To soundproof Oscorp's conference rooms, the walls are layered—concrete, gypsum board, acoustic felt.
Not as tough as solid concrete, maybe—but far beyond what an ordinary person, or even a typical shell, could punch through.
And yet, under Batman's fist, Kingpin's massive body smashed straight through the wall, blasted into the next conference room, then crumpled another concrete wall before he finally stopped.
The shock blew out the windows; glass rained across the floor.
Silver Sable stood dumbstruck, dropping the chair she'd been gripping.
She flashed back to the first time she'd seen Batman in Sublevel B2's human lab—just a plain black stealth suit then, not the armored getup now. Back then he'd gone 1 v 50 and flattened her security team one by one—and she'd still felt bold enough to take a crack at him.
Watching Kingpin sail across the building now, she finally grasped how vast the gap was.
She overturned her earlier judgment again:
"This guy is absolutely not human. That exposed jaw is just misdirection."
"What's hidden under that suit—vampire? Werewolf? An awakened pharaoh?"
She stared at Batman—steady on his feet, the only sign of recoil a spiderweb of cracks in the floor beneath him—and a string of legends flickered through her mind.
"From Scorpion Mac and driver Walker's descriptions, Kingpin's 'fat' is almost all muscle—durability far beyond human."
"Half of Peter Parker's strength is enough."
With advance intel on Fisk's oddities, Batman didn't bother 'testing.' He metered out the power and sent him flying with one strike.
Parker's physique was too strong; even half was more than enough. He needed to end it fast—to limit wall damage in Oscorp, and above all, avoid snapping load-bearing columns.
Batman stamped forward, charging after Fisk's tumbling path.
From Sable and Matt Murdock's angle, the fight moved out of view—but the sounds carried: crack after crack.
"That's…" Sable heard the rapid-fire pops like a string of firecrackers and had a guess.
"He's breaking Fisk's bones," Matt said.
Minutes later, Batman dragged the heavy body back into the boardroom, looked at Matt, and said:
"He's yours."
Then he turned and dove out through the shattered window.
By the time Sable reached the sill, he was gone.
Fisk lay there, fightless. Matt didn't touch him—he called it in and had Manhattan PD haul him away.
The man who once gripped all of Hell's Kitchen—headed for a coronation over Manhattan's underworld—fell just like that.
All the way to the cell, Kingpin stayed silent. No raging, no begging. His face slid back into its gentle, paternal calm, as if those shattered bones weren't his.
Matt and Sable followed the officers to the precinct, watched Fisk locked in a holding cell, and turned to leave.
"You seem to think you're heroes," Fisk said at last, just as Matt reached the door. "You think a jail can hold me."
Matt stopped, the blind eyes "facing" him.
"The real prison is the chaos outside—vermin tearing at each other over a pack of cigarettes (**) and plunging everything into disorder.
"In three months I'll be back in the sun. Only I can bring order to this anarchy."
He slumped onto the cot like a throne. "When you see a broken bridge, and you're the only one with the strength and the blueprint to fix it—you're responsible for the work.
"New York needs an emperor of the underworld."
Matt nodded, stepped to the cell opposite, got permission, and slid the sight-blocking panel aside, leaving only bars.
"You're not wrong," he said. "But they've already confessed everything—cigarettes, guns, brothels, robberies… I won't predict your sentence, but you know what's coming."
Fisk's gaze slipped past the bars—saw who sat across—and his gut sank.
The two men were Mac the Scorpion and Walker, the driver-bodyguard—vanished the night before, now in custody.
Under normal procedure, Fisk was staring at life.
With those two—his most trusted—now witnesses, Matt hid Ivan and his daughter Maddie; no need to put them on the stand.
"I don't know what Batman did to make Walker talk… His methods may be harsher than I thought. I hope he hasn't pegged me as Daredevil," Matt thought, shaking his head and heading out.
Only after Sable and Matt left—to prepare to fully freeze Fisk's holdings and prosecute his crimes—did Batman drop from a distant rooftop.
"Attorney Matt Murdock is the Daredevil I've met."
In a plaid shirt as Peter Parker, he came openly to check on Dr. Octavius.
During the Oscorp fight, Matt had been listening to Batman's heartbeat—and Batman, with Parker's senses, had taken in Matt's. Walker had said Daredevil took a knife to the thigh; Murdock's leg smelled faintly of antiseptic.
Same calm heartbeat. Same blindness. Same leg wound.
To Batman, Matt might as well have had "Daredevil" written on his face. It hadn't taken much to lock him in.
But Daredevil wasn't an enemy, and Batman wasn't about to out him. He had more pressing work.
Norman Osborn was missing; Dr. Octavius urgently needed surgery to remove the arms and return to science.
And that morning, when Peter put in an appearance at the apartment, the landlord's daughter Ursula handed over a message:
Tony Stark didn't have Batman's number. He contacted Empire State University, who reached Aunt May, who finally called Peter's place.
The gist: they wanted Peter Parker to provide technical services to the organization they'd mentioned—the plain truth being, they wanted Batman to build S.H.I.E.L.D.'s firewall so Batman couldn't hack them again.
~~~
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