Batman had no idea how his son had survived in this environment. There was almost no oxygen here.
Frantic, he activated the detection array—and the results brought a surge of relief. Damian's life signs were still active, and he didn't appear to be seriously wounded.
He silently issued a command to the armor. Life force drained from his body, converting into energy to power flight mode.
A pair of bat-wings spanning a full sixteen feet (~5 meters) unfurled behind him. Light and shadow flickered as he swept across the sky like a great silent bird.
Many Apokoliptian civilians sensed something pass overhead, but no matter how hard they looked, they couldn't spot a thing.
"Robin, respond if you read me."
"Damian, I'm here. Answer me!"
Static crackled through the comm. Nothing but dead air.
Batman felt a fire ignite in his chest. "Damn it!"
He cursed through gritted teeth—half out of worry for his son, half because the armor was genuinely agonizing. Every second felt like being pricked by a thousand needles.
Below, Parademons were herding slaves toward the mouth of a volcano—the so-called appeasement of Apokolips's "wrath." To Batman, it was nothing but the slaughter of innocents for sport.
He couldn't hold back any longer. With a sharp rush of displaced air, he broke stealth, seized two Parademons by the throat—one in each hand—and slammed their skulls together.
Then, moving at blistering speed, he shattered bones and snapped tendons across a dozen grunts.
He held to his no-kill rule—even for Parademons, he wouldn't deliver a killing blow. But that didn't mean he'd let them keep brutalizing prisoners. Those dozen foot soldiers would likely spend the rest of their days bedridden—assuming Apokolips offered that kind of healthcare.
Once the fight started, he held nothing back. Batman needed the violence to vent the rage in his heart and the pain in his body.
Like a replay of a certain pretty young woman's visit a month prior, a road paved with broken bodies appeared once more on Apokolips. Batman had no intention of challenging Darkseid directly—he followed the tracker signal in a straight line, cutting through everything in his path.
Parademons weren't smart. Ruled by fear, they only understood that the dark figure was the enemy, and they threw themselves at him without hesitation.
The Hellbat armor combined the collective genius of the Justice League, driven by Thea's divine power of death. Ordinary grunts couldn't last a single exchange against Batman. The trail of groaning casualties rivaled the road of death from that earlier day.
When it became clear they couldn't stop him, someone flew to report to Apokolips's supreme military commander: Steppenwolf.
"What?! Another solo invader?!" Steppenwolf's eyes went wide. He was absolutely baffled.
This wasn't some revolutionary pilgrimage site—why did people keep showing up to tour the place one at a time?
"You're sure it's just one person?" he demanded.
The messenger swore up and down. One figure in black, unstoppable, like a demon crawled out of Hell itself. Even elite Parademons in formation couldn't bring him down.
With Thea's precedent fresh in his memory, Steppenwolf didn't dare withhold this one. He rose to report to the boss immediately.
His left foot crossed the threshold—then hesitated, and he stepped back. He wanted to see the footage before making a judgment call.
One look nearly made him cough blood. He backhanded the messenger off his feet and bellowed, "That's just a normal human! There isn't a shred of divine power on him!"
He'd almost broken into a cold sweat. If he'd called Darkseid only for the intruder to turn out to be a mere mortal, Steppenwolf's fate would have been extremely unpleasant.
Granted, this particular mortal looked incredibly dangerous. But Steppenwolf had a keen eye—he saw through the facade in an instant. The armor was impressive, yes, but the person inside was unquestionably human.
Wary of a ruse—someone playing weak to bait a response—Steppenwolf watched for another five careful minutes.
Final assessment: Batman was definitively human. Forget New God status—he wasn't even a demigod.
But the Hellbat armor gave Steppenwolf pause. He had no idea how it had been built, and he couldn't identify its power source.
He could tell the armor posed a genuine threat to him—especially since he wasn't at full strength.
He was Yuga Khan's brother. Darkseid's uncle. Getting dismantled by Thea was understandable—losing to the Goddess of Death carried no shame. But if a normal human also beat him, he'd never live it down.
Apokolips's famously warm fraternal bonds kicked in once more: he'd send someone else.
But when he reviewed his roster, the situation was bleak enough to make him weep.
Mantis—critically wounded, still unconscious. Kalibak—critically wounded, though Darkseid had forced him awake. How much fighting strength he had left was, frankly, a sad story. Kanto—defected, struck from the rolls. Doctor Bedlam—core damaged, off somewhere in seclusion trying to repair himself. Granny Goodness—dispatched by Darkseid to rebuild the Female Furies, not even on the planet. Virman Vundabar—a scientist, not a soldier. Sending a scientist to fight while he hid behind the lines? Even Steppenwolf drew the line there.
After counting on his fingers for a while, he realized that the only two on Apokolips still in one piece were himself and DeSaad.
But Steppenwolf was nothing if not cunning. He sent word to Kalibak, emphasizing that this invader was no god—just an ordinary human. A chance to redeem himself.
Kalibak had no idea his grand-uncle was setting him up. Hearing it was merely a mortal—and unable to fathom why a mortal would come to Apokolips—he grabbed his serrated greatsword and charged out.
The instant Batman spotted the lion-maned head, fury erupted. This was the one who'd taken his son. Rage boiled up from the depths of his heart, and something darker surged right behind it—a raw, violent impulse he didn't bother to suppress.
No words. He closed the distance and drove a fist straight into that massive skull—put the criminal down first, then extract the information. That had been Batman's standard operating procedure across twenty years in Gotham, and he wasn't about to change now.
What he hadn't expected was that the fearsome-looking Kalibak was, at this point, all show and no substance.
After Darkseid revived him, Kalibak had barely been clinging to life. His subsequent rampage of slaughter across the universe had restored a fraction of his divine power, but compared to his peak, he was laughably diminished.
Circe had been somewhat useful—she'd captured Heracles and, by ritually killing a lesser Old God, had accelerated Kalibak's recovery. Unfortunately, Heracles was no pushover. He'd seized an opening, badly wounded Kalibak in the process, and escaped.
All told, Kalibak had scraped together just over ten percent of his former strength—less than twenty percent.
Faced with the Hellbat's full-force blow, instinct took over. He defaulted to the only approach he knew: meet force with force.
The impact landed like a thunderclap. Dust and debris erupted outward, the shockwave hurling grunts in every direction. Batman stared, almost incredulous—the lion-headed brute had been launched over forty feet (~12 meters), blood pouring from his mouth, his body convulsing on the ground. Skin, muscle, bone—all visibly trembling, accompanied by fractures and ruptured blood vessels. He looked moments from death.