After Gordon and Batman left the basement of the small chapel, both of them fell into a heavy silence.
After all, the place they had just stood in had claimed dozens of lives in the span of just one short month.
Gotham was a dark city, but when that darkness was laid bare before their eyes, only those with the strongest will could stomach the impact of such profound depravity.
Inside, both Batman and Gordon were riding a turbulent wave of emotions.
For Batman, a newcomer handling his very first case, facing an abyss of boundless evil and pitch-black darkness made him suddenly realize that, just as Schiller had said, he might not be fully prepared after all.
Overwhelming physical power was merely a tool for survival here.
If he wanted to save this city, brute force alone was far from enough.
Lost in these thoughts, Batman turned a corner and saw Schiller standing on the second-floor balcony again, holding an umbrella.
Directly below the balcony was the spot where the beggar used to stay.
Batman felt a surge of absurdity.
How did this goddamn criminal, who had snuffed out dozens of innocent lives, still dare to stand there?
Why were there people in this world who could remain utterly indifferent to living, breathing souls?
How could anyone be so cruel as to kill them without a moment’s hesitation?
Batman’s inner depression flared into rage.
Under Gordon’s watchful eyes, he leapt from the street, landing directly on the two-meter-high balcony.
“Your judgment is coming, you murderous bastard,” Batman said.
“Did you find the evidence you were looking for?” Schiller asked.
“Of course.
And it’s more than enough to convict you.”
Schiller suddenly laughed, his tone light and airy.
“How laughable.
You’re still thinking about a trial?
The Gotham City Police Department really ought to award you a Good Citizen Medal.
You make an excellent police officer.”
“If only there had been such a wonderful officer around when your parents died—someone who found the clues left by the killers and brought them to trial.
That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
“You don’t trust the police, you don’t trust the courts, yet you still hunt for evidence, trying to use the legitimacy of the judicial system to judge me.
Don’t you find your actions incredibly contradictory?”
“You want to prove that I broke the law.
But Batman, your own actions break the law just as well.
If I am to be put on trial, so should you.
You are committing crimes to prove a criminal is a criminal, aren’t you?”
Schiller raised his voice, speaking with theatrical cadence.
“You believe you have the power to take vengeance on criminals in your own way.
Yet in the end, you are still just an ordinary man domesticated by orderly society.
You still obsess over evidence, clamoring for a trial.”
“If you cannot cast this aside—if you cannot break the shackles this orderly society has bound you with, if you cannot erase the concepts of law and due process from your mind—you will never be able to deliver the justice you seek.”
“Bruce…” Schiller looked into his eyes and said, “The law is not justice.
You are.”
“Gotham’s laws did not save your parents, just as they did not save those dozens of missing people.
If you keep clinging to these useless illusions, you will never become the true Batman.”
Schiller could clearly see Batman’s arm trembling.
Veins bulged on his hand as he gripped his Batarang, and his entire body shook.
He was obviously pushed to the brink of absolute rage.
Schiller’s words were a devastating blow to his heart.
He had exposed the young Batman’s greatest contradiction.
Gotham’s laws had failed to save his parents, yet Batman, who claimed he wanted vengeance, was still being held hostage by the framework of order.
In the end, he was still adhering to judicial justice.
“You want me to deliver my own justice?” Batman asked.
Then, he raised a gun and aimed it at Schiller’s forehead.
Batman, of course, had a gun.
In Gotham City, without a firearm, survival was practically impossible—let alone delivering justice.
Schiller remained perfectly calm.
He said, “You still haven’t answered my previous question.
Have you found the evidence you wanted?
What is it?”
“Beside the crates in the chapel basement, there are traces of soil and leaves that you left behind.
They are needles of North American red pine, which only grows on the campus of Gotham University.”
Schiller replied, “And what does that prove?”
“It proves you are the killer,” Batman said.
“Really?
I happen to appear on the streets of Mawson District for no apparent reason, dressed and acting suspiciously.
Then you find leaves from Gotham University at the crime scene, indicating the killer might be someone from the university, so naturally, I must be the killer.
What flawless reasoning,” Schiller said.
Looking at Schiller’s utterly unrepentant, guiltless expression and hearing his nonchalant tone, Batman’s fury finally boiled over.
Just as his finger began to squeeze the trigger, Gordon rushed over, shouting, “Stop!
Put the gun down!” This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
Startled for a fraction of a second, Batman paused.
Schiller tossed a memory card onto the ground between them and said:
“Ironclad evidence?
The killer visited Gotham University, and I happen to be a professor there.
That is indeed incredibly ‘ironclad’.”
“Indeed, you must have desperately wished that when your parents died, someone would have been there to pull the trigger on their killer as decisively as you are doing now, all because the evidence was ‘ironclad’.”
“Don’t talk about my parents…” Batman said, his voice trembling.
“You’re a criminal.”
“You see so many similarities,” Schiller said.
“But your anger has made you overlook far more—and far greater—differences.”
“For instance, I have absolutely no educational background in chemistry or biology.
Furthermore, I have participated in countless serial killer investigations; my counter-surveillance skills aren’t so poor that I’d fail to clean up my own footprints.
But more importantly…”
Schiller looked down at the memory card.
“My evidence is far more ironclad than yours.”
With the interruption from Gordon, Batman’s rage subsided slightly.
As his sanity returned, he realized that despite the cold, damp weather, sweat had completely soaked through the shirt beneath his suit.
Guardedly, Batman picked up the flash drive.
He plugged it into the microcomputer on his gauntlet, and a holographic projection popped up.
By this time, Gordon had run up the stairs onto the balcony.
Looking at the video, he saw a figure in a plaid shirt creeping onto the outdoor unit of an air conditioner.
The figure fed a flexible hose through the window.
Inside the room, the silhouettes of people standing and sitting collapsed one after another.
After leaping down from the unit, the figure entered the building corridor.
A moment later, he emerged dragging two large trunks, loaded them onto a cart, and wheeled them away.
The figures inside the room were gone.
This was actually an inspiration Schiller had taken from Batman.
Jonathan was truly lacking in counter-surveillance awareness; Schiller had stood right in the corridor of the building opposite him, filming with a camera, and he hadn’t even noticed.
Then again, no one in Gotham would wander around in the dead of night, especially in a slum like this, where a single misstep could cost you your life.
Gordon suddenly cried out, “No wonder!”
“I remember when we registered the addresses of the missing people, the victims indeed lived on lower floors.
Almost all of their homes had balconies…” Gordon said.
He then looked at Batman and Schiller.
Turning to Batman with boiling anger, he snapped, “I completely misjudged you!
Were you really about to shoot him just now?
Do you have any idea how close you came to murdering someone?!”
Batman stared in silence at the projection on his arm.
Anyone with eyes could see that the killer’s build in the video was worlds apart from Schiller’s.
Although Schiller didn’t know how to fight and didn’t work out, he was still quite tall—only slightly shorter and leaner than Batman, standing at nearly 190 centimeters.
The man in the video, on the other hand, was at most 170 centimeters tall and couldn’t have weighed more than sixty kilograms.
“Professor Jonathan is a nice, decent man.
That’s what you thought, isn’t it?
Because he doesn’t check homework, treats you kindly, and would never fail you.
But I am different.
I am a troublesome professor who always nitpicks your assignments, springs exams on you, and threatens to fail everyone.”
“So, naturally, I had to be the killer, while he couldn’t possibly be.
After all, how could a cowardly, quiet, scrawny little man like him be a serial killer?”
“Stop talking,” Batman said, his voice trembling.
He recalled the scene with the beggar that day.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could still see the dark stain left on the wall where the beggar had leaned.
An overwhelming wave of guilt and shame washed over him once more.
Gordon’s words added fuel to the fire.
“I don’t care what kind of weirdo you are, running around the city in tights making a mess, but you nearly murdered an innocent man!
What kind of grudge do the two of you have?
If this is personal, settle it yourselves.
Don’t interfere with police business.”
“Are the Gotham police not busy enough?
You wanted to commit murder right in front of me?
Do you want me to lock you up behind bars right now?” Gordon barked.
Working overtime for days on end had already frayed his nerves.
He said impatiently, “Tights-wearing freak, hand over that flash drive.
I need to take it back for the case file…
And you, sir, please come back to the station with me.
After a brief silence, Batman silently reached out his arm and handed the flash drive to Gordon.
He realized that his highly anticipated debut was nothing but a series of blunders.
Schiller, the man he had pegged as a criminal, was the one who had actually cracked the case by providing the most crucial evidence.
Schiller said nothing more, and Batman remained standing where he was.
Out on the streets, the endless rain began to pour once again.
Just as Schiller was about to leave with Gordon, he heard Batman speak behind him: “…I’m sorry, Professor.”
Schiller froze mid-step.
He found it hard to believe his ears.
What did Batman just say???
Did he just apologize???
Schiller turned around in disbelief.
Batman stood in the shadows cast by the building, with a single beam of street light reflecting off his cowl.
His lips were pressed into a tight, thin line.
Schiller felt a sense of utter absurdity.
This was Batman.
*Because he’s Batman.*
And Batman was always right.
Batman never apologized to anyone.
In the face of everyone’s doubts, he would only ever offer one response: “Because I’m Batman.”
In the Batman comics, Schiller had seen too much of Batman’s dark side—preparing Kryptonite to guard against Superman, devising contingency plans to take down every single member of the Justice League.
He seemed to trust no one, not even himself.
Admittedly, when the comic writers created this character, these darker aspects made him far more compelling and left a deeper impression on readers.
But this had also given Schiller a prejudice against Batman.
He believed Batman was supposed to be exactly like that—the way he was in the comics.
Batman would never apologize, because he never believed he was wrong, and he deemed those countermeasures against his allies absolutely necessary.
This had created a blind spot in Schiller’s mind.
It wasn’t that Batman was incapable of apologizing; when he truly realized he was in the wrong, he still felt regret and guilt.
Schiller indeed wanted to teach the young Batman a few lessons: to avoid prejudice, not to judge a book by its cover, not to let anger cloud his judgment, and to maintain independent thought.
But Schiller suddenly realized that he wasn’t really in a position to lecture Batman on prejudice.
He himself harbored an indelible stereotype about this character, wanting Bruce to transform into the comic-book Batman of his mind as quickly as possible.
But as it turned out, this story wasn’t about a wise, learned professor and his young, reckless student.
It was a classic tale of *Pride and Prejudice*.
Batman, with the absolute pride of his own reasoning, had believed Schiller must be the killer.
Blindsided by preconceived prejudice and armed with a few pieces of circumstantial evidence that happened to fit his narrative, he had almost shot Schiller.
Yet Schiller had harbored his own prejudice against Batman, believing he should already be the mature, cautious, and deeply paranoid dark hero from the comics.
Neither of them had any room to talk; they were two of a kind.
Now, Batman seemed to have learned his lesson.
He clearly understood that he was not omniscient or omnipotent.
His reasoning could be blinded by prejudice, leading to catastrophic errors, and his impulsiveness under such pride made his actions even more lethal.
He caught sight of the cut on the side of Schiller’s neck—a wound he had inflicted with his Batarang.
Back then, he had assumed Schiller was a criminal and threatened him as such.
Though he hadn’t pulled the trigger today, the previous cut was deep, as Gordon had pointed out, and would undoubtedly leave a scar.
Batman felt a deep wave of guilt, followed by cold dread.
He realized that just because the law failed to judge every criminal correctly did not give him the right to unilaterally judge others with his own arrogance.
As long as he could not guarantee he was one hundred percent right, any impulsive act of violence could leave a permanent, indelible scar on an innocent person—or even a good man.
He could only feel relieved that the price paid by the innocent was not their life.
Standing in the shadows, Batman resolved that he must prevent such a tragedy from ever happening.
He decided that no matter how depraved or evil the criminal, he would never kill.
If even a single innocent life were to perish by his hand, he would become a far worse criminal than the one who had murdered his parents.
After all, the criminal who killed his parents might have acted out of greed or revenge, taking only two lives.
But if Batman began taking innocent lives, then there would be absolutely no hope left for this city.
In the comics, Batman’s no-kill rule seemed to have existed from the very beginning.
Schiller had never bothered to look into why that rule existed.
In fact, he had often found it incredibly frustrating.
Why couldn’t Batman just kill those frustrating villains, the madmen who broke out of prison time and time again to wreak havoc?
He had thought this countless times while reading the comics.
But he never expected that in this world, the young Batman would solidify his resolve never to kill criminals precisely because of him—because of Schiller.
Because he was Batman, the city’s sole hope.
If he were to be crushed by the guilt of taking an innocent life, Gotham would be truly beyond saving.
By a twist of fate, although Schiller had still not helped the young Batman build his psychological pillar, he had successfully cemented one of Batman’s core defining traits: his no-kill rule.
Schiller had no way of knowing that in the days to come, he would regret his meddling on this day countless times.
Once Batman had fully matured, Schiller would roar in his heart time and again: *Why can’t Batman just lift a finger and snap those damn criminals’ necks so they stop breaking out to ruin my peaceful life over and over again?!*
And all of this stemmed from what happened today.
He had brought it entirely upon himself.