As expected, the members of the Great Mage Alliance were soon in big trouble. After being raided by mobsters, they walked on foot to the church. When they set off, they were fully armed. By the time they reached their destination, no one would doubt if their next stop was mentioned to be a bathhouse.
By the time the group rushed to the church's entrance in a state of panic, let alone magic wands, weapons, and wallets, their robe outerwear, boots, and even the earrings and bracelets worn by the female mages had all disappeared. They looked like guests when they arrived but looked like prisoners when they left.
It is difficult to describe this as theft. The only difference between this and a robbery on the street is that with a robbery, at least you know who the perpetrator is. On this journey, the Great Magicians only felt the items on their bodies continuously disappearing without spotting a single shadow.
It can't possibly be that every person on the street is a thief, right?
Thinking so, the Great Mages missed all chances of retrieving their stolen goods. This dark city brutally taught them a lesson: if anti-theft procedures are not thorough, you might as well not bother at all.
Of course, they did manage to meet Bruce Wayne. However, when they approached Bruce, who was dressed in a lavish suit descending from a luxury car and accompanied by a group of armed guards, all Bruce did was wave his hand and have someone beside him throw them a couple of coins.
Without magic, a magician is just an ordinary person. No one wants to court death by lunging at a gun's muzzle. However, not only were the magicians from the Great Mage Alliance present in Gotham, but also many individuals from the mystic world whose powers do not derive from demons, yet they still possess special abilities.
Most of them were persuaded by Witch Circe to become the advance troops in her exploration of Gotham. But these people did not fare much better than the members of the Great Mage Alliance, primarily because they were too complacent.
There is no city in the world with worse public security than Gotham. It is the birthplace of the latest criminal attacks and techniques, the Jerusalem of criminology. All revolutionary criminal techniques in the world are propagated from Gotham to the major cities. By the time this happens, Gotham has already made yet another breakthrough.
This results in the citizens of other cities being well behind Gotham in terms of fraud detection and theft prevention, and people from the mystic world being even more lagging.
Even though they can fend off street racers and robbers, they can't guard against ubiquitous newsies and flower-selling children, hotel room service staff cloaked in perfect disguise, criminal organizations that trap people in restaurants and hotels well in advance, or even passers-by and onlookers on the balconies above. One plan gives rise to another, and nobody can protect against theft forever, but in Gotham, there are always thieves.
The mysterious practitioners retreated from Gotham one by one. They had arrived with pomp, but when they retreated, they were running with their tail between their legs. However, the valuable items in their pockets did provide substantial assets for Gotham's thieves.
Next entered the Vampire phalanx. However, the Thirteen Clans were not that foolish. They sent a group of young hotbloods to investigate Gotham.
The vampires seemed to understand the strategy of adding fuel to the fire. Therefore, after a minor scale reconnaissance, the Thirteen Clans started to deploy their main force to attack Gotham. The Demon Party slightly held back, while the Mob Party went utterly mad.
For many years, the Thirteen Clans have been operating in Europe, and their tribes have grown stronger than ever. Plus, after the Red Moon rallied offspring around the world, thousands of bats flooded into this sinful city.
The mobs of Gotham are definitely not going to take this lying down. After several years of transformation and development, most of the gangs have become filthy rich. Moreover, the munitions plants of Wayne Enterprises are located in Gotham - when offered the right amount of money, guns could be obtained while still warm from production.
After an initial moderate scale of street fighting had taken place, the mobsters realized that fighting in this way was too draining. However, the unique ecosystem of Gotham operates only with profitable deals.
The vampires were figuring out Gotham, and Gotham was also studying and learning the properties of these vampires. They captured many live specimens to research. They also learned about the mystic world definition of vampires from Father Daniel.
Therein lies an essential point - the blood of vampires stores their energy and can be used for casting spell materials. The heart can be used for making medicine, and other organs can be used as certificate materials in the mystic world for trade. The purer the bloodline, the higher the selling price.
As a result, there is one industry in Gotham that usually goes unnoticed yet now suddenly takes the stage. That would be organ trafficking.
Anxious to make money, the mobsters could only extract value from vampires in this way. The local black market, the largest underground market for banned goods in the world, was now accessible at their fingertips. All that was needed now was to put the goods on the market.
However, the organ traffickers in Gotham only acted as middlemen, who simply accepted and shipped the goods without getting their hands dirty. The main reason being that the lower-class residents in Gotham were submerged in the dark rainwater, making their organs not feasible for use. Given Gotham's notoriety, outsiders would shun Gotham, making abduction impossible. So they could only barely make a living by being a transit station.
Who among these middlemen traffickers had ever seen this scope of operation? The mobsters knew only to strive for a return, but they overlooked one thing - in this group of organ traffickers, you couldn't find a chief surgeon. Looking after a large group of vampires was a significant cost, considering that they required feeding.
The mobsters were anxious as ants on a hot pan, but they decided to become self-reliant, as always, by training professionals. Those vampires that first entered Gotham were extremely unlucky, as they had become guinea pigs.
However, the field of anatomy is not something one can learn overnight. Unable to bear wasting high-quality resources in their hands like this, the mobsters ended up sending a representative to the Iceberg Restaurant to get in touch with Cobblepot.
Upon hearing about this situation, Cobblepot didn't know what course of action was appropriate either. In the end, it was Bruce who proposed that every time a vampire was captured, it should be sent to Gotham Hospital. Even with round-the-clock shifts between hundreds of surgeons in dozens of hospitals, they could just barely manage the large scale invasion of the Thirteen Clans.
By the time the surgeons, organ traffickers, and even mobster drivers who helped with the transportation of materials were all exhausted and about to cough up blood, three vast refrigerators had been filled to the brim. While vampires might not be a fire that can come together, they can sprinkle about like stars in the sky.
Of course, the large-scale attack of the vampires caused no small trouble for the mob, weakening their active forces to a certain extent. It can be imagined that the frequency of mob fights will decrease for some time in the future, creating a good security environment for the upcoming music festival.
The thieves did not achieve good results in this round, mainly because the young vampires were impulsive and penniless, and as soon as they came to Gotham, they began to fight, giving the thieves no chance to steal anything valuable.
However, as the situation increasingly leans towards Gotham's side, the real old European nobles of the vampire clans finally can't sit still. The elders of the Thirteen Clans made a collective move, proposing to negotiate with the Gotham Gang.
This strategy has been played in Europe for hundreds of years. It's nothing more than first fighting and then negotiating. Even if the situation is unfavorable to us, we can say that we love peace, and if you don't negotiate, naturally it's because you're barbaric.
Throwing in bait during negotiations, promising benefits - but not enough - to divide the opponents into two factions, peace and war, to reduce their decision-making ability and speed, weakening their fighting power, and then take down the target with one strike in the battlefield.
The plan was good, but the first step encountered a small problem - the Gotham Gang declared on the spot that they were indeed barbaric.
The logic here is unarguable. How could they be civilized if they're part of the mob? Which gang in this world loves peace?
The moral kidnapping didn't work. The elders began to lure them with benefits, only to find that the mob had already completed the self-sustaining cycle of war. They started killing first, until the opponents were completely defeated, captured them, sent them directly to the hospital for dissection, and froze the organs on the spot, pulling them to their own stalls with their own trucks, and selling them. The profits of the whole process alone were at least ten times the value of the chips the vampires could offer.
The elders of the Thirteen Clans gnashed their teeth but couldn't do anything. In the end, they used a public opinion offensive, but whether it was the mystic world, heaven, hell or any special dimension, as soon as they heard the vampires cursing Gotham, they would say "You just figured that out?" and "Why did you mess with Gotham?"
After the golden trio of tricks, which had often been successful in the civilized world, tripped up, the elders knew they had a tough fight ahead of them, and the greatest power they could rely on was their ancestor Cain. As long as Cain gave them his blood, they could greatly strengthen their powers.
So, what was Cain doing?
He was playing games with Batman.
Just when the vampires launched a large-scale attack on Gotham, desperately trying to get the core fragments in Bruce's hands, Bruce slipped away from Gotham and found Cain, saying he wanted to play a game with him.
Which joker can refuse Batman's invitation to play a game?
So, the ancestor of the Blood Race that the Thirteen Clans had hoped for, Cain, completely forgot about his unfortunate descendants waiting for his salvation, and played chase and hide games with Batman every day.
Either Cain didn't drink enough of Bruce's blood last time or Bruce wasn't mad enough, resulting in the Joker being not aggressive enough, so it was mainly Cain hiding. This led to one of the world's most famous paintings - "Joker, where are you? You're not in London at all!"
On a certain day after the war between the vampires and Gotham ended in a stalemate, a full moon hung high over a small island on the outskirts of London. The dark Gothic Castle peak shone like a glittering sword under the moonlight, and suddenly a dark figure appeared at the top of the sword.
The mysterious silhouette at the top was two pointed ears. The slender and elegant body wrapped in a black cloak, with a "whoosh", the bat wings spread out, the dark figure charged straight into the banquet hall of the palace.
The elders of the Thirteen Clans were horrified, and the head of the group, Bruhe, almost dropped his wine glass. He stared at the newcomer and spat out a name, "Batman?!"
Oddly enough, Batman is not well-known in the society of ordinary people, only because of a bit of hype from Metropolis reports, but in the world of mystics, he is indeed famous, mainly because the demon who was in bad luck spread the word about how brutal this bat is.
The elders of the Thirteen Clans didn't know that Batman was Bruce, so several of them stood up and looked at Batman and said, "Batman, what are you doing here?"
"I bring you news of the ancestor of the Blood Race, Cain." Batman's deep, raspy voice echoed in the hall.
A few of the elders' eyes lit up immediately, they thought Batman was bringing them a message from Cain.
The elders were still thinking about it when Batman looked up at the bloodshot eye decoration on the center wall of the hall and spoke in a cold tone.
"I got ahead of myself and planted a large bomb beneath the palace. Don't doubt my abilities, it can blow your descendants and this island sky high. No magic can resist the power of this explosion."
Batman looked up and smiled, saying,
"So, Joker, it's time to make a choice."