Disclaimer: I do not own anything in this story. Worm is property of Wildbow. I do not have any interest in offending anyone and only wish to entertain readers.
Note: Bonus points for those who understand the meaning of the title.
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What people don't tell you in fanfics is usually how long it takes to build something in large scale. Sure they would breeze over it, saying it took multiple weeks or even months, but I underestimated how long it would actually take to build my own Batcave.
In the comics it was never specified how long it took Bruce to build his Batcave and put everything he needed into it. Well, I'll tell you how long it took me, it took me more than 3 months! While I admit that being rich and just having the materials I needed delivered to my house was very useful I still had to bring it to my Batcave.
Luckily, I had already finished my training and I was able to assemble pretty much everything I needed such as platforms, pillars for stability, lights, staircases, elevators, and pretty much everything else I needed to make this another home for me.
I was currently admiring my Batcave that I spent months building and designing by myself. I had everything I believe I would need in my journey to become The Batman.
After admiring my finished cave, I decided to go get some lunch. I took the elevator I built in my Batcave and pressed a button to go up and once I got up, the elevator was secretly behind a tall old-timely clock case.
I went to the kitchen to eat my food and Sakuya, being the ever-reliable maid already had my favorite food ready for me to eat.
I got to the table and quickly ate my food so I can begin planning my hero work and which villain to target first.
...
Soon, I finished my meal and put the dirty plate and cup on the sink and walked back to my hidden elevator and went down to my Batcave. I walked down the stairs and saw my large Batcomputer which had multiple large monitors to track and view various things around the world, a keyboard, and multiple custom built desktop PC's to run everything.
I sat down on my batcomputer and began searching for some information on capes and parahumans in general and there was quite a bit of interesting stuff about them.
In Worm, how people people get their powers is by quite literally suffering a traumatic event whether it be mentally, physically or any other method and it's aptly described as, "The Worst Day of your Life."
An interesting fact is that regular average citizens don't know that, they believe that powers are gained by "breaking your limits", which was in truth a lie perpetuated by the governments to make people not commit self-harm on themselves and or others to gain powers.
Searching the web, I noticed that there are more female capes than male capes, which was actually understandable. Around the world, woman are treated as second class citizens. In those places, where they're seen as nothing but wives to marry off and birth children, it's likely that they will be under more stress than the men. Therefore, worldwide more woman would trigger than men.
Which was both interesting and very sad. It's also not accounting of the various issues such as depression, substance abuse, and other sources of stress on Earth-Bet which also affects trigger rates.
I looked at the estimation of the parahuman population and it was actually pretty surprising how small it was, around 650,000~ parahumans worldwide. Though considering various factors such as Endbringer attacks, fights between various capes, and more it's not surprising, but I was expecting at least a million.
I began searching up famous capes and surprisingly they do have a database of capes worldwide. It was honestly an unexpected boon, but considering that parahumans have been around for over 20 years and there are people on the internet that can get obsessive about things, I'm not surprised.
When I visited the site it was actually organized pretty well it's separated into various categories such as heroes, villains, rogues what organization they're part of, but obviously like a public site there are some things missing.
I began to think of what villain I should go after and there were many options to pick.
Based on the database of known capes for the past 20 years, there was a massive option to scroll through and there were a lot of villains, both female and male. Though, some were more tame than others, some villains were just terrible.
I kept scrolling and I did eventually find a villain that I believe the world would be better off without, Heartbreaker.
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Heartbreaker was a powerful master with the ability to manipulate the emotions, any emotion. No one knows his range and it's very speculative, but I do know that his power is line-of-sight based. He was known throughout the northeast of United States of America and Canada. His use of his abilities made him feared by the public.
I began to recall what I knew about Heartbreaker, he was born in Europe and later moved to Quebec. He used his abilities to form a cult-like harem of beautiful and useful women that adored him and served him zealously, willing to commit crimes and even die for him. From these women, he sired numerous children, who he would purposely try to trigger in order to bolster his forces.
His children were his primary resource, and he kept them under strict control, going to tremendous efforts to reacquire his children if they were taken away. Starting around the age of eight, he would continuously attempt to "test" his children on their birthdays or whenever he was having a bad day, setting up situations to torment them into triggering and gaining powers.
Heartbreaker operated in an elusive manner, laying low in the houses of the women he manipulated and utilizing the women and children under his command to do errands and carry out his whims. Along with controlling attractive women for his own pleasure, he controlled women in important positions, using them to embezzle funds or monitor PRT activities in order to stay one step ahead of the law.
Authorities did mobilize forces against him whenever Heartbreaker was noticed, but his children were always able to alert him beforehand, and the people they sent in often fought guerilla forces of brainwashed innocents that let Heartbreaker and much of his group get away, making mobilizing against Heartbreaker not only difficult, but costly in terms of civilian casualties. Local authorities kept an eye on things, rooting out Heartbreaker's moles and putting out warnings, but avoided placing a kill order on Heartbreaker due to the risk of vigilantes coming out of the woodworks and causing excessive collateral damage.
Overall, Heartbreaker was a scumbag that needed to go. I'm sure that nobody will really miss him when he dies. I decided that he would be my first target.
Though despite knowing I can easily beat him, there's a problem, his so-called harem of mind controlled women. According to WOG, it's permanent. Even if I kill or remove Heartbreaker's powers the effects will stay and there's no possible way to recover.
I'm also sure that no amount of therapy will ever fix them or re-integrate them back into society. As everyone knows what happened to them and there will always be people saying, "Man, if I had his powers." which will trigger a lot of bad memories.
The only thing I can think of to save them is quite literally erasing their memories with something like the Neuralyzer from MIB. Even in Canon when Imp killed Heartbreaker, Imp mentions that all the women were screaming and running around while leaving the children alone, which could go either way (either they were freed and panicking, or grieving and panicking).
There's also his children called the Heartbroken that have a variety of powers from hypnotic suggestions, temporarily blind senses, inducing fear, and a variety of other powers. And that's only Heartbreaker's children that do have powers, he has a lot more.
I have to prepare for this and the only thing that I can think of is quite literally mind-wiping them. So I decided that my first target would be Heartbreaker.
...
After deciding that Heartbreaker would be my first victim I decided to prepare myself against him. I have learned from various mentors and despite how powerful Heartbreaker's powers are his power is ineffective against those that have dulled emotions.
I began to prepare to build some gear and tech that can counteract with Heartbreaker's power and his kids.
I decided to go with a very simple solution using drones and very potent knockout gas. Heartbreaker's powers are about manipulating people not tech and he has no physical enhancements and is only a human.
The hard part is finding where he is, rescuing the women, and hiding myself from the authorities. Sometimes, I do wonder why the Protectorate didn't immediately eliminate Heartbreaker, if you think about it, it's gonna be a massive PR win showing that they do keep the peace and the public support of eliminating a serial rapist.
Though, that's enough thinking about what-ifs and time for me to prepare against Heartbreaker.
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Author's Note: The first chapter is done for the second arc Batman Zero Year. Ren will be cleaning up the various disgusting villains and will make a name for himself. It will also show how different he is and how he's morally flexible.