Watching Lashina slit her own throat cleanly and decisively, Helen, Harley, and Wanda in Harley's mind spoke in unison.
"Big Trouble..."
Batman had indeed received an epic upgrade this time, but it had gone horribly wrong. None of the skill points had gone into the scientific inventions and detective deductions he originally excelled at, nor into any normal use of magical energy. This juvenile bat, not yet Batman, seemed to have sprinted off in an unknown direction, never to return.
Suddenly, Little Bruce looked up at Helen.
The instant she saw Little Bruce's blue eyes, Helen found herself on a vast icy plain. A distant flute echoed behind a gigantic figure.
Helen instantly took a deep breath and regained consciousness, but she knew the real Big Trouble had only just begun, because Little Bruce had started floating.
Surging dark energy like ocean tides lifted him up. Beneath Little Bruce's feet, the floor had become a swamp of darkness. More and more tentacles made of dark energy crawled out from under him, segments of cryptic script winding around them. The Lowly beside him merely glanced at those patterns before screaming, tearing off his own face with his hands and gouging out his eyeballs.
Batman did not kill people. They simply died from their greatest inner fears.
Little Bruce stood silently among countless tentacles with his head lowered. More and more dark energy corroded through the ceiling above and the floor below, and half the starport hall was packed with black tentacles covered in cryptic script.
"What is that?!!" The guards on the lower level cried out as they backed away, scrambling toward the communications room. They wanted to contact more guards as quickly as possible, but the black tentacles were like roots proliferating amid endless nutrients, invading every passageway almost instantly.