Gotham was always raining.
Batman melted into the night, standing atop a stone gargoyle, his expression unreadable as he looked out over the rain-soaked city.
Three hundred sixty days a year, this was routine. Tonight, something was different.
Without warning, the world spun like a kaleidoscope, dazzling and disorienting. Scene after scene flickered past his eyes like a carousel.
Catwoman, Harley, Zatanna, Wonder Woman, Talia… fleeting nights and stolen hours with each of them in different places, at different times.
Corrupt judges, bought-off psychiatrists, police who looked the other way, officials in bed with the mob.
Joker, Two-Face, Penguin, Scarecrow… villains repeating the endless cycle of crime, capture, and escape.
The rush of images made his head pound, but Batman stood firm, sharpening his awareness.
Then the scene shifted. A cramped, dingy apartment. An unfamiliar older man, stern-faced, speaking directly to him:
"If you have the power to help others, you have the moral responsibility to do it. That's not a choice—it's a duty. With great power comes great responsibility!"
A gunshot cracked. The man collapsed into a pool of blood, clutching Batman's hand with fading strength.
"Peter…"
"Peter!"
The call yanked Batman back to reality. The name wasn't his, but he turned instinctively toward the voice.
A slightly overweight man in a lab coat was watching him with worried eyes.
"Peter Parker, are you all right?"
Peter Parker?
Batman's gaze snapped over the man. His sharp eyesight caught the name printed on the badge clipped to the lab coat:
Otto Gunther Octavius.
Who?
Questions piled in his mind. He looked down at himself—and froze. No Kevlar armor, no titanium plating. Just an ordinary plaid shirt.
And this wasn't Gotham's storm-soaked rooftops. It was a brightly lit laboratory.
"Scarecrow's Fear Toxin? Or the Mad Hatter's Mind Control?"
Batman didn't panic. His eyes swept the room.
Pristine, orderly. Portraits of famous scientists lined the walls. Einstein, Newton—familiar. But others he didn't recognize: Bruce Banner, Hank Pym. Among them, Otto Octavius.
Equipment filled the lab, and at the front stood a massive machine, an octopus of steel turned upside down. A whiteboard beside it was covered in equations.
"Otto Octavius, world-renowned nuclear physicist? That machine… a Tokamak device?"
He ignored Octavius for the moment, analyzing the whiteboard.
Wayne Enterprises had once pursued nuclear fusion to power Gotham. Unlike Octavius's Tokamak, Wayne's team had focused on Magnetic Confinement Fusion. The mathematics was entirely different.
After shutting down the project, Batman had studied the field himself. He knew Tokamak design well enough to spot a subtle error in one parameter. Aside from that, the equations were sound.
The formula was too precise, too advanced. Scarecrow and the Mad Hatter couldn't fabricate knowledge they didn't possess. That meant this wasn't an illusion.
"Peter, you don't look well. I suggest you go home and rest. Come back tomorrow," Octavius said, frowning at his silence.
If Harry Osborn hadn't personally vouched for him, Octavius would have thrown this young man out already.
Before Batman could reply, a sharp sting pierced the back of his neck. Cold spread like liquid ice, racing down his spine and into every nerve.
The world seemed to freeze, sounds warping—cloth rustling, glass shifting, his own heartbeat hammering loud and distorted.
The chill pulled his senses toward the Tokamak. That was the source.
An alarm blared, red warning lights flashing. Octavius rushed to the console, fingers flying over the controls. Within minutes, the lights dimmed back to white, the sirens silenced.
"As you can see, my fusion experiment still isn't stable. I'll need to check every step," Octavius said with a smile. No trace of defeat.
Failure was part of science. Each setback was experience gained. Octavius wasn't discouraged.
"That reaction… it felt like my instincts warning me of imminent danger," Batman thought, eyes narrowing. He turned toward the scientist.
"Doctor, may I borrow your computer?"
He didn't explain why. Octavius, already absorbed in troubleshooting, waved him off.
"Go ahead."
Batman slid into a free workstation, booted it up, and his fingers blurred across the keys.
Illusion or not, the first priority was information. He hacked the local police database, pulling up every record on "Peter Parker."
Name. Residence. School enrollment.
"So this is my identity? A junior at Empire State University. An orphan raised by Ben Parker."
Expressionless, Batman logged out and scrubbed every trace of his intrusion. He excused himself and left.
Following the address listed in the system, he walked nearly an hour through the crowded New York streets until he reached the apartment.
He locked the door. Drew the curtains. Sat cross-legged in the living room and closed his eyes.
The walk had convinced him ninety-nine percent this wasn't a dream. But one final test remained—meditation.
He had studied it under Zatanna, a defense against psychic assaults. It could cut through illusion.
Three hours passed. Darkness filled the apartment. Batman's eyes snapped open.
"Not an illusion. But it could still be Barry Allen. A change in the timeline triggering a chain reaction."
He rose to his feet, voice low and steady.
"I need to find out why my mind is inside this young stranger… and figure out how to get back to Gotham."
"The fastest way is to find this world's Bruce Wayne—if he even exists here.
"But knowing myself, there's no way he'd believe Peter Parker's body holds another Bruce Wayne's soul. The best option would be to knock him out, lock him up, and keep him there until I figure out how to return to my own world."
Batman's eyes drifted to Peter Parker's excuse for a computer—something cobbled together with mismatched parts, the case replaced by a shoebox.
It looked pathetic, but it ran smoothly enough. He pulled up a browser and began searching a string of keywords.
His face grew more grim with each keystroke. At last, he pushed back from the desk and moved to the window, staring down at the cars on the street below.
This world had no Gotham. No Metropolis. No Central City. And no wealthy heir named Bruce Wayne.
This wasn't a parallel universe. It was something else—an entirely unfamiliar world.
No Kryptonian ship crash-landing in a Kansas field. No demigoddess from Paradise Island. But there was a man in red and blue spandex calling himself Spider-Man.
"Starting from zero. My return home just got pushed back indefinitely. But I'm Batman. This won't stop me.
"I need money, a base, equipment, gear—and total mastery of this body."
He clenched his fist. The memory of that sudden chill in Octavius's lab—right before the alarms went off—flashed back.
He couldn't allow any ability to exist outside his control. If he had to rebuild from nothing in this world, then everything would be under his command.
The fist tightened further. That's when he noticed something else: this body was far stronger than any human peak he'd ever trained to.
Not on par with his Hellbat Armor, but easily twenty tons of raw strength.
The discovery didn't thrill him. It unsettled him.
Precognition of danger. Strength beyond normal human limits. A soul displaced. Peter Parker's missing consciousness. None of it was under his control.
He drew in a slow breath and began searching the apartment.
The internet painted Peter as nothing more than an ordinary college student. Batman needed more.
Soon, he had laid out several items across Parker's messy desk: a red-and-blue bodysuit covered in web patterns, two wrist-mounted devices, a notebook, and a few chemical canisters.
The suit matched the one he'd seen online: Spider-Man's costume. The devices were his Web-Shooters.
The notebook was chaotic, the front pages scribbled with formulas—drafts, really. Batman studied them closely and realized they were the exact formula for the web fluid. The chemical canisters were half-finished batches, ready to be mixed to completion.
The back pages were sketches—designs for Spider-Man's suit.
Every piece of evidence pointed to one conclusion: Peter Parker was Spider-Man.
Night fell. Sleep was out of the question. Batman scanned a map and located an abandoned shipyard not far from the apartment. Dressed in Peter's black clothes, he slipped out into the night.
"I need to fully map out this body's speed, strength, reflexes, and senses. For now, I'll focus on strength and speed."
The shipyard was eerie in the dark, wind moaning through rusted steel and broken wood.
Rotten water seeped from pipes. Garbage piled in corners. Even vagrants avoided the place.
Batman's luck held. He found an old gantry crane, its weights scattered on the ground.
Testing confirmed it: his baseline strength was twenty-five tons. At full sprint, his enhanced muscles carried him up to 190 kilometers per hour.
And no matter the terrain—obstacles, uneven ground—his reflexes let him navigate effortlessly.
He eyed the Web-Shooters he'd brought along.
He remembered the footage of Parker's acrobatics, swinging across the city in exaggerated arcs. Batman's mouth tightened. Still, after a moment of hesitation, he strapped them on.
Two minutes later, he tore them off with visible irritation. Even with his years of using the Grapple Gun, Parker's flamboyant web-swinging was a style he couldn't adapt to.
"With the right application of force techniques, I can push this body's speed and strength even further."
He filed the results away mentally and began drafting a training regimen.
He wouldn't rely on borrowed power. Strength didn't belong to him until it was forged through discipline.
Muscle memory. Reflex conditioning. Combat technique. Everything would be retrained.
For three days, he barely slept more than a couple hours each night. By day, he moved through New York, studying this world. By night, he trained relentlessly in the abandoned shipyard.
Using Parker's student credentials, he even slipped into Empire State University's labs, running bloodwork and testing every facet of his biology: healing rate, sensory acuity, everything.
The trail led him back to a single origin: a genetically altered spider.
Even that intangible danger sense—Peter Parker's notes had named it the Spider-Sense.
"Scientifically, it's the brain processing micro-environmental changes at subconscious speed, projecting them as warnings into conscious thought.
"If that's true, then it can be trained."
In the deepest warehouse of the shipyard, he cleared a space. On the wall, he pinned a massive map of New York.
More than fifty colored pins dotted its surface. Surrounding it were clipped articles and handwritten dossiers.
Crime families. Active gangs. The city's power players.
Batman stood before the map, arms folded, staking a silent claim over the city as his hunting ground.
"To build the equipment that can pinpoint my way back, I'll need resources. A fortune. A corporation to rival Wayne Enterprises.
"Octavius's Nuclear Fusion Energy could be the key. But first, I need startup capital.
"My first fund will come from them—the gangs of New York."