The Laughing Spider #27.
The Batmobile's engine was a controlled roar beneath him, every component responding with surgical precision. Bruce Wayne's hands were steady on the controls, but his mind was racing through calculations at a speed that would make most supercomputers hesitate.
Three routes. Five probable exit points. Seventeen variables.
No tracker on either of them. Just years of experience and enough interactions to understand the Joker's routine.
He studied the heads-up display pulsing beside him. A map of Gotham's arterial darkness. Underground.
Harley was hardly original. She would use Joker's established pattern. He didn't need to believe that -- he knew it.
"Master Bruce," Alfred's voice was crisp through the comm. "GCPD reports eighteen officers wounded. Thirteen critical. Helicopter crew survived, barely. The pilot may never walk again."
Bruce's jaw tightened. "Casualties?"
"Seven and counting. Most of them guards at Gotham National." A pause. "Reports suggest injuries consistent with... extreme force trauma. Compound fractures. Crushed vertebrae. One man's arm was torn from the socket."
Enhanced strength. Bruce had cataloged it the previous night -- landings that cracked concrete from short jumps. But this level of brutality was new. Uncontrolled.
"The helicopter was a Bell 206L-4," Alfred continued. "Fifteen hundred pounds empty weight. Reports indicate it was pulled from the sky mid-flight. That requires approximately--"
"I know what it requires." Bruce's fingers moved across the holographic display, pulling up the surveillance footage from Gotham National. Frame by frame. Analyzing.
There.
The figure in the footage was wrong. Not just the obvious ways -- the tattered costume, the chemical-scarred skin visible even through the grainy security feed. It was the movement. Last night on the rooftop, the Spider had fought with controlled aggression. Calculated. Every web-shot placed with purpose. Every dodge economical.
This thing in the footage moved like a puppet with cut strings. Jerky. Erratic. It laughed while breaking bones. Laughed while a helicopter crashed. Laughed while officers screamed.
And on its back--
Bruce isolated the frame. Enhanced the resolution. The image pixelated, then clarified.
A potted plant. Secured with webbing. Green petals catching the security lights.
His breath stopped.
"Alfred. Pull up the Arkham manifest. Poison Ivy's personal effects."
Keys clicking. Then: "One pheromone rose. Confiscated during her last arrest. Marked as highly dangerous. Capable of inducing complete psychological dependency with minimal exposure. Status: went missing during a failed rescue attempt."
Bruce's hands tightened on the controls. "It was never missing. Ivy knew we'd search for it. She left it somewhere we'd never look."
"With Miss Quinn."
"With Harley." Bruce's mind was already moving through the implications. "Ivy trusted her. Probably the only person she did trust. And now--"
The Spider had it. Secured to his back like a parasite. Those thorns would be penetrating skin constantly. Injecting pheromones directly into the bloodstream with every movement.
But the puzzle only fragmented more. What connection did it have to the Roman Ring? Why would Harley give it to him? What was the Spider's endgame?
The questions crystallized into action. Bruce veered left, tires screaming their protest against physics.
His mind returned to the previous night. The rooftop confrontation. The way the Spider had moved -- not just fast, but aware. Dodging attacks before they fully developed. Precognitive. And the strength to match -- catching a Batarang mid-flight, webbing that could restrain him even briefly.
But there had been something else. Something beneath the competence.
Hesitation.
When Batman had issued his warning -- leave Gotham -- the Spider's body language had shifted. A microsecond of genuine consideration before the defiance returned. Not the reaction of someone fully committed to villainy. More like someone still deciding what they were becoming.
That window had closed.
"The incident this morning," Bruce said quietly. "Old Gotham. What were the specifics?"
"Multiple casualties in an alley behind a chemical supplier. Several of Miss Quinn's associates found in critical condition. They've been... uncooperative with police. Laughing despite severe injuries. Two expired during transport."
"Scene analysis?"
"Extensive webbing. Chemical composition consistent with your findings. Signs of significant combat."
Bruce's jaw set.
The Spider and Harley had been enemies. He'd tracked their conflict all week -- the stolen mallet, the public confrontation, the escalating bounties. They should have killed each other.
Instead, they'd become something worse.
"Master Bruce, the Spider nearly bested you last night. His strength, his reflexes, his precognitive awareness -- you noted all of them as extreme threats. If he's been compromised by Joker's chemicals and Ivy's pheromones simultaneously--"
"I'm prepared." Bruce's voice was flat. Controlled. But beneath it, something cold was settling in his chest. Not fear. Batman didn't fear. But recognition. Understanding of threat level.
His fingers traced the weapons array by muscle memory. The solvent that could dissolve the Spider's webs -- refined from Joker toxin precursors, optimized to destabilize the polymer lattice. But that was for the white webbing he'd encountered last night. The security footage showed green strands that ate through riot shields like acid.
No time to synthesize an alternative. He'd have to adapt.
The Batmobile prowled through Gotham's streets, a predator tracking prey through concrete canyons. Bruce's mind overlaid the tunnel network beneath the city -- decades of memorization, updated constantly through Wayne Enterprises' infrastructure contracts.
"Station Road and Grundy," he said, more to himself than Alfred. "Tunnel convergence seventeen feet below street level."
The vehicle stopped with perfect precision. Bruce emerged, cape spreading like wings in the sodium light. His movements were economical, practiced. Every motion served purpose.
He approached the manhole cover. Crouched. His gauntleted fingers found the edge, and with a burst of enhanced strength, he pried it open. The darkness below yawned, breathing the city's decay.
Bruce descended three rungs. His cape settled around him as he activated the cowl's night vision. The tunnel system spread before him in shades of green -- water pipes, electrical conduits, the ghost of Gotham's abandoned subway.
"How many tunnels converge at this point?" His voice was barely above a whisper.
"The map shows four. None heading in the direction of the factory."
"There are five here." Bruce's hand traced a crack in the tunnel wall -- too irregular, too rushed. "Secret passage. Harley's doing, most likely."
"You're setting an ambush."
"I'm controlling the engagement zone." Bruce's hand moved to his belt, selecting shaped charges with practiced precision. "They think they're safe underground. I'm bringing them to the surface."
The charges adhered to the tunnel ceiling with magnetic clamps -- small, precise, designed not to kill but to collapse a specific section. To create an exit where he wanted one.
He ascended the ladder, muscles coiling with each rung. At street level, he positioned himself with tactical precision. One hand on the detonator. The other poised over his grapnel gun.
Waiting.
The city breathed around him. Distant sirens. The hum of traffic on the expressway. Somewhere, a woman laughed -- normal, human, unbroken by chemicals.
Two minutes passed. Five. Bruce's breathing remained controlled, measured. Heart rate steady at fifty-two beats per minute.
Then: laughter.
Not from above. From below. Echoing up through the tunnels, distorted by concrete and water, but unmistakable. High. Manic. Wrong.
The sound of a mind that had been taken apart and reassembled incorrectly.
Bruce's thumb hovered over the detonator. Calculating. One hundred feet away. Seventy. Forty.
The laughter grew closer. And beneath it, another sound -- Harley's voice, cajoling, praising. The cadence of someone reinforcing behavioral conditioning.
Twenty feet.
Bruce pressed the detonator.
The world became violence.
Concrete exploded upward in a controlled eruption that sent the manhole cover spinning through the air like a discus. The street buckled, cracked, split open in a fracture that ran precisely twelve feet before stopping -- exactly as calculated.
Smoke billowed from the breach. Dust and debris. The smell of cordite mixing with Gotham's perpetual decay.
Then: coughing. Choking. The sound of lungs expelling concrete dust.
Bruce's hand was already moving. The grapnel gun fired before conscious thought engaged, the line -- reinforced weave, strong enough to restrain meta-humans -- shooting into the smoke with a pneumatic hiss.
A figure stumbled from the breach. The Spider. Or what remained of him.
The line wrapped around his torso before he could orient himself. Magnetic clamps engaged with sharp clicks, tightening. Bruce triggered the winch.
The line went taut with a sound like a piano wire snapping.
The Spider jerked backward, arms pinned to his sides, lifted off the ground. For a heartbeat he hung suspended, green webbing dripping from his wrists, the rose on his back scattering petals.
Then Bruce slammed him down.
The impact cracked pavement. The Spider's body hit with enough force to crater the street, dust exploding outward in a perfect circle. The rose crushed slightly, more petals scattering like toxic confetti.
"GOOD NIGHT!" Harley's scream was raw, primal. She emerged from the smoke coughing, makeup running in black rivers down her cheeks, bat clutched in white-knuckled hands.
Bruce's second line fired before she could orient herself. Wrapped her ankles. The winch triggered and she went down hard, chin cracking against pavement. Blood bloomed from her split lip, bright red against white makeup.
Three seconds. He'd had them both restrained for three seconds.
Then the Spider moved.
Not the controlled movement from their previous encounter. This was wrong -- joints bending at angles that shouldn't be possible, muscles contracting in sequences that violated anatomy.
The laughter bubbled up from his chest, manic and uncontrolled.
His wrists flexed. Green webbing shot from both simultaneously, not aimed but sprayed. The strands hit the grapnel line -- Bruce's reinforced weave line -- and began dissolving it.
Not breaking. Dissolving. Eating through molecular bonds like acid through paper.
Early Access Chapters in Patreon.com/MimicLord
Latest update: #50.