Chapter 2028

Smoke rose from the ground, and cold, gleaming metal boots stepped into a puddle, one step heavy, one step light.

The fine, misty rain drifted onto the broken brick wall. Fingers with abrasions pressed into the brick seams, followed by a strong arm leaning against it. Arkham Knight was gasping for breath.

He slowly crouched down, withdrawing his hand to press against his broken right arm. His half-side faceplate and chest plate were completely gone, and the broken edges were all metal edges that had been violently torn.

This was the closest he had ever been to death.

Thump, thump, thump.

He heard his own heavy heartbeat, just like every night in the past year when he counted the bells of Cat Getan Cathedral, falling unconscious in pain. They overlapped once again.

He had never seen Batman so angry.

A few minutes ago, Arkham Knight had been knocked to the ground by Batman with almost no power to resist. The strong black shadow pinning him down had torn off his shoulder armor with a single blow and shattered his arm at the same time.

This was followed by two ribs and half of his chest plate. Blood surged up from his lungs, choking his throat and causing him to let out a fearful whimper.

Batman suddenly stopped. An intense desire to survive caused Arkham Knight to flip him over, then jump off the edge of the rooftop in a panic, breaking a leg in the process.

His whole body was in pain—it hurt too much. Arkham Knight gasped continuously, but his breathing became increasingly chaotic. He had no choice but to sit on the ground and look up at the giant moon above Cat Getan.

He continued to count his heartbeat, just as he had done every day throughout this year. But perhaps it hadn't lasted a year; in the first few months, he had still thought too much, far too much.

"It hurts... it hurts so much..."

With a swish, Batman opened his eyes.

"It hurts..." he repeated.

Then he used his arms to support his upper body at top speed, looked to one side, and shouted, "Peter... Peter! Peter, are you there?"

"I'm here." When the voice came from behind Batman, his injured arm finally transmitted pain. The unexpected muscle contraction caused him to fall back onto the bed.

Peter appeared before Batman, shirtless, with bandages wrapped around half his chest and one arm. Judging by the way they were tied, Alfred must have just bandaged him.

"Are you in a lot of pain?" Peter clearly heard Batman's shout just now. He said, "You can have some painkillers. If you don't use them often, they will be very effective."

Batman just lay silently on the hospital bed, as quiet as a corpse. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he found he couldn't stand such a quiet atmosphere.

Fortunately, Peter spoke up in time: "Did you just have a nightmare? I heard you calling a name over and over."

"What?"

"You were shouting 'Jason' in a very anxious tone, and you also shouted 'Where are you?' and 'Get away' several times. For over ten seconds, you were convulsing continuously. Alfred and I were worried that your sleepwalking would cause your wounds to deteriorate, so we added straps to your waist."

Batman looked down and only then discovered a restraint strap cinched around his lower abdomen. This was the culprit behind why he had wanted to get up just now but found his arms lacked the strength to support him.

"Who is Jason?" Peter asked with some curiosity while wiping his arm with a towel.

"My... my former assistant."

Batman keenly sensed that his language system was a bit out of control. He sighed in his heart. It seemed the Joker had changed his strategy, no longer using that nonsense to interfere with him, but instead turning to attack his mental system from within.

"Where did he go? Why are you looking for him?" Peter walked over to undo the restraint strap for Batman, deftly unfastened the gauntlets of the Batsuit, and upon seeing the abrasions on the knuckles, revealed an expression of "as expected."

"He went missing." Batman lay flat where he was, struggling to calm his unstable heart rate.

Just now, he had suffered too great a shock: the despair of loss, the surprise of recovery, the fear of repeating the same mistakes, and the uncontrollable anger after the fear.

"... I lost him," Batman murmured. "We had an argument one day, and then he disappeared. No weapons, no beacon, and he didn't leave any message."

"I searched every street, every house, and every criminal's lair in all of Cat Getan, but I found nothing."

Batman sensed that Peter's movements in cleaning the abrasions on his hand had paused. That polite sadness caused an indescribable irritability to rise in Batman.

"Everyone says he's dead." Batman discovered that this sentence had actually come out of his own mouth, carrying anger and complaints that shouldn't have belonged to him at all.

"So easily... unreasonably... even so, I should have found his body."

"Perhaps he left this city, left this country, which is why you didn't find him."

A slightly superficial comfort, but Batman chose to accept it, because just now this child was about to commit another irreversible mistake, and he had to hurry to talk about it.

"You shouldn't have pressed that button," Batman said.

"Then the missiles would have leveled all of Cat Getan City, and it was full of citizens collapsed on the ground, dead or alive," Peter shook his head and said. "I really can't believe they would do that."

"Do you want me to count on you?" Peter looked into Batman's eyes and said. "But if your methods were truly effective, we wouldn't have had this night."

Batman frowned.

"Of course, I don't think Batman is useless. You have effectively brought fear to those criminals, but what I am more interested in is what comes after fear."

Batman thought that when he believed Peter and Alfred had been buried with Wayne Manor in the missile bombardment, he had felt deep fear.

Then came an uncontrollable anger.

Batman was furious almost in an instant. The irritability, even brutality, in his heart felt like it wanted to tear a hole in this world.

Even though he knew Peter and Alfred were already safe, this rage still made his blood boil, allowing his muscles to erupt with power greater than ever before, tearing Arkham Knight's armor to shreds with a single blow.

"Humans in primitive society often relied on such emotions to survive," Peter said. "When we see a wild beast, we first feel fear, and in order to survive, we must erupt with sufficiently powerful strength."

"Our bodies remembered this choice during long evolution, and those physiological symptoms of boiling blood and surging adrenaline often affect emotions. When that primitive wildness rushes to the brain, it turns into anger."

"The safe environment of modern society allows the vast majority of people to choose avoidance when facing fear. This is the greatest positive effect Batman has brought to this city."

"But in a megacity, it is inevitable that there will be a few gifted criminals. When facing fear, they won't cowardly retreat, but will be provoked into similar primitive instincts, producing an overreaction out of self-protection."

"If they happen to have a genius brain or other powerful abilities, anger will ignite their thinking while simultaneously crushing their reason, causing them to give birth to a crazy wisdom."

Batman listened very carefully, because he had just experienced it himself, and this was a novel angle that no one had ever discussed.

"Then what about the reverse?" Batman asked. "Does fear give birth to anger, and does anger originate from fear?"

"Sometimes it does." Peter's tone was not so certain. He said, "I only know that occasional anger is normal, but if one often feels angry and is always exceptionally irritable, then there must be some stimulus in their life that makes their emotions unstable."

"If it isn't something that exists in reality, then perhaps it could be fear from the bottom of one's heart."

This sentence seemed to touch Batman. He lay silently on the bed for a good while before he finally said, "I had a dream—perhaps it wasn't a dream, but something the Joker wanted me to see."

"I saw Jason. He was sitting on a chair in the middle of a dark room, his hands hung up, covered in blood."

Peter turned around with some interest, leaning his back against Batman's bed, and looked at him, asking, "Do you mean he was kidnapped?"

"It should have been a long time ago." Batman's tone carried a trace of imperceptible trembling. "He had many wounds on his body, more than half of which were old wounds, ranging from one to three months old."

"He was shouting for Batman, asking where Batman was. He said he was in pain, his whole body was in pain."

Batman seemed to suddenly be unable to breathe. The remaining words were stifled back into his lungs, and when the air he choked back surged up again, it carried a bloody taste.

Peter blinked. Just as he was about to say something, Batman raised his hand to cover his chest and gasped a few times.

Peter hurriedly pressed his chest to keep him lying flat and then helped him catch his breath. Batman used that hand to slowly touch the side of his cheek, as if there were something there.

"The symptoms are getting more and more severe," he said. "I'm starting to feel phantom pain. I felt his pain. It really hurt."

Peter's hand on Batman's chest plate paused, revealing a thoughtful expression. Batman groped below his cheek and said, "I saw a scar on Jason's face, as if it had been deliberately carved by someone. It was a capital letter J."

Peter's eyes widened.

He composed his expression before Batman looked over, withdrew his hand, and said, "Do you have any research on brain waves?"

Batman looked at him without speaking. Peter turned and walked to the table nearby, adjusting the bandage on his arm while saying, "I heard a theory in our universe."

"Brain waves between people can influence each other, as can human brain waves and magnetic fields. We discovered a certain radiation in the fear gas earlier, which must be related to the topic we are researching on how fear gas makes people feel fear."

"I suspect whether this radiation might be a certain special brain wave, a type of interference frequency. When it affects a normal person's brain waves, it makes them feel fear, and as I said before, behind fear is anger."

"Therefore, people infected with fear gas will have more unstable emotions and be more inclined toward violence. They are stimulated by a certain interference frequency, triggering their instinct for self-protection, thereby falling into chaos."

"So I am currently trying to abandon chemical analysis and instead start from the perspective of electronic signal science and brain science to see if I can crack fear gas at its essence."

Beep—beep—beep—

The Bat-communicator placed to the side rang again. Peter had just gone to pick it up when he discovered Batman had already gotten out of bed and taken the communicator. Nightwing's voice came from the other side.

"The situation isn't looking good, Batman. When I arrived at the Clock Tower, I found signs of violent forced entry. It's possible Barbara was taken away."

"I found a recording left by Gordon there. About an hour ago, they were trapped in the vault of the Citibank, and when I went to the vault, it had already been broken into."

"I suspect two groups of people kidnapped the father and daughter. I can only confirm that one of the groups is Penguin's men, because I saw the black-market transaction records between Penguin and the military that she left on Barbara's computer."