The Death Knell

"Inform the Birds of Prey and ask Batgirl and the others to go find Batwoman to work together. We must find a way to efficiently distribute immunity measures as soon as possible."

Batman shot a hook lock into the sky, turned over and entered his aircraft, and said to the butler while flying over the police station:

"Director Gordon should have found what I want to investigate. I can't leave for now. You can forward the collected intelligence to the Justice League."

"Okay, Master Bruce, be careful." The butler also simply cut off the communication and started working. He didn't ask why at all. Anyway, he just made arrangements according to what the master said.

As for conveying messages to the master, this is the steward's duty, right? In the past, it was not an exaggeration to say that a butler was the diplomatic ambassador of a family.

Seconds later, Batman landed silently behind the man.

Commissioner Gordon was still the same as he always was on rainy days. He held up the collar of his windbreaker, smoking in the shelter of the rooftop, stamping his feet, and looking around even if the lenses of his glasses were covered with water mist.

After all these years, he still didn't know where to look above his head.

"I am coming."

"Ah!" Gordon's heart was obviously pounding again. He turned around suddenly, and in the scattered light near the searchlight, you could see the rainwater on his shoulders being thrown away: "Huh, you show up every time. It's so sudden. Fortunately, I don't have a heart disease. Otherwise, I might have been scared to death by you instead of being beaten to death by the villains."

As he said this, he handed over a document in his hand, which was what Batman asked him to help check.

The dark man just glanced at his old friend without any emotion, propped up his cloak with one arm to protect him from the rain, opened the file and looked through it.

He had known for a long time that Gordon did not have a heart disease, otherwise he would not have appeared suddenly like this, but would have appeared in a gentler way.

"It's exactly what I thought." Batman nodded, and the rain fell on his hood, splashing pieces of broken flowers that shone in the light: "The nightmare that gave birth to insomnia is the owner of Gotham. "

His thinking is actually very clear, but it's just the opposite of Deathstroke.

Deathstroke is accompanied by the Dream of a Thousand Cats, who is a Sandman, so dreams or sewers are their home ground. Therefore, Deathstroke's plan is to solve the problem of nightmares in dreams.

Batman is an ordinary person. Although he can make himself half asleep and half awake, he has no advantage in nightmares, so he decided to solve the problem in the real world.

It is known that nightmares are born from nightmares, and dreams do not appear out of thin air. Someone or something else must have done it to hatch the nightmare of insomnia.

Now everyone basically knows what kind of abilities Deathstroke has, even if they don't know much, there are many people who know about the things he killed Perpetua and Darkseid.

It is very likely that Nightmare has already learned this information through dreams.

So where does Insomnia get the courage to make trouble now and confront the death knell?

Batman thinks there are two possibilities.

One is that there is a powerful being behind it, stronger than Proraya or God, and can completely ignore the existence of a person like Deathstroke.

But this possibility is unlikely. Otherwise, there is no need to target Damian specifically for insomnia. You must know that the number of nightmares in Damian's dreams is much more than Batman's own. He thinks of his son's. The special thing is probably that the child regards Deathstroke as his biological father.

In this way, there is an explanation for Insomnia's special care of Damian. This may be to kidnap him and use him to threaten Deathstroke to compromise or cooperate.

This doesn't mean that you completely ignore it, but that you pay attention to it.

Another possibility is that Insomnia doesn't care about the timing, just because it is a madman.

Batman also heard what A Thousand Cats Dream once said to Deathstroke. The cat said that he had never heard of the organization "Sleepless Knights" before, but this sentence was a clue to Batman.

There are two reasons.

First, the craziest mental patients are all in Gotham on Earth 0. This is a quagmire that attracts all the darkness in the world. If Insomnia is really that crazy, then the owner of the nightmare that gave birth to it is most likely in the city. .

Secondly, only Gotham people like to give themselves various "Knight"-related code names, because Batman is called the Dark Knight, so the lunatics who want to play games with him also like to call themselves Knights.

For example, the last organization that called itself the Knights was the Arkham Knights.

Therefore, after Batman revived Commissioner Gordon, he asked him to help investigate Gotham's social security card information through the police department's internal system to see how many people who claimed to be knights or simply codenamed 'Insomnia' were sent to Arkham. Or in several other hospitals.

Bruce sponsored Arkham Sanatorium and had great control over it. He knew every action he sent there, including their names, what they had committed, and what style of crime they liked to commit.

But there is another type of people, those who seek medical treatment on their own or are sent to the hospital by their family members. Such people have no criminal records and no detention records for the sake of privacy. They really go to recuperate. In the past, Batman thought that these people The threat level of the person is not high, and there is not much concern.

After all, someone who can go to the hospital on his own or be sent to the hospital by his family, how crazy can such a person go?

But today, his expectations for human nature were lowered again, because Gordon really found the medical records and certificates of a patient named Christopher Lucas through the police database.

He suffers from severe insomnia, and after his wife and daughter died in one of Gotham's all-too-common explosions, he couldn't sleep and went to Arkham for medical treatment.

However, the elite forces of Arkham Medical are concentrated in the prison called the "Advanced Ward", which is responsible for the "recuperation department" that is open to the public. Because it often admits patients with mild symptoms, there are only a few doctors in charge. .

This is actually Batman's problem as well. The doctors who work in the high-end ward can receive generous subsidies from the Wayne Group every month, but in the nursing home, they don't have any, and the income is significantly different.

Bruce has money, but he doesn't spend it frivolously. He doesn't have the medical skills to care for people with severe mental illness, so why should he give them more money?

So a vicious cycle has formed in the nursing home. If you make less money, you will have no energy to work. The less serious you are about working, the less money you will make.

Christopher Lucas is such an unlucky guy. He only knew that the price of treating mental illness in Arkham Sanitarium was very low, and he came here without money even after his home was bombed.

It turned out that the doctor who treated him was probably an intern. After discovering that he had insomnia, he prescribed sleeping pills and sedatives, and also provided some comfort, but he forgot to tell him how many pills he should take.