BLACKGATE PENITENTIARY - PSYCHIATRIC HOLDING WING - 6:47 AM
The fluorescent lights hummed with that particular frequency that seemed specifically designed to drive already unstable people further into madness, a buzzing drone that wormed its way into the eardrums and nested there like a parasitic insect laying eggs in the folds of the brain. Harleen Frances Quinzel sat in the corner of her padded cell—they had upgraded her from the standard holding cell after she had spent three hours giggling at the wall while drawing pictures in the condensation from her own breath—with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them in a self-embrace that the night shift psychiatrist had noted as "self-soothing behavior indicative of severe emotional trauma" but which Harley herself would have described as "hugging myself because nobody else is gonna do it and also because I'm THINKING very hard and I need to be in the THINKING position."
She had been thinking for approximately fourteen hours straight now, which was a personal record that even her Arkham therapists would have found impressive, and the subject of her thoughts had not wavered for a single second from the blazing skull that had appeared in the middle of the Joker's last performance like an uninvited guest at a party who then proceeded to SET FIRE to the host and also the decorations and also the other guests and basically the entire concept of the party itself.
"He looked at me," Harley whispered to no one, her voice hoarse from the screaming she had done the night before, screaming that had started as terror and morphed into something else entirely, something that the guards had found deeply unsettling because it had begun to sound almost... reverent. "He looked RIGHT at me. Those eyes... those big, beautiful, burnin' eye sockets full of FIRE and JUDGMENT and... and he SAW me, ya know? Really SAW me. Not the costume, not the makeup, not Mistah J's little sidekick. ME. Harleen. The REAL me."
The Penance Stare had done something to her that no amount of therapy, medication, or electroshock treatment had ever accomplished: it had forced her to actually LOOK at herself without the protective lens of delusion that she had carefully constructed over years of codependent insanity with a man who painted his face like a dead carnival reject and thought mass murder was the height of comedy.
She had seen it ALL.
Every victim. Every broken family. Every child who would grow up without parents because Harley Quinn thought it was FUNNY to help her puddin' gas a shopping mall or blow up a school bus or poison the water supply at a charity event for orphans (that last one had been particularly on-the-nose even by Joker standards, and Harley had laughed at the time, laughed until her sides hurt, but now she could feel those children's terror echoing in her bones like church bells tolling for the damned).
She should have been destroyed by it. The other goons—the ones who survived, anyway—were currently catatonic vegetables in the Blackgate infirmary, their minds having simply STOPPED like a computer hitting a fatal error and going to the blue screen of death except the blue screen was their own atrocities reflected back at them in perfect clarity. But Harley was different. Harley had always been different. Her psychology was a pretzel twisted by a pretzel factory that was itself shaped like a pretzel and operated by particularly artistic circus contortionists, and the Penance Stare had simply... untangled some of the knots.
Not all of them. God, not all of them. She was still crazy—she could FEEL the crazy, warm and familiar like a favorite sweater made of barbed wire and hallucinogenic mushrooms—but the specific SHAPE of her crazy had shifted. The Joker-shaped hole in her psyche, the obsessive devotion that had defined her existence for years, had been cauterized shut by hellfire. And in its place...
"He let me LIVE," Harley breathed, her eyes going wide and unfocused as she replayed the moment for the hundredth time. The Ghost Rider—Bone Daddy, she had decided to call him in the privacy of her fractured mind, because she needed a pet name and "Ghost Rider" was too formal for the entity that had SPARED HER IMMORTAL SOUL—had stared into her eyes, had seen every sin she had ever committed, and had... pulled back. Diluted the Stare. Turned what should have been a spiritual execution into something almost gentle, like being dunked in boiling water but only up to your ankles instead of all the way.
"He CARES about me," Harley concluded, her logic following the kind of path that would make Euclidean geometry weep and non-Euclidean geometry nod in approval. "He sees my potential! He knows I can be BETTER! He... he BELIEVES in me!"
She hugged her knees tighter, a dreamy smile spreading across her face that made the security camera operator in the monitoring room cross himself and mutter a prayer despite being a committed atheist for thirty-seven years.
"Mistah J never believed in me," Harley continued, talking to herself with the confidence of someone who had completely lost track of the boundary between internal monologue and external speech. "He just used me. Made me feel special so I'd do whatever he wanted. Classic textbook manipulation—I shoulda recognized it, I got a DEGREE in this stuff! But Bone Daddy... he doesn't want anything FROM me. He just wants me to be GOOD. To choose better. He SAID so! 'May you choose better,' he said, and that's basically a BLESSING, right? A benediction! A spiritual MANDATE!"
She sprang to her feet with sudden manic energy, pacing the small cell in tight circles that made the padding squeak under her bare feet.
"I gotta get outta here," she muttered, her mind already racing through escape plans, contraband acquisitions, costume redesigns. "I gotta find him. I gotta show him I CAN be better! I'll be SO good! The BEST! I'll help him judge the sinners! I'll be his... his SIDEKICK! No, wait, that's too much like before. His PARTNER! His... his ACOLYTE! Yeah! Saint Harley of the Holy Hellfire!"
She stopped pacing, pressing her hands against the padded wall and leaning in close, her nose almost touching the fabric.
"I bet he's lonely," she whispered conspiratorially. "Being a big scary skeleton all the time, nobody to talk to, nobody who UNDERSTANDS the burden of righteous judgment. I understand. I TOTALLY understand. I used to help Mistah J with HIS judgments, even if those were more 'random chaos' and less 'cosmic justice.' I got EXPERIENCE. I'm QUALIFIED."
The fact that her "qualifications" consisted primarily of enabling a homicidal maniac's reign of terror did not seem to register as a potential obstacle in her new career path as a Ghost Rider groupie.
"I'm gonna need a new look," Harley mused, tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Red and black is played out. Maybe something with flames? Orange and yellow? No, that's too on-the-nose. Maybe... leather? He wears leather. I could wear leather. We could be MATCHING. Oh! OH! What if I got a motorcycle too?! We could RIDE together! Side by side! Dispensing JUSTICE! It would be SO romantic!"
She twirled in place, her hospital gown flaring out around her legs, giggling with a sound that was approximately thirty percent genuine joy and seventy percent complete dissociation from reality.
"Watch out, Gotham," Harley announced to her empty cell, striking a dramatic pose that would have looked more impressive if she wasn't barefoot in a padded room with unwashed hair and bags under her eyes deep enough to store groceries in. "There's a new hero in town! Well, antihero. Well, reformed villain. Well, villain-in-recovery who's DEFINITELY not just transferring her obsessive tendencies to a new object of fixation! HARLEY QUINN IS GONNA BE A GOOD GIRL NOW!"
She paused, her brow furrowing.
"For Bone Daddy," she added, as if that clarification was crucial.
In the monitoring room, the security guard reached for his radio.
"Yeah, this is Thompson in Psych Wing. I'm gonna need someone to up Quinzel's sedatives. Like, a lot. Like, 'tranquilize an elephant' levels. She's... she's doing the thing again."
The thing, in this context, being "displaying behavior so unhinged that even by Gotham standards it warranted immediate pharmacological intervention."
THE CLOCKTOWER - ORACLE'S HEADQUARTERS - 9:15 AM
Barbara Gordon had not slept.
This was not unusual—her role as Oracle required long hours of surveillance, data analysis, and coordinating the various vigilantes who used Gotham as their personal punching bag playground—but tonight's sleeplessness was different. Tonight, she hadn't slept because every time she closed her eyes, she saw the Joker's face frozen in an expression of absolute terror, and the sight made her feel something she hadn't allowed herself to feel in years.
Happy.
She was HAPPY that the Joker was dead, and she was done pretending otherwise.
The sun was streaming through the Clocktower's reinforced windows, casting long golden rectangles across the floor and illuminating the truly impressive spread of celebratory food that Barbara had ordered at approximately 4 AM when she realized that she was, in fact, throwing herself a one-woman party for the death of her greatest tormentor. There were three different types of pizza (pepperoni, supreme, and a meat lover's that could have induced cardiac arrest in a lesser woman), two orders of garlic knots, a truly excessive amount of chicken wings in varying degrees of spiciness, a bottle of champagne that had been gathering dust in her emergency supplies for precisely this kind of occasion, and an entire cheesecake that she had no intention of sharing with anyone.
The multiple screens of her command center were all tuned to different news channels, each one showing variations of the same story: "JOKER DEAD - MYSTERIOUS VIGILANTE RESPONSIBLE - GOTHAM IN SHOCK." The talking heads were divided roughly into three camps: those who were horrified by the extrajudicial killing, those who were secretly (or not so secretly) relieved, and those who were using the opportunity to push whatever political agenda they had been nursing before the flaming skeleton showed up.
Barbara ignored them all, focusing instead on the police reports she had hacked, the witness statements she had compiled, and the truly spectacular footage from a traffic camera that had somehow survived the heat and captured the Ghost Rider's confrontation with the Joker in grainy but unmistakable detail.
She had watched that footage forty-seven times now.
"'Look into my eyes,'" Barbara quoted softly, mimicking the Ghost Rider's gravelly baritone as she watched the Penance Stare activate for the forty-eighth time. On screen, the Joker's face contorted, his trademark smile finally—FINALLY—replaced by an expression of genuine suffering. "Yeah. Look into his eyes, you piece of shit. See what you did. FEEL what you did."
She took a savage bite of pizza, chewing with more aggression than the cheese-and-tomato combination strictly warranted.
"Barbara."
The voice came from the shadows near the elevator, because of course it did, because Bruce Wayne had never entered a room normally in his entire life and probably emerged from his mother's womb doing a dramatic backlit silhouette pose while Alfred provided appropriate mood lighting.
"Bruce," Barbara acknowledged without turning around. "There's pizza. And champagne. And before you say anything about 'celebrating death' or 'sinking to their level' or whatever speech you've prepared, I want you to know that I do not care. At all. Even a little bit."
Batman stepped into the light, and Barbara noted with some satisfaction that he looked TERRIBLE. His cowl was off, revealing Bruce Wayne's face underneath, and that face bore the expression of a man who had not slept, had not eaten, and had spent the last several hours having his fundamental beliefs about justice and morality challenged by events beyond his control.
Good, Barbara thought viciously. Maybe now he knows how the rest of us feel.
"I'm not here to lecture you," Bruce said, his voice quiet, almost subdued, which was so unusual that Barbara actually swiveled her chair around to look at him properly. "I'm here because I don't know what else to do."
Barbara blinked. In all the years she had known Bruce Wayne, she had never heard him admit to uncertainty. The man had contingency plans for his contingency plans. He had folders on every superhuman on the planet, including himself. He had once spent six months preparing for a scenario involving time-traveling Nazi dinosaurs because he calculated there was a 0.003% chance of it occurring.
And now he was standing in her Clocktower looking LOST.
"Okay," Barbara said slowly, setting down her pizza slice. "That's... new. What happened?"
"I found him. The Ghost Rider." Bruce moved to the window, staring out at the city, his reflection a ghostly overlay on the glass. "I tracked the thermal signatures, cross-referenced the witness reports, analyzed the residual energy patterns. Constantine was useless—said the creature was beyond his understanding, that its magical signature didn't match anything in any dimension he could access. But I found him anyway."
"And?"
"And I engaged him."
Barbara raised an eyebrow. "You FOUGHT the thing that killed the Joker by looking at him? Bruce, that's insane even by your standards."
"I had to know what we were dealing with." Bruce's hands clenched at his sides. "I hit him with everything I had. Freeze grenades. Shock gauntlets. Pressure point strikes. Sonic disruptors. Nothing worked. Nothing even SLOWED him down. He just... stood there. Let me exhaust myself. And then..."
He trailed off, and Barbara saw something she had never seen on Bruce Wayne's face before.
Fear.
Not the fear of physical harm—Bruce had faced death so many times it had become almost boring—but something deeper. The fear of having your entire worldview shattered like glass.
"Then what?" Barbara prompted, her voice softer now, the celebratory mood dimming slightly in the face of her mentor's obvious distress.
"He showed me something." Bruce turned to face her, and his eyes were haunted in a way that made Barbara's stomach clench. "He called it... I don't know what he called it. A glimpse. A fraction of what he did to the Joker. He showed me the people who died AFTER I spared Joker the first time. The second time. The tenth time. Every victim who could have been saved if I had just..." He swallowed hard. "If I had just ended it."
Barbara was quiet for a long moment, processing this information, feeling the complicated tangle of emotions it stirred up.
"Bruce," she said finally, "you know I've never agreed with your code. Not completely. After what the Joker did to me... there were nights when I prayed for someone to do exactly what the Ghost Rider did. Someone to just... STOP him. Permanently. Without the revolving door of Arkham, without the endless cycle of escape and murder and capture and escape again."
"The code is what separates us from them," Bruce said, but the words sounded hollow, rehearsed, like a prayer recited so many times it had lost all meaning.
"Does it?" Barbara challenged. "Because from where I'm sitting, the code separates US from THEM, but it doesn't separate THEM from their VICTIMS. The Joker kept killing because he knew—he KNEW, Bruce—that you would never stop him permanently. You were part of his game. The straight man to his comedy routine. And every punchline was written in someone else's blood."
"I know." Bruce's voice cracked, just slightly, just enough to show the fractures underneath. "The Ghost Rider... he made me see it. Made me FEEL it. All those deaths, all that suffering, laid at my feet like... like an accusation. And the worst part is, I can't argue with it. I can't say he's wrong."
Barbara wheeled closer to him, close enough to reach out and take his hand if she wanted to. She didn't—Bruce Wayne was not a man who responded well to comfort—but the option was there.
"So what now?" she asked.
"I don't know." Bruce looked at his hands, the hands that had refused to kill for so many years. "For the first time in my life, Barbara... I don't know if I'm the hero Gotham needs. Or if I've just been the warden of a prison with an open back door."
Barbara considered several responses—sympathetic, analytical, brutally honest—and finally settled on the one that felt most true.
"Maybe you don't have to figure that out tonight," she said. "Maybe, just this once, you can let someone else carry the burden. The Ghost Rider is out there, doing what you won't do. You don't have to approve. You don't have to help. But maybe... maybe you can stop trying to stop him long enough to see what happens."
Bruce shook his head slowly. "I can't just stand by while someone executes criminals in the streets. Even criminals who deserve it. Even the Joker."
"Then don't stand by." Barbara shrugged. "Keep doing what you do. Save the innocents, stop the crimes in progress, be the symbol Gotham needs. But maybe... maybe let the Ghost Rider handle the ones who can't be saved. The ones who won't STOP. The ones who use your mercy as a weapon against the people you're trying to protect."
Bruce was silent for a long time, staring at nothing, his expression cycling through emotions too quickly to track.
"The cheesecake is good," Barbara offered, because someone had to break the tension before it became a permanent fixture of the Clocktower's atmosphere. "New York style. I had it delivered from that place in Midtown."
Bruce almost smiled. Almost. "I should go. I need to... think."
"You do that a lot. Thinking. You should try eating instead sometime. It's very therapeutic." Barbara gestured expansively at her feast. "I have more food here than any reasonable human should consume in a week. Help me make a dent."
"Another time." Bruce moved toward the elevator, his cape billowing behind him because he literally could not move without his cape billowing, it was like a medical condition at this point. "Barbara... thank you. For not judging me."
"Oh, I'm judging you," Barbara called after him cheerfully. "I'm judging you SO hard. I just also love you like family, so I'm doing it quietly."
The elevator doors closed on whatever response Bruce might have had, and Barbara was alone again with her screens and her food and the quiet, burning satisfaction of knowing that the Joker would never hurt anyone ever again.
She picked up her champagne glass and raised it to the frozen image of the Ghost Rider on her center screen.
"To you, mystery man," she toasted. "Whoever—whatever—you are. Thanks for doing what the rest of us couldn't."
She drank deeply, and the champagne had never tasted so sweet.
GOTHAM CITY - THE NARROWS - 11:45 PM
Marcus Chen was having a crisis of conscience, which was somewhat ironic given that he was currently sharing headspace with an entity whose entire PURPOSE was to resolve crises of conscience through the application of hellfire and eternal damnation.
He was sitting on the rooftop of his apartment building—the fire escape didn't technically go all the way to the roof, but Marcus had discovered that the Ghost Rider's influence made climbing up the remaining twelve feet of brick surprisingly easy even in human form—and staring out at the Gotham skyline while trying to process the fact that he had, in the space of twenty-four hours, killed the Joker, traumatized Batman, and apparently become the most talked-about figure in the city's long and colorful history of vigilante justice.
The Spirit of Vengeance hummed contentedly in his chest, satisfied with the night's work, like a well-fed cat settling down for a nap. It didn't understand Marcus's moral quandary. It didn't HAVE moral quandaries. It had purposes, and those purposes were simple: find the guilty, judge them, punish them. The mathematics of sin were not complicated when you could literally see people's souls.
But Marcus was still human, somewhere underneath all the hellfire, and humans were COMPLICATED.
I killed people, he thought, watching the distant lights of downtown flicker and dance. Real people. With lives and histories and families. Okay, terrible people. MURDEROUS people. But still... people.
The Spirit stirred, offering something that wasn't quite words but conveyed the general sentiment of "they were guilty, they were judged, stop whining about it."
Easy for you to say. You're a cosmic force of vengeance. I used to be a guy who got stressed about his Amazon deliveries arriving late.
The Spirit had no response to this, primarily because it had no frame of reference for either Amazon or the concept of late deliveries. It simply radiated patient, burning certainty, like a furnace that knew it was going to be needed again soon and was content to wait.
Marcus sighed and pulled out his phone—miraculously undamaged by his transformations, which suggested that the Ghost Rider's powers included some kind of supernatural phone case—and scrolled through the news coverage. Every outlet was running with the Joker story. Some were calling the Ghost Rider a hero. Others were calling him a menace. A few enterprising journalists had already started speculating about his origins, his powers, and whether he represented a new kind of threat to Gotham's already-tenuous social order.
One tabloid had dubbed him "The Burning Skull of Justice," which Marcus had to admit was pretty metal.
His phone buzzed with a notification: "BREAKING: Multiple Criminal Organizations Reportedly 'Going to Ground' Following Ghost Rider Appearance - Experts Suggest Gotham's Underworld in State of Panic."
Well, Marcus thought with grim satisfaction, at least I'm having an impact.
The Spirit pulsed suddenly, a sharp spike of awareness that made Marcus sit up straight, his human senses straining to identify what his supernatural passenger had already detected.
Sin. Nearby. LOTS of sin. And moving.
Marcus closed his eyes and let the Spirit's perception wash over him. It was like switching from standard definition to 4K ultra-high-definition, except instead of colors and shapes, he was seeing souls and sins. The city below transformed into a map of moral geography, with dark spots indicating concentrations of guilt and bright areas representing relative innocence.
And there, maybe fifteen blocks away, was a MASSIVE dark spot moving through the streets. Multiple sources of sin traveling together, their collective guilt forming a cloud of spiritual pollution that made Marcus's stomach turn even through the Spirit's filter.
He stood up, feeling the familiar heat beginning to build in his bones.
What is it? he asked the Spirit.
The Spirit sent back impressions: violence, cruelty, drugs, broken bones, broken lives. A raid. A show of force. Someone making an example.
Who?
An image formed in Marcus's mind, pulled from the collective unconscious or the Spirit's cosmic database or wherever the hell it got its information: a massive figure, muscles upon muscles, tubes feeding green fluid into bulging veins. Bane. And he wasn't alone.
More images: vines wrapping around screaming victims, a woman with green skin and murder in her eyes. Poison Ivy. And skulking in the shadows, a figure in black leather with a whip and a devil-may-care attitude. Catwoman.
What are they doing?
The Spirit's answer was more emotion than information: they were TAKING. Taking from those who couldn't fight back. Crushing resistance. Establishing dominance in the power vacuum left by the Joker's death.
Marcus felt his jaw clench. He'd known this would happen. When you removed one predator from an ecosystem, others moved in to fill the gap. The Joker's territory was up for grabs, and Gotham's rogues were already circling like sharks around a wounded seal.
Well, Marcus thought, the flames beginning to lick up his arms as the transformation started, I guess I should go introduce myself.
THE GOTHAM MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY - 11:58 PM
Bane had always believed in strength.
It was the only philosophy that made sense in a world determined to crush you beneath its heel. He had been born in prison, raised in darkness, forged by suffering into something that could never be broken. He had trained his body to perfection and then improved on that perfection through chemistry. He had broken the Bat, snapped that famous spine over his knee like a dry twig, and proven that no amount of training, no amount of gadgets, no amount of moral conviction could stand against raw, overwhelming POWER.
Tonight, he was demonstrating that philosophy for a new audience.
The Gotham Museum of Natural History had been a soft target—minimal security, maximum valuables, and a convenient location for establishing a new base of operations in the Narrows. Bane had brought twenty of his best men, armed and loyal, along with two strategic allies whose abilities complemented his own. Poison Ivy provided crowd control and interrogation capabilities through her pheromone manipulation and plant constructs. Catwoman provided infiltration expertise and a certain... moral flexibility that Bane found useful.
The heist itself was almost secondary. What Bane really wanted was to send a message. The Joker was dead, killed by some unknown entity, and Gotham's underworld was in chaos. Someone needed to step up and establish order. Someone needed to remind the city who held the REAL power.
That someone was going to be Bane.
"The vault is this way," Catwoman purred, her whip coiled at her hip, her eyes scanning the shadows with feline alertness. "Two guards at the door, electronic locks, pressure sensors on the floor. Child's play."
"Then play," Bane rumbled, his massive frame casting long shadows in the dim emergency lighting. "Ivy and I will handle the main gallery. There are... complications to address."
The complications were the museum's night staff—twelve people, bound and gagged and arranged in a neat row by the dinosaur exhibit, their eyes wide with terror as Ivy's vines crept slowly around them, thorns pressing against vulnerable flesh.
"Please," one of them whimpered through her gag. A young woman, maybe mid-twenties, probably a graduate student working the night shift for extra credit. "Please, we won't tell anyone, just let us go—"
"Shhhh." Ivy pressed a finger to her lips, her pheromones washing over the captives in a wave that turned their terror into something more... pliable. "Don't worry, little seedlings. If you're very, very good, you might even survive the night. But first, you're going to tell me everything you know about the museum's security systems. The REAL systems, not the ones in the brochure."
Bane watched the interrogation with detached interest, mentally cataloging the museum's layout and calculating optimal positions for his men. Everything was proceeding according to plan. Within the hour, they would have everything of value, a compliant staff too drugged to remember their faces, and a clear message sent to every would-be competitor in Gotham: Bane was taking over, and resistance was futile.
Then the skylight exploded.
Bane had approximately 0.8 seconds to process what was happening before a column of fire descended from the ceiling like the wrath of an angry god. It hit the marble floor with enough force to crack the stone, and when the flames cleared, something stood in the center of the impact crater that made even Bane's chemically-enhanced heart skip a beat.
It was a skeleton.
A burning skeleton.
A burning skeleton wearing a leather jacket and radiating heat so intense that Bane could feel it from thirty feet away, like standing too close to a blast furnace.
"INTERRUPTING," the thing said, and its voice was the sound of a coffin lid being nailed shut, "SOMETHING?"
Bane's men opened fire immediately, because that's what trained soldiers did when confronted with the unknown—they shot at it and hoped for the best. Automatic weapons chattered, muzzle flashes strobing in the darkness, bullets tearing through the air toward the burning figure.
The Ghost Rider didn't move.
The bullets hit. Bane watched them punch through the flames, through the bone, and out the other side... where they continued on their trajectory and embedded themselves in the wall behind the creature. No blood. No flinching. No apparent damage whatsoever.
"RUDE," the Ghost Rider observed.
"What the hell IS that thing?!" one of Bane's men screamed, ejecting his empty magazine and fumbling for a fresh one.
"It's the thing from the news," another man whispered, his voice cracking. "The one that killed the Joker. Oh God, oh fuck, oh—"
"CORRECT." The Ghost Rider took a step forward, and the temperature in the room spiked noticeably. "I KILLED THE CLOWN. AND NOW..." Those empty eye sockets swept across the room, taking in the bound hostages, the armed thugs, the green-skinned woman, the massive masked figure. "...I FIND MORE ENTERTAINMENT."
"Shoot it again!" Ivy shrieked, her composure cracking as her precious plants wilted and blackened in the creature's proximity. "Use explosives! Use ANYTHING!"
"That will not be necessary," Bane said, his voice calm, controlled, utterly confident. He stepped forward, adjusting the dial on his venom harness, feeling the familiar surge of chemical power flooding his system. His muscles swelled, veins bulging, bones creaking as he expanded to his full enhanced size. "I have broken the Bat. I have broken countless warriors, countless champions, countless would-be heroes. Whatever you are, creature... you are merely another obstacle to be BROKEN."
The Ghost Rider tilted its flaming skull, a gesture that somehow conveyed absolute contempt.
"YOU THINK SO?"
"I KNOW so." Bane cracked his neck, rolled his shoulders, and charged.
He was fast. Enhanced by venom, he could cover thirty feet in less than two seconds, his footsteps cracking the marble floor with every impact. He was strong. His fists could punch through concrete, bend steel, shatter bone with contemptuous ease. He was experienced. Decades of combat had honed his technique to perfection.
He threw a punch that could have killed an elephant.
The Ghost Rider caught it.
The impact shockwave shattered the display cases within a twenty-foot radius. The bound hostages screamed through their gags. Even Bane's own men staggered back from the force of it.
But the Ghost Rider didn't move.
Not an inch.
One skeletal hand, wreathed in hellfire, had simply risen and intercepted Bane's fist mid-strike. The flames licked at Bane's glove, singing the leather, raising blisters on the skin beneath, but the creature's grip was absolutely, impossibly immovable.
Bane tried to pull back. He couldn't.
He tried to strike with his other hand. The Ghost Rider caught that too.
For a long moment, they stood frozen, the massive masked man straining against the skeletal figure, muscles bulging, venom pumping, every ounce of his chemically-enhanced strength being brought to bear against an opponent who showed no more strain than a mountain would show against a gentle breeze.
"IS THIS IT?" the Ghost Rider asked, and there was something almost like disappointment in its voice. "THIS IS YOUR STRENGTH? THE POWER THAT 'BROKE THE BAT'?"
"I... will... CRUSH you...!" Bane snarled, adjusting his venom flow to maximum, feeling his heart race dangerously fast, his veins standing out like cables under his skin.
"NO." The Ghost Rider's grip tightened. Bones creaked. Bane screamed. "YOU WILL NOT."
With a casual motion, the Ghost Rider twisted Bane's arms—both of them—and THREW him.
Not just shoved. Not just pushed. THREW, like a baseball, like a toy, like he weighed nothing at all.
Bane flew.
He flew through the air, his massive body rotating end over end, and hit the museum's prized Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton with enough force to disintegrate six million years of paleontological history into a cloud of bone fragments and shattered dreams. The dinosaur collapsed, taking Bane with it, and when the dust settled, the man who had broken the Bat was lying in a crater of his own making, his mask cracked, his venom tubes severed, his arms bent at angles that human arms were not designed to bend at.
He tried to rise. His body refused.
"I... am... Bane..." he whispered, more to himself than anyone else. "I am... supreme..."
"YOU ARE A JUNKIE," the Ghost Rider corrected, turning away from him with dismissive finality, "IN A WRESTLING MASK. YOUR STRENGTH IS CHEMICAL. TEMPORARY. ARTIFICIAL. MINE..." The flames around its skull flared brighter. "...IS ETERNAL."
Bane had no response. For the first time in his life, he had encountered something that made his strength look like a child's tantrum. He lay in the ruins of the dinosaur, staring at the ceiling, and tried to remember what it felt like to believe he was invincible.
He couldn't.
Meanwhile, Poison Ivy was having what could charitably be described as a very bad time.
The moment Bane went down, she had sprung into action, commanding her plants to attack the Ghost Rider with everything she had. Vines erupted from every planter, every pot, every crack in the floor where she had seeded spores earlier in the evening. They lashed out with thorns and tendrils and toxic sap, a botanical assault that had overwhelmed armed soldiers, choked out superheroes, and brought entire buildings crumbling down.
They caught fire approximately three inches from the Ghost Rider's body.
"No!" Ivy screamed, feeling her children burn, their psychic death-cries echoing in her mind. "NO! STOP! YOU'RE HURTING THEM!"
"THEY ARE PLANTS," the Ghost Rider observed, walking through the inferno of burning vegetation without apparent concern. "THEY DO NOT FEEL. NOT TRULY. BUT YOU DO. YOU FEEL EVERYTHING THEY FEEL, DON'T YOU? EVERY LEAF THAT WITHERS. EVERY ROOT THAT CHARS. EVERY FLOWER THAT DIES."
Ivy fell to her knees, clutching her head, tears streaming down her green cheeks as her connection to the Green transmitted nothing but agony. "Please... please stop..."
"YOUR LOVE FOR PLANTS IS ADMIRABLE." The Ghost Rider stopped in front of her, looking down with those empty, burning eyes. "YOUR HATRED FOR HUMANS IS NOT. YOU USE YOUR GIFT TO MURDER, TO MANIPULATE, TO TWIST NATURE INTO A WEAPON AGAINST THE SPECIES THAT GAVE YOU BIRTH. THE GREEN WEEPS FOR YOUR PERVERSION OF ITS PURPOSE."
"I'm PROTECTING them!" Ivy screamed, defiant even in her agony. "Humans are a PLAGUE! They destroy everything they touch! I'm the only one who—"
"WHO KILLS HUMANS WITH PLANTS INSTEAD OF POLLUTION?" The Ghost Rider's voice was dry as kindling. "HOW RIGHTEOUS. HOW PURE. HOW UTTERLY HYPOCRITICAL."
Ivy opened her mouth to argue, and the Ghost Rider leaned in close, close enough that the heat made her verdant skin blister.
"RUN, IVY. RUN AND TELL THE OTHERS. TELL THEM THE RIDER HAS COME TO GOTHAM. TELL THEM THEIR SINS WILL FIND THEM. AND TELL THEM..." The flames flickered, almost playfully. "...TO WATER THEIR GARDENS WHILE THEY STILL CAN."
Ivy ran.
She didn't look back.
Which left Catwoman.
Selina Kyle had not survived as long as she had by being stupid. The moment she saw what the Ghost Rider did to Bane—BANE, the man who had broken the goddamn BATMAN—she had begun quietly and professionally making her way toward the nearest exit. Not running, exactly. Running attracted attention. Just... relocating. Strategically. Toward an environment more conducive to her continued existence.
She had almost made it to the emergency door when a chain, burning with hellfire, wrapped around her ankle.
"Oh, COME ON!" Selina snarled, her claws extending automatically, slashing at the chain. The metal didn't even scratch. "I wasn't even doing anything! I was just here for the diamond!"
"THIEVERY," the Ghost Rider rumbled, reeling her in like a fish on a line. "PETTY, IN THE GRAND SCHEME. YOU STEAL FROM THE RICH, THE POWERFUL, THE CORRUPT. YOUR SINS ARE VENIAL, NOT MORTAL."
"Great! Wonderful! So we're good, right?" Selina smiled her most charming smile, the one that had gotten her out of police custody seventeen times and into Bruce Wayne's bed more times than she cared to count. "I'll just be going, then—"
"NOT YET."
The chain pulled tighter, and Selina found herself face-to-face with the burning skull, close enough to feel the heat scorching her whiskers, close enough to see the flames dancing in those empty sockets.
"YOU KNOW BATMAN."
It wasn't a question.
Selina's smile faltered. "I... we've crossed paths. Professionally. And... otherwise."
"GIVE HIM A MESSAGE." The Ghost Rider's voice dropped to something almost intimate, a crackling whisper that seemed to bypass her ears and go directly into her brain. "TELL HIM THAT HIS CODE BLINDS HIM TO THE SUFFERING IT CAUSES. TELL HIM THAT MERCY WITHOUT JUSTICE IS CRUELTY WEARING A MASK. AND TELL HIM..." The flames flared. "...THAT THE NEXT TIME HE INTERFERES WITH MY WORK, I WILL SHOW HIM EXACTLY WHAT HIS MERCY HAS COST. EVERY. SINGLE. VICTIM."
The chain released. Selina stumbled, caught herself, and looked up to find the Ghost Rider already walking away, toward the motorcycle that had somehow parked itself inside the museum without anyone noticing.
"Wait!" she called out, because apparently her survival instincts had decided to take the night off. "Who ARE you? What do you WANT?"
The Ghost Rider paused, turning its skull just enough to look at her over one shoulder.
"I AM VENGEANCE. I WANT JUSTICE. AND I AM VERY, VERY GOOD AT MY JOB."
The motorcycle roared to life, hellfire spreading across its frame, and the Ghost Rider mounted it in a single fluid motion. For a moment, the two of them were frozen there—the cat burglar in her sleek black suit, the burning skeleton on its impossible bike—and then the Rider was GONE, exploding through the museum's front doors in a shower of splinters and flame, leaving behind a trail of fire that slowly faded into the night.
Selina stood in the wreckage for a long moment, her mind racing, her heart pounding.
Then she pulled out her phone and dialed a number she had memorized years ago.
"Bruce? It's Selina. We need to talk. Now."
MARCUS CHEN'S APARTMENT - 3:17 AM
Marcus became human again in the alley behind his building, the flames receding into his skin like water draining from a bathtub, leaving him feeling hollowed out and exhausted and deeply, profoundly satisfied.
He had not used the Penance Stare on Bane or Ivy or Catwoman. They were sinners, yes, but their current crimes—while serious—had not crossed the threshold that demanded ultimate judgment. A good beating, a serious scare, and a clear message about the new order of things in Gotham was sufficient.
For now.
The Spirit of Vengeance purred contentedly in his chest, satisfied with the night's work. It had fed on fear, on the acknowledgment of its power, on the small flames of conscience it had ignited in even the blackest hearts. It could wait for more substantial meals.
Marcus climbed the fire escape to his window—unlocked, because he had stopped bothering with locks after the third time he came home too exhausted to remember his keys—and collapsed onto his bed without bothering to undress.
His phone buzzed. A news notification.
"BREAKING: Ghost Rider Strikes Again - Bane Hospitalized, Ivy and Catwoman Flee Scene - Museum Devastation Estimated in Millions"
Marcus turned off his phone and stared at the ceiling.
He should feel bad about the museum. That T-Rex had been a piece of history. Irreplaceable.
But honestly? He was too tired to care.
Tomorrow, he would go to work. He would enter data. He would be boring, unremarkable Marcus Chen, the guy who kept to himself and never made waves.
And tomorrow night...
Well.
Tomorrow night, Gotham would learn that the Ghost Rider wasn't a one-time occurrence. He wasn't a fluke, a random act of cosmic violence. He was a new constant in the city's equation of crime and punishment.
And he was just getting started.
ARKHAM ASYLUM - SAME TIME
In her cell, connected to monitoring equipment that tracked her every breath and heartbeat, Harley Quinn smiled in her sedative-induced sleep.
She was dreaming of fire.
Beautiful, beautiful fire.
And somewhere in the dream, a flaming skull turned to look at her, and she could have sworn—could have SWORN—that it winked.
"Bone Daddy," she murmured, shifting in her restraints. "I'm gonna be SO good for you. Just wait and see."
The monitoring equipment recorded a spike in dopamine levels.
The night shift nurse made a note: "Patient displaying signs of positive emotional affect. Possible breakthrough?"
She couldn't have been more wrong.
END OF CHAPTER TWO