Schiller straightened his coat and headed out of the lab. Jena lowered her voice and asked, "So who is it?"
"An old adversary from years ago. He was already dead by the time you came to Gotham. Hugo Strange, the former director of Arkham Asylum."
"One of your defeated enemies?"
"More or less." Schiller shook his head. "He was the kind of person who only answered psychology questions on a psychology exam with psychology."
"...And you?"
"Back then, I was the supervillain Scarecrow."
The group drove to what had once been Gotham's central roundabout. Traffic had improved enormously here, but it was still the very heart of Gotham.
Victor set up the equipment at top speed. Before Brainiac had even finished assessing the situation, a plume of icy vapor shot into the sky. Strangely, no one felt cold; only a faint current of air swept past them. Then, a thin film spread through the air, gradually forming a hemispherical protective barrier over Gotham.
"That doesn't look like ice at all," Jena exclaimed. "It looks more like magic, like one of those shields from a cartoon."
"It wasn't ice to begin with," Nora explained. "Dense Ice's official name is actually the 'Stasis Atomic Energy Barrier.'"
"What?" Jena did not understand at first, but she knew those technical terms sounded far more advanced than ice. Her eyes widened as she asked.
"Victor invented Dense Ice more than a decade ago. With his level of technical skill, what do you think he could have turned it into after all these years?" Schiller asked.
"The original Dense Ice merely insulated heat in the broadest sense, meaning it blocked most heat exchange. It could barely still be called ice. But now, it is more like an atomic manipulation technique that brings the atoms in a