Before the homeless man could even turn around to say thank you, the figure had already scaled the wall and vanished into the alley’s shadows.
From touchdown to departure, it had taken no more than forty seconds.
Bruce brought up the third clip.
West District, outside a convenience store.
A robber brandishing a knife was threatening the clerk.
“Pajama Guy” cut in from the flank.
He didn’t throw a punch; instead, he pushed his open palm against the robber’s chest.
The man flew backward, crashing into a pile of cardboard boxes three meters away.
Bruce tiled all three feeds side by side across the main display.
On the left: lifting a car to save a life, a 4-ton burst of power.
In the center: shoving a criminal aside.
On the right: scavenging a loaf of bread and slinking along the wall.
The same person.
The same hands.
Bruce leaned back against his chair.
His fingers tapped twice on the armrest, steady and measured, the intervals between each strike as precise as a metronome.
He fixed his gaze on the three panels, his pupils slightly contracting in the cold glow of the monitor.
“He’s holding back.
When lifting the car, he used his full strength—because if he didn’t, that man would have died.
When shoving the robber, he held back three-quarters of his power—because if he didn’t, the man’s ribs would have shattered.
He has an extraordinarily precise understanding of his own strength.
He knows exactly how much damage a single punch can inflict, and he deliberately refuses to deliver it.”
He reached out and tapped the footage on the right, where the figure was picking up the bread.
The skinny silhouette froze in the center of the screen.
“He’s hungry.
He needs food.
He possesses the physical strength to lift a car with his bare hands.
In Gotham, anyone with that kind of power could acquire anything they desired in countless ways.
Yet he chose the single method that harms no one: scavenging a grimy, squashed, unopened loaf of bread dropped by a mugger at a crime scene.”
Bruce pulled up the timeline over the past two weeks.
From the very first sighting until now, the subject’s mode of traversal had been strictly climbing and leaping.
There was no record of webbing.
Until yesterday.
South Shore Docks.
Surveillance captured him shooting a white, thread-like substance from his wrist, snagging the crossbeam of a crane, and swinging across the entire width of an alleyway.
Bruce zoomed in, examining the trajectory and adhesion of the strand frame by frame.
The outlet was on the inner wrist; there were no mechanical devices.
The way the thread unfurled in midair was not consistent with pre-woven fibers; it was a liquid secretion that rapidly solidified upon contact with the air.
“Biological.
It’s not equipment; it’s physiological.
Two weeks ago, all he could do was climb walls.
Yesterday, he developed the ability to spin webs.
His body is changing.
His genome is progressively expressing new traits.
Strength, wall-crawling, webbing—one after another, like something dormant waking up inside him in sequence.
It isn’t his ceiling.”
Batman stood up and walked over to the clue board, which was still sparse.
The section dedicated to “Pajama Guy” contained only a handful of yarn lines connecting three location pins: South Docks, East Alley, and West Convenience Store.
At the dead center, he pinned a screenshot: the thin back picking up the bread and slinking along the wall, looking frail enough to snap in a stiff breeze.
Then he began to speak, his tone devoid of emotion, delivering a purely deductive profile in the manner unique to Batman.
“Gotham Port, last month: a dockworker had his shoulder blade pulverized with a cargo hook by a coworker over a twenty-dollar dispute in freight cuts.
East End: three fourteen-year-olds stabbed a peer seven times for a pair of limited-edition sneakers, then stood watching him bleed out until the police arrived.
West District convenience store, two weeks ago: a homeless man walked in, took a loaf of bread off the shelf, and the clerk pulled a shotgun from beneath the counter and broke two of his ribs.”
“This is Gotham.
A person will kill for twenty dollars.
They will kill for a pair of sneakers.
And they will get killed over a loaf of bread.
This city teaches every living soul the exact same lesson: your needs matter more than another person’s life.
The hungry steal, the strong take, and the weak die.
Nobody goes hungry and puts food back.
Nobody possesses absolute power and chooses to starve.
Nobody.”
He paused, resting his fingertip against the edge of the screenshot.
“He possesses four tons of raw strength.
He could walk into any convenience store in Gotham and take whatever he wants, and nobody could stop him.
He wouldn’t even need to rob them.
He wouldn’t even have to open his mouth.
He’d only need to stand there, demonstrate his power, and someone would willingly hand over the food.
That is the logic of power.”
“Yet he didn’t.
He chose to scavenge a grimy, squashed loaf of toast dropped by a criminal.
He chose to scale a wall and leave immediately after saving a life without waiting for a word of thanks.
He chose to shove a robber instead of shattering his ribs.
He chose to starve himself while possessing absolute power.”
“This isn’t merely kindness.”
Bruce withdrew his finger from the screenshot.
Staring at the frail back, his voice dropped to a low rasp, as though each word were being forced out from between his clenched teeth.
“This is something far more bizarre.
A person pushed to their physiological limit who still refuses to use their power for personal gain.
A person presented with every condition to commit evil at zero cost, who instead chooses the single pattern of behavior least advantageous to himself and least harmful to others.
This defies normal human nature.
Human nature breaks before starvation, expands before power, and unleashes malice in the absence of risk.
He hasn’t broken.
He hasn’t expanded.
He hasn’t unleashed malice.
He operates like a machine programmed with an absolute moral imperative.
At every single juncture where human nature ought to fracture…”
“…he exhibits an abnormal, almost unsettling…
purity.”
Bruce turned around, facing the clue wall, though his gaze was no longer focused on any of the screenshots.
He was staring at something far more abstract. The source of this chapter is g.com.
“He is in extreme material poverty.
His suit is pieced together from discarded clothes.
He has no logistical support, no partner, no base of operations.
His mask is an old T-shirt.
He is starving.
His body is undergoing uncontrollable mutations, where every emergence of a new ability might be accompanied by immense physical agony.
He doesn’t know where his ceiling lies, nor what he will ultimately become.
He lives under staggering uncertainty.
Yet every time he intervenes, he strictly regulates his power within non-lethal parameters.”
“It isn’t because he fears killing; it’s because he does not *want* to kill.
A person enduring extreme personal adversity who still chooses to expend his limited strength protecting others rather than improving his own circumstances.
A person who remains disciplined even on an empty stomach.
Gotham does not produce people like this.
No city does.”
He fell silent for a long time.
“Someone so…
shouldn’t exist in this world.
It’s irrational.
It’s abnormal.
It’s impossible.”
Alfred did not interrupt him throughout the entire monologue.
The old butler held the silver tray, standing in the shadows beside the workstation, his eyes resting on Bruce’s rigid back.
He had witnessed Bruce Wayne in every conceivable state: an angry Bruce smashed things; a calculating Bruce went silent; an exhausted Bruce collapsed directly into his chair and fell asleep.
This particular state was the one he saw least often.
Bruce called it “the reluctant conclusion.”
When all the data and deductions pointed toward an answer he found impossible to accept, he would review and verify it relentlessly, as though waiting for some overlooked variable to suddenly jump out and overturn everything.
“Master Bruce,” Alfred finally spoke, his voice gentle.
“You have been watching this for forty minutes.
Would you care to review it once more?”
Bruce did not answer.
He shut down the monitors and strode toward the Batmobile.
“Where are you going, sir?”
“To see him.”
“To see what, precisely?”
Bruce gripped the steering wheel.
The rumble of the engine igniting reverberated through the chassis directly into his palms.
He looked up through the fissures in the Batcave’s rocky ceiling, gazing toward the perpetually overcast night sky hanging over Gotham.
“To see who he’s really fooling.
Me…
or himself.”
The Batmobile surged out of the cave.
Bruce tightened his grip on the wheel.
Rather than believe someone so pure and genuinely good could truly exist in this world, he would far sooner believe this was some bizarre prerequisite for an occult ritual.