"NEXUS, pull anything you have on individuals associated with Santa Prisca prison operations, particularly anyone connected to a black site facility referred to historically as Peña Duro."
NEXUS worked in silence for a moment. "Limited information available. Peña Duro is confirmed to exist, a maximum security facility used for both incarceration and unauthorized medical experimentation on inmates, largely ignored by international oversight due to the country's political instability."
"I have one name flagged with high confidence of relevance. A prisoner known only by a number for most of his incarceration, later identified in fragmentary intelligence reports as simply Bane."
"Extensive combat training, both self taught and forced through the prison's brutal internal hierarchy. Subject of repeated Venom compound trials throughout adolescence and early adulthood."
Bruce felt his pulse quicken, not from fear exactly, but from the particular tension that came from watching something he'd read about in another life step off the page and into this one.
Bane didn't need the Justice League to exist. He didn't need Superman or Krypton or any cosmic event to justify his presence. He was a product of Gotham's own underworld, born from a broken prison system and a smuggled compound that had nothing to do with aliens or gods. He could appear now, at this exact point in the timeline, and it would make perfect sense.
'Which means he's probably already here,' Bruce thought.
"Continue tracking those shipments," he said aloud. "I want to know who's receiving them and where."
"Already in progress. I have identified the receiving warehouse as belonging to a shell company with ties to the Falcone crime family, though the transaction patterns suggest an independent contractor rather than a direct Falcone operation. Someone is buying Venom in bulk and the Falcones are simply providing logistics support."
"Someone building an army, or someone building themselves."
"Insufficient data to determine which."
Bruce stood and walked toward the suit fabrication bay, where the first physical components of his new armor sat half assembled on a workbench, nanofiber weave samples stretched across testing frames.
Two weeks until the new suit was combat ready. He didn't know if he had two weeks.
"Show me everything you have on the warehouse."
The screen shifted to satellite imagery of a shipping facility near Gotham's southern docks, a squat industrial building surrounded by chain link fencing and irregular security patrols.
"Thermal imaging from three nights ago shows unusually dense heat signatures near the loading bay," NEXUS said. "One individual in particular registered a body mass and heat output significantly beyond baseline human range. I did not flag it at the time because the reading was brief and I lacked sufficient context to draw a conclusion."
"Pull it up. Full resolution."
The image resolved slowly. A single figure, visible only for a handful of seconds before moving out of the camera's angle. Even through the grainy thermal distortion, the silhouette was unmistakable. Massive shoulders. A build that dwarfed the men working around him. Something covering the lower half of his face that read as a mask on the thermal scan, cooler than the surrounding skin.
Bruce stared at the image for a long moment.
"That should be him," he said quietly. "That's Bane."
"You seem certain."
"I am, it seems obvious given our findings so far." Bruce turned away from the screen, his mind already racing through implications, timelines, contingencies.
The Continuity Ledger file he'd been building on unknown Gotham threats suddenly had its first confirmed entry, and it was worse than he'd hoped and exactly as bad as he'd feared.
Bane in the comics had done what almost nothing else in Gotham's rogues gallery had managed. He'd broken Batman. Not defeated him in a fight through cunning or luck, but systematically dismantled every resource, every ally, every advantage Batman had before finally breaking his spine over one knee in a moment that had defined an entire era of the mythology.
Read more chapters, 30 days ahead of Webnovel Updates on Patreon marvelstark