He visited Sarah at Gotham General on Thursday afternoon, two days after the docks.
She was in a room on the fourth floor, the kind of ward that handled injuries without admitted trauma — the corridor had the particular low-key energy of people being monitored rather than treated. He knocked before entering and she was sitting up in the bed, looking at her phone with the specific focused vacancy of someone using the screen to avoid thinking.
"Hi." He kept it even. "Marcus told me you were here."
She looked at him for a moment. "Hey, Eli."
Her voice had the tiredness in it that wasn't physical — the specific exhaustion that came from six days of performing composure for people who didn't deserve to see you fall apart. She had a bruise on her jaw, a saline drip, and the blanket pulled up to her waist with the careful precision of someone who needed to control the variables available to them.
He sat in the chair beside the bed and didn't say anything that was on the list of things people say.
"I'm leaving Gotham." She put her phone down on the bed tray. "My parents are arranging a transfer to the Star City program. I'm going Monday."
"Okay."
"The research is more relevant there anyway." She said it the way you said things when you needed them to be true and were checking if they were. "I've been thinking about relocating the whole dissertation framework—"
"Sarah."
She stopped. Looked at the blanket.
"I'm glad you're okay," he said.
She was quiet for long enough that the PA system made an announcement about parking validation in the corridor outside. Then she said: "Someone got me out. Whoever — they didn't leave me there." She paused again. "I don't even know if they were real. I think I was so scared by the time the door opened that I might have—"
"They were real."
Her eyes moved to his hands. He was sitting with them folded on his knee, and he didn't move them. The moment lasted two seconds, then she looked back at the blanket.
He left at 4 PM and didn't look back at the room.
Batman's response to the Pier 17 report came Thursday night.
GCPD (anonymous tip, midnight). Six arrested. Contents seized. Estimated value: $2.1M. Marlo: not recovered. His network remains operational. New assignment — map the artifact supply chain. Monthly reports. Longer timeline. Don't rush it.
Then: The Syndicate uses three regional suppliers. One is in Gotham. You're looking for a broker operating under a legal arts-and-antiques cover. This is the long game. Take your time.
He read this in the Moldavia Theater with the Brand's light on the stage and thought about the specific math of it: Batman had neutralized a $2 million operation in twelve hours using an anonymous tip that Elijah had spent six days building to. The Syndicate would rebuild. Marlo was free. The long-game assignment meant months of incremental intelligence-gathering rather than a crisis that forced action.
Good, he thought. That's what I need.
"Gotham's Sanctioned Supernatural: The Pale Rider Contract of 1694" had been available in digital format for nine days when the Gotham Gazette's weekend culture section ran a four-paragraph piece under the headline "GU HISTORIAN FINDS 17TH-CENTURY LEGAL DOCUMENT CONFIRMING 'PALE RIDER' MYTHOLOGY." The paranormal forums had the article within two hours. The Mythbusters website, which had spent six weeks running systematic evidence analysis of supernatural sightings, posted nothing. There was nothing to post. A 90-year-old peer-reviewed journal carrying a credentialed historian's primary-source analysis did not admit a counter-argument from a blog without credentials.
He'd tried the Mythbusters tactic himself when he'd first encountered the debunking campaign — the impulse to fight information warfare with counter-information, to argue each claim down individually. In October, six weeks before the hearing, he'd understood that the correct counter to a systematic delegitimization campaign was not point-by-point rebuttal but a legitimacy source that simply outranked it.
The hearing had demonstrated that in real-time. The paper was the same principle applied to the supernatural question.
The BRE updated over the next four days in the specific way that academic belief updated: slow, zero-decay, permanent. Historians were not passionate believers. They were careful ones. Each person who read the paper and accepted its argument added a thin, durable thread to the Pale Rider network — not the bright-hot conviction of someone who'd seen him in the Bowery, but the kind of settled intellectual acknowledgment that didn't erode between encounters.
[Pale Rider BP: 312. Academic Belief Nodes: +47 (permanent, zero decay). Monthly Growth Rate: +38 BP (stable).]
Level 9 arrived on December 22.
[System Level 8 → 9. +5 Stat Points. New Skills Available at Lv.10.]
He banked the points. The cap was 50. He was running base stats in the mid-teens across most attributes, and the Tier 2 threshold for Pale Rider was 500 BP — the only milestone that actually mattered right now. He was at 312. The memorial was the vector.
The Robinson Hall Scarecrow attack had happened on October 28. The university had scheduled a formal memorial for December 28 — two months out, enough time for the acute grief to settle into the kind of collective commemoration that required a candle rather than a crisis response. Five hundred people expected. Robinson Hall students, faculty, first responders, families of the twelve who hadn't walked out. The memorial was at Gotham Cathedral, which had hosted the recovery services in the days immediately after the attack.
He'd been there when it happened. Not as the Pale Rider — that was six weeks before the system's first real performance. He'd been Elijah Green the newly-transmigrated grad student, trying to understand what reality he'd landed in, watching the police perimeter go up around a building he'd walked past thirty minutes before the gas release.
He remembered the specific quality of that morning: October 28, cold for late October, the sound of ambulances from three blocks away, and the understanding that he'd arrived in a universe where people died in ways that the source material had summarized in three panels.
On December 22 he got the text from Sarah's New York number — her regular phone, not the Star City one, which meant she'd gotten home first.
thanks for being a friend eli. stay safe.
He read it four times.
Then he closed his phone and went to the stage and stood in the dust and the Brand's light and thought about the memorial on the 28th, and the five hundred people who would be there to grieve, and the thing that Ezra Colt had understood three hundred years ago in a city that was newer and more frightened and maybe not so different: that a legend wasn't a performance for its own sake. It was a promise made in public.
December 28, 8 AM.
[System Level 9 → 10. +5 Stat Points. Features Unlocked: Minimap. Narrative Instinct. Legend's Endurance (Lv.1).]
He was eating toast over the kitchen counter when it hit, and he put the toast down and pulled the Minimap up in the HUD corner.
The display resolved slowly — a radius of approximately six city blocks, defaulting to Elijah's current position as center, and then the belief density heat rendering in blue through amber through red. His immediate area: cool. The general neighborhood: ambient. And to the northeast, in the direction of Old Town and the cathedral district—
Red. Not the soft warm orange of an active patrol area or a community meeting. Red in the way that a heat signature read when something concentrated was happening, or about to happen, or had been building toward happening for weeks.
He stood at the window and ate the toast and looked at the Minimap and thought: tonight, then.
To supporting Me in Pateron .
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
👉 Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!