"Let's see what kind of danger made our lovely neighbors skip their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and insist on calling that bat instead."
Below the clock tower stood a convenience store that had already closed, its rolling shutter halfway down.
It wasn't Gordon projecting the Bat-Signal. There were no police cars or sirens, just an armored truck with its rear doors pried open and three masked robbers stuffing money bags into a van.
Honestly, Chen Mo was a little disappointed. Just a bank robbery. He'd thought he might run into Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze, the Riddler, or someone like that.
Ever since coming to Gotham City, he'd handled at least five petty bank robberies like this a day.
Ah, such wholesome local customs.
The Bat-Signal had been switched on by an old man nearby wearing a gas station uniform. It was a portable handheld searchlight with a homemade bat-shaped piece of black paper stuck over it. Light shone past the paper, casting a crooked bat silhouette onto the clock tower wall.
The old man crouched behind a trash can outside the convenience store, holding up his homemade searchlight, looking as if he were doing both the bravest and stupidest thing he'd ever done in his life.
Chen Mo hung upside down from the lamppost above him. "Hey, old-timer, did you make that yourself?"
The old man jumped and nearly dropped the searchlight. "S-Spider-Man?"
Chen Mo pointed at the bat silhouette on the clock tower.
"Nice craftsmanship. But are you sure Batman's free tonight? He might be beating people up at the docks, or chasing Penguin. You know, Batman's a busy guy. Good thing you've still got a friendly neighbor."
Around here, there was no way Batman could drive over faster than he could swing.
Chen Mo lowered himself from the lamppost. "Wait here. Don't get hit by a stray bullet."
The three robbers were stuffing the last money bag into the van.
Chen Mo crouched on the van's roof, waited for them to stack the bags, then spoke. "Hey, you three. Do you need a permit for your armored truck modification service? As far as I know, Gotham City's fines for illegal modifications are pretty steep. And you're not wearing seat belts."
The leader reacted fastest, reaching for the pistol at his waist.
Chen Mo's webbing was faster.
Before the gun cleared its holster, his wrist was already stuck to the door handle with webbing.
The second robber turned to run, but Chen Mo swept his legs out from under him. Webbing wrapped around his ankle, leaving him dangling upside down from the van's side mirror.
The third robber raised his hands and surrendered without a fight.
"Smart choice."
Chen Mo webbed all three of them and the money bags to the side of the van, then wrote a few words on a sticky note: "Attempted ATM robbery. Stolen money recovered. Suspects waiting on the vehicle for police. You're welcome."
He stuck it to the van's windshield.
He'd even paid for the sticky notes himself.
The old man emerged from behind the trash can, still holding his homemade searchlight.
"Th-thank you. I thought Batman would come..."
Chen Mo dusted off his hands. "But I got here first. And seriously, don't you think his entrances are too scary? Suddenly appearing out of the shadows, white eyes, a voice like sandpaper going, 'I am the night'-could your heart take that?"
The old man thought about it, then shook his head.
Chen Mo nodded. "So, your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, at your service. Free of charge. No tips. Just smiles."
He shot out a web and swung to the top of the clock tower before the old man could react, disappearing into the night.
The old man stood outside the convenience store, holding that crooked bat searchlight, and the corners of his mouth did indeed lift into a smile.
"Spider-Man?"
The smile curved very high, very strangely.
Gotham's four-in-the-morning wind was like a stepmother's hefty slap, stinging his face.
Chen Mo crouched on the rooftop of a building beside the robbed bank, looking down at his new outfit.
This suit, crafted at the hefty cost of three hundred and sixty dollars, finally stopped him from looking like some pervert in red-and-blue long johns out stealing manhole covers in the middle of the night.
Why hadn't anyone complimented his cool new clothes during tonight's patrol?
A bunch of heartless people.
People who ignored spiders didn't deserve love.
Chen Mo reached up and touched the pale gray polymer armor patch on his chest. It was only a thin layer, but at least it could stop a small-caliber handgun round at close range.
Of course, if the other guy had a shotgun or rifle, he'd still have to obligingly drop dead on the spot.
...Just kidding. With Spider-Sense, they couldn't hit him in the first place.
Chen Mo silently snarked to himself.
The night finally settled into a temporary quiet. Chen Mo crouched on the rooftop, spacing out while doing his accounts in his head.
For this outfit, he'd spent two whole hours haggling with the ghoul-looking owner of an underground materials shop.
Five yards of ballistic nylon: sixty-six dollars.
Lightweight titanium alloy plates, only a few small pieces, but he'd bargained those down to sixty dollars too.
The most ridiculous purchase was the handheld sewing machine that leaked electricity: thirty-five dollars.
With assorted polymer fibers and heavy-duty glue added in, his two-thousand-dollar writing payment had shrunk substantially in an instant.
He now had a little over sixteen hundred dollars left.
That sounded like a lot, but in a place like Gotham, where even the air smelled of money, it would only buy him two months of compressed biscuits.
Chen Mo had also checked Gotham's rental websites.
Even the worst basement in the East End, with paint flaking off the walls like dandruff, cost five hundred dollars a month.
And that didn't include the deposit.
The real problem was that he was undocumented, without so much as a legitimate credit history. Landlords looked at him like a walking corpse that might die in the apartment at any moment.
They could rent to him, but it would cost extra. A lot extra.
Renting was out of the question. He wasn't renting a place in this lifetime.
Chen Mo thought back to the attic where he lived.
Sure, it leaked, had no stairs, and had a ventilation opening so narrow only a cat could squeeze through, but it had the advantage of being free.
In this fucked-up world, free was the greatest justice.
Chen Mo took a compressed biscuit out of his waist pouch.
The thing was as hard as a brick and tasted no different from chewing a completely dried-out cardboard box.
He took a bite, making his jaw ache.
Just how little did these white Americans expect out of life to invent such inhumane food?
High fat and high calories were one thing, but some desserts were so sweet they actually made his Spider-Sense imagine a "lethal threat."
He even suspected Gotham had so many criminals purely because they'd eaten too many doughnuts and pickled their brains in sugar.
Just as he was about to swallow the last mouthful of cardboard-flavored biscuit, his ears twitched.
A sound was coming from the alley.
Not the usual screams during a robbery, but a few faint, weak barks.
Mixed in were several men's laughter and curses.
Chen Mo sighed and stuffed the remaining half biscuit back into his pouch.
"Time for the friendly neighbor's night shift. Are there really no supervillains who want to take me on?"
He leaped, his red-and-blue figure tracing another crisp arc through the air.
Unfortunately, the nearby buildings were a little short, and he nearly skimmed the ground.
Deep in the alley.
Three thugs in ragged leather jackets stood gathered around a corner.
Their leader was viciously kicking a curled-up shadow with his mud-covered boots.
It was a palm-sized, sandy-yellow puppy, its hind leg dangling at an unnatural angle.
It couldn't bark, only make intermittent, snuffling whimpers.
Deeper in the alley lay the already stiff corpse of a mother dog.
Her fur was scruffy and her belly sunken; she'd clearly given birth not long ago.
Chen Mo landed on a nearby trash can without making a sound.
He glanced at the mother dog.
He vaguely remembered her from the day he'd "scattered money."
That day, she'd curled up beside a dying homeless man, persistently licking his ice-cold fingers.
The homeless man had died. A passing gangster had kicked her, but she'd eventually limped back to this alley.
Now she'd died here, leaving this world with an even more pitiful little thought.
"Hey, guys, did you pick the wrong ball for soccer practice?"
Chen Mo crouched on the trash can lid.
The three thugs spun around.
"Spider-Man? Oh, you got new clothes. That suit looks cool."
The leader was just about to reach for the dagger behind his waist.
"Thanks. Seriously, you're the first person today to say I look cool."
Chen Mo moved like a bolt of lightning streaking through the night.
His webbing stuck precisely to the man's wrist, and he yanked hard.
Crack.
It was the sound of a joint dislocating.
"Having fun kicking just now?"
Chen Mo planted a side kick squarely in another thug's chest.
The man flew backward as though struck by a speeding truck and slammed into the wall with a dull thud.
The third man froze in terror, then turned to run.
Chen Mo flicked his right hand, and webbing wound around the man's ankle as though alive.
"Don't go. Let's talk about the Gotham amendments to animal protection law."
In less than ten seconds.
The three men were stuck back-to-back in one giant ball of flesh, hanging high from a lamppost.
"Help! My ribs are broken!"
"Shut up. I controlled my strength. Your ribs can't be broken. When the cops come, remember to tell them you flew up there because gravity was unstable."
Chen Mo clapped his hands, that vicious streak vanishing without a trace.
He walked to the corner and slowly crouched down.
The puppy huddled in the shadows, trembling like a leaf, its clear eyes filled with fear.
Chen Mo was silent for a few seconds.
He reached out, his movements as gentle as if he feared disturbing a beautiful dream.
The puppy instinctively tried to retreat, but the pain from its broken hind leg left it unable to cry out.
"Shh, don't be scared. I'm not a bad guy."
Chen Mo scooped it off the cold ground and cradled it in his arms.
Chen Mo took the remaining half biscuit from his waist pouch, crumbled it between his fingers, and fed it to the puppy a little at a time.
The puppy tentatively licked his fingers.
The touch was warm.
Its tail gave a weak wag, like a flame about to go out in the cold wind.
Chen Mo stared at that wagging tail and suddenly felt his nose sting a little.
He looked around, confirming there were no other living people in the alley besides the three half-dead pieces of trash hanging from the lamppost.
And with the wind blowing them around, those three could only see the opposite side of the street, not this side.
Mm, good. Nobody's paying attention.
Chen Mo lifted the bottom half of his mask, leaned his mouth close, and planted several fierce kisses on the puppy's forehead.
One round wasn't enough, so he kissed it again.
Hehe.
"Listen, little thing. You're not allowed to tell anyone about what happened today."
Chen Mo threatened it fiercely.
"If anyone finds out Spider-Man kissed a dog, I'll turn you into a hot dog. You hear me?"
The puppy might have understood, or it might not have. It simply stuck out its tender pink tongue and gently licked Chen Mo's chin.
Looking at the dog in his arms, Chen Mo began considering the most practical issue.
"We've got to give you a name."
He stroked his chin thoughtfully.
"Wangcai? No, nobody around here would understand it. Too rustic."
"Wade? Forget it. I actually like him."
A thought suddenly flashed through Chen Mo's mind.
He remembered the enormous bat searchlight he'd seen on the tower earlier.
He remembered that big, pitch-black bat who always hid in the shadows and looked at everyone as though they owed him five million.
"Got it."
Chen Mo looked down at the puppy, an extremely scheming smile curling his lips.
"Your name is Bruce."
"That name will definitely open doors in Gotham. Can't go wrong."
He paused, once again feeling that his choice of name was pure genius.
"Bruce, from now on, we're going to be the greatest duo in this dump."
The puppy seemed very pleased with the name, its tail wagging more energetically than before.
Ten meters away, in the shadows atop the clock tower.
A tall figure blended perfectly into the darkness.
Bruce Wayne, or rather Batman, was silently watching everything in the alley.
He had originally followed the Bat-Signal here, only to stumble upon this scene.
The suit had been upgraded.
He quickly recorded his observations on his handheld terminal: ballistic nylon, titanium alloy plates made without industrial processing, obvious signs of hand stitching.
This meant the boy had no large organization backing him. He was steadily improving his equipment with his own two hands.
Then he saw the boy kiss the dog's head.
And heard that name.
He was a little far away, but remember, Bruce Wayne could read lips.
"Bruce."
At that instant, Batman's eyelid twitched.
Hidden beneath his mask, no one could see just how remarkable the Dark Knight's expression was at that moment.
It was a complex reaction somewhere between speechlessness, a sense of absurdity, and an emotion that defied description.
He added a new tag under the "Spider-Man" file on his terminal.
Threat level: lowered. Notes: severely lacking in common sense, displays a pronounced tendency toward snark, continued monitoring of his mental health recommended.
Batman silently retreated, like a drop of water merging into the sea.
Chen Mo sat at the end of the alley, unaware that the very person he so often joked about had witnessed his entire "feat."
He carefully secured the puppy's broken hind leg with webbing. His technique was clumsy, but the result was sturdy.
"Come on, Bruce. Let's take you back to our leaky mansion."
He stood up and glanced back at the mother dog's body.
There was no soil here, and no shovel.
He found a relatively clean piece of cardboard among Gotham's ruins and laid it over the mother dog.
Then he moved her body into a sheltered corner by the wall.
"Not that it does much good..."
Chen Mo murmured.
Holding Bruce in his arms, he shot out a strand of webbing and launched himself into the air.
The red-and-blue figure vanished into the night.
Bruce huddled inside the suit in his arms, feeling what little warmth this world had to offer.
As Chen Mo swung along, he kept muttering.
"Naming a dog Bruce shouldn't count as insulting a cop, right?"
"Whatever. It's not like he knows."
"Vigilantes aren't even on the official payroll..."
In the distance, another newly lit Bat-Signal flickered across the clouds, as though silently answering his question.
Before you continue