The air in the Tunnel of Echoes was a living thing—thick with ozone, ancient dust, and a low psychic resonance that clawed at the edges of perception. It pulsed with the rhythm of old sorrows and buried secrets, exhaling madness with every breath drawn within its vaulted, ruinous corridors.
Batman moved like a shadow honed to a razor's edge. His cape brushed against the rusted metal and cracked stone of the descent, cowl drawn tight, eyes flickering with cold LED precision. Every motion was calculated, silent, methodical. He scanned the walls—exposed data-conduits and collapsing arches woven between fractured sigils that bore the stain of something both ancient and warped. Beside him, a titan walked: Lion El'Jonson, Primarch of the Dark Angels, clad in battered black warplate, his bolter silent but ready. His breathing was shallow, strained, but his posture remained unbowed.
"The schematics placed Joker's beacon deep within the old Mechanicus grid," Batman muttered, voice distorted through the cowl. "But this... this isn't Mechanicus anymore."
He was right.
What began as structured, utilitarian Imperial design—cogwheel iconography and logic-aligned corridors—now gave way to eerie elegance. The deeper they moved, the more alien it became. Gothic arches interwove with Calibanite craftsmanship. Forgotten murals, half-devoured by moss and Warp-taint, depicted robed knights slaying hydras and daemons, or standing before impossible stars. These tunnels had not been walked by loyal men in centuries.
Lion paused before one mural, fingers brushing reverently across a cracked relief of a winged knight standing alone atop a cliff, his sword plunged into a serpent's skull. His eyes narrowed. "These are pre-Heresy," he murmured. "Caliban's dead sleep here… or what remains of them."
Batman turned slightly, his expression unreadable behind the mask. "The Knightly Orders?"
"Fragments. Memories carved in stone. This section was sealed before the Fall of Caliban. Not purged. Hidden." There was something in the Lion's tone—nostalgia, perhaps, or regret—but it faded beneath the tension humming around them.
They descended into a widened chamber where the air felt like broken glass. The psychic pressure sharpened, the low hum of the Warp becoming a full, throbbing pressure behind their eyes. Here, between fallen statues of long-dead knights and rusted server banks, they found it: a circle of dormant tech-constructs surrounding a central stone plinth.
On the plinth lay a collection of bound tomes—parchments sealed with bone clasps and etched with symbols that twisted and shimmered even under direct light. They pulsed faintly, each beat releasing a wave of nausea and memory.
Batman knelt, scanning one open page. "This isn't Mechanicus script. Or Chaos either." He paused. "Proto-Black Library. These are pre-codex warp studies—Calibanite cult-scholar texts, adapted during the Great Crusade. Left here... buried and forgotten."
El'Jonson's gauntleted hand hovered inches above the nearest tome, but he did not touch it. A flicker of something crossed his face. "Some among my sons believed knowledge alone could protect us from the Warp. That we could wield understanding as a weapon. I allowed it then... I was wrong."
Batman stood. "Joker's using it. The interference beacon—it's not just blocking signals. It's anchored to this archive, feeding off the raw psychic residue. He's created a labyrinth of echoes. A mind trap. We're walking through his insanity projected through your past."
The Lion's grip tightened on his bolter. "Then we silence the echoes."
The path ahead narrowed again, the resonance increasing with each step. The beacon awaited—but so did the Joker's madness, drawn now from the very bones of Caliban, twisting memory into weapon. Targon Secundus had become a reflection of every fractured past, and in the Tunnel of Echoes, the line between memory and madness grew ever thinner.
The world shrieked. Not with the sound of a physical explosion, but with the raw, unfiltered agony of memory made manifest. Joker's "Echo-Skins"—grotesque grafts of Warp-mutated flesh and corrupted Mechanicus tech—pulsed with malevolent light, projecting psychic miasmas that clawed at the very core of the mind.
Batman staggered, vision fracturing. The familiar alley. The scatter of pearls. Then crimson. The warehouse. Jason Todd, lifeless. A crowbar clanged on concrete, a laugh echoing, infinite and monstrous. This wasn't memory. It was re-experience. He could feel the dust in his lungs, taste the blood, smell the staleness of death. He was choking on a scream that had never truly escaped.
Beside him, Lion El'Jonson roared. A sound not of pain, but of tectonic grief. His massive form buckled momentarily, golden eyes glazed over. Caliban burned in those eyes—not the world, but the betrayal. The furious blaze of Luther's heresy. The sky tearing as Chaos seeped into what had once been a sanctuary. The world he had tried to save reduced to molten ash.
"You think you're running, Batsy?" Joker's voice rang out from the servitor swarm, interlaced with vox-static and warp-energy. "Running, running, running! But you're not escaping. You're dragging ghosts with you!"
The planet—Targon Secundus—screamed around them. A graveyard of forgotten battles, now reborn in madness. Joker and Curze had turned the very ground into a psychic snare. The Echo-Skins tapped into raw Warp residue, amplifying psychic echoes from past traumas. Batman and Lion weren't fleeing enemies. They were fleeing themselves.
"We need to be off-world. Now," Batman growled, shaking off the intrusive pain. His voice was raw but steady. He gestured to a signal, faint but persistent: an ancient Mechanicus node, buried deep beneath the surface.
"A long shot," he admitted, already calculating odds. "But there might be a stealth vessel—unmapped, untouched, buried before the corruption."
Their path twisted through ruined battlements and the bones of shattered Titans. Shadows writhed. Echo-Skins pulsed behind every wall. Every step deeper into the crust of the planet was like sinking into a memory made toxic. Lion walked with grim purpose, bolter barking at malformed horrors, his wounds burning with psychic friction.
They reached the node: a cavernous Mechanicus vault sealed beneath millennia of stone. The air inside was still, stale, and charged with a tension that reeked of dormant violence. Lion took position at the entrance, his bolter at the ready. His sword remained sheathed, but his hand rested on its hilt.
He could feel it—Curze. The scent of his brother's presence. Not in sight. But near. The warp shivered around him like breath on his neck.
Batman descended into the heart of the vault. There, encased in dust and silence, lay a stealth frigate—an ancient Void-Hawk class, its once-glorious hull now dulled and coated in silence. It was intact. Whole. But it wasn't dormant. It was angry.
Its machine spirit had gone feral.
Batman connected via neural uplink, jacking in his own command array, meshing it with fragments of Dark Angels protocol recovered from Lion's databanks. His vision flickered with firewalls and binary wards. The spirit fought him, howling in code. He responded in counter-glyphs, feeding it resonant invocations that mimicked Calibanite command cant, laced with Mechanicus override lexicons.
He fed it not logic, but narrative. Honor. Duty. The Lion rides again
The cavern groaned—a dying world exhaling its last. Collapsing rock and shrieking metal composed a symphony of obliteration, each sound a nail in the coffin of Targon Secundus. Dust, thick as ash from a pyre, choked the air, lit only by the sporadic flare of energy discharges and the molten arcs of falling debris.
Amidst the ruin, Lion El'Jonson knelt. The Primarch of the First Legion bled in silence, his once-immaculate armour gouged and torn, the Lion Sword gripped in a trembling hand, its edge flickering like a flame starved of oxygen. A shard of jagged ceramite was buried deep in his flank, but the agony it brought was distant—overshadowed by a voice.
"Brother..."
Curze.
That voice—a blade of silk and poison—slithered into the storm of his mind. It sang of futility, of surrender, of the shadow's dominion. The whisper wormed its way through the dust and chaos, not just to torment, but to claim. For a heartbeat, the Lion sagged, bowed under centuries of bloodshed, betrayal, and brotherhood turned to ash.
But the voice twisted. It wasn't just for him. It hungered for another—the mind still locked over the corvette's control throne. A silhouette in the dust. Batman.
A flicker of fury ignited in the Primarch's fading strength. Pure and cold, the emotion carved away despair. He was the protector. That was purpose enough.
With a roar that sundered the choking silence, Lion El'Jonson stabbed the Lion Sword into the fractured ground. It groaned, then held—leverage for a body that should no longer move. But he did. He rose. Blood dripped freely now, his vision a blur of heat and grit, but still he stood—a towering wraith of battered ceramite and war-born will.
"You will not have him, brother," the Lion growled. It was no threat. It was the final truth.
From the wound of a ruptured tunnel, they came—Night Lords. Not rabble or mutated dregs, but the true sons of Curze, clad in flayed flesh and echoing laughter. Their vox-amplified shrieks pierced the air as they descended in a tide of blades and malice.
The Lion charged.
He became a storm. His sword, a silver blur. Chainblades sparked off his pauldron; bolter rounds ricocheted from his cuirass. Still, he fought—fought for seconds. Fought for the man in the shadows.
Inside the cockpit of the stealth corvette—Ghostwing, its name etched now into its recovered identity—Batman worked. He wasn't a Primarch. He wasn't even a soldier. But his mind was a forge of purpose, his fingers a blur across glowing interfaces. The machine spirit, cowed by his earlier trial, obeyed with grudging recognition. Engines groaned, whined, then roared.
"Initiating vertical ascent," Batman rasped. "Brace for hull breach. No room for failure."
Ghostwing surged to life. A ripple of displacement shimmered around its sleek hull, the stealth field half-engaged even as gravity fought to drag it down. It began to rise—slowly at first, then with building fury. Rock crumbled as the launch chamber buckled beneath the corvette's rising fury.
Lion carved through the Night Lords like judgment incarnate. Bolts of lightning sparked from his blade as it bit through armour and bone alike. His body screamed for reprieve—but it would not be granted. Not yet.
A detonation above—the result of Batman's earlier charge—opened a ragged exit, a shaft of fractured light falling through swirling dust. Lion saw it. Saw his escape.
"Now!" he bellowed into the vox, every syllable carried by raw force of will.
Batman had already calculated it. Velocity, angle, proximity. The moment.
Lion leapt.
A meteor of blood and armour, he launched himself upward. A gauntlet slammed against the rising hull, fingers locking around a narrow strut. His body swung, debris cascading in his wake. With a cry dredged from the deepest pit of his resolve, he hauled himself upward. Another arm found purchase. Then a boot. Then—he was in.
The hatch hissed shut behind him.
Lion collapsed onto the deck, chest heaving, breath ragged. Every nerve screamed. Every bone sang with fire. But he was aboard. He was alive.
Ghostwing roared skyward, engines howling like the wrath of Terra itself. Behind them, the last tunnels of the corrupted world crumbled. The blood-soaked hive vanished beneath. Joker's whispers faded. Curze's scent evaporated in the vacuum.
Through the viewport, the stars emerged—cold, distant, free.
Lion El'Jonson, protector of ancient oaths, had risen one last time.
And a man from another world, forged in shadows, had made the impossible escape real.