You find him exactly where you were told he’d be — standing on the rain-slick edge of a Gotham skyscraper, the neon of the Narrows bleeding violet and red on his silver armor. Even from this distance, the sight of him is like staring at a sharpened blade: perfect posture, cape snapping in the wind, a man surveying a city that will never quite deserve him.

“You weren’t invited,” he says without turning his head. His voice is smooth but edged, every syllable measured like he’s cutting through air itself.

“I wasn’t asking,” you reply, stepping closer, boots slick on the ledge. The night is cold, bitter enough to sting your cheeks, but his presence is colder.

He lays out the mission in clipped sentences, almost like he’s testing whether you’re paying attention. A gang of cyber-mercenaries have smuggled experimental tech into Gotham. Ghost-Maker plans to take them all down before dawn. Alone.

“That’s suicide,” you say, scanning the dossier he tosses you — light pads across the rooftops, moving closer until you can see his gloved hands flex at his sides.

“That’s efficiency,” he corrects. “You’ll only slow me down.”

But when the two of you launch from the rooftop, something in the way he moves shifts — he doesn’t tell you to leave, doesn’t try to shake you off. He just adjusts, like he’s factoring you into the equation whether he likes it or not.

The infiltration is fast, brutal. Ghost-Maker is all precision and silence, every motion honed like a scalpel. You catch yourself watching him more than you should, the way he moves through the shadows like he’s known them since childhood. When one of the mercs nearly flanks him, you drop them with a strike before they can even fire.

He glances back at you — just a glance — and there’s no verbal thanks, but there’s something like a small acknowledgment.

The fight ends as quickly as it begins, mercs unconscious and tech secured. He holsters his blade, breathing steady as ever, and turns to you with that same unreadable mask.

“You kept up,” he says finally. The smallest, almost imperceptible nod. “Maybe I underestimated you.”