Gotham Might Have to Change Its Name From Now On

Gotham's underground had never been silent.

It was far from sunlight and the law.

It was the final destination for the city's metabolic refuse, and the habitat of countless forgotten things.

Rust-eaten pipes were like the blood vessels of some colossal beast, carrying industrial wastewater and the filth of daily life, while abandoned tunnels and air-raid shelters formed a maze-like space that also nourished the lives adapted to the dark.

Mountainous landfills released methane and eerie chemical fluorescence as they slowly rotted; and in certain deeper, older cracks in the rock strata, there even remained inexplicable pulses of energy left behind by the city's early occult experiments or supernatural incidents.

That was Gotham's origin.

Gotham's sewers were far more dangerous than the Hattori Nuclear Power Plant. This was a unique environment repeatedly soaked through by multiple forms of pollution, its ecology deformed and fragile.

And now.

Several mutated rats carrying "Ian-series extraordinary genes" were like a few strange stones tossed into this complicated pool of stagnant water, stirring up rings of hidden, far-reaching ripples.

After Ian's "bloodline purge" against his own kindred species, the underground abyss of Gotham had not returned to its former "normal" state either.

The few mutated rats that had escaped by sheer luck, after losing the protection and sensory network of their vast colony, were like birds startled by the mere twang of a bowstring. Yet precisely because of this upheaval, with the sudden disappearance of species pressure and the extreme drive of survival instinct, they underwent even more violent and unpredictable deformities.

Life always found its own way out in desperate straits, even if that way was twisted and dangerous.

So one of them, while fleeing the cleansing wave, had its back splashed by a stream of residual industrial wastewater mixed with lead and radioactive