Hey! I'm back.

The night wind at Gotham's docks was the same as ever, so fishy it felt like someone had stuffed an entire dead fish into your lungs.

The air carried sea salt, rust, and the lingering scorched stink of burned diesel.

Industrial smoke blotted out the moon completely. Only a few crane-mounted searchlights shone down from above, their pallid beams slicing the container yard into sharp shadows.

Killer Croc crouched in the gap between two rows of shipping containers, his thick tail resting on the ground. His scales scraped against the concrete with the faint rasp of sandpaper against a wall.

He had been crouching here for four whole days.

The day he got out of Blackgate Penitentiary, Maroni had personally sent people to pick him up. It was quite a reception: three armored cars, a box of Cuban cigars, and the words, "The whole East End knows you're back."

The message was clear: make a show of force, scare the shit out of any bastards thinking of betraying them, and collect a few bad debts down at the docks while he was at it. Those dockworkers thought no one would dare ask them for money now that Scarface was in the ICU.

They were all old gambling addicts who played dead when their loan-shark debts came due. A little lesson would straighten them out.

Killer Croc had taken the job, but that wasn't what was on his mind.

He was thinking about Batman. The last time Batman had sent him to Blackgate Penitentiary, that black cape beneath the interrogation light had looked like a blade tearing through his retinas.

His eyes rolled in their sockets, his vertical pupils narrowing to slits in the dark.

He would wait.

Wait for that pitch-black monster to jump down from a rooftop, then use these claws to tear off his armor piece by piece, chew it up, and spit it out in front of him.

Of course, he had still done the job his boss assigned. Those unlucky bastards should have been hanging from utility poles for ages by now. They should have been nearly dried out.

As for that little bug in the red-and-blue tights, he hadn't given him a second thought.

Running into him at the docks that day had been pure coincidence. He had knocked him flying, and that was that. He hadn't taken it to heart.

Tonight, he was crouching here to wait for Batman.

Not far away.

Chen Mo crouched atop a gantry crane, his back hunched like an owl perched on a branch.

He rubbed his faintly aching ribs.

The injury had actually healed. It was purely phantom pain.

The wind was strong tonight, and he tugged his mask farther up the bridge of his nose.

The seam at his shoulder stood out starkly in the moonlight. Chen Mo stared down at the enormous dark-green figure below, then leaped.

His body traced an arc through the air, arms spread wide, his suit flashing a muted red and blue beneath the moonlight.

He landed atop a container diagonally across from Killer Croc, his feet making a very soft thud against the sheet metal.

Without waiting for the other man to speak, he activated the homemade gadget in his hand: a sonic generator cobbled together from old radio parts and a loudspeaker.

A piercing, high-frequency noise tore through the dockside air like fingernails scraping glass.

Killer Croc clutched his head with a pained roar, staggering two steps backward. His back slammed into a container, denting its metal wall.

"Lesson one. Reptiles are sensitive to high-frequency vibrations. You might look like an oversized gecko, but the same biological principles still apply."

Chen Mo's voice drifted down from above with a calm that made people want to punch him.

Killer Croc recovered from the noise-induced dizziness, his slit-pupiled eyes bloodshot.

He shook his head, his scales clinking faintly against one another like metal, then raised his hideous face and let out a deafening roar at the red-and-blue figure above.

"You again, you little flea in pajamas! I'll chew up every bone in your body!"

"Hey! Lots of people have said my new outfit looks cool! Don't call it pajamas!"

Killer Croc lunged.

His massive body launched into the air, his tail sweeping a huge arc behind him. His scales reflected a cold, wet gleam beneath the searchlights, like a moss-covered boulder fired from a slingshot.

Chen Mo flipped off the container, webbing from his left hand sticking to a crane boom off to the side. He pulled sideways, rotated a hundred and eighty degrees in midair, and planted both feet against the container's side.

His fingers nearly brushed the ground. He could feel chips of concrete kicked up by Killer Croc's last step flying past his face.

Killer Croc missed. His claws struck the concrete, sending sparks spraying waist-high.

Before he could recover, Chen Mo had already sprung back up. What he fired wasn't ordinary webbing.

This time, the strands had an extremely faint yellow sheen beneath the searchlights, like diluted amber, and stretched through the air with a thicker, stickier consistency than usual.

Industrial adhesive. He had spent half an hour crouched in a hardware store picking it out.

Web-shooters. He had made them by hand.

He had thought being able to produce his own webbing meant he wouldn't have to make these things.

The Gotham City police should reimburse him for the materials!

Wasn't there some kind of good citizen award? Preferably with a few thousand dollars thrown in.

The webbing wrapped around Killer Croc's ankles, not with its usual light touch, but like a soaking-wet cable that began tightening the instant it wound around him.

Killer Croc tried to lift a leg and found a huge mass of chemically mixed webbing stuck beneath his foot, dragging up pebbles, dirt, and debris from the dockside pavement.

"Technology changes lives. You really do have to use your brain."

Chen Mo crouched on a container, running his mouth as he wound another strand around his wrist.

Killer Croc bent his head and yanked his foot free. The webbing around his ankle snapped, but half-set adhesive filled the gaps between his scales.

Every step picked up another layer of gravel beneath his feet, as though he were stepping on chewed gum.

His walnut-sized brain could sense trouble, but he wasn't the type to back down. He roared, and before the sound had faded, he charged to the foot of the gantry crane, wrapped both claws around its base, and started climbing.

The metal framework twisted under his terrifying grip, bolts snapping free one after another.

Chen Mo crouched atop the boom, looking down as he scrabbled below.

He pressed another button on the loudspeaker, raised the output frequency, and aimed the speaker at the narrow space beneath the boom.

High-frequency sound waves struck Killer Croc's head like boiling oil poured into his ear canals. His hearing and balance failed simultaneously. He clutched his head with both hands and plummeted straight down from over ten meters up, hitting the ground with a crash. His back struck the pavement, throwing up a ring of dust and scattered debris.

Chen Mo jumped from the top of the boom. Three meters above the ground, he fired webbing onto a container to the side and pulled himself sideways. His body turned, both feet pushed off the container's side once more, and he swung through a full circle in midair before landing at the three-way junction deepest inside the yard.

He had chosen his position carefully. Three refrigerated containers were stacked to his left, a row of titanium alloy pipes still awaiting unloading stood to his right, and a dead end lay behind him.

A perfect "physics laboratory."

Killer Croc climbed to his feet, spitting saliva and sand, and charged.

Every step cracked the concrete. When he barreled into the three-way junction, his massive body instantly filled the narrow space.

Chen Mo stood less than two meters in front of him, motionless.

Killer Croc opened his mouth full of crooked fangs. "Got you! I'm going to-"

Chen Mo pulled the main control strand.

An unusually thick strand sprang up from his fingertips, like a plucked instrument string in the dark.

He hadn't strung this strand at random. It was a "fuse" twisted from high-strength nylon and half a bottle of web fluid after he had drawn the map dozens of times on the floor the previous night.

The instant it went taut, every load-bearing point around them gave way at once.

He pulled out the iron supports beneath the refrigerated containers on the left, snapped the wooden braces supporting the pipe stack on the right, and tightened all the low strands he had laid along both sides of the passage.

The heavy cargo that inertia had kept stationary began collapsing slowly under gravity, then accelerated with a tremendous clatter, toppling like dominoes into its predetermined paths.

The containers tipped at precisely the right angle to trap Killer Croc in the gap between them. Three metal boxes weighing dozens of tons in total pressed down above his waist, squeezing him into a space less than a meter wide. His legs were locked in a half squat, and his tail was pinned beneath a container on the other side, completely impossible to pull free.

Killer Croc struggled desperately, muscles bulging all over his body. His scales scraped against the sheet metal with a piercing metallic screech, but the steel on either side held his body fast. Even breathing was so constricted that his eye sockets felt swollen.

Chen Mo didn't stop.

He circled directly above Killer Croc and crouched up high, turned the web fluid to its lowest setting, increased its viscosity, and sent rolls of webbing down over his head, mouth, and body. Every layer hardened rapidly in the air. Every layer bore that extremely faint yellow tint.

The more he struggled, the tighter it wound.

Five minutes later, the docks fell quiet again. There were no more impacts or roars, only the wind moaning through the gantry crane's metal framework and the occasional faint creak of compressed metal from deep among the containers.

Chen Mo stood, looked down at Killer Croc wrapped into a "baby silkworm" by webbing and metal boxes, and took a deep breath.

"You're paying my medical bills. Iodine, bandages, compressed biscuits. And the undershirt I used to patch my suit. You owe me for that." He held up two fingers to indicate an amount.

"Titanium alloy patches, shoulder armor. Not expensive. But labor costs a lot. I sewed it myself, you know?"

He spread his hands, shrugged, and tugged his mask down. His homemade mask kept riding up. That counted as straightening himself out.

"Now can you sincerely tell me my suit looks good?"

Killer Croc wanted to swear, but the webbing over his mouth kept him from getting the words out.

Chen Mo had just turned to leave when he suddenly paused. His Spider-Sense stirred faintly, as though some enormous, silent presence were pressing down from above, blocking half the moonlight.

He raised his head.

At the very top of the gantry crane, that black silhouette was looking down at him in silence.

The tips of his cape drifted slightly to one side in the wind. Otherwise, he was like a stone gargoyle, almost blending into the girder.

His eyes were invisible, his expression unreadable. There was only a silhouette darker than the sky itself.

Without his sharp eyesight, he probably wouldn't have noticed him at all.

An entire container yard and several staggered stacks of containers separated them, one looking up, the other looking down. Between them lay the dockside pavement, now littered with debris, and an enormous crocodile wrapped into a silkworm cocoon.

"Hello, Bat. Want to say thanks to your good colleague? He just took one seriously enormous job off your hands!"