The last thought Nakamura Kenji ever had in his original life was about spreadsheets.
Not about his family. Not about regrets. Not about the things he wished he had done differently or the words he wished he had said to the people who mattered. Just spreadsheets. Quarterly reports. The budget reconciliation that was due by end of business on Friday and would now, presumably, never be completed.
This was, perhaps, the saddest possible way for a human consciousness to end—not with profundity, but with pivot tables.
The truck had come out of nowhere.
That wasn't entirely true. The truck had come out of somewhere—specifically, from the intersection of Meiji-dori and the small side street that Kenji crossed every morning on his way to Shinjuku Station. It had been there, a massive gleaming beast of chrome and steel, barreling through what had definitely been a red light at a speed that suggested the driver either hadn't seen it or hadn't cared.
Kenji had been looking at his phone.
Of course he had been looking at his phone. Everyone looked at their phones. It was 7:47 AM on a Tuesday, the most aggressively mundane moment in the weekly cycle, and Kenji had been reading an email from his supervisor that said, with characteristic brevity and passive-aggressive undertone: "Meeting moved to 8 AM. Don't be late."
He had been calculating the probability of making it on time.
The probability, as it turned out, was zero.
Not because of traffic or train delays or any of the usual obstacles that conspired to make Tokyo's salarymen perpetually five minutes behind schedule. But because Nakamura Kenji, age 27, assistant accountant at Yamamoto Financial Services, was about to be struck by approximately 15,000 kilograms of rapidly moving commercial vehicle.
The impact was surprisingly painless.
Or rather, it was so overwhelmingly painful that his brain simply refused to process it, converting the sensation into a kind of white static that consumed everything. There was a moment of pressure—immense, total, absolute—and then there was nothing.
Nothing at all.
Kenji died with his phone still in his hand and his quarterly reports forever unfinished.
And then, against every reasonable expectation, he woke up.
Consciousness returned in fragments, like a shattered mirror slowly reassembling itself.
First came the smell.
It was not a good smell. It was, in fact, the opposite of a good smell—a complex bouquet of rotting organic matter, stagnant water, industrial runoff, and something that Kenji's brain adamantly refused to identify. It was the kind of smell that suggested whoever was experiencing it had made some very poor life choices.
Then came the cold.
Damp cold. Penetrating cold. The kind of cold that had seeped through clothing and settled into skin and wormed its way down into bone. Kenji was wet. His suit—his one good suit, the dark blue one he saved for client meetings and performance reviews—was soaked through with something that was probably not water.
Then came the pain.
It wasn't the sharp pain of fresh injury, but the dull, diffuse ache of a body that had been through something traumatic and was quietly protesting the experience. Every muscle felt bruised. Every joint felt stiff. His head throbbed with a persistent rhythm that suggested concussion, or possibly just existential despair.
Finally, Kenji opened his eyes.
He was lying on concrete. Cold, cracked, filthy concrete, covered in a thin layer of unidentifiable sludge and decorated with the remnants of garbage that had missed its intended destination. Above him, walls of grimy brick rose toward a narrow strip of gray sky. A fire escape clung to one wall, its rusted metal groaning faintly in an unfelt wind. A dumpster loomed nearby, its lid askew, its contents overflowing in a cascade of black plastic bags and decomposing mystery.
This was not Tokyo.
This was not anywhere Kenji recognized.
He sat up slowly, using the wall for support, and immediately regretted the decision as his head swam and his stomach lurched. The world tilted around him for a moment before stabilizing into a new and deeply unwelcome configuration.
He was in an alley.
A dark, narrow, thoroughly disgusting alley that looked like it had been specifically designed to host the kind of activities that newspapers described with phrases like "body found" and "police are investigating." The architecture was wrong—Gothic and ornate in a way that Japanese buildings never were, all pointed arches and decorative stonework and gargoyles perched on ledges like frozen demons waiting for their moment.
The signs he could see were in English.
Kenji did not speak English.
He had studied it in school, of course. All Japanese students studied English. He had memorized vocabulary lists and grammar rules and achieved perfectly adequate test scores. But that had been years ago, and in the intervening time, the language had faded from his mind like a dream upon waking. He could recognize the alphabet. He could identify some basic words. But the signs around him might as well have been written in ancient Sumerian for all the good they did him.
Kenji stood on shaking legs and tried to think.
He had been hit by a truck. He remembered that clearly—the gleam of chrome, the blare of the horn, the moment of impossible pressure. He should be dead. He was fairly certain he was dead. Dead people didn't wake up in alleys.
Unless this was the afterlife.
Was this the afterlife?
It didn't look like any afterlife Kenji had heard of. It looked like a back alley in a Western city, complete with dumpsters and graffiti and a rat the size of a small dog watching him from atop a pile of discarded cardboard. The rat's eyes gleamed with what Kenji could only interpret as judgment.
He looked down at himself.
His suit was ruined. Stained, torn, soaked with substances he refused to contemplate. His tie hung loose around his neck like a failed noose. His shoes squelched when he shifted his weight. His glasses were cracked, the left lens spiderwebbed in a way that turned half his vision into a fractured kaleidoscope.
He patted his pockets.
No phone. No wallet. No train pass. No business cards. Nothing that could identify him, help him, or connect him to the life he had been living approximately fifteen minutes ago.
Kenji was alone.
Kenji was lost.
Kenji was standing in a puddle of something unspeakable in an alley in a foreign country with no money, no language, and no idea what to do next.
He took a deep breath.
He immediately regretted taking a deep breath, as the alley's aroma forced its way into his lungs with aggressive enthusiasm.
And then Nakamura Kenji did what he had been trained to do through three years of corporate drudgery, through countless overtime hours and impossible deadlines and the slow grinding erosion of his hopes and dreams.
He kept going.
One foot in front of the other.
Toward the mouth of the alley.
Toward whatever incomprehensible situation awaited him beyond.
The street was not an improvement.
Kenji emerged from the alley into a world that seemed designed to maximize disorientation. The buildings loomed overhead, Gothic spires and art deco facades jumbled together in an architectural nightmare. Street lamps cast pools of sickly yellow light that barely pushed back the darkness. The few cars parked along the curb were unfamiliar models, sleek and angular and somehow menacing.
The sky above was gray. Not the bright gray of an overcast day, but a heavy, oppressive gray that seemed to press down on the city like a physical weight. The air smelled of rain and smoke and exhaust and something else, something chemical and unpleasant that Kenji couldn't identify.
The street was mostly empty. The few people visible moved quickly, heads down, shoulders hunched, as if the city itself was something to be endured rather than enjoyed. No one made eye contact. No one spoke to each other. Everyone seemed to be in a tremendous hurry to be somewhere else.
Kenji stood on the sidewalk and felt the full weight of his situation settle onto his shoulders.
He was in a foreign country. He didn't speak the language. He had no money, no phone, no identification, no resources of any kind. His clothes were ruined. He smelled like a dumpster. He looked like a homeless person or a crime victim or possibly both.
He needed to find help. He needed to find a police station, or an embassy, or at least someone who could tell him where he was and how to get home. He needed to explain his situation.
But he couldn't explain his situation.
Because he didn't speak the language.
If he tried to talk to someone, only Japanese would come out. They would know immediately that he was foreign, that he was lost, that he didn't understand. They would see him struggling with their language, making mistakes, mispronouncing words. They would think he was stupid, or incompetent, or—
No.
Kenji's stomach twisted at the thought.
The embarrassment. The shame. The loss of face. Standing in front of a stranger, mouth opening and closing, no meaningful sounds coming out. Looking like an idiot. Being treated like an idiot. Having everyone who saw him think: "What a pathetic person. What a helpless, foolish, embarrassing person."
He couldn't do it.
He would rather die.
He had already died once today, and even that was preferable to the prospect of stammering broken English at a stranger while they looked at him with pity or contempt or, worst of all, that particular expression of impatient condescension that said "why are you wasting my time?"
So he wouldn't speak.
He would figure this out some other way. He would observe and adapt and solve the problem without having to humiliate himself. He was an accountant. He was good at analyzing situations and finding solutions. He just needed to stay calm, stay quiet, and think.
Kenji took a deep breath—through his mouth this time, to avoid the smell—and began walking.
He didn't know where he was going.
He just knew he couldn't stay still.
Twenty minutes later, Kenji had learned several things about his new environment.
First, this city—whatever it was called—was not a pleasant place. The architecture grew more oppressive the further he walked, the buildings taller and darker and more decorated with the kind of statues that seemed designed to watch you. The streets were dirtier than Tokyo, the infrastructure more neglected, the general atmosphere more threatening.
Second, the people here were not friendly. Several had crossed the street to avoid walking near him, casting glances at his disheveled appearance. One had clutched their bag tighter. Another had muttered something that sounded distinctly unflattering. Kenji's ruined suit and desperate expression were apparently universal signals for "potential threat."
Third, he was very tired. The bone-deep exhaustion that had plagued him for years in Tokyo had not gone away just because he had died and woken up in a foreign country. If anything, it had intensified, compounded by the trauma of truck-related death and dumpster-adjacent resurrection. His body wanted to stop. His eyes wanted to close. His mind wanted to shut down and deal with this problem later, preferably never.
But he couldn't stop.
If he stopped, he would have to think about what was happening to him.
If he thought about what was happening to him, he would have to confront the fact that nothing made sense.
If he confronted the fact that nothing made sense, he would have a breakdown.
And having a breakdown in public, in a foreign country, unable to explain himself—that was the one thing worse than whatever else this nightmare city might throw at him.
So Kenji kept walking.
He rounded a corner, passed through a small plaza dominated by a statue of a figure on horseback, and found himself approaching another alley. This one was wider than the first, better lit, with a dead end that seemed to promise at least a brief respite from the oppressive streets.
He walked into it without thinking.
He just wanted to sit down for a moment.
He just wanted to close his eyes.
He just wanted—
"BEHOLD!"
Kenji stopped.
The voice had come from above.
It was a dramatic voice, a theatrical voice, a voice that clearly belonged to someone who had practiced their dramatic declarations in front of a mirror. It echoed off the alley walls with an enthusiasm that bordered on desperation.
Kenji looked up.
Something was descending from the sky.
Something with wings.
Something that looked, against all logic and sanity and basic understanding of how reality worked, like a giant moth.
Killer Moth was having a bad week.
Actually, Killer Moth was having a bad career, but this week had been particularly egregious. The Riddler had gotten all the press for his museum heist. Penguin was hosting some kind of criminal summit that Killer Moth hadn't even been invited to. And earlier that evening, a random street thug had looked at his costume and asked, with genuine confusion, "Are you supposed to be a butterfly?"
A butterfly.
A BUTTERFLY.
Killer Moth had not spent years perfecting his moth-themed villainy to be confused with a BUTTERFLY.
He needed to reestablish himself. He needed to remind Gotham that Killer Moth was a name to be feared. He needed to find someone—anyone—to terrorize, just to prove that he still had it.
The alley had seemed perfect.
Dark, isolated, with a single figure walking into it like a gift from the criminal gods themselves. A victim, practically gift-wrapped. An opportunity to demonstrate the terrible might of Killer Moth.
Drury Walker—that was his real name, though he preferred not to think about it—adjusted his goggles, checked his cocoon gun, and launched himself from the rooftop.
He landed with maximum dramatic effect, his wings catching the air to slow his descent, his boots hitting concrete with a satisfying thud. His cape—yes, he had a cape, capes were classic, capes were intimidating—settled around him in a way he had practiced for hours.
"BEHOLD!" he bellowed, spreading his arms wide. "Citizen of Gotham! Cower before the terrible might of KILLER MOTH! Scourge of the night! Terror of the skies! Mastermind of—"
He stopped.
The figure at the end of the alley had turned around.
Killer Moth had expected many reactions to his dramatic entrance. Screaming was common. Running was popular. Pleading, begging, bargaining—all standard responses that he had prepared witty comebacks for.
He had not expected this.
The man standing before him was clearly foreign—Japanese, if Drury had to guess, based on his features and the cut of his ruined suit. His clothes were destroyed, stained and torn and soaking wet, but there was something about the way he wore them that suggested they had once been expensive. Professional. The uniform of someone who had once mattered.
But it wasn't the clothes that made Killer Moth hesitate.
It was the face.
The man's face was pale. Deathly pale, with dark circles under his eyes so deep they looked like bruises painted by a malevolent artist. His cheeks were hollow, his lips slightly parted, his expression completely and utterly blank.
And his eyes.
His eyes were wrong.
They weren't scared. They weren't surprised. They weren't even curious about the giant moth-man who had just descended from the sky with dramatic declarations of criminal intent. They were just... empty. Hollow. The eyes of someone who had stared into an abyss so profound that everything else had become meaningless by comparison.
Killer Moth had seen fear. He had seen defiance. He had seen confusion and anger and desperate courage.
He had never seen nothing.
"I..." Killer Moth faltered, his dramatic momentum stuttering. "I said BEHOLD! Killer Moth! Are you... are you not going to react?"
The man didn't respond.
He just looked at Killer Moth with those empty, endless eyes.
Inside Kenji's head, a completely different situation was unfolding.
There was a man in front of him.
A man dressed as a moth.
A giant moth.
With wings and antennae and what appeared to be some kind of weapon and an expression of theatrical menace that would have been intimidating if Kenji had any idea what was happening.
The moth-man was shouting at him.
The words were English—Kenji could tell that much from the sounds and the rhythm—but their meaning was completely lost. Something about beholding? Something about a moth? Something that was clearly supposed to be threatening but came across as incomprehensible noise?
Kenji's exhausted brain tried to process the situation.
He had been hit by a truck. He had woken up in an alley. He had walked through a nightmarish Gothic city. And now a man dressed as a giant moth was yelling at him about something.
This was either a very strange dream, a very strange afterlife, or evidence that Kenji had finally lost his mind entirely.
All three options seemed equally plausible.
The moth-man was still yelling.
He seemed to want Kenji to do something. React, maybe. Run away or beg for mercy or whatever people did when confronted by insect-themed criminals in foreign countries. But Kenji couldn't do any of those things.
He couldn't run because he was too tired.
He couldn't beg because he didn't speak the language.
He couldn't react because his brain had simply stopped processing new information, overwhelmed by the sheer absurdity of the situation.
So he just stood there.
Looking at the moth-man.
With his empty, exhausted, thousand-yard stare.
Maybe if he didn't move, the moth-man would go away.
That worked with some animals, right? If you stayed very still, predators would lose interest?
Or was that wrong?
Kenji couldn't remember.
He was so tired.
Killer Moth was sweating.
This wasn't how it was supposed to go.
The man wasn't reacting. He wasn't running, wasn't screaming, wasn't doing anything at all. He just stood there with those terrible eyes, looking at Killer Moth like he was—
Like he was nothing.
Like Killer Moth was so utterly insignificant, so profoundly unthreatening, that he didn't even warrant the basic dignity of fear.
"SAY SOMETHING!" Killer Moth demanded, his voice higher than he would have liked. "I am KILLER MOTH! I have terrorized this city for YEARS! I have battled BATMAN! I have a COCOON GUN!"
He brandished the weapon, hoping the sight of it would provoke some reaction.
Nothing.
The man blinked slowly—once—and continued staring.
That single blink was somehow worse than no reaction at all. It was deliberate. Dismissive. The blink of someone who was acknowledging your existence only to demonstrate how little it mattered.
"I could KILL you!" Killer Moth's voice cracked. "I could wrap you in an unbreakable cocoon and leave you to SUFFOCATE! Doesn't that FRIGHTEN you?!"
The man's head tilted slightly.
Just a small movement. A few degrees of inclination. The kind of thing you might not even notice if you weren't desperately watching for any sign of reaction.
But to Killer Moth, it was devastating.
It was the head tilt of a predator evaluating prey.
It was the head tilt of someone so utterly confident in their own superiority that they could afford to be curious about the insect making noise in front of them.
It was the head tilt that said, without words: "Is that all you have?"
Killer Moth took an involuntary step backward.
His leg hit a discarded crate and he stumbled, catching himself against the wall, and the man still didn't react. Still didn't speak. Still just watched him with those empty, terrible eyes.
"You're..." Killer Moth's voice had gone shrill. "You're doing this on purpose! You're trying to unnerve me! Well, it won't work! I am KILLER MOTH and I am NOT AFRAID!"
The man sighed.
It was a small sound, barely audible. A faint exhalation of breath that, under normal circumstances, would have meant nothing at all.
But this sigh.
This sigh was not a sigh of fear. It was not a sigh of resignation. It was not a sigh of boredom or contempt or any of the reactions Killer Moth could have understood.
It was a sigh of disappointment.
Deep, profound, soul-crushing disappointment.
The kind of sigh a master gave to a student who had failed to grasp the basics. The kind of sigh a parent gave to a child who had done something embarrassingly stupid. The kind of sigh that communicated, more clearly than any words: "I expected so little, and you still managed to let me down."
Something in Killer Moth broke.
He had spent years being underestimated. Being mocked. Being called a joke, a loser, a bargain-bin villain who couldn't compete with the big names. He had developed defenses against that. Thick skin. Denial. The unshakeable conviction that one day, everyone would see.
But this silent dismissal from a stranger in a ruined suit was somehow worse than all the mockery combined.
"Y-You think you're BETTER than me?!" Killer Moth screeched. "You think you can just STAND there and JUDGE me?! I'll show you! I'll show EVERYONE!"
He raised his cocoon gun, finger tightening on the trigger—
And then a new voice cut through the night.
"That's enough."
Killer Moth's blood, which had already run cold, somehow found new depths of chill.
The voice came from above.
It was young—surprisingly young, with the precise diction of expensive education and the steel undertone of someone who had been raised to command. It was the voice of a child, but it was not a child's voice.
A figure dropped from the fire escape above.
Cape billowing, body twisting, landing in a perfect combat crouch between Killer Moth and the silent stranger. The newcomer rose with fluid grace, one hand resting on the hilt of a sword—an actual sword, because apparently this city was insane enough to have sword-wielding children in costumes.
Robin.
The current Robin, not the acrobatic one or the angry one or the deceased one but the newest one, the dangerous one, the one who had been raised by assassins and trained to kill before he could read. Damian Wayne, though Killer Moth didn't know that name, only knew the reputation that preceded it.
This Robin was not known for mercy.
"Killer Moth," Damian said, the name dripping with contempt. "I was hoping for a challenge tonight. Perhaps Bane, or Clayface, or someone whose threat level rises above 'minor inconvenience.' Instead, I find you. Harassing civilians. In Crime Alley. How disappointingly on-brand."
"R-Robin!" Killer Moth stepped back, cocoon gun lowering involuntarily. "I wasn't—this isn't—HE started it!"
Damian's masked eyes narrowed.
"The civilian started it?"
"YES! Look at him! LOOK AT HIM!"
Damian looked.
Damian Wayne had been trained from birth to assess threats.
His grandfather, Ra's al Ghul, had drilled the skill into him through endless hours of observation exercises, teaching him to read body language and microexpressions and the subtle signs that separated civilians from combatants, prey from predators. His father, Batman, had refined those skills further, adding deductive reasoning and psychological analysis to the mix.
Damian could look at a person and know, within seconds, what they were capable of.
He looked at the man standing behind him.
And for the first time in a very long time, Damian Wayne was uncertain.
The man was obviously civilian in appearance. His suit was ruined, his posture was poor, his physical condition suggested someone who spent more time at a desk than in a gym. He looked like a businessman who had suffered some kind of terrible misfortune—mugging, perhaps, or a bad fall, or a night of drinking that had ended in an alley.
But that wasn't what Damian saw.
Damian saw the stillness.
The man stood with unnatural calm, his body relaxed in a way that spoke of either complete control or complete surrender. No tension. No readiness. No sign of the fight-or-flight response that should have been triggered by a supervillain attack followed by a vigilante intervention. He just... stood there.
Damian saw the eyes.
Empty. Hollow. Devoid of the emotional reactions that should have been present. Not the emptiness of shock or the blankness of confusion, but something deeper. Something that suggested the man had looked into something terrible and had all other concerns burned away.
Damian saw the breathing.
Slow. Even. Controlled. The breathing of someone who was utterly unafraid, or perhaps beyond fear entirely.
And Damian saw the way the man looked at him.
Not with gratitude, as a rescued civilian should. Not with fear, as someone facing an armed vigilante might. Not with confusion, as a foreigner in a strange city would reasonably display.
Just... observation.
Calm, steady, evaluating observation.
The look of someone sizing him up.
The look of someone who was not impressed.
Damian felt an unfamiliar sensation creep up his spine.
It was not quite fear. Damian Wayne did not fear. He had faced assassins and demons and the various nightmare creatures that populated Gotham's rogues gallery. He had stared down monsters that would drive normal men mad.
But this... this was unsettling.
This man was unsettling.
"You," Damian said, addressing the stranger directly. His voice came out sharper than intended. "Did this insect threaten you?"
Kenji watched the child.
A child in a costume had just dropped from the sky.
A child with a cape and a mask and a sword.
A sword.
An actual sword.
Kenji's brain, already struggling with the moth-man, now had to contend with the addition of an armed child vigilante. The child was small—maybe twelve or thirteen, though it was hard to tell with the mask—but he moved like someone much older. Much more dangerous.
The child was speaking to him.
The words were English, incomprehensible, but the tone was commanding. Demanding. The child wanted something from him. A response, maybe. An explanation.
Kenji couldn't give him an explanation.
He couldn't explain anything.
He didn't know what was happening. He didn't know where he was. He didn't know why there were people in costumes descending from rooftops and waving weapons around. He didn't know anything at all.
And he absolutely could not admit that.
If he opened his mouth and only Japanese came out, the child would know he was foreign. The child would know he was helpless. The child would look at him with pity or contempt or that special expression reserved for people who couldn't function in normal society.
No.
Better to stay silent.
Better to wait.
Maybe the child would go away too.
Kenji looked at the armed vigilante child with his empty, exhausted eyes, and said nothing.
Damian waited for a response.
None came.
The man just looked at him. That same steady, empty, evaluating gaze that had apparently unnerved Killer Moth so badly. Those same hollow eyes, now fixed on Damian with calm attention.
The silence stretched between them.
One second. Two seconds. Five.
Damian was accustomed to silence. His father used silence as a weapon, stretching it out until suspects cracked and spilled their secrets. Damian had learned the technique, had practiced it, had mastered it.
He had never had it used against him.
But this man's silence was different.
It wasn't aggressive silence, the kind meant to intimidate. It wasn't defensive silence, the kind meant to protect secrets. It wasn't even stubborn silence, the kind meant to frustrate interrogators.
It was absolute silence. Complete silence. The silence of someone who simply had nothing to say, or who had decided that words were not worth the effort.
The silence of someone who was waiting.
For what?
Damian didn't know.
That bothered him.
"I asked you a question," Damian said, letting an edge creep into his voice. "It's rude not to answer. Especially to someone who just saved you from a supervillain."
Nothing.
The man blinked—slowly, deliberately—and continued looking at him.
Damian felt his eye twitch behind his mask.
This was not how civilians behaved. Civilians babbled thank-yous and asked questions and displayed appropriate levels of gratitude when vigilantes rescued them from costumed criminals. They did not stare at their rescuers with expressions of distant evaluation. They did not remain silent as if the conversation was not worth their participation.
"Are you mute?" Damian demanded. "Deaf? Mentally impaired in some way?"
The man's head tilted slightly.
That same small movement that had unnerved Killer Moth. A few degrees of inclination. Curious. Evaluating.
And somehow condescending.
As if Damian had just asked a foolish question and the man was debating whether to dignify it with a response.
"—Tt."
Damian clicked his tongue in irritation—a habit he had picked up from his father and never managed to break. He didn't like this. He didn't like being looked at like this. He didn't like the sensation of being assessed by someone he couldn't read.
Behind him, he heard Killer Moth whimper.
"You see?" the villain hissed. "You SEE? He does that! He just LOOKS at you! And you feel like—like—"
"Like you're being judged," Damian said quietly.
"YES!"
Damian looked at the silent stranger again.
The man hadn't moved. Hadn't spoken. Hadn't done anything at all. And yet somehow, without any action whatsoever, he had made both a supervillain and a trained assassin deeply uncomfortable.
That was a skill.
That was a very dangerous skill.
"Who are you?" Damian asked.
Kenji observed the interaction happening in front of him.
The moth-man and the child were talking to each other. About him, apparently, based on the way they kept gesturing in his direction. The moth-man seemed frightened. The child seemed annoyed. Both of them seemed to be expecting something from him.
But Kenji had nothing to give.
He was so tired.
He had been tired for years, really—tired of his job, tired of his life, tired of the endless gray routine of salary work and cramped apartments and trains packed with silent, exhausted people just like him. The truck had killed him. The afterlife or the isekai or whatever this was had deposited him in a nightmare city full of costumed lunatics. And now these two were looking at him like he was supposed to do something.
He didn't have anything left.
No energy to react. No capacity for surprise. No ability to muster the appropriate emotional responses to his insane situation.
Just exhaustion.
Deep, profound, absolute exhaustion.
The exhaustion of someone who had given up on the expectation that life should make sense.
Kenji looked at the child with his empty eyes, and something in his expression must have shifted, because the child took an almost imperceptible step backward.
Damian caught himself retreating and immediately stopped, furious at his own reaction.
He did not step back. He was Robin. He was the son of the Bat. He was trained by the League of Assassins and mentored by the Dark Knight himself. He did not step back from empty-eyed strangers in ruined suits, no matter how unsettling their stare might be.
But something had changed in the man's expression.
Nothing visible. Nothing Damian could point to and identify. The face was the same blank mask it had been before. The eyes were the same hollow voids. The posture was the same relaxed stillness.
And yet.
Something had shifted.
Something that made Damian's instincts—instincts honed through years of combat training and real-world experience—scream at him to pay attention.
The man was dangerous.
Damian didn't know how he knew. There was no evidence, no concrete proof, nothing he could put in a report or explain to his father. Just a feeling. A sense. The recognition of a predator who was not performing for anyone.
Most criminals performed. They had their costumes and their gimmicks and their theatrical speeches, all designed to create an image, to project an identity. Even the truly dangerous ones—the Jokers and the Banes—were performers at heart, playing roles they had created for themselves.
This man was not performing.
He was simply... present.
Here.
Watching.
Waiting.
The man sighed.
And Damian felt a chill run down his spine.
It was the same sigh Killer Moth had described. Small. Quiet. Almost inaudible. A faint exhalation of breath that should have meant nothing.
But it didn't mean nothing.
It meant disappointment.
Deep, profound, soul-crushing disappointment.
The disappointment of a master looking at a student who had failed to meet even basic expectations. The disappointment of someone who had hoped for more and received less. The disappointment of a person who had seen so much that this—a supervillain and a vigilante and all the chaos of Gotham—barely registered as interesting.
Damian felt his grip tighten on his sword hilt.
He didn't like this.
He didn't like this at all.
"Killer Moth," he said, without taking his eyes off the stranger. "Leave. Now."
"But—"
"NOW."
Killer Moth didn't need to be told twice. His wings buzzed to life and he launched himself into the sky, fleeing into the Gotham night with considerably less dignity than he had arrived with.
Which left Damian alone with the silent stranger.
The alley was very quiet.
Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed. Closer, a rat scurried through garbage. The wind whispered through the fire escapes above, making the rusted metal creak and groan.
Damian and the stranger faced each other in the yellow glow of a distant street lamp.
Neither moved.
Neither spoke.
The silence stretched between them, growing heavier with each passing second.
Damian was very good at silence. He could outlast most people easily, waiting patiently while they squirmed and fidgeted and eventually broke. But this man showed no signs of squirming. No signs of discomfort. No signs of anything at all.
He just waited.
As if he had all the time in the world.
As if nothing Damian did could possibly matter.
"I don't know who you are," Damian said finally. His voice was quiet, controlled, revealing nothing of the unease he felt. "But I know what I'm seeing."
The man didn't respond.
"You're not a civilian. Civilians react. Civilians show fear or relief or gratitude. Civilians don't stand in alleys looking at trained combatants like they're evaluating whether we're worth the effort of killing."
Nothing.
"Your suit is Japanese. Expensive, before it was ruined. You're not from here. You're not from anywhere near here. Which raises the question of how you ended up in Crime Alley looking like you crawled out of a grave."
The man's head tilted slightly.
Damian's hand tightened on his sword.
"You're testing me," he said. "Watching how I react. Gathering information. That's fine. I do the same thing. But know this: I am Robin. I work with Batman. And we will find out who you are."
The man blinked.
Slowly.
Once.
And Damian, heir to the Demon, son of the Bat, one of the most dangerous twelve-year-olds on the planet, felt a sudden and entirely irrational urge to leave.
Not run. He would never run. But... leave. Strategically retreat. Disengage from this situation that was making his instincts scream warnings he couldn't articulate.
"I'll be watching you," Damian said. "Batman will be watching you. If you're a threat to this city, we will stop you."
He reached for his grappling hook.
The man didn't react.
"And get some new clothes," Damian added, because he was Damian and he couldn't help himself. "You smell like death."
He fired the grappling hook and rose into the air, ascending toward the rooftops with as much dignity as he could muster.
It wasn't until he was three buildings away, perched on a gargoyle and watching the alley through binoculars, that Damian allowed himself to admit the truth:
He had retreated.
He, Damian Wayne, had retreated from a man in a ruined suit who hadn't said a single word or made a single threatening move.
And he didn't know why.
He didn't understand what he had seen.
But he knew, with the certainty of someone who had been trained to recognize danger since infancy, that the silent stranger was not someone to be underestimated.
His father needed to know about this.
Immediately.
Kenji stood alone in the alley.
The moth-man was gone. The child was gone. The night was quiet again, filled only with the distant sounds of the city and the closer sounds of rats going about their ratty business.
He was still standing.
That seemed like an accomplishment, somehow.
Kenji looked up at the gray sky, at the Gothic buildings, at the unfamiliar stars struggling to shine through the cloud cover.
He had no idea what had just happened.
A moth-man had yelled at him. A child with a sword had yelled at him. Both of them had eventually left. None of their words had meant anything to Kenji, but they had seemed upset. Maybe even scared.
Scared of what?
Kenji didn't know.
He was too tired to know.
He was too tired to think.
He was too tired to do anything except put one foot in front of the other and keep moving.
That was what salarymen did.
They endured.
They survived.
Even when nothing made sense.
Even when the universe threw moth-men and sword-children at them for reasons beyond comprehension.
They just kept going.
Nakamura Kenji shuffled out of the alley and into the streets of Gotham City.
He didn't know where he was going.
He didn't know what he was going to do.
He didn't know anything at all.
But he was moving.
And for now, that was enough.
The next few hours were a blur.
Kenji walked through the city without destination, letting his feet carry him wherever they wanted to go. He passed through neighborhoods that shifted in character from block to block—industrial areas giving way to residential streets giving way to commercial districts and back again, all of it rendered in the same Gothic-noir aesthetic that seemed to define this strange place.
Eventually, the sky began to lighten.
Dawn was coming, gray and reluctant, barely distinguishable from the night that preceded it. But it was morning, and morning meant people, and people meant the possibility of finding something—a shelter, a consulate, some kind of help.
Kenji found a bench in a small park and sat down.
He was exhausted beyond exhaustion. His legs ached. His head throbbed. His stomach had given up growling and settled into a sort of resigned emptiness. He closed his eyes for just a moment, just to rest them, and—
—and woke up three hours later to the sound of pigeons.
The sun was fully up now, weak and watery but definitely present. The park had come alive around him, though "alive" was perhaps too strong a word. A few homeless people occupied other benches. A businessman hurried past without looking up from his phone. A woman walked a dog that seemed deeply suspicious of its surroundings.
Kenji sat up, wincing at the stiffness in his muscles.
He was still here.
Still in this nightmare city.
Still alone.
Still unable to speak the language.
But he was alive. That was something. After getting hit by a truck, being alive was definitely an improvement over the alternative.
He needed to find food. He needed to find water. He needed to find shelter. He needed to figure out some way to survive in this place without speaking to anyone.
Kenji took a deep breath.
And started walking again.
Several miles away, in a cave beneath a mansion, a conversation was taking place.
"Unknown male," Damian said, his voice clipped and professional. "Japanese, late twenties. Found in Crime Alley being accosted by Killer Moth. Subject displayed no fear response to either Killer Moth or myself. Refused to speak. Possibly mute, possibly traumatized, possibly something else entirely."
Batman stood before the Batcomputer, his cowl pushed back to reveal the tired face of Bruce Wayne. He had been up all night dealing with a Riddler plot at the museum. He was not in the mood for mysteries.
But mysteries were his job.
"Something else?" he asked.
"His eyes, Father." Damian paused, searching for the right words. "They were... wrong. Empty in a way I've never seen. Not shock. Not trauma. Something deeper. Like everything had been burned out of him and only the shell remained."
Bruce turned to look at his son.
Damian did not exaggerate. Damian did not make things up for dramatic effect. If he said something had unsettled him, then something had genuinely unsettled him.
That was concerning.
"How did he move?"
"Like a civilian, mostly. Poor posture, no combat readiness. But..." Damian hesitated. "There was something underneath. A stillness that felt trained. And when I threatened him, when I pushed, he just... looked at me."
"Looked at you?"
"Evaluated me. Like I was a specimen. Like he was deciding whether I was worth his attention." Damian's jaw tightened. "He decided I wasn't."
Bruce was quiet for a moment.
"You felt threatened?"
"I felt..." Damian struggled with the word. "Uncertain. I couldn't read him. I couldn't predict him. He was a complete unknown, and every instinct I have says that complete unknowns in Gotham are dangerous."
Bruce nodded slowly.
"I'll look into it."
"I assumed you would."
Bruce turned back to the Batcomputer and began typing. Facial recognition. Immigration records. Interpol databases. Every tool at his disposal would be brought to bear on this mystery man who had rattled his son.
"One more thing," Damian said from the doorway.
Bruce glanced back.
"Killer Moth was terrified of him. Genuinely terrified. And that man didn't do anything. Didn't move. Didn't speak. Didn't threaten. He just... stood there."
Damian's expression was troubled.
"Whatever he is, Father, I don't think he's pretending. I don't think it's an act. I think that's just... him."
He left.
Bruce turned back to the computer.
The screen showed no matches. No records. No identity. Just a blurry image captured by a street camera, showing a man in a ruined suit walking through Gotham with empty eyes.
"Who are you?" Bruce murmured.
The image didn't answer.
But somewhere in the city, a Japanese salaryman was walking into a convenience store, desperately trying to figure out how to buy food without speaking.
He settled for pointing.
The cashier looked at him strangely.
Kenji was too tired to care.
Word spread quickly through Gotham's underworld.
By midday, Killer Moth had told everyone who would listen—and many who would not—about the terrifying encounter in Crime Alley. About the man who had stared him down without a word. About the empty eyes that had judged him and found him wanting. About the sigh of disappointment that had cut deeper than any insult.
"There's something new in town," Killer Moth said, to anyone who would listen. "Something different. Something wrong."
By evening, the story had grown.
The Silent One, they called him. The man who didn't speak. The man who didn't react. The man who had made Killer Moth flee in terror and, according to rumor, had even unnerved Robin himself.
Who was he?
Where had he come from?
What did he want?
Nobody knew.
But everyone was watching.
And in a small park on the edge of Crime Alley, Nakamura Kenji sat on a bench, eating a convenience store rice ball that he had purchased through an agonizing process of pointing and nodding, and wondered why people kept looking at him strangely.
He was too tired to figure it out.
He was too tired for anything.
But tomorrow was another day.
And somehow, against all odds, he would survive it.
That was what salarymen did.
They survived.
KENJI'S STATUS (END OF CHAPTER 1):
Words spoken: 0English learned: 0Times kidnapped: 0 (this will change)Villains terrified: 1 (Killer Moth)Heroes unsettled: 1 (Robin)Criminal reputation: "The Silent One" (emerging)Understanding of situation: 0%
CURRENT THOUGHT: "Tomorrow, I need to find better food. And water. And maybe a place to sleep that isn't a bench. And a dictionary. Do they have dictionaries here? They must have dictionaries. I just need to find one. Without talking. Without admitting I don't speak the language. Without embarrassing myself in front of strangers."
He paused.
"This is going to be very difficult."