Cheshire and Killer Croc were both alive.
Ethan felt a surge of something that started as disappointment and immediately corrected itself into relief, which was the appropriate response and the one he was going with.
He and Wesker pulled all three survivors out of the debris — Deadshot first, then Croc, then Cheshire, who had somehow maintained her mask through the entire encounter with the structural integrity of someone who had decided the mask was non-negotiable regardless of circumstances.
A notification materialized before he'd finished:
[ Killer Croc's Shattered Scale]
[ Description: A scale lost during a beating of exceptional brutality, after which Croc watched his enemy flee without further engagement. The scale carries the particular quality of a pride that has been broken and is deciding what to do next. Can be used to summon a parallel universe Batman.]
[ Note: An entity summoned through non-human trauma — would it be anything resembling a person?]
[ "Bane ran. He just ran. There are people who can survive without fighting? I've been doing this the hard way my entire life for what?"]
[ Crisis Energy Units Converted: 50]
[ Total Crisis Energy Units: 60]
[ WARNING — Targetable Batman file downloading.]
[ Bat-Rex]
[ Threat Classification: E]
[ Earth-27 is a world of dinosaurs. No Justice League. Only the Jurassic League. Every hero and every villain: a dinosaur.]
[ Consume 20 Crisis Energy Units to synchronize now?]
Ethan looked at this for a moment.
I could become a dinosaur, he thought.
No, he decided, and put it aside.
He got an arm under Deadshot's shoulders and pulled him upright. The man winced — ribs, internal something, the specific controlled expression of a professional cataloguing damage without showing it.
"Am I going to Arkham?" Deadshot asked.
His voice was flat. Not a joke, not quite — the question of a man who had survived the night and was now taking inventory of what came next.
"No."
Croc was already sitting up on his own, moving with the sluggish deliberateness of a body that had taken more than it wanted to and was operating on reserves. He blinked. Looked at the rubble around him. Looked at his broken arm.
"I'm hungry," he said, to no one in particular. "You got anything to eat? My arm's broken."
His eyes traveled upward, found the figure standing in front of him, and the whole sequence of recognition — that's Batman, standing very close to me, I should probably do something about that — crossed his face in slow motion. He made an attempt to get up. Got halfway. Subsided.
He did not have the reserves for a threat response. He lay back down.
Cheshire had already located her feet. She stood, assessed the lot, and started for the far wall at an efficient limping pace that she'd apparently decided constituted a getaway.
Ethan caught the back of her hood and redirected her with a tap to the back of the head — firm, practiced, the sixteenth time he'd done something like this in the last forty-eight hours and noticeably smoother than the first.
She went down. He set her down properly.
He was getting better at this. He wasn't sure how he felt about that.
Alright. He straightened up, looked at the lot — three injured contractors, one elderly hostage coordinator, three body-shaped sections of rubble that had stopped being contractors — and allowed himself one breath of something that felt like forward motion.
Load them up. Get out of Gotham's sight. Regroup. The plan is behind schedule but still operable. Bane retreated, which means he's still running the Exhaustion model even if he's adapted it. He needs more data before he'll commit. I have—
He stopped.
He was still thinking.
That was the problem: he was still thinking. And the thought that had arrived, quietly, while he was moving through the post-fight mechanics, was one that he recognized from a specific genre of story. The kind of story where the villain lets the heroes think they've won, and then—
Does Bane just walk away?
He stood completely still.
In the comics — yes, eventually, eventually he walked away. But that was a different Batman, operating on a different timeline, who had just demonstrated real capability. Tonight, what Bane saw was a bluff. A performance. He's smart enough to suspect it. And someone that smart, who suspects a bluff, who wants information—
Would test it.
Ethan's face went the specific color of someone who has correctly predicted an unpleasant thing and has just confirmed the prediction.
He turned around.
The corner of the lot.
The shadows between two gutted vehicles.
The figure that stepped out of them was not hurrying. It never hurried. It had been watching, with the patience that a man develops when a pit is the first thing he ever knows, and it had seen what it came back to see.
"Bane—"
The word ran through all of them simultaneously — not Ethan's voice, not any one person's voice, just the shared sound of a group of people whose bodies had decided something before their minds finished the sentence.
Deadshot reached for ammunition with a shoulder that would rather he hadn't. Wesker disappeared behind him with the speed of a man for whom self-preservation was a fully developed instinct. Croc stopped lying down, which was the most his body had available.
He pulled himself upright and stood beside Ethan — not strategically, not from training, but from something simpler and older: the instinct of a creature that has been hurt and is choosing, despite everything, to stand next to the strongest thing in its vicinity.
He said, with genuine wonder:
"I never thought I'd live to say this. Standing next to Batman." A pause. "Fighting with Batman." Another pause. "I used to watch the people he protected. Wondered what that felt like." He looked at the approaching figure. "Now I know."
Nobody had time to engage with this.
Ethan rose to his full height.
The movement was nothing — just standing, the basic act of a person deciding to be upright. But something about the way he did it made the air in the lot feel different, the way pressure changes before weather. Deadshot, who had spent his career in the business of reading rooms, felt something shift in his chest that was not quite fear and was not quite the opposite.
Bane stopped.
Not because he'd reached his chosen range. Because his body had filed an objection that the Venom had not overridden.
He stood in the open, in the cold pre-dawn light, and looked at the figure across the lot from him. The Venom lines pulsed. The compound did what it always did — amplified, enhanced, pushed every physical parameter past its natural ceiling. And the thing standing across from him looked back without adjusting.
The silence stretched.
"I knew you before I ever left the pit," Bane said.
His voice, filtered through the mask's respirator, had a quality of deliberateness — each word placed, not spoken. The voice of a man who grew up with nothing and learned that every word costs something.
"I knew you in dreams. I knew you as the thing I was climbing toward — the obstacle, the wall, the final proof. I broke out of that hell for one purpose: to find you. To end you. To take what was yours." He looked at the lot, at the wreckage, at the people standing behind the figure across from him. "And instead I find you here, hiding. Letting madmen exhaust themselves against the city while you watch from a distance. Waiting for me to come to you, like a man who doesn't trust his own hands."
"That's one reading," Ethan said. The voice was level — no heat, no performance, just the measured cadence of a man who has already decided the outcome of this conversation. "Here's another: I let the Arkham parade burn itself out because none of them were worth my time. I hired contractors because watching amateurs fight each other is efficient intelligence gathering." He tilted his head slightly. "And I came here tonight because you moved too early. Which tells me you're nervous."
Bane's chest expanded.
"I saw you in the shadows earlier," he said. "Watching. Not moving. I thought: a wounded man, hiding his injury. Now I think something else."
"What do you think?"
"I think you are not what you were." The words landed carefully, each one a test. "I think something has changed inside the bat. And I think you are wondering whether I can see it."
The Venom surged. It always surged when the moment demanded it — when the body needed to become adequate to the stakes.
"You made those men fight for you," Bane said. "You watched from far away. You came only when they were broken." His eyes narrowed behind the mask. "The Batman I dreamed about did not do that."
"The Batman you dreamed about," Ethan said, "is standing in front of you."
A long silence.
Bane's jaw worked behind the respirator.
The creature is good, something in him admitted, against his will. It is very, very good. But good is not the same as real.
He watched for the crack. The flinch. The micro-expression that couldn't be controlled, the involuntary tell that no actor could fully suppress when real danger was present and the distance was closing.
He took one step forward.
Ethan did not move.
Is he real, Bane thought, or is he performing real?
The answer mattered. If this was performance, Bane would end it here, tonight, and the years of planning would resolve into something clean and final. If it was real—
Then he was standing in front of the Batman he had prepared to face, without the exhaustion advantage, without the broken spine already delivered, without the months of careful setup that the original plan had required.
And I am not ready for that.
He took the step back.
"I will give you this night," Bane said, with the controlled dignity of a man choosing retreat rather than suffering it. "Recover your wounded. Bury your dead." He turned. "We will finish this conversation when the terms are more suitable."
"Before you go," Ethan said.
Bane paused.
"You said you came here to take what was mine." Ethan's voice carried something in it that hadn't been there a moment ago — not louder, not harder, just more settled, the way a key sounds different the moment it finds the right lock. "Gotham isn't yours to take. It never will be."
Bane did not turn back.
He walked into the dark.
The lot was quiet for a long moment.
Then Ethan turned back to the group, looked at the injured contractors, looked at Wesker, looked at the two trucks still sitting there full of money, and thought through the next several steps with the focused efficiency of someone who needed to be several miles from here before dawn finished arriving.
He got one arm under Deadshot. Hoisted Cheshire across the other shoulder. Picked up Croc with a third arm that he'd improvised from the Bat-Wraith transformation — a single tire-radius extension, enough to grip — and tucked Wesker under his actual arm.
Then he put his feet together.
And became a vehicle.
The transformation took four seconds. The resulting shape was low, fast, and distinctly unusual-looking — the Bat-Wraith's chassis adapted to Gotham's streets, all four contractors distributed across the interior in the approximate arrangement of people who had not consented to being transported this way but lacked the physical capacity to object.
The engine turned over.
He was gone.
Behind him, in the empty lot, the arc lights were dead and the money trucks sat quietly and the debris field was still.
Bane stood at the far edge of the lot, in the shadow of the wall, and watched the vehicle disappear.
He stood there for some time.
What, he thought, was that.