Man-Bat summarized how he'd ended up the way he was in one sentence.
"I messed up. It's that simple."
"That sounds like an understatement."
"It is. But it's the only framing that makes it bearable."
"Okay." Jude kept his voice neutral. "So you took the serum yourself. Found out it was defective afterward?"
"No. I knew it was defective before I took it." The clicking undercurrent in his voice made the admission sound stranger than it was, like a confession delivered through a broken radio. "I knew it wasn't ready. I took it anyway. There were mistakes — things I'd caused — and the only way to fix them required the serum to already be in me. Sometimes you do the thing you know you shouldn't do because the alternative is worse."
Jude shook his head slowly. "The price seems steep, though. This morning you couldn't form a sentence. You were all but feral."
"You haven't seen my worst." The bat's expression, filtered through the mutation, was difficult to read — but something in the set of his ears and the cant of his jaw read as grim. "Since the serum, it's been a constant fight — my rationality against the instincts the formula wrote over it. Most of the time I'm somewhere in the middle. Lucid enough to know I'm not fully lucid. The pendulum swings."
"You don't have red hair," Jude said.
A pause. "No."
"I'm just saying. In case that was going to be the next part of the metaphor."
The bat let that sit for a moment. "If you see me start to go — if the wildness takes over — get clear. In that state I can't distinguish ally from target. I'm telling you this in advance because it won't be possible to tell you once it's happening."
"Understood and fully agreed," Jude said. "Self-preservation is genuinely my strongest skill. But — and I'm asking this seriously — why not just let Batman bring you in? Arkham isn't pleasant, but at least you wouldn't be out here in the dark worrying about who you're going to hurt."
"The serum is addictive." Langstrom said it flat, without drama, the way you say something you've accepted so thoroughly it no longer surprises you. "Strongly. I can't function without it now, which means I can't just stop and wait for a cure that may not exist." A beat. "And my wife. If I stop helping the Joker, she's in danger. She didn't choose any of this. I'm not going to let her pay for my mistakes."
"So you're stuck," Jude said. "Help the Joker, stay a villain, keep your wife safe. Don't help him, she's at risk. And the Riddler's people kill on contact, so you can't afford to lose either side's protection."
"That's the shape of it, yes."
"Supervillains really are all just people in impossible situations with terrible options."
"Langstrom." Mr. Freeze's voice cut through the communicator. "Have you reached the designated position?"
"We're here. I've done an aerial pass of the surrounding area. Nothing yet."
"They'll come. You're looking for a full platoon — I'll need your air support when they move in. And is Thor's control still inactive?"
Man-Bat glanced at Jude. "Yes."
The wail Jude managed to produce in the half-second before the chip activated was very small and very heartfelt.
"Good," said Freeze. "Thor — you're under Langstrom's direction from here. If he has no specific orders, use your own judgment."
"Yes," said Jude, in the flat affect of a man who was definitely under control and not at all currently evaluating exit options.
Man-Bat descended and set him down on the street, along with his bicycle and folded robe. Jude's utility in this operation ran through his pistols and his wheels — keeping him airborne served no tactical purpose.
Luck, Langstrom thought, lifting off again. If we're lucky tonight, maybe all three of us find a way out of this.
He gained altitude — and stopped.
There was another figure in the sky.
Steel flight armor, custom-built by the look of it, the kind of fabrication that spoke to either genuine engineering talent or an extremely committed hobby. The eyes of the helmet visor glowed pale green in the dark, faintly luminescent, like foxfire. One hand held a compact flamethrower — pistol-sized, purpose-built. Incendiary devices and fuel canisters were racked along the armor's chest. At his back, a pair of biplane jetpack wings beat with a sound like shears through air.
On the street below, Jude looked up, took inventory, and sighed internally. Garfield Lynn. Firefly. Who had, according to what those Falcone soldiers had said weeks ago, been a firefighter. Looking at the custom armor and the pistol flamethrower and the incendiary rack, Jude revised that assessment. Former firefighter did not cover the engineering work on display here. Someone had called the origin wrong, or this was one of those DC timeline situations where the clay got entirely reshaped between continuities. Either was possible.
"The people Freeze sent against us tonight," Man-Bat said quietly, hovering. "This wasn't what I expected."
"That's not all," Firefly called across the dark, his voice carrying the particular arrogance of someone who has prepared a line in advance. "Tonight you lose more than Man-Bat — you lose the Mad Hatter too."
Who covers the Freeze-shaped gap in that math? Jude thought, but nobody was asking him.
"You've overextended, Garfield," Man-Bat called back. "Both sides are thin on personnel right now. If you fail tonight, there's no recovery."
"And if we succeed, we turn the whole board around." Firefly swept a slow arc through the air, unhurried, the jetpack wings cycling at a low idle. His visor turned toward Jude. "You even brought the freak cyclist. You really think that changes anything?"
Even. Jude noted the conjunction with genuine irritation. As though his presence was a footnote. A small concession of resources. Even.
"It's two against one," Man-Bat said. "I have the strength and instincts of a predator. Saul is a dead shot. You're a former firefighter. What exactly do you think this looks like from your end?"
"Pyrotechnics artist." Firefly's voice went sharp and offended at the word firefighter, which was apparently the wrong descriptor. "I'm a pyrotechnics artist. And you're about to learn what that distinction means."
He dropped into a steep dive.
Man-Bat folded and swooped to meet him. The serum had given Langstrom claws built for shearing, and the muscle power behind them was not human muscle power — the strike raked across Firefly's chest plate in a spray of sparks, five deep gouges tearing through the outer armor layer, and sent him tumbling backward through the air.
The armor held. Dented, scratched, slightly deformed at the sternum, but functional — Firefly corrected his flight path with the high-pressure jets, gained distance, and brought the flamethrower up in one practiced motion.
In the night sky, the flame threw a column of pure, blinding light.
To Jude, standing on the street below, it was bright enough to make him squint and look away. To Man-Bat — whose mutation had given him the visual processing of a nocturnal mammal, tuned for darkness, calibrated for the faintest movement against shadow — it hit like a flashbang directly behind the eyes.
The bat froze mid-flight. The vertigo and pain registered visibly even from the ground — a full-body flinch, wings locking, downward drift. And then the flamethrower swept across him in a burning arc.
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