There is a version of this world where the story begins in a cornfield.

In that one, a ship falls from the sky, and a boy in Kansas learns that the sun loves him more than it loves anyone else. In that world, the age of gods arrives in red and blue, and the world looks to him for hope.

This is not that world, but a mirror image of one you know all too well within the multiverse. This is the world beneath it but follows in parallel for now. The ghost-layer. The negative space.

Before there were gods, there were soldiers. Before there was a Bat of Gotham, there was a man who swore he was done with death and found it waiting for him in every room.

His name was Alfred Pennyworth.

History, as mortals like to tell it, begins with Bruce: a boy, an alley, a gun, pearls scattered across wet stone.

But if you peel back the years—if you walk backward down the alley and through the decades—you find that death did not start with the Waynes.

It started here. In a London that never quite existed and yet always has. In streets where fascists march in tailored suits, where revolutionaries plot between jazz sets, where secret societies play chess with nations and call it policy.

In a war that never made history books but scarred the bloodlines of those who would one day shape the age of heroes. Call this Earth for another designation, if you like. Call it a sister-world to the one where a Kryptonian falls, and a Bat rises. Call it the universe that gets taken over by Anti-Life before it becomes a Knightmare. It could have happened, but we will never be too sure. I'm just someone that documents everything that happens in the multiverse.

I have watched worlds die. I have watched worlds never get the chance to live. This is neither. This is the story of the years before its zero point. A story that happened years before it actually started.

But that hardly matters. The important thing is that their shadows rhyme and flow together like a river. And in those shadows, a soldier comes home. He believes his story is already over. He is wrong.

This story begins at Minus Three—the price extracted before destiny could assemble its dark knight. If you have ever heard or seen a tale called "Godzilla Minus One", then you understand the shape of it and why I labeled it as such. It's a world forced to pay a debt before it is allowed to breathe again.

Listen and watch closely.

Before the Bat of Gotham, there was a man with a ruined conscience, a stolen future, and a talent for violence.

This is his tale, and I am here to share it as it unfolds. This is Year Zero Minus Three.