The shockwave knocked out windows for blocks, a blast so loud it seemed to chew through the city itself. Black smoke poured into the sky, curling like a fist ready to drop more punches. The tower stood in ruins now, its top half gone like someone had bitten it off and spat out chunks of steel and concrete onto the streets below. Sirens screamed almost instantly—why wouldn’t they? It was Arkham City; alarms here were practically on standby.
Batman clocked the scene from a rooftop a few blocks away, crouched low but set like someone ready to start punching. He took in the disorder—not just the smoking carcass of Blackgate Tower, but the panicked people below, scattering like spilled marbles. Cops were already swarming, cordoning off streets, barking orders no one would listen to.
The air was filled of burning metal and charred rubber. He could see flashes of fire still licking at what was left of the upper floors, bright orange against the deep black shroud of smoke wrapping around them. A hellish beacon for anyone with half a brain to realize: this wasn’t just an accident.
The Blackgate Tower wasn’t just some office block; this place was a fortress—a guarded sanctuary for lawyers who rubbed elbows with mobsters over drinks while laundering cash through shell companies that didn’t need names or signs. It wasn’t hard to connect dots: whoever blew it up wasn’t just looking for fireworks—they wanted heads. And judging by the power of that blast? Whoever did this had serious resources and an even bigger grudge.
Batman didn’t waste time. He launched himself from the rooftop, grappling hook hissing as it latched onto a skeletal fire escape a block closer to the blast.
The descent was fast, each ledge he cleared brought him closer to the street that was now a mess of screaming civilians, honking horns, and shouts from officers trying to restore order. No one noticed him—good. The Bat wasn’t there for hand-holding or crowd control.
Once on the ground, he moved fast. Direct route, no hesitation. The edges of his cape cut through the smoky air like blades as he approached the site. The smell hit him first—a cocktail of burning chemicals, scorched wiring, and something deeper, rawer, that reminded him too much of charred bodies. He ignored it—or buried it somewhere deep enough that it wouldn’t interfere. His focus narrowed to what mattered—Survivors.
Cops were already sweating in the fight to retain some kind of perimeter around Blackgate Tower’s shattered skeleton. Yellow tape flapped against barricades pushed back by curious onlookers and panicked rubberneckers with phones out like they were filming a blockbuster instead of a potential massacre site. Batman ignored them all, slipping past a cluster of uniforms who saw his silhouette but didn’t bother trying to stop him.
“Gordon,” he called out when he spotted him just outside the epicenter, barking at some poor patrolman gripping a radio like it owed him rent money.
Gordon turned, face half-lit by rotating reds and blues slicing through the haze.
“You’re here,” he said, voice raspier than usual either from yelling or that ever-present pack-a-day habit Batman had long since stopped commenting on.
“What do you have?” Batman asked.
“Not enough,” Gordon replied without missing a beat. He waved toward the rubble like there was supposed to be answers hiding there somewhere under all that smoking concrete and dismantled rebar. “Blast took out half the building—upper floors mostly—but we’ve got no idea who’s behind it yet or if anyone’s still alive up there.”
“They aren’t,” Batman said, scanning what little structure remained upright like he was looking for an entry point. “Any survivors?”
“Nothing yet,” Gordon admitted. “Rescue teams are on their way, but some of my guys tried to push in already. Didn’t get far. The whole thing’s like a damn maze—unstable, too. One wrong step and it’ll come down on everyone still inside.”
“Do you have any suspects on who did this?”
“No solid leads yet,” Gordon said, his voice edged with frustration. “Anonymous tip about a possible explosive device came in twenty minutes before the blast. By the time we scrambled units here, it was too late. Could be Joker, could be Two-Face, could be some lunatic trying to make a name for themselves—we just don’t know.”
Batman thought Gordon’s suggestion was nonsense. Most of his enemies were locked up tight in Arkham, doped to the gills or buried so deep in solitary they’d forget what daylight looked like.
Joker? He hadn’t heard so much as a whisper about him for months—not an unusual trick for the clown, but every intel line from Oracle to his own legwork said the guy was still rotting in his padded cell. Same with Harvey. Hell, even Hush was tucked away, and that freak loved blowing things up just to see his name in headlines.
The Court of Owls? That paranoid part of his mind wanted to throw them into the mix, but logic beat it back down. He’d dismantled their operations piece by piece. No masks in the shadows anymore—at least not that mattered. They weren’t sloppy enough to leave this kind of calling card anyway. The Court thrived on subtlety—the long con. This wasn’t their style; this was a megaphone-level shout from someone looking for attention.
But still… Joker? Some shmuck who slipped through Arkham’s revolving doors without anyone noticing? Maybe Gordon wasn’t completely off-base—maybe someone had crawled out of the woodwork with a manic grin and a score to settle. It wouldn’t be the first time some lunatic got lucky with TNT and bad intentions.
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What gnawed at Batman more than anything else, though, was how cleanly this had been pulled off. Whoever did it knew exactly where to hit Blackgate Tower to make it fold in on itself like a crushed soda can while leaving behind enough mayhem to keep law enforcement spinning their wheels for days—weeks if they were lucky not to miss something critical.
This wasn’t amateur hour. Joker loved chaos too much to pull off something this polished; he thrived on theatrical messiness, not analytic destruction. And if it wasn’t him, then who? Scarecrow liked his toxins, Riddler couldn’t resist signing everything with neon-green ink like a middle schooler tagging lockers, Penguin preferred blood over bombs—and none of them screamed “demolition expert.”
The fact that he didn’t have an answer only pissed him off more.
It wasn’t like he believed Arkham was airtight—he never did—but this didn’t feel like the usual rogue gallery antics. Which left only two options: someone new trying to make a name for themselves or someone old playing by new rules. Neither option made him feel any better as he stepped closer toward what used to be Blackgate Tower’s front entrance.
Whoever pulled this off wanted attention, and they were going to get it whether they liked it or not. Batman would make sure of that personally.
“I’m going in,” he said.
Gordon raised his eyebrow. “What? That’s—”
Batman didn’t wait for Gordon to finish. He was gone before the last words left the man’s mouth, grappling toward the skeletal remains of Blackgate Tower. The hook caught high on an exposed beam, and he shot into the air, slicing through smoke and ash. His cape fanned out before he reeled himself in, boots finding purchase on what used to be someone's corner office.
The sick irony wasn’t lost on him: a fortress designed to keep secrets buried now stood wide open, gutted like a fish.
The inside looked worse than he expected—not just destruction, but obliteration. Floors had collapsed onto one another like layers of a cake dropped from ten stories up. Desks were splintered into kindling, chairs fused to chunks of melted carpet and metal. A copy machine rested at a forty-five-degree angle, its chassis cracked open and spitting broken glass like teeth. Papers fluttered in the thick air, some burnt at the edges, most covered in soot and unrecognizable save for random letterheads smeared with ink stains.
The heat lingered even here; patches of fire still clung to whatever hadn’t already been consumed. He stepped over a protruding piece of rebar that jutted up like a spear, careful not to disturb it too much—it was holding up what little remained of the ceiling two floors above him. The groan of stressed metal trembled through the structure every few seconds—this place isn’t going to stand upright much longer.
Batman clicked his comm, the familiar static crackling in his ear. "Oracle, do you copy?"
"I'm here," Barbara's voice came through clear despite the interference from the building's remaining electrical systems. "Already scanning police frequencies and security footage from nearby buildings. No clear shots of anyone suspicious entering or leaving Blackgate before the blast."
"What about thermal readings?"
"Working on that now. Satellite coverage shows the blast originated from somewhere between the forty-fifth and forty-eighth floors. But Bruce..." She paused, and he could hear the rapid clicking of keys in the background. "Something's off. The building's security systems went dark exactly three minutes before the explosion. Not gradually—all at once. Someone knew exactly what they were doing."
"Send me the building's original blueprints. I need to know where the structural weak points were."
"Already on it. But there's more—I've been digging through Blackgate's client list. In the past month, three major law firms pulled their offices out of the building. No explanation given, just sudden lease terminations with penalty fees paid in full."
Batman moved deeper into the wreckage, stepping over a fallen support beam. "Names?"
"Sending them now. But here's the kicker—all three firms represented different crime families. The Falcones, Maronis, and the Russians. It's like they knew something was coming."
"Keep digging. I need everything you can find on those firms and their recent cases."
"Sure. Be careful in there. That building's about as stable as a house of cards in a hurricane."
"Just keep me posted," he replied, cutting the connection as he pressed deeper into the ruins.
He moved further in, looking every crevice for movement—anything that might indicate someone was still breathing under all this wreckage. Nothing. Just mangled furniture and shredded drywall. A steel filing cabinet lay on its side nearby, its drawers half-open and spilling charred legal documents onto the broken floor tiles. No sign of life.
A section of wall had collapsed ahead of him, exposing what used to be an elevator shaft. The cables dangled down into darkness below; the car itself was gone—probably part of that pile sitting somewhere on the street outside now. He paused long enough to listen for anything—a voice, even a cough—but all he heard was fire crackling and another distant groan from the building’s skeletal frame.
He pressed forward through what looked like it had once been a hallway but now felt more like an obstacle course. A busted conference table sat buried under concrete slabs painted with streaks of blackened dust. Still no bodies—alive or otherwise—which only made his jaw tighten further because it meant one thing: if anyone had been here when this happened, they were either incinerated or crushed beyond recognition.
The remains of what might’ve once been a stairwell came ahead—a uneven opening leading upward—but it looked more like a vertical death trap than anything remotely stable. Batman hesitated for only half a second before climbing over the wreckage toward it; his gauntlets gripped twisted railings and fractured steps as he hauled himself upward against the pull of gravity—and the building’s steady protests.
The rooftop—or what was left of it—gave him nothing but a better view of how bad things really were. Smoke poured out around him in slow spirals as embers drifted higher into the night sky like angry fireflies. From here he could see straight down where entire floors had pancaked together into indistinguishable rubble piles; nothing recognizable, let alone livable.
No survivors. None that mattered anyway.
He stood there for another moment, letting himself process—not the carnage in front of him but what it meant: someone wanted Blackgate Tower erased, not just damaged or inconvenienced but wiped off the map. This wasn’t collateral damage; this was something else, and its goal is to leave no witnesses.
Whoever did this didn’t care about bodies—they cared about results.
Nearby, a chunk of loose concrete fell away from an upper support beam and slammed down onto what remained of a desk below it with a crack loud enough to make anyone else flinch—but not him. Instead, he turned on his heel and fired off another grapple line without wasting another second; he’d seen all he needed to see.
Gordon would have questions when he got back down there—questions Batman probably wouldn’t answer until later, when he pieced together who could pull off something like this.
But right now? There were no answers up here—just ghosts trapped inside melted office equipment and scorched drywall threatening to collapse under its own weight any second now.
Time to move before those ghosts dragged him down with them.