“Hi,” Vivi greeted the goat as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Do you know how to get beneath the arena, ringmaster?”

Jason glanced at her, perplexed. “You know him?”

“First time meeting.”

“…What?” Jason frowned. “How are you this confident with a stranger?”

The dark drapes of the circus tent shimmered as tiny lights began to flicker. Jason recognized the glow—slimes. Gotham City even had an eccentric “Slime Research Society” now, which practically lived in the circus. To them, these creatures supposedly had the potential to become “demon kings,” though how they saw that remained a mystery.

As the slimes floated closer, their glow seemed to draw all the surrounding light into their orbit, creating an almost oppressive ambiance. The white goat moved further into the shadows, its form barely visible. Meanwhile, Jason had his first real look at the creatures.

They weren’t just glowing blobs. These slimes resembled translucent cells, their bodies housing darker cores. Upon closer inspection, it was clear—those cores weren’t just shapeless nuclei.

They were eyeballs.

And now, every single one of those eyeballs turned to stare directly at the two humans.

Jason’s voice turned cold. “Looks like we’ll have to deal with these non-human creatures before we get to the killers.”

Around them, more figures appeared—knee-high rabbit attendants, a slender red fox announcer, and burly brown bear guards. These anthropomorphic animals seemed to emerge seamlessly from the shadows between the circus seats. But Vivi wasn’t fazed. She remained fixated on the slimes and remarked with an almost absent-minded tone, “I see. The pet training competition pets don’t have the real game’s tactile feel, so they only require visual connectivity.”

Jason blinked, utterly lost. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Hmm,” Vivi mused. “To the audience, it’s like a semi-holographic experience. The map design is pretty good too—better than VR by a bit.”

The goat’s lips curled into what might’ve been a smile—though with a goat’s face, it was hard to tell. His voice, deep and resonant, answered her initial question. “I know the way beneath the arena. There’s a passage below.”

“Lead the way,” Vivi said.

Jason hesitated, disabling his night vision since the scene was now overly illuminated. He noticed a shared trait among the animals: each bore scars. Subtle but present. The red fox had a long gash concealed beneath its fur, running from its neck to its clothing.

Trailing behind, Jason saw the “slimes” floating in their wake, casting a multicolored glowing trail. If he ignored the grotesque reality of their biology, it could almost be considered romantic.

The goat led them backstage. Vivi noticed a leaderboard on display—ranking participants in the training competition. Despite the hour, Damian’s alias was listed among the top ten. How he managed to find time for competitions was beyond her.

Beneath the arena was a dark, dank space. Removing a ground cover revealed a trapdoor leading to a subterranean chamber. The stench of fish lingered, likely remnants of the area’s previous life as a fisherman’s dwelling before the docks overtook it.

Jason inspected the walls and quickly identified an anomaly—a section where the sound and thickness felt off. “There’s something behind this,” he muttered. “You weren’t lying.”

He didn’t wait. Blasting the wall with explosives, Jason opened a hole before Vivi could even grab the hammer she’d been considering.

As they moved forward, Vivi turned back once. The slimes floated eerily, their glow lighting the goat ringmaster and the assembled animals. She hesitated but then slipped through the opening.

Once she was gone, the animals slowly bowed their heads. They crouched low, remaining in that posture for several minutes before standing upright again. One by one, they disintegrated into nothingness, leaving only the goat behind.

The slimes’ light faded, plunging the area into utter darkness.

---

Batcave.

“The police took the assassin. His attire matched the one who attacked me before,” Bruce Wayne said, reviewing the footage on his computer. “They used freezing technology to subdue him. This isn’t just one killer—it’s an organization with a unified name and modus operandi. Robin… Robin, are you listening? Robin!”

“Ah—sorry, Bruce.” Tim Drake rubbed his eyes, snapping out of his daze. “I’ve just been… exhausted lately.”

“Go rest,” Bruce said, placing a firm hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been out of it for days.”

Tim gave Bruce a faint smile. “It’s fine, B. Oh, right… what about your investigation into Jason?”

“I’m not sure,” the man known as Batman replied. “There are very few things I’m uncertain about, but now, thinking back… the boy in the maze almost felt like a hallucination. The biscuits can transform adults into children—we can’t even determine if that ‘Jack’ was eight years old or eighty.”

“But there was no body in Jason’s grave,” Tim said, his concern evident. “Even if it was a hallucination, hallucinations can’t make a corpse disappear.”

Yet neither of them voiced the obvious question.

The surveillance cameras could be avoided, but Gotham City had eyes that couldn’t be evaded—Gargoyle, Vivi’s eyes.

Bruce hadn’t sought Vivi’s help because doubts lingered in his mind. Consider what it took to revive Superman, he thought, and ask why Jason would have been resurrected. Before his death, Jason had only been an ordinary vigilante. The thought of a resurrected son made Bruce’s mind wander to darker possibilities—others in Gotham who had similarly returned from the dead.

Regardless, he would continue investigating, the Batman way.

As for Tim, he might have once suggested asking Vivi for help to uncover the truth quickly. But their visit to the cemetery had planted doubts of his own, halting him in his tracks.

Tim was the Robin who most resembled Bruce—his detective mindset, his need for control. While he might appear to trust on the surface, he always kept a backup plan, not out of distrust but as preparation. A contingency.

He’d always believed that, even if Mr. C was suspicious, Vivi herself was innocent. He didn’t want to use that second plan. He didn’t want to… really.

Tim smiled at Bruce again and decided to catch some sleep before it hit 2 a.m.

After Tim left, Bruce sat silently before the Batcomputer. He began working, typing rapidly as the screen shifted through layers of security and encrypted files. Ten minutes later, the first photo appeared.

It was an image of a girl’s corpse lying in the Gotham Academy sewers, light falling upon her lifeless form.

The second photo depicted the interior of an East District cathedral. A wooden sculpture of the same girl sat at a desk, lifelike to the finest detail, down to the strands of her hair. She looked as if she were merely asleep, yet the wood revealed her true nature.

As the final loading bar approached completion, Tim’s photos filled the screen. Bruce leaned back in his chair, his gaze unwavering.

The series of photos seemed to be taken on an overcast day.

They depicted the same nameless grave, its wet earth disturbed, the small and unassuming coffin lying exposed.

The next image showed the coffin opened. A black body bag had been partially unzipped, revealing the curled-up form of a young girl inside—a corpse, frozen in time as if she had just died moments ago.

Her cause of death was unmistakable. Her neck had been twisted at an unnatural angle, a fatal injury that no one could survive.

As an experienced detective, Bruce’s mind quickly reconstructed the scene from the evidence. Her fingers were rigid, as though she had braced herself for an imminent attack. From the angle of her head, her assailant must have come from directly behind, pressing down on her. Her gaze, slightly upward, seemed to search for something—perhaps a way to escape, or perhaps for help. But clearly, she hadn’t managed to escape.

Her brown hair fanned out around her, her green eyes wide and unseeing. The next photo showed her hair carefully combed, her eyes closed as if in peaceful sleep.

It was Vivi White’s face.

Bruce stared at the screen, his expression unreadable. After a moment, he tapped a few keys, deleting all traces of his activity.

When Bruce first became Batman, he worked alone. He had no Robin. In those days, he sometimes wept in his sleep, haunted by the people he hadn’t been able to save. To him, anyone who died because of his mistakes had died because of him.

That was why he had to keep going, had to strive to be perfect. As Bruce Wayne, he funded programs for children and women, created job opportunities. As Batman, he saved everyone he could. But he knew it was never enough.

He thought Gotham was improving. He saw Gotham improving. The city was changing, from its infrastructure to its people—like a video game edging toward a happy ending if the player worked hard enough.

But in this real-world game, what price did the “player” pay? Vivi carried the vague and almost dismissive label “VV,” with no past, and wholeheartedly pursued the goals imposed upon her by others. When she wielded her mysterious powers, what was the cost she paid? Or, as Doctor Strange once saw it, what did she truly bring to the one pulling the strings?

---

Underground.

Beyond the wall lay a narrow passage that eventually opened into an abandoned, granite-lined sewer. It reeked of decay, the connecting pathways to the rest of the city sealed off. Jason loaded his gun with cryogenic rounds, a new prototype developed by Mr Freeze, and tested its balance.

In his other hand, he gripped his personal firearm. He was ready.

Since the enemy cannot die, Jason figured there was no need to hold back.

From behind him, Vivi peeked her head out. The hooded cloak she wore was actually part of a magician’s costume set, cleverly repurposed through the set’s unique “magic” ability to appear as something else. Vivi had already run through the first three mandatory failed magic tricks the outfit required.

At the end of the passageway, three branching paths emerged. One bore the faint markings of dried blood smeared into the number “13,” its once-crimson hue dulled by oxidation on the metal surface.

From the shadows, dozens of silver knives suddenly shot through the air, aimed squarely at Vivi, who trailed slightly behind.

“Vivi White,” came a voice from the darkness, as if the speaker had been waiting there all along. “The Court of Owls sentences you to death.”

Caught off guard, Vivi sighed inwardly. Why did they pass up the adult male right next to me and choose to attack me—a delicate, fragile game player?