Rat-tat-tat
The sound of bullets erupted wildly toward the other armored vehicles just as the Humvee carrying Tony Stark was launched into the air.
The front of the armored Humvee Tony Stark was riding in was obliterated by a missile, then it crashed to the ground with a thunderous boom, the hood erupting in thick smoke and flames.
Tony Stark's mind went blank.
Though he was an arms dealer, he had always lived in a peaceful environment. He had never imagined that one day a terrorist attack would happen to him.
Another missile whistled in from afar. Tony glanced at the soldiers who had passed out from dizziness inside the armored vehicle and forcefully shoved open the door.
This Humvee could explode into a fireball amid the artillery at any moment. Tony had to get away from here.
Amid the bullets, cannon fire, and smoke, Tony Stark stumbled toward a few scattered rocks in the distance, hoping to use them as cover to send a distress signal.
He quickly pulled out his phone from his pocket—the screen half-shattered—and finally saw the text message Batman had sent after the call wouldn't go through:
"I'm Batman. You're in danger. Immediately enter any nearby hiding spot and send a distress signal so I can find you."
Beep-beep-beep...
Tony Stark remembered the phone call General Rhodes had received before boarding the armored Humvee. His fingers flew across the phone keyboard.
But right at that moment, a missile flew in from afar and slammed into the dirt beside the rocks where Tony Stark was hiding with a bang.
In the instant before the missile exploded, Tony Stark saw the words on it: "Stark Industries."
The next second, the missile detonated. The violent shockwave hurled Tony Stark into the air, slamming him hard onto the ground.
Even with the bulletproof vest inside his suit for protection, the metal shrapnel from the close-range explosion pierced through it, gradually staining Tony Stark's white shirt red.
Batman couldn't establish contact with Tony Stark, rendering his warning useless.
He needed to enter Stark Tower and find evidence that Obadiah was the mastermind behind all this.
"During my previous visits to Tony Stark, his JARVIS AI only manifested on the top floor, in Tony's private area."
"But that doesn't mean his JARVIS isn't connected to Stark Tower's internet. To avoid alerting anyone, I need to anticipate this possibility in advance."
Batman didn't rush to Stark Tower right away. Instead, he began upgrading the Oracle AI attached to the Arkham suit.
Due to hardware limitations like computer performance, even though Oracle AI surpassed Tony Stark's JARVIS in certain aspects by a wide margin, it still couldn't provide comprehensive assistance.
Batman needed to prepare in advance.
"Once Alice buys a building in the Manhattan district as per my instructions, I'll need to bring Alfred into play."
Thinking of Alfred eased Batman's perpetually high-tension state for a moment, but he immediately resumed his work.
The Alfred AI required massive server clusters, along with even larger cooling and power systems to support it—something the current Batman didn't have access to.
Two hours later, Batman completed the temporary upgrade to Oracle AI.
Wearing the Arkham suit, Batman used his grapple gun to swing from a high-rise into the top floor of Stark Tower, arriving in Tony Stark's private area without alerting anyone.
Using the workbench there, he quickly located Obadiah Stane's office. Then, he slinked through the ventilation ducts all the way and dropped down from the ceiling into Obadiah's office.
Obadiah wasn't in his office at the moment. He was currently holding a board meeting in a conference room two floors away from Batman.
"Obadiah used Hydra to snipe Eddie Brock, and he leveraged the public pressure I created to lure Tony Stark to the Middle East for a missile demonstration."
"This was bound to happen eventually. The public pressure I manufactured only accelerated the timeline."
Batman hadn't yet gathered any evidence that Obadiah might attack Tony Stark, but that didn't stop him from analyzing and inferring based on Eas Security and the act of supplying guns solely to Hydra agents for sniping Eddie.
"Bold hypotheses, careful verification" applies not just to scientific research but also to seeking the truth in cases.
At that moment, Batman's fingers flew like lightning across Obadiah's office computer keyboard, hammering it like a storm. JARVIS AI showed no reaction.
Whether it had already taken over Stark Tower's network and security systems or not, at least in Batman's eyes, it could be ignored for now. Oracle AI had launched an attack on it the second Batman entered the building.
With Batman's operations, the computer screen flickered rapidly. No page lingered in Batman's view for more than three seconds.
"If there was no attack en route to the demonstration site, then the enemy would definitely strike on Tony's return journey."
"Ordinary terrorist groups couldn't inflict major damage on a fully armed armored convoy."
"But Obadiah is the secret mastermind behind Eas Security. If he's been planning an operation against Tony all along, then the weapons in their hands must be Stark Group armaments—even possibly including missiles."
Multitasking, Batman soon located the Eas Security logistics records hidden in Obadiah's computer, layered under heavy encryption.
These records went back as far as seven years, with the most recent one from just two days ago—the very guns used to snipe Eddie Brock.
"Hydra agents didn't carry guns on their mission; instead, they had to purchase them temporarily."
"That's somewhat incomprehensible, but if we follow my earlier deduction—that this Hydra agent was primarily executing another task, 'rendezvousing with internal SHIELD contacts'—then not bringing guns makes perfect sense."
"Barbara, copy and organize all these records."
Batman said to Oracle AI. He had no intention of sorting and querying these records on the spot; he left it to Oracle AI instead.
Obadiah could return at any moment, and Batman wasn't prepared to make a move on him right away.
Batman wasn't sure if Hydra had infiltrated the Stark Group, or if, beyond Obadiah and Stane, there were others involved in the weapon smuggling channels to the market.
Batman needed to take them all down in one fell swoop, not just remove the obvious thorn.
Moreover, even arresting Obadiah now wouldn't mean much for Tony Stark, who was far away in the Middle East.
In Batman's view, he had already assumed Tony Stark would encounter danger. One purpose of querying the records was to plan how to rescue Tony.
For Batman, investigating the weapon flows and rescuing Tony were one and the same. Per his deduction, the terrorist group cooperating with Obadiah was using Stark weapons. Saving Tony wouldn't just save a life—it would be key to severing this weapon chain.
As Batman rapidly queried and copied all the Eas Security information, just as he finished and was about to leave.
Beep.
Obadiah's private encrypted email suddenly pinged with a new message received.
Batman glanced at the office door he hadn't relocked, then used Peter Parker's superhuman hearing in this body to confirm no one was in the hallway outside before opening the email.
It was a video email. When Batman played it, the screen showed four or five terrorists holding Stark Group firearms. In their midst, Tony Stark was bound to a chair, eyes tightly shut, lips pale.
His chest was wrapped in bandages, and his previously meticulously styled hair was now a disheveled mess—he looked utterly filthy and wretched.
Behind Tony Stark and the gun-wielding men hung a dark red flag on the wall, featuring ten rings forming a larger ring, with two crossed swords in the center.
"Tony Stark has lost too much blood. As I deduced, he was attacked and has now been captured by the terrorists."
Batman instantly assessed Tony Stark's condition.
"Obadiah Stane, this is Gulmira."
An off-screen voice spoke, not in English but in Pashto.
Batman didn't need a translation; he was a master of languages himself.
"You didn't tell us our assassination target was this Tony Stark. You must pay the price for your lies and deception... The price for assassinating Tony Stark has now gone up!"
"You need to wire eighty million US dollars into our account before we can continue our pleasant cooperation."
The video email was only a short dozen seconds long, boiling down to one sentence: "Gotta pay extra."
Without a half-second of hesitation, Batman immediately transferred—rather than copied—the email to the computer equipped with Oracle AI.
He erased the related records of this email, then wrote a program on the spot to redirect any subsequent emails from the Middle East directly to Batman's computer before finally leaving.
Batman needed to keep that group in a state of not receiving the money, thereby keeping Tony Stark alive.
For a terrorist organization driven purely by profit, a living Tony Stark was far more valuable than a dead one.
Several hours later, in a cave in the Middle East, Tony Stark was jolted awake by the foul, damp cave air choking him.
He felt excruciating pain all over his body, his limbs weak, his mouth parched.
Tony Stark coughed a few times as memories flooded back like a tide. He remembered everything that had happened.
The missile demonstration, the ambush, Stark weapons...
Tony Stark saw where he was lying. Not far away, a man had his back to him, shaving. Beside his head on a rock sat a dark, grimy water cup.
In the past, he absolutely wouldn't have touched something like that.
But now, thirsty and hungry, Tony Stark didn't think twice. He rolled over to grab the cup.
But halfway through rolling, Tony Stark felt something tugging at him, and the cup was knocked to the ground by his movement.
"If I were you, I wouldn't do that." The shaving man heard the noise but didn't turn around; he just spoke.
Tony Stark looked bewildered at his other side. There was a wooden table with a car battery on it.
Two wires extended from the battery, connected to Tony Stark's body, the interface hidden beneath the bandages on his chest.
"Cough..."
Tony Stark was at a loss, clumsily tearing open the bandages. He saw what the battery wires were connected to: an electromagnet embedded in the hollowed-out cavity of his chest.