Batman - Apocalypse
Chapter 1: Prologue
"Hope." A dream. A goal to strive towards. An ideal. Hope would, frequently to others, seem achievable. Men like Bruce Wayne brought up the people of Gotham with his words and, unknown to almost everyone, his wits and fists. Bruce Wayne has said "Tomorrow is just a dream away." But now, his words were as useless as the struggle fighting against the inevitable end. It was more painful to some than others though. Bruce, whom was the Batman, suffered the most. Not physically, but mentally. It was a scar, worse than any a knife or dagger could give you. And it had happened so fast. The Talons, Brother Eye... The Joker. The names of his enemies filled his mind with hatred towards them. It had started with The Talons. A strike on North Gotham was planned and executed late at night, a town attack, killing many. Almost like a terrorist attack. Brother Eye had begun to rise, releasing 7th stage robots built in S.T.A.R Labs by Brother Eye's "associate," Cyborg. Cyborg had been controlled, released a horrible force upon Gotham. But it was just beginning.
As things began to heat up, The Joker rose from the underbelly of everything, unleashing hell upon Gotham. A virus, that spread through Gotham so quickly, Bruce thought it has gone through the air. Almost a million people died in one week, inside the chaos that was Gotham. It had never been this bad. Not even when he had fought his best friends, who had been infected by a similar concoction. Damian and Barbara were the first to die. Trapped under a powerful structure and turned to ash like a piece of paper by Brother Eye's patrol drones. The rest, Bruce hadn't even known how they died. Just that they did. Jason, Selina, Tim, Cassandra, Stephanie, even Helena. It was a futile effort, trying to keep Gotham safe when under the circumstances, three groups of terrorists held parts of Gotham. Finally, everything came crashing down. In an attack on Wayne Manor, orchestrated by the Joker, missiles had been fired into Wayne Manor, destroying his father's built house. But it didn't matter. The projectile had taken something else... something more important. The explosion killed Alfred and Richard, cooking them in a bath of fire. It had injured Samantha, and Bruce watched in horror. She was stuck, underneath the bottom of the staircase, which has fell on her as she coughed in the smoke. He couldn't do anything. For once in his damned life, The Batman could do nothing.
"Go... now!" Sam's words had been exactly, through coughs and a nearly collapsed windpipe. Grabbing his daughter Mysteria, he rushed out, plunging the two of them into the cave below, grabbing what they could frantically, while he clawing through the rock of the cave angered like a wild animal. He went deep, through corridors until he soon reached the sewers, tattered and scarred on the wet, filthy surface of the narrow pathway. Even the sewer had been destroyed.
Nobody had won. Not Batman, not the Talons, not Brother Eye, or The Joker. There was no winning score, nothing to be on top. Even though the Bat's enemies held Gotham... it didn't matter. Because there was nothing left to hold. Gotham was an apocalypse of a place. Hell. Hell with a war raging above between Talons and robots and zombie-like creatures, as the fires consuming everything.
To Bruce, to Batman, there was no war. The war was over. And everyone had lost.