Red Hood once said of Bruce, "He was a little too trendy." At this moment, Schiller understood that remark on a profound level.
But somehow, Schiller accepted that incredibly cool Divine Artifact shredder. And somehow, Bruce got the hundred-odd fragments Schiller had sent the KGB to collect.
And somehow, God fled in disarray from the theater in Schiller's Mind Palace. And somehow, the shredder appeared in the office at Gotham University. Finally, somehow, Victor and Anna both used up all their annual leave and fled Gotham in disarray, never appearing in the Gotham University office again for the next month.
Before Bruce left, Schiller asked him a question. "Why did you want to gather all the Eclipse fragments?"
Bruce merely hugged the box of fragments, smiled, and said, "I told you. The essence of manipulation is love."
After returning to Wayne Manor, Bruce took all the fragments to the Batcave in the outskirts. But he did not hurry to put them together. Instead, he used magical materials he had prepared long ago to begin drawing a Magic Circle on the floor.
Yet after the Magic Circle was complete, he did not pour any power into it. Instead, he began tinkering with the fragments again.
The fragments of the Heart of Darkness possessed an instinctive attraction to one another. Bruce barely needed to assemble them deliberately. He simply piled them together, and the many similar-looking Black Diamonds began changing into different shapes before gradually fitting together.
But because Bruce had covered the entire room in Magic Circles, no matter how the Black Diamonds assembled themselves, they remained within the circles' range. When the final core fragment flew out and embedded itself in the center of the Black Diamonds, completing the Heart of Darkness, a world-shaking power erupted.
Endless rage surged from