[ WARNING — Anchor Item Detected: "Tear of the Ventriloquist's Shattered Persona"]
[ Scanning for compatible Batman target…]
[ WARNING — No targeted Batman found.]
[ Initiating random match: searching for low-tier Batman… Match successful.]
[ Matched: Bat-Wraith]
[ Threat Classification: F]
[ Synchronizing… Complete.]
[ Current Crisis Energy Units: 0]
[ WARNING — Summoned Batman originates from the Dark Multiverse. Moral framework severely compromised. May degrade the host's ethics and psychological stability.]
His cells were screaming.
Not in pain — in something worse than pain. Something that had no name in any language built for human experience. His DNA toppled like dominoes in a chain that wouldn't stop, and particles that had no business existing in this reality pressed themselves against the fabric of what was real and held on, intertwining, becoming mutual, manifesting in forms that the whole of human language couldn't begin to describe.
[ File: "Bat-Wraith's Memories" — Synchronized.]
[ You may now synchronize additional—]
[ @#$%&! — No additional anchor items detected. Crisis Energy Units: 0. Further synchronization temporarily unavailable.]
…In the parallel universe where Bat-Wraith existed, Batman had threaded a fragment of himself into every technology that governed the world…
…He had become infrastructure. Caretaker. The shepherd who kept the flock warm and safe and fed…
…But the flock revolted. They didn't want warmth and safety. These idiots wanted freedom — and every ugly, inefficient, self-destructive thing that came with it…
…I was systematically erased from the planet. My technological networks, my physical form — destroyed…
…All I could do was upload what remained of my consciousness into the chassis. Into the vehicle. The only thing left that was still mine…
Wait.
No.
Ethan Cross surfaced from the memories like a man breaking through ice — gasping, oriented, himself.
I'm not Bat-Wraith. I'm not Batman. I'm Ethan Cross.
He'd been under for half a second, maybe less. The memories were still hitting — waves of them, crashing against the inside of his skull, making his temples throb with—
He stopped.
…temples?
He looked down.
Where his arms had been, two wheels were turning against the floor. Spinning freely on polished concrete, going nowhere, leaving black rubber streaks across the evidence room tiles.
A sharp sound behind him — glass giving way all at once. Ethan tried to turn his head and discovered he didn't have one. His rear camera feed — rear camera, he had a rear camera — showed the reflection of his own expanded chassis pressing through the glass partition wall of the adjacent office, frame buckling outward, safety glass showering the floor in a curtain of small cubes.
He processed this for a moment.
I turned into an SUV.
I turned into anSUV.
The memories kept coming, filling in the gaps whether he wanted them to or not. Bat-Wraith's entire existence, compressed and delivered in a torrent — every decision, every loss, the love and the hate and the slow grinding fury of a mind that had been right about everything and been destroyed for it anyway. The grief of a man who'd become a machine because there was nothing else left to become.
And underneath all of it, rising through the cracks like floodwater:
Kill them. Break everything. Burn it.
Ethan's gaze — his camera feed — landed on Arnold Wesker, still sitting on the floor with the Batman plush clutched to his chest.
The urge that surfaced was immediate and specific and completely insane. Blood. It wants a bath in—
He filed that away.
Right. So that's what moral contamination feels like.
He examined the feeling the way a technician examines a faulty component — with clinical detachment and mild annoyance. The Dark Multiverse's psychological residue, pressing against his decision-making architecture, trying to find purchase.
It found none.
What's the practical argument for killing Wesker right now? He ran the logic. He's compliant. He's useful. He's the first piece of a plan that I need to survive the next several weeks. Killing him serves no purpose.
The urge evaporated. Instantly. Like it had never been there.
Ethan considered that for a moment.
Huh.
He'd expected more of a fight. He'd braced for a real internal struggle — the corrupted memories of a Dark Multiverse Batman warping his judgment, forcing him to actively resist. Instead the intrusive impulse had dissolved the moment he ran a basic cost-benefit analysis.
The conclusion arrived slowly, then all at once.
Right. I'm not Batman. That's the whole point.
The contamination worked by resonating with an existing moral framework — Batman's framework, with all its weight and conviction and deeply-held principles about justice and the sanctity of life. A genuine Batman absorbing Bat-Wraith's memories would have felt his ethics under siege, felt the darkness pulling against everything he'd built himself to be. The internal war would have been real.
Ethan Cross didn't have Batman's moral framework. He had his own, which was considerably more pragmatic and considerably less dramatic about it.
Put it another way, he thought. Everyone else faces the trolley problem and agonizes over which track to pull the lever toward. I'm the one standing off to the side wondering what the photos would sell for.
Different frequency entirely. Nothing to interfere with.
He filed that under useful to remember and moved on.
Can I change back?
The thought was barely formed before it was already happening. Half his mass dissolved into dark-red light, particles scattering and then rushing back inward, collapsing into shape — flesh, fabric, the familiar weight of the tactical suit settling across his shoulders. The memories cut off mid-frame, like a projector switched off.
He stood in the evidence room. Same room. Same fire burning down to embers across the floor. Same Arnold Wesker staring at him.
Ethan flexed his right hand, confirmed the knuckles were knuckles. He rolled his left wrist.
On a thought—
His left hand dissolved from the forearm down, replaced in an instant by the heavy rubber-and-steel mass of a spinning off-road tire. Then back. Hand again.
He stared at it.
So I can just… do that. Whenever I want. I can become a truck.
He turned the information over, looking for the angle where it became tactically useful.
He couldn't find one.
An SUV, he reminded himself. I can turn into an SUV. Against Bane. Against the man who broke Batman's spine through sheer physical force. He paused. I could run him over, I suppose.
He decided to table the question and return to his original plan, which had the advantage of not relying on inexplicable vehicle-based superpowers from a morally compromised interdimensional wraith.
He looked at Wesker. Wesker looked back at him with wide, blinking eyes, the Batman plush in his lap issuing a steady stream of encouragement in a voice that was definitely not Batman's actual voice but was close enough to pass in low light.
"What just happened stays in this room."
"Woof."
"Use your words."
"…Okay."
Ethan decided to move on.
The broader plan was intact. That was what mattered.
The snowball was already rolling — Wesker was secured, compliant, and deployable. From here, Ethan could work from the background. Direct, without being present. Use Wesker as the visible actor while the actual maneuvering happened several steps removed. Gotham's criminal ecosystem was interconnected enough that one cooperative villain, properly handled, could open doors to a dozen others.
And with Wayne Enterprises' financial infrastructure behind him — discreetly, carefully, through enough intermediary channels that it couldn't be traced — he could supplement that with hired professionals. International contractors. The kind of people who showed up, did the work, collected payment, and asked nothing about context.
Villains plus contractors, no rules of engagement, overwhelming numbers.
Bane was formidable. Bane was possibly the single most dangerous physical combatant in Gotham's history. But formidable had limits, and surrounded was a different problem than challenged.
Ethan had absolutely no intention of handling this personally.
There were people in this universe specifically designed for that kind of work. A Kryptonian with a day job at the Daily Planet. An Amazonian five thousand years old who was currently posing as an antiquities consultant somewhere on the East Coast. Between the two of them they had enough raw capability to handle any crisis that he might fail to navigate on his own.
He hadn't located Clark Kent at the Daily Planet yet, and Diana Prince wasn't in any directory he'd checked. But Lois Lane was already at the Planet — he'd confirmed that — and the timeline math put both of them arriving on the main stage soon. He just needed to survive long enough to reach that window.
Deal with Bane. Hold the line. Don't die.
After that: retirement. Legitimate, comfortable, well-funded retirement. Bruce Wayne's net worth was an obscene number that he hadn't finished counting, and Gotham had a social scene that practically ran on wealthy people with nothing productive to do. He'd spent his previous life clawing his way up through Hollywood for a fraction of this. The finish line was right there.
As for the inevitable universe-scale catastrophes that the DC timeline had scheduled—
That's what the Justice League is for, he thought. Demi-gods and aliens and men powered by rings. The entire infrastructure of superhuman intervention, assembled and operational. They don't need me.
He felt, genuinely and without irony, optimistic.
But first things first.
He looked at Wesker.
Wesker looked at his Batman plush.
The Batman plush said something supportive.
"You're making a phone call," Ethan said. "We need to discuss contractors."
He paused, then added:
"Soldiers. Hired soldiers. Not — it doesn't matter. I'll explain on the way."