Bane Showdown

The Old Gotham Library had been closed for thirty years. Its grand stone columns had gone gray with moss, its windows were dark, and the shelves inside still held thousands of books that nobody had opened since before Batman was born. Dust lay on every surface like a thick gray blanket.

Tonight, the library had a visitor.

He was enormous — taller than two doors stacked on each other, arms like the trunks of old oaks, his head covered with a black mask that connected by thick rubber tubing to a device on his back. That device pumped a glowing green liquid called Venom steadily through the tubing, and the Venom made him stronger than any human being had any right to be.

His name was Bane. And he was waiting for Batman.

Bane had spent months studying Gotham City. Not just its streets and its criminals — its secrets. He had gathered information from the darkest corners of the underworld, cross-referenced old medical records, traced financial connections with patience and discipline. And at the end of it all, he had learned something that almost no one alive knew.

He knew that Batman was Bruce Wayne.

Batman arrived at the library through a shattered upper window, silent as falling ash, and dropped to the floor of the main reading room. The moonlight came through the high windows in long pale bars, illuminating rows of silent shelves.

"I know you're here, Bruce," said Bane's voice, low and patient, from somewhere deep in the dark.

Batman's jaw tightened slightly. He kept moving.

They met in the center of the reading room, between two enormous shelves that reached all the way to the vaulted ceiling. Bane stepped into the pale moonlight, and he was even larger than the shadows had made him look. He crossed his enormous arms.

"You cannot match me in strength," he said simply. It was not a boast. It was mathematics.

"I know," Batman said.

KRAAASH — Bane moved like an avalanche, and Batman dove sideways just as a fist the size of a cinder block destroyed the reading table behind him. Batman rolled, came up, and ran — deeper into the library, between the shelves.

He needed the environment. He needed to think faster than Bane could move.

BWOOM — Bane crashed through one shelf like it was cardboard, sending thousands of old books cascading to the floor in a fluttering storm of pages. Batman was already three rows ahead, pulling a small device from his belt, calculating the floor layout he'd memorized from blueprints earlier that day.

There — the old boiler room access, and above it, a floor section that the building's original construction records showed was weakened by ancient water damage. Batman's feet landed exactly there. He pressed a button on his belt and immediately leaped to the side.

CRAAACK — the floor gave way beneath Bane's massive weight with a sound like a thunderclap, and the giant dropped eight feet into the old boiler room below in a cascade of splintered wood and plaster dust.

Batman dropped after him.

The boiler room was dark and hot, the old boilers ticking like slow metal hearts. Bane was already rising — he didn't even seem hurt. The Venom was doing its work. He reached up, grabbed a boiler pipe, and ripped it loose. Steam HISSED through the dark in white clouds.

Batman fired his grapnel — CLANK — swung up over the steam — WHOOSH — and landed on a beam above the boiler. He could see it now in the dim light: the Venom regulator. A small device on the back of Bane's mask, the control point for the whole system. He reached into his belt for one of his heated Batarangs.

It glowed orange in the dark.

Batman took a breath. One shot. He needed exactly one shot, at exactly the right point on that tube.

He threw. ZING — the heated Batarang sliced through the main Venom delivery tube with surgical precision, and a burst of greenish vapor escaped the severed line.

Bane stopped mid-swing. He looked down at the tube. His eyes went wide behind the mask.

Without the Venom, Bane's body had to do the work alone — and the sudden withdrawal hit him like a tidal wave. His legs folded. The great, terrible weight of him buckled, and he went to his knees, then to the floor of the boiler room with a long, slow THUD.

Batman landed softly beside him and crouched down.

"Bruce Wayne," Bane said weakly, staring up at the ceiling. "You surprised me."

"You reminded me why I keep fighting," Batman said quietly. "You reminded me that the day I stop preparing, the day I stop thinking — that's the day Gotham loses its protector. I can't afford that."

He stood. Outside, sirens were growing louder.

"I don't need to be stronger than you," Batman said. "I just need to be smarter."

The Gotham City Police Department found Bane in the boiler room eight minutes later, exactly as described in an anonymous tip to Commissioner Gordon. They found Batman's footprint in the dust. They found the severed Venom tube. They found, on the broken floor of the reading room above, a single Batarang laying in a pile of old encyclopedia pages.

They did not find Batman.

He was already in the Batcave, writing up case notes.