Breathing heavily, Harvey lowered the gun, his chest heaving with each ragged gasp. It was perhaps the most impulsive act of his life. He knew, logically, that he should have done what the man had predicted—squeezed every ounce of information out of him first.
But Harvey couldn't take it anymore.
He couldn't suppress the storm of emotions roiling inside him. He couldn't silence the whispers in his mind. He couldn't endure the sight of the man who had reduced him to this grotesque state, now groveling with nothing more than hollow words and paltry promises as punishment.
So, he pulled the trigger.
As the wailing of police sirens grew louder in the distance, the fallen White Knight of Gotham slumped against the wall, sliding down until he was seated on the floor. A bitter, ironic thought crossed his mind: tomorrow, Gotham's newspapers won't have to worry about selling copies.
"Always causing trouble for others," he muttered to himself, his voice dripping with exhausted sarcasm.
A cold voice suddenly rang out, startling Harvey into looking up sharply in the direction of the sound. Standing before him was a man with white hair, clad in a white, hooded robe. His expression was icy, and his purple eyes were fixed dispassionately on the bloodied corpse bleeding out on the floor.
"Who are you?" Harvey asked instinctively.
The man didn't answer. Instead, he lightly waved his sleeve, and Harvey felt an overwhelming wave of drowsiness crash over him. Unable to resist, he sank into a deep sleep.
The last thing Harvey saw before succumbing to unconsciousness was those serene, penetrating purple eyes watching him.
Once Harvey Dent was unconscious, Avery, who had arrived just in time to intervene, glanced briefly at the corpse on the floor. With a snap of his fingers, the body, along with all traces of the blood soaking into the floorboards, disintegrated into a fine gray dust.
Then, without hesitation, he vanished from the scene with Harvey in tow.
Avery had no intention of leaving incriminating evidence behind. If the police confirmed that Harvey Dent had committed murder, he would never be able to return to his former position. Good collaborators were rare, and this incident could severely jeopardize Batman's plans.
Avery had no personal connection with Harvey Dent. While he found the man's plight somewhat pitiable, it wasn't his concern. His primary objective was to ensure Harvey remained intact—both physically and reputationally—so that he could continue serving as Gotham's district attorney.
The room fell completely silent.
Less than a minute later, Batman, clad in his black armored suit, slipped in through the window and landed silently on the floor. His sharp eyes scanned the now-empty room, a flicker of confusion passing over his face. He meticulously examined the scene but found nothing aside from a pile of gray dust on the floor.
Realizing he was out of time, Batman left before the police arrived.
Moments later, the police burst into the room in full force, only to find themselves equally perplexed. Harvey Dent was nowhere to be found, nor was there any trace of a second individual.
Where had Avery taken Harvey Dent?
He had returned him to his own home—more precisely, to Harvey Dent's house.
The human mind has its limits, regardless of whether one is an ordinary person or a wizard. The difference lies only in the threshold of tolerance. When an individual experiences something that exceeds their mental capacity to process, it can lead to madness or total collapse.
Healing psychological trauma was not Avery's specialty. Despite being a prodigy in the magical arts, he knew the vastness of magical knowledge meant no one could master everything. Even a single branch of study could consume an entire lifetime.
Avery's expertise lay in elemental magic, with a secondary focus on potion-making. Other areas of magic he only dabbled in—enough to have a basic understanding but far from a mastery.
Fortunately, Avery's "dabbling" meant he had committed vast amounts of written knowledge to memory, even if he hadn't explored it in depth. As a result, he could still attempt to address Harvey Dent's growing tendencies toward a fractured psyche, though it would require some improvisation.
As he recalled passages from his mental library, Avery studied the unconscious Harvey lying on the bed. For a moment, his strikingly handsome face betrayed a hint of uncertainty.
"Well... if I can't heal him, it can't possibly make things worse, right?"
With that thought, Avery decisively got to work.
Time passed slowly. The process was anything but smooth, but in the end, Avery managed to avoid making Harvey's condition worse—a small victory in itself.
When Avery finally concluded the treatment, Harvey Dent was still soundly asleep. The looming threat of a fractured soul had been reversed and mended. The troubling memories from recent events had been suppressed, reduced to the level of an overly vivid dream—one that wouldn't leave deep scars on Harvey's psyche.
Building on this foundation, Avery took the opportunity to fully restore Harvey Dent's disfigured face. This part of the process played directly into Avery's strengths, making it a much smoother and faster task.
Interestingly, the plastic surgeon Bruce Wayne had once mentioned to Harvey was none other than Avery himself. The "surgeon" was merely a convenient cover for his magical expertise. However, Avery hadn't expected Harvey to reject the opportunity for treatment, choosing instead to exact brutal revenge on his assailant by killing him.
Avery was not opposed to the concept of meeting violence with violence. Though he wasn't exactly a paragon of morality, his fundamental values hadn't been entirely twisted. In his view, those who committed atrocities deserved punishment; if they died, it was their own doing.
Of course, this stance was likely to draw objections from both the law and Batman, but at this point, the course of events was beyond anyone's control.
That was why Avery hadn't interfered when Harvey pulled the trigger to kill the man. Instead, he'd opted to clean up the evidence afterward, ensuring Harvey's actions wouldn't leave irreparable damage to his future.