Searching for Bruce

A light rain drizzled down that evening.

A strange man had arrived in the slums where Miller Bay met Adams Harbor.

Draped in a gray raincoat, he slipped through the shadows of abandoned homes.

He seemed to have found his target, stopping in front of an old gasoline drum with a fire burning inside.

The homeless man warming himself by the fire stepped back and drew a dagger hidden behind his waist.

The dagger reflected the flickering firelight.

"You trying to rob me?"

"Don't get me wrong. I'm just looking for information. I heard someone pulled a strange man out of the river mouth about a year ago."

"Nobody you're looking for here. Get lost!"

"A little goodwill."

A breath of vapor escaped from beneath the hood as the man held out a hundred-dollar bill.

The homeless man's expression softened a little. He crouched lower and slowly approached, then snatched the bill.

"Bodies float down the Gotham River and out to sea every day. People here live off whatever they can strip from them. Nobody remembers what they look like." The homeless man held the bill to the firelight, checking the security thread beside Franklin's portrait, then grinned to reveal a mouthful of crooked yellow teeth.

"If you'd seen him, you'd remember. He wore black body armor and a cape, with a mask covering half his face."

The homeless man raised his eyes warily.

"What exactly are you after?!"

William pulled off his rain poncho.

"I just think Gotham still needs Batman..."

"Don't say that name! For every person who needs him, there's another who hates him. Why should I trust you?"

William's heart raced. He had been wandering the slums for three days and had finally found a lead on Batman. It seemed Zsasz's information had been accurate.

He nearly revealed his identity, but then remembered the police's poor reputation in Gotham.

William pulled out another two bills.

He believed money was always the best way to win people over.

The homeless man licked his lips and abandoned any thought of digging further.

But when he reached for the money, William pulled his hand back.

"You can't keep getting money out of me with words alone. I need solid evidence."

The homeless man turned and rummaged beneath the bedding in the corner, pulling out a crumpled mask.

With those pointed ears on top, it was unmistakably Batman's cowl.

"This thing's brought me luck. Ever since I kept it, those damn bikers haven't ridden past my door late at night. Throw in another two hundred and it's yours!"

William pulled out two more bills.

Maroni would never have imagined he would spend his undercover operation funds on Batman merchandise.

Then he asked who else had any Batman gear. With the homeless man guiding him, he toured the entire slum and collected the cape, chest armor, and boots.

William felt like the Destined One, tasked with collecting the scripture-seeker's six relics, even if none of this equipment was worth as much as its owners' accounts.

"When I took off his mask, I heard him groaning. Said his head hurt."

"'Who am I? Where is this?!' That's what I heard."

Combining these accounts with Gordon's clues, William surmised that Batman had probably been brainwashed during his fight with the Mad Hatter, erasing all his memories. That would also explain why he had vanished completely from Gotham despite still being alive.

Gotham was so big. Where could a man with amnesia be hiding?

He pondered this and was about to take his haul home when faint sounds of an argument drifted from the intersection.

William hid behind an abandoned phone booth and peered ahead.

Several men had surrounded a young man carrying an umbrella. He was tall and powerfully built, with neatly cropped black hair and both hands in his pockets.

Despite the winter weather, he wore only a gray T-shirt. Scars covered his exposed skin, making him look like a marble statue carved by an inexperienced craftsman.

The pair of crimson boxing gloves hanging around his neck hinted at his occupation.

The argument grew increasingly heated, and William saw someone pull out a knife.

The young man reacted almost instantly, kicking the knee of the man behind him before turning and pinning the knife wielder's wrist.

A shoulder throw, a soccer kick, a high roundhouse to the head-in the blink of an eye, the young man had dropped four middle-aged men.

His ruthless moves left William staring in amazement.

"Could this guy be Batman?"

A bold theory occurred to William, but he immediately shook his head and laughed at his own naïveté.

Although his height and hair color were both similar to Bruce's, William had only just begun investigating Batman's disappearance. What were the odds of the man himself falling into his lap?

Just as he dismissed the thought, a system notification popped up.

[High-difficulty side quest detected: Encounter a nameless girl with amnesia and help her recover her memories. Completing this quest rewards one use of "save access" and one Marking Beacon.]

Had his guess been right?

William blinked in astonishment and immediately summoned his AI assistant.

"Hello, I'm here!"

"This, uh, nameless... girl with amnesia. Is she Bruce Wayne?"

"If I told you in advance, how could it count as a high-difficulty side quest?"

"Then what's this save point in the quest rewards?"

"You've played games before, haven't you?"

This AI assistant's replies were truly infuriating.

"I just want to confirm: can this thing ignore space or time and send me back to a saved state with a 'whoosh'?"

"More or less. If you complete this high-difficulty quest, Little A will explain everything in detail. Is there anything else you need?"

William hesitated no longer. He stuffed his newly acquired Batman gear into the abandoned phone booth and chased after the young man.

The men were still rolling and twitching on the street corner. Passersby kept walking, unwilling to spare them even a pitying glance.

William stepped over their kicking, contorted legs and watched the young man enter a bar around the corner.

It was a bar converted from an apartment building. Its battered sign read "Black Truffle," and several bullet holes remained in the tiles beside it.

Despite being such an unremarkable bar, it actually had security stationed at the entrance.

A burly white man in a leather jacket stood with his belly jutting out and his hands crossed over his crotch. The grip of a gun was just visible beneath his belt.

As expected, William was stopped.

"Name!"

"William Hans."

"You're not one of our customers. Get out." The guard waved impatiently.

William flashed his badge. Sure enough, that intimidated him. The white man frowned and muttered a few words, then took out a radio to report the situation.

"Boss, the cops are here again. What do we do?"

"What the hell! I already paid this quarter... Forget it. Send him up!"

The guard opened the door and gestured for him to enter.

The bar was dimly lit, and a stale reek of alcohol seemed to have soaked into the wood grain.

It wasn't opening time yet. Only a few drunks sat drinking alone at the counter, while the servers and bartenders played blackjack at a table in the corner. They cast hostile looks at William as he appeared.

William was taken upstairs, where a lean man with a goatee received him.

"Who do you work for?"

The man's tone was hardly welcoming. He looked this unexpected visitor to the slums up and down, then poured a glass of whiskey and pushed it toward William.

"I don't work for anyone. I just saw someone fighting in the street, then coming into your place..."

Before he could finish, the lean man had propped his leather shoes on the desk.

He raised his clinking glass and drained it in one gulp.

In his other hand, a gun's dark muzzle pointed at William.

"Get out! I won't say it twice."

Only then did William realize he had made a foolish mistake. In the slums, being a police officer had never meant anything. What mattered was the network of connections behind that officer.