Chapter 110: Bat-Tech Beyond Human Comprehension
Approximately 5,500 meters above the Adirondack Mountains in northeastern New York State.
This was the altitude for civilian high-altitude skydiving. Batman, wearing a jump suit that made him appear somewhat bloated, sat inside the aircraft cabin.
"Josh, I'm not joking when I say jumping where you want is basically suicide." Inside the jump plane's cabin, an instructor made one final attempt at persuasion.
"Nobody's ever jumped at the location you chose. You don't even want an instructor with you. Are you really going through with this?"
Josh—a moderately overweight man of means who'd always dreamed of skydiving and impulsively decided to try it after passing the skydiving club today.
This was Batman's current cover identity. His face wore the expression of a spoiled rich kid seeking thrills. "That's right. It wouldn't be worth my time unless nobody's tried it before!"
Skydive Perris ranked among America's premium clubs, regularly hosting wealthy clients seeking the skydiving experience. Someone like "Josh" came through every month.
The club maintained extremely high tolerance for affluent customers. As long as the money was right, they'd provide virtually any service requested.
"But you're just a beginner..." The instructor sighed, feeling like good advice was wasted on the damned. "Listen carefully. According to the information on your watch, when you descend to this altitude..."
"After you hit the ground, you must send us a signal letting us know you're alive. Otherwise we'll dispatch a rescue helicopter to find you... though by then you'll probably already be part of the soil."
The instructor painstakingly repeated all the critical points about skydiving to Batman, going through everything multiple times.
As they approached Batman's requested jump location, the cabin door slowly opened. Batman pretended to hesitate momentarily, then before the instructor could speak, stumbled forward as if losing his balance and fell out.
"Damn, that guy, ugh!" The instructor watched Batman's rapidly shrinking figure with continuous sighs.
A man who'd never jumped before, paying top dollar specifically to go without an instructor, slightly overweight—in the instructor's eyes, Batman was already as good as dead.
The plane flew farther and farther away. Once the instructor could no longer see Batman's form, he shook his head and returned to his seat in the cabin.
"Damn it, I didn't even see him open his chute!"
Batman indeed hadn't opened his parachute. While still airborne, he'd immediately pulled out a batarang to cut the jump pack's straps, then spent a few seconds removing the jump suit he'd been wearing.
The reason his "Josh" identity appeared physically bloated was entirely because the Arkham suit underneath added bulk to his body contours.
Whoosh! The cape behind him whipped and cracked in the screaming wind of rapid descent. Batman's body maintained vertical alignment during the fall while opening the parachute pack he'd gripped after cutting the straps.
There was no parachute inside. The pack contained only Batman's cowl, which he hadn't worn on the jump plane, along with the biological signal lure Dr. Banner had created.
Casually tossing the lure aside, Batman placed the cowl on his wind-swept head.
The white lenses activated. Batman adjusted his orientation mid-air, shifting from head-up-feet-down to head-down, angling toward the SHIELD base hidden within the Adirondack Mountains.
Driving to the Adirondacks would require four to five hours, then infiltrating the SHIELD base to find the data Batman needed, then another four to five hours driving back.
That timeline was too long. Venom still waited in the habitat box at the City Hall station for Batman to return and conduct comprehensive research.
The mysterious white symbiote's whereabouts remained unknown.
And every minute Batman delayed, more weapons might flow from Stark Industries or SHIELD into the black market.
Batman had to choose the most efficient infiltration method. For the return trip, Batman had already confirmed that a vegetable delivery truck would park near the SHIELD base perimeter today. He would hide aboard and ride back to New York.
Batman currently lacked his own aircraft, and purchasing one on short notice was impossible. His chosen method for infiltrating the SHIELD base was direct descent from high altitude.
Moreover, since parachutes were far too obvious—even low-altitude deployment carried the risk of detection by the SHIELD base.
For all these reasons, Batman chose a body landing.
"I once returned to Earth from the Moon, 240,000 miles away, after the lunar base exploded, relying only on the spacecraft's propulsion system."
Mid-air, Batman's thoughts remained crystal clear, constantly calculating descent velocity and using his calculations to determine whether to deploy the bat-cape.
"I just need to calculate my distance from the ground and continuously use the bat-cape to reduce speed for a safe landing."
"Peter Parker's physical capabilities far exceed my original body. I can appropriately reduce the buffer distance."
5,500 meters sounded high, but actual descent required only about one hundred seconds.
Batman mentally calculated his distance from the ground, then deployed the bat-cape with only forty seconds remaining before ground impact.
SNAP!
In an electrical current inaudible to human ears, the electrified bat-cape instantly became rigid as steel, slowing Batman's descent rate, though he still rushed toward the ground at tremendous speed.
BOOM!
A thunderous impact. Batman slammed diagonally into the Adirondack Mountain soil.
But in less than five seconds, Batman braced his arms and extracted himself from the earth, taking several deep breaths to adjust his physical condition to optimal status.
Within the Adirondack Mountains, the SHIELD base responsible for Project Pegasus sat less than five kilometers from Batman's position.
There he would find the local network data he needed, the Tesseract he'd built his business empire to access at close range, and much more information about this world hidden within the local network that he didn't yet know.
But time was critical. Batman had to prioritize the most urgent matter: hacking the local network to search for information related to Stark Industries weapons.
Other secrets and Tesseract data would have to wait for another opportunity.
Daylight hadn't yet faded. Batman didn't sprint at full speed but maintained an even, rapid walking pace toward the base.
The SHIELD base was mostly hidden within the mountain itself, with only a small portion exposed. Security cameras and patrolling sentries were practically everywhere.
However, for Batman this broke down into three simple steps.
Step one: hack the base's surveillance network so his movements would never be captured by monitoring systems or trigger alerts.
Step two: employ Batman's elite-level stealth capabilities to enter the base interior right under the noses of heavily guarded sentries.
Step three: control a SHIELD satellite to use as a hidden node, allowing him to immediately hack the local network upon reaching the base interior without triggering any internal firewalls.
As for SHIELD's external firewall, Batman had written it himself. He knew exactly how to exploit it.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap.
Crossbones Brock Rumlow sat in a truck's driver's seat, listlessly tapping his fingers against the steering wheel's edge.
His vehicle sat openly in the staging area outside the Adirondack Mountains SHIELD base, loaded with tons of vegetables and meat.
His current identity: a cargo driver employed by SHIELD, transporting food twice weekly.
Crossbones Rumlow's face had undergone meticulous disguise, already passing inspection by the sentries during the recent security check.
Currently, sentries were conducting comprehensive vehicle inspection—X-ray scans, ultrasonic scanning, fuel cap seal verification, and fuel sample testing...
Identity disguise was complete, but the truck's inspection still required passing multiple layers of scrutiny.
Crossbones Rumlow's fingers tapped the steering wheel, his peripheral vision monitoring the sentries' every move through the rearview mirror.
After Black Widow Natasha had imprisoned her greatest obstacle, Hawkeye Clint Barton, in the Raft, she'd come to work at this SHIELD base in the Adirondack Mountains.
This was Black Widow's third time entering this base. The previous two times, she'd taken no action.
But now, on the third entry, even the notorious Black Widow couldn't delay any longer. She had to execute this mission.
The mission: steal research data about the Tesseract from Project Pegasus.
Crossbones Rumlow was here to provide Natasha's extraction. The two had never met. Everything proceeded according to Hydra's arrangements.
He'd hidden the data-receiving device inside the truck door, removing the interior panel and securing it behind the anti-intrusion beam—a location that avoided the metal detector's focus areas.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap.
Rumlow's steering wheel tapping gradually slowed. He watched sentries wielding various instruments methodically scan the truck bed, even using tools to examine the truck's undercarriage inch by inch.
Fortunately, the device hidden in the door went undetected. Rumlow saw the inspection sentry give an okay gesture in the rearview mirror and quietly breathed a sigh of relief.
Now it depended on Black Widow Natasha's performance.
Whether she succeeded or not, Crossbones Rumlow would drive away after the food in the truck finished unloading.
Inside the SHIELD base, Natasha wore a wrap dress, walking with elegant steps toward the monitoring room. One of the sentries on duty there had been exchanging glances with her these past few days. Her going there would be perfectly natural, raising no suspicion.
As a spy embedded within SHIELD, she had to complete the mission while leaving a logically consistent behavioral trail for post-incident SHIELD review.
Her action window was less than half an hour, but for her, that was more than sufficient.
Before Crossbones Rumlow arrived, Black Widow had already completed all preparations for packaging and transmitting the data without drawing anyone's attention.
Now she simply needed to return to the monitoring room and activate the data extraction device she'd previously installed in the core data server room—the internal local network server room.
Worth mentioning: she'd installed that data extraction device during her previous visit to this base with Hawkeye Clint.
Even if discovered, the trail would lead to Hawkeye, having absolutely nothing to do with her, Black Widow Natasha.
As for Hawkeye, he remained imprisoned in the Raft.
"Hey, Natasha!" The sentry saw Natasha push open the monitoring room door, his face breaking into an enthusiastic smile as he rose to greet her.
Other sentries in the monitoring room made teasing remarks, unable to suppress their envy that this lucky bastard might actually land the notorious Black Widow.
But Natasha knew the best way to keep a man hooked was maintaining distance while staying close. Despite continuously flirting with this sentry these past days, even now coming here voluntarily—
Facing the enthusiastic sentry, Natasha instead played reserved, appearing somewhat flustered as she retreated to a corner of the monitoring room, extracting a data receiver and transmitter from inside her wrap dress and connecting it to an interface.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the SHIELD base's internal local network server power and cooling systems—
Batman installed a tiny self-powered man-in-the-middle hardware device on the cooling pump's controller.
To hack the internal local network, Batman didn't need to work through the system like ordinary hackers.
He only needed this intermediary hardware device to precisely control coolant flow rates, letting these microscopic changes affect the server's core processor calculations, causing extremely difficult-to-reproduce minor errors at specific moments.
This wasn't sabotage but rather creating a brief, nanosecond-level time window.
The SHIELD satellite he controlled would accept an anomalous command during this window due to hardware malfunction—a command normally rejected. This command was Batman's backdoor.
Then Batman would leave SHIELD directly, using the travel time from here to the vegetable transport truck parked outside the base to search through the satellite window for the information he needed.
SHIELD security experts focused on network firewalls and software vulnerabilities. Almost nobody would imagine someone could physically manipulate the cooling system to create an attack window. This approach completely exceeded their comprehension.
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advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces