CHAPTER 45: ATTACK ON KANE MANOR
The darkness inside Kane Manor was absolute.
Hydra's comms specialist had severed every external connection—landlines, cellular networks, even emergency beacon frequencies. To the outside world, the estate on the outskirts of New York City had simply blinked out of existence. An isolated island in a sea of oblivious suburbia.
Two minutes earlier.
Bruce stood before the full-length mirror in his master suite, adjusting the collar of his charcoal-gray suit. Not the armor. Not yet.
His Bat-clock had screamed the warning an hour ago—a subconscious calculation of patterns, of surveillance gaps narrowing, of the city's predatory rhythms shifting. The same instinct that had whispered of H.Y.D.R.A.'s presence in Fisk's bunker now thrummed in his veins.
They're coming.
The ghost of Thomas Wayne flickered at the edge of the mirror's reflection. "You could leave, son. Let them search an empty house. Preserve Cain."
Bruce didn't answer. He fastened his cufflinks—solid platinum, each containing a micro-EMP emitter. His father's ghost represented the path of the man he might have been. But the man in the mirror was Batman. And Batman did not retreat from his own territory.
Besides, a colder, smoother voice slithered through his mind—the Red Death. They've cut the power. The communications. They think they've made you blind and mute. How… quaint. Let me show you how to repay the insult. Ten seconds. That's all I'd need.
Bruce's knuckles whitened on the dresser. "No."
Your morality is a leash, the Red Death purred. In this world, it will get you killed. Or worse—captured. Studied. Dismantled by men like Stark. Better to be the predator than the specimen.
"Not your way." Bruce's voice was gravel in the dark.
He moved to the window, peering through a gap in the ballistic-grade shutters. No visible movement on the grounds. Professional. They'd approach under thermal-damping blankets, using the tree line. Probably a pincer movement—front and rear entrances simultaneously, with a sniper team establishing overwatch on the eastern ridge.
He counted silently in his head.
Three… two… one…
The front door exploded inward with a muffled crump of shaped charges. Not the theatrical, splintering-wood chaos of movies. This was surgical—the lock and deadbolt vaporized, the door swinging open on shattered hinges with minimal noise discipline.
Bruce didn't move. Let them come to him.
He heard the whisper of tactical boots on marble—two teams, four men each, clearing the foyer with practiced, overlapping fields of fire. Night-vision goggles would be active. They'd see the house in ghostly green.
He remained still, a silhouette against the dark window. A target.
The first soldier reached the top of the grand staircase. Bruce heard the faint click of a safety being thumbed off. They weren't here to capture. They were here to erase.
Now.
As the soldier rounded the corner, Bruce moved.
Not with the flashy acrobatics of his early years. This was economy of motion. The door didn't splinter outward—it imploded, Bruce driving his shoulder through the solid oak as if it were balsa wood. The soldier on the other side had a microsecond to register the blur of darkness before 220 pounds of armored vigilante and shattered timber hit him like a freight train.
CRACK.
The sound of ribs collapsing under the Kevlar-weave suit's reinforced shoulder plate was sickeningly loud in the hallway.
Bruce didn't stop. He used the soldier's body as a shield, spinning and driving the stunned man into his two teammates who were bringing their weapons up. They stumbled back, their disciplined formation broken.
Gunfire erupted.
Muzzle flashes lit the hallway in strobing hellfire. Bruce felt the impacts through the human shield—thump-thump-thump—as rounds meant for him shredded the H.Y.D.R.A. operative's vest and flesh. The smell of cordite and blood filled the air.
The soldier in his grasp went limp.
Bruce heaved the corpse forward. It wasn't a throw; it was a projectile. The dead weight took both remaining soldiers in the hallway off their feet, a tangle of limbs and gear crashing to the floor.
One of them, younger, faster, was already scrabbling for his sidearm. Bruce was on him before his fingers found the grip. A stomp to the wrist elicited a sharp cry of pain—bones ground to powder. A follow-up kick to the temple silenced him.
The last man in the hallway had managed to roll free and bring his rifle to bear. Bruce saw the red dot of the laser sight paint his chest.
He didn't dodge.
Instead, he flicked his left wrist. The platinum cufflink shot from its setting, a tiny silver dart. It didn't hit the soldier. It hit the wall socket beside his head.
The micro-EMP emitted a pulse barely the size of a basketball.
But it was enough.
The soldier's night-vision goggles—amplifying light a thousandfold—flared into a supernova of feedback. He screamed, clawing at his face as the overloaded electronics seared his retinas. His rifle clattered to the floor.
Bruce closed the distance in two strides. A palm-heel strike to the sternum drove the air from the man's lungs. A follow-up elbow to the jaw dropped him like a sack of cement.
Silence, save for the moaning of the blinded soldier and the ringing in Bruce's own ears from the gunfire.
It had taken seven seconds.
From the floor below, he heard shouted commands. The rest of the team was converging. Eight more, maybe ten. They'd be more cautious now. They'd use grenades.
Bruce's mind raced, calculating trajectories, angles of approach, the structural weaknesses of his own home. He could lead them into the west wing, collapse the gallery balcony on them…
Or, the Red Death whispered, a smile in its voice, you could stop playing in the shadows. I could have you downstairs before their next heartbeat. You could break every neck in the house before the first body hits the floor. Efficiency, Bruce. It's a form of mercy.
Bruce leaned against the wall, breathing controlled, listening to the footsteps advancing up the main staircase. They were moving slower now, covering each other.
He reached to his belt, not for a weapon, but for a small, non-lethal sonic disruptor. A tool for creating confusion, not carnage.
As his fingers brushed it, a new sound cut through the tension.
Not from inside the house.
From outside.
A roar, deep and mechanical, growing rapidly closer. The distinctive, thunderous repulsor whine of an Iron Man armor in full flight.
The H.Y.D.R.A. soldiers heard it too. Their advance halted. Bruce heard the panicked whisper over their comms: "Stark? He's early! Abort?"
The leader—Bruce recognized the guttural tone from Fisk's bunker: Crossbones—snarled back. "Negative! We finish this. Stark's one man. We have the numbers. He walks into our ambush."
Bruce's lips thinned beneath the cowl. A three-way confrontation. H.Y.D.R.A., Iron Man, and himself, trapped in the center.
He looked at the moaning soldier at his feet, then at the approaching footsteps on the stairs.
The Red Death's voice was crystalline, tempting. See? Your hesitation has cost you the initiative. Now you're the prize in a tug-of-war between a terrorist and a narcissist. Let me out. I'll give you the speed to turn them against each other. To make them destroy themselves.
Bruce's hand tightened around the sonic disruptor. He made his choice.
He tapped the comm unit hidden in his cowl, activating a local, short-range frequency he'd piggybacked on H.Y.D.R.A.'s own jammed signals. A backdoor he'd left for himself.
His voice, filtered and grim, echoed in the earpieces of every H.Y.D.R.A. soldier in the house.
"Your overwatch team on the eastern ridge is neutralized. Your extraction vehicle has a tracking beacon on its undercarriage. S.H.I.E.L.D. ETA: four minutes."
He paused, letting the shock settle.
"You have one choice. Fight me and die here. Or fight your way past Stark and run. I suggest you run."
For a heartbeat, there was dead silence on the channel.
Then chaos erupted.
Downstairs, Crossbones roared in fury. Gunfire barked—not at the upstairs, but at the ceiling, at the windows, a sudden, violent distraction.
Bruce heard the front door crash open again as H.Y.D.R.A. soldiers burst onto the lawn, abandoning stealth for desperate speed.
Just as the brilliant, blinding white light of an arc reactor flooded the shattered foyer from outside, and Tony Stark's amplified voice boomed through the night:
"Alright, party people! The fun's over! Everyone keep your hands where I can—whoa!"
Repulsors blazed as Iron Man was forced to swerve, a hail of unaimed gunfire ripping through the space he'd just occupied.
In the hallway, Bruce allowed himself a single, slow breath.
The first move was his. He'd shattered H.Y.D.R.A.'s cohesion. He'd forced Stark into a reactive position.
But now the real game began. He had an Avenger on his lawn and a house full of evidence.
He moved to the window, peering out. Iron Man was a golden-red beacon in the darkness, weaving through panicked H.Y.D.R.A. fire, his repulsors blasting craters in the manicured lawn as he tried to disable fleeing vehicles.
Bruce's eyes narrowed. Stark was focused on the external threat. He hadn't looked up yet.
He still had a window. A small one.
Turning from the window, Batman melted back into the shadows of Kane Manor, leaving the sounds of battle behind him. He had a bunker to reach, a identity to shed, and a playboy billionaire to become before Tony Stark decided to knock on what was left of the front door.
The ghost of Thomas Wayne watched him go, a proud, sad smile on his spectral face.
The Red Death simply laughed, a sound like breaking glass.
Well played, it conceded. But the board just got more crowded. And the king has entered the game.
(End of Chapter)
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