CRASH.
The sound of shattering glass jerked Mario awake. He opened his eyes to find the Joker staring at him through the broken panel, one leg already through the opening in his glass prison.
"Going somewhere?"
The clown had been thinking all night, apparently. Whether that made him more dangerous or just more desperate remained to be seen.
Dawn had broken over Gotham. The storm clouds from the previous night had cleared, revealing a beautiful sky.
After his night of thinking, the Joker no longer wore that bitter, hate-filled expression. When he heard Mario's question, he simply stared back.
"You should kill me. Because if you don't, I will find your weakness."
Mario stood. He walked over to the Joker's cage, close enough to see the madness still lurking behind those eyes.
"No, I won't kill you."
He had a gut feeling that this was the real Joker standing before him, not some body double or sacrificial pawn. Even if he killed him now, the Joker would just resurrect using the Dionysian Factor running through his blood.
The Joker returned Mario's stare. Then he turned and climbed fully through the broken glass panel, walking away without looking back.
Mario watched him go for a few steps before calling out. "Stop."
The Joker's footsteps faltered for just a moment, but he kept walking toward the building's exit. Whatever Mario intended to do, he clearly didn't care. His mind had narrowed to a single purpose: kill Mario, or be killed by Mario. Nothing else mattered.
Mario opened his inventory and pulled out a shulker box he kept for miscellaneous items. Inside were things he rarely used, like decorative blocks, spare tools, and the lead rope he now retrieved. He quickly closed the distance to the Joker, lead rope in hand. With a mental command, one end of the rope materialized around the clown's neck.
He had used lead ropes before, but only on animals. Never on a person. The Joker seemed oblivious to the new addition, continuing his march toward freedom.
Then he hit the invisible wall.
At exactly ten meters from Mario, an irresistible force yanked him backward. He stumbled, caught completely off-guard by the sudden resistance. He spun around and spotted the rope extending from Mario's hand to his own neck.
He felt an overwhelming force grab him from behind, dragging him back across the debris-strewn floor straight toward Mario. He reached up, trying to tear away the rope, but his hands passed straight through it like it was made of light.
Mario dragged his captive back to the central plaza of the abandoned building, ignoring the Joker's increasingly frantic attempts to remove the rope. He pulled out wooden planks, crafted two fence posts, and planted them firmly in the concrete. Then he tied the lead rope to the fence and dusted off his hands.
The rope's effective length shortened from ten meters to five as it connected to the fence. The Joker continued struggling. But Minecraft mechanics didn't care about willpower. The rope held.
He stopped struggling and fixed Mario. But Mario didn't care. He didn't even stop laughing as he looked the clown dead in the eye.
"I need time to figure out a solution for you. Until then, you stay here."
"You really think you can keep me here forever?"
Mario didn't answer.
The Joker's expression shifted. What he needed was to find a way out, then kill this man. Having reached that conclusion, he ignored the thick dust and grime covering the floor and simply sat down. His eyes went hollow, as if his soul had left his body.
Mario pulled out blast-proof glass and began constructing a proper containment cell around the clown. Unless the Joker decided to kill himself right now, he doubted he could break through over a meter of reinforced glass with his bare hands.
Satisfied with his prisoner secured, he headed up to the roof of the abandoned building. He placed a waystone in the center of the rooftop.
On the way, he pulled Batman's corpse from his inventory and laid it out on the concrete.
"Wonder what kind of reaction this guy will have when he wakes up."
Mario positioned himself theatrically, raising one hand toward the sky. "Rise, my Dark Knight!"
Holy light descended from above, bathing Batman's body in golden radiance. Time seemed to flow backward as the shattered skull began reassembling itself piece by piece. Bone fragments flew back into place, tissue regenerated, and finally skin sealed over the reformed head.
"Ugh..."
Batman sat up abruptly, one hand clutching his head. His mind was a confused mess.
"How you feeling?"
At the sound of Mario's voice, he executed a combat roll and came up throwing. Two Batarangs flew toward where Mario stood.
Mario caught both projectiles and tossed them into his inventory. "Calm down, Mr. Wayne."
Batman froze. His cowl had been destroyed in the shooting, leaving his face fully visible. The fact that Mario knew his identity wasn't surprising at this point, but hearing it spoken aloud still sent a chill down his spine.
He sorted through his memories, trying to make sense of what had happened. The feeling of that bullet drilling into his skull was not a dream or a hallucination.
Staring at Mario, his expression became incredibly complex. "That was real."
He had confidence in his willpower. He couldn't be fooled by illusions so easily. Which left only one possibility, an impossibility he was struggling to accept.
Looking at Bruce's pale face, Mario couldn't suppress a slight smile. Resurrection was resurrection, but there was no way to restore the destroyed cowl, leaving the Dark Knight's identity fully exposed.
"You'll understand soon enough."
Mario found another clear space and pulled out Gordon and Barbara's corpses, laying them side by side. He raised his wand, and holy light burst forth once again.
This time, he didn't shout any dramatic declarations. He simply murmured softly, "Resurrection."
It felt wrong to say nothing during a resurrection, but the earlier proclamation had been embarrassingly over-the-top. This quiet acknowledgment felt more appropriate.
At the points where their bodies had been severed, the missing halves rapidly regenerated. Flesh, bone, and organs reformed in seconds.
Gordon woke first. His mind took a moment to catch up, processing fragmented memories until he recalled the moment of being shot. His chest, which should have had a gaping hole, was intact.
"Barbara..."
He pushed himself up, searching for his daughter. Finding her beside him, alive and unharmed, he let out a shuddering breath of relief.
He held Barbara in his arms and looked up at Mario. "What is going on?"
"Uh..." Mario said. "Gordon... your pants. I don't think your daughter would appreciate you being half-naked."
Mario's timing was impeccable. The moment he finished speaking, Barbara's eyes opened, and immediately focused on her father crouching beside her, completely bare-assed from the waist down.
Her brain short-circuited for a moment. That was an image that would require therapy to process.
Gordon's reaction was lightning-fast. He immediately turned away, then shot meaningful looks at both Batman and Mario. The message was clear: One of you better have spare clothes.
Mario pulled a set of clothes from his inventory. He only kept one spare outfit, his current clothes were self-cleaning and indestructible thanks to Minecraft logic, so he rarely needed backups. He'd only bought this set on a whim during a recent shopping trip.
He tossed the clothes to Gordon. The commissioner immediately passed them to Barbara without hesitation, then turned his gaze toward Batman.
Bruce stared back. "You can take the pants off your own corpse."
He pointed at the severed lower half of Gordon's body lying several meters away. Gordon followed the gesture, recognizing his own legs, shoes, and pants. His brain struggled to process the surreal image of his disembodied lower half just sitting there.
His ability to handle weirdness was clearly inferior to Batman's. He stood frozen, staring at his former legs. He pulled his gaze away and looked at Mario, who had turned to face away while Barbara got dressed.
"The memories in my head are not hallucinations, are they?"
"They are real."
Mario pulled out the anti-materiel sniper rifle.
Seeing the weapon, Gordon's mind was stuck on a single thought: he had died and come back to life. Which meant Mario possessed the ability to resurrect the dead.
Batman felt the same existential dread. Knowing that Mario could bring people back from death made all his previous investigations and contingency plans completely meaningless. Life and death, the ultimate limitation on human behavior, meant nothing to someone with resurrection power.
In his mental threat assessment, Mario's danger level had just jumped to the maximum. Someone who could reverse death was beyond anything he'd encountered before.
With an incredibly complicated expression, Gordon stripped the blood-stained pants off his disembodied lower half. It was a weird experience, he even took a curious glance to confirm it really was his own body.
"Are you a god?"
Other than divinity, he couldn't think of any explanation for this kind of power.
"Nah." Mario waved dismissively and spoke with complete honesty. "I'm just a vampire hunter."
Gordon's expression froze, but he didn't argue. He didn't want to believe it, but what choice did he have? He silently pulled on the salvaged pants.
"Where's the Joker?"
He looked around curiously, not seeing the clown anywhere. Had Mario already eliminated him?
Mario walked to the edge of the rooftop and looked down. In the small plaza below, the Joker sat quietly inside the blast-proof glass enclosure.
"He's down there. Right now he doesn't know I can bring people back. At the moment, he's having trouble accepting that I killed the Batman he values so much."
He shot a glance at Bruce.
Batman stared back. Why are you looking at me? I didn't do anything.
By this time, Barbara had finished dressing in Mario's spare clothes and had pieced together the general situation. She wasn't particularly bothered by the fact that she'd been briefly naked in front of three men. She simply moved away from Gordon, putting some distance between herself and her well-meaning but overprotective father.
Looking at what used to be her lower body lying on the ground several meters away, she raised her hand. "Hey, guys. Could one of you help me take care of my... former legs? Even though I've got new ones now, they were with me for a while. Seems wrong to just leave them lying around."
Though phrased as a question, her gaze remained fixed on Mario. She had a strong intuition that he had a solution.
"Don't worry, let me handle it."
Mario pulled a bucket of lava from his inventory and walked over, dumping both Barbara's and Gordon's severed lower halves into the molten rock. With a sharp hiss, they instantly turned into puffs of white smoke and vanished.
Batman stared at the lava, which bubbled and popped.
"That's lava. But that's wrong. As far as I know, volcanic lava typically ranges from 700 to 1,200 degrees Celsius. There's no way it could produce this kind of instant vaporization effect."
He frowned, questioning whether his education had been somehow flawed.
"It is lava," Mario confirmed. "It's similar to volcanic magma, but not quite the same thing."
Ordinary people would have simply marveled at how hot the lava was, like Gordon and Barbara, who'd been surprised their bodies dissolved so quickly. But Batman's nature demanded explanations. Once he started voicing his confusion, Gordon and Barbara both realized there was something deeply strange about what they'd just witnessed.
Mario appreciated smart people. They asked good questions, especially when confronted with things that challenged their understanding of reality.
"I need you to buy this building. I want to establish a base here."
"A base? For what?"
"For what?" Mario thought for a few seconds. "I want to form an alliance. What do you think of the name 'Justice League'? We could recruit people with a sense of justice to join."
When Batman heard the name, something resonated within him. It felt right somehow, though there was also a strange sensation, like something that should have been his had been taken.
"I'll contact people and purchase this building. But what about the Joker?"
He walked to the edge of the rooftop and looked down at the imprisoned clown. This time, he didn't lecture Mario about the sanctity of life or the importance of not killing.
"I'm keeping him alive. But I think there are other Jokers out there besides this one."
Mario pulled out a waystone and placed it on the rooftop.
"Wait here for a moment. I need to find a few people and completely resolve the Joker situation."