Hello, did anyone miss me?

Beneath the Iceberg Lounge.

The wall of monitors cast its light over Oswald's sour face. He clutched a black umbrella, tapping its tip against the expensive floor tiles without any rhythm.

On the screens, countless riders in crude masks were pouring in from the outskirts of the docks. They carried automatic weapons, and some had even mounted light machine guns in their motorcycle sidecars.

A half-bald crow hopped back and forth beside the surveillance console.

Oswald stared at the locust-like members of the False Face Society and gave a harsh sneer.

"Have our people pull back. Make room for these lunatics."

The subordinate beside him froze for a moment.

"Boss, Warehouse Three, the one we just took..."

Oswald whipped his head around, his savage expression looking particularly eerie in the glow of the screens.

"Are you a complete idiot? Batman's there. Let Black Mask's morons fight that lunatic in the black cape to the death. All we need to do is stand by and watch them rip each other's guts out."

He turned back to the screens, his voice carrying the excitement of someone watching a show.

"Once they've had their fill of biting each other, we'll go clean up. That's called efficiency."

"Yes, boss..."

The stairwell of Warehouse Three, in the central dock area.

The burly bald man had just struck a grenade against the corner of the wall. Before he could throw it, a dense hail of bullets rained down from above.

Bullets struck the iron railing in showers of sparks, leaving his ears ringing.

Gritting his teeth, he flung the grenade upward through the gap in the stairs with a backhand throw.

Boom!

The blast sprayed his face with scraps of sandbags.

"Kill those Falcone bastards!"

He roared and stood, failing to notice the engines of hundreds of motorcycles gathering into a low thunder at the dock entrance behind him.

Nor did he know that the False Face Society's main force had completely cut off his retreat. The warehouse was now a giant tin can, and he was just a piece of luncheon meat inside.

At a second-floor window.

A Falcone Family sniper squinted, watching for movement at the stairwell entrance. His finger had just settled on the trigger when he suddenly felt a chill at the back of his neck.

There was no sound, no footstep, not even a breeze.

A hand in a black Kevlar glove reached out of the darkness, clamped precisely around the sniper rifle's barrel, and lifted it.

Bang!

The bullet hit the ceiling light, scattering broken glass across the floor.

The sniper turned in terror and saw only a pair of white goggles flash through the darkness.

Then the back of his head slammed against a hard chest plate.

Batman drove his knee into a point three centimeters above the man's lumbar spine, controlling his strength with extreme precision-enough to incapacitate him instantly, but never to cause paralysis.

He stuffed the unconscious sniper into the shadows of a shelving unit, then slipped away toward another firing position.

A heavy-weapons position had just been set up outside the warehouse.

Two False Face Society members were excitedly feeding an ammunition belt into a machine gun, aiming straight at the damaged second-floor window.

Behind them, a black shadow dropped soundlessly from the top of a shelving unit.

Batman landed without making any movement to cushion his fall. He simply grabbed both men by the backs of their collars and slammed them together.

A dull thud of colliding flesh and bone rang out.

Both men's eyes rolled back as they crumpled to the ground.

Batman did not stop. He was like a ghost weaving through the firelight, and wherever he passed, the gunfire there eerily fell silent.

He was not just subduing criminals. He was also defusing a bomb that could blow the entire dock sky-high at any moment.

Meanwhile, at the edge of the docks, atop the tallest container crane.

Chen Mo crouched on the crane's crossbeam, the wind pressing his red-and-blue suit tight against his body.

He looked down over the battlefield below.

What a spectacular scene.

On the left, Maroni's men were charging for their lives, while on the right, Falcone's men were putting up a desperate resistance.

On the perimeter, hundreds of masked small fry were circling frantically, occasionally tossing a couple of Molotov cocktails into the crowds.

Chen Mo could not help remarking on it.

"Gotham nights sure are lively. Everyone's really working hard to stay awake."

Chen Mo rubbed his aching lower back. He had just handled forty minor incidents in a row, and now he was seeing double whenever he looked at people.

If someone had told me there was a big job tonight, I wouldn't have wasted so much breath on patrol. Now even my throat hurts a little.

Chen Mo's gaze swept through the chaotic lines of fire before finally settling on the depths of the warehouse.

There, a black cape occasionally flashed in the fading light of explosions.

"Old Bat's busy down there."

Chen Mo muttered to himself, his mind rapidly working through the options.

His persona was the great, glorious, righteous Little Sun.

Given the current situation, charging straight down and unleashing his full power would definitely trigger a "killing" alert.

After all, every last one of these Gotham people was practically made of paper.

And when he was tired, he had never been very good at controlling his strength.

So Chen Mo had to intervene in a more "artistic" way.

His gaze fell on the row of crookedly stacked containers beneath the crane.

The False Face Society had piled those containers up as a makeshift roadblock. Their bases were not secured at all, and they swayed slightly in the sea breeze.

Chen Mo sighed and leaped off the crane.

He flipped in midair, his webbing sticking precisely to the crane's steel cable, and swung through a huge arc like a swing.

"Hey! Everyone down there!"

Amplified by his speaker, Chen Mo's voice instantly drowned out the noisy gunfire.

The various forces locked in battle instinctively looked up.

A red-and-blue figure was descending from the sky, holding a glistening strand.

Chen Mo landed on the topmost container and lightly tapped his toes against it, feeling out the metal box's center of gravity beneath his feet.

"Your containers aren't stacked securely. This really isn't up to workplace safety standards."

The moment he finished speaking, he exerted his strength.

Four tons of force burst through the tips of his toes in an instant.

Creeeak-

The teeth-grating screech of metal against metal instantly rang across the docks.

Under Chen Mo's kick, the row of containers stacked three high toppled like dominoes, crashing down toward the False Face Society's motorcycle convoy.

"Holy shit!"

"Run!"

The riders who had looked so menacing a moment ago instantly erupted into panic, twisting their throttles all the way and scattering in every direction.

Rumble!

The enormous containers slammed into the concrete, kicking up clouds of dust ten meters high.

The once-spacious entrance was blocked solid.

The False Face Society's reinforcements were stranded outside, and a portion of the firepower inside the warehouse instantly fell away.

Crouching atop the fallen containers, Chen Mo dusted off his hands and flashed a brilliant smile at the stunned gangsters below.

"You're welcome. I'm your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man."

"Who the fuck thanked you?"

Chen Mo raised his hand and fired off a quick little combo, sealing the mouth of the guy who had answered before hanging him upside down from the container.

"All right, I heard your heartfelt thanks. You're too kind."

You actually had the nerve to answer, huh?

On the warehouse's second floor.

Batman was hanging the last of Falcone's gunmen from the ceiling.

He looked out the window just in time to witness the spectacular sight of the row of containers collapsing.

His gaze flickered behind his white goggles.

He had seen it clearly.

The instant Spider-Man kicked, he had used his webbing to make minute adjustments to the angle at which the containers fell.

That angle had sealed off the road perfectly while avoiding every unfortunate soul standing in the middle of it.

Such exact control over strength and angles absolutely came from serious practice and careful calculation.

So he had brains as well as strength?

More importantly, the kid really was trying "not to hurt anyone."

Batman withdrew his gaze and leaped down from the second floor, landing in the very center of the ground-floor hall.

The remnants of Maroni's and Falcone's forces surrounded him.

Dozens of gun barrels instantly swung toward the black figure.

"It's him!"

"Open fire!"

Before the shots could ring out, a red-and-blue figure smashed through a side window and rolled to a landing beside Batman.

Chen Mo crouched on the floor, his movements as light as a real spider's.

"Hey, buddy. Pretty lively over here."

As he spoke, he casually fired two strands of webbing, yanking the gunmen on either side who were about to open fire straight into the air.

"Need a hand? Though I don't recommend such strenuous outdoor exercise this late at night."

Batman did not look at him. He merely replied in a low voice.

"Don't kill anyone."

Chen Mo pursed his lips.

"Do I look like some kind of violent thug? I've won a Model Young Citizen medal."

He suddenly sprang into the air, tracing a complex trajectory.

"What about you? Does that cape catch the wind? Looks pretty heavy."

At that moment, the battle in the warehouse officially fell into the rhythm of Spider-Man's running commentary.

Before Spider-Man arrived, everyone had been fighting for half the night, and all their speech bubbles combined still amounted to less than his first ten minutes there.