8:17 AM.
Gotham City.
This dark city, built on sin, is barely breathing in the thick, foul-smelling acid rain.
Beneath the low-hanging sky, Gothic spires and ferocious water beasts loomed in and out of view amidst the billowing smoke.
"Whoosh--"
A cold rain was falling softly.
The depth-of-field lens penetrates the damp ground, piercing through the earth's crust to a depth of hundreds of meters, sinking deep into the bottom of the manor.
"Boom--"
at the same time.
The underground river pounded and crashed against the empty dome, creating resonant waves.
The air was still filled with the pungent smell of glue and a strange, burning odor...
The suspended camera slowly moved horizontally, following the overflowing white steam.
A broken-backed machine skeleton was crookedly embedded in a flat groove with an arc-shaped magnetic attraction.
Below the fuselage, the exhaust nozzles were clearly still scorching.
The entire windshield, constructed from multiple layers of bulletproof resin, had already been baked at terrifying temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees.
It solidified into a translucent, paste-like shell.
"Sizzle--!"
At this moment, the still intact black canopy bounced off the ground and, with inertia, rolled forward to form a complete staircase.
Soon, a slightly disheveled figure emerged, clutching his back.
The dimly lit camera shone directly onto that brightly lit face.
It was none other than Bruce Wayne, his face grim after he removed his mask.
At this point, Bruce had long lost the composure he once possessed, the one who seemed to understand everything and rule with "fear."
His battle suit was almost entirely undamaged.
The bulletproof chest armor is covered with corrosion marks etched by high temperatures, even after being baked at thousands of degrees.
Some paints carbonized after only a short time.
Then, like a lump of solidified asphalt, it was branded into the flesh of his chest, ribs, and lower abdomen.
If left untreated, you'll indeed get a free tattoo.
"Um--"
Bruce grunted, grabbed the unbuttoned shirt at his chest with his backhand, and yanked it off forcefully.
"Tear!"
The entire patch of skin that had been stuck together, along with the nearly cooked, yellowish-white tissue, was torn apart.
Soon, blood began to seep out from under the skin.
With heavy breathing, dark blood mixed with cold sweat dripped down his pale cheeks and onto the ground.
But Bruce didn't even raise an eyebrow.
He shifted his position to avoid Alfred, who was holding a sterile tray and looked worried.
Then he strode to the control panel and, with his fingers covered in soot, suddenly gripped the lead seal panel below the control panel, which had already softened from the heat.
Immediately afterwards, they pried out a still-warm black box solid-state drive.
"Sir... the monitoring system transmitted your electrocardiogram in the last thirty seconds."
Alfred followed behind him, his words still revealing lingering worry.
"Your heart rate exceeded 180 upon contact with that unknown energy, and your cardiac enzyme levels were all abnormally high..."
Furthermore, there are second-degree burns and edema... You now need full-body debridement...
" Alf, we don't have much time left."
Bruce's voice was unusually hoarse.
He limped to the center of the cave, in front of the ring-shaped cold light control panel suspended in mid-air.
He raised his right hand and forcefully inserted the hard drive into the slot of the main computing matrix.
"Click!"
Mechanical snap-fit assembly.
"Buzz--!!"
The next second, the thirty-six liquid-cooled computer units buried deep underground started up simultaneously, emitting a vibrating hum.
The six-sided, four-meter-high circular curved screen was quickly and completely engulfed and lit up by the surging data stream.
soon.
The footage of the Atlantic Ocean, which lasted only four seconds in total, was analyzed by the reconstruction engine.
It was disassembled in real time into hundreds of high-precision slow-motion slices.
Zoom in with a telephoto lens.
Bruce used a joystick to slowly zoom in on the slices for comparative observation.
Left side of the screen.
The patrol vessel, which was over a hundred meters long, was slowly unfolding its stern-shaped winglets and aiming its cannons at the enemy.
Around the muzzle of the side gun, the eerie red aurora had shrunk to its lowest point.
Until, the air, under ionization, twists into rings of energy that gleam intensely.
Immediately afterwards.
The two beams of red light descended.
It simply and casually descended from the gap in the clouds.
The stillness brushed onto the spine of the unknown warship.
"Zzzzz!!!"
The energy level projection module inside the machine was constantly scrolling on the screen.
[Energy reading: Unable to be determined (exceeded the limits of the external analyzer)]
[Medium reaction: Atmospheric ionization along the way, local vacuum collapse]
[Hot melt deconstruction time: 0.38s]
On the screen.
In the instant those two thin red lines swept past, the warship was as fragile as a piece of flesh that had been cut open.
The 100-meter-long hull neatly disintegrated from the centerline and then collapsed.
"Smack!"
Bruce froze the image at the source of those two red rays.
The focal length was pushed to its limit by the algorithm, and soon, a magnified real-time image appeared in the upper right corner of the screen.
The person hovered in the middle of the ocean at low altitude.
He was only wearing a faded, coarse cloth work jacket and trousers stained with black spots.
It is simple, unremarkable, and even a bit old-fashioned.
Apart from what appeared to be blond hair, there was nothing particularly special about it.
"See, Alf..."
The old butler's cloudy eyes were filled with a blank stare as the red spots on the screen reflected his disorientation.
He didn't know what had happened.
However, he had never seen his master examine anything with such a solemn expression.
"... Was that the military's doing, or... something from Hell...?"
"He's nothing, Alf."
"None of those."
Bruce stared at the screen, his long, slender fingers typing out a string of code on the keyboard.
Soon, a waveform graph popped up on the other side of the screen.
"Before the windshield carbonized, the outside temperature jumped directly from eight degrees Celsius to four thousand one hundred..."
Bruce said.
"The warship's cross-section was extremely smooth..."
This proves that what runs through it is not conventional thermal energy, but some kind of high-energy particle light flow that cannot yet be resolved.
Alfred frowned:
"So?"
"So look here, Alf."
Bruce pulled up a screenshot from the optical sensor.
That was the instant John turned his head, his gaze sweeping over the fighter jets and fixing on Bruce.
The hairs on Alf's body stood on end.
" Alf, you need to know..."
The fighter jet's windshield is made of three layers of acrylic resin, one layer of microcrystalline quartz, and an inner layer of radar-absorbing coating.
Its thickness is a full 75 millimeters, capable of blocking detection across the entire infrared and microwave bands, but it...
Bruce drew a red line across the screen.
"At the moment the probe captured his gaze, his eyes weren't fixed on the nose of the aircraft, nor on the engine air intake..."
As he spoke, Bruce controlled a red dotted line that crossed the 75-millimeter-thick armor.
Then, it positioned itself perfectly in the driver's seat, in Bruce's own spot.