The squad now is three dirty, exhausted men.
Bullock was deep in nicotine withdrawal.
He kept his back hunched, his head wobbling from side to side like a broken bobblehead, wandering forward like a zombie that had entirely given up on thinking.
“How much longer until we’re out of here?” “Tomorrow morning if we’re lucky,” Gordon muttered, adjusting his grip on Bullock.
“I reckon its around 3AM now.
I just hope Barbara is asleep.” The thought that he might never see his daughter again carved deep, dark lines into his face.
Vincent wasn’t feeling any better.
He was the mastermind behind this suicidal plan, and the crushing weight of that responsibility was entirely on his shoulders.
Back when he watched Batman movies, a particular doubt used to bug him.
He had always believed that to truly cleanse a city as dirty as Gotham, a masked vigilante sneaking in the shadows was never going to be enough.
If the economy stopped growing and the wealth gap remained vast, the high society elites would never stop draining the lifeblood of the lower class.
Instead of risking a life fighting crime in a costume, it made more sense to invest funds into reforming Gotham’s economy.
Every new job opening was one less thug on the streets.
But after ending up here, he finally realized that Gotham’s rot had been seeded a century ago.
The decayed roots ran deep and deep.
Faced with elite families that had run the city for generations, Bruce Wayne was poor in everything but money.
And money, to his enemies, was the most useless commodity of all.
*Did a random thought I had years ago cause the birth of this Batman-less universe?* The realization made Vincent unsettled.
The trio managed to slide down another two tiers into the sewer system.
Even without a map, Gordon’s memory of the layout served him well enough.
There were four levels in total, and they had finally reached the absolute bottom.
If nothing went wrong, the main drainage outlet should be somewhere on this tier.
Down here, the water level reached their waists, and the current kept grewing violent.
The good news was that they didn’t need to force themselves to walk anymore; the rushing black water was actively pushing them toward the finish line.
The bad news was that Bullock was showing clear signs of severe methane poisoning.
“Partner…
I am so cold,” Bullock slurred with a faint, dazed smile.
“My head is spinning.
I’m gonna kick the bucket in this hole, aren’t I?” Gordon kept his face straight, refusing to answer.
He simply used both hands to brace his partner’s back, forcing the heavy detective forward.
The men had reached their breaking point.
Vincent had never missed Bruce Wayne more.
In the pages of the comic books, the burden of the Dark Knight seemed effortless.
Experiencing the reality, Vincent finally understood the agonizing weight on those billionaire shoulders.
Divinity.
It was a trait present in almost every superhero, yet it was the one thing Batman fundamentally lacked.
What did people picture when they thought of that word?
They pictured Superman spreading his arms toward the sun with his cape billowing in the wind, or the Flash running until his flesh tore apart to reverse the timeline.
They never pictured Bruce Wayne.
Even through Nolan’s cinematic lens, the Dark Knight taking the fall for Harvey Dent was a noble sacrifice, but it wasn’t divine.
Yet right now, in this dark, Vincent felt a taste of that unwritten divinity.
*Understand me…
Become me…
Surpass me, and save Gotham…
Save its miserable people…* A sudden, foreign memory invaded Vincent’s mind.
It belonged to the original owner of this body.
He saw himself sinking in a massive glass vat, a raspy, broken whisper echoing relentlessly in his ears.
…
“The exit!
The exit is right ahead!” Gordon’s shout snapped Vincent out of his hallucination and brought him back to reality.
The sound of rushing water echoed through the tunnels.
As the flashlight cut through the narrow, catacomb-like sewer passage, it revealed a huge cavern ahead.
Vincent shook his head, forcing the intrusive memories out of his mind as he hurried forward.
The main drainage outlet was a titanic shaft the size of a football field.
From a network of massive pipes, torrents of wastewater plunged hundreds of feet into the abyss.
The bad news: a heavy metal filtration grate was bolted across the entire floor of the shaft.
The mesh was incredibly dense, with gaps only large enough to pass something the size of an apple.
If they wanted to ride the current out into the sea, they would have to find a way to force that steel grate open.
Was there even worse news?
Yes.
Three Bio-Humans were hanging around right at the bottom of the shaft.
To say they were “guarding” the place was an overstatement.
They simply searched through the filtration mesh, eating rotten garbage and plastic with their iron stomachs.
However, fresh human flesh would be a major upgrade.
Given the loud sound of the water, the creatures probably wouldn’t have noticed them if they kept quiet.
Unfortunately, Gordon’s frantic shouts to encourage his semi-conscious partner had been too loud.
The three Bio-Humans turned their heads in perfect unison to lock their eyes onto the trio.
Up close, these monsters were even more massive than Gordon had anticipated.
They stood at least twelve feet tall, with sickly grey-green skin covering their bodies.
Their muscles were unnaturally bloated.
Their arms and backs were covered in coarse, boar-like black hair, but their lower bodies were entirely naked.
Comic books put tattered shorts on these monsters to get past the censors, but out here in reality, nobody bothered to dress a bioweapon.
Vincent caught a brief glance and instantly grimaced in pure disgust.
He felt like his eyes were going to bleed.
But there was no time to look away.
The three Bio-Humans dropped their frames simultaneously, arching their backs and bending their knees as they slammed their massive hands onto the metal grate like silverback gorillas, bracing for impact.
“What the hell are they doing!” Even Bullock was shocked out of his stupor, his eyes wide and alert, completely snapping out of his previous half-dead state.
“I don’t know, but we need to run!” Gordon barked, turning to retreat, but Vincent grabbed him firmly by the collar.
“Jump!” Without waiting for a response, Vincent threw himself over the edge.
“Are you out of your goddamn mind” Gordon couldn’t understand why Vincent would choose to dive into the pit.
The walls of this drainage shaft were completely slick.
Once they dropped down, climbing back up would be impossible, leaving them as appetizers for the monsters below.
But the situation didn’t give him the luxury of choice.
The Bio-Humans launched themselves into the air, heading directly toward the tunnel entrance.
They crossed the dozens of yards separating them in less than a second, their massive claws closing in on the cops’ faces.
At the ultimate second, Gordon chose to trust Vincent’s play.
He grabbed Bullock’s collar tight and jumped blindly into the void.
The drop from the tunnel’s entrance to the bottom of the shaft was nearly twenty feet.
Fortunately, the shaft wall sloped at a sixty-degree angle.
The two officers slid and tumbled down the slick surface, slamming hard but safely onto the floor below.
Vincent’s calculations had been correct.
If they had turned around to flee, their exhausted bodies would never have outrun the bio-engineered speed of those monsters against the heavy current.
But landing on the filtration grate wasn’t a permanent solution either.
Seeing their prey escape the first strike, the Bio-Humans turned mid-air and crashed back down onto the ground.
A massive boom echoed through the shaft as all three monsters landed together.
The heavy steel mesh bent and warped under the impact of the landing, but it refused to break.
This had been Vincent’s actual bet: to rely on the momentum of the falling Bio-Humans to shatter the barrier holding them back.
But he had clearly underestimated the quality of Gotham’s municipal engineering.
*They say this goddamn city is built on corruption, so why the fuck did the contractors actually do a good job on the sewers!* Trapped in a corner with three monsters closing in, Vincent felt like crying.