Leon squatted on a rusted drainpipe in the East End, squeezing the energy bar in his hand.
It was too hard to bite into, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away.
What the hell?
Who is an energy bar that even Spider-Man can’t bite through actually made for?
Adhering to the principle that every grain is the fruit of hard work, Leon stuffed it back into his pocket and brushed the crumbs off his hands.
Tonight’s night patrol was already over.
He had originally planned to go back and feed the dog, then continue rushing his draft—the sooner he finished, the sooner he could teach the next session and get paid.
Bruce’s broken leg was almost fully healed; yesterday, he had already started gnawing on Leon’s shoes.
Then, gunshots rang out.
It was like you were just about to get off work when your boss walked over and dumped a pile of project tasks on you.
It wasn’t just sporadic gunfire; it was the dense, crackling explosion of an entire street being lit up at once.
A massive project task.
Two off-road vehicles painted with black skull logos burst from the street corner.
Thompson submachine guns poked out from the windows, tongues of fire spraying half the street.
The suit-clad thugs from The Falcone Family immediately returned fire.
The sound of shell casings hitting the ground was as dense as a rainstorm pounding on a tin roof.
Street-side windows were shattered to bits, cafe awnings were shot into fishing nets, and even two streetlights were knocked out by stray bullets.
A drenched homeless man crawled out of a cardboard box next to a fire hydrant, cursed ‘Motherfucker,’ and ducked back in.
Leon sighed.
“Bullets aren’t free, you know? And who’s going to fix the streetlights? Gotham’s GDP is being shot away by people like you.”
In the middle of the street, a little girl carrying a flower basket stood frozen in place.
Her basket had fallen to the ground, and several white Carnations rolled into the muddy water.
The driver of a black sedan had already been shot dead, his upper body slumped over the steering wheel with his foot still pressed on the gas.
The out-of-control car was like a mad bull, its tires screeching against the pavement and emitting an acrid burnt smell as it skidded sideways toward the little girl.
Leon launched himself directly from the third-story drainpipe.
He was like a stone fired from a slingshot, tracing a red and blue streak through the air.
With his arms spread wide, two strands of Spider-web shot simultaneously from his wrists, accurately sticking to the car’s front bumper.
He landed, dropped into a horse stance with his knees slightly bent, and instantly tensed his core and back muscles.
At that moment, his entire body’s strength poured into his arms.
His feet pressed two deep imprints directly into the asphalt road.
The sedan emitted a piercing screech of twisting metal as he forcibly yanked the front bumper out of shape.
The entire car veered off its original path, grazing the little girl’s skirt, and crashed into the adjacent cafe with a thunderous boom.
The glass curtain wall shattered everywhere.
A coffee machine’s water pipe burst, spraying hot water mixed with glass shards across half the wall.
Leon’s figure flickered, scooping the little girl into his arms before she could even react.
Supporting her back with his left hand and protecting her head with his right, he moved in a few leaps to the safety behind a sturdy stone pillar.
He squatted down and set her on the ground.
The little girl stared at him blankly, her lips trembling.
Her eyes were filled with tears that hadn’t quite fallen yet.
Leon looked down at her, then at the flower basket scattered on the ground.
He picked up a white Carnation from the muddy water that hadn’t been crushed yet, blew the mud off the petals, and tucked it into a gap in his suit’s shoulder—right next to the crooked, centipede-like seam he had sewn himself.
“Be a good girl and hide in the alley for a bit. Close your eyes and count. By the time you open them, everything here will be peaceful.”
She froze for a second before asking, “Count to what?”
Leon thought about it for a moment.
“One hundred. If you count wrong, you have to start over.”
She nodded, closed her eyes, and began to count.
Leon stood up, turned around, and leaped into the center of the crossfire.
The two factions were in the heat of battle.
Falcone’s men were huddled behind two bulletproof sedans changing magazines.
One bald man was shouting into a walkie-talkie, “East End, East End, we need reinforcements!”
Before the words even left his mouth, a volley of bullets forced him back behind the car.
Members of the False Face Society under Black Mask were pushing forward, relying on their superior numbers.
A burly man dragged a drum-fed shotgun from the back seat of an SUV and fired toward Falcone’s position.
He didn’t hit anyone, but he blasted a fire hydrant into a fountain.
A three-meter-high water column erupted, drenching the homeless man who had just crawled back into his cardboard box.
“Fuck!” The homeless man scrambled out of the box and ran deep into the alley, clutching his bedding.
Leon sidestepped a string of stray bullets.
They whizzed past his ear, chipping a row of fragments off the red brick wall behind him.
He casually shot a glob of Spider-web, accurately sealing the barrel of a False Face Society gunman’s weapon.
Just as the guy was about to pull the trigger, the barrel backfired.
The shell casing burst out the side and smacked him in the chin, leaving him holding nothing but a smoking, flared-out metal stump.
“Wow, are you a flower seller too?”
Before the man could answer, Leon had already flipped away.
With a sweeping kick, he knocked down two thugs who were about to throw grenades.
As the grenades rolled out of their hands, Leon’s quick eyes and hands shot two strands of Spider-web, gluing their hands to the spare magazines on their waists.
The pins hadn’t been pulled, but when the two men looked down and saw the green iron lumps in their palms, their faces turned as white as freshly painted walls.
They froze in place, not even daring to take a deep breath.
“Playing with fire late at night? Careful, you might wet the bed.”
He landed, braced his hands on the ground, and crawled rapidly up the wall to circle around to the side.
A bald Falcone squad leader was waving a Uzi and shouting, “Get ’em!” He had barely taken two steps when a strand of Spider-web snagged his collar.
He was yanked up like a fish on a line and hung from a lamppost, dangling precariously as his Uzi fell to the ground.
“Sorry, this area is closed tonight. Can’t you guys go fight in another neighborhood? I just finished my patrol here and I don’t want to do it again. Besides, this is all residential. Do you have any civic sense?”
“Who the hell are you?!” the bald man shouted, struggling on the lamppost.
“For real? You don’t know me?”
Leon pulled a crumpled sticky note from his waist pouch and slapped it onto the bald man’s forehead.
On it was written in crooked handwriting: ‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
Scope of business: Robbery, brawling, intimidation, illegal possession of firearms.
The above actions will result in you being hung from a lamppost.’
The bald man opened his mouth to curse, but the sticky note blew up and covered his eyes, leaving him to only emit a muffled roar of rage.
The rest of the men began to panic.
Several of Black Mask’s henchmen exchanged glances.
While retreating, one shouted into a communicator, “Boss, we ran into that Spider—yeah, the one who hangs people from lampposts—”
Before he could finish, his mouth was sealed by a glob of Spider-web.
Falcone’s men weren’t stupid either.
While Leon was dealing with Black Mask’s crew, they scrambled to drag their wounded into the cars to make their escape.
One of them looked back at the street full of poor bastards hanging from lampposts before diving into the car.
A second later, the door slammed shut without hesitation, and the tires screeched against the pavement as the engine roared, disappearing around the corner.
Black Mask’s men fled as well.
Aside from those pinned to the ground by Spider-web, the rest vanished into the alleys, their footsteps fading into the darkness.
Just then, Leon’s Spider-Sense tingled again.
He crouched on the lamppost and didn’t look back.
He performed a backflip, his body tracing a perfect arc in the air, and his toe accurately kicked the barrel of a pistol equipped with a silencer.
The pistol flew out, hit the wall, and misfired.
The gunman was an elite shooter under Black Mask.
He had risen silently from the cafe ruins, switched to a silenced pistol, and aimed for the back of Leon’s neck.
Before the gunman could react, Leon shot a strand of Spider-web in mid-air to wrap around the man’s waist.
Using the momentum to pull himself over, he drove his knee into the man’s chest, pinning him against the wall.
The impact caused a fine crack to appear in the red brick wall.
“A sneak attack? That’s really low-class. How does your boss train you guys? Last time, someone else tried to sneak up behind me and I left him hanging on a billboard all night. Do you know him? No? Never mind then.”
He pulled the magazine from the gunman’s tactical vest and tossed it aside.
The magazine hit a mobster tied to a lamppost on the head.
The man groaned, harboring resentment but not daring to speak out.
Leon let go, and the gunman slid to the ground.
The violence in his eyes was gone, replaced by confusion; he couldn’t understand how he had been discovered.
At the end of the street, the low roar of an engine approached.
Two cold lights shone from the shadows like the eyes of a steel monster.
The vehicle glided out from the alley mouth almost silently, like a deeper shadow peeling away from the darkness.
Returning to the top of the lamppost, Leon looked toward the light.
It was a pitch-black chassis with sharp-edged armor plates and tires taller than he was.
A thought popped into his head: with current gas prices, how much fuel does that thing burn every time it steps on the gas?
He quickly snuffed out the thought, because calculating it would only make him feel worse.
Leon waved at the black armored vehicle.
“Hey! You’re late. I got them all.”
He pointed at the street full of mobsters tied in various poses by Spider-web, his tone carrying an indisputable pride.
“Black Mask’s guys are on the left, Falcone’s are on the right, and that bald guy in the middle is the leader. I labeled them so they’re easy to recognize. Want to come down and do a headcount? I’ve sorted them by gang and even ordered them by rank. That guy hanging from the highest pole tried to hit me in the neck earlier—he’s particularly, especially low-class.”
Batman did not answer.
He stepped out of the shadows, his goggles coldly scanning the gunmen tied up like cocoons all over the ground.
The sticky note on the bald man’s forehead flapped in the wind.
The handwriting was crooked, and the ink was slightly blurred by the breeze.
His gaze lingered on the bald man for a second before moving to the unlucky fellow wrapped in Spider-web on the cafe sign, finally landing on Leon.
Leon hopped down from the lamppost and brushed the dust off his hands.
“Which side were you chasing?”
“Roman Sionis’s men robbed one of Falcone’s underground trading points.”
Batman’s voice was still just as deep, and he still spoke just as little.
But the good news was that he was finally willing to answer.
“Yeah, Spider-Man and Batman vs. Black Mask. This should be in the papers tomorrow, right?”