Bruce Wayne coughed through the dust as he pulled himself to his feet in the now-darkened Batcave. A tremendous explosion only seconds ago had knocked him off his feet, where all power to the secret hideout had abruptly shut off. The backup generators soon kicked in, however, and the billionaire was able to survey the damage.

“Well, it’s a good thing that I wasn’t still in the garage,” Bruce groaned to himself as he clutched his aching shoulder, taking notice of how the roof over his collection of vehicles had partially collapsed.  Making his way over to his main computer, the Dark Knight ran an assessment of the damage to the Batcave, though he was alarmed to find that the entire mansion was almost completely gone.

“M-master Wayne!” Alfred yelled from the stairs, limping down with his butler uniform looking jostled. “I was on my way bringing your breakfast, when the entire mansion just collapsed on itself! I was lucky that I was halfway down the stairs.”

“Alfred, thank goodness,” Batman sighed with relief, springing to his feet as his black bathrobe dangled loosely from his well-toned body. “Stay down here, I think we’re under attack. It seems that most of the mansion was destroyed.”

“Sir, where is Jason?” the butler asked, his voice still shaky.

“After what happened to Dick, I sent him to the Hall of Justice to await my command,” Bruce replied, sitting back down at his computer. “It seems that I was correct in thinking that the bald man in a cape would be coming after me.”

“Are you certain, sir? He didn’t move very far when I was monitoring him while you were on your way back” Alfred noted.

“I’ve been at the Batcave for the last half hour, and if my assumptions about this man are correct, then he’d be more than capable of moving both extremely fast, and causing all this damage,” Bruce explained as his face returned to its normal serious expression. “His power is immense, he looked at me as if I were a mere fly that he was waiting to swat. Whatever universe he’s from, he’s probably unmatched in terms of raw strength there. He was having trouble fighting whatever it was that the Joker did to him, however, and I fear that it’s only getting worse.”

“I see,” Alfred replied with a nod, before looking towards the staircase. “I know the house was reinforced to withstand a hurricane, but wasn’t the Batcave built to withstand a nuclear bomb?”

“Exactly, yet it still sustained damage,” Batman answered as he passed his Butler and climbed the stairs to survey the state of the house above. Despite his shoulder still-aching, the Dark Knight pushed his weight against a wall that had fallen atop the hidden entrance to the Batcave, and after using his immense strength, he was eventually able to push the debris away and stepped into one of the mansion’s expansive alcoves.

There wasn’t much left of Wayne Manor. A vast majority of the structure appeared to have been blasted away, where only one of the main walls still stood. Furniture, flooring, and anything else found in Bruce’s home was strewn over the ground, with the house in complete shambles. Stunned at the condition of his family estate, the billionaire superhero moved to the blown-apart front door to see if the rest of the property had been damaged. As he made his what was left of the front porch, Bruce noted an eerie silence in place of the distant traffic that normally filled Gotham’s streets.

It was gone. Looking out at where the city’s large skyline was normally in view of the manor, the towering buildings appeared to have vanished, and worse yet, there was not a single building in sight. Everything was flattened, with uprooted trees and smashed cars thrown around the obliterated Earth and the crumbled remains of roads littering the grassless dirt. It looked as though a nuclear bomb had gone off, and that there was little, if anything, left of Gotham City.

Standing just outside where his front door once was, Bruce Wayne’s eyes trailed over the horizon, his face still a flat, serious expression. Biting his lip at the slow realization that the city that he loved, the city that he swore to protect, had been wiped off the surface, Batman fell into a stunned silence as he slowly fell to his knees.

“Good Lord, Master Wayne, I can’t believe…oh my God,” Alfred said as his voice trailed upon joining his friend at the porch. “T-the city…what could have happened?”

“The bald man, Alfred,” Bruce stated flatly, trying desperately to maintain his composure despite his fists trembling. “One of the last things that Dick reported was that he witnessed him effortlessly obliterating a large warehouse, reducing it to dust. If that was only an inkling of his power, then the entire planet might be in trouble.”

The remnants of the mansion trembled as something fast abruptly landed right behind the two. Turning around, Bruce saw this friend and fellow superhero, Clark Kent, standing there with a grim expression on his face.

“My God, Bruce, I’m so sorry,” Superman stated with dismay, his red cape blowing silently in the wind as he walked towards his fellow Justice League member and put a hand on his shoulder. “I heard the explosion from work, and it’s all over the news now. We’ll find out who did this, I promise.”

“I already have an idea of who did it, but that can wait until we’ve assembled everyone at the Hall of Justice,” Batman replied, turning around and not taking his eyes off of where Gotham once stood. “I’m going to go suit up. For now, Clark, I need you to assist first responders in finding survivors. They’ll need your strength.”

“Of course, and I’m sure I’ll be seeing you there soon as well,” Superman said with a nod, before lifting his arms and taking off into the sky, blasting off into the distance like a fighter jet.

“Alfred, I’ll be suiting up and taking whatever drivable vehicle that I have left,” Bruce next explained to his butler. “Now I hate having to keep burdening you, but I need you to stay in the Batcave in case you have to talk me down from breaking my code. I have never wanted anyone dead like this for some time.”

“I understand, Master Wayne,” Alfred nodded as he returned to the staircase with his ward. “Please, please be careful. You’ve just mentioned how dangerous this bald man is.”