"What did I do?" Norman Osborn felt as though he'd been wrongly accused. He had been behaving himself all along—he hadn't done anything, had he?
Batman didn't explain. He needed Norman Osborn to see it with his own eyes.
Though it was Osborn Tower, Batman seemed more familiar with the place than its owner, Norman Osborn. Leading him from the top floor all the way down, they arrived at the second basement level.
Because a criminal case had occurred on Osborn's second basement level—fifty homeless people had died in human experiments—and an accident on the third basement level had resulted in the gruesome deaths of seven scientists, both the second and third basement levels of Osborn Tower had remained sealed off to this day. Unlike the other floors, they had never been restored to normal use.
In the second basement level laboratory, the bodies of those homeless people had long since been sent to the morgue under the jurisdiction of the New York City Chief Medical Examiner's Office.
But the more than fifty massive glass tanks that had been used for human experimentation were still here.
Batman said nothing. Half his body melted into the shadows as he watched Norman Osborn pass by each glass tank with a somewhat bewildered expression.
Norman Osborn stopped from time to time, frowning in thought, then continued forward.
He wasn't stupid. Even if he couldn't remember what had happened here, the restraint straps inside the glass tanks meant to hold human bodies, the drug delivery tubes that had been inserted into the homeless people...
Most importantly, beside each glass tank was a nameplate marked "Test Subject No. XX."
The nameplates listed the test subject's blood type, race, height, weight, and a host of other human body data.
Clearly, humans had once been confined inside these tanks.
Norman Osborn felt his head beginning to ache. He leaned back against a glass tank and slowly sank down, holding his head in both hands.
Fragmented images flashed before his eyes, but those images were extremely distorted, as if a painting had been reflected through countless convex and concave mirrors, making it impossible for him to distinguish the content clearly.
Norman Osborn didn't want to examine those images closely, because he could sense how bloody they were, how terrifying.
"I'm sorry, I can't remember," Norman Osborn said.
Batman emerged from the shadows, still not saying a word, and led Norman Osborn away from the second basement level to the third basement level.
Compared to the second level, which was eerie and cold but with all its equipment still intact, the third basement level laboratory was no different from ruins.
Experimental equipment torn apart by monsters, shattered walls, exploded transparent octagonal cages...
All of this spoke to a violent incident that had once occurred here.
Norman Osborn was secretly alarmed. He looked at a mark clearly left by a fist punched into the wall, then stole a glance at Batman.
Besides Batman and that green giant monster, who else could have done all this?
There were traces of blood on the laboratory floor and on the experimental instruments, but the blood had long since dried and turned into black marks, covered by dust, making it almost impossible to tell that this place had once been awash in blood.
Batman still said nothing. This time he led Norman Osborn out of Osborn Tower and headed straight for Queens.
The two arrived at an apartment building.
The place was undergoing reconstruction, but in the remaining ruins, traces of explosions and fire were still visible.
Norman Osborn still didn't understand what had happened here. More fragmented images flashed before his eyes—images of flames, of corpses.
The images remained distorted, each fragment like a vision of hell.
Their final stop was a place that made Norman Osborn feel somewhat uneasy: one of the facilities under the jurisdiction of the New York City Chief Medical Examiner's Office—the morgue.
This morgue was different from the one at Metropolitan Hospital, where most of the bodies were patients.
The Medical Examiner's morgue, however, stored in cold storage the various bodies discovered by the NYPD during their investigations—people who had died horrible deaths.
Norman Osborn was in a daze. He didn't know how Batman had bypassed the guards and surveillance to bring him to the morgue.
He shivered from the cold air in the morgue, watching as Batman left him off to the side and went forward alone to open one refrigerated drawer, then another...
Opening a total of sixty drawers containing bodies.
Norman Osborn hugged his shoulders with both arms. He was so cold he wanted to curl up into a ball, wanted to leave this morgue.
He didn't understand why Batman had brought him to this sinister, terrifying place. More bloody, horrific images flashed through his mind.
Wait—he seemed to have seen a familiar name... Spencer Smythe?
Wasn't he the robotics expert at Osborn Industries?
When had he died?
Curiosity overcame his fear of his fellow humans' corpses. Norman Osborn slowly approached, looking at the rigid, frozen bodies covered with white sheets.
Carefully, he lifted a corner of the white sheet and saw Spencer's face—one eye had become a bloody hole, now a pitch-black cavity.
Norman Osborn was startled and couldn't help but step back several paces.
With this retreat, he saw several more familiar names: Alistair Smythe—Spencer's son; Martha Smythe—Spencer's wife.
Norman Osborn's heart lurched. Images flashed through his mind of flying through the air, of a chain of explosions and flames.
He rubbed his increasingly painful head and looked at the other bodies.
Seven more names he recognized were written on seven more refrigerated drawers: Alex Henderson, Morris Stanner, Leon Rockwell...
Norman Osborn saw fists covered in fresh blood and white brain matter. He saw these seven veteran scientists of Osborn Industries lying in pools of blood. He saw how a monster had personally taken their lives.
Batman stood silently to the side throughout, like a statue that wouldn't speak. Visible wisps of white cold air swirled around him, coating his Arkham suit with a layer of frost.
Norman Osborn was starting to panic. He looked at each one in turn. Of the remaining fifty bodies, some names he still remembered, others he had long forgotten.
But with each name he saw, images flashed through Norman Osborn's mind—of how a monster in human skin had personally selected homeless people, how he had promised them benefits, how he had locked them in transparent glass tanks, how he had let them die in human experiments.
Norman Osborn felt thunderstruck. He knew who that person was now, and he understood what those images in his mind really were.
That person was Norman Osborn himself. Those images were the crimes he had committed.
Norman Osborn sat down on the floor, not caring that the morgue floor was cold and hard. His head hurt more and more, and the images in his mind grew clearer and clearer.
It was he who had personally killed the seven scientists, driven Spencer Smythe to his death, blown up his son and wife, and caused the deaths of fifty homeless people.
Norman Osborn looked toward Batman, then struggled to get up from the floor. Bending over, he violently threw his head toward the hard metal corner of the mortuary table in the morgue.
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