bacchusnovels Chapter 520 I'll tell you with silence that I won't turn my back.
Chapter 520 I'll tell you with silence that I won't turn my back.
Chapter 520 I use silence to tell you, I will not turn back.
Boom!
A loud bang.
Night Owl felt as if he were bound to a chair. It was pitch black all around, with a light shining down on him like a spotlight on a stage.
He opened his eyes and saw Joker sitting calmly in front of him, dressed as a police officer interrogating a prisoner. Night Owl looked down and realized he was wearing a prison uniform; his armor and mask had disappeared at some point.
Night Owl felt a little out of place. He had been wearing the Night Owl mask for a long time. He was very busy, working day and night, no less so than Batman.
Even when he sleeps, he wears a mask in front of his Owl computer, and when he wakes up, he continues working. He has too many things to worry about, and all of these things are happening simultaneously. Sometimes the mask is like his mask, and sometimes it is like his face; he has long been inseparable from the name Night Owl.
He did so much for his universe; his love for his world was far deeper than Batman's; he made far more detailed preparations than Batman; he worked far harder and made far more sacrifices than Batman.
Therefore, he is the one who should win, and his world is the one where survival is deserved.
Night Owl knew perfectly well that this idea was completely wrong. He was equating effort with success. He should have known that long ago, he already knew…
In this world, hard work doesn't always guarantee a reward, and unwavering devotion never yields a response. The idea that hard work guarantees success is just a lie to fool children.
But occasionally, quietly, a timid glimmer of hope would creep into his mind: that by doing everything in his power, he could somehow increase his chances of survival in this world by even a tiny bit. That way, at least everything he did wouldn't be meaningless, would it?
"What's wrong?"
He heard the Joker say that.
"Nothing you want to explain?"
Night Owl closed his eyes and turned his head away. Even in this state, he remained as aloof as a female elf.
Night Owl tried to break free from the straps on the chair. He knew that the scene before him was not real, but a hallucination caused by the Joker virus attacking his central nervous system. And the Joker in front of him was not real either—the Joker was long dead, killed by his own hands. They were tearing each other apart as they fell from Wayne Tower into Gotham, the city that gave them birth, the city they both loved, their wicked mother.
On that day, only one of the Gotham Twins remained. Night Owl killed the Joker, and in doing so, he also killed... a part of himself.
The Joker in front of him was merely a personification of his memories of the Joker in his mind.
He had no interest in talking to his collection of memories of the Joker—he was trying to focus, ignore the Joker's ramblings, and figure out how to wake himself up.
Given a brief moment of lucidity, he could choose from the 132 antidotes he had prepared for the Joker's viruses and drugs to best alleviate his current symptoms and inject them into his body, and then figure out how to concoct the antidote.
He struggled and strained, then imagined himself falling. The sensation of falling could wake a person from a dream; he had been trained in this.
Then he found himself standing in the shadows, not far away, with his Dick Grayson, his Claws, his family, their hands bound, hanging from the ceiling.
A beam of light shone like a spotlight on Joker and Dick, hiding Night Owl in the shadows.
The owl wanted to move, but it couldn't move at all.
"Wake up... wake up," he heard the Joker say to Dick.
"What? You thought I was going to hurt you? Why? Here? Oh, I'm not a bad person, no no no no no."
He said, "I'm a good person. At least I used to be. The real bad person is the night owl, and he abandoned you like a dog he didn't like."
No, I didn't.
Night Owl wanted to curse, but he couldn't utter a single word. He knew it was all just an illusion. He closed his eyes, trying to break free, but when he opened them again, the same scene was still before him.
"Oh, can I take care of him, Dad? Oh, please, please, I'll take good care of him..." The Joker was acting out a madcap drama in front of Claws, just as Night Owl remembered, then his voice turned low: "As long as you're happy, my princess, but make sure people know he belongs to you."
Then he snapped his fingers at the claws hanging from the ceiling, and Dick Grayson fell helplessly to the ground, while the Joker raised his crowbar and slammed it down on his head.
Boom!
The sound seemed to strike the heart of the night owl.
The Joker's voice, masquerading as the father, rang out: "We don't want him to end up running back here, right?"
Then he switched back to his little girl voice: "No, we don't want that, Daddy. I want to have him forever."
He kicked Claw Dick, sending him sprawling into the shadows, followed by the man's scream and the sound of a crowbar shattering bones: "I... used to... be a good guy! But now the game's over. I'm too tired. There's no more game. Thomas... killed... my Harley. Let it all end."
One, two, three blows—the screams of Claw Nightwing mingled with the Joker's laughter that sounded like a mix of madness and weeping. Night Owl could no longer close his eyes.
"Enough!" he roared. "You pale, insane lunatic! What the hell do you want???"
He found that he could move again, and he ran desperately into the darkness, only to find that there was no one around him, as if he were shouting in the wilderness.
Then, when he came to his senses, he found himself sitting in the interrogation chair again.
He saw the Joker sitting opposite him, slowly placing a King of Spades card in front of him.
Then another card, Xiao Wang, was added.
"You murdered Harley Quinn. An innocent girl." He heard the Joker say, "I want you to understand that my murder of [Claw] Dick Grayson wasn't just revenge. Your act of killing an innocent person made me realize that you've completely become a monster who doesn't value human life. I can no longer stop you. Therefore..."
(Note: This Dark Multiverse is different from Earth-3 in the main universe. In Earth-3, Harley Quinn is a monkey, but in this Dark Multiverse, Harley Quinn is the Joker's lover.)
He heard the Joker say, "I'm determined to break my no-kill rule and pay for Claws' lives."
He said, "You know very well that it wasn't you who caught me. It was that I was determined to die by your hand. Heh heh heh."
Night Owl felt he had a thousand words to say, and he felt like a volcano about to erupt, but his mouth was glued shut and he couldn't open it at all.
"...Dick is innocent."
"Dick is utterly wicked for following your orders; Harley is innocent, and you know that yourself!"
"I had no choice! If I didn't do that, Superman and his criminal syndicate wouldn't accept me. They would think I was weak and try to take over Gotham. Superman is too powerful then. Once he takes over Gotham, he will completely replicate everything he did in Metropolis. Gotham will be awash in blood!"
"And at that time, you also knew very well that Thunder Zamza was eyeing us covetously, and Super Queen's attitude was ambiguous. I had to tell them that I had a ruthless heart just like them in order to fit in with them and protect my city!"
"If I hadn't teamed up with Superpower back then, Gotham City would have been destroyed by Thunder Zamza! I had to do it! I had to get close to Superpower before I could counter him. Back then, everything about Superpower was unknown to me!"
"Damn it, you have no idea what I've sacrificed for my city!"
Night Owl unleashed a torrent of profanities, spewing forth a torrent of vulgarities from his cold-faced mouth, before concluding with the final line: "Everything I did was to protect my Gotham, my city!!! I had no choice!!!"
"So you sacrificed Harley Quinn without any scruples. Because her boyfriend was the Joker, and you couldn't catch the Joker, but you could take your anger out on innocent people, right? You executed about 2000 people who opposed you, and that day was a bloodbath, with the stench of rotting corpses permeating every alleyway of Gotham."
He heard the Joker say something that sounded exactly like Night Owl's tone, something he had never heard before.
The Joker remained expressionless, then his voice became a double-layered mix, and his appearance gradually changed. The Joker's purple hair gradually blurred and disappeared, then transformed into two pointy ears, followed by his iconic owl glasses.
The Joker transformed into Night Owl's own likeness, and Night Owl could still hear the other's voice echoing:
"Harley Quinn's death directly led the Joker to consider ending his own life to admonish me."
"No! Shut up!" Night Owl shouted, but the other party didn't stop at all.
"So he killed Dick, and then deliberately died at my hands."
"No, I beg you... please stop talking."
"So all of this is a consequence of my choice to sacrifice an innocent person. I crossed and violated my bottom line, just this once, and then I suffered terrible consequences."
"Actually... the person who personally killed Dick Grayson..."
"Please stop talking..."
"...It was Thomas Wayne himself."
The owl stood still.
Tears streamed down his lips from beneath his mask, bitter and salty.
"Think about it, Thomas," he heard the Joker say. "You killed your parents, and you're determined to change Gotham City and save it from their clutches."
"You were once full of vigor, you once thought you could change everything. Then you started growing scales, fangs, and claws."
"As you killed the innocent for the first time, you grew dragon horns and a dragon tail. You gave up and eventually became a dragon... the very thing you once swore to defeat."
"You associate with people like Superpower, SuperQueen, Deathstorm, and Johnny Quick. By your standards, each of them should be a prisoner, either sent to jail or killed outright. But you turn a blind eye to what they did. From then on, you stopped killing criminals altogether. You started recruiting criminals, and you made them work for you. Ha, how is that any different from your parents?"
"I made them ban crime throughout the city. I made them help me maintain a high-pressure rule over the entire city in order to eradicate crime completely! I'm different from my parents; they were..."
The owl was yelling, but the other party completely ignored his sophistry.
"But you still have a chance to change all of this. You have a chance to correct your mistakes," Night Owl heard the Joker say.
"Stop now, old friend. Stop sacrificing others to save yourself."
"The corruption of an upright person is as harmful as poisoning a public well," Night Owl heard the Joker say. "You can take your world and stand with Batman against the Anti-Monitor. You can defeat him."
"Superman Supreme, Black Death Emperor, those trump cards you've prepared that you might use in the event of a battle against the Anti-Monitor..."
"Why didn't you ever consider the possibility of fighting alongside Batman?"
"You will regain your past glory and become a truly good person again."
The owl saw the owl who had transformed into him remove his mask and then his armor, turning into a boy of about fifteen or sixteen.
The owl knew the child.
The child's name is Thomas Wayne Jr.
At the age of 15, he murdered his mob parents. He vowed never to abandon anyone again, to save Gotham City from its turmoil, and to reshape the world into the way he wanted it to be.
He was only 15 years old at the time, and countless people were willing to follow him. They were willing to die for him, and even if they were captured by his gangster parents and had every last bone in their bodies broken, not one of them would betray him.
Those were bygone years, as pure as gold, as dazzling as diamonds.
Gone forever, never to return.
The owl saw the child reach out his hand to him.
It was a child's hand, stained with the blood of sin, yet perfectly clean, like the clear evening sky after the rainy season in Gotham City.
The owl slowly reached out its hand.
It was an adult's hand, stained with an unknown amount of sticky blood, utterly filthy.
His hand made a grasping motion in the air, as if he really wanted to grab that small hand, but in the end... he withdrew it.
"What's wrong?"
He heard his younger self ask him in a voice he hadn't heard in many years, "Why?"
The owl didn't speak; he closed his eyes and remained silent.
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself back in reality, and the effects of the Joker virus on him had already...
Completely disappeared.
At least for now.
He turned to look at the group of cosmic overlords who had been almost crippled by the draining of their power, and at the Batman universe that was almost right in front of him on the monitoring screen.
The merging of the two universes is inevitable, the outcome is already decided, it's too late, the two universes are already too close, he personally orchestrated all of this during the time he was controlled by the Joker virus.
The two universes will eventually merge, but that doesn't mean that Night Owl will inevitably lose.
The Night Owl's armor created an anti-gravity field, carrying him out of the thrust tower where he was located.
As the owl looked down over Gotham City from high above, he imagined the feeling of the cold wind blowing against his face through his mask in the extremely oxygen-deprived environment. At that moment, even the most extreme romanticism in the world could not compare to a fraction of what he felt.
Wind, passing through the wilderness, slow your pace.
I will tell you with my silence...
I will not turn back!
(End of this chapter)