Bruce's File

Lynn raised his right hand to block.

The blade slashed across his forearm, but his Indestructible skin stopped its edge. He felt the force of the blow, but it didn't break the skin.

The squad leader's hand jolted with the shock of striking stone.

His first reaction wasn't panic but an instant assessment: "The target has extreme durability."

He changed tactics, abandoning slashing attacks for a thrust, concentrating all his strength on a single point.

The wakizashi thrust toward Lynn's eye.

It was a vicious move.

His eyes were a weak point that Indestructible didn't protect.

But Lynn's Super Senses had calculated the blade's entire trajectory while its tip was still fifty centimeters away. Black Widow's combat instincts drove his body into a backward dodge.

The blade's tip grazed past the bridge of his nose.

Lynn struck with both hands at once. His left hand clamped onto the back of the wakizashi, while his right palm slammed into the wrist of the squad leader's weapon hand. His strength surged.

The wrist deformed for an instant under the force. The squad leader could no longer hold on.

The wakizashi slipped from his grasp.

Lynn seized him by the collar and flung him bodily across the room, slamming him into the clinic wall.

A web of cracks spread across the wall.

The squad leader slid down and landed on one knee.

His left hand braced against the floor, while his right arm hung limp at his side. His wrist was ruined.

"Who hired you?" Lynn stood before him.

There were three cuts in his white coat, but not even a red mark on his skin.

The squad leader looked up at him.

There was no fear in his eyes behind the mask, only something cold.

Then his mouth moved.

At the same instant, Lynn heard a tiny click between his molars. A glass capsule had been crushed.

Cyanide.

He reached out to stop him, but it was already too late.

The suicide device used by Hand Death Squad Ninjas was embedded inside the back molar. It took only 0.3 seconds from triggering it to releasing the poison.

The squad leader's body stiffened, then collapsed.

His breathing stopped.

His heartbeat ceased seven seconds later.

Lynn crouched and checked him.

Dead.

Cyanide poisoning. There was no saving him.

He stood and looked at the body on the floor without much emotion.

The Hand's use of Death Squad Ninjas was nothing new. These men had been treated as expendable even while they were alive.

All that remained was the cleanup.

He used the clinic's sutures to bind all eleven surviving ninjas.

The sutures were far stronger than ordinary rope, and the harder they struggled, the tighter they became.

Then he sent an anonymous text to Frank's disposable phone number: "The clinic has twelve packages. One's broken; the rest are usable. Come clean them up ASAP."

Finally, he cleaned.

He wiped away all the blood with bleach.

He put the medicine shelves back in place and replaced the grout between the floor tiles where blood had soaked in.

He tossed the slashed white coat into a garbage bag.

Forty minutes later, Miracle Clinic looked as if nothing had happened.

Lynn went upstairs, changed into a fresh white coat, and lay back down on the folding bed.

He didn't know that seven hundred meters from the clinic, a miniature bat-shaped surveillance drone on the roof of an apartment building had recorded everything that had happened that night.

The Batcave.

Bruce Wayne sat in front of the massive monitor, replaying the infrared footage for the third time.

The image wasn't very clear. The distance of seven hundred meters and the refraction through the clinic's glass windows had blurred the infrared footage to some extent.

But it was clear enough to make out a few key details.

Alfred stood behind him, holding a cup of tea that had gone cold.

"That's the third time, sir."

Bruce didn't respond.

He froze the footage at the moment Lynn took down the first group of ninjas—the knife-hand strike to the carotid sinus.

"Zoom in. Frame by frame."

The image enlarged to show Lynn's right hand.

The angle of the strike, the area of contact, the direction of force—all were broken down into a sequence of still frames.

Bruce stared at it for ten seconds.

"The angle of that knife-hand strike," he finally said. "To hit the carotid sinus precisely, you need to concentrate the force on a two-centimeter-wide area along the outer edge of the palm, while keeping the angle between forty-five and fifty degrees. Miss by even a little, and you either won't knock them out or you'll kill them."

"How long would that take to learn?" Alfred asked.

"For an ordinary person? At least two years of specialized training. A prodigy, at least six months." Bruce skipped to the footage of Lynn dealing with the second group of ninjas. "But that's not the point."

He pointed to the moment Lynn used a flail in the stairwell to snare a ninja's ankle.

"The way he used this weapon—he wasn't used to fighting with a flail. He took it from his opponent. But even the first time he used one, he showed this level of distance control and force distribution. That means his combat foundation isn't from a single discipline."

Bruce fast-forwarded to Lynn's face-off with the squad leader.

"Look here." He pointed to the frame where Lynn leaned back to dodge the wakizashi thrust.

"That backward lean was just enough for the blade's tip to graze past his nose—less than a centimeter off. Reflexes alone can't explain that precision. It was anticipation. He had already calculated the blade's trajectory before his opponent even swung."

"Much like your own methods," Alfred said.

Bruce didn't reply.

He rewound to the part where Lynn used the medicine shelves to set a trap.

Then came the slick alcohol-covered floor. Then the tactic of using the narrow stairwell to limit the enemy's numerical advantage.

"Using the environment, setting traps in advance, strategies for dismantling a group while outnumbered..." Bruce's voice dropped low.

"These aren't things a combat instructor can teach. They're a way of thinking honed in real combat—or cultivated through a particular kind of tactical training."

He paused.

"Some of the decision-making patterns in his tactical thinking are a lot like mine."

Alfred's hand paused around his teacup.

"You mean—"

"I'm not sure. But it's too much of a coincidence." Bruce tapped a few keys. "Pull up all the records from when I was treated at his clinic three weeks ago."

A file opened, documenting the entire course of Bruce's treatment at Miracle Clinic.

He had been half-conscious at the time, but the recording system built into the Batsuit had preserved a wealth of data.

Bruce scrolled to a point in the recording: some of Lynn's decisions during the surgery.

"Here." He pointed to a line of data. "When treating my knife wound, he chose to make the incision from lower left to upper right. That's different from the usual approach of a right-handed surgeon."

"The standard approach should have been top to bottom. But the cut from lower left to upper right happened to avoid an unusually dense patch of deep scar tissue between my seventh and ninth ribs."

"I got those scars when I was seventeen, during my training with the League of Assassins. Apart from me and Alfred, no one knew they were there."

"But he avoided them."

Alfred set down his teacup.

Bruce opened a new encrypted document.

The file was titled Investigation on Lynn.