The flamethrower swept across Man-Bat and the fur caught immediately.
Whatever the serum had done to Langstrom's muscle density and pain tolerance, it had not made him fireproof. His bio-mutated hide could take blades and absorb bullets that would drop a normal man, but fire was fire, and inside a second he was a large, shrieking fireball tumbling through the night sky.
"Langstrom!" Firefly swooped in a triumphant arc above the burning bat, voice cracking with delight through his visor. "How does it feel?! How does it feel now?!"
On the street below, Jude watched the burning figure and quietly activated I Didn't Kill, sweeping the skill's field across both targets overhead.
You're welcome, he thought to no one in particular.
The burning bat screamed — not with pain, or not only with pain — and charged directly at Firefly.
Whatever remained of Kirk Langstrom in that moment, the flames had finished burning it away. The rationality, the careful measured speech, the guilt about his wife — all of it incinerated, leaving only the serum's animal architecture running at full power. A wounded predator, stripped of restraint, moving on pure instinct. It was, objectively, terrifying to watch.
Man-Bat hit Firefly like a thrown engine block.
The communicator on Jude's belt crackled. "Thor, you're released. The Mad Hatter's theater is under attack — have you and Langstrom neutralized those soldiers yet?"
"There are no soldiers, Fries." Jude watched the struggling mass of bat and armor spiral across the dark sky. "The intelligence was wrong. No platoon. One Firefly."
"You still have a two-on-one advantage."
"I have an advantage if I can actually hit them. Which requires them to come down to a range where a pistol is useful. At the moment they're fighting at three hundred feet and apparently have no intention of descending. So what I have is two separate one-on-one fights — one of which I have no participation in — and the one I am in, the odds are unclear." A pause. "Can you come support?"
"Negative. I'm en route to the theater. The Hatter's too critical to lose — without his controlled civilians, we have no replaceable manpower."
"I understand," Jude said pleasantly. "I'm just noting that I can't stand here and wait for Firefly to finish with Man-Bat and then redirect his flamethrower at me. And if Batman shows up—"
"Stay on the field until the engagement ends. You can pray Batman doesn't come. Now back under."
The click of the remote. Jude's posture straightened into the controlled position. His face went appropriately blank.
At the Falcone villa, the Joker clicked off his communicator and went back to whatever he'd been doing, unbothered.
In the sky, the fight had evolved past tactics into something more primal.
Man-Bat had locked onto Firefly with both sets of claws and was refusing to let go, the flames still burning across his fur, his screams cycling between pain and pure aggression. The serum's animal instincts had finished overwriting rational decision-making entirely — a dying beast, in the final calculus, hits hardest. The worse the damage, the more ferocious the response. Evolutionary logic, running unimpeded.
The claws found the armor's gaps. The teeth found the shoulder joint. With a sound like a car being slowly unfolded, sections of Firefly's chest plate tore free, and what was underneath made Jude, watching from street level, stop blinking for a moment.
The burns covered his face completely. Charred scar tissue over dark new skin, the nose compressed inward by the contracture, eyelids turned out, the remains of his ears reduced to calcified tumors of melted cartilage. It extended down his neck and both hands, and the geometry of the damage made it clear it didn't stop at the collar line. These were old burns — long healed into permanence — not tonight's work. This was what Garfield Lynn looked like under the armor.
How is he still alive.
"I am going to kill you!"
Firefly, face exposed, roared it at the creature tearing him apart with evident displeasure at being seen. And then — still screaming — he pressed the flamethrower against the bat's burning body and pulled the trigger again.
The flames hit the bat. The flames hit him. The two became a single combusting mass, tumbling and wheeling in the dark above the street, and from the wheeling mass came sounds that should not have sounded like what they sounded like.
Firefly, Jude realized slowly, was laughing.
Or something adjacent to laughing. A pitiful, half-howl that carried in it, unmistakably, a thread of pleasure. He'd heard the rumors — that Garfield Lynn had crossed from arsonist into something beyond arson, that fire wasn't a tool for him so much as a relationship — but hearing it confirmed from three hundred feet directly above your head while the man burned himself alive was different from hearing about it second-hand.
The only people who make it in Gotham are the ones who were never quite right to begin with. He kept arriving at this conclusion. It kept being correct.
"Come on," Jude muttered, scanning the sky. "Come on."
As if in response, the darkness above the intersection split open and the Batplane came through it, low and fast, trailing pale blue exhaust. Two shots fired from the undercarriage — Jude's eyesight was good enough to register the non-lethal profile before they hit — rubber rounds, both connecting, dropping Man-Bat and Firefly out of their combusting embrace into separate states of pain and momentary paralysis.
A second weapon extended from below the fuselage. High-pressure water, cold, fired at the force of a firehose, hit both of them simultaneously and drove them straight down into the street. The flames went out in the impact.
Modifications. The Clayface engagement had apparently prompted a re-evaluation of the jet's loadout. Whether that was specifically about Clayface or partly anticipating Firefly was unclear and probably both.
Jude took thirty seconds to lean over the fallen Firefly and extend the I Didn't Kill field — they'd been too high during the fight, outside effective range, and he'd been watching the casualty math nervously. The arsonist, improbably, had survived the fall and the water and the burns that were apparently just Tuesday for him. He'd be in Arkham by morning.
The battle was over.
Mr. Freeze's exact orders had been not to flee the battlefield before the engagement ends.
The engagement had ended.
Jude unfolded his bicycle, swung onto the seat, and was moving before the Batplane finished its descent.