Wrote this thing in a few hours when I couldn't get this idea out of my mind. It's more for fight scene practice than anything else. It's unbetaed, so please forgive any faux paus inconsistencies I may have missed. May or may not have Bat-wank, depending on your point of view. I don't own anything.
Batman v. Omni-Man (DC x Invincible)
The Batman stared down yet another alien god with unfathomable power yet again. He kept his breathing quiet, refusing to show even the slight amount of weakness. His current suit wasn't even close to deal with a metahuman like Omni-Man. Depending on the situation, he had developed several different suits with slight modifications. All of it was proportional for the situation at hand.
This one he was wearing was designed against a moderate metahuman. The armor plating, with a charge running through it, would harden in response to kinetic force. The suit was more fit for fighting someone like Bane.
At best, it made a single hit from Omni-Man survivable, most likely at the cost of severe internal bleeding. And by then, it would be too late for him.
"You just couldn't keep your nose out of it," Omni-Man said, calmly. "Your way back to your dimension was practically guaranteed. And you threw everything away to come here, after me."
He half-expected for Omni-Man to continue, to monologue as benefiting the mad and the powerful, but the Batman's psychological profiling of him didn't imply any sort of tendency. Not unless it was extremely personal.
The next sentence he uttered would kick off the fight. If he had been in this dimension a little longer, dug a little deeper, there would be leverage to use as a distraction. A pressure point to harass Omni-Man into becoming sloppy.
Instead all the Batman could do was reaffirm his purpose, the very core of his being.
"It'd be an injustice to leave a murderer like you roam free."
Omni-Man breathed the sparest of breaths and then moved.
The Batman only just barely dodged it. It was far more based on instinct and muscle memory. If the Batman had been caught off-guard, he would be little more than blood splatter on the wall. But he had studied Superman's movements, recognizing the overlap that all flying bricks seemed to have. As he dove, rolling back onto his feet, the Batman saw the adjustments Omni-Man had to make for his second charge.
The alien had to turn around, his eyes taking a precious few seconds to hone on him instead of instinctively locking onto him. That confirmed another one of Batman's observations: while Omni-Man did a degree of enhanced perception, it was not even close to Superman's.
Good.
That was one area he didn't have to worry about. The Batman moved once more, reaching into belt as he did.
Omni-Man swung wide this time, hoping the length of the attack would clothsline him. He ducked, feeling the blow shear the tips of his cowl's ears, and did his best to spin back around. Omni-Man had already turned around, the momentum bringing a roundhouse kick to cleave his head from the body.
But the Batman had already thrown his desired device: a circle-shaped device with a large hole in the middle. It landed squarely on Omni-Man's face and roared to life, a steam of fire pushing the alien back a meager few feet before it exploded and blinded him briefly.
The Batman dipped into the shadows of the Guardians' old base.
Total time that had passed was less than a minute and the Batman could feel his heart pounding his chest. Far, far more than any of the other times that Superman had been compromised by external forces.
Always, always his friend held back and gave the Batman that fighting chance to make things right.
All of his contingency plans for a rogue Justice League were designed on the basis that they could be saved or otherwise be incapacitated non-lethally. He was a paranoid man that trusted sparsely, but even he believed in the hope of their world, trusted enough that anyone could turn things around.
If Superman went rogue like this, the Batman may not survive, but he would leave behind the tools to deal with the aftermath of such an event… most likely to be used in a lethal fashion. That notion grated at him, even if he intellectually understood that the world would have little choice.
Because, it would take years to prepare for someone like Omni-Man. Defeating him here would leave this world little choice but to execute him. And this world wouldn't allow a danger like Omni-Man be contained on his world. Cecil didn't strike him as that type of man.
It almost seemed like there was no good way to deal with the aftermath.
His mind never could stop, never slowing down to find the most optimal solution to save everyone he could - an almost boyish desire borne from that moment in the alley.
He ran through all the options of the utility belt and knew, without a doubt, that if he angled it just right, one of his foam pellets could be used to kill Omni-Man if it filled his lungs. He had gathered an important tidbit from Invincible in a purposefully innocuous conversation about space-flight: Viltrumites needed air.
While they had powerful lungs, he doubted he could quickly clear them out like Superman could.
It would take extreme luck for such an event to occur… and he immediately dismissed it. Frankly, the Batman would rather die fighting before stooping to such a level.
But he needed to buy time and decided to work his way up.
Time was running out for him and he didn't know when Omni-Man would strike. That would put him on the backfoot. So he scuffed his foot on the ground in a seemingly accidental fashion.
Omni-Man struck, as predicted, as rocks splashed above the ducking Batman. He pulled out a taser, connecting it to his suit's systems, and fired into Omni-Man. The armor tightened painfully and the internal systems screeched as they were temporarily drained.
All in a desperate attempt to fry Omni-Man into submission.
There was only mild discomfort on Omni-Man's face before he tore out the tasers. The Batman quickly discarded the weapon, skirting to the left and throwing out four different batarangs. One flew past him, while the other three struck.
The first one that struck wrapped the alien in the strongest, tensile material on his Earth. It gave him just enough pause for the other two batarangs to strike. One smacked him in the head, delivering a chemical payload to knock him out.
He doubted it would affect the alien's physiology, but it needed to be tested all the same.
The second batarang stuck onto Omni-Man's collar just as he easily tore himself free. Before he could remove that as well, the first batarang returned slamming into the back of Omni-Man's head and transformed into a metal blindfold.
In that opening, the Batman activated the sonic batarang to its most dangerous levels and it started to blare loudly. His cowl clicked, shielding his ears as the sonics screamed so loudly that it shattered the computer screens in the base.
Omni-Man hissed out, falling his right knee from the pain.
It seemed like the Batman finally found an opening to exploit. Shame that he only had two more sonic batarangs in his utility belt. A countermeasure could be developed if he escaped. But if he tried running, then that would set Omni-Man off. With no veneer of deniability to his cover, there would be nothing holding him back from rampaging across the Earth.
All those deaths would be on Bruce Wayne's cowardice.
From all his research into this world, there was no other superhero that could, reasonably, fight back against him. No combination, no silver bullet… and the Batman doubted even Invincible had a chance.
He was going to stand his ground here.
Omni-Man wasn't going to stop here, not until the Batman was dead. He needed more time and the only solution was to delve in deeper into the base. With the right type of cave-in, the Batman could fake his death and continue operating incognito if his hail mary didn't work out.
Then Omni-Man surprised him, shooting toward him blindly. Even though the speed he traveled was so fast that it shattered the batarangs attached to him. It didn't changed the initial trajectory.
Omni-Man shoulder-checked the Batman. It barely clipped him, but the impact dislocated his arm, shattered his collarbone, and sent him flying back.
He almost blacked-out, almost felt like his back was broken all over again. His suit had shielded him well enough, but he was completely disabled from the right side down.
The alien prepared for one final attack, to kill the Batman.
But he wasn't going to make it easy on him.
Through extraordinary amounts of pain, he used the left side of his body and fired his grapple gun. The shot was low and it flung him across the ground, the world devolving to spots of pain and glimpses of a tumbling world.
He couldn't see the intended blow to splatter him, but he certainly felt it in his bones. The Batman fell into a clumsy roll and collided with a wall. His grip on the grapple gun never wavered and he prepared to fire a second shot.
His grip couldn't ever stop wavering as Omni-Man crushed his wrist to mush, the hand just barely still attached to him.
The Batman finally cried out, before letting it draw to a quiet angry hiss. He fell back onto complex breathing exercises, focusing on something other than the pain.
"Stupid," Omni-Man said simply, with all the disdain of an unfeeling monster.
His utility belt finally started to flash quietly, the light barely visible to the curled-up Batman.
Finally.
He just needed to buy the final few seconds for his hail mary.
"You want to know why I came here, drawing your ire instead of fleeing and coming back with help?"
Omni-Man looked down on him, shadows casting his face in a sinister, yet curious light. The aura of a man in complete control of a situation. Who couldn't see past his own superiority.
"Couldn't risk anyone else setting you off, couldn't let you hurt anyone else." The Batman spat blood. "Everyone else on the planet was in danger from you. After all, you killed the Guardians, your friends, so easily."
There was a split-second flash of emotion. A chink in the armor. Shame he couldn't use this earlier.
"They were nothing to me," he said before raising his fist to kill the Batman.
"That's why you're going to lose. Because you are alone."
Before the fatal blow could land, someone grabbed Omni-Man's wrist. Someone in a blue suit with a red cape and an s-shaped symbol on his chest. Superman caught the second blow from Omni-Man, holding both his wrists. Surprise flashed on Omni-Man's face as he tried pulling himself free.
"I wasn't so stupid to come without calling for reinforcements."
The Batman smiled red.
"You okay, Bruce?" Superman asked.
"Just finish it."
Clark nodded before Omni-Man kneed him in the stomach. He huffed out in slight pain, before the Man of Steel let go of one of Nolan's wrist and delivered an upper atmosphere uppercut. Omni-Man rocketed high above to the sky, with Superman following in his wake.
While he just focused on dragging himself back onto his feet.
The Batman couldn't always win alone, so despite his general and off-putting demeanor, he wasn't alone.
He had friends and allies to call upon and that was why justice would always prevail in the end.