Smoke rose from the ground, and the gleaming metal boots stepped on the puddles, taking each step carefully.
A thin drizzle of rain hit the broken brick wall, fingers with scratches pressed on the cracks of the bricks, and then a strong arm leaned forward, and the Arkham Knight gasped.
He slowly squatted down and retracted his hand to hold his broken right arm. Half of his visor and breastplate were missing, and the broken parts were all metal edges that had been violently torn.
This was the closest he came to death.
Boom, boom, boom.
He heard his heavy heartbeat, just like when he had counted the bells of Gotham Cathedral every night for the past year and passed out in pain, they overlapped again.
He had never seen Batman so angry.
A few minutes ago, Arkham Knight was punched to the ground by Batman with almost no way to fight back. The strong black shadow that suppressed him ripped off his shoulder armor with just one blow and smashed it at the same time.
Broken his arm.
Then came two ribs and half of the breastplate. Blood surged from his lungs and choked his throat, causing him to let out a terrified whimper.
Batman suddenly stopped. His strong desire to survive caused Arkham Knight to knock him over. Then he jumped off the edge of the roof in a panic and broke another leg.
His whole body ached. The pain was so severe that Arkham Knight kept panting, but his breathing became more and more disordered. He had no choice but to sit on the ground and look up at the huge moon over Gotham.
He continued to count his heartbeats, just as he had done every day for a year, but maybe it didn't last a year. In the first few months, he thought too much.
"It hurts... it hurts..."
With a swish sound, Batman opened his eyes.
"It hurts..." he repeated.
Then he raised his upper body with his arms as quickly as possible, looked to one side and shouted: "Peter... Peter! Peter, are you there?"
"I'm here." When the voice came from behind Batman, pain finally came from his injured arm, and the unexpected muscle contraction made him fall back on the bed.
Peter appeared in front of Batman, with his upper body naked, half of his chest and one arm wrapped in bandages. From the way the knots were tied, it could be seen that Alfred should have been bandaging him just now.
"Do you feel pain?" Peter obviously heard Batman's shout just now. He said: "You can take some painkillers. If you don't use them often, it will work quickly."
Batman just lay silently on the hospital bed, as quiet as a corpse. Maybe for the first time in his life, he actually found that he couldn't stand such a quiet atmosphere.
Fortunately, Peter spoke in time: "Did you just have a nightmare? I heard you keep shouting a name."
"What?"
"You were shouting 'Jason' in a very anxious tone, and you shouted 'Where are you?' and 'Go away' several times. You were twitching continuously for more than ten seconds. Alfred and I were a little worried about you.
Sleepwalking can cause wounds to worsen, so I put a strap on your waist."
Batman lowered his head and discovered that there was a restraint strap on his lower abdomen. This was the reason why he just wanted to get up but found that his arms were unable to support him.
"Who is Jason?" Peter asked curiously while wiping his arm with a towel.
"My...my former assistant."
Batman was keenly aware that his language system was a little out of control. He sighed in his heart. It seemed that the Joker had changed his strategy and no longer interfered with himself with those nonsense, but instead turned to attack his mental system inwardly.
"Where did he go? Why are you looking for him?" Peter came over and untied Batman's restraints, and quickly untied the gauntlets of the Batsuit. After seeing the scratches on his knuckles, he revealed an unknown figure.
material expression.
"He's missing." Batman lay flat on the spot, trying to calm his erratic heart rate.
He had suffered a huge shock just now, the despair of losing, the surprise of regaining something, the fear of repeating the same mistakes, and the uncontrollable anger after fear.
"...I lost him." Batman murmured: "We had a fight one day, and then he disappeared without a weapon, without a beacon, and without leaving any message."
"I searched every street, every house, every criminal lair in Gotham, but I found nothing."
Batman paused when he felt Peter cleaning the scrape on his hand with a cotton swab. That kind of polite sadness made Batman feel an indescribable irritation.
"Everyone is saying he is dead." Batman found that these words actually came out of his own mouth, with emotions of anger and complaint that should not belong to him at all.
"So easy...unreasonable...even so, I should find his body."
"Maybe he left the city and the country, so you didn't find him."
It was a slightly superficial consolation, but Batman still chose to accept it, because the child was about to make another irreversible mistake just now, and he had to hurry up and talk about it.
"You shouldn't have pressed that button," Batman said.
"Then the missiles will level the entire Gotham City, and here are all the citizens lying on the ground not knowing whether they are alive or dead." Peter shook his head and said, "I can't believe they would do this."
"Do you want me to count on you?" Peter looked into Batman's eyes and said, "But if your method was really effective, we wouldn't be facing this night."
Batman frowned.
"Of course, I don't think Batman is useless. You have really brought fear to those criminals, but I am more interested in what is after the fear."
Batman thought about how he felt deeply afraid when he thought Peter and Alfred were killed in a missile bombing along with Wayne Manor.
Then came an uncontrollable rage.
Batman was furious almost instantly, and his heart was violent and even violent, as if he wanted to tear a hole in the world.
Even though he knew that Peter and Alfred were safe, this rage still made the blood all over his body boil, causing his muscles to explode with more powerful force than before. It only took one blow to kill Alfred.
Knight Cam's armor was completely torn to pieces.
"Humans often rely on these emotions to survive in primitive societies." Peter said: "When we see wild beasts, we will first feel fear, and in order to survive, we must burst out with enough strength."
"Our bodies have remembered this choice during the long process of evolution, and the physiological symptoms of blood boiling and adrenaline surge often affect emotions. When the primitive wildness rushes to the brain, it turns into anger.
"
"The safe environment of modern society will make most people choose to avoid it when faced with fear. This is the biggest positive effect Batman has brought to this city."
"But there are inevitably a few criminals with extraordinary talents in a megacity. When faced with fear, they will not retreat cowardly, but will be aroused with similar primitive instincts and overreact out of self-protection.
"
"If they happen to have a genius brain or other powerful abilities, anger will ignite their thinking, overwhelm their reason, and give birth to crazy wisdom."
Batman listened carefully because he had just felt the same thing, and this was a novel angle that no one had ever talked about before.
"What about the other way around?" Batman asked: "Fear gives birth to anger, does anger come from fear?"
"Sometimes." Peter's tone was not so sure. He said: "I only know that occasional anger is normal, but if you often feel angry and are always particularly irritable, then there must be something in his life that makes him angry.
A source of irritation for emotional instability.”
"If it's not something that exists in reality, then maybe it's the fear in my heart."
This sentence seemed to touch Batman. He lay silently on the bed for a while, and then said: "I had a dream. Maybe it was not a dream, but what the clown wanted me to see."
"I saw Jason, he was sitting on a chair in the middle of a dark room, his hands were hung up, and he was covered in blood."
Peter turned around with some interest, leaned against Batman's bed, turned to look at him and asked: "You mean he was kidnapped?"
"It should have happened a long time ago." Batman said with a subtle tremor in his tone: "He has many injuries on his body, most of which are old injuries, ranging from one month to three months ago."
"He was calling Batman, he was asking where Batman was, and he said he was in pain, all over his body."
Batman seemed to be out of breath all of a sudden, and the rest of his words were choked back into his lungs. When the breath of air that he choked back came up again, it smelled of blood.
Peter blinked and was about to say something when Batman raised his hand to cover his chest and gasped a few times.
Peter quickly pressed his chest to make him lie down, and then gave him some relief. Batman slowly touched the side of his cheek with that hand, as if there was something there.
"The symptoms were getting worse," he said. "I started to feel phantom pain, and I felt his pain, and it really hurt."
Peter's hand on Batman's breastplate paused, showing a thoughtful expression, and Batman groped his cheek and said: "I saw a scar on Jason's face, like
Someone carved it deliberately, it is a capital letter J."
Peter's eyes widened.
He calmed down his expression before Batman looked over, took back his hand and said, "Do you have any research on brain waves?"
Batman looked at him without speaking. Peter turned around and walked to the table next to him. While adjusting the bandage on his arm, he said, "I heard a theory in our universe."
"The brain waves between people will affect each other, and so will the brain waves and magnetic fields of humans. We have previously discovered some kind of radiation in the fear gas. This must be related to how the fear gas we are studying produces in people.
It’s about the subject of fear.”
"I wonder if this radiation is some kind of special brain wave, an interference wave frequency. When it affects the brain waves of normal people, it will make them feel afraid. And as I said before, fear
Behind it is anger.”
"Therefore, people infected with fear gas will become more emotionally unstable and more inclined to violence. Their self-protection instinct will be stimulated by a certain interference frequency band, and they will fall into chaos."
"So I am now trying to abandon chemical analysis and start from the perspective of electronic signaling and brain science to see if I can essentially crack the fear gas."
Drip - drip - drip -
The Bat communicator placed aside rang again. Just as Peter was about to get it, he found that Batman had already gotten out of bed and took the communicator. Nightwing's voice came from the other side of the communicator.
"The situation is not optimistic, Batman. When I rushed to the clock tower, I found signs of violent demolition there. Barbara might have been taken away."
"There I found the recording left by Gordon. They were trapped in the Citibank vault about an hour ago, and when I went to the vault, it had been broken into."
"I suspect that two groups kidnapped their father and daughter. I can only confirm that one of them is Penguin's subordinates because I saw the black gold transaction between Penguin and the military left by Barbara on her computer.