**January 31, 1989. Around 3:30 AM. The same building in West Gotham City.**
Commissioner Loeb's body hadn't moved an inch. The number of bullets was decreasing, only because the number of shooters still holding weapons and not lying unconscious on the floor was dwindling. The SWAT team was now just four floors from their destination.
As the one-sided firefight gradually subsided, Falcone's bodyguards escorted him out of the hall toward the elevator. Once the number of combatants in the room dropped to zero and SWAT was one floor closer, the bat merely cast a glance at Loeb's corpse, the only one with a bloody pool beneath it. Next, he looked at the large panoramic window in the hall, which more closely resembled a sieve after the shootout—it was a miracle it hadn't shattered completely—then headed toward it, shattering that miracle by crashing through it feet-first from a running start. After that, finding himself outside the building, he hooked his grapple onto the building's façade and, using the momentum from the jump, swung on the grapple line toward his target on the north side of the building, smashing through another window and landing on a floor one below the SWAT team.
SWAT didn't hesitate a second, immediately descending to the appropriate floor at the sound of breaking glass. Entering the room, a small dining area, it might have seemed empty—even though the SWAT team had night vision goggles and weapon-mounted flashlights, it didn't help them much in spotting the bat in the unlit room. Suddenly, one of the armed officers fires a couple of shots toward a sound coming from the same doorway they just exited. The bat, who had been hiding above the doorframe the entire time, navigated the stairwells one after another, while the SWAT team, of course, couldn't keep up, and the stairwell hindered their bullets from reaching the target.
Of course, the escape couldn't go that smoothly. As soon as the bat first appeared in the main dining hall at the party, complete pandemonium erupted, and of course, many building workers had to drop everything during the evacuation. Including the kitchen staff. Including the cooks who prepare food on gas stoves. Naturally, there was one screw-up who, in a panic, forgot to turn one of them off. When the bat and the SWAT team were around the 7th or 8th floor, roughly three rooms from the stairwell, a powerful explosion thundered—a gas cylinder had blown up. The blast was strong enough to demolish the kitchen on that floor and severely warp the adjacent rooms. A couple of minutes before that, in that same room, due to the unextinguished stove, a towel hanging above it caught fire, then the flames began to spread rapidly through the kitchen until they reached a gas cylinder on the opposite side.
The entire stairwell was filled with smoke. It would have been a sin not to use this opportunity to escape the SWAT team chasing him, but the bat had a different plan for getting to the street. Stopping on a floor three levels below where the explosion occurred, he passed through three rooms, ending up right beneath the one where a huge hole had been blown in the wall by the explosion, and where there was consequently a sizable hole in the ceiling of that room too. Hearing the approaching SWAT team, he grappled onto a metal beam jutting from the wall, bypassing the two floors above him and leaving the SWAT team far behind. Realizing that the SWAT team would be delayed for a long time due to the distance and the increasing smoke and fire, since part of the stairwell was already engulfed in smoke and the fire wasn't stopping its spread through the building. He sat down on the protruding beam, right on the wall within the hole itself, gaining a view of almost all of Gotham—he was cut off from the fire, and the wind carried the smoke in the opposite direction. There was already not enough space around the building for police cars—their sirens drowned out the crackle of the fire. Fire engines were already gathering around the building in full force; they had been called as soon as the first tongues of flame were spotted, so they arrived quickly. The first firefighters were already climbing ladders to the upper floors of the building, more precisely, to the eighth floor.
As soon as the dark figure of the bat, sitting on the beam near the fire, became noticeable from the ground, it caught the attention of all the police and firefighters gathered at the base of the building. But the bat wasn't concerned with that; he had another reason for climbing up here besides shaking the SWAT team—to get a view of the entire district. From this distance, he could see the ground perfectly, and despite all the police and fire trucks around the building, his attention was drawn to a black Cadillac that emerged from an alley behind the building and was heading in the opposite direction from the cluster of emergency vehicles. While he contemplated how to descend from such a height, firefighters were climbing the ladders, the fire continued to rage throughout the building, already reaching three floors below its epicenter, and of course, not everything could go so smoothly. Another explosion thundered, three floors below the previous one—another gas cylinder reached by the fire. The explosion doubled the intensity of the blaze; the firefighters who had just climbed the ladder had to pray for their luck that it didn't hit them—all except one. He was the first to climb the fire escape, and at the moment the cylinder exploded, he was the closest to the blast. He was thrown into the depths of the building by the explosion, his face caught fire, and his fire uniform was severely damaged. As the fire obscured the view inside the building, the bat jumps down three floors, grabs the poor firefighter by the waist, pressing his cape against the man's face to extinguish the flames, and leaps out from the other, less scrutinized side. He then grapples onto the building's façade and safely lands in the alley behind it, laying the firefighter on the ground. The man's face was stripped of all skin; what was underneath was covered in burns. He wanted to touch his face with his hands, but from that simple action, his face flared with pain.
Firefighter: "Ah! Hot, hot!"
Bat-Man: "I know. Touching it will burn it more," he says, taking bandages and anesthetic from his utility belt. "This will hurt," he uttered before pressing the bandages to the man's face.
It hurt, but the man was quite capable of enduring such pain—after all, they don't let just anyone work for the fire department.
Firefighter: "I… I read about you in the paper. … They described you there as some kind of demon."
Bat-Man, trying to distract the man from his current state, his voice deeper and rougher than usual: "I don't read the papers. I made a promise a long time ago, and I'll be whoever I need to be, good or bad, to keep it."
Firefighter, with weakening breath: "Say what you want. You don't seem like a demon. … Listen, I'm sorry."
Bat-Man: "For what?"
Firefighter: "You… you were chasing that fat guy, right? I saw him getting into a car when my crew was pulling up here. He's some kind of mobster, huh? And you lost him because of me."
Bat-Man: "He won't get away. I know all the places he could go. I don't think I could have passed you by."
Firefighter, almost fully catching his breath: "You're not a bad guy. Thank you."
Bat-Man, finishing the bandaging: "Alright, let's go."
He hoists the man over his shoulder and, grappling onto the building, carries him over to a newly arrived ambulance. A couple of seconds later, paramedics notice the firefighter by their vehicle. They didn't question where he came from; they had to help him anyway, it was their job. The question became even more irrelevant when the man was immediately recognized by other firefighters—their tongues stuck in their throats at the sight of his face. Luckily, their attention wasn't drawn to the otherwise unremarkable sewer grate next to their truck.
Paramedic, helping the man, getting the firefighter into the vehicle: "Your name, sir?"
Firefighter: "Lynns. Garfield Lynns."
Paramedic: "You received excellent first aid, Mr. Lynns." After a short time, the vehicle headed in the direction of the hospital.
The burning building of the largest construction company in all of Gotham was on every news channel, even outside Gotham. News of Commissioner Loeb's death and the first public appearance of the giant bat—today had changed everything in Gotham, once and for all.