By the time the surgery was halfway through, Jonah had already realized something was wrong. This was not a situation he could handle, but gamblers were like that—until they had lost the shirts off their backs, they always believed they could turn things around.
When Strange appeared, Jonah's misjudgment of the situation had reached an absurd level. He believed that if he were given another half hour, the surgery would certainly succeed perfectly, and Strange knew that precisely why he had persuaded the agent to steal his credit.
In the operating room, Strange was like a lion patrolling his territory. He strolled behind Jonah without any intention of taking over as the lead surgeon.
Yet Jonah felt as though he had returned to his days as an intern, when the attending surgeon teaching him had completed a procedure so simple it could not have been simpler. Just as he had back then, he panicked.
He desperately analyzed the paths and structures of those anomalous nerves, completely forgetting the model they had devised during the consultation. Instead, he started over from scratch, preparing to take a gamble.
"Don't you want to give it a try?"
Strange heard a voice by his ear. At first, he thought it was a hallucination, but soon he heard the same call again. He turned toward where the voice had come from.
In that instant, Strange's pupils contracted sharply. A black-haired, blue-eyed youth stood in the corner of the operating room, smiling at him.
It was Bruce Wayne.
More precisely, it was Bruce Wayne's soul. Yet it was far more substantial than an ordinary person's soul, with a hazy glow lingering around its edges.
"Don't you want to try saving me?"
The instant Bruce's voice appeared in Strange's mind, alarm bells rang in his heart. He