The coffee hit the monitor screen and ran down in brown rivulets.
Ethan's head bounced off the van's ceiling. He was already grabbing the edge of the console to steady himself before the pain registered — eyes locked on the feed, four camera angles, all of them showing the same thing.
He moved fast, Ethan thought, with the cold clarity of someone whose adrenaline had just reordered his priorities. Way too fast.
He'd made an error. Not a small one.
The whole plan had been built on a structural assumption: that Bane operated like a boss encounter — patient, territorial, waiting for the hero to finish his preparation arc before stepping forward to deliver the climactic confrontation. That was the Knightfall template. Exhaust Batman through the Arkham breakout, let months of grinding attrition do the work, then move in for the kill when he's already broken.
But that plan had been designed around Bruce Wayne — a Batman whose compulsive need to protect every civilian in Gotham made him a reliable participant in every crisis Bane manufactured. Bruce couldn't ignore a hostage situation. Bruce couldn't let the Joker rob a bank without showing up. The Exhaustion Gambit worked because it was impossible for Batman to opt out of it.
Ethan had opted out of all of it.
He'd been ignoring Gotham's revolving disaster roster for days, redirecting resources instead of deploying himself, and apparently that change had been visible enough to register.
Because Bane was smart. That was the part people forgot, or overlooked because the physical presence was so overwhelming. The man had spent years in a pit studying everyone who passed through it. He'd orchestrated the Arkham breakout as a strategic instrument. He didn't win through strength alone — he won because he read his opponents accurately and then built a plan around what he saw.
He'd looked at the changed Batman, and the contractors appearing in Gotham, and the absence of the expected behavior pattern — and he'd concluded, correctly, that whatever was happening needed to be removed before it complicated anything further.
Simplest solution wins. That was Bane's operating principle. Not elegant, not theatrical. Just direct, total, and immediate.
I should have seen this coming, Ethan thought, watching the feed.
He picked up the microphone.
Across the city, a bank alarm was ringing.
People poured out of the entrance in a disorganized stream, and behind them came the Joker and his crew, loaded down with bags, moving at a leisurely pace that suggested nobody expected meaningful interference. The Joker stepped through the doors into the open air, spread his arms, tilted his face toward the empty street, and laughed.
"Come on, Bat! Party time!"
Silence.
A light rain.
Not a car in sight. Not a police radio crackling somewhere in the dark. Nothing.
A piece of litter tumbled down the street on a gust of wind and plastered itself against the Joker's face. He peeled it off. It was a campaign flyer: CAST YOUR SACRED VOTE FOR MAYOR KROL.
He stared at it for a long moment.
Then something shifted in his expression — the specific shift of a man who has just had an idea he finds genuinely interesting.
"...Hey. Hey. I just thought of something." He turned to his crew. "Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha—"
Back in the van, Ethan was already talking.
"Hold position. You don't need to win — you need to not die. Keep moving, keep distance, make him work for every inch."
"Easy for you to say—"
Deadshot's voice had lost nothing of its professional control, but the sweat on his forehead was visible through the lens of the fixed camera. His four gun barrels — two submachine guns in his hands, two more mounted on his forearm rigs — were cycling through coordinated arcs, overlapping fields of fire that should have been physically impassable.
Should have been.
Bane moved through them anyway.
Not through speed alone — through something harder to counter, a combination of timing and trajectory reading that processed the fire patterns and found the seams between them in real time. He flowed through the gaps the way water finds channels, unhurried, continuous, each movement arriving exactly where the coverage wasn't.
Deadshot had never aimed at something he didn't hit. He'd built his entire professional identity around that fact.
He was hitting Bane. He just wasn't stopping him.
He reached back and came up with the anti-tank launcher — desperate, too close, wrong engagement range—
"SCREW IT—"
The round went wide. Bane was already inside the minimum safe distance, already close enough that the launcher was a liability rather than a weapon. Deadshot dropped it without ceremony.
"HELP—"
The word came out before he could swallow it. Floyd Lawton did not ask for help. That was a foundational personal policy. The fact that it had just escaped his mouth told him something useful about the current situation.
Metal rang against skin.
Cheshire had closed the distance — not the cautious, measured approach of someone choosing their moment, but a flat sprint with everything committed to it, blades already moving. The first strike opened a line across Bane's shoulder deep enough to matter against anyone else. Against Bane on full Venom, it parted the surface and stopped.
He turned toward her with the expression of a man mildly inconvenienced.
One hand, open palm, swinging through the cross-guard of her blades. The steel folded. Not bent — folded, the metal sheering along stress lines it wasn't designed to have. The same motion continued through and connected with her center mass, and Jade Nguyen — who was fast enough to have dodged bullets on three separate documented occasions — left the ground.
She hit the half-collapsed wall of an adjacent structure and went through it. The wall settled around the point of impact.
Silence from that corner.
"Pull back," Deadshot said, more to himself than anyone. "We pull back now—"
"If the floor were blades," the Tattooed Man observed, from a position slightly behind and to the left of all of this, watching with his arms loosely crossed, "she'd already be dead."
"SHUT YOUR MOUTH."
"I'm just saying the geometry—"
"SLIPKNOT, NOW."
Slipknot was already moving.
He passed Deadshot at a run, one hand trailing loops of rope that were already spinning into deployment patterns. His name was not a boast — he was genuinely exceptional at this, and the fifteen lines that left his hands in the next two seconds fanned out in interlocking arcs that closed around Bane from seven different angles simultaneously, the geometry designed to make any single escape route create tension in three others.
"Ha." He pulled the lines taut and felt them bite. Bane was caught — actually caught, for a real half-second. Slipknot grinned, the expression of a craftsman whose work has just done exactly what it was built to do. "Other end of the skill gap, big man. How's the view from—"
"DON'T," Deadshot said.
Slipknot had already opened his mouth.
The ropes went taut. Then they didn't. Bane's hands found two separate anchor lines and the whole system inverted — the trap becoming a handle, the geometry reversing, Slipknot's own rigging now functioning as the mechanism by which he was yanked off his feet and into close range. He crossed the distance between them involuntarily, moving too fast to get his arms up.
Bane caught him.
The things that happened next took about four seconds and were not reversible.
Slipknot, the tactical part of Ethan's brain noted distantly, watching through the feed, confused physical skill with physical capability. He thought if he could catch Bane in the ropes, the ropes would hold. He forgot that Bane had already shredded the ropes once, at range, without particular effort.
The reminder cost Slipknot everything he had.
"Wow," the Tattooed Man said. "Actually dead. Called it."
Deadshot turned and looked at him with an expression that could have stripped paint.
"He's gone." Ethan's voice came through the earpiece, clipped and direct. "Don't process it. Take Croc and go — now, Deadshot, now."
"I know," Deadshot said, with the tone of someone who would be having a much longer internal reaction to this later, in private, and was currently storing it somewhere watertight. "I know."
He turned.
Killer Croc had gotten up again.
Both arms broken — one clearly, one probably — scales cracked across his torso from Bane's earlier barrage, moving with the asymmetric lurch of something that had sustained damage it hadn't finished accounting for. None of that had reached his eyes. His eyes were a color they hadn't been before: not the usual cold reptilian yellow-green, but red — completely, uniformly red, iris and sclera both saturated, the color of something that had passed through pain and come out the other side of it somewhere uncharted.
His face had changed. Subtly, structurally — the jaw extended a degree further, the brow ridge dropping, the proportions sliding fractionally away from human and toward something older.
He screamed Bane's name.
He charged.
He moved fast — faster than he had earlier, which had been fast enough to register as a genuine threat. Whatever the rage state was doing to his physiology, it was doing more than just removing his inhibitions.
Bane caught the charge by the forearm. He didn't step back, didn't absorb the impact or redirect it — he just stopped it, the way a wall stops a thrown object, and then reversed the motion in a single clean extension that folded the arm in a direction arms don't fold.
Croc screamed. Real sound — not the battle-cry from before but the involuntary, undignified kind.
"BANE—"
He did not stop. Broken arm and all, he came back.
Bane took hold of the ankle.
What followed was utilitarian. Bane didn't appear to be angry, or satisfied, or particularly engaged — he was solving a problem, and the solution was to remove the variable. He swung Croc in a downward arc and drove him into the asphalt. Once. The concrete fractured. Twice. Croc's limbs stopped organizing themselves into anything purposeful. Three times. Four.
"Insect," Bane said. Flat, declarative, the same register you'd use to identify a street sign.
The Venom lines pulsed. He reached for the adjustment on his mask — the manual regulator, the input dial — and turned it up. The compound surged through the tubes, viscous and luminescent, and the muscle tissue beneath his skin expanded visibly in response, filling in geometry that hadn't been there a moment before. He gained three inches of height in roughly four seconds.
Deadshot raised both guns. His jaw was set.
"Grab Croc and pull back," Ethan said again, through the earpiece.
"I heard you." Deadshot exhaled hard. "Tattooed Man — get Croc. Move. I'll cover."
He fired.
Not a careful shot, not a target selection — everything, all four barrels simultaneously, maximum rate, the kind of output that reduced structural steel to components. He watched the rounds land on Bane's chest in a tight cluster and detonate against the surface there with white-hot percussion, smoke rising from the impact points in thin pale threads.
When the smoke cleared, the damage was a shallow depression in the skin, edges pink, a slow seep of blood beneath.
Floyd Lawton stared.
"What," he said, "the hell."
He'd hit harder targets. He'd put rounds through vehicle armor and bunker walls and, on one memorable occasion, a reinforced safe door. He had never, in his professional career, shot a human being and produced those results.
That is not a human being, some accurate part of his brain noted. That is a problem with a face.
He was already backing up. Tactical retreat, not a rout — hands still tracking, eyes still on the target, every step deliberate. Tattooed Man had gotten Croc's arm over his shoulders and was hauling him toward the lot's edge with the motivated speed of a man who had successfully recalibrated his threat assessment.
And then the Tattooed Man stepped in front of them.
He turned to face Bane. He cracked his knuckles.
"Alright," he said, with the cheerful confidence of a man who had been waiting for this moment. "You lot have had your fun. Step aside. Tattooed Man handles this."
Deadshot's expression did something complicated.