I left Wayne Manor without looking back.
Not because I felt anything resembling regret, but because the outcome had already been confirmed the moment I made my decision. Fate in this world was flexible, but not blind. It adjusted. It compensated. And sometimes… it mutated.
The Wayne family had refused cooperation.
That alone sealed the divergence.
As I walked through the burning district, I extended my divination magic outward, watching the threads of causality unfold like collapsing constellations. Millions of branching outcomes flickered before me—most of them unstable, most of them irrelevant.
But one stood out.
A single, persistent line.
Bruce Wayne.
It did not break.
It did not fade.
It hardened.
I tilted my head slightly.
"…So that's how it is."
I expanded the vision further, refining probability layers, stripping away noise until only structural inevitability remained.
Over ninety percent probability.
Not of his survival.
Not of his trauma.
But of his transformation.
"…I caused it," I murmured to myself.
Not in the emotional sense others might interpret it.
In the mechanical sense of causality.
The loss of the Waynes—no matter how it occurred, no matter what variables contributed—had been pushed into existence by my presence. A ripple event that forced the creation of something the timeline had always been afraid to allow.
Batman.
I exhaled slowly.
"That's almost funny."
A human who would become a symbol of fear in order to fight fear itself… born from a single deviation in my path.
A correction the world made to balance my interference.
I continued walking as Gotham burned behind me in distant echoes.
The Spirit of Fire stirred faintly within my spiritual core, reacting to my thoughts rather than any physical stimulus. It had grown stronger again—fed not just by destruction, but by the density of emotional collapse spreading through the city.
Grief.
Anger.
Fear.
All of it became fuel in this world.
I could feel it.
Not consume it.
But understand it.
Somewhere far behind me, a child would be kneeling in ashes.
Building something new from what was lost.
A symbol.
A weapon.
A future enemy—or perhaps something else entirely.
I closed my eyes briefly.
"…Bruce Wayne," I said quietly.
Not pity.
Not admiration.
Just recognition.
A point in history had been marked.
And I had been the catalyst.
When I opened my eyes again, my focus shifted forward.
There were greater things than this moment.
Greater systems.
Greater beings.
The final one percent still waited inside me like a locked horizon.
The Great Spirit.
And once that was complete…
Even symbols like Batman would only be echoes of a world that had already moved past them.