Police chatter in his ear had been frantic, then abruptly silenced. Possible 10-71, multiple subjects down. Unknown assailant. Requesting backup and... uh... medical. The industrial district was a maze of decaying brick and corrugated steel, and the address led him here—a loading bay door hanging crookedly off its tracks.

It wasn’t a massacre. It was an exhibit.

Eight men, all known mid-level dealers for Blockbuster’s narcotics ring, were arranged in a rough circle in the center of the concrete floor. None were dead. Each was conscious, their breaths coming in ragged, pained hitches. Each was meticulously, surgically ruined.

Knees bent at angles nature never intended. Hands that looked like they’d been put through a hydraulic press. One man stared at the ceiling, a deep, precise cut rendering his face into a permanent rictus of terror. There was no rage in the scene. No messy brutality. Just cold, efficient dismantling.

A flicker of movement to his left. A small monitor, rigged to a car battery, was replaying a loop from a security camera. The footage was grainy, black and white. A shadow, little more than a blur, moved through the room. It didn’t run. It flowed. A dealer would raise a gun, and the next frame showed the weapon on the floor, the man’s wrist already broken. The efficiency was terrifying.

Nightwing approached the nearest man, whose name he recalled as Eddie “Knuckles” Malone. Eddie’s eyes, wide with shock and pain, tracked him.

He turned, launching himself back through the broken door and into the rain. The rooftops were his highway. He calculated the fastest route to the docks, his mind racing. The Wraith was moving with purpose, systematically hitting Blockbuster’s operations. And they were at least nineteen minutes ahead of him.

As he landed on a soot-stained chimney stack, his eyes scanned the labyrinth of cranes and shipping containers below. Movement. A flicker of deeper black against the gloom, slipping between two stacks of containers near the water’s edge. No sound. No shadow that seemed to belong to it.

Got you.