Chapter 2023 Knight's Horror Night (VII)

Smoke rose from the ground, and the metal boots with cold light stepped on the puddles, one step heavy and one step light.

The faint drizzle hit the broken brick wall, and the scratched fingers pressed the brick seams, followed by a strong arm leaning up, and the Arkham Knight gasped.

He squatted slowly, retracted his hand and pressed the broken right arm. Half of his face armor and chest armor were gone, and the broken parts were all violently torn metal edges.

This was the closest he had ever been to death.

Boom, boom, boom.

He heard his heavy heartbeat, just like counting the bells of Gotham Cathedral every night in the past year, and they overlapped again when he fainted in pain.

He had never seen such an angry Batman.

A few minutes ago, the Arkham Knight was almost powerless to fight back and was knocked to the ground by Batman with a punch. The strong black shadow holding him down only used one blow to tear off his shoulder armor and smash his arm at the same time.

Then came two ribs and half of the breastplate. Blood rushed up from his lungs and choked his throat, causing him to whimper in fear.

Batman suddenly stopped. Arkham Knight flipped him over with a strong desire to survive, and then jumped off the edge of the roof in a panic, breaking another leg.

His whole body was in pain, and the pain was too severe. Arkham Knight kept gasping, but his breathing became more and more disordered. He had to sit on the ground and look up at the huge moon over Gotham.

He continued to count his heartbeats, just as he did every day in the past year, but perhaps it didn't last for a year. In the first few months, he thought too much.

"It hurts... it hurts..."

With a swish, Batman opened his eyes.

"It hurts..." he repeated.

Then he used his arms to prop up his upper body 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, his injured arm finally felt pain, and the unexpected muscle contraction made him fall back on the bed.

Peter appeared in front of Batman, naked from the waist up, with half of his chest and one arm wrapped in bandages. From the way the knots were tied, it can be seen that Alfred was bandaging him just now.

"Do you feel pain?" Peter obviously heard Batman's shout just now, and he said: "You can take some painkillers. If you don't use it often, it will work quickly."

Batman just lay silently on the bed, as quiet as a corpse. It may be the first time in his life that he actually found that he couldn't stand such a quiet atmosphere.

Fortunately, Peter spoke in time: "Did you have a nightmare just now? I heard you keep shouting a name."

"What?"

"You were shouting 'Jason' in an anxious tone, and shouted 'Where are you?' and 'Get out of here' several times. You were twitching for more than ten seconds. Alfred and I were a little worried that your sleepwalking would worsen your wound, so we put a strap on your waist."

Batman looked down and found that there was a strap tied around his lower abdomen. This was the culprit for his arm being unable to support him when he wanted to get up just now.

"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 used those nonsense to disturb himself, but turned to attack his mental system inward.

"Where did he go? Why are you looking for him?" Peter came over to untie Batman's restraints, and swiftly untied the gauntlet of the batsuit. After seeing the scratches on his knuckles, he showed an expected expression.

"He's missing." Batman lay flat on the ground, trying to calm his unstable heartbeat.

He had just been hit too hard, the despair of losing, the surprise of regaining, the fear of repeating the same mistakes, and the uncontrollable anger after the fear.

"... I lost him." Batman murmured, "One day we had a fight, and then he disappeared, without a weapon, without a beacon, and without leaving any message."

"I searched every street, every house, and every criminal's lair in Gotham, but found nothing."

Batman felt that Peter paused in cleaning the scratches on his hands with a cotton swab. The polite sadness made Batman feel an indescribable irritability.

"Everyone says he's dead." Batman found that this sentence came out of his mouth, with anger and complaints that should not belong to him at all.

"So easy... unreasonable... even so, I should have found his body."

"Maybe he left the city, left the country, so you didn't find him."

It was a superficial comfort, but Batman chose to accept it, because the kid was about to make an irreparable mistake, and he had to hurry up to talk about it.

"You shouldn't press that button." Batman said.

"Then the missile will flatten the entire Gotham City, and there will be citizens lying on the ground, not knowing whether they are dead or alive." 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 really worked, we wouldn't have this night." Batman frowned.

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

Batman thought that when he thought Peter and Alfred were buried in the missile bombing with Wayne Manor, he felt the fear deeply.

Then there was an uncontrollable anger.

Batman was furious almost in an instant, and the irritability and even tyranny in his heart seemed to tear a hole in the world.

Even though he knew that Peter and Alfred were safe, this rage still made his blood boil, and his muscles burst out with more powerful strength than before, and he only needed one blow to completely tear the armor of Arkham Knight apart.

"Humans often rely on such emotions to survive in primitive societies." Peter said, "When we see wild beasts, we will feel fear first, and in order to survive, we must burst out with enough strength."

"Our bodies have remembered this choice in the long evolution, and the physiological symptoms of boiling blood and surging adrenaline often affect emotions. When the primitive wildness rushes to the brain, it will turn into anger."

"The safe environment of modern society will make most people choose to avoid when facing fear. This is the biggest positive effect Batman has brought to this city."

"But there are inevitably a few gifted criminals in a megacity. When they face fear, they will not retreat cowardly, but will be aroused by 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, while overwhelm their reason, giving birth to crazy wisdom."

Batman listened very carefully, because he just felt the same way, and this is a novel angle that no one has ever talked about.

"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 certain. He said, "I only know that occasional anger is normal, but if he is often angry and always particularly irritable, then there must be some stimulus in his life that makes him emotionally unstable."

"If it is not something that exists in reality, then perhaps it may be the fear in the heart."

This sentence seemed to touch Batman. He lay in bed in silence for a long time before he said, "I had a dream. Maybe it was not a dream, but something the Joker wanted me to see."

"I saw Jason, he was sitting in a On the chair in the middle of the 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 his head and looked at him and asked: "Do you mean he was kidnapped?"

"It should have been a long time ago." Batman's tone was trembling with an imperceptible tremor: "He has a lot of injuries, most of which are old injuries, ranging from one month to three months ago."

"He was calling Batman, he was asking where Batman was, he said he was in pain, all over his body. "

Batman seemed to be out of breath suddenly, and the rest of the words were held back in his lungs. When the choked back air came up again, it smelled of blood.

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

Peter hurriedly pressed his chest to let him lie flat, and then helped him breathe, and Batman slowly touched the side of his cheek with that hand, as if there was something there.

"It's getting worse," he said. "I'm starting to feel phantom pain. I feel his pain, and it really hurts."

Peter paused with a thoughtful expression on his hand on Batman's chest plate, and Batman felt under his cheek and said, "I saw a scar on Jason's face, as if someone had deliberately carved it. It was a capital J."

Peter's eyes widened.

Before Batman looked over, he restrained his expression, retracted his hand and said, "Do you have any research on brain waves?"

Batman looked at him without saying anything. Peter turned and walked to the table next to him. While adjusting the bandage on his arm, he said, "I heard of a theory in our universe."

"Brain waves between people will affect each other, and so will human brain waves and magnetic fields. We have previously discovered some kind of radiation in the fear gas, which must be related to the topic we are studying on how the fear gas makes people feel fear."

"I guess this radiation may be some special brain wave, an interference wave frequency. When it affects the brain waves of normal people, it will make them feel fear. As I said before, behind fear is anger."

"Therefore, people infected with fear gas will become more unstable and more prone to violence. They are stimulated by some interference frequency bands to have a self-protection instinct, thus falling into chaos."

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

Drip-drip-drip-

The Batcomic on the side rang again. Peter was about to take it when he found that Batman had gotten off the 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 traces of violent demolition. Barbara might have been taken away."

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

"I suspect that two groups of people kidnapped the father and daughter. I can only be sure that one of them is the Penguin's men, because I saw the black gold transaction records between the Penguin and the military on Barbara's computer."