.
Batman held his position by the window.
"It seems I won't have to introduce myself," he said.
It wasn't a question, and it wasn't particularly surprised. It was the measured acknowledgment of a man filing a detail he had already suspected but was now confirming. Maxwell had used his name. That meant Maxwell knew it. Batman was processing what that meant and how, and doing it behind a cowl that gave nothing away.
Maxwell stayed where he was. Hands at his sides. Weight balanced. He ran the calculation the same way he always ran it when he couldn't read a situation clearly: what does this person want, and what are they willing to do to get it.
Batman hadn't drawn anything. No batarangs, no grapple, nothing from the belt. He'd come through a window into a room where Maxwell had just killed someone and he was standing there talking, which was a posture that said certain things about intent.
Or appeared to say them.
Maxwell had just completed that thought when Batman moved.
.
No warning. No shift in posture, no telegraph, no preparatory breath — just the sudden violent fact of a strike arriving at the precise location Maxwell's head had been a tenth of a second earlier.
He'd moved on instinct. Pure reflex, the area awareness and the League training reacting before his conscious mind had caught up with what was happening. He felt the displaced air of the strike against his cheek as he dropped below it, close enough to be uncomfortable.
He came back up moving.
Batman was already adjusting. The follow-up came low, a body shot aimed at the ribs that Maxwell read off the shoulder rotation and deflected with his forearm, redirecting the force sideways rather than absorbing it. He pivoted inside the deflection and drove an elbow at Batman's chin.
Batman rolled his head with it. The contact was glancing, not the clean hit Maxwell had aimed for. Still, it connected.
They separated. Two feet.
Maxwell breathed. Batman breathed.
The study was not a large room. Four meters across, the desk in the center, the body against the far wall, the window behind Batman with the curtain still moving. Not a lot of space to manage distance in, which suited close-range work and complicated anything that relied on footwork.
Batman understood that. He pressed.
The next sequence was three beats — high, low, high again — the layering of a man whose fighting style had been refined over decades against opponents who ranged from street-level to metahuman. Each strike had a secondary option built in, the kind of technique that made blocking the first move into a setup for the second. Maxwell had seen this architecture before. Slade Wilson had it. Ra's al Ghul's senior instructors had it.
Batman's version was different from all of them. More adaptive, less systematic — it changed mid-sequence in ways that suggested a mind processing and adjusting in real time rather than executing a memorized pattern. Fighting Batman was like fighting someone who was reading you as fast as you could give him information.
Maxwell stopped giving him information.
He went reactive. Stopped initiating, stopped committing to exchanges that gave Batman data to work with. Deflect, redirect, don't counter. Let the space do the work. He moved around the desk, keeping it between them, using the furniture to manage the geometry the way he'd managed the loading bay floor against the Court's operatives. Not retreating — positioning.
Batman followed. Of course he followed. He came over the desk rather than around it, the cape spreading as he cleared it, and the move was faster than it had any right to be at his size and weight.
Maxwell was already moving. He'd seen the setup in the body lean — the subtle forward shift that preceded clearing an obstacle — and stepped inside the landing rather than away from it, getting to a position where the desk couldn't be used again without Batman conceding ground he wouldn't concede.
Close now. Very close. The kind of range where power mattered less than leverage.
Maxwell went for the lock.
Batman had been waiting for it.
The counter arrived before the lock was halfway established — a hip rotation that broke the angle, a weight shift that converted Maxwell's leverage attempt into a direction Batman controlled. Maxwell felt himself moving in a direction he hadn't chosen, found his footing on the wrong side of center, and used the displacement the way he'd used similar displacements before: turned it into movement, kept the momentum going rather than fighting it, came out of the stumble already facing back in.
Batman hadn't pressed the advantage.
He'd stepped back. Given Maxwell the space to recover. Stood with his hands up and his weight balanced and looked at him.
Maxwell looked back.
They were both breathing harder than a casual observer would have expected. The study was undisturbed except for the desk having shifted two inches across the floor. The body against the wall had not been involved in any of it, which Maxwell noted as a professional courtesy on Batman's part, avoiding a dead man on the floor as an obstacle.
Batman lowered his hands.
Maxwell kept his up for another second. Then he lowered them too.
.
"You're quite good," Batman said. "For a hitman."
The voice had a different quality than it had before the fight. Still controlled. But something in it had shifted — not warmer, not friendlier, but the specific register of professional acknowledgment. Assessment delivered with accuracy rather than performance.
"It seems the League of Assassins did their job."
Maxwell picked up his jacket from where it had ended up — against the wall, dislodged during the exchange near the desk — and put it back on. He straightened the collar. Took a breath.
"Na," he said. "All they did was polish what was already there."
He meant it. The League had refined him. Given him the framework, the depth, the methodology. But the foundation — the seven years of law enforcement, the five years of Gotham survival, the year of operational work before Ra's al Ghul had ever seen him in a mountain courtyard — that had been his. The League polished material that was already worth polishing.
Batman looked at him for a moment. Reading, always reading, the cowl's lenses processing whatever they processed and the mind behind them doing its own parallel work.
Maxwell knew, in the way he knew most things about this universe, that Batman had come here tonight not to stop him or arrest him or deliver a verdict on the body against the wall. He'd come to assess. The file had been building for over a year — Coventry, the Court engagement, Metropolis, Blackgate, the rooftop conversation with Jason and Dick, Gordon's monitoring brief. Batman had been building a picture and tonight he'd come to test the picture against the reality.
The test had ended in a draw.
That told Batman what he needed to know. And Maxwell understood, with the particular clarity of someone who had spent two years studying the people around him, that a draw against Batman — in a confined space, without preparation, at the end of a job that had already cost him physical output — was a data point that moved the needle on something.
He looked at Batman across the study.
"What do you want?" he asked. Flat, direct, the question that the whole evening had been building toward. "I don't recall the Bat ever needing a hitman."
Batman held his gaze.
Outside the window behind him, Gotham was doing what Gotham did — continuing, indifferent, enormous, full of things that needed handling in ways that the categories of legal and sanctioned didn't fully cover.
The curtain moved.
Neither of them looked away.