“Who saved us?”
Will asked the question that mattered most.
As the words left his mouth, he unconsciously licked his dry lips, his eyes fixed firmly on James Gordon.
If what he’d seen before losing consciousness hadn’t been a hallucination…
Then Batman still existed in this world.
He was simply hiding in a far more secretive way.
“You don’t know either?”
“When Bullock and I fell into the ocean, we managed to cling to a reef for a while.”
“Eventually, both of us ran out of strength and sank beneath the water.”
“The next thing I knew, I woke up on shore.”
Gordon’s answer steadied Will’s racing heart like a powerful sedative.
He had to leave.
He had less than an hour to find Batman.
Before departing, he borrowed some money from Gordon, along with a flashlight and a length of rope.
“What do you need those for?”
“Don’t worry.”
“I’m not going to do anything illegal.”
“But I can’t tell you what I’m planning.”
“Otherwise, you’ll react just like last time and start shouting about sending me back to Arkham Asylum.”
After saying goodbye to Gordon, Will hailed a taxi.
The moment he told the driver he wanted to go to Wayne Manor, the man immediately began cursing and tried to throw him out.
For years, Wayne Manor had been plagued by rumors of ghosts.
Aside from YouTubers looking for haunted-house content, nobody wanted to go anywhere near that place.
Especially not in the middle of the night.
Everything changed after Will slapped three hundred dollars onto the driver’s face.
“In a hurry?”
“As fast as you can.”
“Then buckle up.”
The orange taxi sped wildly through Gotham’s nearly deserted streets.
Crossing the Robert Kane Memorial Bridge, it finally reached Wayne Manor in the northeastern outskirts of Gotham.
The headlights illuminated rusted iron fences.
The abandoned estate resembled the rotting corpse of some gigantic beast, exuding an aura that made people instinctively uncomfortable.
“I’ll wait in the car.”
Locking the doors, the driver somehow produced a bag of macaroni and began crunching away contentedly.
Climbing over the fence, Will soon found the old well sealed beneath wooden planks.
It led to the Batcave.
It had once imprisoned Bruce Wayne’s greatest fear.
It was the starting point of a hero’s legend.
Smashing apart the boards, Will tied one end of the rope around a dead tree before descending slowly with the flashlight clenched between his teeth.
The damp stone walls were carpeted in moss.
The noise disturbed the sleeping bats within the cave.
A deafening storm of fluttering wings surged toward him from the endless darkness.
Will had always thought he wasn’t afraid of bats.
But when countless winged creatures swept past his face…
He squeezed his eyes shut anyway.
Then he smelled it.
That familiar stench.
The same rotten odor he had encountered over and over in the sewers.
It was the smell of fear leaking from his own pores.
Perhaps humanity’s instinctive fear of these disease-carrying little creatures had already been carved into its DNA.
No wonder Batman had chosen them as his symbol.
Reaching the bottom of the shaft, Will followed the uneven cave passages for nearly five minutes.
The powerful flashlight eventually illuminated a vast limestone cavern.
He was destined to be disappointed.
No advanced technology.
No Batmobile.
No glass display cases containing armored suits.
Everything remained exactly as it had always been.
An abandoned underground mine.
A rusted mining elevator lay dead at the bottom of the cavern, like the corpse of a forgotten soldier stubbornly standing guard over an empire that no longer existed.
Will knew he would die at Maroni’s hands.
This meaningless transmigration game should have ended long ago.
The fact that he’d survived this long was already a miracle.
“Find what you were looking for?”
Back in the taxi, the driver continued chatting endlessly.
“Don’t worry.”
“If the cops ask, I won’t tell them you were here.”
“In Gotham…”
“Everybody’s got secrets.”
Will couldn’t be bothered to answer.
He simply rested his forehead against the window and watched the desolate scenery slide backward into the darkness.
:::
There wasn’t much time left.
If he had only a little life remaining, Will wanted to spend it back at the Senate Apartments—the only place in this cold, unfamiliar world that still felt remotely like home.
After paying the taxi fare, he emptied every dollar left in his pocket into the driver’s hand.
“Guess I won’t be paying you back, Detective Gordon,” Will muttered with a foolish grin.
The moment he turned around, however, he froze.
A familiar figure stood on the apartment steps.
Oswald?
The two men, both battered and bruised, stared at each other in silence.
“…Damn it, Oswald!”
“How the hell did you get out?”
The instant the question left his mouth, Will realized how stupid it sounded.
Maroni had never needed to restrict Oswald’s movements.
The entire city of Gotham was already in the palm of his hand.
“I slipped out of the hospital.”
“That son of a bitch Maroni thought I was still unconscious, so he didn’t leave many people watching me.”
Oswald’s jaw was wrapped in plaster, making his words thick and muffled.
After everything that had happened, Maroni had fallen from the lofty pedestal he’d once occupied in Oswald’s heart.
The respectful “Mr.
Maroni” had become “that bastard.”
“You didn’t recover the money, did you?”
Will silently shook his head.
Surprisingly, Oswald didn’t seem angry.
“It was never a task anyone could’ve completed.”
“But…”
“I still have to thank you.”
“You look like you’ve been through hell.”
“I stole two bottles of your beer.”
“So let’s call it even.”
The two exchanged weary smiles, quietly accepting the worst possible ending.
Ten minutes remained before midnight.
With death looming over them, they sat together on the apartment steps, chatting idly about whatever came to mind.
“You’re from the Cobblepot family, aren’t you?”
“One of Gotham’s Four Great Families.”
“So how’d the heir to a family like that end up working as one of Maroni’s lackeys?”
Oswald absentmindedly rubbed his signature hooked nose.
“…That’s not a very pleasant story.”
“Maybe I’ll tell you another time.”
He said another time.
Both of them knew there wouldn’t be one.
As the city’s clock tower began striking midnight, hurried footsteps echoed from the end of the street.
Were Maroni’s assassins finally here?
Oswald dusted himself off and rose to his feet.
If he was going to die, he’d rather meet death standing.
Then the newcomer stepped beneath the streetlamp.
Will’s heart skipped a beat.
What was she doing here?
“There you are!”
“Why didn’t you tell Detective Gordon where you were going?”
“I’ve been running all over Gotham looking for you!”
She shot Oswald a wary glance before grabbing Will’s wrist.
“Come with me.”
“I need to tell you something.”
She dragged him into a nearby alley.
“I’m sorry…”
“I probably won’t survive tonight.”
“Our partnership…”
Will had barely begun apologizing when she stuffed a stack of checks into his hand.
He switched on the flashlight and counted.
Nine cashier’s checks.
Each worth five hundred thousand dollars.
Four and a half million in total.
Together with the five hundred thousand Hugo had already returned to Maroni…
It added up to the entire missing fortune.
“Where did these come from?”
“Hugo Strange, obviously.”
Selina tilted her head and flashed him a smug grin.
“But…”
“We never even found his hideout.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Are you an idiot?”
“Use that brain of yours.”
“The biological monsters are violent and uncontrollable.”
“If Hugo didn’t want them wrecking his equipment, he would never build his laboratory on the lowest level of the sewers where they roam.”
“The first and second levels aren’t safe either.”
“Too easy for people to discover.”
“So…”
“His lab was on the third level.”
“You found it…”
“…and stole the money?”
Will’s breathing quickened.
He clutched his chest, taking several deep breaths before calming down.
Every time he prepared himself for the worst…
Death brushed past him without striking.
After surviving that kind of emotional whiplash again and again…
Even a healthy heart would eventually develop problems.
But Selina’s answer caught him completely off guard.
“No.”
“I went there intending to steal it.”
“But Hugo seemed to know I’d come.”
“He was waiting for me.”
“So…”
“Correction.”
“I wasn’t waiting for this lovely young lady.”
“I was waiting for you.”
The familiar voice drifted from the darkness.
Will raised his flashlight.
The beam landed upon Hugo Strange’s smiling face.
His expression was polite.
Too polite.
As Will was still processing Hugo’s sudden appearance…
Selina suddenly turned on him.
Something sharp stabbed into his neck.
He felt the needle pierce his skin.
Instantly, a surge of numbness like an electric shock spread through his entire body.