Bruce pushed himself up from the floor and stood where he was, taking a deep breath. He saw Shiller reach for the remaining disposable needle, paused for a second, then lunged at him again.
Shiller drew his hand back from the drawer and pushed Bruce away, but because of the force, he almost flung him outright. This time, though, Bruce was prepared and didn't fall. After adjusting his stance, he circled in from the other side.
"You sure you want to fight me here?" Shiller narrowed his eyes at him.
"We don't seem to have ever really gone at it, do we?" Bruce said coldly. "I mean, hand-to-hand like this."
"You think I'm not good at this kind of thing?"
"If we're talking about combat technique, yeah. But I also know very well that in a fight, Strength is everything."
"Then you should give up," Shiller said.
"I just want to give it a try." Bruce bared his teeth in a provoking grin. "After all, not everyone gets the chance to have a brawl with their college Professor. I'm sure a lot of people dream about it."
"My students especially." Shiller didn't bother wasting words. He directly grabbed the chain of the clavicle ring. Bruce pounced from the right; Shiller dodged left and swung the iron rod to force him back. But Bruce slipped aside nimbly and circled to Shiller's left, hooking a leg to try to trip him.
Shiller didn't fall for it and stepped back half a step, shifting his body out of the way. He knew perfectly well his fighting skills could never compare to Bruce's, even if Bruce was no longer Batman and hadn't thrown a punch at anyone in a long time. He had been a Martial Arts Master, after all, and Arrogant almost never fought.
If he tried to match Bruce in skill, it would be very difficult. There are all kinds of grapples and chokes specifically designed for dealing with opponents stronger than you—once you get Lei-locked, you can still lose.
So Shiller chose to avoid the sharp edge head-on. Bruce could probe him as many times as he wanted, but as long as Shiller caught him once, Bruce wouldn't have any strength left to resist. A mortal body simply can't contend with a train.
Bruce suddenly threw a punch. Shiller let out a cold snort, turned sideways to evade, and reached for Bruce's arm. But Bruce suddenly changed tactics, bending low to slip under Shiller's hand, then darting behind him, trying to choke his neck.
Shiller had expected that. He immediately turned his body and stepped aside, denying Bruce any chance to get his arms around him. As Shiller reached for Bruce's shoulder, Bruce slipped sideways again and went for another leg sweep. Shiller didn't give him another opening—he whipped the iron chain, the rod smashing toward Bruce's chest.
But in the blink of an eye, Bruce moved like he had eyes in the back of his head. He suddenly dropped and rolled, dodging the iron rod. Shiller had put a lot of force behind the swing; with a bang, the rod slammed straight into the wire mesh surrounding the mechanism.
Szzzt—electric light flared, and Shiller was blasted straight off his feet.
Electricity was different from everything else. Other forms of damage only made Shiller's Strength erupt more fiercely, but this kind of thing made the muscles reflexively contract and the whole body seize up. No matter how strong you were, you couldn't use it for a while.
The current that ran through the mechanism seemed to have been specially tuned—adjusted specifically for the human body, just to stop any big brained genius from trying to brute-force the device. Whoever got shocked would be paralyzed for a good while.
Shiller lay stiff on the floor for over ten seconds. He couldn't move, but he could see what Bruce was doing. Bruce picked up the disposable needle from the drawer, attached the hose, and jabbed it into his own arm.
Blood quickly flowed along the tubing into the scales. Bruce looked back at him, teeth clenched. "I never meant to be Batman again. You forced me."
Shiller lay on the ground gasping. When the muscle rigidity finally wore off, he slowly stood up, lifted his gaze to the machine, and said, "This mechanism was probably designed by another me."
"How do you know?" Bruce asked.
"No one knows my own weak points better than I do."
"So you do have weaknesses?"
"Of course." Shiller took a deep breath. "Otherwise how do you think they managed to lock me up back then?"
Bruce's movements froze. He sank back into Shiller's memories again and saw how the young Shiller had been shut up in that laboratory.
Clearly, Shiller's talent had already been useful in his childhood. It wasn't much weaker than it was now, and once it erupted it was hard to handle—controlling him was extremely difficult.
But whatever else he was, Shiller was still a carbon-based life form. As long as you're carbon-based, as long as the parts you use to exert force are muscles, you can't be immune to the negative effects of electric current. And that became the only method of controlling Shiller.
With a snap, Bruce yanked the needle out, took a deep breath, turned to Shiller, and said, "Enough! How long are we going to keep this up?"
Shiller only gave him a detached smile. "You started it."
"Are you kidding me?!" Bruce said incredulously. "You're the one who insisted on staying. Don't tell me you're going to use that theory of yours again and dump all the responsibility on me? I'm not falling for it this time!"
"Weren't you the one who said you wanted to play the high-difficulty dungeon?" Shiller looked at him, seemingly puzzled.
Bruce opened his mouth. He stepped forward, spreading his hands. "Even if we're playing a high-difficulty dungeon, this is not how it's supposed to go, right?"
"Then what were you expecting?" Shiller still stared at him. "At Gotham's darkest, we were the ones who bled the most. Did you really think, in a high-difficulty game, we'd work together in perfect harmony and overcome the challenge side by side?"
Bruce covered his forehead. He took a deep breath, trying to give an Explanation. "I just thought it was too simple and boring. When I play alone, I still go for hard mode. With the two of us…"
"But you agreed too!" Bruce remembered his previous lesson and decided to go on the offensive. "Since you already anticipated this would happen, you should have stopped it!"
"Why would I stop it?" Shiller looked over at him and asked, "I thought you wanted to relive the good old days."
Bruce scrubbed his face hard, his tone carrying a deep helplessness. "Why do I feel like you're not better at all?"
"Oh, Bruce." Shiller propped his thumb with his other hand and said in an offhand tone, "You didn't actually think that just because you got better, I should be cured too, did you?"
"I thought at the very least you should…" Bruce ran out of words. After thinking for a long time, he finally said, "At least be a bit more normal."
"No." Shiller shook his head lightly. "Never, Bruce. I've never changed. At least, you didn't manage it."
"What do you mean?!" Bruce gritted his teeth and took a step forward, staring into his eyes. "So everything we went through—none of it meant anything to you?"
Suddenly he froze, then slammed his fist hard against the wooden exit. "Shiller, you're doing this again! I told you, I'm not falling for it anymore!"
Shiller finally burst out laughing, almost out of breath. "Very good. Looks like you really have made progress, Bruce."
Bruce, seething, pounded a few more times. "When the hell are you going to stop your Psyshock on me?!"
"Didn't you just use Psyshock on me too?" Shiller looked at him, still smiling, then dropped his gaze to the needle mark on Bruce's arm.
Bruce clenched his fist and had to admit that although he'd caught on in the end, he had still partially fallen for it just now. He'd gone right back down the same path—trying to use hurting himself to teach Shiller a lesson.
He really had drawn quite a bit of blood, but not enough to count as major blood loss, at most just a little over the safe blood volume for donation. So aside from a bit of chill in his fingertips, he didn't actually feel unwell.
What truly made him uncomfortable was that, after all this circling around, he still couldn't fully immunize himself against Shiller's little Joker combo—throw out a question and make Batman choose, pretend to be the good guy to misdirect, provoke him into losing control, ride the emotional wave into self-harm and blood sacrifice, stab him with the Guilt Knife of Mind Manipulation, follow up with a one-hit-kill Psyshock, then use the chaos to dump all the blame in one smooth chain.
Old tricks, sure, but if they work, why change them. He'd been pulling this exact routine since the very first time the two of them met. Still falling for it, still falling for it!
"We really can't keep doing this," Bruce said. "I'm not Batman anymore, and you're not Joker anymore."
"You're still not listening to me." Shiller grabbed his arm and pressed his hand over the still-seeping needle mark. "Back in the first level, I already told you you might have to be Batman for a bit. Did you really not hear that?"
Bruce froze, then looked completely undone. "How was I supposed to know that's what you meant? Wasn't that just a joke?!"
Then he roared, "You keep telling me to listen to you, and then you don't let me listen to you. If I don't listen, I miss your hints; if I do listen, I walk right into your trap. What the hell am I supposed to do?!"
He slammed his fist into the wooden exit again. Whether it was because he was too strong or because the thing was just shoddy, the lid on top got knocked crooked.
He realized he was losing control again and tried hard to steady his emotions. "When we get back I'm telling the Justice League: I've already quit being Batman and Joker is still chasing me!"
But soon he also noticed that, because Shiller had set his own bone so violently, the wound at his clavicle was bleeding a lot. It had soaked through his clothes, splattered all over the floor, and their fight had smeared it everywhere.
"All right," Shiller said. "The blood sacrifice is done; time to get to the actual business."
He took a deep breath, picked up the metal spike, went over to the bricks around the mechanism, jammed the spike into the crack between the bricks, and swung the crowbar down.
CLANG!!!!!!!
Bruce was jolted back a step, then bared his teeth and sucked in a sharp breath.
CLANG!!!! CLANG!!!! CLANG!!!!
The metal spike was hammered straight in by brute force, sunk all the way in with only a small section sticking out. Then Shiller hooked the crowbar around the spike and started prying. In just three moves he had completely levered out a stone brick that had been fitted in the ground with a seamless joint.
Then he went down the line, prying out the entire row of bricks one by one, even clearing out the debris from the joints between the bricks, casually tossing each brick onto the floor. When he finished, he wasn't even out of breath.
Shiller turned and headed for the exit; Bruce followed along very obediently. At the doorway, Shiller turned to look at him and asked, "Not mad anymore?"
Bruce shook his head, swallowed, and said, "Professor, whether you believe it or not, I'm believing it now."
"Believe what?"
"That you really do just want to teach me, not hurt me. If you'd just punched me directly back in the Morson district, there wouldn't be a Batman in this world anymore."
"You think I didn't want to?" Shiller shoved the crowbar into his hands, wiped a finger across the blood near his clavicle, and glanced down at his fingertip. "Filthy."