The air in the vault hung thick with the metallic tang of ozone and the faint, sickly-sweet perfume of decay. Batman, still feeling the phantom ache of warp damage, gripped the Lion's relic sword. It pulsed with resonant power, a counterpoint to the thudding of his own heart. The psychic imprint left by the Lion remained behind his eyes—a lattice of ancient tactics, stoic fury, and disciplined will that stood as a fragile but vital shield against the encroaching madness.
He could feel it now. A tremor. A psychic ripple swelling through the ancient stone, thickening the shadows. The Joker was close. But this wasn't the Joker of Gotham's alleys and bloody funhouses. This was a creature reshaped by the Warp, no longer a man but a sentient breakdown in reality—a rupture in logic fueled by laughter.
The vault's adamantium doors groaned inward, not with hydraulics but with the shriek of rending sinew. And there he was.
The thing that had once been the Joker loomed, a grotesque marionette of Chaos. His flesh shimmered like oil, shifting in color between bruised purple and necrotic green. Tendrils of warp-energy writhed from his back and shoulders, slithering through the vault like hunting serpents. His grin had become something elemental—an impossibly wide tear in reality, framed by eyes that burned crimson and emerald. His laughter, warping through a dozen voices at once, splintered the air.
"Batsy! You old relic! Come to see the new me? Pretty, isn't it? Wove it myself—from screams and sinew!"
Batman raised the relic sword. The Lion's runes flared with blue flame, reacting to the presence of pure corruption. His psychic shield surged, grounding his mind against the onslaught of gibbering, screaming thoughts pouring from the Joker. The sword was not just a weapon. It was a legacy. A pact. A burden.
"You've finally become what you always pretended to be," Batman growled. "A joke without a punchline."
"Oh, but you're wrong," the Joker giggled. "You see, you are the punchline."
He lunged, not moving through space so much as interrupting it, bypassing physics. Batman turned with the strike, parrying a blow from a limb that bent at impossible angles. The vault flared with warp-light. The relic blade screamed against the Joker's claws, throwing sparks of reality.
For a moment, Batman was inside the Joker's mind—a prison of carnival colors, weeping faces, and walls made of mirrors that laughed. But the Lion's imprint surged, guiding Batman through the mental minefield, turning horror into strategy. He deflected a blast of warp energy, then sidestepped a shadow-formed maw that tried to devour him from the ceiling.
They clashed again. Batman struck true—a deep blow into the Joker's side. The creature howled, staggering back. The wound pulsed with foul, glimmering light, then healed, flesh knitting like a film run backward.
"Ooh! That tickled!" the Joker shrieked. "But this isn't chess anymore, Batsy—this is kabuki theatre!"
He gestured, and the vault's shadows peeled into monstrous faces, mouths howling, claws reaching. Batman cut them down, blade swinging with grim elegance. Each strike severed nightmares from nightmare-flesh. But for every illusion destroyed, more emerged. The psychic shield faltered, overburdened.
He remembered the Lion's words:
This blade will not end the warp, but it can cut through the noise. Use it when silence is most needed.
Batman struck again, not at the Joker directly, but through the veil of shadows—piercing the illusion at its root. Reality shivered.
And then, the moment came. Joker paused, limbs trembling, form destabilizing. Batman saw the opening, a heartbeat of vulnerability. He drove forward, unleashing everything—his training, his pain, the weight of Gotham, and the Lion's buried wrath—into one decisive strike.
The relic sword plunged into the Joker's core. Warp-light burst out in shrieking rays. The Joker screamed, a sound of fracturing dimensions and unraveling minds. His form spasmed violently, glitching through a dozen shapes. The vault walls buckled.
And yet, the laughter returned. Hoarse. Mutilated. Undeniable.
"You can't kill a joke, Bats," the Joker gasped, grin wide even as his body rippled with instability. "Not when the galaxy still needs a punchline."
His body shattered into a thousand flickering faces, each laughing, before coalescing near the doorway—a silhouette of entropy against the light of the void.
Then he was gone.
Batman lowered the sword. The psychic shield flickered and died. Silence fell, thick and ancient. He stood amid broken stone, warped sigils, and lingering echoes.
The Lion's sword vibrated gently in his hand. It had not failed. It had endured. As had he.
But the Joker had escaped. Wounded, yes. Disrupted. But not defeated. And now he had tasted the Warp's power.
Batman turned back toward the vault's inner sanctum, his cape trailing through the dust. The war was no longer for Gotham. It was for something much larger. And the laughter, however distant, had just begun again.
The grinding roar of collapsing metal echoed behind me—a symphony of destruction I had orchestrated to buy us time. Dust billowed, thick and choking, swallowing the once-pristine vault in a suffocating haze. I moved quickly, the relic—an orb pulsing with alien light—firm in my gauntleted hand. The crystalline data shard, humming with whispered secrets, was secured inside my utility belt.
But the Lion, El'Jonson, wasn't so lucky. The Joker's warp-fueled trap had weakened him. I saw him stumble, caught beneath crumbling stone and twisted metal. A guttural roar tore from his throat as the tomb he once called sanctuary collapsed around him. I wanted to go back. But the mission—the threat—had to take precedence. For now.
Behind me, laughter—high-pitched, gleeful, deranged—echoed through the choking dust. Joker. His voice, even now, twisted into the air like a toxin.
"Oh, Batsy! Always so dramatic! But don't worry, my furry friend," he crooned, voice amplified by warped comms. "This is just the warm-up! Act Two is coming, and it'll be a real roar!"
The vault doors slammed shut behind us, deformed and scorched from the collapse. Joker was sealed within—at least for now.
The escape was a blur. I moved with practiced precision, each footstep measured, each breath calculated. The chaos around us—collapsing ceilings, flickering lights, failing power grids—barely registered. My partner followed, silent but swift. The Joker's trap had done more than damage the vault—it had destabilized the facility's entire structure. Alarms blared, an ever-present siren song of failure.
We broke through to the underbelly of Gotham. The air was thick with ozone and the sharp, acrid tang of warp-tainted residue. The relic and the shard were secured. But the Lion—El'Jonson—was still trapped inside.
I stopped. The tremor beneath our feet told me he was still alive.
"He will not survive that," my companion growled, voice low and guttural. "The structure is too unstable. He is weakened."
I turned to face him. "He's a survivor," I replied, each word deliberate. "And he will be accounted for."
The urgency that had brought us together now gave way to tension. We had fought side by side, but I knew this alliance was born of necessity, not shared ideals. He was a creature of ancient fury, primal instinct. I was a man—a symbol forged in discipline, intellect, and restraint.
With the Joker gone—for now—and the immediate threat averted, that difference began to show.
"He needs to be dealt with," my partner said, staring hard at me. "Joker. His chaos is a plague. He must be put down. Permanently."
I remained still. "Joker is a symptom, not the disease. Killing him won't end the chaos. It will only immortalize it."
He scoffed. "A legend? He is a jester who delights in madness! My kind removes such threats. We burn them out."
"And that's why your kind is extinct," I replied, voice cold. "You create silence where understanding is needed. Joker's mind is a weapon. His death wouldn't disarm it. It would amplify it."
"Containment?" he snarled. "He always escapes. Every time, more people die. This time, he nearly killed El'Jonson!"
"Which is why we adapt," I said. "We learn. Capture him. Study him. Use his own madness against him. Killing him won't stop others from taking his place. Understanding might."
He took a step closer, muscles tensed. "You crawl toward hope while the galaxy burns. The universe doesn't reward hesitation. It punishes it."
"And restraint is what keeps us from becoming monsters," I shot back. "My code is what separates me from him. If I kill Joker, then I've already lost."
The silence stretched between us—thick, heavy, a chasm of ideology. He didn't understand. He couldn't. His world had been built on absolute control, swift purging. Mine thrived in ambiguity, in holding the line.
"Would you really let him live?" he asked, incredulous.
"I'd see him imprisoned. Contained. Cut off from his tools, his chaos, his audience. There is more to be learned from him than from his corpse."
Then something shifted.
The shard pulsed in my belt. I reached for it as a faint hum began to emanate from its crystalline surface. Alien resonance. A whisper on the edge of perception. I felt the change in the air before I saw it—the ripple, the flicker of warp-tainted energy.
A thought surfaced—unbidden, wrong. Not mine. Chaos, unbound.
In the Warp, far beyond our reach, a scarred face split into a manic grin. Joker's presence—fractured and scattered—was reconstituting. His laughter echoed, not through air, but through the fabric of reality itself.
"Konrad… my dear Konrad," he whispered, voice a silken knife. "The Lion is wounded. The Bat… predictable. But you… so wonderfully unpredictable. Act Two begins. And this time... the punchline is eternal."
The shard wasn't just data. It was a beacon. Joker's key to a greater horror. He wasn't finished. He was only getting started.
And now I knew: this war wasn't just for memory. It was for the soul of the galaxy.