"Alberto! Don't run!!"
Jude's voice carried across the orchard with cheerful enthusiasm, like someone offering helpful directions to a lost tourist rather than hunting down a serial killer.
The Holiday Killer's face—hidden beneath the wide-brimmed hat and high collar—twisted with horror.
When he heard Jude's shout, when he processed the words and realized this stranger somehow knew his identity, his pace became faster.
Desperation overrode strategy. Fear overrode everything.
What a joke! his mind screamed. If I don't run now, I'll be hit by the wheelchair!
His legs pumped harder, lungs burning, heart hammering against his ribs.
And where did this unknown person come from? Why does he know my identity? How—
But it was too late for questions.
How could human legs—even well-trained, athletic legs belonging to someone who'd committed a dozen murders without getting caught—outrun a wheelchair moving at superhuman speed?
The Holiday Killer only heard the whirring sound of the wheelchair behind him getting closer. And closer. And impossibly closer.
And singing.
The man on the wheelchair was singing.
"I stumbled towards you—" The voice was cheerful, slightly off-key, carrying the particular enthusiasm of someone who really enjoyed their work.
The sound was almost directly behind him now, close enough that he could feel displaced air against his back, close enough that he knew with absolute certainty—
WHAM.
A tremendous force hit him between the shoulder blades.
The Holiday Killer—Alberto Falcone, youngest son of Carmine Falcone, the Roman's child who'd spent his entire life being dismissed as weak and gentle and unfit for the family business—experienced something he'd never felt before.
The sensation of flying.
For a brief, absurd moment, he genuinely believed he had wings.
His feet left the ground. His body sailed through the air in a graceful arc. The orchard spun around him—trees, sky, wet grass, all blurring together.
He was airborne for perhaps two seconds.
It felt like an eternity.
Then gravity reasserted itself.
But he didn't hit the ground.
A figure in black intercepted his trajectory mid-flight, caught him with practiced precision, and rolled with the impact. Once, twice, three times across wet grass, distributing the force of the collision across multiple rotations until momentum bled away into friction and physics.
They came to rest in a tangle of limbs.
Alberto lay there, stunned, trying to process what had just happened.
He wasn't injured. Bruised, probably. His ribs ached from the initial impact. But nothing broken. Nothing bleeding.
The figure had saved him.
Saved him.
From the wheelchair.
That had hit him.
Alberto didn't have time to process the absurdity before cold metal clicked around his wrists.
Handcuffs.
He was being handcuffed.
His vision cleared enough to see the figure standing over him: Batman. The Dark Knight. Gotham's greatest detective, dressed in black armor and cape, cowl casting his face in shadow.
No.
Alberto's brain kicked into overdrive, thoughts racing at desperate speed.
Ever since he'd run out of the orchard gate—ever since that glowing wheelchair had appeared like a circus nightmare—information had been flooding his mind faster than he could process it. He'd been completely reactive. Scrambling. Panicking.
But he was smart.
Very smart.
And it only took him a few seconds to sort out the current situation.
A stranger driving a colorful high-speed wheelchair had shouted out his true identity and sent him flying. Then Batman had caught him and handcuffed him on the spot.
Excluding the fancy interference elements—the absurd wheelchair, the singing, the theatrical timing—the core truth was simple:
He'd been waited for.
Batman and the wheelchair man had set a trap.
And he'd walked right into it.
Not only that—they'd guessed his identity. Known who he was beneath the Holiday Killer mask.
Alberto's mind raced through the implications.
The trap had been brilliant. Truly brilliant.
Batman had allowed him to kill the two leaders of the Maroni family. Let the murders happen. Gotham City lost a mafia family—the Maronis destroyed, their power base shattered.
Then Batman arrested the Holiday Killer on the spot. Gotham City lost a pathological criminal.
Two birds, one stone.
Clean. Efficient. Morally complicated but strategically perfect.
It's a pity, Alberto thought with genuine regret, that he arrested me directly.
Because there were still people Alberto wanted to kill.
Carla Vitti who'd once tried to challenge the Roman's authority.
The family insiders who weren't completely loyal to his father.
Other gangster families who'd come to Gotham from outside, trying to muscle in on Falcone territory.
Oh, what a pity, he thought. I wanted to clear more obstacles for my father.
He wondered if Carmine would scold him when he came to visit prison.
But if Alberto had to do it again, he might still make the same choices.
Because he was Falcone's son.
Not a gentle, good boy who happened to be born into the family.
Not an outsider who needed protection from the ugliness of their world.
He was qualified to stand beside his father. Had proven it through blood and bullets and carefully planned murders that had destroyed an entire criminal dynasty.
Moreover—
The feeling of standing in the center of the storm had been intoxicating.
In his life, Alberto had never been so eye-catching. Never been the focus of so much attention. Never mattered.
He'd relied on his own strength to completely destroy one of Gotham's black families. Had removed constraints, broken free from all the restrictions of his sheltered life, risen above the stale old rules that said he was too weak, too gentle, too good for this world.
It was freedom.
It was power.
It was everything he'd ever wanted.
Wearing the mask called "Holiday Killer" had actually meant taking off the mask called "Alberto."
The real him. The capable him. The dangerous him.
And the beautiful irony was that as an outsider to the traditional mafia chess game—someone who didn't follow the blood-soaked rules of vendetta and territory and respect—he'd gained advantages that insiders could never match.
A person who didn't follow the rules of the chessboard could destroy sophisticated games that took generations to build.
He'd proven that.
Even if he'd lost in the end.
Alberto pulled himself from his thoughts, assessed his immediate situation with forced calm.
Batman had already called Commissioner Gordon—that much was obvious from the way he was standing, waiting, not interrogating yet.
But strangely, there were no police cars around. No sirens. No backup.
Just Batman. And the wheelchair man in the black robe standing a few yards away.
They still have a use for me, Alberto concluded immediately.
This wasn't a simple arrest.
This was something more complicated.
Then two unexpected figures appeared, walking out from behind the orchard trees.
"Bah! Those Falcone kids are really no good!"
"I should draw my gun and kill you right now, you little bastard!"
White-haired Luigi Maroni and black-haired Sal Maroni—the two generations of the Maroni family's leadership, father and son, the men Alberto had just shot four times in the chest with perfect accuracy—came stomping toward him, cursing with the particular venom of people who'd narrowly avoided death.
Both men were alive.
They ripped open their shirts, revealing Kevlar bulletproof vests underneath.
Police-issue vests.
The GCPD logo was extremely conspicuous on the chest panels.
"Damn it!" Luigi spat. "I almost died at the hands of that little bastard!"
"Four perfect shots," Sal added, touching the impact points on his vest where bullets had struck. "If we hadn't been wearing these, we'd be bleeding out in the orchard right now."
Alberto—who'd been relatively calm until this moment, who'd been processing his capture with strategic detachment—couldn't help himself.
He cursed.
Loudly.
Because he understood now.
He'd underestimated Batman's paranoia.
The Dark Knight would never condone criminals being killed in front of him. As long as a person was alive, Batman would never watch them die—even if they were gangsters with blood on their hands like Sal and Luigi Maroni.
Even if killing them would make Gotham safer.
Even if letting them die would solve problems.
Batman's code was absolute.
Asking the Maronis to wear bulletproof vests in advance meant telling them the plan beforehand. Which added unnecessary risk. Required trusting criminals to follow instructions. Meant preventing them from secretly deploying their own people after learning about the Holiday Killer's movements. Meant making sure they didn't reveal flaws in their daily behavior that would tip off a careful observer.
If Alberto had noticed unusual security arrangements around his targets, or realized the Maronis were pretending to be vulnerable while actually fishing for an assassin, he would have escaped.
Would have survived.
Would still be free.
That was why Commissioner Gordon wasn't leading a team of officers—because any visible police presence would have spooked the trap.
"You're a complete lunatic," Alberto said to Batman, voice shaking with frustration and unwilling respect. "You didn't have to go through all this extra work! If you'd just let them die, this would be over! Did it ever occur to you that I might have aimed for their heads?"
"Given the caution of the father and son," Batman replied, voice flat and certain, "you wouldn't have gotten close enough for a headshot. And you were equally cautious—you only chose the torso, which was easier to hit from distance, and you fired twice per target to ensure lethality."
He paused.
"But I didn't expect you to actually choose to kill both father and son on Father's Day. We thought you would only kill Luigi—the father."
Jude walked closer, still wearing his black robe to avoid being identified.
"That was surprising," he admitted. "Made the plan more complicated. But it worked out."
"What if?" Alberto's voice rose, desperate to find a flaw in the perfect trap. "What if I had aimed for their heads? They'd be dead right now! Your plan would have failed!"
"Then you should have really aimed for the head, little bastard," Luigi sneered, touching his vest again with evident satisfaction.
Jude shrugged beneath his robe.
If you'd really aimed for their heads, he thought, you still would have failed.
Even if Alberto had made headshots, the targets would have discovered that the bulletproof vests weren't the strongest insurance measure Batman had arranged.
Jude pulled up his system inventory mentally, looking at the item he'd deployed that morning:
[Life Grilled Mushroom Skewers]
Effect: Increase one-time health limit by 8
Price: $5.000
Duration: 24 hours
Note: I don't want to eat durian anymore. —Link
The effect was temporary but powerful. If normal people had 1-2 health points in system terms, then these mushroom skewers had temporarily boosted the Maronis to cockroach-level vitality.
Eight times normal durability.
The Maronis didn't know why there'd been an extra skewer of fragrant grilled mushrooms in their breakfast that morning. But they'd really enjoyed the dish—savory, perfectly seasoned, clearly high-quality ingredients.
Batman had watched them eat with his own eyes, confirming both skewers were consumed completely.
Between the bulletproof vests and the mushroom buffs, the Maronis could probably have survived a car bomb.
Multiple redundant safety measures.
Because Batman was thorough.
At that moment, two more figures arrived at the scene—a car pulling up near the orchard entrance, doors opening.
Harvey Dent stepped out first, his face carrying the particular intensity that came from finally catching a criminal he'd been hunting for months.
Commissioner Gordon followed, expression more cautious, more aware of the moral complexities involved.
"As we agreed before, Mr. Maroni," Gordon said, addressing Sal directly. "You have to lend us a hand."
Sal Maroni nodded slowly.
"Of course," he said, voice carrying the weight of a deal made with the devil. "I will help you accuse the Romans—"
He looked directly at Alberto.
"And bring down the Falcone family."
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