"Ha... Gotham again?"
The dark, cloudy night sky with tall gothic buildings and deep, shadowy alleys stretched out before him.
Viktor looked at the familiar scene in front of him and stood completely still for a full three seconds.
He was heavily armed from head to toe, and even his face was covered by a skull-like tactical mask.
The pitch-black lenses were equipped with scanning functions, capable of detecting even the tiniest and most carefully concealed traps in all kinds of complicated environments.
A steady stream of alert sounds came through his earpiece.
"Air composition analysis complete. Air quality below average, but no highly toxic gas aerosol components detected."
"No nanomachine signals detected."
Since the tall buildings around him were packed so closely together, Viktor decided to fly up a little higher to get a better view.
But the moment he rose about ten meters, a line of large words entered right into his field of vision.
It was a huge white banner hanging between two tall buildings a few hundred meters away, with a line of large text words in red paint.
"DON'T LOOK UP! If you already did, don't move."
There was a big smiley face drawn in the same red paint in the end.
It looked like it had been painted not too long ago, with trails of red dripping downward along the white background of the banner.
He turned his head and saw similar banners hung in every direction in the darkness all around him.
"IT'S DANGEROUS HERE!"
"DON'T COME THIS WAY!"
"JUST STAY WHERE YOU ARE!"
The banner had faces painted in red after the words.
They all looked wildly different from each other, but most of them were smiling.
They were the kind of smiles that looked wildly exaggerated, with the corners of the mouth stretched all the way back toward the ears.
This feeling...
Viktor felt a sudden chill run through him, and Batman's heavy, serious voice came through the earpiece.
The footage being transmitted back to the other world through his lenses had a delay of about one or two seconds.
"This is the Joker's style. Don't act rashly. You absolutely cannot let your instincts take over right now."
"Warning. A signal lock from outer space has been detected."
"What?"
A powerful sense of danger surged through Viktor.
He looked up and saw a bright blue light flashing in the middle of Gotham's dark night sky.
This scene felt extremely familiar.
"They even have a space cannon?!"
A giant pillar-shaped satellite in outer space, aimed directly down at Gotham City from far above, was rapidly charging up energy at its base.
In the next instant, a high-energy beam wider than the base of the Egyptian pyramids came crashing straight down onto Viktor's position.
The danger triggered his survival instincts, and Viktor desperately wanted to dodge the attack coming from outer space.
But just as he was about to fly at full speed in any direction to avoid, the strange banners hanging all around him and Batman's warning made him force himself to hold back that instinct.
The thick blue light instantly swallowed his whole figure.
The streets of Gotham City roared with deafening noise, and the ground and buildings kept collapsing under the continuous high-energy blast.
When the blue light finally faded away, Viktor looked around at everything surrounding him.
Except for the tiny patch of ground directly beneath him, every street and building in a dozen blocks all around had been destroyed by the high-energy blast just now.
The ground had collapsed inward, and the rocks at the bottom of the crater were melting from the heat, bubbling up with black foam.
The attack had struck in a perfect ring, deliberately leaving only the single vertical space where Viktor was standing completely untouched.
"So that orbital strike that even made me feel like I was about to die was just a joke?"
Viktor suddenly felt much more alert.
"Yes. This is the Joker's style, but if you had moved just now... zzzt... you would have... zzzt—"
The cross-dimensional communicator seemed to be hit with some kind of signal interference.
Batman's voice was replaced by a grating electronic noise.
Viktor frowned and tapped the side of his earpiece.
After realizing he had completely lost the signal, he had no choice but to temporarily turn off the earpiece sound.
He descended lightly onto the only intact patch of ground.
Before he could even begin thinking about his next move, a sharp and piercing laugh rang out from a dark alley several hundred meters to his left front.
"Hehehehe—"
"Cheating takes all the fun out of it. Since Batman knows me so well, why didn't he just come here himself?"
The sharp voice suddenly turned incredibly bitter and resentful—and at the same time silently shifted location, coming from another alleyway several hundred meters to his right.
"It's been so long since I properly played a game with Batman. Why didn't your world's Batman come here himself?"
Viktor ignored the voice that kept moving around. Even though this was his first time facing the Joker directly, he knew exactly how to get under her skin.
He pushed his foot off the ground, flew up out of the burning crater, and headed toward the first banner he had spotted.
"Hey!"
The sharp voice was no longer bitter, and it changed into something that sounded almost annoyed.
"Why are you ignoring me?"
Viktor acted as if he heard nothing.
Based on the plots he had seen in comics, whether Viktor flew into the alley on the left or the one on the right, it was hard to say if he would even find Joker, but one thing was certain: nothing good would come of it.
He arrived in front of the banner and tore it open with one hand. His lenses scanned the open night sky.
'Unknown metallic material detected.'
As the lens kept flashing red alerts, the space behind the banner revealed dozens of thin red lines that formed a messy, tangled grid of wire.
It was a nano-level metal wire made from some unknown material.
Viktor frowned and slowly moved close to one of the red-marked nano metal wires. He stretched out his index finger and lightly touched the wire with just the very tip of his fingernail.
He drew his hand back and gave it a gentle flick.
The small piece of fingernail that had made contact simply split apart on its own and fell down into the dark street below.
Even though Viktor still didn't know whether those threads made of unknown material could cut through his bones, they could at least slice through his flesh easily.
The sharp laugh came again from somewhere behind him.
"Well? Isn't it an interesting design? What a shame. Batman cheated for you. Otherwise, I would have finally gotten to see what a flying superhuman looks like when they get chopped into pieces."
This time, Viktor responded directly to the Joker's bragging.
"Indeed. It really opened my eyes. Though surely you haven't remodeled the entire world, right? A project this big must have been pretty boring."
Joker's laughter came again from another place.
"Hahahahaha, you really do have a good eye. Why don't you try guessing..."
Viktor's expression said as if he had expected this.
"That means there's a very high probability this world isn't Lex Luthor's actual base."
He pretended to raise his locator device as if he were about to activate it.
"In that case, I have no time to play with you. You can stay in this world and enjoy it by yourself. No one will be here to admire your traps anymore."
"Wait!"
The sharp female voice finally snapped with frustration.
...
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