Today, I Was Determined to Be This Dog!

Strictly speaking, describing it as becoming a dog was still an exaggeration.

As far as Chen Tao's proposal was concerned, Parallax Hal had, at most, obtained an incarnation that Chen Tao could restrain in the lower reaches of the Over-Time Stream.

Was he completely under Barbatos's control, just like the Anti-Monitor Dragon? No.

He was merely channeling his own power through a weapon.

If the Batman Dragon could provide him with something other than a Crowbar—say, a puppet made of metal, or a powerful physical body like the mortal Mobius that Barbatos had provided to the Anti-Monitor—then Hal should have been able to act on his own.

But because the weapon could not attack people automatically, he needed the Batman Dragon to wield it.

The Batman Dragon was essentially an on-demand substitute fighter. The request sounded somewhat insulting, but in reality... it seemed acceptable.

Parallax Hal was still confronting Barbatos and the others, but this confrontation seemed to have already lost its meaning.

Although the portal that had extended the chains was still there, everyone knew that Hal no longer had any chance of passing through it. Thus, Batman's suggestion really did seem to be Hal's only option at present.

If he could not truly bring his physical body to the lower reaches, then retreating to the next best option, like the Anti-Monitor Dragon, did not seem entirely unacceptable.

However...

"You'd already thought of this, hadn't you?" Hal said quietly.

Chen Tao had just been about to brush off the question when he suddenly shivered.

He did not answer immediately. Instead, he carefully considered Hal's thoughts before changing the subject.

"At least I've never sabotaged you. I've done everything I could to pull you down here. This is merely a backup plan forced upon us by desperation."

That was the