"You're still alive." The voice was cold, precise—his own, but layered with something darker. The man blinked awake to peeling ceiling paint and the stench of stale cigarettes. His head pounded like a drumline.
The flickering streetlight outside cast long shadows across the apartment's grimy floor. Something clattered in the distance—a pipe, maybe, or a broken bottle kicked by strays. He rolled onto his side, muscles taut, and froze. A familiar blue coat hung over a chair beside the bed. The hilt of a sword peeked from beneath it, gleaming dully in the dim light.
He sat up slowly, fingers brushing against his own face. High cheekbones. Sharp jaw. His reflection in the cracked mirror across the room showed a man who wasn't supposed to exist—pale, composed, with eyes that cut like steel. The name surfaced in his mind before he could stop it: *Vergil*.
Outside, Gotham groaned. Distant sirens warbled through the night. He reached for the coat, leather smooth under his touch, and something in the air shifted—a pressure, a hum, like reality itself was bending around him. The sword's weight felt right in his grip. Too right. He exhaled, watching his breath mist in the cold. Nothing about this place smelled like home.
Yamato thrummed when his fingers tightened around the hilt. It wasn't just metal—it was an extension of his ribs, his spine, singing with the same dark pulse that coiled in his gut. The blade whispered promises of cleaved space, of doors to places that didn't belong in this world. He flexed his fingers. The air shuddered.
A scream echoed from the alley below. Raw. Desperate. His head snapped toward the sound, body moving before thought could catch up—coat swirling, boots silent against the rotting floorboards. Gotham was a city of broken things. The kind that begged to be cut apart.
He paused at the threshold, katana angled low. Behind him, the apartment stank of decay. Ahead, the night promised blood. A smirk curled his lips. It wasn't a choice. Not really. Vergil never walked away from a sharpened edge.
The alley was a box canyon of brick and fire escapes, the fight unfolding like a grotesque ballet. The Joker's laughter coiled around gunshots, manic and unhinged. Robin dodged a crowbar swing, his cape snapping like a wounded bird. Batman moved like shadow given form—until a goon's lucky shot grazed his shoulder. The woman pressed against the dumpster gasped, fingers clawing at wet pavement.
Yamato's edge caught the neon glow. The weight in his palm was blasphemy. This city fought with fists and gadgets. It didn't understand swords that split dimensions. He exhaled, and the world *bent*. One step—then he was between the woman and a grinning thug mid-swing. The blade's whisper was the last thing the man heard.
"Now," Vergil said, flicking gore from steel, "who's next?" The Joker's grin faltered. Robin froze mid-strike. Even the Batman stilled, cowl tilting in something like recognition. The air tasted of ozone and inevitability. He could feel it—the wrongness of his presence here, the way Gotham's chaos recoiled from something older, sharper. Perfect.
The blade slid home with a whisper. Behind the clown, the alley erupted in silver. Gangsters screamed as their limbs separated from torsos mid-stride, faces still twisted in confusion. Arterial spray hung suspended like rubies before gravity remembered itself. The Joker turned slowly, mouth open, to find his army reduced to twitching meat. "Oh," he breathed. "You're *fun*." His pupils dilated.
Batman moved first—always does—but Vergil was already stepping through space itself, coat flaring like wings. He reappeared nose-to-nose with the clown, close enough to smell the rotting greasepaint. His free hand gripped Joker's chin, forcing eye contact. "You play with madness," Vergil murmured. The blade's hilt pressed cold against the clown's ribs. "I *am* madness."
Robin's escrima sticks sparked uselessly against Yamato's guard. The boy's snarl faltered when Vergil didn't even glance his way. Somewhere above, a gargoyle cracked under sudden pressure. The Batman's grapple line snapped taut. Too slow. Always too slow. Vergil exhaled, and Gotham's night tore open down the middle.
The Joker's grin lasted exactly three frames before his body became geometry—sharp angles bisecting softer tissue. His severed fingers still twitched around the detonator when his torso slid diagonally from his hips. The pieces hit the pavement with wet, uneven thuds, his purple coat now just scattered fabric among the carnage. Vergil flicked Yamato once. The blade drank the neon light greedily.
The alley smelled like copper and gunpowder, the Joker's laughter still echoing from the brickwork despite his absence. Robin retched behind his mask. Batman landed hard, his boots splashing in a puddle of something that wasn't water. "You didn't—" he began, but the words died when Vergil turned. The cowl hid most things. Not the tightening of his jaw.
"Tell me," Vergil said, stepping over the clown's bisected grin, "why would you keep the clown alive for all these years?" The katana's tip traced a lazy arc through the air, droplets pattering like rain. "I just did your job for you." His voice was silk wrapped around a scalpel. The Batman's silence stretched taut—too long. Vergil's smirk sharpened. "Ah. You *enjoyed* it. The dance."
Robin lunged, a wordless cry tearing from his throat. Yamato met his charge with a sigh, the flat of the blade slamming into his ribs hard enough to send him skidding through offal. Vergil didn't watch him fall. His eyes stayed fixed on the shadow in the cape. "You let him live because he made you *feel*," he murmured. "How human."
Somewhere above, a batarang whirred through the dark. Vergil caught it between two fingers without looking, the metal shrieking as it crumpled like foil. The Batman's grapple gun clicked. Vergil tilted his head. "Try again," he said, and the night split open around them.
Yamato moved in silver whispers—first horizontally, then vertically, a lazy crosshatch in the air. The utility belt sagged, pouches spilling smoke pellets and lockpicks onto wet concrete. Robin's escrima sticks clattered to the ground in neat halves, wiring sparking impotently. Neither man bled. Neither man even flinched. The precision was surgical; the message obscene. *You are naked before me.*
Batman's cape billowed as he recoiled, gloved hands flying to his belt—only to find straps severed with millimeter precision. His gauntlets were next, the outer plating sliding off like banana peel. Robin gagged as his domino mask fluttered away in two perfect pieces, exposing wide, furious eyes beneath. Vergil watched their faces rearrange—anger, then disbelief, then something colder. Fear tasted better when it was fresh.
The katana's point settled lightly against Batman's sternum, denting the Kevlar without breaking skin. "Run," Vergil suggested. Behind them, Gotham's sirens wailed closer. The blade's edge gleamed, hungry. "Or shall I carve the coward out of you next?"
Then he sheathed Yamato with a sound like a guillotine snapping shut. The air sighed in relief. Robin scrambled backward, boots slipping in viscera, but Vergil was already turning, coat swirling around his ankles like liquid shadow. He stepped over the Joker's severed grin without glancing down. The alley's darkness clung to him as he walked away—not retreating, just *done*.
The Batman's voice cracked like a whip. "You don't just walk away from this." Vergil paused, fingertips brushing Yamato's hilt. Behind him, the utility belt's scattered contents steamed in puddles of blood. Robin was still breathing hard, fists clenched around the broken halves of his sticks.
"Then tell me, Mr. Wayne," Vergil said, the name dripping like poison, "what do you suggest I do?" The alley went dead silent. Even the sirens seemed to stutter. Batman's jaw tightened—not at the violence, but at the syllables. *Wayne*. A secret carved open with surgical precision. Robin's head snapped toward his mentor, domino-maskless face slack with shock.
Vergil didn't turn. He didn't need to. The weight of that name settled over Gotham like a blade hovering above its throat. The Batman exhaled through his nose, cape pooling around him like spilled ink. "You don't belong here," he growled, but the words lacked teeth. The air smelled of split concrete and something darker—fear, not of death, but of being *known*.
Yamato hummed, a sound like a beast waking. Vergil's smirk was a knife wound. "Neither do you." Then he stepped into the night, dissolving into the space between streetlights, leaving behind only the Joker's severed grin and two unmasked men standing in the ruin of their own mythology.
The Batmobile smelled like leather and gun oil, the silence between them thicker than the armor plating. Robin's fingers trembled around the wheel—not from fear, but from the adrenaline crash of watching a god walk through their world like it was paper. Batman stared straight ahead, cowl discarded between them, his jawline a hard shadow in the dashboard lights. The cave's stalactites loomed ahead, dripping with condensation or maybe judgment.
Alfred's polished shoes didn't so much as squeak on the cave floor. "Master Dick," he began, teacup balanced perfectly, but Robin was already halfway up the staircase, domino mask crumpled in his fist. His voice cracked like dry timber: "He *knew*." The cave echoed it back, bouncing off the T-Rex and the giant penny. Batman didn't flinch. He just flexed his bare fingers, watching the way his knuckles whitened.
The teacup hit the cave floor with a porcelain scream. Alfred never dropped things. "Bruce," the old man said, very quietly, "what have you let into our house?" The Batcomputer's screens flickered—blue, then red, then black. Somewhere above, a colony of bats stirred in their sleep. The cave held its breath. Batman finally looked up, and his eyes were the only thing in the room that didn't waver.
"I don't know," he admitted, and the words tasted like ash. The confession hung between them, raw as the split utility belt still draped over his chair. He flexed his fingers again, feeling the absence of gauntlets, the way his callouses caught on air. Alfred inhaled sharply—not at the violence, but at the syllables. *I don't know*. Three words Bruce Wayne hadn't spoken since he was eight years old.
Dick's footsteps echoed from the upper levels, too heavy for a man who moved like water. The cave smelled like pennywort and gunpowder, the way it always did after a bad night. Batman—no, *Bruce*—reached for the cowl, then stopped mid-gesture. His reflection in the monitor showed a man without armor. The screen blinked once, then displayed a single frame: security footage of the alley, frozen on Vergil's smirk as he stepped through space itself. The timestamp was wrong. It read *YEAR: ????.*
Alfred's shadow stretched long across the cave floor. His voice, when it came, was softer than the blade that had carved through Gotham's myths. "Then we find out." Bruce exhaled. The Batcomputer whirred to life on its own, keys clacking like bones. Somewhere in the darkness, Yamato's absence hummed. The cave had never felt so small.
Three days later, the search yielded nothing. No fingerprints in any database—not Interpol's, not Argus's, not even the League's shadow archives. No birth certificate, no dental records, no ghost of a paper trail. Dick's fingers hovered over the keyboard, wrist braced in athletic tape, staring at the screen's blank verdict. "Like he's not even from this *planet*," he muttered. Bruce didn't correct him. The footage from the alley still played on loop—frame 37 showed Vergil's blade slicing through light itself. Physics had blinked.
Oracle's voice crackled through the comms, sharp with static and something else: dread. "I've got eyes on every camera from here to Blüdhaven. Nothing. Not a single frame." The silence that followed was textured, thick with the unspoken possibility. Nobody hacked Barbara Gordon's systems. Nobody *erased* themselves from existence. The cave's stalactites dripped. Bruce's knuckles pressed white against the desk.
Then the Batcomputer beeped—once, high and thin. The screen flickered to black before resolving into crisp white text: *SUBJECT: VERGIL. STATUS: N/A. ORIGIN: DATA INSUFFICIENT*. Below it, like an afterthought, glowed a single line in red: *QUERY: ARE YOU CERTAIN YOU WISH TO PROCEED?* Alfred's teacup hit the saucer with a chime. The cave exhaled. Bruce's finger hovered over the keyboard. The air smelled of ozone and something older. Yamato's hunger.