“Huff…Huff…”
The sound of heavy breathing echoed through the intricate dark alleys of Gotham East District.
The cold rain stabbed into his trachea like ice blades; William felt as if his lungs were about to explode.
He wasn’t carrying a person on his shoulder, but a two-hundred-pound domestic pig—luckily, this pig didn’t thrash around.
Two hundred pounds of pure muscle, plus a tactical bulletproof vest soaked in muddy water, weighed down on him so heavily that with every step, his kneecaps let out an overburdened crackling sound.
On the edge of his retina, that string of ghostly blue numbers had long since turned a piercing crimson.
[Remaining Time: 05 minutes 12 seconds.
Target Vital Signs: Critical.]
“Turn left, hop over the dumpster, then through the rusted wire fence—”
William silently recited the route he knew by heart.
The memories of his past three months struggling in the Gotham Slums became his life-saving straw at this moment.
He crushed a puddle underfoot and suddenly veered into a dead end filled with foul-smelling industrial waste.
William gritted his teeth, supporting Bruce’s sliding body with one hand while the other roughly shoved aside several pieces of scrap metal used for camouflage, revealing a heavy, rusted iron door.
His blood-stained fingers rapidly pressed a six-digit code into the lock, then he pressed the handle down with force.
“Bang!”
William kicked the iron door open and stumbled into the underground clinic carrying Bruce.
The incandescent light instantly stung his eyes, making it impossible to keep them open.
Before he could even catch his breath, he exerted sudden force from his waist and slammed the heavy richest man in Gotham onto the stainless steel operating table like a sack of flour.
“Clang!” The sound of metal colliding was deafening in the empty clinic.
[Remaining Time: 03 minutes 05 seconds.]
There wasn’t a single second to waste.
William ripped off his soaked old white coat and grabbed a pair of medical scissors.
“Snip!
Snip!” The sharp blades pressed against Bruce’s skin, roughly cutting and peeling away the expensive yet tattered tactical suit.
Under the lights, Bruce’s naked body was a shocking sight.
His perfect muscle lines were covered in a mix of old and new bruises.
There were bloody through-and-through gunshot wounds on his right thigh and left shoulder, with dark red blood seeping out in rhythm with his weak pulse.
But William’s gaze didn’t linger on the gunshot wounds at all.
His hands, now in sterile gloves, quickly pressed down on Bruce’s abdomen.
It felt like a hard wooden board to the touch.
Board-like rigidity.
“Fuck,” William cursed for the second time tonight.
The gunshot wounds were just bloodletting; the truly fatal injuries were internal.
A heavy blow from a blunt object had caused rib fractures, and the broken bones had likely punctured organs.
There was massive internal bleeding in the abdominal cavity, and the blood irritating the peritoneum had caused severe muscle spasms.
If he didn’t open the abdomen to stop the bleeding immediately, this future Dark Knight would be completely brain-dead from hemorrhagic shock in two minutes at most.
[Remaining Time: 02 minutes 15 seconds.]
William took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again half a second later, his heart rate had instantly stabilized.
Absolute logic plus absolute focus—this was the professional skill of a surgeon.
“Iodophor, large scalpel, abdominal retractor, suction machine,” William muttered to himself, his hands turning into a blur as they swept across the instrument tray.
The blade followed Bruce’s linea alba, slicing down with precision and coldness.
Subcutaneous fat, linea alba, peritoneum.
There wasn’t a hint of hesitation.
The moment the peritoneum was cut, dark red accumulated blood surged out like a broken dam, instantly flooding the drainage grooves of the operating table.
“Suction needs to be at maximum power!”
William stepped on the pedal, and the nozzle probed into the abdominal cavity, frantically sucking out the blood until his field of vision finally cleared a bit.
He reached both hands into the bloody mess, and following his memory of anatomical structures, he precisely located the bleeding point.
Splenic rupture.
The tear was five centimeters long and was still pumping blood out frantically.
“Found it.
Need to stop the bleeding immediately.”
William’s left hand squeezed the splenic pedicle tightly to temporarily block the blood flow, while his right hand grabbed a hemostat to begin the repair.
At this life-or-Death moment, a sudden change occurred!
Bruce, who had fallen into a deep coma due to excessive blood loss, suddenly suffered a violent convulsion.
Before the anesthesia could fully take effect, the intense pain of the laparotomy, combined with the hallucinations produced by the brain in a near-Death state, completely triggered the most desperate trauma deep within this young scion’s heart.
“Bang!
Bang!”
In Bruce’s ears, there was no sound of surgical instruments clashing, only the deafening gunshots in Crime Alley from that rainy night over a decade ago.
“Pearls—pearls everywhere—”
Bruce’s tightly closed eyes darted frantically, and a Beast-like raspy growl escaped his throat.
He snapped his eyes open, his pupils dilated and unfocused.
In his vision, William, dressed in surgical scrubs, became the masked robber holding a gun.
“It’s you!
The murderer who…
killed my parents!
I won’t let you get away!”
Bruce’s right hand, the one that hadn’t been shot, shot out with the peak of human muscular instinct, locking onto William’s right arm—the one holding the hemostat—like an iron vice!
“Crack, crack, crack—”
The piercing sound of bones grinding together rang out instantly.
William’s expression changed drastically as cold sweat poured down.
He felt as if his right arm was being crushed by a hydraulic press, the intense pain stabbing through his nerves directly into his brain.
“Let go!
You’re fucking crazy!
I’m saving you!” William gritted his teeth, his left hand trying to pry Bruce’s fingers open.
They didn’t budge.
Even after losing over 1500cc of blood and being on the brink of Death, Bruce Wayne’s grip strength was still terrifyingly high.
This was the body of a monster, tempered by over a decade of hatred and obsession.
[Remaining Time: 00 minutes 58 seconds.
Target heart rate spiking abnormally, blood pressure dropping rapidly!]
Not only was William’s arm about to break, but if this continued for another half minute, Bruce himself would die because his struggling would cause his spleen to tear completely.
“You ungrateful rich brat.” A flash of ruthlessness appeared in William’s eyes.
Can’t pry it open?
Then I won’t.
William gave up struggling, his left hand suddenly releasing Bruce’s fingers as he turned to grab the medical defibrillator from the nearby cart.
“Charge!
360 Joules!
Shock him to Death!”
The machine emitted a rapid beeping sound.
William grabbed the two paddles coated in conductive gel with one hand.
Ignoring all medical protocols, he pressed one firmly against Bruce’s carotid sinus and the other against his left chest.
“Quiet down!
Stop moving!”
William roared, his thumb slamming down on the discharge button.
“Bang!”
The dull sound of current piercing flesh exploded in the clinic as 360 Joules of high-voltage electricity surged through Bruce’s massive frame.
The future Batman, who would make all of Gotham’s underworld tremble in fear, had his muscles tighten violently as if struck by lightning.
He bounced half a meter into the air, his eyes rolled back, and he slammed back onto the stainless steel table with a heavy thud.
The iron hand that had been locking William’s arm finally slumped down weakly.
“Huff—” William panted heavily, rubbing his right arm where a ring of purple-black bruising had already appeared, hissing from the pain.
“Physical anesthesia, you got off easy.”
He snorted coldly, glanced at the countdown on his retina which had less than forty seconds left, and grabbed the hemostat again, throwing all his focus back into the bloody abdominal surgery.
The suturing needle danced under the shadowless lamp.
Knotting, cutting the thread, cleaning the abdominal cavity, closing the layers.
William’s hands were as steady as a precision industrial machine.
The muscle memory honed over countless nights in the emergency department in his previous life was pushed to its limit now.
[Remaining Time: 00 minutes 10 seconds.]
“The last stitch.”
William flicked his wrist, tightened the suture, and cut it.
“Done.”
He dropped the scissors and leaned his hands on the edge of the operating table, panting heavily as sweat dripped from the tip of his nose into the cold stainless steel tray.
At that exact second, the crimson countdown on his retina stopped abruptly, turning into a brilliant ghostly blue light.
Crisp mechanical prompts exploded in his mind one after another.
[Urgent Mission: Survival in the Dark Alley.
Completed.]
[Mission Target’s vital signs have left the critical state.
Current status: Severely Weak (Stable).]
[Treatment Completion: Perfect.]
[Distributing mission rewards—]
[Obtained Reward 1: Master-level Combat Muscle Memory (Merging)]
[Obtained Reward 2: Special Medical Recovery Potion (Stored in System Space)]
The moment the voice faded, before William could react, an incredibly overbearing heat appeared out of nowhere throughout his entire body.
“Ugh!”
William groaned, his legs going soft, and he knelt directly beside the operating table.
It wasn’t an infusion of knowledge, but the purest and most violent physical reconstruction.
He felt every inch of his muscle fibers being torn and reorganized.
The ruthlessness of Krav Maga, the strangulation of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the bone-shattering power techniques of Muay Thai—countless combat instincts for killing and subduing enemies were forcibly etched into his neural reflex arcs.
Cold sweat instantly soaked through his newly changed surgical scrubs.
It took a full five minutes for the tearing pain to recede like a tide.
William slowly stood up.
He rolled his neck, letting out several crisp bone pops.
Looking down, his body—which had been somewhat thin from years of staying up late for surgeries—didn’t look much different on the outside, but it now contained a terrifying power like a leopard ready to explode at any moment.
He casually picked up a discarded scalpel, his fingers twitching slightly.
“Whoosh!”
The scalpel turned into a flash of cold light and, with a ‘thud,’ pinned a dead fly on the wall five meters away with absolute precision, sinking deep into the wall.
William looked at his hands, a satisfied smile curling at the corners of his mouth.
In this Gotham City with its’simple and honest’ folk, one couldn’t survive long just by knowing how to use a scalpel to save people.
Now, he finally had the confidence to fight back.
With a thought, a glass vial emitting a pale green fluorescence appeared in his palm.
[Special Medical Recovery Potion: Can rapidly repair damaged human cells and accelerate bone healing.
Highly effective for fatal injuries.
Note: The process is accompanied by intense pain.]
William glanced at Bruce Wayne, who was still unconscious on the operating table.
Although this guy had been pulled back from Death’s door by him, with two gunshot wounds plus broken ribs, he would normally have to stay in bed for at least three months.
And Gotham wouldn’t give Batman a three-month vacation.
“Lucky you, and you’ve got a tough life.
But remember to pay a high price for this later.”
William stepped forward and unceremoniously pushed that tube of green potion directly into Bruce’s IV line.
Having done all this, he walked to the sink and washed the blood from his arms and face with cold water.
The clock on the wall pointed to 2:00 AM.
Next was just waiting for the results.