The Eighteen-Year-Old Alma Mater Dance

Henri Ducard!

Ra's al Ghul's current name. His real name was unimportant. He had many identities, and names were nothing more than labels to him. All that mattered was knowing that he was the leader of the League of Shadows.

The League of Shadows had endured for centuries without falling. Its purpose was to fight against... ahem, to uphold order and justice in the world, eliminating decadence and corruption.

Gotham was a breeding ground for crime. Its persistently high crime rate attracted hordes of scum and villains every year, stimulating tourism, promoting sustainable economic growth, and creating a healthy, thriving cycle for the criminal industry.

Gotham City's crime families, secret organizations, and gangs were tangled together like roots, parasites sucking the lifeblood from the city and steadily pushing it into the abyss. The government's inaction, the police's incompetence, the public's indifference—everything made the city seem utterly hopeless.

In Duka's eyes, Gotham was a diseased tumor. Before the cancer cells spread wildly, it had to be removed as soon as possible. You couldn't say Duka's ideas were wrong. He just had a hole in his brain. In Wuxia World, he would have been a martial arts prodigy whose skull cap could fly right off his head.

Though Duka's thinking was extreme and he loved taking things to extremes, his skills were indeed extraordinary, reaching the limits of what ordinary people could achieve. The League of Shadows members trained by him could infiltrate and assassinate with ease, each one capable of taking on ten opponents.

Arkham was a psychiatric hospital, at most a heavily guarded prison. It took the shadow warriors no effort at all to infiltrate it. These executioners, who had operated in the darkness for years, were like true shadows. Their tactical execution was as precise as a scalpel, dismantling