"Hiss... whoo~~~"
Tonight's wind was a little restless. Standing at a street corner, the man pinched his cigarette butt between two fingers and reluctantly took one last drag. Only when the burnt stench of cotton flooded into his nostrils with the nicotine, making him tear up, did he toss the butt into a small puddle by the roadside.
With a sputter, the flame went out, but rain still fell from the sky, while the fireworks remained dazzling.
"Ptooey!" The man spat out a mouthful of black, bloody phlegm, wiped the corner of his mouth with his sleeve, and pulled his trench coat tighter. Hunching his neck like a brooding hen, he muttered, "Nimue's prophecy said I should wait here, but what exactly am I waiting for? Doesn't look like a night for aerialist performances, hehe."
Gotham had a famous pastime: aerialists. Back when the great families ruled the city, people especially enjoyed it—throwing disobedient people off skyscrapers.
On one hand, it created the appearance of suicide. On the other, the victim's remains would be mangled enough to serve as a warning.
Ordinary people did not get to enjoy that treatment. Common little punks would merely end up dead in an alley or on a dock. Only targets with a bit of notoriety could serve as the chicken killed to scare the monkeys.
After parting with Deathstroke at the Oblivion Bar, Constantine had not gone home to sleep. Instead, he came to Gotham and, like an idiot, waited at a crossroads in the middle of the night, getting soaked by rain and blasted by cold wind.
Two hours earlier, a lively crowd of revelers had passed in front of him.
An hour earlier, that same crowd, now mostly drunk, had wandered back past him.
During that time, he had finished the