Vampire Rule N°38: People focus on the fancy abilities, but the side effects are just as useful, if you are smart enough to use them.
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Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.
It could mean getting up at five in the morning, drinking some disgusting coffee and leaving the comfort of your home for a three hour commute to a job you hate.
Cracking your finger and getting started on some work exactly five hours before the deadline, doing some good old fashioned productive panic-leveraging.
Or taking advantage of your undead constitution to literally stop breathing and underwater past a police and government blockade into an island where the criminally insane were staging a breakout and increasing the chances of the whole city getting blown up by a smuggled nuke.
In all cases, it sucks.
Enormously.
John did his best to pretend that he wasn't regretting his life choices for the epsteinth's time in the last few months, focusing less on how gross his everything felt and more on how he finally felt a measure of resistance and physical effort that does not involve his supernatural muscles getting shredded by advanced weaponry.
'And all it took was the literal ocean,' He thought, kicking the underground floor with enough force to send himself upward like a torpedo, traumatizing some fish along the way.
Another kick just as he started to slow down gave him the necessary momentum to roleplay as Aquaman for exactly fifteen seconds before exiting the water, then he got to play Superman for five more seconds.
It would've been much more enjoyable if the water hadn't stopped dulling his sense and he was now forced to take in the chaos of a literal warzone between the GCPD and the nutjobs who saw fit to work in Arkham Asylum, against those other nutjobs trying to escape the island through the single bridge linking it to Gotham proper.
The sounds, smells and sights of hundreds of men in various states of panic duking it out with whatever means they judged acceptable.
Which was literally everything.
Whatever hesitation the cops might've had about shooting everything even remotely threatening went out the window around the same time Bane left his cell and somehow managed to get ahold of his venom injection system, then decided to break the state's monopoly on violence.
Then there was the utter and complete anomaly called poison ivy, whose blood's scent somehow managed to reach his nose despite everything else going on, and was starting to make him consider a vegetarian diet.
'Probably tastes like fruit juice,' He thought.
It took literally every sliver of willpower he had not to enter the fray and slaughter his way to the world's most hardcore climate activist then proceed to waste his persona's carefully curated reputation for the sake of one snack.
That eco-friendly, premium-grade sap sauce got him acting unwise.
Alas, a plan had been made and thus a plan he must stick to.
One which involves a more discreet manner of snacking, with less witnesses and hopefully doing something to fix the overall clusterfuck of a situation.
Not that he'd ever mix those two goals, he'd rather go sunbathing than drink the biohazard the Joker has flowing through his veins.
John stopped thinking about the vampiric equivalent of Indian street food, knowing nothing good would ever come from such things, and focused his attention on more important matters.
Such as leaving the rocky ship hazard Arkham Island had in place of a beach, locating the high value targets and taking them down while maximizing gains.
It was easier said than done given the size of the estate, but things had a way of working out when it came to crazed superpowered individuals.
Especially since most of them had a habit of making things go boom, despite their powers being totally unrelated to pyrotechnics, or anything resembling the moveset of an angry pomeranian with a potty mouth.
*Bang*
Case in point, he heard the sound of what appeared to be military ordinance going off, coming from the Eastern Wing of the Asylum proper.
Now, it sounds pretty normal, given the whole 'Crazy inmates breaking out and fighting everything with a badge and a gun Gotham could spare'
And that's when not jumping straight into trouble helps.
The inmates were held in the Western and Northern Wings, the penitentiary and intensive care facilities respectively, all of whom were going North-West toward the single bridge to escape the hell hole.
Which meant they had no business going on the other side, where all you could find was the old mansion and some warehouses.
Unless you were one of the glue-sniffing deniable assets who helped start this whole mess, eager to obey your government overlords and complete a glorified fetch-quest with your literal life on the line…because Waller.
That meant people with enhanced physiologies, and thus exotic blood which might or might not help him grow further in his path to true crimson fuckery.
"So eastward we go," He grinned with a bit more teeth than strictly necessary, anticipating what kind of meatbags he would snatch before the end of the night.
John hit the ground running, for once not needing to hide in any meaningful way since the whole place was already on red alert and all available manpower was being used to keep the civilians and staff alive while they evacuate, and keep the inmates in at all cost.
That meant that cracking the ground with superhuman jumps as an exclusive movement method was viable, without needing to slow down to avoid going from cryptic urban legend to urban damage menace.
It was liberating, for all sixty seconds it took him to cover half the island and reach those unruly children prowling the asylum without invitation, or at least the roof above them.
All that was left was spotting their exact location within web of interconnected warehouses.
Not very difficult, when one of them was literally a nine feet tall hyper-concentrated blood container and the other registered as the equivalent of an ice cream cone, they couldn't exactly escape his notice despite running around behind layers of concrete.
'Five targets, two metahumans and three regulars,' He thought, red eyes moving around as he took in their shapes and movements, forming a plan of attack that went straight out the window the moment a sixth entity entered the perimeter, making a beeline for his quarry.
It was quick, precise and capable of highly irregular movement patterns. It moved in quick bursts on ground or air, barely making a sound through it all.
The newcomer's speed was also an aberration, it varied nonsensically, sometimes at the limits of human ability, sometimes so fast it would break a regular person's neck thrice over.
Until it reached their shared target, and instead of joining forces, elected to attack them.
Though 'attack' was slightly inaccurate, what John was seeing despite being reliant on sounds and blood flaw, was the surgical dismantling of a numerically superior force of superhumans by a single opponent.
A reverse jumping of extreme brutality, and if his assessment was right, utterly ruthless given that this man just punched the giant's ballsack with full force.
John couldn't help but wince.
It was like watching a car crash, absolutely fascinating in a messed up way, the schadenfreude was such that he wasn't even mad about delaying his meal.
Then just as the ballbuster started fighting across an elevated platform against a martially inclined non-meta, the vampire managed to put together three brain cells and understand who the heck it was.
'Well I'll be damned,' His eyes widened, and he almost started laughing at the irony, 'I spent months in Gotham, gave you dozens of opportunities to confront me, served you an identity on a silver platter, and that's how we ended up meeting, Batman?'
He thought the bat would be busy finding the dirty bomb and getting rid of it, maybe pummel the joker until he's one giant bruise, not play around a bunch of b-list villains whose life would be better used satisfying his thirst.
But that's life.
'Still, it changes things,' John frowned, still following the fight closely, he was learning things just from the show, 'Should I rush into battle and try to build a rapport through ass kicking? Wait for him to capture them only to swoop in and turn them in capri-suns? Or continue observing until I find the perfect opportunity?'