"The fastest way is to find this world's Bruce Wayne—if such a person exists here."
"Knowing myself, there's no way he'd believe that Peter Parker's body holds another Bruce Wayne's soul. So my best option would be to knock him out and keep him confined until I figure out a way to return to my original world."
Batman glanced at Peter Parker's computer—a cobbled-together rig with a shoebox for a case. It looked shabby, but it ran smoothly enough. He quickly opened a browser and searched a string of keywords.
As his fingers flew, his expression grew steadily more severe. At last he stood and moved to the window, watching the traffic below.
This world had no Gotham, no Metropolis, no Central City. There was no billionaire heir named Bruce Wayne. This wasn't a parallel universe; it was a completely unfamiliar world.
No Kryptonian who crash-landed on a Kansas farm. No demigoddess princess from Themyscira. But there was a guy in red-and-blue tights calling himself Spider-Man.
"Everything starts from zero, and the time to get back has stretched into the indefinite. But that won't stop me—because I'm Batman."
"I need money, a base, equipment, gear, and complete command of this body."
He clenched his fist, remembering the sudden chill in Dr. Octavius's lab just before the alarms sounded.
He would not tolerate any ability in himself that he couldn't control. If he had to start from nothing in this world, he would need a thorough plan—and everything would proceed on his terms.
As he tightened his fist, he noticed something else: this body's raw strength was immense, far beyond the human limits he'd pushed before. It wasn't on par with what he could do in the Hellbat armor, but by a conservative estimate it had around twenty tons of force.
The discovery didn't please him; it made him anxious.
A premonition of danger, strength far above normal, a soul transplanted into this body, the question of where Peter Parker's consciousness had gone… every single thing was outside his control.
He drew a slow breath and began to search the apartment Peter rented.
Online, Peter Parker was just an ordinary college student. Batman needed more than that, and he'd find it here.
Soon he had laid out on the cluttered desk a red-and-blue suit covered in web patterns, two wrist-mounted devices, a notebook, and several jars of chemical reagents.
The suit matched the Spider-Man costume he'd just seen online. The two devices were the web-shooters Spider-Man used to fire webs.
The notebook was a mess; the first pages had been used as scratch paper and were full of chemical formulas.
After a careful read, Batman realized they were the recipe for the web fluid used in the shooters. The jars contained semi-finished chemical stock—just needed to be mixed in set ratios to produce the fluid.
The later pages were Peter Parker's hand-drawn schematics—the Spider-Man suit designs.
Everything pointed to Peter Parker being Spider-Man.
Night fell. Batman had no intention of sleeping. He found an abandoned shipyard not far away on a map, changed into one of Peter's black outfits, and left the apartment.
"I need full metrics on this body—speed, strength, reflexes, senses. For now I can only test strength and speed."
The abandoned shipyard was eerie in the dark, every breeze drawing out a chorus of creaks. Rank water ran through exposed pipes, heaps of industrial trash lay scattered—no place even vagrants wanted to haunt.
Luck was with him: he found a rusted gantry crane and a dozen counterweights scattered nearby.
Testing put his baseline strength at twenty-five tons. With that power behind him, an all-out sprint reached 190 km/h. No matter the obstacle or how complex the terrain, his reaction speed handled it with ease.
Looking at the web-shooters he'd brought, he remembered videos of Peter Parker's acrobatic midair swings. His mouth twitched. After a moment's hesitation, he strapped them on.
Two minutes later, wearing an awkward grimace, he took them off. He'd used grapnel guns with similar function, but he couldn't adapt to Peter's flamboyant web-swinging.
"With specific power-application techniques, both strength and speed can go up another tier."
He logged every datapoint about the body and drafted a comprehensive training plan. He wouldn't stop training just because Peter Parker's physique was this strong. In his mind, none of this power belonged to him.
Muscle memory, conditioned reflexes, combat technique—he would retrain them all.
Over the next three days, apart from a bare hour or two of sleep, he spent his days moving through New York's streets, learning everything he could about this world, and his nights training nonstop at the shipyard in black clothes.
Using his ESU student status, he quietly ran his own bloodwork in the university lab and tested everything about this body—healing rate, the five senses, and more.
From the traces Peter had left behind, he'd pinned down the source of these abilities: a genetically altered spider. Even the intangible "danger sense" appeared in Peter's notes under the label "Spider-Sense."
"From a scientific standpoint, this is the brain's ultra-rapid, subconscious processing of micro-level environmental changes, projected into consciousness as an 'alert.'"
"If that's the case, I can train it specifically."
Deep in the shipyard, he had cleared out a warehouse. A large map of New York covered one wall, more than fifty colored pins stuck across it. Around the map were clippings from various newspapers and handwritten dossiers.
These marked the larger criminal organizations currently active in New York. Arms folded, Batman stood before the map as if the entire city were his hunting ground.
"Building and calibrating a device that can precisely lock onto my original world will take vast funds and space. I'll have to start from scratch—build a Wayne-Enterprises-level empire in New York to support it."
"Dr. Octavius's fusion project is a promising play, but I need seed capital to get in."
"The first big payday comes from these gangs."