Falcone.
One of Gotham's old-established crime families.
Lynn made a note of the name and didn't press him.
He found some nylon rope in the storage room and tied Leo up tight with three different kinds of knots.
Then he started cleaning up.
After simulating seventeen possible plans in seconds, he chose the best one: back up the surveillance footage of Snake Eyes's surgery to an encrypted cloud drive as leverage, delete every image involving himself and overwrite the data three times to make it unrecoverable, then format the entire hard drive.
He tucked the forged surgical records onto Leo, leaving them for Kingpin's men to find.
Leo had never told him the safe's combination, but Lynn figured it out in eleven seconds from the wear on the keys.
He gathered the passport and more than two thousand dollars in cash.
He erased every trace of himself from the clinic.
Clean, efficient, and airtight.
Leo lay on the floor with his neck crooked, watching Lynn finish everything. At last, fear eclipsed every other emotion in his eyes.
"Who are you, really...?"
Lynn crouched down to meet his gaze.
Behind his gold-rimmed glasses, his expression was calm and cool. He looked at Leo as if he were a patient file that had already been dealt with.
He didn't answer. Instead, he stood and brushed the dust off his knees.
Behind him, in the operating room, the heart monitor's beeping suddenly changed rhythm—the beats quickened, and the waveform grew stronger.
Lynn turned around.
On the operating table, Batman's fingers twitched.
He was waking up.
The heart monitor's beeping suddenly grew shrill, its steady waveform jerking into a jagged sawtooth.
Lynn turned around.
The man in the tattered armor on the operating table was opening his eyes.
This wasn't the slow return to consciousness of someone coming out of a coma.
Batman's eyes focused almost instantly.
His pupils constricted, his eyes moved, and his irises reacted to the light—the entire physiological process was over in two seconds.
The first thing he did upon waking wasn't groan or ask a question. He scanned.
With the eyes of a beast, he scanned the entire room.
Lynn stood perfectly still.
His mind worked at a speed beyond ordinary comprehension, dissecting the true intent behind every one of Batman's minute movements.
Bruce Wayne's gaze first fell on his chest.
The stitches were neat, the bandages clean, and the knife that had taken his consciousness was gone.
He drew a faint breath, testing the limits of his lungs.
His gaze shifted left.
He glanced at the readings on the heart monitor once, clearly committing every key figure to memory.
Next, the surroundings.
The fluorescent light buzzed overhead.
Mold spotted the wallpaper in the corner.
Blood-soaked clumps of gauze littered the floor.
Then there was Leo, bound up like a human dumpling, huddled in despair against the wall, barely daring to breathe.
Finally, on another operating table, Snake Eyes's corpse lay covered by a white sheet, a pair of ashen feet exposed to the air.
Everything ultimately led to Lynn.
The gaze came to rest on him.
That stare felt almost tangible, like a probe, like a scalpel, peeling back his disguise layer by layer.
It was analyzing him.
His age, build, stance, the blood on his hands, the expression behind his lenses.
And the position where he stood, less than two meters from the operating table—a deadly distance.
The entire scan took no more than five seconds.
"You saved me."
Bruce Wayne's first words were a statement, not a thank-you.
His voice was hoarse from blood loss, but every word rang out as clearly as a strike against an iron plate.
Lynn nodded without rushing to respond.
Bruce tried to push himself upright. The moment he put weight on his arms, his brow furrowed sharply.
A violent, dull pain flared where his ribs were broken. He clenched his teeth and forced himself to sit up.
"What's happening outside?" he asked.
"Not good," Lynn replied. "The explosions stopped over forty minutes ago. I've been locked in here and can't confirm what's going on outside."
He told the truth.
But only part of it.
Bruce looked down at his battered armor. The bat symbol on his chest was covered in blood and scorch marks, but its outline remained clear.
He didn't hide it.
He didn't acknowledge it, either.
"Do you know who I am?" Bruce raised his head, his gaze boring straight into Lynn's eyes.
It was a direct question.
Lynn already had his answer ready.
"I recognize the suit." Lynn pointed to the emblem on his chest. "Everyone in Gotham knows it. But I don't care who you are."
Bruce didn't reply.
He stared at Lynn for a full three seconds.
Lynn caught a detail no ordinary person could have noticed: the depressor muscle beneath the right corner of Bruce's mouth twitched faintly, by less than half a millimeter.
He was assessing Lynn, judging whether his words were true.
"I'm a businessman," Bruce said at last. "I do business in Gotham. I ran into trouble tonight. Someone was after me, and by the time I made it here, I was out of it. Is this place a... clinic?"
A businessman.
Behind Lynn's lenses, the faintest hint of a smile flickered.
A "businessman" in forty-million-dollar Kevlar armor, with seventeen bullet wounds and a Joker-made poisoned blade wound.
His face promptly took on a nervous look, and his fingers fidgeted without thinking—a carefully crafted, youthful gesture of unease.
"Yeah, a clinic. An unlicensed one," Lynn said. "I'm just an assistant. The owner ran off."
"Ran off?"
"Something happened." Lynn nodded toward Leo. "It had to do with him, not you."
Bruce's gaze followed his gesture to Leo, who was bound tight with gauze stuffed in his mouth. He could only let out a despairing whimper.
"Who is he?"
"The clinic's owner. He killed someone and tried to run, but then a fight broke out outside, so he came back." Lynn's tone was as flat as if he were recounting a piece of news that had nothing to do with him.
Bruce glanced at Snake Eyes's corpse again but didn't ask for details.
A few seconds of silence passed.
"You did a good job with the surgery," Bruce said, abruptly changing the subject as he examined the stitches on his chest. "The density and angle of these stitches aren't something an assistant would manage. Did you study surgery?"
Here came the test.
Bruce was probing Lynn's real abilities. The identity of a "clinic assistant" couldn't explain this level of expertise.
"I studied a little," Lynn said. "At a community college medical school. I was there for two years, but I ran out of money and dropped out."
"Two years was enough to get this good?"
"I learn fast."
Bruce didn't press further, but his deep-set eyes made it clear he hadn't believed a word.
Over the next few minutes, his probing became more systematic.
He remarked as if casually, "It's dangerous outside."
Then he added softly in French, "Outside is hell."
An unexpected foreign phrase, tossed out as if in passing.
An ordinary person would ignore it, or might not understand it at all.
But if Lynn's reaction showed that he understood, it would prove his education went far beyond that of a "community college dropout."
Lynn understood.
He knew not only that it was French, but also that the expression was common in upper-class conversation.
But he chose to play dumb.
"What?" He tilted his head slightly, his expression perfectly blank.
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