Chapter 32: The Bat Succeeds
As Wilson Fisk stepped into his private elevator, the two massive bodyguards flanking the doors had only a moment to register a blur of motion before a dark figure was between them.
CRACK!
There is a specific, sickeningly crisp sound when two large, solid objects are slammed together at high speed.
Bruce held a guard's head in each hand, having used their own momentum against them. He released his grip, and the two men slumped to the polished floor in a heap, unconscious.
The Spider-People clinging to the ceiling above couldn't help but wince, their necks retracting slightly into their shoulders.
"That had to hurt," Spider-Ham muttered, imagining the cartoon stars that would be circling his own head after such a hit.
Bruce stepped over the fallen guards into the private elevator foyer. Spider-Man Noir, thinking tactically, immediately moved to kick the sealed elevator doors open—a task well within a Spider-Man's strength.
The Bat stopped him with an upraised hand. Instead, he tossed a small, disc-like device onto the door's control panel. With a sharp hiss and a spark, the doors slid smoothly open, revealing the dark elevator shaft.
"Handy little gadget," Peter B. Parker remarked.
Without a word, Bruce fired his grapple gun upward into the shaft. The hook caught, and he dropped straight down into the darkness, his cape flaring out to slow his descent.
"Okay, now I hate him a little, too," Peter B. said, looking at Gwen.
Gwen didn't reply. A nagging feeling had settled in her gut. The Bat was holding something back. She was sure of it.
The Spider-People flipped down into the shaft, landing silently at the bottom. The Bat was already gone, vanished into the labyrinth of maintenance tunnels like smoke.
"Now I'm convinced he's the real deal," Peter B. whispered. "The whole 'disappearing act' is Batman 101. Even Superman loses him."
"Well, according to the Bat," Gwen said, taking a steadying breath, "Kingpin has an army waiting for us down here. Let's hope we're ready."
She then turned to Peni. "Okay. Time to come clean. Which key is real?"
"The one with three horizontal lines in the spider logo is real. The one with four is the decoy," Peni confessed, figuring the secret didn't matter now. They were about to leave this universe anyway.
Gwen and Peter B. simultaneously pulled out their keys, holding them up to the dim emergency light.
"Damn Bat," Gwen hissed, her frustration boiling over.
Both keys in their hands had spiders with three horizontal lines.
Peni gasped, confused. But at that moment, a soft chime sounded in her cockpit. An encrypted message had just arrived on SP//dr's system. It was from the Bat.
"I knew you would tell them how to distinguish the keys. Understand this: either key you hold may now be the functional one. Do not worry. You will go home. I will destroy the collider."
Reading the message aloud, Peni watched Gwen's expression darken. Gwen now genuinely wanted to rip the cowl off and punch whatever face was underneath.
"So what's the play now?" Spider-Man Noir asked. While the others talked, he'd been scanning the vast collider chamber from their hidden vantage point. He'd spotted several figures in white lab coats positioned around the perimeter, holding what were unmistakably compact assault rifles.
"We take out anyone who gets in our way," Gwen stated, her anger sharpening her focus. It wasn't just about the keys anymore. It was the Bat's utter lack of trust.
As the Spider-Peone swung into action against Fisk's perimeter guards, the Bat had already ghosted to his objective. He stood motionless in a deep shadowed corner of the massive collider lab, a part of the darkness itself. He had to credit the villains' aesthetic—their lairs were always so poorly lit. It made infiltration almost easy.
"Initiate the sequence," Kingpin's voice boomed as he strode into the lab, his focus entirely on the humming machinery. He was moments from getting his family back.
"Uploading genetic sequences for Vanessa Fisk and Richard Fisk."
"Beginning spatial resonance scan."
The clinical, professional chatter from the technicians highlighted their skill, but it also allowed Bruce to pinpoint several agents whose movements were a little too precise, a little too observant for simple scientists. In the gloom, they performed subtle, extra actions at their consoles.
"Secondary ignition countdown initiated. Five. Four."
Bruce's hand closed around a small, cylindrical device.
"Three. Two. One."
With a ground-shaking THRUM, violent energy beams erupted from the twin collider nozzles, colliding in the center of the chamber in a storm of light and sound. The machine was live.
It was Bruce's moment.
He had calculated the EMP's yield precisely. It would fry electronics but leave the raw, contained energy of the collider untouched—for now.
As a special containment pod began to move on rails toward the energy vortex, Bruce threw the EMP device. It sailed in a high arc, clattering once, then twice, against metal gantries before landing almost delicately in the exact center of the lab floor.
Clang... clang...
The sound was absurdly loud against the roar of the collider.
Kingpin didn't hear it. His world was the glowing vortex. Tombstone did. He drew his weapon, scanning the shadows, but saw only the lab's heavy blast door swinging slowly shut. His eyes dropped to the small cylinder on the floor. He recognized it a second too late.
"BOSS, GET DOWN—!"
Dr. Octopus saw it too. Her mechanical arms whirred, stretching to snatch and throw the device away.
She was not fast enough.
The EMP detonated.
A silent, invisible wave of destructive broadband electromagnetic radiation flooded the chamber. Every screen went black. Every console died with a fizzle and a shower of sparks. Dr. Octopus's arms spasmed and dropped, lifeless, as their systems fried.
"What? What happened?!" Kingpin roared, whirling around from the still-glowing energy storm to face a lab plunged into chaos and darkness. He saw only the failure of his screens, the collapse of Octavius's arms. The plan was crumbling, and he didn't yet understand why.
His question was echoed outside the lab by a different group.
"Why'd it stop?" Spider-Ham asked, looking at the stalled containment pod.
Gwen peered through a viewport into the now-darkened lab, lit only by the eerie glow of the uncontrolled collider energy. She could see Kingpin's massive silhouette, raging against the dying light of his machines.
A slow, grim smile touched her lips. "Looks like the Bat succeeded."
(End of Chapter)
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