The night breeze over the Gotham docks was the same as ever, reeking so fishy it felt as though someone had shoved an entire dead fish straight down your throat.
Sea salt, rust, and the indelible scorched tang of burnt diesel mingled in the air.
Industrial smog blotted out the moon completely, leaving only a few high-mounted crane floodlights casting pallid beams that carved the container yard into sharp, jagged shadows.
Killer Croc crouched in the narrow gap between two rows of shipping containers.
His thick, heavy tail rested against the concrete, scales scraping against the ground with the raspy scratch of sandpaper on a wall.
He had been squatting here for four full days.
The day he got out of Blackgate Penitentiary, Maroni had sent a welcoming committee in style—three armored cars, a box of Cuban cigars, and the line: “The whole East End knows you’re back.”
The message was crystal clear: make a statement to scare the daylights out of any two-timing scum, and collect a few bad debts down at the docks while he was at it.
Those dockworkers seemed to think that just because Scarface ended up in the ICU, no one would dare come after their money.
Just a bunch of degenerate gamblers playing dead after running up loan shark debts; beat them within an inch of their lives, and they’d fall in line.
Killer Croc had taken the job, but it wasn’t what occupied his mind.
He was thinking about Batman.
The last time Batman had put him away in Blackgate, that black cape under the glare of the interrogation lights had felt like a blade slashing across his retinas.
His eyes rolled in their sockets, slitted pupils narrowing to fine slits in the dark.
He was waiting.
Waiting for that pitch-black monster to drop from the rooftops so he could tear through that body armor piece by piece with his bare claws, chew it to bits, and spit it back in his face.
Of course, he’d still done the boss’s errands.
Those poor bastards had probably been hanging from utility poles for hours now, practically air-drying.
As for that little insect in the red-and-blue spandex, Croc hadn’t given him a second thought.
Bumping into him at the docks that day had been pure coincidence; swatting him away was just swatting him away, nothing worth remembering.
Crouching here tonight was still all about waiting for Batman.
Not far off.
Cole Vance crouched atop a gantry crane, hunched over like an owl perched on a branch.
He rubbed his vaguely aching ribs.
The injury had actually healed already; it was purely phantom pain.
With tonight’s heavy wind, he tugged his mask up a little higher over the bridge of his nose.
The crude stitching on his shoulder stood out conspicuously under the moonlight.
Cole locked his eyes on the dark green behemoth below and leaped.
His body traced an arc through the air, arms outspread, his suit flashing a dull glimmer of red and blue in the moonlight.
He landed on the shipping container diagonally across from Killer Croc, the soles of his feet hitting the sheet metal with a muffled thud.
Without waiting for the brute to speak, he pressed the trigger on his makeshift gadget—a sonic generator cobbled together from scrap radio parts and a megaphone.
A shrill, high-frequency blast tore through the dockyard air like fingernails raking across glass.
Killer Croc clamped his hands over his head, a guttural shriek of agony tearing from his throat.
He staggered back two steps, slamming into a container and caving in a section of sheet metal.
“Lesson one: reptiles are sensitive to high-frequency vibrations.
Even if you look like an oversized gecko, biology still applies.”
Cole’s voice drifted down from above with an infuriatingly calm cadence.
Killer Croc shook off the sonic daze, his slitted eyes laced with bloodshot veins.
He shook his head, scales rattling against each other with a faint metallic clatter, before lifting his hideous face toward the red-and-blue figure above and unleashing a deafening roar.
“You again, you pajama-wearing flea!
I’m gonna crunch every bone in your body into powder!”
“Hey!
Stop calling it pajamas!”
Killer Croc lunged with explosive force.
His massive frame launched into the air, tail whipping in a wide arc behind him.
Scales caught the floodlights with a clammy, cold sheen, hurtling forward like a moss-covered boulder fired from a catapult.
Cole flipped off the container.
With his left hand, he shot a web-line onto a crane arm to the side, yanked hard, and spun a full 180 degrees midair before planting both feet against the container’s side.
His fingers brushed just inches from the ground, feeling the spray of pulverized concrete from Croc’s impact whistle past his cheek.
Croc missed his mark, razor-sharp claws digging into the concrete and sending sparks showering waist-high.
Just as Croc tried to pivot, Cole bounced back.
What he fired wasn’t ordinary webbing.
Under the floodlights, this thread gleamed with a faint amber tint, stringing out through the air with a viscosity far thicker than usual.
Industrial adhesive—picked out after camping in a hardware store aisle for thirty minutes.
Web-shooters—handcrafted by himself.
He’d thought that being able to produce silk organically meant he wouldn’t need to build these gadgets.
The Gotham City Police Department really ought to reimburse him for material costs!
Isn’t there a Good Samaritan Award or something?
Preferably one with a few thousand bucks attached.
The webbing wrapped around Croc’s ankles—not with its usual light touch, but like a waterlogged hawser that tightened the instant it struck.
Croc tried to lift his leg, only to find a huge mass of chemically doctored webbing glued to his soles, dragging up gravel, dirt, and dockyard debris along with it.
“Technology changes lives.
Really pays to use your brain, doesn’t it?”
Cole muttered from atop the container while winding another line around his wrist.
Croc yanked his foot free, snapping the strands around his ankle, but the semi-cured adhesive was smeared deep between his scales.
With every step, a fresh layer of gravel stuck to his soles, as if he were walking on chewed bubblegum.
His walnut-sized brain registered the nuisance, but backing down wasn’t in his nature.
With a bellow that hadn’t even finished echoing, he charged to the base of the gantry crane, wrapped his claws around the frame, and began to climb.
The metal framework groaned and warped under his monstrous grip, bolts popping and shearing off one after another.
Cole crouched at the tip of the crane’s boom, watching him claw his way up from below.
He hit another button on the modified megaphone, cranking up the frequency, and aimed the horn right down into the narrow corridor beneath the boom.
The high-frequency waves battered Croc’s head like a pot of boiling oil dumped straight into his ear canals, wrecking his hearing and sense of balance instantly.
Clapping both hands to his head, his massive body plummeted straight down from over a dozen meters up, crashing into the ground with a thunderous boom that threw up a halo of pulverized dust.
Cole leapt from the boom.
Three meters above the deck, he fired a web-line onto a nearby container, banked hard, twisted sideways, kicked off the container wall, and swung in a smooth loop before sticking the landing right at the three-way junction deep inside the yard.
His positioning was meticulous: three stacked refrigerated containers to his left, a rack of unoffloaded titanium alloy pipes to his right, and a dead end at his back.
A perfect “physics lab.”
Croc hauled himself up, spitting spittle and sand as he charged.
Every stride cracked the concrete beneath him.
When he slammed into the three-way junction, his colossal bulk instantly clogged the narrow passageway.
Cole stood less than two meters away, completely motionless.
“Gotcha!
I’m gonna—”
Cole yanked the master web-line.
An extraordinarily thick strand twanged from his fingertips, vibrating in the dark like a plucked harp string.
This wasn’t just any stray strand; it was a “detonation cord” twisted from half a vial of web fluid and high-tensile nylon, prepared after he’d mapped out the layout on his floor dozens of times the previous night.
The instant it pulled taut, every load-bearing trigger point gave way in unison.
The steel chocks propping up the reefers on the left snapped free; the timber cribbing supporting the steel pipes on the right splintered; and the low trip-lines strung along both sides of the corridor snapped tight.
Kept in place until now by sheer inertia, the heavy cargo began to slide, accelerating under gravity with a deafening roar, tumbling along the prearranged trajectories like dominoes.
The tilting containers pinned Croc neatly in the center gap.
Dozens of tons of steel pressed down right above his waistline, squeezing him into a space less than a meter wide.
His legs were trapped in a permanent half-squat, and his tail was pinned under the base of another container, utterly immovable.
Croc thrashed with all his might, muscles bulging as his scales ground against the sheet metal in a screeching screech, but he was clamped tight by the steel on both sides, squeezed so hard his eyes bulged just trying to draw breath.
Cole didn’t stop there.
He vaulted above Croc, crouching overhead, dialed the web shooter’s nozzle to maximum viscosity, and unleashed thick bundles of webbing down onto his head, snout, and torso.
Each layer cured rapidly upon contact with the air, shimmering with that faint amber sheen.
The more Croc struggled, the tighter the bindings clamped down.
Five minutes later, silence reclaimed the dockyard.
No more impacts, no more roars—only the mournful wail of wind through the gantry crane’s steel frame and the faint groans of stressed metal deep in the container stacks.
Cole stood up, looked down at Croc bundled like a giant silkworm cocoon between the steel crates, and let out a long breath.
“You owe me medical expenses.
Povidone-iodine, bandages, ration biscuits.
And that undershirt I sacrificed to patch my suit—you’re paying for that too.” He held up two fingers, indicating a figure.
“The titanium plates and shoulder armor weren’t expensive.
But the labor was.
Hand-sewn by yours truly, you know?”
He shrugged with open palms, tugging down his mask—the homemade thing kept riding up—to tidy his look.
“Now, could you give me a sincere compliment on how good my suit looks?”
Gagged with webbing, Croc tried to curse up a storm, but couldn’t squeeze out a sound.
Cole was just about to turn and leave when he suddenly froze.
His spider-sense gave a faint twitch, like some immense, silent presence bearing down from above, cutting off half the moonlight.
He looked up.
Perched at the very apex of the gantry crane, a dark silhouette silently gazed down at him.
The edge of a cape rippled slightly in the wind, but otherwise, the figure was as still as a carved gargoyle, almost seamlessly blending into the steel girder.
No visible eyes, no expression—just a silhouette blacker than the night sky itself.
If not for his sharp eyesight, he probably wouldn’t have noticed at all.
Separated by the entire expanse of the yard and tiers of crisscrossed shipping containers, one looked up while the other looked down.
Between them lay the debris-strewn dock floor and one giant crocodile wrapped up like a silkworm pupa.
“Hello, Bats!
How about a little ‘thank you’ for your friendly colleague?
He just saved you a ton of heavy lifting!”