[ Gotham City ]
The Star City duo really couldn't get used to Gotham's hospitality—where people fired rockets at helicopters just for existing. Thea had patrolled her own city for nights on end, and not once had she seen anyone wield something so ridiculous. These people weren't just hardened; they were borderline war-torn.
She quickly directed Catwoman to raise the altitude and turned to Felicity. "Try finding a place to land—somewhere like the police station, a government building, or maybe some private estate belonging to a rich eccentric."
Felicity focused on launching Gotham's digital invasion with the quiet hum of the propellers in the background.
"Oh... yeah, scratch the city hall idea," she said, rotating the tablet for Thea to see. Onscreen was a two-meter-tall bald brute with a metallic breathing mask and a torso full of muscles. One of his arms looked like it could bench-press a refrigerator.
Thea frowned. "Yeah, that guy is definitely not getting a public servant of the month award. Any government that hires him would resign in protest. That must be Bane."
She mentally compared his build, brute strength, and absurd resilience. He looked like a final boss. Or at least, he should have.
Thea wasn't so sure anymore. She'd pieced together intel from Catwoman and her past life memories. While events had started similarly to that movie—Bane crushing Batman—the plot had clearly veered off the rails.
...
Yes, Bane had hacked a TV station. Yes, he'd constructed a nuclear reactor for some dramatic live threat. But two days into his big doomsday broadcast, nothing. Gotham was quiet. People were eating shawarma, dancing in parks, ignoring the so-called threat like it was just another Tuesday.
When his henchmen confirmed the broadcast had gone live without a hitch, Bane grew suspicious. Why no panic? No fear?
Bane, refusing to accept defeat, flagged down an old man passing by and started explaining, in great detail, all the terrible things he'd done. Nuclear threats, public takeovers—he bragged like a villain on a press tour. He expected fear, awe, maybe even a little begging.
But the old man just chuckled. "Young man, you're too sincere. It's hard for someone that honest to survive in Gotham. You're too focused on the surface—look deeper. Take me, for instance. I'm seventy-six, been a 'good citizen' for over sixty years. Seems harmless, right?"
He tapped his basket and added casually, "I've got a dirty bomb in my basement, two bottles of sarin in my fridge, and this morning I picked up two kilos of radioactive material. You seem down—want to buy it cheap?"
With growing unease, Bane started randomly interviewing other citizens. Each response made his mask itch with disbelief. No one was scared. No one even blinked. Everything he thought would terrify people turned out to be Gotham's daily background noise.
"Do you think I was scared?" In most places, that sentence would be a threat wrapped in a question. In Gotham, though, it was just a statement of fact—an honest reflection used as casually as a greeting.
People here used to be scared, sure—back when they were young, when they didn't know any better. Now, that sentence showed up more in drinking games than in emergencies. It had lost all bite and become just another line in the Gotham dialect.
These people had seen too much. Fear? They'd run out of that emotion a long time ago. Cast a fear spell in any other city and the streets would explode into chaos. In Gotham? You'd see the words "immune" flash across their faces like a passive skill in a game.
If Gotham were a video game starting zone, players would get a 50% passive resistance to all fear-based magic.
When Bane saw that his usual scare tactics had all flopped, he finally turned to his partner—Talia al Ghul, the daughter of Ra's al Ghul, former lover of Batman, and mother of his son Damian.
Talia, elegant and dangerous, had been trained by one of the most ruthless minds in history. She calmly introduced Bane to an old idiom: "Use barbarians to control barbarians." In short? Use Gotham to fight Gotham.
So, with some hesitation—and probably a prayer under his breath—Bane unlocked the gates of Blackgate Prison.
Then, for extra chaos, they unleashed hundreds of Arkham's mentally unstable inmates onto the streets like a horror-themed parade float gone wrong.
The outcome? Carnage. Rivers of blood. Gotham turned into a no-man's land overnight. But as the dust settled, Bane realized his plan had worked too well.
Turns out, that whole idea about Gotham people sticking together? Total myth. Gothamites tore into each other with a kind of brutality that made even Thea flinch. The more "local" you were, the more viciously they came for you.
The city turned into a blood-soaked carnival. Bodies dropped like leaves in autumn. And while the chaos achieved impressive results, Bane quickly discovered the flaw—there was nothing left for him to do. He'd even disassembled the nuclear reactor himself after witnessing the mental instability of Gotham's average citizen, he started to worry someone might come poke it just to see what happens or some lunatic would try to borrow uranium from it for a party trick. Now Nobody even cared about it anymore. It had been sitting untouched for days.
He could fight—but he is not immune to nuclear fallout.
Bane, once filled with grand dreams of leading an uprising, now sat in existential defeat. Even yesterday, the Penguin—yes, that Penguin—had shown up groveling at his feet. But the moment Bane turned his back, he and a few men stole a truckload of weapons and vanished like a puff of smoke.
Then there was the Scarecrow. Bespectacled, well-spoken, and apparently deadly after midnight. He told ghost stories so horrifying that three henchmen literally died from fright and two more went catatonic. Then, as if demonstrating Gotham's own flavor of betrayal, he slipped away into the night.
Felicity's live feed now showed what had become of the so-called final boss. Bane, reduced to a sad NPC, sat alone on the steps of city hall... tossing pebbles into the pigeons.
...
Seeing how much fun Bane was having throwing pebbles like a child at recess, Thea decided to let him sit there and rot in peace—for now.
They scouted a few more locations after that. Every place told the same story: a city on the brink. The police station looked like it had been shelled. Scorch marks licked up the walls, bullet holes decorated the facade like twisted ornaments, and corpses littered the ground—some in uniform, most not. It was clear the villains had taken a beating, but not without taking a few officers down with them.
Thea had expected chaos, but not carnage on this scale. Her stomach clenched. She glanced at Catwoman. "Did you and Robin agree on a rendezvous point?"
"…Yeah, we did. But we passed by there earlier—it's nothing but flames now. I haven't been able to contact anyone."
Seriously? No backup plan, no fallback location, just a single meetup spot in a city on fire? If Batman hadn't been the brains of the operation, the whole team would've been a smear on the sidewalk by now.
With Catwoman at a loss, Thea turned to the only other resource she trusted more than her bow—her friend.
"Scan the city using facial recognition. Track down Commissioner Gordon." His big, weathered face had been a Gotham icon for decades. If anyone was still trying to hold the line, it was him. Plus, unlike the masked Bat-family, he was easier to spot.
Felicity's fingers danced across the keyboard. "They've got layers of encryption. I can break it, but I'll need a little time."
To Be Continued...
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