When Jude arrived at the theater on his bicycle, the stalemate was holding — barely.
"Fries, can you ease up on the ice? It's not just slowing Batman down, it's got my vines locked up too."
"My weapon is ice," Mr. Freeze said, with the patience of a man who has had this conversation before. "Batman is equally affected."
"Go say that to his roller skates."
Freeze looked. Batman was crossing the ice on a set of skate blades that had apparently emerged from the soles of his boots at some point, moving across the frozen pavement with the smooth efficiency of someone who had specifically prepared for this contingency, which he obviously had.
Freeze said nothing. He filed it under of course he did.
"Pamela." He swept a beam across an incoming batarang. "How long on the pollen?"
"Twenty-four minutes."
"That cyclist is fast."
Ivy turned. A bicycle was coming down the road at full speed, heading directly for the center of the engagement, black robe trailing, the rider apparently unconcerned about the ice.
"Finally," Jude said, arriving.
Ivy spun back at the sound of his voice and found a batarang embedded in Mr. Freeze's helmet, cracks already spreading from the point of impact. Her distraction had cost him. Freeze had gone very still in the way a person goes still when they are calculating how long they have before their life support system fails — his entire existence outside the suit depended on a zero-degree microenvironment, and the cracks were spreading.
The flowers on Ivy's armor closed instantly. A new cluster opened — pale purple, different genus, different chemistry — and a second fragrance began moving on the wind.
"I'm here to help!"
Jude hit the ice and immediately began to slide. The wheels lost traction, the bike fishtailed, and for one second it looked like an imminent crash — then master-level cycling instincts took over and he somehow found the line, weight shifted, tires chattering against the frost, and he was moving again. Accelerating, even.
He drew both pistols.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Batman's cape came up, deflecting the cluster, and he slipped sideways into cover with the unhurried fluency of a man for whom this was a Tuesday. Several batarangs arced back through the air toward Jude — and missed, each one, as he cut angles on the ice that shouldn't have been geometrically available on a bicycle.
"At my speed," Jude announced, "you can't hit me."
At the Falcone villa, the Penguin let out a breath he'd been holding. "Boss, he may not be entirely useless."
The Joker shrugged.
On the communicator, the battle sounds continued.
"I don't need to hit you." Batman's voice carried the particular quality of someone making a factual observation rather than a threat. "You were finished the moment you rode in."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
The bicycle went out from under him.
One moment Jude was mocking someone from a moving vehicle, and the next moment he was airborne, and then horizontal, and the ice came up to meet him with the frank indifference of ice. He slid several feet and came to rest on his back, looking up at the sky, which had developed several enormous icebergs.
"Hey — what is this? Why can't I grip the handlebars? Why are there icebergs? Why are there icebergs on land?"
"Poison Ivy's hallucinogenic compound," Batman said. "The concentration has been dropping, but you absorbed enough before it diluted."
Jude turned his head toward Ivy with an expression of profound personal betrayal. "Pamela. You."
"What exactly did I do to you?" She sounded almost amused. "I'm unaffected. Freeze is unaffected. Batman is unaffected. The Mad Hatter is unconscious and therefore also unaffected. This appears to be a you problem."
Jude was no longer listening. He'd spotted Mr. Freeze collapsed against the wall, breathing in shallow, labored pulls — the batarang impact had cracked the helmet's seal and the ambient temperature was doing the rest. Jude crawled over, produced a roll of yellow tape from somewhere in his robe, and began applying it to the helmet with the focused intent of a man who had diagnosed the problem and was fixing it.
"Thor. That's enough. Stop."
The helmet was now sealed. It was also wrapped so thoroughly in yellow tape that Mr. Freeze could see approximately nothing.
Jude sat back, looked at his work, and seemed to register for the first time who he was looking at. "Sorry. Didn't recognize you."
"Thor." Freeze's voice was strained. "We need you to—"
"Grandma? What are you doing here?" Jude looked at him with the concerned attention of a man addressing a family member he hasn't seen in years. "And why are you bald now?"
Mr. Freeze decided not to respond to this.
Thirty seconds after arriving on the battlefield and briefly, genuinely contributing to it, Jude lay down on the ice street and went to sleep. Not dramatically, not as a consequence of injury — simply folded, found a comfortable angle, and was unconscious.
The three remaining combatants stared at him for a moment.
"Can your compound induce sleep?" Batman asked.
"Not typically," Ivy said. "Most people don't fall asleep in an active combat situation."
"It's over," Batman said, filing this away. "Both of you are coming back to Arkham."
"We're still two against one," Ivy said. "Don't get ahead of yourself."
"Mr. Freeze is finished."
He was already moving — blades cutting across the ice, closing the distance to Freeze before the sentence finished echoing. Freeze raised the freeze gun, but the tape over his helmet had reduced his vision to blur and shadow, and the beam went several feet wide. Batman cut inside it, changed direction twice to shed Ivy's responding vine strike, and put himself directly in front of Freeze.
The translucent tape let through enough light and shadow that Freeze registered the approaching figure. He swung the freeze gun like a club.
Batman ducked it and drove a punch into his chest.
The armor held. The man inside it didn't — the impact knocked the air from his lungs, one sharp involuntary gasp, and in that window Batman moved with the efficiency of someone working to a plan. Two batarangs into the legs. Another pair of vine strikes from Ivy, both dodged. Two more batarangs, one into each of Freeze's hands.
"Don't move," Batman said. "The batarangs are sealing the suit's integrity points. Remove them and the freezing gas vents at full pressure. You'll overheat within seconds." He pressed the interface on his gauntlet. "It's done, Pamela. You can't win this."
The engine sound arrived before the aircraft was visible — a low, building roar from directly overhead. The Batplane appeared through the darkness, holding position above the theater.
"Herbicide payload. Full spraying system." Batman looked at Ivy. "Your vines are neutralized."
Ivy studied the plane. Something in her expression shifted.
"Unmanned," she said.
At the Falcone villa, the Penguin put it together in the same moment. "There's only one Batman. He ran the second engagement by remote — the Batplane handled Man-Bat and Firefly on autopilot while he came here in person. That's how he was on two battlefields at once." He was already reaching for the communicator. "Move everyone from the Man-Bat location to the theater. Now."