DC: I am Bruce Wayne

Chapter 29: Deathstroke and Smallville

---

"Everything has a beginning and an end. Life is just a cycle of starts and stops. There are ends we don't desire, but they're inevitable, we have to face them. It's what being human is all about."

– Jet Black, Cowboy Bebop

---

A year is a long time. A lot of things can happen in a year. For Bruce, however, a year was too short and it passed by quicker than he could appreciate it.

For the last year, he had primarily been concentrating on his martial arts and chi training, trying to become DC's Iron Fist. However, even with the harshest training possible as well as the gene amplifier, his chi mastery was barely able to enter the level of Hamon of Jojo's Bizzare Adventures world, let alone try to coy Nen or chakra techniques with it.

That was after he tried to modify the meditation and breathing techniques that Richard taught him for chi in the image of Hamon's breathing technique as well as the breathing styles from Demon Slayer.

But it wasn't good enough as his current level of chi manipulation was neither as flashy as the other two nor as broken. He was sure he couldn't slash a rock with a normal sword nor could he make bubbles of acid through his superior chi manipulation.

But he still had hope. According to his theory, his chi would either improve with time as he grew up or it would become better as he made more and more improvements to his genetics using different serums.

Bruce had revealed his gene amplifier to Selina and Alfred as well after he concluded it was safe enough for them to use. Selina wanted to use it the moment she heard about it without even wanting to know what it exactly was just because Bruce had used it while Alfred just began to berate him about the side effects of artificial steroids.

However after Bruce made him understand what it truly was and how it functioned, he agreed to be injected with the gene amplifier. Bruce primarily injected him with it mainly because he wanted his most important and loyal henchman to always remain at his peak. The butler was too badass when he needed to be, so he could not let him become weak with age.

Anyway, not everything that happened in his life the last year was all sunshine and rainbows. The most unfortunate thing that happened to him in the last year was that Richard's two years were up and he left after that bidding all of them a hearty goodbye.

But before leaving, Richard had a private conversation with Bruce not only telling him some of the most important lessons he had learned in his life but also giving him a clue that there was some large secret organization constantly monitoring him for some reason.

Bruce however wasn't too surprised by this. He had been expecting either the Court of Owls or the League of Assassins to be keeping an eye on him. In fact, he would have been quite surprised if nobody was keeping tabs on him.

However, that didn't mean he was going to let people walk all over him and wasn't gonna retort at all. No, he was doing his own monitoring as well, keeping tabs on certain people, most specifically keeping watch on the 'dirty' politicians and rich crime family members in Gotham using his drones and Cortana's digital algorithms. He had collected a lot of incriminating evidence against a lot of these people but hadn't given any of the information to the cops yet since he intended to use them later down the line to get 'favors' or good leverage material.

Also after Richard left, Bruce didn't waste any time and moved his sight to his next potential combat instructor, one who wouldn't focus on teaching him meditation or chi but how to instead use his skills to the maximum efficiency and fulfill his objective in any way possible, no matter what he had to do.