Gotham’s Upper East Side, a private villa under the Wayne family name.
The poolside speakers vibrated so intensely that ripples shuddered across the water’s surface.
The heavy bass thumped like an invisible hand, forcing everyone’s pulse into the same mindless rhythm.
Bruce Wayne leaned against the open-air bar.
The glass of whiskey in his hand had been there for forty minutes, its liquid level virtually unchanged.
The ice had long since melted, diluting the drink into a murky pale amber.
Nearby, someone let out a shrill burst of laughter that sounded like fingernails scraping down a chalkboard.
A C-list starlet was currently trying to drape herself across his arm.
Her perfume hung in the air like a chemical weapon—tuberose over a base of musk and patchouli.
The top notes had entirely evaporated, leaving only a cloying, suffocatingly sweet floral heart.
In his head, Bruce dismantled her perfume formula note by note.
It was the only way he could distract himself from the burning sensation in his sinuses.
He wore a smile.
It was the standard Wayne smile: the corners of his mouth turned up just right, his gaze vacantly gentle, perfectly embodying an heir whose brain had been hollowed out by booze and women, leaving behind nothing but a pretty face.
Nobody ever looked closely into the eyes of a man like that.
Across the pool, two trust-fund brats were arguing over something.
One reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a pocket watch, its bezel encrusted with a ring of diamonds of an unnaturally vivid blue.
*Heat-treated color alteration,* Bruce deduced silently.
*Type IIa diamonds, high-temperature annealing, lattice restructuring to shift the color from brown to blue.
Cost roughly one million to one point two million dollars.*
The young heir twirled the pocket watch on his finger, boasting that he hadn’t bought it—he’d won it at a Monaco casino last month from the son of a bankrupt Greek shipping tycoon.
When he said the word “won,” his tongue snapped against his teeth as though he were savoring a fine dessert.
Not to be outdone, the other bragged that the door handles in his yacht’s restrooms were inlaid with polished meteorite slices, so that “you can touch outer space while washing your hands.”
*Iron meteorite slices, Widmanstätten pattern, market value roughly three to five hundred dollars per gram.
The material on a single door handle could feed a Gotham dockworker’s entire family for fifteen years.*
Holding his glass, Bruce politely clinked it against the champagne offered by the meteorite-doorknob owner.
His lips didn’t even graze the rim.
His gaze drifted past the edge of the pool, past the terrace railings, past the sprawling tiers of Upper East Side lights, and settled on the dark expanse toward the southern docks.
“Excuse me.”
Bruce Wayne set down his glass and flashed the starlet still clinging to his arm a practiced, completely vacant smile.
“Boring board meeting tomorrow.
I need to get back and catch up on my beauty sleep.”
The starlet pouted, muttering something along the lines of “you do this every time.”
Bruce didn’t listen.
He turned and slipped through the crowd, his gait loose and frivolous, identical to any other playboy drained by alcohol and nightlife.
A corner away, the engine of a Lamborghini roared to life, vanishing swiftly into the night.
Three minutes later, a matte-black Batmobile rolled out from a concealed exit beneath Wayne Manor.
Like a silent, armored beast, it slid smoothly into the shadows of Gotham’s midnight streets.
Down in the Batcave, Bruce stripped off his tailored suit in half the time it had taken to put it on.
The perfume still clung to his collar—tuberose, musk, patchouli.
He tossed the shirt into the laundry basket with a touch of restrained violence.
It wasn’t the shirt he resented; it was having been subjected to four hours of chemical warfare.
At this early stage in his vigilante career, Batman still seemed human overall—or at least, he still possessed recognizable human emotions.
Alfred stood by the main console.
“Master Bruce, the dossier you requested on the ‘Pajama Guy.’ Incidentally, your departure this evening was forty minutes ahead of last month’s average.
The press may very well run with ‘Wayne Heir Suspected of Acute Kidney Failure’ by tomorrow morning.”
Bruce didn’t reply.
Such dry humor was too cold to warrant a comeback.
Taking a seat before the primary display, Bruce brought up the first piece of surveillance footage.
South Docks, timestamped two weeks ago at 02:14 AM.
A skinny figure flipped down from a wall.
Red and blue clothing—though calling the getup a “suit” was far too generous.
It was a crude homemade patchwork of old pajamas and a sports hoodie, the stitching uneven, with several seams across the chest already burst open to reveal a faded gray undershirt beneath.
His frame was frail; his shoulder span was less than two-thirds that of an adult male.
He crouched on the edge of a shipping container, peering down at the scene unfolding below: a mugger wielding a blade, and a dockworker cornered against the wall.
Bruce had expected him to pounce.
Any normal adult possessed of strength and a moral conscience would, when faced with such an asymmetric crime, instinctively end it with speed and violence.
That was the law of Gotham.
The strong spoke with power, the weak spoke by running away, and there was no third language.
He didn’t pounce.
Instead, he raised both hands and hopped down from the shipping container, landing directly between the mugger and his victim.
Palms facing outward, fingers splayed wide—an unaggressive, almost clumsy posture.
The dockyard camera had no audio, but Bruce could read lips.
*”Don’t do anything rash, big guy.
That knife looks pretty sharp.
If you cut your hand, getting a tetanus shot isn’t cheap.
Are you really sure your insurance covers that?
Because mine definitely doesn’t.”*
The mugger lunged with the knife.
Bruce instinctively began calculating the skinny figure’s evasion path: *He’ll move left; his center of gravity leans right.
Container to the left, open space to the right—the optimal move is a backflip leveraging the edge of the container.*
A normal fighter would make that move.
But this person was clearly not normal; he didn’t dodge at all.
“Pajama Guy” merely shifted his torso with minimal movement.
The tip of the blade grazed past the tangled threads on his chest, missing by less than two centimeters.
Then he seized the mugger’s wrist, twisted, and shoved.
The entire exchange took less than four seconds.
The mugger dropped the knife.
Almost immediately, “Pajama Guy” released his hold, and the mugger fled in terror.
The footage showed “Pajama Guy” lingering in place for another two minutes, staring down at a bag of bread the mugger had dropped.
The plastic bag was caked in grime, the sliced loaf inside squished out of shape, but it remained sealed and intact.
He bent down, picked it up, and patted off the dirt.
Then he glanced left and right to ensure the alley was clear, stuffed the bread into his shirt, hugged the wall, and quickly scurried away.
Bruce stared at the frail back hugging the wall.
He tapped the keyboard twice, rewinding the footage to play it again.
Picking up the bread.
Looking left and right.
Stuffing it into his shirt.
Slinking away along the wall.
“He took the bread,” Bruce said.
His voice was quiet, sounding less like a statement of fact and more like an attempt to verify something he could hardly bring himself to believe.
Alfred stood behind him, the silver tray in his hands perfectly steady.
“A vigilante who appropriates carbohydrates from a crime scene.
Considering Gotham’s cost of living, such behavior possesses a certain economic rationality.”
Bruce remained silent and brought up the second recording.
East End, alley entrance.
A family sedan had flipped onto its side in the middle of the road, its undercarriage facing the street, fuel leaking from the tank.
A homeless man was pinned beneath the edge of the vehicle, his leg wedged in the gap between the chassis and the pavement.
A crowd of onlookers stood in a safe semicircle, holding up their phones, but not a single person stepped forward.
The thin, red-and-blue figure clambered down from the wall.
He landed.
There was no hesitation, no assessment, not the slightest pause of *can I actually do this?*
He gripped the edge of the car’s undercarriage with both hands, bent his knees, and braced his spine.
Bruce pulled up the force-analysis overlay.
The curb weight of that vehicle was 1.3 tons.
To lift one side of a flipped chassis and pry open a gap wide enough for an adult to pull their leg free required an instantaneous burst of force between 3.8 and 4 tons.
On screen, that skinny body tightened like a spring pulled to its absolute limit.
The seams along his thoracic spine completely tore apart.
He lifted the car.
The chassis rose about forty centimeters off the ground, and the homeless man dragged his leg out, scrambling desperately to a safe distance.
“Pajama Guy” lowered the vehicle.
The body slammed into the pavement, kicking up a cloud of dust.