently torn metallic edges on the fractures.
This was the closest he's been to death.
Thump, thump, thump.
He heard his heavy heartbeat, akin to the tolling bells resonating from the Gotham Cathedral every night for the past year. As they merged once again, he passed out in agony.
He'd never seen Batman so enraged before.
Just a few moments ago, Arkham Knight was fiercely punched down by Batman with hardly any strength to counterattack. His imposing shadow pinned him down, and with just one blow, tore off his shoulder plate, simultaneously shattering his arm.
Followed by two ribs and half a chest plate. Blood gushed from his lungs, choked in his throat, making him whimper in fear.
Batman suddenly halted. A strong will to survive made Arkham Knight throw him off and jump off the edge of the roof in panic, breaking another leg in the process.
His entire body was in pain, intense unbearable pain. The Arkham Knight gasped continuously but his breathing grew more and more chaotic. He had to sit on the ground, looking up at the colossal moon enveloping Gotham's sky.
He continued counting his heartbeats just as he had done every day for the past year. But perhaps it hadn't even been a year, during the initial few months, he found himself overthinking.
"It hurts… It hurts so much..."
Suddenly, Batman opened his eyes.
"It hurts…" he repeated.
Then, with the fastest speed, he restrained his upper body with one arm, looking to the side and shouting, "Peter... Peter! Where are you, Peter?"
"I'm here." As the voice came from behind Batman, his wounded arm finally succumbed to the pain, seized by unexpected muscle spasms causing him to fall back onto the bed.
Peter appeared in front of Batman, bare-chested with bandages wrapped around half of his chest and one arm. From the knots, it was clear that the bandages had just been administered by Alfred.
"Does it hurt a lot?" Peter obviously heard Batman's exclamation earlier and said, "You can take some painkillers. They'll act quickly if you're not habitual to them."
Batman just lay silently on the bed like a corpse. For the first time in his life, he found such silence unbearable.
Luckily Peter spoke up just in time, "Did you have a nightmare? I heard you calling a name repeatedly."
"What?"
"You were calling 'Jason', your voice anxious, shouting 'where are you?' and 'get out!' a few times. You were having muscle spasms for about ten seconds. Alfred and I were worried that sleepwalking might worsen your injuries, so we added a bandage to your waist."
Batman looked down to find a restrictive band tied around his abdomen, the real culprit behind his inability to muster the strength to get up.
"Who is Jason?" Peter asked curiously while wiping his arm with a towel.
"My... my former assistant."
Batman could sense some anomaly in his speech control system. He sighed, seems like Joker had changed tactics, now attacking his own psychological sphere instead of using distractions.
"Where is he now? Why were you looking for him?" Peter asked as he came forward to untie the restrictive band on Batman, methodically removing the handguard of the bat clothes. Upon seeing the scrapes on his knuckles, Peter's expression read he was not surprised.
"He's missing." Batman lay still, striving to stabilize his irregular heartbeat.
The impact he'd experienced just now was tremendous. The despair of loss, the joy of regaining, the fear of repeating the past, and the uncontrollable rage after fear.
"...I lost him." muttered Batman,"We had a fight one day, and then he disappeared. No weapons, no tracker, not even a message left behind."
"I've searched every street, every house, every criminal den in Gotham, but found nothing."
After a pause in Peter's movements as he cleaned Batman's scraped hands, a courteous sentimentality ensues, causing Batman to feel an inexplicable agitation.
"Everyone says he's dead." The words came out of Batman's mouth tinged with an uncharacteristic bitterness.
"That easy... It's illogical... Even so, I should have found his corpse."
"Perhaps he's left the city, or even the country. That's why you couldn't find him."
The consolation was rather superficial, but Batman chose to accept it. This kid was about to make another irreparable mistake. He needed to discuss it urgently.
"You shouldn't have pressed that button." Batman said.
"Then the missile would have flattened the whole Gotham City with unconscious civilians all over the place." Peter shook his head, "I cannot believe they would have gone that far."
"Do you want me to trust you?" Peter looked at Batman's eyes and said, "But if your approach is really effective, we wouldn't have faced tonight."
Batman knitted his brow.
"Of course, I don't think Batman is incompetent; you effectively instilled fear in the criminals, but I am more interested in what comes after fear."
Batman thought back to when he thought Peter and Alfred were buried in a missile attack at Wayne Manor, recalling the intense fear he had felt.
Then arose an unfettered anger.
Batman almost caught fire in fury, with rampant uneasiness and even cruelty in his heart, as if he wanted to tear the world apart.
Even though he knew Peter and Alfred were safe, this rage still made his blood boil, releasing an unprecedented physical strength, enough to tear apart Arkham Knight's armor in a single blow.
"The human race often relied on such emotions to survive in primitive society." Peter began, "When we saw a beast, we would first be afraid, and in order to survive, we had to release a powerful force."
"Our bodies remembered this choice throughout evolution, and physiological symptoms such as boiling blood and increased adrenaline often impact our emotions, turning primitive wildness into anger."
"The safe environment of modern society allows most people to choose to avoid it when facing fear. This is the most significant positive impact that Batman has had on this city."
"But there are inevitably a few gifted criminals in a huge city. When they face fear, they will not retreat timidly but are likely to arouse similar primitive instincts. They will have an overreaction for self-protection."
"If they happen to also have a genius brain or other powerful abilities, anger will ignite their thinking, overrun their reason, and give birth to insane wisdom."
Batman listened very attentively because he had just experienced this, and this was a novel perspective that no one had discussed before.
"So what about the other way around?" Batman asked, "Can fear give birth to anger, or does anger originate from fear?"
"Sometimes." Peter's tone was not as certain as before. He said, "I only know that occasional anger is normal, but if one is often angry and especially irritable, there must be some sources of emotional instability in their life."
"If it is not something that exists in reality, then maybe this could be fear at the bottom of one's heart."
These words seemed to touch Batman. He laid silently in bed for a while before finally saying: "I had a dream, or maybe it wasn't a dream, but what the Joker wanted me to see."
"I saw Jason, he was sitting in a chair in the middle of a dark room, his hands were hoisted up, and he was covered in blood."
Peter turned around with interest, leaning against the edge of Batman's bed, and turned to him in question, "You mean he was kidnapped?"
"It should've been a long time ago." Batman's tone had a hint of trembling, "He had many wounds, most of them old, ranging from a month to three months old."
"He was shouting for Batman, asking where Batman is, he said he was in pain, and in pain all over."
It was as if Batman suddenly couldn't breathe, the rest of his words suffocated in his lungs. The air that welled up abruptly carried a bloody smell.
Peter blinked and was about to say something when Batman lifted his hand to cover his chest and gasped a few times in haste.
Peter quickly pressed against Batman's chest, letting him lie flat, and eased his breath. Batman slowly touched the side of his cheek again, as if there was something there.
"The symptoms are getting worse." He said, "I've started to feel phantom pain, I felt his pain, it was really painful."
Peter's hand resting on Batman's armor hesitated. He showed a thoughtful expression, while Batman started to explore below his own cheek again and said: "I saw a scar on Jason's face, as if intentionally engraved by someone, it was a capital 'J'."
Peter's eyes widened.
Before Batman saw it, he subdued his expression, retracted his hand, and asked, "Have you studied brainwaves?"
Batman looked at him without saying a word. Peter walked over to the nearby table, adjusting the bandage on his arm while saying, "I've heard of a theory from our cosmos."
"People's brainwaves interact, and human brainwaves also interact with magnetic fields. We previously discovered some form of radiation in the fear gas which must be related to our study of how exactly the fear gas produces fear."
"I speculate that this radiation could be some special type of brainwave, a disturbance in frequency. When it affects the normal brainwaves of a person, they will feel fear, and as I mentioned earlier, behind the fear is anger."
"Therefore, people infected with fear gas become emotionally unstable and are more inclined to violence. They have a self-protective instinct stimulated by some kind of interference frequency, which leads them into chaos."
"That's why I'm currently attempting to abandon chemical analysis and approach it from the perspective of electronic signal and brain science, to fundamentally crack the fear gas."
Beep— Beep— Beep—
A notification from the Bat communicator placed aside went off, Peter was about to pick it up when Batman already got up from the bed and picked it up. On the other end, it was Nightwing's voice.
"The situation isn't good, Batman. When I arrived at the bell tower, I found traces of violent intrusion. Barbara might have been taken away."
"I found a recording left by Gordon there, about an hour ago they were trapped in the vault of Citibank, and when I got to the bank, there had already been an intrusion."
"I suspect there are separate groups kidnapping the father and daughter. I can only confirm one of them is under Penguin Man because I saw on Barbara's computer that she left Penguin Man's underground arms transaction with the military."