Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps

Inside Arkham Asylum, every inmate welcomed a day that felt like New Year’s.

All the devices used to torture them had stopped operating, ensuring that every bit of electricity would be used where Red Death Batman wanted it.

That was on Bruce Yu!

Though he did not understand why Bruce Yu was doing this, to Red Death, this world was already broken. What humans thought no longer had anything to do with him.

Bruce Yu’s limbs were locked onto the electric chair. The scarlet Speed Force coiling around Batman’s fingertips turned into blades of electricity as he leaned close to Bruce Yu’s face and said frantically, "Do you know how long Barry Allen screamed after his bone marrow was drained? A full four hours!"

The blade suddenly plunged into Bruce Yu’s shoulder blade. High-frequency vibrations ground the bone into powder, and blood splattered across Batman’s red mask, drawing a smile to the lips of the mad Batman.

"Not enough! Still not enough!" Batman roared as he pressed a button on the Control Panel. Bruce Yu’s muscles spasmed all over, his eyeballs nearly bulging from their sockets from the severe pain, but all that came from his throat was a hoarse sneer. "Is that all you’ve got?"

Red Death kicked Bruce Yu into a three-meter-tall transparent glass tank. Dried bloody handprints from unknown criminals still clung to its walls.

He pressed the red button on the Control Panel, and six black rigid tubes stabbed toward Bruce Yu’s body.

Yet although Bruce Yu did not resist at all, his body was still far too strong. His Ghoul Bloodline alone made him nearly immune to small-caliber bullets, and tubes like these could not pierce his skin.

"Then I’ll have to do it by hand." Batman pulled out a sharp, custom-made Batarang and stabbed it into Bruce Yu’s neck, waist, thigh, and other places!

With several wet pops, the black tubes penetrated as dark purple liquid gurgled through them and poured into Bruce Yu’s veins.

"This is my exclusive formula infused with Fear Gas." Batman pressed his face against the outside of the glass tank, the corners of his mouth stretching to his ears beneath the mask.

The gas inside the tank suddenly turned fluorescent green. Bruce Yu instantly sprang up and slammed into the glass like a live shrimp tossed into boiling oil!

But iron rings locked all four of his limbs tightly to the tank walls, leaving him to convulse like a specimen!

Pain!

Heart-rending pain!

But it was not just pain!

It came with countless hallucinations!

He saw Main God Fang Yu, naked and chained up in a dungeon. Meng Yao and Da Qiang held bone cleavers and chopped off his feet with crunching blows. Blood sprayed onto the ceiling before dripping back down. Main God Fang Yu, wracked by pain, rubbed his severed legs against the floor tiles as he tried to retreat, leaving two bloody trails across the marble. He struggled endlessly, but the moment he reached the door, Da Qiang dragged him back again.

After an unknown amount of time, Da Qiang and Meng Yao seemed to have grown tired. Meng Yao smiled beautifully. "In the next reincarnation, kick him out of the team and let the Main God eliminate him."

With that, Da Qiang threw Main God Fang Yu, now a Human Pig, into a container resembling a wine jar to await the next Horror Film reincarnation.

The image suddenly zoomed in!

Bruce Yu wanted to see Main God Fang Yu’s condition inside the wine jar!

Main God Fang Yu raised his head blankly, but there were no organs in his hollow eye sockets to provide him with sight.

Ahhh! Ahhhhhh!

Bruce Yu screamed inwardly! Yet not a sound escaped him!

He clutched his chest and staggered back several steps, only to see the image suddenly flash!

The laughter and chatter of Tokyo’s bustling crowds, police car sirens, the metallic scraping sound of a killer wiping a blade—all the sounds twisted into a steel rod and stabbed into his brain!

Conan World Fang Yu crouched beside a concrete barrier, his fingertips brushing over a camera lens.

The setting sun stretched his shadow long. Through the lens, he saw Yamamoto Ryuichi, the baseball team’s ace pitcher, arguing with the delinquent girl Hayakawa Aya. Faint purple bruises could be seen beneath Aya’s school uniform collar.

"The third one this week." He muttered as he adjusted the focus, the shutter sound swallowed by the noisy club activities downstairs.

As the only second-year student in the journalism club, he was always ordered around by upperclassmen to capture "hot scoops."

Late at night, at a convenience store.

Fang Yu bit into a rice ball as he browsed through the photos. The television at the counter was broadcasting news about a string of attacks. "The third female throat-slitting case this month. The suspected murder weapon is a Utility Knife."

The glass of the refrigerated case behind him reflected a shadow—a man in a baseball cap staring at the camera in his hands, his fingers unconsciously rubbing the knife handle in his pocket.

In the equipment room after school, Fang Yu stood on tiptoe to reach an archive box on the top shelf when he suddenly heard muffled sobbing outside the door.

Through the gap, he saw Yamamoto Ryuichi pin Hayakawa Aya against the wall by her throat, a Utility Knife pressed against her collarbone. "Call the police again, and I’ll slice your face apart!"

The camera’s automatic-focus beeping exploded through the dead silence, and Conan World Fang Yu’s heart leaped into his throat!

Damn it! Damn it! Why did this thing make a sound?!

Yamamoto Ryuichi, holding the Utility Knife, turned his gaze toward Conan World Fang Yu’s hiding place.

Three days later, inside an abandoned factory.

Conan World Fang Yu’s blindfold was stuck to his face with blood, and the hemp rope around his wrists had bitten into his flesh. He heard the scraping sound of a Utility Knife being drawn, along with his own heartbeat.

"You photographed something you shouldn’t have." Yamamoto’s voice mingled with the sound of water dripping in the warehouse as the blade slid over Fang Yu’s adam’s apple!

"Whew."

Bruce Yu looked dazed. He did not know whether he had witnessed the death of himself in another world or whether it was merely a hallucination caused by the poison gas.

But none of that mattered.

What mattered was that after the face identical to his own had died, it felt as though he had truly experienced it all.

The pain of death filled him with terror!

Willpower?

Did it still exist?

He suddenly felt a chill on his right leg—the man-eating ants formed by the poison gas were gnawing on his calf! Every ant that bit off a piece of flesh turned into glowing-hot iron slag, scorching his thigh muscles until they twitched violently.

He wanted to lift his leg and shake them off, but the iron ring had locked his ankle in place. All he could do was watch as his knee was gnawed down to white bone.

Bruce Yu began slamming the back of his head against the glass tank, making it ring with loud bangs.

Batman trembled with excitement from head to toe! He laughed maniacally. "Increase it! Increase it more! Inject the gas! Inject it!"

In a daze, the poisonous mist condensed into Uchiha Obito’s face! "Trash like you thinks you deserve the Uchiha name?" Obito reached out, gouged out Bruce’s eyeball, and stuffed it into his own other hollow eye socket!

The scene abruptly changed. Itachi’s Mangekyō Sharingan spun within the Tsukuyomi space. Bruce Yu was nailed to a cross, watching as his skin was peeled away inch by inch with a kunai, exposing throbbing nerves and blood vessels.

"Amaterasu!"

Amaterasu burned Bruce Yu until nothing remained but stark white bones. The agonizing burning pain left Bruce Yu able only to ram the back of his head against the cross over and over.

"Try this!" Batman pressed a button. Several holes opened in the floor, and smoking, highly corrosive liquid began spreading outward bit by bit.

Scalding bloody water seeped from the inner walls of the glass tank, corroding Bruce Yu’s feet down to white bone!

And within the illusion, Pirate World Fang Yu’s scream rose from the liquid below his feet. "Save me! They’re using Poison Spiders to gnaw off my toes!"

Bruce Yu lowered his head and saw himself inside a cage in LEVEL 6 Infinite Hell, where jailers were piercing his eardrums with red-hot iron rods while Jailer Beasts smashed his twisted legs again and again with Wolf Fang Clubs.

The poison gas suddenly mixed with the smell of cooking fumes. Bruce Yu knelt in the greasy back kitchen of a restaurant, his forehead being ground into a bucket of rancid slop beneath the head chef’s leather shoe.

"A yellow-skinned monkey thinks he deserves to work standing up?"

A blazing wok shattered his finger bones, and blood mixed with gutter oil as it flowed into the drain.

Bruce Yu’s fingernails had all flipped back from clawing at the glass tank, and his eyeballs had been burned cloudy gray-white by the poison gas.

His vocal cords had already been torn apart by negative pressure, yet he forced a roar from his windpipe. "Is that all?"

Batman suddenly punched the Control Panel. "Set the power to maximum!"

A violent current engulfed Bruce Yu. His skin instantly charred black and began to crack. The tank filled with the stench of roasted flesh. This was the first time Bruce Yu felt that he might actually taste pretty good.

A montage exploded across his retina.

Obito flayed him alive with a kunai. In LEVEL 1 Hell of Red Lotus, needle grass pierced through his feet. Cockroaches from the restaurant kitchen crawled into his mouth.

Batman projected the scene of Bruce Yu being tortured onto the surveillance screens in every cell. "I’ll let the patients you once defeated see what becomes of you!"

Inside Cell 7 of Block D, Penguin slapped the iron door with hands as thin as chicken claws. "Look! Isn’t that Bruce Yu, the ‘Gotham Vigilante’?" He flashed a gold tooth with half of it missing. "This brat raided my vault back then! Now he’s getting flayed alive like a dead dog! Pfft, hahaha! Yeah! Rip out his guts! Hahaha!"

Suddenly, the sound of someone smashing a wall came from Cell 13 in Block C. Joker’s green head pressed against the monitor. "How dare you hurt my dear neighbor?!" He grabbed a chamber pot and hurled it at the camera, his crazed shriek echoing through the hallway. "Batman! You’re an animal! You’re insane! Insane! Ahahahaha! You’re Gotham’s craziest bastard!"

In the soaking pool of Block F, Cell 2, Killer Croc punched apart a water circulation pipe. "Trash! You’re all muscle for nothing!" He pointed at the mangled, bloody Bruce Yu on the screen and roared, "That crazy bat skinned me seven layers deep, and I still bit a chunk out of his leg! How the hell did you knock me flying back then?! Trash!"

Half a month passed quickly.

Having absorbed the Speed Force and become Red Death, Batman tortured Bruce Yu with the relentless cruelty of an eagle hunter breaking his prey.

Batman had even moved his bed into the room where Bruce Yu was being tortured.

He woke early. The instant he opened his eyes and saw Bruce Yu soaking in corrosive liquid with a vacant stare, Batman laughed.

"Looks like our antihero has broken down too. No matter. Just increase the dosage."

Bruce Yu suddenly split his carbonized lips in a grin, his mad laughter making the tank hum. "Not enough. Still not enough."

Batman walked over in great confusion. "You still haven’t broken down?! This can’t be willpower at work. You must have gone insane long ago! You’re used to torture!"

Bruce Yu’s eyes had long since been blinded by the corrosive liquid. Following the source of the voice, he turned his head to "look" at Batman. "I said it isn’t enough. Didn’t you understand me?"

"I said!"

"Still!"

"Not!"

"Enough!"

The moment Bruce Yu finished speaking.

Suddenly! Strange words appeared in his mind!

"Bright daylight shines, while darkness waxes and wanes."

"Evil Spirits and demons cannot hide their forms."

"Heretics and rebels fear our divine light."

"Green Lanterns shine eternal, their radiance spanning all ages!"

"Bruce Yu of Earth, you possess the great willpower to overcome fear!"

"Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps!"