"You damn boring bastard!"
Joker apparently hadn't anticipated Viktor's reaction at all. The deranged laughter finally turned into angry shouting.
"You're a superhuman who can fly anywhere and do anything! You got toyed by an ordinary person like me and almost lost your life. How can you be so completely calm about it?!"
"Don't you have even a shred of dignity as a powerful being?!"
Viktor tilted his head slightly, and his right hand remained pressed over the locator on the back of his left hand the entire time.
Even staying here to keep talking with her, Viktor didn't need to worry about her suddenly launching a surprise attack to destroy the locator device on his hand.
"As long as my mind is clear and thinking straight, dignity is far less important to me than staying alive."
"It's too shallow to define strength only as the power to fly through the sky and be invincible. This world isn't my homeworld, and back there, people are used to solving every single problem with raw, pure physical combat."
"It may be brutal and bloody, but at least no dirty tricks or secret schemes are happening behind people's backs. That kind of culture would never allow someone who likes to fight dirty to ever grow up and be strong."
"But Earth is different. After coming to Earth, I met an extraordinarily powerful teacher. In terms of pure strength alone, she outclasses the one called Batman tens of thousands of times."
"And yet my teacher told me that if she and Batman ever came into conflict serious enough that they had no choice but to settle it by force, she would never dare let Batman be the one to choose the place for the fight."
"It's because Batman always fights dirty."
"Most people who've just gained superpowers immediately feel that since they're no longer afraid of ordinary guns and missiles, they can look down on everybody else."
"A genetic virus, nanotechnology, magic, and sorcery. If all you can do is fly around or shrug off bullets, you're nowhere near immune to these far more advanced forms of human 'intelligence.'"
Viktor gestured at the nano-wire grid in front of him.
"My skin is tough enough to let me smash through continents and endure thousands of degrees of heat—and yet this thing, made from who knows what, effortlessly sliced through my fingernail."
"And considering you may well have more similar weapons hidden up your sleeve... I can treat you as someone fully capable of ending my life at any moment."
"And choosing to avoid a fight is clearly the smarter move rather than worrying about some idea of a strong person's dignity, losing my mind, running around looking for you everywhere, and letting you happily watch me step into traps you may have been setting up for who knows how long."
Joker was silent for a moment, and an even more frustrated scream came.
"I have never met anyone like you! You're not just more boring than Batman. You're more boring than Aquaman, and even more boring than Wonder Woman!"
Viktor let out a quiet laugh.
"Oh? Are they still alive? Why is it that, among the people in this world who tried to stop me, I didn't see the Batman, Aquaman, or Wonder Woman you mentioned?"
"There's also a Lex Luthor on our Earth. And let me guess, knowing Luthor's personality, could it be that all these 'not boring' people you mentioned were killed by him?"
The already mentally unstable Joker seemed to be struck by something at those words.
"Batman is NOT dead! Batman will NEVER die! He is the only one in this world who gets to be killed by me! When Batman finally falls into my hands, I'm going to make that pathetic man suffer ten thousand times over!"
Behind the mask covering his face, Viktor's expression finally showed just the faintest hint of a smile.
He even pretended to look interested and slightly lifted the right hand that had been firmly covering the locator device on the back of his left hand.
"Why do you hate Batman so much in particular?"
Joker screamed back without any hesitation.
"Because he is a pathetic, worthless maggot. He should have been the one who died in the first place, but he was too frightened by that gun. If he had pulled Bruce behind him, if he had just protected Bruce—!"
The Joker's voice rang out clearly inside the Batcave.
Viktor's side had only been cut off from receiving a signal from the Batcave, but the interference hadn't affected the other devices on his body that were picking up signals from that world.
Among everyone present, Oracle and Nightwing both looked with incredible shock toward the figure standing in front of the Bat-computer.
Shazam reacted a moment later.
Only after noticing that everyone's eyes had gathered on Batman did Shazam seem to realize what was happening.
"Oh."
"Oh, my god."
Initially, Batman barely reacted when he heard that the Joker's voice was a sharp female voice.
That kind of extreme, suppressed madness, combined with vocal cords damaged by some kind of chemical, made the voice impossible to connect to any particular person.
But after the series of furious curses aimed at the other world's Batman, the sharp, piercing quality was suddenly gone, replaced by a sob the woman could no longer hold back.
In that instant, the strength and spirit of a person who should never have been broken by any hardship completely collapsed.
Batman could still handle it when finding out his father was Batman, but his mother becoming the Joker...
That's not something any ordinary person could handle.
After having been enemies with the Joker for so long and knowing clearly that underneath the Joker's seemingly smile was the exact same severe mental illness and emotional pain that he himself carried.
In the room, the only one who had no idea what those words meant or what they represented was, surprisingly, the first to react.
Flashpoint Superman.
"His blood flow is too fast!"
As soon as he said that, Flashpoint Superman rushed forward and caught Batman's shaking body before he could fall.
Superman's eyes flickered faintly red as he used his X-ray vision to check again, then sharply warned everyone in the room.
"A few tiny blood vessels in his brain have ruptured under the pressure. He needs immediate medical attention!"
Batman was still struggling to shake off Superman's supporting arm, pulling out a locator and trying to strap it to his own hand.
"Cyborg, open the portal, let me through!"
"I have to go through!"
However, Batman's tall body was swaying so badly that he couldn't even stand up properly on his own.
Nightwing rushed over to stop him, but Batman punched him in the face and sent him flying backward.
"Get out of my way! I said let me through!"
Viktor quietly reached into his chest and withdrew a second letter.
The one he had exchanged for Batman's letter using Thomas's envelope before setting out the first time.
"In that case, Ms. Joker, I'd like to deliver this letter to you. It's from someone in our world."
The sharp sound and every cry fell completely silent.
A few seconds passed, and Viktor's ears caught the sound of messy footsteps.
They were coming from deep underground, about a hundred twenty meters below.
However, Viktor didn't choose to burst down there and capture her.
He simply stood where he was and waited until the squeak of a rusty door hinge turning sounded from somewhere in a nearby building.
A woman with a wild tangle of green hair with black eye makeup streaked and smeared by tears into dark grey lines all down her pale white face.
Even though she had already seen the stamp through some hidden surveillance device, she couldn't stop herself from asking.
"That's, cough, cough, whose letter is that?"
She forced out several hard coughs to keep her voice from sounding so sharp, and the words that came out were hoarse and raw.
Viktor held the letter out toward the woman standing slightly behind him and to the side.
"It's from Bruce. Bruce Wayne."
...
600 POWER STONES = 1 BONUS CHAPTER
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