Chapter 56: Harvey's Struggle

"Could it be Harley? Poison Ivy sure acts fast," Roland mused.

"What's wrong?" Jason walked over and asked.

"Nothing, just some adult-rated stuff," Roland yawned. "Let's go, time to head back."

"What about these people on the ground?" Jason pointed at the unconscious bodies scattered around.

"It'll take them at least a month to get off a hospital bed. Just leave them here."

"Oh."

The two of them walked back, only to suddenly hear a burst of impassioned German echoing through the air.

"Es bleiben im Raum. Keitel, Jodl, Krebs und Burgdorf."

"Das war ein Befehl!"

"Der Angriff Steiner war ein Befehl……"

"Die gesamte Generalität ist nichts weiter als ein Haufen niederträchtiger, treuloser Feiglinge!"

"Why does this voice sound somewhat familiar to me?" The more Roland listened, the stranger it felt. Although he didn't understand a single word of German, the heavily emotive accent alone was terrifying enough.

"Sounds like the Fuhrer," Jason remarked.

"No, I feel like I've heard this voice somewhere before..." Roland vaulted over a courtyard wall and spotted Harvey Dent raising his hand at a 45-degree angle.

"What on earth are you up to?" Roland nearly tumbled off the wall.

"Ah... I'm just... rehearsing," Harvey startled, caught off guard by Roland's sudden appearance.

"Rehearsing?" Roland blinked. "For what? The invasion of Poland?"

"No, just a stage play..." Harvey wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.

"You actually have time to act in a play?" Roland found it even more bizarre. In a place brimming with extraordinary talent like Gotham City, the District Attorney's office was always swamped with work. Harvey barely had time to eat these days, so how did he have the leisure for this?

Besides, was Harvey ever the artistic type?

"Well... I haven't had much on my plate lately..." Harvey thought for a moment and replied.

"Oh." Roland nodded. "Got any plans later? How about we grab a bite at that café where we first met?"

"I have other matters to attend to shortly, so I'll probably skip it..." Before Harvey could finish his sentence, Roland struck him squarely in the chest with a palm-heel blow.

Yet bizarrely, his chest dissolved instantly like yellow clay, spilling onto the ground.

"Clayface, it's you." Roland disgustedly shook the yellow substance off his hands. Although it looked like mud, its essence was actually liquefied human tissue.

Matt Hagen, currently one of the few super-powered villains in Gotham City, was originally an actor who relied on his looks until a car accident disfigured him.

This forced him to rely on face cream produced by Daggett Industries to restore his handsome visage, but the cream's effects were unstable. Whenever he failed to apply it regularly, Matt's face would turn into a puddle of mush.

Leveraging the cream, Daggett blackmailed Matt into committing numerous illegal acts, including using Daggett's disguises to impersonate Bruce Wayne and swindle funds from Wayne Enterprises out of Lucius Fox's hands.

However, the plan failed, and Matt was forced to swallow massive amounts of disguise compound by a pair of hitmen—one obsessed with cleanliness and the other wearing headphones—transforming his entire body into a monster composed of mud-like material.

Even so, his abilities were formidable; his body could morph into weapons of any shape, possessed variable flexibility, allowed him to assume the appearance of anyone, granted immunity to all conventional weapons, and rendered him virtually unkillable.

"Talk. Why were you masquerading as Harvey?" Roland demanded.

"I won't say a word!" Clayface's hand abruptly transformed into an axe, slashing down toward Roland.

"Well, that won't be up to you." Roland unleashed a flying whip kick, shattering the axe into pieces, followed by another downward chop that split Clayface's body in two.

"It's useless." Clayface reassembled himself, his hands mutating into a pair of lobster claws as he lunged at Roland.

"As expected, physical attacks are useless..." Roland bolted forward, spotted a fire hydrant, and quickly opened it, only to find...

"There's no water in this fire hydrant either?" Roland couldn't help cursing as Clayface's lobster claws lunged right behind him.

Roland leaped to dodge the attack, taking the opportunity to blast Clayface's body apart once more.

Though Clayface's ability was troublesome, he had practically zero combat skills and tried to flee after trading blows with Roland for a few rounds.

"Trying to run?" Roland stomped the concrete floor with a seismic force that thundered like lightning, his punches reaching the absolute limit of human speed to beat Clayface into a pile of mud before kicking the sludge directly onto an unmaintained, sagging high-voltage power line.

"Arghhhhhhhhh..."

"Phew..." Roland looked at the convulsing pile of mud and let out a breath.

"Just kidding, I'm not afraid of electricity." Clayface instantly oozed away into the storm drain.

Roland immediately bit his finger, covering Clayface's residue with red-ink runes, but Clayface simply left his outer layer behind while a thick mass of mud slid down into the sewer.

"This guy really knows how to run." Roland felt as much of a headache as a non-Haki user in the One Piece world facing a Logia-type devil fruit user.

After a moment of thought, Roland dialed Harvey's number. "Hey, Harvey, you've got trouble."

Late that night, Harvey, Gordon, Roland, and Batman gathered together. The petty criminals who had committed crimes that day felt as though they were living in a dream.

They had barely thought about committing a robbery when a priest stared blankly right at them, followed by Batman dropping out of nowhere to beat them to a pulp. The moment the beating stopped, the police hauled them away, the priest provided a complete testimony, and the prosecutor announced they would be prosecuted swiftly and severely.

"So, someone is plotting against Harvey?" The quartet, having kept Gotham's underworld on edge and finished their night's work, sat around discussing the events Roland had encountered during the day.

"That's right, and the method is identical to the one I used to threaten the Penguin earlier—pure, shameless plagiarism," Roland said with righteous indignation.

"I think you're focusing on the wrong thing," Gordon coughed to remind him. "Wait, you threatened the Penguin?"

"Yeah, why else do you think he turned himself in?" Roland countered.

"Back then, it went like this..." Batman recounted what had happened earlier at the Iceberg Lounge.

"I had no idea you could be so ruthless." Gordon and Harvey both turned to look at Roland.

Gordon asked, "Since you've thought of this trick, do you have any way to counter it?"

"Yes, I have two solutions," Roland nodded. "The first approach is the same as my previous method: compile dirt on the mayor and their cronies for mutually assured destruction."

"And the second approach?"

"To have the entertainment industry drop a massive scandal and throw it out there to overshadow the heat on Harvey's situation," Roland said, raising an eyebrow at Batman. "If we go with that, I'll leave it to you."

"Me?" Batman wore a bitter smile and instinctively touched his lower back. "I'm not sure I can handle that kind of burden."