While piloting the helicopter back toward Wayne Manor, Batman had already drafted an enormous procurement list in his mind for implementing his backup plan.
He needed to complete everything before Doomsday flattened Metropolis and Gotham alike—and before the Wayne family lost the ability to mobilize enough resources to support the effort.
Just as Bruce was deep in calculation, the helicopter's cabin door was suddenly pulled open from the outside mid-flight.
Joey flew directly into the cabin against the pressure of the spinning rotors, carrying Diana in his arms.
He gently laid the unconscious Amazon inside the helicopter.
Batman immediately noticed what Joey was holding in his other hand.
The Helmet of Fate.
Superman had succeeded.
"Prepare to kill the engine."
Before Bruce could even offer congratulations, Joey tossed out those words and immediately flew back out of the cabin once again.
As every warning alarm on the cockpit dashboard suddenly erupted into shrill alerts, Batman instantly understood why Joey had told him to shut the engine down.
The helicopter was accelerating forward at an impossible Mach speed.
Superman was beneath them, lifting the entire aircraft and carrying it through the sky.
The moment Bruce shut off the engine and removed his hands from the controls, his vision blurred briefly and then the three of them had already arrived back at Wayne Manor.
The place where everything had begun.
Batman rose to carry the injured Wonder Woman himself, only for Joey to stop him.
"She's still carrying dangerously high levels of radiation. Let me handle it."
Without the protection of a lead-lined Batsuit, the residual radiation lingering on Diana's body would be enough to make an ordinary human like Batman seriously ill.
Joey had no desire to see the Justice League Watchtower suddenly gain two radiation patients at once.
Bruce glanced toward the golden Helmet of Fate in Joey's hand.
Perhaps it was only an illusion, but within its mirror-smooth surface, he thought he saw the shadow of enormous black wings sweeping past.
Like a bat spreading its wings in flight.
Joey patted the helmet lightly.
"Find Martha. Have her restore everything back to normal."
The Helmet of Fate began glowing with golden light once more, transmitting new information into Joey's mind.
It could restore everything to its original state.
But traces of this twisted reality would still remain behind in the restored world like lingering afterimages.
Tonight, not a single message Joey received from the Helmet of Fate had been good news.
Including the fact that it could not heal Diana's injuries.
The powers of Nabu conflicted with the ancient divine essence within Diana.
And there were even worse revelations beyond that.
For example, this world truly was on the brink of destruction.
Assuming Joey had been speaking to him, Batman reached out to take the helmet.
"I'll go find her—"
But before Bruce could finish, the helmet suddenly floated upward on its own and shot away toward downtown Gotham.
"Bruce!"
Watching the helmet disappear into the distance, the still-confused Batman was suddenly embraced tightly by Catwoman as she rushed over.
"You scared me to death!"
"I'm sorry, Selina."
Batman gently removed her arms from around him.
"I'm not him. And all of this is about to end."
Catwoman's expression dimmed with loss.
"Then… the other Bruce—my Bruce… will he come back?"
"...I don't know."
After a long silence, Batman lied without changing his expression.
This reality was twisted.
This history was an anomaly.
That other carefree playboy Bruce Wayne had never truly existed in the first place.
"I can see it now," Alfred said quietly as he approached as well.
"There's a weight and weariness in your eyes that the young master never possessed. I cannot imagine how much suffering you've endured."
The chaos of tonight's banquet had kept Alfred overwhelmed with responsibilities, preventing him from noticing Bruce's abnormal behavior earlier.
"No matter what happens," Alfred continued softly, "please take care of yourself, Master Bruce."
"Thank you, Alfred..."
Looking at the aging butler—who had devoted his entire life to serving the Wayne family, his old age now unmistakably showing—Batman found himself unable to finish even a simple word of thanks before everything before his eyes dissolved like a fading illusion.
In the next instant, Batman found himself back inside the deafeningly crowded circus tent.
"Holy shit, this show even has Batman in it?!"
The atmosphere inside the tent instantly erupted. Batman's sudden appearance to save the day completely ignited the audience, their thunderous cheers nearly lifting the roof off the entire tent.
This was the exact point in time from several hours earlier, when Batman had saved the Flying Graysons.
Not only had he returned to normal reality, he had even come back several minutes earlier.
After confirming that the Grayson family was unharmed, Batman immediately connected to the Justice League communication channel. Before he could even speak, Superman's voice rang out first.
"Cyborg, Diana is severely injured! We need teleportation now!"
"Teleportation... unavailable... malfunction... systems offline..."
The communications from the Watchtower headquarters came through in broken fragments. Eventually, Cyborg rerouted the channel onto civilian network frequencies operating through the internet itself.
"All major systems inside the Watchtower are experiencing timer failures! The entire station is paralyzed! This kind of thing shouldn't even be possible!"
Cyborg could barely comprehend what he was seeing inside the system.
The Watchtower's central processor—supposedly capable of flawlessly calculating and observing even the aftershocks of universal destruction—had somehow malfunctioned.
The system clocks had abruptly jumped forward by several hours, causing every connected subsystem to crash due to the resulting temporal discrepancies and triggering a catastrophic chain reaction.
"The central core isn't broken," Superman said grimly. "The problem is the world itself. The entire solar system just had several hours stolen from it."
The sound of rushing wind came through the communication line—the unmistakable noise of Superman taking flight.
"Batman, take care of your family… she doesn't seem quite as insane anymore."
Joey had also realized that the Helmet of Fate had restored reality to its original state—and had even rewound things by several minutes.
With the magical concealment gone, the entire circus was now fully visible to him.
Inside the tent where he had previously encountered Martha and Thomas Wayne, Martha sat collapsed in a pool of blood, her face smeared with white makeup as she blankly held a sharp knife in her hand.
Thomas Wayne stood frozen nearby, gripping a handgun tightly, yet unlike before, he had not taken action without hesitation.
Seeing that neither of them seemed intent on killing the other, Joey stopped paying attention to them.
With teleportation unavailable, he instead picked up the unconscious Wonder Woman—still suffering under the effects of massive radiation exposure—and flew directly toward the Watchtower.
Fortunately, an Amazon's body was incredibly resilient. The radiation dose Diana had absorbed would have killed an ordinary human dozens of times over, yet it was not immediately fatal to her.
At this very moment, a brutal war was unfolding inside her body—a struggle between the Amazons' extraordinary regenerative abilities and the cellular collapse caused by nuclear radiation.
Joey desperately needed the Watchtower's medical equipment to stabilize her condition.
This time, the Helmet of Fate did not allow Martha to wear it again.
Instead, it shot into the sky and followed Joey as he flew.
Joey suddenly felt something inside his chest pocket begin to stir violently. He opened his suit, allowing the object to float out on its own.
It was the Tarot card that blonde Kara had once handed to him.
Although no one had ever explicitly told him where it came from, Joey was inexplicably certain that the card belonged to Madame Xanadu.
The image on the Tarot card began to shift once more.
'The Fool' briefly transformed into 'The Lovers.'
Then the image rapidly changed again before finally stopping on a card that radiated an omen of extreme catastrophe.
Lightning struck the top of a towering spire.
The tower burst into flames and collapsed.
People fell screaming from the summit.
Whether upright or reversed, 'The Tower' was a far more terrifying omen than even 'Death.'
Adversity. Suffering. Deception. Destruction.
Above all else, the card symbolized unforeseeable disaster.
But now Joey no longer wanted to waste time deciphering the Tarot card's vague warnings.
Because earlier, the Helmet of Fate had already given him a far clearer and more direct warning.
The reason the Joker had been able to steal the power of Nabu, the Lord of Order, so easily… was because a colossal upheaval was approaching not only this universe, but the realms beyond it as well.
The dark-matter universe Joey inhabited had not formed naturally.
It had been forged by something far greater.
Back during his battle against Barbatos, Joey had already glimpsed fragments of that truth within the overwhelming torrent of information that had nearly destroyed his mind.
And now the Helmet of Fate had shown him an even clearer vision of the coming disaster.
A catastrophe that transcended this universe itself.
Every world would suffer in the approaching calamity.
A clever yet fatal deception would push the already chaotic Dark Multiverse into an even deeper abyss of darkness.
These universes—already doomed by their very nature—would soon face a disaster beyond their comprehension.
Because the place where these universes were forged… was a blazing furnace hidden within primordial chaos and endless void.
Under the care of its master, the forge-fire within its core had once burned eternally, endlessly creating, reshaping, and sustaining infinite multiverses.
But now—
the fire was dying out.