Didn't Want to Rush a Deadline

Chen Mo crouched on a rusty drainpipe in the East End and squeezed the energy bar in his hand.

Too hard to bite through, too much of a waste to throw away.

What the hell? Who exactly were they making these energy bars for if even Spider-Man couldn't bite through them?

Following the principle that every grain took hard work to produce, Chen Mo stuffed it back into his pocket and brushed the crumbs off his hands.

He had already finished tonight's patrol. He had planned to go home, feed the dog, then get back to rushing his manuscript so he could finish it sooner, hand it in sooner, and get paid sooner.

Bruce's broken leg had almost fully healed. Yesterday, he had started chewing on Chen Mo's shoes.

Then gunfire rang out.

You were just about to clock out when your boss came over and dumped a pile of project assignments on you.

It wasn't sporadic gunfire, either. It was a dense barrage of explosions, as if an entire street had been set alight at once.

An enormously important project assignment.

Two SUVs covered in black skull symbols tore around the corner. Thompson submachine guns poked out of their windows, spitting flames down half the street.

The Falcone Family's suited thugs on the other side immediately returned fire. Shell casings hit the ground as densely as a downpour pounding a tin roof.

The storefront windows along the street were shot to pieces, a café's awning was turned into a fishing net, and stray bullets even knocked out two streetlights.

A soaking-wet homeless man crawled out of a cardboard box beside a fire hydrant, cursed, "Motherfucker," then ducked back inside.

Chen Mo sighed. "Do bullets grow on trees? Don't streetlights need repairs? You people are shooting Gotham's GDP to pieces."

In the middle of the street, a little girl carrying a flower basket stood frozen. The basket tumbled from her hands, and several white carnations rolled into the muddy water.

The driver of a black sedan had already been shot dead. His upper body slumped over the steering wheel, his foot still pressing the accelerator.

The out-of-control car was like a mad bull. Its tires scraped across the ground with a piercing screech and a burnt smell as it skidded sideways toward the little girl.

Chen Mo launched himself straight off the third-floor drainpipe. Like a stone fired from a slingshot, he traced a red-and-blue line through the air.

He spread his arms, firing two strands of webbing from his wrists simultaneously and sticking them precisely to the sedan's front bumper.

He landed, planted his feet in a horse stance, and bent his knees slightly. The muscles in his waist, abdomen, and back instantly tightened.

At that moment, all the strength in his body poured into his arms, and his feet pressed two deep footprints straight into the asphalt.

The sedan let out a piercing shriek of twisting metal. He forcibly bent its front bumper out of shape, and the entire car brushed past the little girl's skirt as it veered off course and crashed into the café beside her.

The glass façade shattered across the ground. A pipe in the coffee machine burst, spraying hot water mixed with glass shards across half a wall.

Chen Mo darted forward and scooped the little girl into his arms before she could react.

Supporting her back with his left hand and shielding her head with his right, he made several leaps and landed behind a sturdy stone pillar farther back.

He crouched and set her on the ground.

The little girl stared blankly at him, her lips still trembling. Tears filled her eyes but didn't fall.

Chen Mo looked down at her, then at the flower basket spilled across the ground.

He picked a white carnation that hadn't been trampled to pieces out of the muddy water, blew the specks of mud off its petals, and tucked it into a gap at the shoulder of his suit, right beside the seam he had sewn himself, its crooked stitches looking like a centipede had crawled across it.

"Be good. Go hide in the alley for a bit, close your eyes, and count. By the time you open them, it'll be peaceful here."

The little girl stared at the two white eye patches on his mask. After a second, she asked, "Count to what?"

Chen Mo thought for a moment.

"A hundred. Start over if you lose count."

She nodded, closed her eyes, and started counting.

Chen Mo stood, turned around, and leaped into the center of the firefight.

The two sides were really getting into it.

Falcone's men huddled behind two bulletproof sedans, changing magazines. One bald man was shouting into a radio, "East End! East End! We need backup!"

Before his voice had faded, a burst of bullets forced him back behind the car.

Relying on their superior numbers, Black Mask's False Face Society members were pushing forward. A burly man dragged a drum-fed shotgun from an SUV's back seat and fired toward Falcone's men. He didn't hit anyone, but he blasted a roadside fire hydrant into a fountain. A jet of water shot three meters high, drenching the homeless man who had just retreated into his cardboard box.

"Fuck!" The homeless man scrambled out of the box, grabbed his bedding, and ran deeper into the alley.

Chen Mo turned sideways to dodge a string of stray bullets. They skimmed past his ear and struck the redbrick wall opposite him, blasting out a line of debris.

He casually fired a blob of webbing, plugging a False Face Society gunman's barrel with precision.

The guy was just about to pull the trigger when his gun blew apart. A shell casing burst out sideways and struck his own chin, leaving him holding nothing but a smoking morning glory.

"Wow, you sell flowers too?"

Before the man could answer, Chen Mo had already flipped away.

He swept both legs sideways, knocking down two thugs who were about to throw grenades.

The grenades rolled out of their hands. Quick-eyed and quick-handed, Chen Mo fired two strands of webbing, sticking their hands to the spare magazines at their waists.

The safety pins hadn't been pulled, but when the two men looked down at the green lumps of metal in their palms, their faces turned as white as freshly painted walls. They froze, not even daring to breathe too hard.

"Playing with fire this late at night? Careful you don't wet the bed."

He landed, planted both hands, and rapidly crawled along the wall to circle around to the side.

A bald squad leader from Falcone's side was waving an Uzi submachine gun and shouting, "Move!" He had barely finished speaking and taken two steps when a strand of webbing stuck precisely to the back of his collar. Like a fish swung up on a fishing rod, he was yanked into the air and left dangling from a streetlight pole. He swayed as the submachine gun fell from his hand to the ground.

"Sorry, this area's closed for business tonight. Can you take your fight to another block? I just finished patrolling this one. I don't want to do it again. Besides, this is all residential. Do you have any consideration for other people?"

"Who the fuck are you?!" the bald man shouted, struggling on the streetlight.

"Seriously? You don't recognize me?"

Chen Mo took a crumpled sticky note out of his waist pouch and slapped it onto the bald man's forehead.

A crooked line of writing read: Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Services cover robbery, brawling, intimidation, and illegal gun possession. The above activities will result in you being hung from a streetlight.

The bald man opened his mouth to curse, but the wind lifted the sticky note over his eyes. All he could manage was a muffled roar of anger.

The others began to panic.

Several of Black Mask's men exchanged looks and started backing away while one shouted into his communicator, "Boss, we ran into that spider-yeah, the one who hangs people from streetlights-"

Before he could finish, a blob of webbing sealed his mouth. He was yanked into the air and stuck to the café's precariously dangling sign.

Falcone's men weren't stupid, either. While Chen Mo was dealing with Black Mask's men, they hurriedly dragged their wounded into the cars and prepared to flee.

Before climbing through a car door, one of them glanced back at the unlucky men hanging from streetlights all along the street. The next second, he slammed the door without hesitation. The tires scraped across the ground, giving off a burnt smell, and the engine roared as the car vanished around the corner.

Black Mask's men ran too. Apart from the few webbed to the ground, all the others darted into the alleys, their footsteps fading into the darkness.

Just then, Chen Mo's Spider-Sense went off again.

He was crouching atop a streetlight and didn't look back.

He immediately backflipped, his body tracing a perfect arc through the air as his toes struck the barrel of a suppressed pistol with precision.

The pistol flew away, struck the wall, and blew apart.

The man holding it was one of Black Mask's elite gunmen. He had risen silently from the café's wreckage, switched to a suppressed pistol, and aimed at the back of Chen Mo's neck.

Before the gunman could react, Chen Mo had already fired webbing around his waist while still airborne and used it to pull himself over. He drove a knee into the man's chest and pinned him against the wall.

The impact sent a fine crack through the wall's red bricks.

"A sneak attack? That's pretty low. What kind of training does your boss give you? Last time, another guy snuck up behind me too. I hung him from a billboard and left him out all night. Know him? No? Never mind, then."

He pulled the magazine out of the gunman's tactical vest and casually tossed it away.

The magazine struck a gangster tied to a streetlight on the head. The man grunted, angry but not daring to speak.

Chen Mo let go, and the gunman slid down to sit on the ground. The violence in his eyes was finally gone, replaced by confusion. He had absolutely no idea how he had been discovered.

At the end of the street, a deep engine rumble drew closer. Two cold lights lit up in the shadows like the eyes of a steel monster.

The vehicle slid out of the alley mouth almost silently, like a patch of deeper shadow peeling away from the darkness.

Back atop the streetlight, Chen Mo looked toward the lights.

A pitch-black body, sharply angled armor plating, and tires taller than he was.

A thought popped into his head: At current gas prices, how much fuel would this thing burn with one press of the pedal?

Then he quickly killed that thought, because working it out would only make him feel worse.

Chen Mo waved at the pitch-black armored vehicle.

"Hey! You're late. They're all mine."

He pointed at the gangsters webbed into various poses all along the street, his tone carrying unmistakable pride.

"Black Mask's men on the left, Falcone's on the right. The bald guy in the middle is the squad leader. Labeled for easy identification. Want to come down and take inventory? I've sorted them for you, by gang and then by rank. That one hanging from the tallest light pole tried to shoot me in the back of the neck. Extremely, especially low."

Batman didn't answer.

He stepped out of the shadows, his goggles sweeping coldly over the gunmen bundled like cocoons across the ground.

The sticky note on the bald man's forehead flapped in the wind. Its writing was crooked, the ink a little blurred by the wind.

His gaze lingered on the bald man for a second, then moved to the unlucky man webbed to the sign outside the café before finally settling on Chen Mo.

Chen Mo jumped down from the streetlight and dusted off his hands.

"Which side were you following here?"

"Roman Sionis's men raided one of Falcone's underground trading sites."

Batman's voice was as deep as ever, his words as few as ever.

The good news, though, was that he was finally willing to answer.

"Yeah! Spider-Man and Batman versus Black Mask. This has to make tomorrow's papers, right?"