Batman caught the hesitation immediately. He had no idea what was giving them pause—he simply assumed that villains everywhere operated the same way: backstabbing each other, pulling the rug out from under their own allies. Gotham's criminals did it. Apparently, so did Apokolips.
Good news for him. Banking on the fact that magic wasn't dealing significant damage, he went all-in on DeSaad, then seized the opening to rocket toward the tracker's coordinates—toward Damian.
"Get back here!" Steppenwolf whipped out a chain, lassoing Batman's ankle and hauling him backward.
At the same time, curiosity flickered. The intruder wasn't heading for the palace. He wasn't targeting the wounded New Gods. He was flying toward the civilian quarters. Steppenwolf suspected there was an angle here he wasn't seeing, and he urgently pinged DeSaad on the psionic channel.
"What's in that direction? What's he after?"
DeSaad was equally clueless. He'd only just entered the fight—he knew even less about the situation than Steppenwolf.
Were people really just showing up to Apokolips for fun now?
The two gods puzzled over it but came up empty. The one person who actually knew the full story—Kalibak—had been knocked unconscious thirty seconds ago. All they could do was fight Batman in the dark.
They weren't trying to kill him. Containment counted as a win. Both fought more cautiously.
Batman analyzed the situation coolly and realized he needed to break the stalemate. If they kept chasing him, finding Damian wouldn't matter—he'd never get out.
Steppenwolf had eons of combat experience under his belt. "Formidable" was an understatement. True, Thea had beaten him like a stray dog, but that was an overwhelming difference in raw power. On equal footing, Steppenwolf could claim near-invincibility without exaggeration.
Arrogant as Batman was, he didn't think he could take Steppenwolf in a straight fight.
Which made DeSaad the key to breaking the stalemate.
A magic-focused god wasn't necessarily helpless in melee—at higher tiers, everyone dabbled in everything. Thea could brawl; Diana could cast spells. Naturally, DeSaad had close-combat skills too.
At the moment, DeSaad was wielding a dagger, weaving it in rapid patterns as he and Steppenwolf pressed Batman from both sides.
In DeSaad's mind, Batman was nothing more than impressive armor wrapped around a mortal. Two New Gods teaming up against something like that felt almost beneath them. A trace of complacency crept into his fighting.
"His armor definitely has a time limit. No ordinary person can sustain energy output at this level."
The reasoning was straightforward. He shared his assessment with Steppenwolf on the psionic channel, and the warrior agreed wholeheartedly. If any random mortal could strap on a suit and go toe-to-toe with gods for a hundred rounds, the title of New God wouldn't be worth much.
Run out the clock. Let the enemy self-destruct. They could practically see it already—Batman howling in agony, collapsing into a pile of desiccated bones.
DeSaad hurled an explosive fireball at the armor. To his shock, it passed through as if striking empty air, sailing off into the distance. The Batman standing before him wavered like a reflection in water, distorted, and vanished.
"A mirror image?!" DeSaad had studied enough science to recognize that this wasn't magic—it was an ingenious piece of optical technology.
Realizing he'd been singled out as the primary target, he uttered a single word. Dark flames erupted around him, wrapping him in a cocoon of black fire.
Before he could feel relieved, his peripheral vision caught a massive fist closing in from the left at terrifying speed.
DeSaad had fought Martian Manhunter on the New Continent. Batman had reviewed that battle footage dozens of times.
There was no magic bullet for taking down a sorcerer-god. But Batman—a man who slept one hour out of every twenty-four—had brute-forced his way to a solution through sheer obsessive analysis.
From minor conjurers to mages to archmages to divine-tier casters like Thea, Batman had fed their combat data into supercomputers, running simulations, building models, testing inferences.
He understood nothing about mana flow or spell architecture. That didn't stop him from observing from the outside.
Rhythm. Every spellcaster had a fixed rhythm. Disrupt it, and they needed time to recalibrate.
And DeSaad's rhythm was the one Batman had studied most.
He'd prepared multiple countermeasures for exactly this moment. Seeing DeSaad take the bait, he ignored the dark flames entirely and drove his fist into the god's left cheek.
DeSaad went spinning. Before he could recover, Batman—propelled by the Speed Force, driven by death-energy—spread his wings and was already on him, burying another fist into his exposed abdomen.
Left, right, left, right. Batman attacked in a frenzy. DeSaad attempted a teleport, but a supersonic burst disrupted the spell. The violent backlash combined with his internal injuries forced a mouthful of golden blood from his lips.
Steppenwolf chased desperately, but speed had never been his strength—it was the main reason he'd tolerated Zoom's existence back on Earth-2. Batman's burst speed matched Zoom's, and even at full effort, Steppenwolf couldn't close the gap.
All he could do was listen to his old comrade DeSaad scream.
A sharp crack echoed. After the sustained assault, Batman decided the god's anatomy was close enough to human. A driving knee shattered DeSaad's spine, followed by two brutal strikes to the back of the skull. Confirming that DeSaad was out cold, Batman didn't spare Steppenwolf a single glance—he banked hard and rocketed in the opposite direction.
One blitz, one enemy down. The cost: a large section of his armor had been scorched black. Corrosive magical energy was seeping through the plating every second. Power output had climbed from its safe threshold of 50% to 65%, the surplus diverted entirely to repelling the arcane intrusion.
Steppenwolf no longer dared underestimate this mortal. The man was vicious—toward his enemies and toward himself in equal measure. Barking orders for his subordinates to tend to DeSaad, he launched himself in pursuit—though his speed was, frankly, embarrassing.
"Damian!" The tracker showed his son just ahead. Batman kicked the door in.
Inside, two figures—one adult, one child—stared at him with blank expressions.
His son Damian was holding a book, mid-page-turn. The woman named Circe had her hands raised, fingers dancing, pulling threads of dark energy from thin air and weaving them into some kind of pattern.
Even without expertise, it was obvious they'd been in the middle of a lesson. Batman was certain of that much.
"You've got a death wish!" Circe saw a hulking black figure crash through her door and assumed Apokolips was trying to intimidate her. Without a second thought, she flung a shadow bolt.
Against an ordinary Batman, that spell would have been an instant kill. But this was Batman in the Hellbat. He'd tanked DeSaad's agony spells head-on—Circe's attack felt like a gentle breeze.
The shadow bolt's trajectory played out in slow motion. The armor's systems assessed the energy signature as weaker than DeSaad's sorcery. He chose to simply punch through it.
Damian was seeing the Hellbat armor in action for the first time. He hadn't expected the birthday present he'd helped arrange to be this powerful. For a moment, he could only stare.
Circe watched her spell shatter under a casual backhand. Her brows shot up, and with a flick of her left wrist, she launched a shimmering, multicolored orb.