Killer Croc bit through the rat and let the pieces fall.
Bone and blood dripped from his fangs into the water below, spreading outward in thin red rings that disappeared in the dark. He exhaled — a long, wet sound that echoed off the curved brick walls of the tunnel — and the smell of it was not a smell anyone would choose to be near.
Waylon Jones stood at over seven feet tall. His skin had long since finished being skin in any conventional sense — dark greenish-grey scales covered every surface, dense enough to stop small arms fire, and the claws and fangs that came with them had stopped belonging to the human end of the spectrum a long time ago. He looked less like a man who had a condition and more like the condition had decided to become a man, and the man was an afterthought.
But even with his cognition half-submerged in animal instinct and sensory data, one thing stayed sharp.
One name.
"Bane."
It circled in the back of his skull on a loop that never quieted — not a thought so much as a wound that had learned to speak. He moved through the lower sewer channels, through the dark and the stench and the particular ecosystem that existed forty feet below Gotham's streets, following the old pipes toward wherever Bane's men had been operating.
His arm ached. Croc knew exactly what that ache meant: one hit, and Bane had snapped the bone clean. One exchange. Not even a fight — a demonstration. This is what I can do. This is how little you matter.
The humiliation of it sat in Waylon Jones's chest like something with teeth. In the natural world, crocodilians were patient, long-memoried, and absolutely committed to the matter of settling debts.
He would get there. He would find Bane and he would—
His stomach growled.
He'd eaten a rat. The rat had not been enough.
Croc's posture deflated slightly. Even apex predators had logistics problems.
He lowered himself into a crouch beside a dry section of pipe, settled his weight, and let the animal stillness come — the reptilian patience that could hold a position for hours without twitching. He'd wait. Rest conserved energy. He'd think about Bane when he wasn't hungry.
The smell hit him before any conscious thought could form around it.
His nostrils flared. Every secondary eyelid snapped into position and then retracted, the reflex equivalent of a double-take. He uncoiled from his crouch without deciding to.
Roasted pork.
Not scraps. Not something dead in the water. Something that had been prepared — heat and fat and rendered skin and whatever herbs someone had known to use, the smell of a whole animal done right. It was coming from above, filtering down through a grate somewhere overhead.
He stared at the ceiling.
This is the Narrows, the part of his brain that still ran verbal analysis noted. There is no reason for this smell to be here.
Then the smell hit him again and that part of his brain went offline.
"Food."
The manhole cover hit the pavement of the abandoned lot with a clang that nobody was around to hear. Croc hauled himself out of the ground, dripping, and straightened up to his full height.
The lot was derelict — stripped cars in various states of collapse, construction debris, broken glass catching the moonlight. Empty in every direction. The mist had cleared, and above it the sky was pale with stars.
In the center of the lot: a whole roasted pig. Golden. Perfect. Lacquered skin gleaming.
Killer Croc stood very still.
His secondary eyelids slid across once.
Then the analytical fraction of his cognition reasserted itself, slow and deliberate as a machine coming back online.
Trap. The placement was theatrical — too centered, too clean, too obviously designed to be found. Bait. There'd be something in the meat. Poison, sedative, something.
He tested the air. No foreign chemical signatures. Someone had used a neutralizing agent.
So. Who would go to this much trouble?
He didn't know.
He thought about it a while longer.
He still didn't know.
Croc stared at the pig.
The analytical process had reached its natural limit, and the conclusion it had arrived at was: someone set this up. Beyond that, the machinery had run out of road. His head itched. The next logical step refused to materialize.
He stood there for a moment.
Fine, he decided. Doesn't matter.
Whoever had laid this out needed him to eat the bait here, in the open, where they could watch. That was the obvious play — trigger the trap, wait for the target to go down, move in.
He wasn't going to do that.
He was going to pick up the pig, take it back underground, and eat it somewhere they couldn't see him. Then he'd wait in the dark. If someone came down to check on a poisoning that hadn't happened, the dynamic between hunter and prey would reverse itself immediately. If they didn't come, he'd surface on his own terms.
Either way, he held the initiative.
That, Croc thought with genuine satisfaction, is actually smart thinking. Short timeline, correct tactical read. I'm smarter than people give me credit for.
He stepped forward and grabbed the pig with both hands.
The current hit him like a wall falling over.
Several hundred thousand volts discharged through the contact points embedded in the pig's skin and drove themselves through Waylon Jones from fingertips to feet. The sound it made was a sustained sizzle. The smell was unpleasant. His scales went from dark grey-green to black in patches, and he hit the ground in a full-body spasm that the pavement did not appreciate either.
Four arc lights detonated from beneath the debris piles at the lot's corners, flooding the space with noon-bright white.
A voice from somewhere in the shadows:
"…That worked?"
Another voice, from a different corner:
"No. No. There is no way someone actually fell for that. That trap was embarrassingly simple."
Waylon Jones, flat on his back, still twitching, heard every word.
The blood in his body reversed direction.
Whatever remained of his higher cognitive function punched out its timecard, put on its coat, and left the building. What replaced it was not rage in any medically recognizable sense — it was more like the concept of rage that had achieved self-awareness and decided to wear a body.
He screamed.
It echoed off every surface in the lot and kept going.
He made it to his feet — the electrical residue still cycling through his nervous system meant his movement was less charging and more performing an aggressive contemporary dance, but at 1,500 pounds the distinction mattered less than it normally would.
Thirty meters away, Arnold Wesker was already moving — not running so much as conducting a full-contact negotiation with gravity, scrambling on hands and knees around the edge of a gutted car chassis. The Batman plush in his hand continued to broadcast Ethan's voice through the internal speaker:
"Just that? That was it? That was it?"
In a nondescript panel van parked on a side street several kilometers away, Ethan Cross sat in the driver's seat with a coffee going lukewarm in the cupholder, watching four separate camera feeds on a tablet — satellite overview, the plush toy's embedded lens, two fixed cameras he'd placed in the debris piles that morning. He was comfortable. He was warm. The coffee was decent.
The feeds showed Killer Croc attempting to charge in a direction that the residual current kept redirecting.
Ethan leaned slightly toward the plush's wireless module.
"Just that? Just that? Just that?"
A knock on the driver's window.
He looked over. A kid — late teens, some kind of Narrows corner crew by the colors — was tapping on the glass with two fingers, chin up, the practiced posture of someone who'd done this before and expected it to go a certain way.
Ethan rolled the window down.
The kid clocked the pointed ears first. Then the half-mask. Then the rest of it.
He made a sound that was not a word and ran. He covered ground quickly. He did not look back.
Ethan rolled the window back up and returned to his coffee.
Back in the lot, the net system triggered.
Croc had made it four strides before the pressure plates registered his footfall and the buried rigging activated — dozens of high-tensile loop lines erupting from the ground around his feet, climbing his legs with mechanical speed, wrapping his torso, catching his arms, the whole system drawing tight and converting his forward momentum directly into immobility. He went down face-first into the concrete with an impact that cracked it.
He writhed. He roared. He got nowhere.
Deadshot emerged from his blind at the lot's north edge, looked at the secured target, and then looked at the man standing next to him.
Captain Javelin was wearing a costume that incorporated yellow, blue, and a confidence level entirely unsupported by the garment's design. He was visibly vibrating.
"I just made two million dollars," he announced, to no one specific. "Two million dollars. For this. For this operation."
"You baited an oversized reptile with food," Deadshot said.
"Two million dollars."
"He fell for it in under thirty seconds."
"Two million—"
"I'm ending this conversation." Deadshot turned to Cheshire, who was standing to his left looking composed and faintly entertained. "Get word to Slipknot and the Tattooed Man. Tell them we're at the extraction phase."
Cheshire nodded. A free payday was a free payday. Her disposition was accommodating.
Javelin was still going. "When this is over I'm going home. I'm going to get married. I am done with the life." His voice had taken on a quality that approached spiritual. "This is the best day I have ever had."
Deadshot looked at him for a long moment.
"No one here is listening to you," he said, and walked away.
He stopped beside Arnold Wesker, who had found a relatively stable piece of rubble to crouch on and was now catching his breath with the expression of a man who had recently reconsidered all of his life choices simultaneously. Deadshot looked down at him.
"So." He kept his voice businesslike. "All along you've been telling us — no lethal force on Croc. You want him functional. You want him working for you."
He gestured at the thrashing, howling mass of restrained crocodilian thirty feet away.
"Is that still the plan?"
The Ventriloquist opened his mouth. Nothing came out. The Batman plush in his hand answered instead, briskly:
"I have a method in—"
"UNFORGIVABLE!"
The roar shook loose dust from the debris piles. Croc had worked one arm far enough free to slam it into the ground, which expressed its disapproval structurally.
Deadshot lowered his hands from his ears.
"Right." He looked at the plush toy, then at Wesker, then back at the plush. "Here's my honest professional assessment. You have permanently and deeply antagonized that animal. Getting him calm enough to have a conversation — let alone agree to work for someone — is not a realistic objective." He paused. "The target is secured. But I think what you wanted and what you have are two different things."