Daniel landed on the rooftop of a tall building overlooking Gotham.
From above, the city looked like it had descended into hell. Cars lay overturned across the streets, many still burning.
Thick smoke rose into the sky as panicked civilians ran in every direction — some desperately trying to escape the violence, others taking advantage of the chaos by breaking into supermarkets and electronics stores.
Gunshots, explosions, and distant screams echoed throughout the city.
Daniel looked down at the devastation and sighed. "Humans really do the dumbest things during an apocalypse."
Bruce had said there were only hundreds of infected. Looking across Gotham now, that information was already outdated.
The infected weren't in the hundreds anymore. There were thousands.
His expression darkened. "The Joker..." He clicked his tongue.
"That bastard is like a cockroach. He just refuses to stop causing trouble." He folded his arms.
"One of these days I should clean up every immortal and undying nuisance in this universe. The world would be a much more peaceful place."
Daniel stepped off the rooftop and dropped toward the street below, landing in the middle of the road with a heavy thud that cracked the asphalt beneath his feet.
The moment he appeared, a nearby man turned toward him. His face was stretched into an unnaturally wide grin, bloodshot eyes filled with madness. Without a word he raised an assault rifle and pulled the trigger.
"DIE!"
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
A stream of bullets tore through the air. Daniel didn't bother moving. The bullets flattened against his body and fell harmlessly onto the pavement.
The infected man's grin only grew wider as he kept firing until the magazine ran dry.
Daniel looked at him thoughtfully. "They're all victims of the Joker Virus."
He rubbed his chin. "I'm not even sure whether there's a cure."
His gaze drifted across the surrounding streets. Infected civilians were attacking anyone they could find, already numbering in the thousands.
"If I kill all of them, it's genocide. If I leave them alone, they keep killing innocent people."
He sighed. Then his eyes lit up.
"Oh. I almost forgot." A smile spread across his face. "Anti-Dimension."
The space around the gunman distorted for an instant. Nothing appeared to happen.
Then the man's feet left the ground.
"Huh?"
He continued rising, arms and legs flailing wildly as though gravity had forgotten he existed.
Daniel had simply altered the man's gravitational axis — instead of being pulled toward the Earth, he was now being pulled sideways into empty air.
Within seconds the infected man was floating dozens of meters above the street, unable to touch the ground or reach anyone else, still screaming and firing uselessly into the sky as he drifted farther away.
Daniel watched him for a moment and nodded in satisfaction. "Perfect. Still alive... but can't hurt anyone."
He pushed off the pavement and began skating down the ruined street, gliding effortlessly over shattered asphalt.
As infected civilians rushed toward him from every direction, he raised a hand casually.
"Anti-Dimension Equation."
The invisible force spread across the street. One after another, the infected lost contact with the ground.
"Huh?" "W-What?!"
Instead of falling upward, each person was pulled along a completely different axis. One shot sideways toward a building wall. Another drifted diagonally into the sky.
Several more floated high above the streets, kicking their legs helplessly as they spun through the air.
Within seconds, dozens of infected were suspended far above Gotham, completely unable to reach anyone below.
Daniel continued skating through the city, flicking his fingers whenever another group appeared. Every gesture sent more infected floating harmlessly into the air.
He couldn't help grinning. "This power is actually really fun."
Unlike Death Energy, Anti-Dimension didn't push or pull — it rewrote the target's axis within space itself.
If a person's natural axis pointed toward the Earth, Daniel could rotate it in any direction he wanted.
The moment he did, reality treated that new direction as down. That was why every infected floated away at different angles instead of simply levitating.
He skated beneath the airborne crowd, occasionally glancing up at the dozens of screaming people drifting across Gotham's skyline.
"This is way more practical than I expected."
With almost no effort, he was removing infected from the battlefield without killing a single one.
"So long as I don't change them back..." He shrugged. "They're basically harmless."
As he continued through the city, more infected charged from side streets and alleyways.
Daniel didn't slow down. He simply pointed. One after another, they left the ground and joined the growing collection of floating figures hanging over Gotham like bizarre human balloons.
***
Deep beneath Gotham, inside one of the city's main water treatment facilities, Batman and Robin moved through the maze of pipes and filtration tanks.
The building had already been abandoned. Several workers lay unconscious on the floor while green chemical drums bearing crude Joker smiles were scattered throughout the facility.
Robin examined one of the containers before looking at Batman. "He really planned this out."
Batman crouched beside a shattered control panel. "The Joker Virus isn't spreading randomly."
He picked up a sample of the bright green liquid leaking into the filtration system.
"He intended to contaminate Gotham's water supply."
Robin's expression hardened. "If this gets into the city's reservoirs, it won't just be thousands anymore."
Batman walked straight to the emergency control console and manually activated the city's isolation protocols. Massive steel floodgates began sliding shut throughout the underground tunnels.
CLANG. CLANG.
Warning alarms echoed through the facility as valves closed one after another, cutting off the contaminated water before it could reach the remaining reservoirs. On the monitor, red warning lights gradually turned green.
Robin let out a relieved breath. "We stopped it."
Batman nodded. "We prevented the virus from reaching the rest of Gotham's water network." He looked at the map on the monitor. "But that only limits further exposure. The people who were already infected are still out there."
*****
A/N: If you'd like to read ahead of the Webnovel release schedule, you can join my Patreon!
The Patreon version is 30 chapters ahead.
👉 patreon.com/Universal_Peace