Location: Derelict Imperial Research Station — Orbit of a Dead Moon, Uncharted Sector
The darkness was not mere absence of light; it was a suffocating pressure, an oily presence that clung to the lungs and whispered blasphemies into the soul. Even the void outside seemed gentler than what lurked within this broken station.
Batman and Lion El'Jonson moved in unison, cutting through the decaying corridors like phantoms. Their mission was simple in concept—secure a corrupted xenos artifact—yet each step further into the station proved it was anything but.
The air reeked of rust, ozone, and something older—something warped by the Immaterium. Every door creaked like bone. Every bulkhead wept frost and static. Here, sound died too soon, and light bent in ways it shouldn't.
Batman's cowl filtered the gloom into a tactical overlay. He swept his arm forward, releasing a cloud of silent drones that mapped the immediate area. The readout was fragmented—some anomaly interfered with real-time relay. Warp interference.
"Psychic pollution increasing," he muttered. "Curze is near."
Beside him, the Lion stalked silently, every motion betraying power only barely leashed. His black and green armor bore deep gouges, and the faintest shimmer of bleeding psychic energy pulsed from beneath fractured seals. He was wounded, but unbowed.
Then the whispers came.
At first, they were subtle—a breeze where there was no wind, a low tremor in the bones. Then they coalesced.
For Batman: the Joker's laughter, high and broken; Jason's scream in a concrete tomb; the silence of Gotham after a chemical weapon he'd failed to stop. His hands clenched unconsciously. The weight of every failure returned, made manifest in whispers behind his ear.
"He's using emotional projection," Batman growled. "Don't listen."
The Lion didn't answer. He walked like a man walking toward old ghosts.
The voices in his head were different: Luther's betrayal, the flames of Caliban, the last screams of his fallen sons. The faces of the Knights he could not save. "You abandoned us." "You broke your own Legion." "You failed all of us."
His grip on Fealty tightened, the blade vibrating with restrained fury.
Then the trap was sprung.
With a violent shriek, a psychic shockwave tore through the corridor. A wall of shattered plasteel and debris exploded between them. Dust and sparks blinded Batman momentarily—long enough to catch the blur of a clawed silhouette retreating into shadow.
"Lion!" he barked into comms, only to receive static. No signal. No line of sight.
Isolation. Classic predator tactic. Batman immediately recalibrated, deploying a signal beacon to try piercing the interference. His instincts screamed that this was no random attack—Curze was herding them. And this cursed station was his cage.
---
Elsewhere, deeper within the structure—
Lion El'Jonson limped into a vast central chamber, his breath shallow, the leg wound from a prior battle reopening under strain. Every inch of this place felt steeped in psychic hatred. The whispers were now screams—taunts from long-dead voices, twisted into the shape of his failures.
"You carry their ghosts."
"You are not forgiven."
"You let your sons burn."
He gritted his teeth, pushing forward.
Then came the real shadow.
Konrad Curze emerged like a hallucination given form. Gaunt, tall, pale as cadaver wax, his armor draped in tatters of skin and chain, eyes like dying stars. His lightning claws hissed out, hungry and crackling.
"Brother," Curze whispered, his voice a dry hiss against the warp-tainted air. "Still dragging that broken leg? Still pretending you can lead?"
The Lion raised Fealty without speaking. No speeches. No emotion. Just the readiness of a warrior long beyond pain.
Curze struck without warning—a blur of pale death. The first clash rang like thunder, claws screeching against Lion's sword. The Lion deflected, twisted, struck low—his form precise despite injury.
But Curze was faster.
He ducked under the strike, carving a line across the Lion's side. Blood sprayed. Ceramite cracked. The Lion staggered, caught himself. Fealty flashed upward, nearly catching Curze's shoulder—just missed. Curze vanished into shadow.
"You hid from all of us," Curze murmured from somewhere behind him. "Hid your doubts. Hid your guilt. You don't carry the First Legion—you bury it."
Another strike. This one to the Lion's wounded leg. He dropped to one knee with a grunt. His teeth clenched. Blood pooled beneath him. But he still did not yield.
"You came here to stop a weapon," Curze continued, circling like a carrion bird. "But it's you who brought it with you. You are the curse, Lion. You always were."
The Lion rose slowly, breath ragged, Fealty shaking faintly in his grip. His blood soaked into the floor. But his eyes—those burning green eyes—never looked away.
---
Meanwhile…
Batman plunged deeper into the station's understructure, navigating blind through Warpslick corridors, guided only by sound and intuition. Every shadow twisted. Every wall wept psychic bleed. The voices were louder now—Joker mocking, Alfred dying, Gotham burning.
He didn't listen.
Instead, he activated a short-burst sonic pulse—his own psychic anchor. The feedback was crude, but it gave him a heading.
"I'm coming," he muttered into the static.
Then he moved—into the storm.
The wind tasted of ash and ozone, a sickly cocktail churned by the worsening warp storms that clawed at Targon Secundus. Hours after the cataclysmic vault battle, the planet was less a world and more a festering wound, Joker's corruption having seeped into its very heart. Twisted flora, once verdant Calibanite forests, now writhed with grotesque limbs, and the low, guttural thrum of the Outer Catacombs resonated with the faint, unsettling laughter that was never truly gone.
Batman moved alone. His cape rippled like living ink as he slipped through the diseased labyrinth of alien tunnels and shattered stonework. Every breath tasted of ruin. Every shadow whispered threat. He was searching for the Lion—tracking his last-known signal through jagged pathways that twisted with no logic. The psychic traps he'd laid earlier had bought time, but barely. Curze was still hunting.
A faint distortion blinked across his HUD—a heat signature flickering just ahead, distorted but massive. Batman quickened his pace.
---
Elsewhere, the Lion stood his ground amid the torn remnants of an ancient support chamber. His blade, Fealty's Edge, trembled faintly with the resonant energies of warp interference. Blood pooled at his feet—his own—and dripped from a fresh wound just below his ribs. His left leg dragged. Curze had vanished again.
The shadows hissed.
Then he emerged—Konrad Curze, pale and terrible, like a wound in reality. His form shimmered at the edges, slipping between material presence and the psychic realm. The laughter of the Joker echoed faintly from above, distorted and mechanical, feeding through the war-torn tunnels like venom through veins.
"Still standing, brother?" Curze rasped. "How quaint."
The Lion didn't answer. He simply braced.
They clashed again—blade and claw, fury and control. The Lion was weaker now. Slower. But not yet beaten.
---
Batman's boots skidded to a halt. A collapsed sub-section had rerouted him—but he spotted it: a path between support beams, part of a collapsed hangar system. He activated a detonation remotely—one of his fallback barriers—and the brief burst of kinetic force blew away a narrow route into the chamber ahead.
Inside, he found them.
The Lion, bloody but unbowed.
Curze, looming and maddened, just beginning his next strike.
Batman didn't hesitate. He tossed a trio of dark spheres—psychic dampeners. They hit the ground and ignited with a low-frequency pulse, bathing the chamber in blue-white energy. Curze staggered.
"Go!" Batman shouted.
The Lion's head snapped toward him. A moment of recognition. Then, with every last ounce of strength, the Primarch surged toward the fallback shaft—the tunnel Batman had been preparing for hours.
Curze howled. "You DARE interrupt this?"
Batman didn't answer. He moved. He fired his grapple, flipped through the rafters, detonated sonic bursts and adhesive traps. One after another.
The final psychic dampener cluster flared as Curze lunged again, and Batman dove for the shaft just as the plasteel hatch slammed shut behind him.
Curze hit the door with enough force to crack adamantium. But it held—for now.
Inside the shaft, darkness.
Batman landed hard. The Lion was already waiting, leaning against the tunnel wall, one gauntlet pressed to his side. Still alive. Still defiant.
"You have my thanks, Dark Knight," the Lion rasped.
Batman said nothing. He simply looked upward—toward the echo of Joker's laughter still ringing in the deep.
They had survived. But the hunt was not over.