Genius on the Left, Madman on the Right (Part 1)

Bruce had never expected so many unforeseen twists to arise during this internship.

What troubled him most, of course, was his Psychology Professor, Schiller.

This professor seemed less like someone who had arrived in Gotham only a few months ago and more like a native born and raised here. No—perhaps even most locals could not manage what he did.

At a speed that caught even Bruce off guard, Schiller rapidly figured out every rule in the city. Then, building on that foundation, he not only mastered them all but became one of the best at playing by them.

Bruce had once heard Gordon say that Gotham was like a vast swamp. Anyone who entered it would slowly sink into the inescapable mire.

Yet Schiller, this professor who claimed to be an ordinary man, had plunged headfirst into that swamp right before Bruce’s eyes. Not only had he reacted quickly and moved nimbly, he had leaped straight into its deepest part without the slightest intention of pulling himself out.

In the blink of an eye, he had seamlessly turned into someone even worse than the worst scum. From manpower arrangements and geographical advantages in gang shootouts, protection fee rates for bars and restaurants, and odds at underground casinos, to rules for large-scale contraband deals, security for arms transport, and smuggling routes for hazardous goods—there was nothing this professor did not know.

Even Falcone nodded repeatedly at his suggestions, praising Schiller as a natural for this line of work. He said that if Schiller had come to Gotham thirty years earlier, Rodriguez would surely have had a place among the Twelve Families.

This made Bruce’s impression of Schiller exceedingly complicated.

If one said the professor was doing good, then the methods he used could no longer merely be called dishonorable. They were outright collusion with evil.

But if one said he was doing evil, he truly was using his own abilities to keep prying at Gotham’s existing balance and, through some utterly absurd methods, shifting it in the direction he wanted.

And in Bruce’s view, that shift did not seem to be headed in a worse direction. Instead, it had bizarrely established a precarious but better new order.

Especially after Bruce received word from Gordon that Gotham’s crime rate had dropped noticeably over the past two weeks, he found the whole thing absurd.

In the industrial chain Schiller had created, the police’s combat strength had been greatly enhanced, because they were allied with Gotham’s largest gang, the Falcone family.

Because the Police Department commissioner received Falcone’s direct support, the Godfather supplied them with large quantities of heavy weaponry, while they used the Godfather’s influence to intimidate everyone else.

Now, whenever gangs started shooting at each other, they could arrive on the scene within ten minutes, swiftly suppress both sides, then arrest them all and throw them into psychiatric hospitals.

Unlike before, the police were far too enthusiastic about their work. Opportunities for field operations now had to be fought over. As long as they admitted an official gang member to the psychiatric hospital, they could take two percent of all the hospitalization fees he paid as compensation.

Gordon had nearly worked himself mad these past few days. Even the perennial slackers were howling to charge onto the front lines and fight to uphold justice and crush the gangs.

Lately, this righteous detective did not even know what justice was anymore. Such effective gang suppression should clearly have been a good thing, yet he always felt that something was wrong.

Still, these operations had curbed the gangs’ arrogance while also improving the police officers’ lives, making them start to love this damned job.

Recently, Gordon had discovered in utter shock that people in the entire Police Department were actually working overtime! What devil had taken control of them?!

Indeed, it was a devil called greed. With a gun in hand, there was no need to panic. When you were holding a fully loaded heavy machine gun and ordering gangsters to cease fire, you too would feel that this job was nothing special. And when you received a handsome reward afterward, you would think it was simply the best job in the world.

At first, Falcone still needed to send out his Black Gloves to stir up conflicts between certain gangs and get them to open fire on one another.

But later, tempers flared. "Hyena" and "Captain" joined forces to ambush the Snatchers two streets away, while A-Train at the edge of the East End quickly joined the battle. Three of the four giants of Elizabeth Street wanted to lend a hand, and Maroney, who had just finished swallowing up the Red Crow Gang’s remains, happened to enjoy himself in the chaotic melee. The entire East End became a complete mess.

The gang shootouts had already killed plenty of people. Just when the fighting was at its fiercest, the police charged into the battlefield carrying heavy machine guns and rocket launchers. The gangsters were dumbfounded. Were they the gangsters, or were the police? What kind of cops enforced the law with rocket launchers?!

Just like that, one wave had died in their own shootouts, and another wave had been arrested by the police. The East End’s strongest gangs were all badly weakened. None of them dared stick their heads out anymore, and they all retreated to their turf to lick their wounds.

Gordon’s Field Operations Team became famous in a single battle. All of Gotham knew about these cops’ violent tactics: armored pickups charged straight in with the gas pedal floored, ballistic shields went up, heavy machine guns sprayed wildly, RPGs focused on key targets, and they pushed forward all the way before finally clearing the ground with grenades.

The East End’s most troublesome gangs had all been flattened. Who among the rest dared say anything?

Of course, this was still mostly out of respect for Falcone. Since the Old Godfather was willing to support the police with everything he had, he possessed both reason and force. Ordinary gangs were unwilling to pay such a heavy price just to tug the Old Godfather’s whiskers, while those willing to pay had been battered half to death by this sudden barrage of blows. Gotham had thus grown strangely quiet.

All of this had begun with a flash of inspiration from some ordinary professor one morning.

Bruce thought that this professor had become the bad apple among a group of bad apples. The bad apples treated him as a companion, while the enemy of their enemy had become justice’s good friend.

Bruce truly did not know how to judge such behavior.

Of course, Batman was a genius. After his initial struggle, he felt that he had discovered a new possibility in Schiller’s actions.

He had always believed that criminals should be dealt with swiftly, precisely, and ruthlessly. Even killing a chicken called for a butcher’s knife; ideally, evil forces should be uprooted completely so they could never rise again.

But Schiller did not use that method. Whenever he struck at a faction, not only did he refrain from eradicating it completely, but sometimes he even spread a little fertilizer on the force he had once targeted, allowing the poisonous shoots that had already been cut down once to flourish again. Then he used them as wedges to dismantle another tangled mass of Vines.

After witnessing these actions, Bruce asked Schiller that question again. Bruce said, "Are you really just an ordinary person? Or do you possess some unknown special power that lets you accomplish all this?"

Schiller sat at his desk in the office. He spun the ballpoint pen in his hand, then tapped the desktop to indicate that Bruce should sit down. He said, "When I tell you that I am an ordinary person, the point of that answer is not whether I possess some miraculous power that ordinary people lack."

"It is that I want to tell you that humanity’s most miraculous power is the brain that can think."

Schiller stood and walked to the window. The attending physician’s white coat made him look even straighter and taller. Compared to the rather stern professor he had seemed to be at school, Doctor Schiller appeared calmer and gentler.

He said, "The answer to this question is not whether I am truly an ordinary person. It is, as I once warned you, that your advanced armor and expensive equipment cannot make you the real Batman."

"Because the answers to the questions troubling you do not lie in those external things."

"They lie in the brain that every ordinary person possesses."

"Really, if you calm down and think about it, you will understand that absolute violence cannot fulfill any of the conditions you seek. Whether it is revenge or saving this city, that path is destined to be a dead end."

Schiller lowered his head and fiddled with the ballpoint pen in both hands before saying, "Actually, the path you chose is itself a dead end. But if you do not want to die, then among countless dead ends, you must find a path to life."

"I merely showed you one method among them, but not all of them. It isn’t…"

Bruce said, "Isn’t this enough? Force, wisdom, and determination—isn’t that enough?"

Schiller said, "There is also Gotham."

"…When will I learn Gotham?"

"Perhaps when you die."

Before Bruce could speak, Schiller said, "Gotham is a book that can never be finished."

"I am only a professor. What I need to do is what I do in class: I have already marked the key points for you, but you must write the exam yourself."

Bruce said, "Are the key points strategy and balance? Or the power of wisdom? Thought and foresight?"

"No. Just as I do in class—the entire book is important."

Bruce was speechless. He did not know whether Schiller was mocking him for not paying attention in class or hinting at something else.

But Schiller’s answer made him understand something.

If stopping crime in this city of sin through violence was destined to be wishful thinking, if even Batman’s force and wealth could not use such a simple and brutal method to fill this swamp and level it, then perhaps setting aside pure violence and using his other strength—his intelligence—to manipulate everything from behind the scenes would be better.

A city overflowing with endless violence could not use violence to solve every problem. Great force was merely his ticket through the door, never the whole answer.

When he opened that door with great wealth and equipment, he encountered Schiller, this teacher. And what Schiller showed Batman was an entirely new Gotham.

A Gotham stripped of the surface violence, bloodshed, and fierce conflict—a Gotham filled with countless mists and innumerable tangled relationships.

When Batman followed the veins within the massive canopy down to the roots beneath the earth, when he slid along the crevices of the iceberg from that one corner into the cold sea below, only then did he finally see Gotham’s true face.

This is a new world, Batman thought.

But to him, this was not a setback or a blow. It was a shot of adrenaline.

His brain had never run as quickly as it did today. He had never imagined that he possessed the ability to accept and sort through such complicated relationships so quickly, until he could keep pace with every step Schiller took.

The thrill of gradually digging out a vast root system by following tiny veins fascinated Batman. He experienced excitement and joy even more intense than beating criminals with his fists.

Bruce thought that perhaps this was the right answer.

Perhaps this was the kind of person he was—facing a complicated problem that might leave any ordinary person utterly despairing, he became excited like a madman.

This was him. This was the Bat.

A stubborn, pathologically thrill-seeking Bat, crazier than the mentally ill—Batman.