"Ahhh!"
On sublevel B2 of Oscorp, faint screams and groans lent a touch of horror to the bright, white lab.
The moment he entered Oscorp, Batman found a terminal and hacked the system to locate the lab.
Patrolling guards and security doors meant nothing to him. He was tucked into a surveillance blind spot, watching the scene ahead.
Before him stood a transparent tank. Inside, a filthy, rag-clad man was locked in, his skeleton grotesquely warped, ribs thrusting forward into a pigeon chest.
There were more than fifty such tanks in the lab, each holding a human being.
Most of them were already dead. The few still alive were barely breathing, minds broken, as if they'd been through something unspeakable.
Their vitals were maintained only by the tank apparatus; even if Batman wanted to rescue them, he couldn't.
Beyond various degrees of deformity, they all had one thing in common: matted hair and grime—indistinguishable from alley vagrants.
"Maybe they were vagrants—abducted by Oscorp for forced human experimentation."
"In theory I should hand this straight to the police and let the NYPD investigate and shut it down."
"But what if the government or military is backing this? Maybe blasting it to the media is best."
Wearing only his stealth suit, without the functions of his old Batsuit, he found the lab's security room and sent the footage to the Daily Bugle's inbox.
He didn't rush out afterward. He rifled quickly through the lab's files.
"Subject No. 5: enhanced physical abilities. Tests show strength eight times that of a normal human. Side effects: eight squid tentacles; full cephalopod traits. To date, the only successful trial."
"Experiment offers a new direction for a super-soldier serum, but Subject No. 5 escaped and remains at large."
The subject was plainly the Squid-Man.
Every other entry was stamped a big, fat failure. Batman had come to collect evidence of Oscorp's crimes, but at the bottom of the stack he found a record with no serial number at all:
"Unnamed subject—suspected to be more perfect and successful than Subject No. 5. Codename: 'Spider-Man.' Actual identity unknown. Hypothesis: an outsider stole the serum, self-administered, and gained powers."
"Suspected abilities: super strength, super speed, hyper-reflexes, regeneration, web projection, danger precognition."
The line hit Batman like a hammer.
"Peter Parker is an Oscorp lab subject? Paid for with dozens of lives?"
He felt as if two mountains had dropped onto his back, crushing the air from his lungs.
"No. That's wrong."
His will snapped him back. He remembered Peter's notebook clearly describing how he got his powers:
—bitten by a genetically altered spider during a tour of Oscorp's biotech facility.
That didn't match Oscorp's record at all. "Spider-Man" was an accident, not a lab subject.
"Maybe it's just Oscorp grasping at straws—researching a super-soldier serum while Spider-Man happens to be active in New York."
"But I need to go to the biotech facility myself and verify."
Oscorp's biotech floors ran from the 20th level up—front and center, the division that made the company famous, unlike the human experiments buried on sublevel B2.
He took a breath, stopped paging through paper files, and cracked open a lab computer, tunneling into Oscorp's core secrets.
Most of the core files concerned biotech—the foundation of Oscorp's rise as a multinational. Apart from the human experiments, most of their business and projects were legal.
Beeep—beeep—beeep—
The security system detected the intrusion and tripped the alarms.
Batman was about to move when a file labeled "Spider-Slayer" froze him in place.
"Codename 'Spider-Man' may hold the key to a successful super-soldier serum. Compared to the Squid-Man, Spider-Man—active daily in New York—is easier to lure and capture."
"Spider-Slayer Program: adapt the man-portable powered armor supplied to the military, plus glider tech, specifically to target 'Spider-Man'…"
Clatter—
After a rush of bootfalls, the unlocked security door smashed inward. The clack of rounds chambering followed—by his ear, fifty-one guns.
"The system flags an intruder… Damn it. Norman Osborn didn't tell me he was running this kind of butchery? This is what I've been guarding day and night?!"
A sharp, musical woman's voice cut through to Batman's hiding place.
From where he crouched, he could see only a back: silver-white tactical suit, short silver-gray hair; a lithe, powerful waist and full hips tracing a striking silhouette.
"Uh… President Silver Sable, that's because Norman only told us to hold outside the lab. With the security doors, we couldn't get in," someone murmured.
Silver Sable fell silent for a beat. That was, in fact, the order Norman had given her.
"So… Ms. Silver Sable, what do we do?" another asked, hesitant.
"Catch the intruder," she said without missing a beat. "We take Norman's money first—then we put Norman in prison to be 'ministered to' by the chaplains…"
"And don't fire. Looks like a few of these poor souls are still alive."
"You work. I'm going to photograph this and blow it wide open."
Quietly, Batman dabbed a touch of gel onto the floor. This squad bursting in on the alarm had wrecked his plan.
No matter. The more people who knew about Oscorp's human experiments, the better—and from what "Silver Sable" said, they were only hired guns and despised this as much as he did.
"I can't get caught. I have too much to do."
He slipped far enough from the gel, clicked the remote, and popped it.
He'd laid only a smear—he wasn't trying to hurt anyone, just draw Silver Sable's team's eyes.
One versus fifty. Advantage: me. Batman burst from cover.