Thirty-five meters underground.
The black marble council chamber outside Dormancy Pod Seventeen.
Its usual deathly silence was gone.
The ceiling overhead gave off a teeth-grating creak. Dust rained down onto the twelve white candles in the center of the long table, making their flames sway wildly.
Rumble!
An incredibly muffled mechanical roar traveled down through dozens of meters of rock. Heavy tunnel-boring machines, brought in overnight by Wayne Enterprises, were gnawing frantically through the rock above the Court like ravenous steel beasts.
Bang!
A senior female member wearing a pure white owl mask abruptly rose, slamming both hands onto the table.
"We've lost contact! All three elite Talons are gone!" Her voice carried an unmistakable shrill edge and even cracked. "Not only have we lost contact, the self-destruct mechanisms in their electrum alloy never even activated! How is that possible?!"
At the far end of the long table, the Chief Justice sat in the shadows without a word.
Several blurry infrared surveillance screenshots lay on the table.
They showed the deep excavation pit at the Lake Street construction site the previous night. In the images, the Asian Man in a wrinkled suit crushed an electrum short blade with one hand, then punched a Talon's chest into pulp.
The entire process took less than ten seconds.
"He's not human." Grey Owl, who handled intelligence, swallowed, his voice dry beneath his mask.
"According to the preliminary analysis from our source inside the GCPD-the Gotham Police Department-the kinetic energy of that punch was equivalent to a head-on collision with a heavy truck traveling at two hundred kilometers per hour. The Talon's cellular regeneration simply couldn't keep up with the damage he inflicted."
"So what?!" another hard-line senior member roared.
"The Court has lurked in Gotham for centuries! Are we going to let some