Venom Robin found it hard to stomach the sight of the "Old Bat" in the Spider-Suit, mimicking that lively, chatty persona.
Atop the rooftop of the Empire State Building, the Batmobile had fully deployed and reconfigured, losing any semblance of a "car." Even the four tires had been discarded to the side. In their place stood a signal detector nearly two meters tall, bristling with antennas and pulsing with radio waves invisible to the naked eye.
Yet, Batman refused to let Tony Stark—Iron Man—use broad-spectrum electromagnetic interference to disable the bombs, nor would he allow Max Dillon—Electro—to locate them via the power grid.
"What on earth is the Old Bat planning?" Venom Robin muttered, tearing his eyes away from the workstation screen.
He glanced toward the first level of the Batcave where Black Widow was held in isolation. After confirming the woman, her face obscured by a metal mask, posed no immediate threat, he sat down in the chair Batman had previously occupied.
Several papers were scattered across the desk, and a slew of systems and files remained open on the computer. It seemed Batman had intentionally left these accessible rather than locking the terminal, almost as if he were waiting for Venom Robin to discover the plan for himself.
"Step one is clear enough. He's using the radio detector to find the bombs. But if that's all he wanted, he could've just let Electro trace them through the grid."
"Does he not trust Max Dillon? Or does he suspect the bombs have some kind of electromagnetic receiver—something that would detonate the moment a pure energy being like Electro got close? Or maybe they're purely mechanical, and a current would accidentally trigger the firing pin?"
Venom Robin's deduction hit a snag almost immediately.
He lacked a deep understanding of explosives, and his knowledge of electricity and electromagnetism was practically non-existent. He had no idea if such signal receivers even existed.
"Think about it from another angle. During the dinosaur invasion, John Garrett—the Black Knight—might have learned about Electro's existence. The bombs he planted wouldn't just be designed to stop Batman; they'd be built to counter Electro and Iron Man, too."
Venom Robin felt this line of reasoning was solid, but he still couldn't fathom how Batman intended to disarm the bombs one by one after locating them with the radio detector. In his mind, having Tony Stark deploy a swarm of drones seemed like the only viable solution.
However, Garrett's three-hour deadline was fast approaching. No matter how fast the drones were, they wouldn't make it in time.
"The Old Bat must have another trick up his sleeve." Venom Robin began leafing through the papers Batman had left on the desk.
Soon, his gaze landed on a sheet printed with a collection of seemingly unrelated information: Manhattan's entire groundwater system, subway routes, and cast-iron piping networks. He couldn't wrap his head around what this diagram was for.
Just then, from the top of the Empire State Building, Batman—still in the Spider-Suit—spoke into his comms: "I need to report to Batman."
Venom Robin blinked, watching the "Spider-Man" on the screen put on a show of reporting for duty.
"What is he doing?" Robin scratched his head in confusion. Suddenly, a pop-up appeared on the workstation in front of him.
"Robin, I know you're watching. Press the following buttons in order..."
Despite being miles away at the top of the Empire State Building, Batman seemed to know Venom Robin's every move inside the Batcave. Robin followed the instructions, pressing the buttons one by one, then crossed his arms and waited for the next development.
Beep.
The workstation emitted a soft chime. A window opened in the bottom-right corner of the screen, filled with a cascading torrent of code. A second later, the data converged into two letters:
"A.P."
"A.P.?" Venom Robin leaned in closer. He was familiar with those initials.
A.P. was the abbreviation for the Alfred AI, a project Batman had been pouring his spare time into, coding its foundation from scratch. But as far as Robin remembered, the Alfred AI was barely ten percent complete. What could an AI without even its core logic finished actually do?
While Robin was still wondering, a new word flashed in the Alfred AI window:
"Hacked."
"??? Hacked what?" Venom Robin was completely lost.
The next second, the workstation screen was smothered by dozens of console windows opening simultaneously.
"Is this... every base station and signal tower in Manhattan?" Venom Robin narrowed his eyes.
This again touched upon electrical engineering—a field where he was still in the dark. However, his lack of technical expertise didn't stop him from understanding what the towers were doing. Batman had clearly intended for Robin to follow along; the console windows were no longer displaying raw code, but clear directives.
"Hacking Manhattan's base stations and signal towers to force them to release mutually-canceling interference waves. Under the control of the Alfred AI, these waves will interweave over the city to form a massive phased-array cancellation field."
Venom Robin read the command aloud, then nodded with a sense of self-satisfied comprehension.
"Hacked," another window from the Alfred AI popped up.
"What now?" Robin leaned in.
This time, instead of commands and code, hundreds of individual video feeds flooded a new window. Robin recognized them instantly: these were the ports and vessels surrounding Manhattan. In the footage, massive metal ships were moving into a specific formation, lining the riverbanks like a defensive wall of steel.
First the underground blueprints, then the signal towers, and now the hijacked ships in the harbor.
"Robin, Batman mentioned you might have trouble following along," Doctor Otto's voice crackled through the encrypted channel into the Batcave. "Let me give you a hint... look at Manhattan right now. Doesn't it look like a cage?"
"A cage?"
Venom Robin looked back at the underground system blueprints. His heart skipped a beat as the realization finally hit him.
The radio waves from the signal towers created a massive phased-array cancellation field; the underground infrastructure formed a natural shielding grid; and the massive hulls of the ships along the river acted as the perfect grounded reflective surface, bouncing any radio signals attempting to escape the water back into the city's interference field...
Combined with the current torrential downpour, Batman was turning the entire island of Manhattan into a colossal Faraday Cage. He was going to neutralize every single bomb at a speed far exceeding anything Electro could achieve!
As the gravity of Batman's plan set in, Venom Robin didn't feel relieved—he felt even more uneasy. Even he could deduce that Garrett's bombs might not just be triggered by radio, but could be set to detonate if hit by sudden electromagnetic interference. What was Batman's countermeasure for that?
"Wait..."
Venom Robin realized he had overlooked something. Every task Batman had been busy with in the Batcave lately clearly wasn't a waste of time. So, why had he been obsessively researching an All-Wave Projector up until this moment?
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