Batman's Warning: This Was No Ordinary Prison Break!

Dawn over Arkham Island was stained gray-red by thick smoke and the smell of blood.

Helicopters thudded overhead. GCPD patrol cars blocked the only bridge to the island. The piercing alarms had finally stopped, leaving behind the deathly silence that followed a disaster.

Commissioner James Gordon stood in Arkham Asylum's main control room, wearily rubbing his brow.

Broken monitors and charred wires littered the floor. Bullet holes and dried blood covered the walls. The acrid residue of tear gas hung in the air.

"How bad is it?" Gordon asked hoarsely. He had not slept in over twenty-four hours.

An officer approached with a report, his face grim.

"Commissioner, we have the preliminary figures. Thirty-seven guards and medical staff injured, twelve of them seriously. Nineteen inmates dead and more than fifty seriously injured. The security systems in sectors A, C, and D are almost completely destroyed. The cost... it's astronomical."

Gordon sighed and pulled a crumpled cigarette pack from his pocket, only to find it empty.

"What about the supercriminals? Joker, Scarecrow, Riddler... Are they all still here?" That was what mattered most to him.

As long as those ticking time bombs remained locked up, Gotham would not be destroyed tonight.

"They're all here." The officer's answer let Gordon breathe a little easier. "The worst of the riot wasn't in the high-security wing. Their cells held. But... two people are missing."

"Who?"

"Harley Quinn and... an Asian inmate named Link."

"Harley Quinn?" Gordon frowned. "She escaped on her own? Does she have the brains to plan a riot on this scale?"

"I'm afraid so. We found evidence of her at the docks. She stole a speedboat. As for Link... his file says he's an ordinary man with mild violent tendencies. He probably followed her out in the chaos," the officer speculated.

At that conclusion, half the weight on Gordon's chest finally lifted.

Harley Quinn was insane, but there was a limit to the damage she could do. As long as Joker remained locked up, she could not cause too much trouble.

It looked like an ordinary prison break: costly, but with consequences still under control.

Just then, cold air swept in through the doorway.

Everyone in the control room shivered instinctively.

A tall figure in black appeared silently at the door, as though the night itself had taken shape.

White lenses swept over the wrecked room, betraying no emotion.

"Batman." Gordon went to meet him, weariness deepening on his face. "You're here. You probably know what happened. A damned riot, and Harley Quinn slipped out during it."

Batman said nothing. He walked to a huge bank of monitors that was still working.

With a tactical-gloved hand, he tapped a few keys on the dusty console. The surviving surveillance clips began playing in fast-forward.

A fight in the cafeteria, a chase through the corridors, a bloody struggle in the wards...

Watching the chaos gave Gordon a headache.

Batman's gaze, however, fixed on a few inconspicuous corners.

He froze the footage.

"Gordon, look here," he said in a low, gravelly voice.

Gordon leaned in. The screen showed the high-security isolation ward in sector A one minute before the riot began.

Everything was calm.

Batman brought up footage from sectors C and B at the same moment.

They were just as calm.

Then he played all three clips at once.

At precisely 11:07:13 p.m., three unrelated violent inmates in three separate sectors began attacking their cell doors in the same second, as if they had received a signal.

Gordon's pupils contracted sharply.

"Is that... a coincidence?"

"There are no coincidences in Gotham." Batman's voice was cold as iron. "There were seven flashpoints, not one. They erupted at the same time across different sectors, drawing away the first wave of guards with precision and setting off a chain collapse of the defenses."

He pulled up another clip.

On-screen, the lights in sector D went out. Countless cell doors sprang open at once, and inmates poured out.

"The power system was deliberately shorted. It was professional work, not brute-force sabotage. Whoever did it disabled the electronic locks in sectors D, E, and F while leaving the main circuits to Joker's and Scarecrow's cells untouched."

Batman traced a finger across the screen. A red route appeared, starting at sector D's power substation, passing through dark corridors, avoiding the guards' usual routes, and ending at the medical wing.

"Harley Quinn couldn't have done this. She likes creating chaos with hammers and bombs, not this kind of... surgical precision."

Cold sweat broke out across Gordon's back.

He finally realized he had been wrong.

This was no ordinary prison break.

It was a meticulously planned, flawlessly executed military operation.

"Then who was it? Penguin? Two-Face? Neither of them has a reason to go to this much trouble for Harley Quinn."

Batman said nothing. He returned to the Batcave.

Streams of data cascaded down the Batcomputer's enormous screen.

He fed Arkham's floor plans, security protocols, guard shift schedules, and the inferred escape route into the system.

The system ran billions of simulations.

Minutes later, a conclusion appeared in the center of the screen:

[Escape route success rate: 97.8%]

[Requirements: S-class psychological profiling, A-class knowledge of mechanisms and traps, and real-time control of emotions throughout the asylum.]

[Recommended operative: None.]

Batman stared at the word "None" for a long time.

Scarecrow, Riddler, and some form of Mind Control he had never encountered...

A frightening possibility took shape in his mind.

He opened the files on the two missing inmates.

Harley Quinn's file was extensive.

But the other one...

Link.

His file contained only a blurry intake photo and a brief entry: incarcerated for fighting, mild violent tendencies. Family background, social ties, history... all blank.

He was like a ghost who had appeared out of nowhere in Gotham.

Batman stared hard at the unremarkable face on the screen.

A nobody had planned and carried out the most efficient prison break in Arkham's history, and he had taken only Harley Quinn with him.

Why her?

Was it a show of force aimed at Joker? Or did he see something in her?

Questions circled endlessly through Batman's mind.

He knew a new shark had entered Gotham's murky waters.

One he knew nothing about, dangerous precisely because he was unknown.

"Alfred," Batman said into his communicator.

"Yes, sir."

"Add a new target, codename 'Ghost,' to the Alpha-level threat list. Priority second only to Joker."

"His name is Link."