Inside the Communications Room (Please Bookmark, Please Recommend)

Inside the Communications Room

Barbara was very nervous now.

After Batwoman left that day, Gordon had no choice but to bring Barbara along with him to work at her own request.

Not to have her work at the police station exactly—more like having her help out in the communications room as a volunteer. No salary, and no special treatment from anyone.

With Gordon's position and prestige, let alone arranging for his daughter to become a police officer, even if he wanted Barbara to be the next commissioner, there would be people supporting him.

But he had not done that. The police department served the citizens; it was not his family business. If he abused his authority, what difference would there be between him and the people he hated most?

Barbara understood that as well. She was very happy to help the police department, and help her father, as a volunteer.

So when she came here half a month ago, she had worked diligently at everything within her ability. She possessed unparalleled computer knowledge, ranking among the best even in Gotham. This was exactly where she could put it to use.

Her coworkers quickly accepted her, not because she was the commissioner's daughter or because of the misfortunes she had suffered, but because her skills were exceptional and she was genuinely a very good person.

The Barbara of this world had no idea that in other Parallel Universes, she too was a Superhero. She had once been active as Batgirl for a long time. After Joker damaged her spine, she changed her name to Oracle and became Batman's primary source of technical and intelligence support.

She was also the founder of the Birds of Prey, the intelligence officer of the Suicide Squad, Supergirl's good friend, and an unofficial member of the Justice League. At the same time, because of Batman, she had provided technological support to nearly every Superhero except The Flash and that bunch of tech geeks.

She was unbelievably busy.

But under the influence of Earth -11's greater will, everyone other than Bliss unconsciously abandoned any thought of becoming a Superhero.

The Barbara here thought dressing herself up as a bat was pretty perverted.

Yet at this moment, she desperately wished she were a Superhero rather than a helpless hacker.

About ten minutes earlier, a group of Men in Black had launched a surprise attack on the police station. Barbara had spotted them on the surveillance feeds and issued a warning, but the officers' response speed was worrying.

During the ambush, the officers suffered heavy casualties in the first exchange. The enemy's firepower was overwhelming, and they destroyed every camera. Barbara could only learn what was happening through the radio.

Her coworkers locked Barbara and the other male officers in the communications room, because it and the Arsenal were the sturdiest places in the station. Then they went out to hold off the enemy, telling her to find a way to contact the military outside the city or the Amazon Council.

Unfortunately, the enemy had come prepared. They cut off every connection between the police station and the outside world immediately. Under these circumstances, Barbara felt that she was not only crippled, but mute and deaf as well.

She could only sit in her Wheelchair, trying again and again to find some way to contact the outside world.

The internet had been cut off, the phones were jammed, and there was no telegraph machine. She wished a carrier pigeon would suddenly appear beside her right now—anything would do.

Perhaps all she could hope for was that someone would notice what was happening here and contact the military outside the city. But she also understood that in a stormy midnight like this, nobody would notice the commotion here.

The perfect time for a crime.

She could only listen through the door to the gunfire and screams outside, her heart sinking into an abyss.

But soon, the shouts outside changed. The words were no longer the chaos of battle, but exclamations of astonishment and other cries.

"God! She's so fast!"

"My supreme god Zeus!"

"Ah, stop him!"

"Help! It's Deat—"

Barbara, her heart in her throat, soon realized that everything outside had fallen silent. Both the gunfire and shouting had stopped.

What happened? What was going on outside? What about her coworkers?

Her mind raced, but the tense situation and the sobbing of the male coworkers in the room made it impossible for her to focus. Her thoughts were in complete disarray.

Then she heard strange laughter and someone humming a little tune outside the door. It immediately reminded her of Jester. That terrifying feeling left her frozen in place. It was as if her back had begun to hurt again in an instant. She remembered being shot by Jester, collapsing to the ground in agony, and became trapped in those terrifying memories.

Then another voice sounded, seemingly reminding the person humming to use less explosives. That snapped Barbara back to her senses.

Barbara immediately wheeled herself backward and hid behind a desk, preparing to avoid the blast. At the same time, she looked around for a weapon she could use for self-defense.

Unfortunately, the people locked in the room with her included several male coworkers who handled internal administrative affairs, a few forensic examiners, and a cleaner. None of them carried guns. The only things in the room that could possibly count as weapons were probably a few chairs and her Laptop.

She hugged the computer to her chest.

Boom!!!

The door was blown open directly. The blast pushed it violently into the wall, and its hinges let out warped creaks.

But Barbara could no longer hear anything. It was her first time facing an explosion from such close range. Her ears rang, and stars danced before her eyes.

She could only lie across the desk and watch vaguely as two figures walked out of the smoke, surveying the room.

"Gordon isn't here. I win."

As one of them spoke, she took a weapon from her back and walked toward the male officers by the wall with ill intent.

Barbara shook her head and struggled to sit up. She was Gordon's daughter. She would not surrender so easily. She had to protect her friends.

"Don't bully the men! If you want something, come at me!"

Her voice made the figure heading toward the wall pause. It was as if she had heard something disgusting, rubbing her arms repeatedly as though hair had grown all over her body and needed to be pressed down.

That neurotic reaction made the male officers cry even harder. Some of them had even fainted from fright.

Unlike Barbara, whose vision had been blurred by the blast, they had spent the entire time cowering miserably in the corner with their heads down. They had clearly seen that black-and-yellow armor and knew exactly what it represented—

The world's infamous Mercenary, a Super assassin with a 100% mission completion rate: Deathstroke!

Deathstroke was not often active in Gotham. After all, this was not the center of the world, merely a city on North America's east coast. Deathstroke's clients were spread across the entire world.

But that did not stop Gotham's people from remembering Deathstroke. She was highly skilled and exceptionally intelligent; even Batwoman could not catch her.

These officers in charge of administrative work had never been out in the field. They had only heard colleagues say that Deathstroke had done business in Gotham several times, leaving corpses strewn everywhere and blood flowing like rivers in her wake. It was not just the targets—the targets' subordinates and families, even their pet dogs, had all been shot dead.

If Cindy knew that this was her image in Gotham's rumors, she would laugh herself senseless. In truth, she did not like killing too many people while dealing with a target.

For example, after killing a gang boss, she could leave his underlings alive. Maybe one of them could inherit the territory and business, and then her client would hire Deathstroke again to solve the problem. Wouldn't that mean more money for her?

It was like harvesting leeks. Underlings were not worth the same as bosses. Cindy was not afraid of troublesome jobs that made money; she hoped there would be as many of them as possible.

At that moment, Cindy looked as though she had discovered a new continent. She looked Barbara over from head to toe and nodded in satisfaction.

"Looks like I won the bet. There really is a 'Gordon' here."

The sight of all these sobbing men had thoroughly annoyed Su Ming. He had never seen so many men gathered together crying their eyes out. It felt disgusting, so the moment he entered, he had wanted to knock them unconscious. This time, he could use a little more strength—maybe keep them out for ten days or half a month.

Then a woman in the room told him not to bully the men and to come at her instead, which gave him goosebumps all over.

He turned to look at the woman who had spoken, guessing that she was the target the Men in Black were trying to capture.

Calling her a woman would be less accurate than calling her a girl. She was probably only seventeen or eighteen, much younger than Cindy, with a quiet and gentle appearance.

She wore the square glasses of a bookworm, had two braided pigtails, and wore a red sweater with loose threads over a white plaid shirt with pink stripes. She looked extremely old-fashioned.

Still, her skin was very pale, one of the advantages of being a homebody. Her features were actually quite pretty too; she simply had not dressed herself up at all.

He saw her Wheelchair, and combined with Cindy saying she had won the bet, Su Ming understood the girl's identity.

"Barbara Gordon?"

Though he phrased it as a question, Su Ming was already certain. Barbara was someone who appeared in almost every Batman publication. Though she looked somewhat different in reality than in the comics, her distinctive temperament and traits gave her away.

"Who are you?" Barbara felt the person had given up on bullying the male officers and secretly breathed a sigh of relief, but she had no idea what would happen to her next.

Su Ming glanced around. The smoke and dust from the explosion still had not settled, and he felt that the Barbara of this world seemed a little airheaded.

"Then put your glasses on properly and take a look at who I am."

Barbara rubbed her eyes, wiped the dust off her glasses, and looked carefully.

"!!!"

As the commissioner's daughter, she naturally knew something about the criminals Gordon often mentioned.

Among them were several people Gordon had specifically warned her about. They were especially dangerous even among criminals, and if Barbara ever saw any one of them, she was to hurry and hide in the police station.

There were people like Jester, Ra's al Ghul, and Mad Hatter, mostly lunatics or cold-blooded killers. Naturally, that also included the world's most dangerous Mercenary, Deathstroke.

Cindy had come to Gotham on business several times before, then patted her butt and left. By the time the police arrived, the bodies were already cold, the crime scenes completely contaminated by blood, leaving no evidence whatsoever. Batwoman had fought her before, but Cindy knocked her unconscious. She was no match for her at all.

Once Bliss had made preparations to capture Cindy on the spot the next time she came to commit a crime, she discovered that Cindy's fighting style had changed again during her second appearance, and she had succeeded in killing her target once more.

Again and again, Deathstroke was like a fleeting shadow. If Jester did not always appear in Bliss's dreams, then Deathstroke would have been a frequent visitor to her nightmares.

She could not be beaten, and she could not be caught. Deathstroke always inspired fear, like the bat in her own heart.

That was what Batwoman had told Gordon, and Gordon had told Barbara as well. She still remembered him saying:

"Deathstroke is also a lunatic, really. She's just a calm lunatic. She never thinks there's anything wrong with killing people. People die when they live. She merely speeds up the process and sees herself as nature's porter."

Of course, remembering her father's words at a time like this did not help Barbara's situation in the slightest. It only made her panic more.

One Deathstroke was already deadly enough, but there were two here!

Wait, two Deathstrokes?

Barbara took off her glasses again and forcefully slapped her own head. She suspected she had a concussion. She was actually seeing double.

After fussing around for a while, she discovered that the Deathstrokes before her had not decreased in number. She tilted her head adorably and began to think.

Could it be that Deathstroke had completed all those impossible assassinations in the past because they were actually an assassin duo, or even an assassin organization? One Deathstroke would lead Batwoman in circles around the city while the other took the chance to kill the target?

Barbara felt that she had discovered the truth. At the same time, immense terror surged into her heart. She seemed to know a secret she was not supposed to know. They would definitely silence her!

There were still so many things she wanted to do. She had not met her biological mother yet. She...

Seeing her staring blankly into space, Su Ming simply used the Taser to knock out all the other officers first. The world was finally quiet.

"Which one of you is Deathstroke?" Barbara had not been killed. Instead, both Deathstrokes watched her with interest. She clutched her computer tightly, as if it could give her a sense of security.

She saw the other officers slumped in the corner by the wall. Fortunately, there was no blood, so they should be all right.

"I am. He isn't." Cindy hurried forward several steps and took Su Ming's original position.

Su Ming shrugged. Anyway, this was her world. She could say whatever she wanted. The fact that he was Deathstroke was already an objective reality; there was no use denying it.

"What exactly are you doing at the police station? This is not a place you should be." With the expression of someone ready to die heroically, Barbara spoke sternly to Cindy.

Cindy was a little surprised. It seemed Commissioner Gordon's daughter really was courageous. No wonder she had managed to survive Jester. "We came to find your father. There are some matters we need his help with, but it looks like he isn't at the station?"

"Don't even think about finding out where my father is. Kill me if you want." The moment Barbara heard they were looking for her father, she immediately refused.

Cindy shook her head. She had no intention of killing Barbara.

As Gordon's daughter, she should be a valuable target too. Since no one had paid for her, Cindy would not kill her. Besides, she now had a mission: prevent the destruction of the world. That was what mattered most.

"I don't know whether you saw those people in the corridor—the ones in black suits. They should be from a tightly organized gang." Su Ming decided to change tactics and use gentler words to extract information. "Their targets are you and your father. I'll go out now and destroy the device in their vehicle that's blocking the signals. Then see if you can contact him."

If the call went through, Su Ming and Cindy only needed to wait here for their prey. Could Gordon really abandon his daughter?

If the call did not go through, that would prove Su Ming's deduction even further. Gordon had been kidnapped, and Barbara would definitely try to save him. It would be even better if she could bring Batman directly here.

This was an open scheme.

Barbara neither agreed nor disagreed. Su Ming was about to leave, but Cindy volunteered to destroy the equipment instead, asking him to stay behind and talk to Barbara. Men in this world always had a slight advantage when it came to communication.

Looking at the girl in the Wheelchair, Su Ming did not know what to say. His identity was that of a bad guy. The police commissioner's daughter probably hated him to the bone.

Time passed second by second until Cindy returned, humming a tune. Not only had she gone out and blown up the signal jammer, she had also restored the police station building's network connection.

She was soaked from head to toe, water constantly dripping from her armor. "There's an informant among your coworkers. They should be somewhere in that pile by the wall. I found that the network had been physically cut off from inside the police station. So, did you two reach any kind of agreement while I was gone?"

What agreement could there be? Did sitting silently together in the room count?