The night over Gotham felt like an overturned iron cauldron, smothering every trace of light beneath it.
Leon crouched atop the roof of an abandoned apartment building overlooking the East End slums, watching the sky slowly shift from pitch-black to a filthy gray that resembled a burial shroud left unwashed for decades.
Frost clung to the rusted ventilation duct behind him, and even the frost in Gotham looked gray.
He pulled the zipper of the secondhand work jacket he’d scavenged from a thrift stall all the way to his chin.
The worn collar pressed against his neck, cold and slick like the skin of a dead snake.
Back in the attic, the broken sofa was still waiting for him.
The exposed springs dug straight into his lower back whenever he lay down, and if he stayed still long enough, he could hear his vertebrae grinding faintly against the metal frame beneath the cushions.
But tonight, he didn’t want to go back.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw that shantytown again—the endless layers of corrugated metal roofs stacked like fish scales, pressing down on people who weren’t quite dead yet.
In only half a month, Gotham had already shown him too much.
He had seen a dockworker who offended a gang get skewered alive on an iron frame, his skin burned away until the flesh beneath showed through.
He had seen a homeless man lose his leg after a convenience store owner blasted him with a shotgun over stolen bread.
He had seen three fourteen-year-olds crouched in an alley calmly dividing up loot like kids sharing chips, laughing while they stripped a pair of limited-edition sneakers from another fourteen-year-old lying in a pool of blood nearby.
Leon pulled the crude red-and-blue mask over his face and vaulted silently off the ventilation shaft.
No destination.
No objective.
He just didn’t want to stay anywhere that had a ceiling.
Gotham’s day and night were two completely different cities.
The night belonged to madmen, criminals, and a certain paranoid billionaire who liked hanging from rooftops dressed like a bat.
The daytime Gotham belonged to everyone else: the elites leaving Wayne Tower in handmade suits, the homeless rotting in alleys like petri dishes breeding maggots, and the respectable executives who priced antibiotics beyond the reach of the poor before smiling into cameras and talking about “equal medical access for all citizens.”
Ranchers fenced land.
Farmers increased crop yields.
And Gotham mass-produced suffering.
Leon crouched on the edge of the rooftop, staring down at the streets below while a ridiculous question circled endlessly in his mind.
In Gotham… what exactly qualified someone as a “good person”?
Did the word even mean the same thing here as it did everywhere else?
Before he could think any further, gunshots shattered the silence.
Three muffled shots rang out from the bank on the corner, sounding like nails being hammered through thick blankets.
Then came the screaming.
Even Gotham citizens screamed with a kind of exhausted familiarity, like people inconvenienced by bad weather instead of armed robbery.
Bank heists were practically a daily routine in this city.
Leon dropped from the rooftop.
Inside the bank lobby were four robbers: two carrying pistols, one with a shotgun, and one holding a submachine gun.
The hostages had been herded into a corner and crouched together in rows like frozen meat stacked inside a supermarket freezer.
A young woman in a gray hoodie buried her face in her knees, shoulders trembling silently.
Beside her, a middle-aged man wearing gold-rimmed glasses clutched his head while muttering over and over, “I have a wife and kids… I have a wife and kids…” like a desperate prayer.
His glasses hung crookedly from his face, one lens cracked straight down the center.
At the edge of the crowd sat an old man in a gas station uniform.
His gray hair drooped over his forehead, and the way he hunched down looked disturbingly practiced, as though survival itself had become muscle memory. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
One robber was smashing the reinforced counter glass with a short-handled sledgehammer.
After failing three times in a row, he cursed violently.
Another stuffed stacks of cash into a canvas bag with rough, impatient movements, like he was shoveling garbage into a dumpster.
The third kept sweeping the shotgun muzzle back and forth across the hostages, seemingly deciding which person to execute first if anyone caused trouble.
The last one—the man with the submachine gun—stood in the middle of the lobby barking orders in a shrill voice.
“Move faster! Faster! Faster!”
Leon dropped silently through the ceiling ventilation shaft, hanging upside down above the center of the bank lobby.
No jokes.
No speeches.
Tonight, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man genuinely wasn’t in the mood.
A strand of Spider-Web shot out.
Leon dropped straight down like a falling weight.
His feet landed on the shoulders of the man with the submachine gun while his knees clamped around the robber’s neck.
Twisting his waist sharply, Leon hurled the man across the lobby.
The submachine gun slipped free, skidding across the floor before bouncing against the edge of the counter and spinning away.
The other three robbers turned simultaneously.
Leon gave them no time to react.
A Spider-Web shot from his left wrist and wrapped around the wrist of the man swinging the sledgehammer.
Leon yanked upward violently, causing the hammer to slip from the robber’s grip and smash directly into his own foot.
Before the scream could even leave his throat, Leon had already dragged him flat onto the ground.
Another web shot from Leon’s right hand, wrapping around the ankle of the robber stuffing cash into the bag.
One hard pull sent the man crashing backward onto the tiles.
The back of his skull hit the floor with a sickening thud, and stacks of hundred-dollar bills scattered everywhere.
The shotgun wielder finally reacted and raised his weapon.
Leon tilted slightly sideways.
The movement was tiny, almost lazy, but the buckshot still missed him by less than an inch, blasting a massive hole into the ceiling as plaster rained down like snow.
Leon grabbed the barrel, shoved it upward, and slammed the shotgun stock directly into the robber’s face.
The crack of his nose breaking sounded as crisp as snapping celery.
Four men.
Twelve seconds.
Leon dragged the unconscious robbers outside the bank entrance and tied them neatly to the stone pillars with Spider-Webs.
Different poses.
Perfect spacing.
Like packages waiting for delivery.
One of them was still groaning weakly, blood bubbling from the corner of his mouth while his shattered nose hung crookedly to one side.
Leon crouched in front of him and spoke calmly.
“Your nasal bone’s broken. Go to the emergency room and get it reset. Don’t go through outpatient registration—by the time you finish waiting in line, it’ll heal crooked.”
The robber stared at him blankly, unable to understand what this lunatic in pajamas was talking about.
Did he look like a Wayne Enterprises executive?
The stolen cash bags sat piled beside the counter, swollen with stacks of fresh hundred-dollar bills.
No loose change.
Which, honestly, was obvious.
Nobody robbed banks using sacks full of coins.
Sirens echoed several streets away, growing closer and closer like stray dogs snarling in the distance.
Most of the hostages had already fled.
The young woman in the gray hoodie glanced back once while running out, lips moving as if she wanted to say something, though Leon couldn’t hear it.
The middle-aged man with the glasses ran the fastest and didn’t even stop to retrieve his broken frames.
The old gas station worker was the last to leave.
Before exiting, he paused beside the counter, dug into his pocket, and quietly placed a half-melted hard candy onto the surface.
Then he walked away.
Maybe because Leon really did look like a kid.
Leon stood silently before the bags of money.
According to the role he’d been carefully maintaining for the past half month, he should fire a Spider-Web now, swing out through the rear exit, and disappear before the police arrived.
Clean.
Efficient.
Friendly neighborhood behavior.
Leon reached out and grabbed one of the bags.
The system immediately buzzed inside his head.
A low, constant vibration, like a needle pressing lightly against the back of his skull.
It wasn’t painful, but it made its presence known.
Waiting for him to let go.
Leon didn’t release the bag.
Instead, he lifted it onto his shoulder.
The buzzing intensified slightly.
His mind remained completely empty.
No images of the twelve-year-old girl clutching dirty cash.
No memories of antibiotics priced higher than human lives.
Nothing.
He simply stood there in the empty bank lobby, carrying the money while sirens wailed closer outside and the system buzzed endlessly in his head.
Then he spoke quietly.
“Stop your fucking buzzing.”
The sound paused.
“I know what I’m doing is right.”
Silence.
The system went completely quiet, as though someone had wrapped a hand around its throat.
Leon stacked the bags together, bound them tightly with Spider-Webs, and slung the massive bundle across his back.
With four tons of strength, carrying a few bags of cash barely counted as effort.
Then he walked calmly out the rear entrance of the bank, climbed the wall, and disappeared into Gotham’s gray dawn.