The air of Targon Secundus was a broken melody, writhing under the oppressive weight of Joker's psychic influence and the churning Warp storms that locked down the system. Every breath was a rasp of recycled air, thin and metallic, tasting of ozone and madness. Batman, a silent sentinel in the gloom of a hastily established bolthole deep beneath the planet's ravaged subsurface, ignored the faint, unsettling whispers that seemed to seep through the very plasteel walls. His true focus was on the holographic tactical overlay shimmering before him—a maelstrom of corrupted data and impossible odds.
The display painted a bleak picture. Outer orbit was a charnel house of twisted metal and psychically scarred void-mines, now controlled by Joker's cults and their Warp-mutated monstrosities. Every loyalist frequency was jammed, each comms-link a conduit for the Joker's cackling and the dissonant chorus of his choir. Escape was a cruel joke.
Batman ran simulations—hundreds of them. Each one ended in failure. A direct assault: suicide. Stealth infiltration: untenable. Yet amid the madness, a faint, almost imperceptible signal whispered through the static. A resonance—ancient, uncorrupted. He filtered the deluge through the fortress of his mind and traced it.
Theta-Prime-9.
A Mechanicus substation, long-buried and forgotten, once used to monitor Warp tides. Shielded deep beneath the crust, it may have survived the initial bombardment. If it possessed a stealth jump-ship, it could be their only exit. The odds were infinitesimal, but greater than zero.
Behind him, a groan—pain and effort barely suppressed. Lion El'Jonson, Primarch of the Dark Angels, lay on a reinforced cot, his armor scarred and breached. Black ichor pooled near his pauldrons, and his breath rasped with barely hidden pain. Yet his eyes—those indomitable eyes—burned with clarity.
"Report, Human," he rumbled.
Batman turned. "A Mechanicus sub-node lies three hundred kilometers south through the lower crust. Theta-Prime-9. Possible warp-jump vessel. Stealth-grade." He omitted the lethal gauntlet between them and it. The Primarch would infer it.
Lion moved, trembling, catching himself on a steel strut. "Three hundred," he echoed. Not questioning—accepting. He attempted to rise and nearly collapsed.
"You're bleeding internally. Movement will accelerate degradation."
The Primarch fixed him with a gaze that crushed doubt. "I will not be cargo while my brother howls for blood."
Batman nodded, retrieved stasis-plates. Designed from salvaged Mechanicus tech, they hummed as he pressed them to breach points. Cold light shimmered. They slowed the hemorrhaging—a handful of hours bought from certain death.
Lion stood taller. Weakened, but mobile.
"Oracle," Batman called into the comm, slicing through Warp-chatter.
"Still a madhouse, B," came her voice, distorted but focused. "Choir's howling louder. Joker's got his eye on something. Curze's patterns are shifting—more aggressive. Predator mode. They know you're moving. Just not where."
"They will," Batman murmured. Curze hunted with madness. Joker guided it. Together, they were an apex predator. And Batman? Prey.
He turned to Lion. "We go quiet. No engagements. Follow my path."
"Lead, Human," Lion said, gripping Fealty's hilt.
They descended through geothermal shafts and skeletal service tunnels—a necropolis of old machines. Lights flickered. Whispers taunted. Joker's madness laced the air. Patrols neared. Batman guided them through blind spots, mapped with near-obsessive precision.
Once, three warped mutants rounded a corner. Before Batman reacted, Lion moved. Three necks snapped. Three corpses dropped.
"Necessary," the Lion rasped.
Batman said nothing. The Lion's rage was tempered by pain, but effective.
Hours passed. The resonance grew clearer. Then—the gateway. Half-buried under rubble. The cog-and-skull of the Mechanicus, scorched but proud. Batman cut through the seals.
Inside—a tomb of forgotten tech. Emergency panels flickered. Servitors stood like statues. And in the launch cradle: salvation. A Void-Hawk class jump-ship, black and silent, absorbing light. Stealth-grade.
"The odds," Lion murmured. "Were not so small after all."
"Functional. Barely," Batman said. "Primary systems dormant. Warp drive must be cycled manually. And we have company."
Laughter echoed. Joker's voice, raw and triumphant. "Little bat and his wounded dog… the hunt ends here."
A snarl followed. "The Night Haunter demands his due."
Batman turned. The shadows hunted them again. But now, they had a way out.
And they would take it.
The air itself was a serrated whisper, a symphony of deranged laughter and the low thrum of warp-tainted machinery. This corrupted Goth-Hive, once a beacon of Imperial endeavor, now festered under the Joker's grand, bloody jest. Every shadow seemed to writhe with malicious intent, every echo carried the cackle of the Mad King's choir—a cacophony of vox-chatter so thick it could be tasted like ash and despair. It was the ultimate stage for a twisted game of predator and prey, and the most dangerous hunter now stalked its blood-slicked corridors.
Beneath this storm of madness, Batman moved. He was a phantom amidst the wreckage, a silhouette of grim resolve against the lurid, shifting light. His cowl's optics, usually piercing the gloom of Gotham, now fought the kaleidoscopic corruption of a world slipping into unreality. He wasn't hunting. He was preserving—a life, a chance, a path.
His gauntlets danced over a flickering tactical overlay projected onto the rusted wall of a collapsed hab-unit. He hadn't stopped analyzing, not even for a moment since the Lion had fallen. The goal was egress—but escape from a Chaos-corrupted nightmare was never so simple. Every exit was another trap, every tunnel a potential ambush. Joker's cults infested the upper levels, and deeper still, something worse stirred—the true monster in the hunt.
Batman's mind ran simulations. Dozens. Hundreds. Each ended in death or madness. Every known route was monitored or laced with ambient warp radiation, enough to shatter a mortal mind. And yet, beneath the warp-static and Joker's cackling choir, something else pulsed—a faint vox-code, buried and forgotten.
He isolated it, running it through compression algorithms and anti-psy filters that would baffle even a Tech-Priest. Slowly, it resolved into a Mechanicus designation: Theta-Phi Relay 3-9, Omnis Protocol Layer 17—a hidden substation buried before the hive's collapse, likely used to monitor warp tides. It was unregistered, unguarded, and untouched. If it still functioned, it might provide access to an underhive transport conduit, or even a launch cradle.
It was a desperate gamble, but Joker's chaos fed on predictability subverted. He wouldn't anticipate something logical. The Mechanicus station was buried too deep, too rational to be within the Mad King's focus. It would be the site of their escape. The Ghost Run had a direction now.
"Speak your intentions, Terran," a voice rasped, thick with pain but unyielding in its timbre.
Lion El'Jonson, Primarch of the First Legion, sat against a cracked bulkhead. His once-radiant armor was marred by breaches, seeping ichor and flickering with failing power nodes. The massive wounds inflicted by his traitorous brother still festered beneath the surface. Yet in his pale, agony-etched face burned a defiant light—the fire of a warrior who refused surrender.
Batman knelt, producing a shimmering, translucent sheet from his utility pouch. "Stabilization protocols," he said, already working. "An improvised stasis-field array. It won't heal you, but it will slow the internal collapse. Buy us time."
He affixed the thin plates with surgical precision. Each one hummed faintly, latching to exposed armor or wounded flesh. Where they settled, a soft blue pulse resisted the surrounding corruption. The stasis field acted like a dam against the hemorrhaging of divine biology.
Lion flinched only once, as a plate locked over a rent near his heart. A grunt escaped, but no complaint followed.
"I will not be cargo," the Primarch growled. The statement held more than pride—it bore the echo of betrayal, of shame, of the dark bond that still chained him to his fallen kin.
Batman's expression was hidden, but his voice carried the weight of iron certainty. "You won't be. You'll be a weapon. And a distraction. A damn effective one once we breach the first layer."
The Lion nodded, tension relaxing marginally. Despite the pain, he began to rise, slow but steady. The field was holding. Barely.
Even as he finished applying the last plate, Batman's cowl twitched. Something brushed the edges of his sensor net—a thrum, like a blade scraped down the spine of reality. Not a sound, but a presence. Curze.
The Night Haunter wasn't merely near—he was aware. A predator feeling for the pulse of prey. A spike of terror rippled through the air like heat. Joker's psychic scream fed him, amplifying his aura until the hive itself recoiled.
Where Joker sought to unmake sanity with laughter, Curze hunted the soul with silence.
Batman's calculations snapped into alignment. They needed to move. The Ghost Run would begin now.
Batman turned to the Lion. "We move. Now. Stealth is our only path. Stay behind me. My shadow will keep you hidden."
The Primarch's hand instinctively found the hilt of Fealty. He didn't raise it—he merely touched it. Reverence. Resolve. "Lead the way, Human."
And so they moved.
Through haunted corridors where forgotten Mechanicus constructs lay shattered by psychic backlash. Through conduits warped by reality's death-throes. Through systems where Joker's hymnals of chaos bled from every shattered shrine and twisted vox-array.
Batman's sensors detected patrols—cultists wearing skin as vestments, and beasts that had once been men. He evaded them all, guiding the Lion through ventilation shafts, collapsed halls, and flooded basements. His tech pulsed faintly—thermal masking, sonic cloaks, null-fields—all stretched to their limit.
Once, they were spotted. Three mutants, twisted and massive, lurched into view from a rusted side-tunnel. Before Batman could react, Lion surged forward. His movements, fueled by pain and fury, were thunderous. Three strikes. Three corpses.
He returned, breathing heavily. "Necessary. They saw us."
Batman nodded. He'd calculated the same.
Then, it came—the hum. Faint at first, then rising. A pure, steady tone in a world of chaos. The entrance to the Mechanicus station.
It was half-buried under rubble, the cog-skull icon cracked but still defiant. Batman cut through the seal with a beam from his gauntlet. The door hissed open, and the air changed.
Inside, the station was a cathedral of silence. Dust-laden servitors stood frozen. Glow-panels flickered overhead like stars in a dying galaxy. And there, nested in a launch cradle beneath the surface, was a ship—a sleek, black craft. Angular, stealth-capable, designed for evasion.
A Void-Hawk. Their salvation.
"The odds," Lion murmured, staring at it. "They were not so infinitesimal after all."
Batman's cowl tilted. "Not odds. Calculations."
He moved to the control dais, fingers flying. The warp-drive was offline. Manual override required. They had maybe ten minutes to bring it online.
Then, from behind them, a laugh. High-pitched. Wet.
"Run, little bat. Run…"
The Joker's voice, transmitted from a thousand broken vox-speakers. And beneath it, a growl—a predator's call.
"The Night Haunter demands his due."
Batman and the Lion stood at the brink of salvation.
The hunt was no longer in the shadows.
It was here.
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Sorry can only upload now, there a project must be done hope you still enjoy this story.