Thud!
Fist met face with a crunch. The man's features twisted, and tears, snot, and blood sprayed out like a burst hydrant.
The fist unclenched, flexing its fingers. The dark-red nylon suit was already soaked through with blood.
Hell's Kitchen—beneath a crumbling tenement, in a hidden mini-casino—Daredevil was dropping Kingpin's men one after another.
Szz—
A sheet of blood splattered a bulb. White smoke hissed up and the bulb popped.
It was the casino's last tungsten lamp. With it gone, only the dim, gaudy strip lights remained.
"Brother—no, please, sir! This is just a small house—regulars only! I don't know how I offended you!"
The casino boss—short and fat—was pinned against his throat by Daredevil's billy club at the end of a long corridor.
The corridor behind Daredevil was strewn with bodies—casino staff and gangsters, dead or alive unclear. With the club pressing his windpipe, the boss gulped.
"You want cash? Girls? We don't run that here, but if you need— I can introduce—"
Thump!
Daredevil punched the wall beside the man's head. "When did you join Kingpin's crew?"
"A-about two weeks ago?"
"Tell me every Kingpin site you know." Daredevil withdrew the club, grabbed the boss by the lapels with both hands, and slammed him to the wall.
"J-just a… a vice parlor…" the boss kicked helplessly, blurting it out.
"…Give me the address," Daredevil said after a beat.
The boss rattled it off. A heavy shot to the gut doubled him to the floor, and he watched, eyes wide, as the intruder who wrecked his place walked out.
Ten minutes later, in a Hell's Kitchen flophouse, an old man mid-thrust stared in horror as a dark-red figure crashed through the window—the stench of blood rolling off him turned the man's legs to spaghetti.
Thud!
Dull, meaty impacts and screams echoed under the pulsing purple lights.
…
Oscorp Sublevel B3. The instant Batman and Black Cat slipped in, they split the work.
Felicia clicked on a penlight and meticulously swept the damage. Batman stepped to the smashed console. He lifted his forearm; armor plates slid aside without a sound and a palm-sized computer he'd built popped out.
He needed to verify whether the B3 equipment had been used last night.
"Not Kingpin's handiwork," Black Cat said a few minutes later, coming to his side. "What did you find?"
Batman folded the mini-computer back under the armor. "These instruments were powered up and used last night… Oscorp ran a human experiment."
Both their eyes went to the transparent, ten-square-meter octagonal cage.
"Without a big server, my current rig can't process a proper scene analysis."
This suit had no "Detective Mode" to feed him automatically—but Batman was a detective.
He stepped into the cage, using himself to reconstruct the subject's movements.
"Light this corner," he said, pointing left-front.
Felicia tiptoed around debris, angling the beam where he wanted.
"Subject's build was average. Likely male. No extra limbs or built-in weapons. The killer wasn't Dr. Octavius.
"The researchers didn't mount any effective countermeasures…"
In his head Batman ran the sequence: breaking the rig, smashing out of the cage, killing each researcher in turn. His feet mirrored the imagined steps; Felicia shadowed him with the light. They stopped at a corner.
"The last kill was here.
"From the marks, the final survivor crawled, knelt, begged—and had his throat torn out."
He glanced at the blood sprayed across the wall.
"I'm going to pull the building's surveillance—assuming it hasn't been scrubbed." He looked to Felicia. "Your next move?"
She didn't answer. Her eyes had fixed on the console's sheared metal—at a nearly invisible filament there, trembling in the faint breeze of their motion.
She reached—Batman stopped her. "Don't."
He rebuilt the killer's routine in his head: followed the team to B3; took off his shirt; stepped into the cage… experiment proceeds… breaks out… kills everyone… retrieves his shirt from under the smashed console.
"That thread is silk—the kind used in high-end suits. The subject wasn't a vagrant. He was a man in a silk suit."
He didn't take the thread. He drew Felicia out of B3 and into B2, popped a terminal, and started in.
"I'm in the internal surveillance. Watch the hall."
She nodded obediently. She still wasn't sure if this cold, gadget-laden, bat-summoning man was even human—but his professionalism since they'd entered B3 made obedience the easy choice.
"Start on 25—elevators, stairs, garage…"
He ran fast queries. Every relevant feed from last night was gone—scrubbed clean.
"Silk suit. Knew the internal cameras existed and wiped them. Not present when I scouted. Most likely exited via the garage…"
That didn't fit many people. In Batman's book, it fit exactly two:
Harry Osborn and Norman Osborn.
"I need time to visit Harry—and a window to pull neighborhood footage near his home."
He logged it mentally and moved to item two for the night: find Dr. Octavius.
Against the killer who took seven researchers, Octavius—who fought NYPD in the Brooklyn sewers and killed more than thirty—was no less dangerous.
Everything Batman had bought and built by day was for one purpose tonight: tracking Otto Octavius.