Beneath Wayne Manor in Gotham City.
The Batcave was colder than usual.
Bruce Wayne sat alone before the enormous Batcomputer. Dense streams of data filled its screens, like cold iron chains binding the entire world.
Crime rate: 0%.
Unemployment rate: 0%.
Wars: 0.
Famines: 0.
The figures updated in real time across the globe, so perfect they were suffocating. Human society had never been so "healthy," or so deathly still.
Bruce picked up a cup of coffee that had long gone cold, but did not drink it. He only watched the figure broadcast simultaneously on every channel in the world, seated on the Throne in Wakanda: Link.
He was called the New God, the savior, the guardian of the universe.
But in Bruce's eyes, he was merely a more powerful, less predictable, and far more dangerous warden.
He had built a prison of unprecedented size, a cage called "happiness" that spanned the entire universe.
"Anti-Link Protocol... Version 17.0. Failed."
Bruce muttered to himself and deleted a complex folder from the screen. Kryptonite radiation, Magic suppression, spatial disruption... Every plan he could devise against Link's known abilities had been proven a joke during the battle at Kamar-Taj.
When a being could alter reality with a snap of his fingers, any resistance based on the laws of physics seemed laughably naive.
He had lost.
Utterly.
The moment Link snapped his fingers and resurrected the dead, erasing every wound, he had pulled the rug out from under every impulse to resist on Earth. Who would rebel against a god who could give them everything?
Worse, Bruce could feel part of himself being "healed" too.
The anger and obsession that had driven him to become Batman, burning ever since his parents fell in that alley, were being smoothed away by an invisible force. More