Facing the Dark Knight

Falcone.

The old-guard crime family of Gotham.

Lynn noted the name without asking further questions.

He found nylon rope in the utility closet and bound Leo tightly using three different types of knots.

Then, he began to clean up.

Simulating seventeen scenarios in a few seconds, he chose the optimal solution: back up the surveillance footage of the Snake Eyes surgery to an encrypted cloud drive as leverage, delete all footage involving himself, overwrite it three times to ensure it was unrecoverable, and finally, format the entire hard drive.

He stuffed the forged surgical records back onto Leo, leaving them for Kingpin's men to discover.

Leo had never told him the safe's password, but based on the wear on the keys, he had deduced it in eleven seconds.

Passport, over two thousand dollars in cash—all secured.

His own traces were completely wiped from the clinic.

Clean, efficient, and airtight.

On the floor, Leo watched Lynn finish all this with his neck crooked, the fear in his eyes finally overwhelming all other emotions.

"Who... who exactly are you?"

Lynn squatted down to look him in the eye.

The gaze behind his gold-rimmed glasses was calm and cold, looking at him as if he were a completed medical record.

He did not answer, stood up, and brushed the dust off his knees.

Behind him in the operating room, the rhythm of the "beep-beep" from the ECG monitor suddenly changed—the frequency accelerated, and the waveform intensified.

Lynn turned his head.

On the operating table, Batman's fingers twitched.

He was waking up.

The beeping of the ECG monitor turned sharp, and the waveform jumped from a gentle curve into jagged, ferocious teeth.

Lynn turned around.

On the operating table, the man in the tattered armor was opening his eyes.

It was not the slow awakening of someone recovering from a coma.

Batman's eyes focused almost instantly.

Pupil contraction, eyeball rotation, pupillary light reflex—the entire physiological process finished in two seconds.

The first thing this man did upon waking was not to groan, nor to ask questions, but to scan.

With a pair of beast-like eyes, he scanned the entire room.

Lynn stood where he was, motionless.

His brain was operating at a speed beyond human comprehension, dismantling the true intent behind every micro-movement of Batman.

Bruce Wayne's gaze first landed on his own chest.

The stitches were neat, the gauze clean, and the dagger that had stolen his consciousness was nowhere to be seen.

He took a very light breath, testing the limits of his lungs.

His gaze shifted left.

He swept over the data on the ECG monitor in a single glance, clearly having already memorized all the key indicators.

Next was the environment.

The buzzing fluorescent light on the ceiling.

The moldy wallpaper in the corner.

The blood-soaked gauze pads on the floor.

Then, there was Leo, bound like a rice dumpling, shrinking desperately against the wall, his breathing nearly stalled.

Finally, on the other operating table, the corpse of Snake Eyes covered by a white sheet, a pair of gray, lifeless feet exposed to the air.

Everything eventually converged on Lynn.

The gaze stopped.

That look felt tangible, like a probe, like a scalpel, peeling away his disguise layer by layer.

It was analyzing.

Analyzing his age, build, posture, the bloodstains on his hands, the expression behind his lenses.

And the lethal distance of less than two meters between where he stood and the operating table.

The entire scanning process took no more than five seconds.

"You saved me."

Bruce Wayne spoke, his first sentence a statement, not a thank you.

His voice was hoarse from blood loss, yet every word was as clear as if struck against an iron plate.

Lynn nodded, not rushing to respond.

Bruce tried to prop up his upper body, but as soon as his arm exerted force, his brow furrowed sharply.

A violent, dull pain radiated from his fractured ribs; he gritted his teeth and forced himself to sit up.

"The situation outside?" he asked.

"Not good," Lynn replied. "The explosions stopped over forty minutes ago. I was locked in here and couldn't confirm the situation outside."

He told the truth.

But only part of it.

Bruce looked down at his tattered armor; the bat emblem on his chest was covered in blood and scorch marks, yet its outline remained distinct.

He did not cover it.

He did not admit it, either.

"Do you know who I am?" Bruce raised his head, his gaze piercing straight into the depths of Lynn's eyes.

The question was direct.

Lynn's answer had long been prepared.

"I recognize this suit," Lynn pointed to the emblem on his chest. "No one in Gotham doesn't recognize it. But who you are—I don't care."

Bruce did not respond.

He stared at Lynn for a full three seconds.

Lynn caught a detail an ordinary person would miss: a faint contraction of less than half a millimeter in the depressor anguli oris muscle below the right corner of Bruce's mouth.

He was evaluating, judging the truth of those words.

"I'm a businessman," Bruce finally said. "Doing business in Gotham. I ran into some trouble tonight, someone was hunting me, and I wasn't conscious when I escaped in here. This place is... a clinic?"

A businessman.

A flicker of nearly non-existent amusement flashed behind Lynn's lenses.

A "businessman" wearing forty million dollars worth of Kevlar armor, suffering from seventeen gunshot wounds plus a special toxin-laced blade from the Joker.

Yet, a look of nervousness appeared on his face at the right moment, his fingers rubbing together unconsciously—a carefully designed, uneasy little gesture belonging to a young man.

"Right, a clinic. The unofficial kind," Lynn said. "I'm just an assistant, the boss ran off."

"Ran off?"

"Yeah, something happened." Lynn tilted his chin toward Leo. "It has to do with him, not you."

Bruce's gaze followed toward Leo, who was bound tight, a piece of gauze stuffed in his mouth, capable only of desperate whimpers.

"Who is he?"

"The clinic owner. He killed someone and wanted to run, but then the fighting started outside, and he fled back here." Lynn's tone was as flat as if he were recounting a piece of unrelated social news.

Bruce glanced at Snake Eyes' corpse again without asking for details.

A few seconds of silence.

"Your surgery was well done," Bruce suddenly changed the subject, looking down to examine the stitches on his chest. "This suture density and angle—it's not the level of an assistant. Did you study surgery?"

The test had arrived.

Bruce was probing his true capabilities; the identity of a "clinic assistant" could not explain this level of professionalism.

"Studied a bit," Lynn said. "Two years at a community college medical school. Ran out of money, dropped out."

"Two years is enough to reach this level?"

"I learn things fast."

Bruce did not press further, but those deep eyes indicated that he did not believe a single word.

Over the next few minutes, the probing became more systematic.

He mentioned, as if casually: "It's dangerous outside."

Then, he added softly in French: "Outside is hell."

An abrupt, casual foreign phrase.

An ordinary person would ignore it or simply not understand it at all.

But as long as Lynn's reaction showed he understood, it would prove his educational background was far more than that of a "community college dropout."

Lynn understood.

He not only knew it was French, but he also knew this usage was common in the colloquialisms of high society.

But he chose to play dumb.

"What?" He tilted his head slightly, his expression perfectly bewildered.