"I'm back!"
When Bruce stepped into Wayne Manor, he shouted, but didn't hear Martha's response. He quickly walked through the front hall, also not spotting the two in the dining room or the kitchen.
So he continued toward the back, arriving in the rear garden, where he saw another Bruce, holding a hose and watering the plants, with a wound on the back of his hand from a spider bite.
"Where are Thomas and Martha?" Bruce asked.
"They've gone to Dick's parent-teacher meeting," the other Bruce replied, putting away the hose and turning to look at Bruce, "What's up? You looking for them for something?"
By this time, Bruce had walked over. He said, "Not really anything urgent, I was mainly here to see you. How's your wound doing?"
"Actually, it healed a while ago, but Thomas and Martha aren't reassured. Until the family doctor comes for the next full check-up, I can't leave," the other Bruce sighed, "I also wonder how my universe is doing."
"I told you that Spider-Man didn't actually die, right? Did he come to see you?"
"No, but he left me a note, telling me he's found a new job and won't be back for a while, though it's good to know he's still alive."
"So, have you considered looking for a new job?"
The other Bruce raised an eyebrow, while Bruce walked up and put his arm around his shoulder, saying, "I'm sure the next family doctor's check-up will confirm that you are actually completely fine."
"So, normally, you should return to your universe, but I believe you don't want to go back now, you want to stay with Thomas and Martha, at least for a little while longer."
The other Bruce looked a bit embarrassed, as if caught in an intimate thought. He said, "I do want to stay with them a bit longer, but if you..."
"Actually, I totally don't mind," Bruce shrugged and said, "I've been pretty busy lately, it's nice to have you here to keep them company."
"But you know, Thomas hates idleness, and if you're recovered and still hanging around the house all day…" Bruce drew out his words, which made the other Bruce shiver.
"Okay, it looks like you have a job to offer me," the other Bruce said, "But I must remind you, even with Spider-Man's abilities, I'm still an ordinary person, far behind those so-called normal Batmans, I might find it hard to handle your kind of work."
"No worries, it's not anything too difficult." The two turned a corner and entered the lobby. Bruce looked at his counterpart and said, "By the way, do you have a costume?"
The other Bruce shook his head, "My previous costume is ruined, and Thomas doesn't seem too fond of me tinkering with these things."
"That's true, but since you've already become Spider-Man, you might as well ask the other Spider-Men about how they make their costumes. Get yourself a snazzy costume first, then we can talk about the entry assessment," Bruce said.
"There's an entry assessment?"
"Of course, but don't worry too much. It's just a very simple little test, easy to pass," Bruce reassured him.
In David's psychic battlefield, the battle between the two dinosaurs was nearing its end. To be precise, after the first few encounters, they hadn't really fought at all.
It was the female dinosaur, both named Cole Norton, who had pinned the Bat Tyrant Dragon down, then sniffed around it, left and right, such that when time flow resumed, the Bat Tyrant Dragon had to distance itself because it had no idea how to respond to a real dinosaur's mating behavior.
The Bat Tyrant Dragon raised a short arm and said, "First of all, I was not originally a dinosaur, I am Batman, and second, this body is not a real dinosaur, but a mechanical Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Cole Norton let out a howl, which the Bat Tyrant Dragon didn't understand at all because he was not actually a dinosaur and hadn't seen other dinosaurs before meeting Cole Norton, so he didn't speak dinosaur.
While it was astonishing that there still existed a language Batman didn't understand, at least, this Batman inhabiting the mechanical Tyrannosaurus Rex lacked such knowledge.
So he could only respond instinctively, ensuring the peculiar female dinosaur didn't pin him again, but using a language without thorough understanding usually doesn't yield good results.
Cole Norton immediately became excited and bumped her head against the Bat Tyrant Dragon. The Bat Tyrant Dragon tried to dodge, but she stuck close to him again.
"Uh, what are they doing?" Miles said, confused.
"It looks like courting," Gwen Spiderman shrugged and sighed with relief before adding, "The good news is, they probably won't fight anymore; the bad news is, you probably won't be able to approach Cole Norton for research any time soon."
The Time Manipulator sighed as well.
Just then, Shadow Batman's communicator beeped. He answered it with a few responses, then turned back to the Spider Squad and said, "Bad news, we're running out of bandwidth. We need to withdraw for now."
"Why are we out? Didn't we test it before? The bandwidth should have just enough to accommodate a few of us. Did something unexpected happen in the real world?"
"That's not it, it's just that new people need to come in," Shadow Spider-Man replied. "Nick says the current upload and download speeds are already very dangerous. If we don't pull a group out, we're going to start experiencing lag."
"But we still need to help the Time Manipulator..."
"You're going to the real world?" the Time Manipulator suddenly asked. The Spider-Men nodded, and then he said, "Then help me look up some information. What exactly is this creature that appears in the depths of time?"
"Perhaps the Time Management Bureau will have records," Gwen Spiderman suggested. "Once we find the answer, we'll send someone to find you. But in exchange, you need to tell us the information about the machine that the X-Alliance is manufacturing."
"I can tell you part of it now as a down payment," the Time Manipulator said. "It's meant to end the war completely. We've been preparing for this all along."
After Spider-Man left, the battle between the Batmonster Vehicle and the Knight Armor was drawing to a close. With Barry and the Batmonster Vehicle working together, the Knight Armor's limbs were blown to smithereens.
In the end, the Batmonster Vehicle leaped off Barry's body and charged at the Knight Armor's chest plate with a bang, slamming it against the opposite wall. The floating helmet spun through the air and clattered to the ground with a clang.
Lightning Batman walked over, picked up the helmet, and then discovered that it wasn't made of steel at all, but of plastic, only imitating the texture and pattern of metal.
Turning the helmet over, he even found a price tag attached to the back. Lightning Batman looked closely and realized it was nothing but a cheap plastic toy helmet sold in some discount supermarket in France.
The Batmonster Vehicle, Lightning Batman, and Barry gathered together and quickly came to the same conclusion as the other Batmen: these seemingly chaotic personas actually followed an internal logic. They might be phantoms evolved from David's thoughts and imaginations at a certain moment.
However, as to how to eliminate these personas, they still had no clue. The group found out that once these personas returned to their original forms, they became indestructible.
Lightning Batman speculated that this might be because they couldn't destroy David's memory. Once the personas took on their original form from memory, they became impossible to kill.
Barry studied the helmet for a long time and finally found that it was nothing more than an ordinary plastic helmet, devoid of any magical properties that could repel attacks. No matter what he did, he couldn't leave a single mark on it.
"We need to go deeper," Lightning Batman said. "Find the personas that can communicate, and ask them what's going on."
"Then let's go," the Batmonster Vehicle said as it opened its door. "There's no other transportation in this city, which means we can race through the streets alone."
As the Batmonster Vehicle carried Lightning Batman and Barry deeper, Batman, Batwoman, and Charles were also making their way deeper into the Soulstream Sect.
They, too, found that the tree representing fear was indestructible and came to the same conclusion. However, Batman thought even more deeply.
The human memory is not as robust as imagined. Even adults, when recalling things from long ago, find memories to be blurry, and sometimes they even doubt whether those distant memories were real or just fantasy.
David's experience with that big tree must have occurred when he was very young. But if the big tree was indestructible, did it mean that in David's heart, this piece of memory was very solid?
People always have a few impressive events that they remember for most of their lives. Considering the dangerous nature of the event, it was normal for David to remember it clearly.
But if there were so many personas here, and all of their origins were clearly remembered by David, manifested indestructibly within the psychic battlefield, that would be truly incredible.
Batman also speculated that many of these personas might have been just fleeting glances while walking, casual observations that sparked associations or strange characters that appeared in dreams. For normal people, these things would be quickly forgotten; no one would remember in detail what they saw on a street they walked down when they were very young.
"Could this be symptomatic of a hyperthymesia condition?" Charles proposed a possibility. "Unable to control which memories the brain receives and unable to forget, leading to memories swelling within the brain, resulting in the situation we see today."
"But if that were the case, the situation would certainly be far more chaotic than what we're seeing now," Batman said. "Patients with hyperthymesia can't control the positioning of their memories; it's a mental disorder, and the inner world of a mentally ill person would not be so orderly."
Charles fell silent, having seen the insides of many mentally ill patients, which indeed were utterly chaotic, often an illogical mess, such as things that would never belong together being mashed into one item and then endlessly spinning and floating, obscuring all vision.
David's psychic battlefield was chaotic, but it was a rational chaos, with rules and order. This indicated he could control his psychic world. He might be mad, but not sick.
"This may have something to do with his current condition," Batwoman speculated. "We need to figure out what's causing his pain. These personas?"