Bruce dropped from the roof, cape catching the air and slowing his fall to something silent and controlled.
He landed in a crouch on the warehouse's loading dock, the suit's boots absorbing the impact without a sound.
The first guard turned the corner three seconds later.
Before Bruce had consciously registered the man's weight shifting toward alarm, his body was already moving, Threat Sense flagging the tell a fraction of a second before the guard's mouth even opened to shout.
Thud!
A single strike dropped him silently. Bruce caught the body before it hit the ground and lowered it without a sound.
He moved into the warehouse's main floor. Five guards remained, spread out around the crates, relaxed, unaware.
Bruce felt something different in how his body approached the problem this time.
No mental catalog of which style to use against which stance.
His hands and feet simply answered as each guard came within range, Combat Synthesis blending strikes across disciplines without a flicker of hesitation between them.
Crack! Thwack! Thud!
Three guards went down in under four seconds, each strike flowing directly into the next without any gap for a fourth guard to react in time.
The fifth and sixth guards finally noticed, both reaching for weapons at the same moment.
Bruce felt the decision arrive without deliberation. He activated Overdrive.
Heat flooded through his muscles, a controlled, willed surge beyond even his enhanced baseline. He crossed the fifteen feet separating him from the two guards in a fraction of the time it should have taken, closing the distance before either gun cleared its holster.
Bam! Bam!
Two strikes, one to each guard, dropped them both within the same half second.
Bruce stood in the center of the warehouse, chest heaving, the Overdrive fading out of his system and leaving behind the familiar shaking exhaustion he'd trained through in the dimension.
Six guards down.
Zero shots fired.
Total elapsed time, according to the cowl's internal clock, eleven seconds.
"Operation complete," NEXUS reported. "All hostiles neutralized. No injuries sustained. Suit performed within all projected parameters. New skill activations functioned exactly as trained."
Bruce allowed himself a moment to simply breathe, cowl's sensors sweeping the warehouse for any remaining threats and finding none.
"Eleven seconds," he said quietly.
"For context, your first operation against Bruno Mannheim's organization required just under two hours from insertion to extraction. This operation required under two minutes total, including approach and extraction."
Bruce gathered evidence from the crates, cataloguing the shipment for GCPD's anonymous tip line the same way he always did, and made his way back out into the night.
The suit held its silence the entire way, no creak, no rustle, nothing but the sound of his own controlled breathing inside the cowl.
He returned to the cave two hours later, suit removed, body aching in the satisfied way of genuine accomplishment rather than injury.
Alfred had left a plate of food in the small refrigerator down there, something he'd started doing without comment weeks ago, another quiet acknowledgment of a life he wasn't allowed to fully understand.
Bruce ate slowly, letting the exhaustion of the past three days finally settle into something like peace.
"Status," he said eventually.
Read more chapters, 30 days ahead of Webnovel Updates on Patreon marvelstark