CHAPTER 46: THE BOMBED KANE MANOR
The world was fire, noise, and pressure.
One moment Bruce was gliding, his reinforced cape snapping in the night wind, the cold air biting at the exposed lower half of his face. The next, a sun was born at his back.
The shockwave hit him like the fist of a god. It wasn't sound; it was a physical wall of concussive force that slammed into him, compressing his lungs, ringing his skull like a bell. The heat was an afterthought—a searing wash that singed the edges of his cape and scorched the back of his cowl.
His controlled glide became a violent, tumbling cartwheel through the air. He lost all orientation. Sky, ground, the inferno that was his home, the dark teeth of the tree line—all spun in a dizzying kaleidoscope. His grapple line, half-deployed, snapped taut against a passing pine and ripped free, spinning him again.
Then impact.
He hit the woods shoulder-first, plowing through underbrush, snapping saplings, finally slamming to a stop against the thick, unyielding trunk of an ancient oak. The air left his body in a pained grunt. For a moment, there was only the high-pitched whine in his ears and the taste of copper in his mouth.
Get up.
The voice was his own, ragged and desperate. Not the ghost, not the monster. The Batman.
He pushed himself up on trembling arms. Every part of him screamed in protest. His ribs, likely cracked from the soldier's body blows and now the impact. His shoulder, dislocated or worse. A wet, hot trickle down his back—shrapnel, or a tear from the tree.
Through the ringing, he heard the new sound: the thunderous repulsor whine of the Iron Man armor descending. He saw the gold-and-red glow painting the swirling smoke above the clearing.
Stark was here.
He couldn't be here. Not like this. Not wounded, not as Batman.
Gritting his teeth, Bruce forced himself to his feet. A wave of dizziness nearly sent him back down. Concussion. Probable. He ignored it. Survival was a sequence of tasks. First: distance.
He stumbled deeper into the woods, using the trees for cover, each step a symphony of pain. Behind him, the mansion roared as secondary explosions—gas lines, his own hidden munitions caches—tore through the remains. The light of the fire threw his staggering, monstrous shadow ahead of him against the pines.
A missile, his mind cataloged, cold and clinical despite the agony. Shoulder-fired. MANPADS. Hydra had an extraction team with heavy ordnance waiting. Crossbones' signal was the trigger. A scorched-earth policy. They couldn't capture the asset, so they erased the site and the target.
It was a level of ruthlessness that even the Gotham rogues rarely employed. This wasn't about sending a message. This was about sterilization.
He reached the edge of his property, the high stone wall now just a broken silhouette against the hellish glow. He had a motorcycle cached in a false-bottomed drainage culvert a half-mile east. It was his emergency exit, one of three. He'd planned for a siege, for a stealthy retreat. Not for being blown out of the sky.
He couldn't make it. Not in this condition. He was losing blood. His vision was tunneling.
Let me, the Red Death whispered, its voice silken and urgent. I can stitch the flesh. I can burn the pain away. I can have you at the bike before Stark finishes his first thermal scan. Just a taste of the Speed. Just a sip.
The temptation was a physical ache, worse than the shrapnel. It promised not just survival, but dominance. He could heal, retrieve the bike, be across the state line before Fury finished his first cup of coffee.
"No," Bruce gasped, the word tasting of blood. He wasn't just refusing power; he was refusing the door. Let the Red Death out for a second, and it would never be fully caged again. He knew it in his bones.
Instead, he fumbled at his belt with numb fingers. Found a small, non-descript capsule. A beacon. It didn't call the police. It didn't call S.H.I.E.L.D.
It called the one person in this universe he had, in a moment of calculated risk, given a direct line to.
He crushed it under his thumb.
Then, leaning against the cold stone, he began to move. Not east. South. Toward Queens. A longer journey. A desperate gamble. But the Parker residence was a sanctuary he'd already vetted, and its occupant had a history of patching up broken heroes.
The journey was a blur of agony and sheer will. He used alleys, rooftops where he could muster the strength to grapple, the darkest stretches of park. He left a trail a child could follow—drops of blood on fire escapes, scuff marks on gravel. He was a wounded animal, and the city was full of predators. But the cowl held. The legend held. A few late-night stragglers caught glimpses of a looming shadow passing overhead, a darker patch of night, and hurried on, fear overriding curiosity.
Finally, the familiar rooftop of May Parker's Queens home. The last drop of strength left him as he rappelled down the side wall. His landing on her small porch was less a controlled descent and more a controlled collapse.
He raised a fist. Knocked. The sound was pitifully weak.
He heard movement inside. Felt her cautious approach through the door. The baseball bat was a sensible precaution.
He leaned harder against the doorframe as it opened, the light from her hallway a blinding assault.
May Parker's face shifted from wary fear to shock, to a deep, immediate compassion that struck Bruce with a force greater than the missile. She didn't see a monster, a vigilante, a myth. She saw a wounded young man, bleeding on her doorstep.
Her eyes—Peter's eyes—held no judgment, only concern.
"Sorry," he managed, the Bat-growl failing, leaving his voice raw and painfully human. "I need urgent medical help."
"I understand, I understand." Her words were a soft, steady mantra. She tossed the bat aside without a second thought and moved to him, slipping his good arm over her shoulders with a surprising strength borne of a lifetime of resilience. She took his weight without flinching, guiding him inside, kicking the door shut behind them.
The warm, lived-in clutter of her home was a universe away from the sterile opulence of Kane Manor or the Gothic severity of the Cave. The smell of old books, lemon polish, and something baking. Family photos. A knitted blanket on the couch. Safety.
"The basement," Bruce whispered. "Peter's… workshop. Secluded."
May didn't question how he knew. She just nodded, her jaw set. "Lean on me. Almost there."
As she helped him down the narrow stairs, Bruce's failing consciousness registered the familiar, bittersweet sight of Peter Parker's legacy—the webshooters in various stages of assembly, the chemistry set, the computer with schematics still glowing. A shrine to a lost boy.
She eased him onto a rolling lab chair. "I'll get the kit. Peter… he kept one here. For… for situations."
As she bustled away, Bruce's head slumped forward. The ghost of Thomas Wayne materialized by the workbench, his expression grim. "You led them here, son. To her."
"No trail," Bruce murmured, barely audible. "Beacon was clean. Short-range. Untraceable."
"You hope."
The Red Death was silent for once. Perhaps it was savoring his vulnerability. Perhaps it knew this was a different kind of test.
May returned with a large, professional-grade medkit. She flipped it open, her hands steady. "Alright, mister. Let's see the damage." Her tone was all no-nonsense, maternal authority. "And the cowl has to come off. I can't work around it."
Bruce hesitated. In Gotham, the mask never came off. It was the line. The last defense.
But this was not Gotham. This was May Parker's basement. And she had already seen behind the mask of every hero who mattered to her.
With a shuddering, painful breath, he reached up with his good hand. There was a soft hiss of releasing pressure as the cowl's seal broke. He lifted it away.
May Parker's breath caught for just a second. She saw the sweat-matted dark hair, the pale, blood-streaked skin, the intense blue eyes shadowed with pain and a burdensome weight. She saw not the fearsome Bat, but the lost young man beneath—the same age Peter had been. Bruised, broken, but unbroken.
A soft, sad smile touched her lips. "Well, hello, Bruce," she said gently, as if greeting a neighbor's boy who'd scraped his knee. She'd recognized him from his public appearances as Cain, of course. But that didn't matter now. What mattered was the shrapnel in his back and the way his shoulder was sitting wrong.
She picked up the antiseptic and scissors. "This might sting."
As she began to work, cutting away the torn suit, cleaning the wounds with efficient, gentle hands, Bruce allowed his eyes to close. The pain was a distant throb. The fear of pursuit, a quiet hum.
For the first time since arriving in this universe, in the basement of a grieving aunt, with enemy forces hunting him and an Avenger sifting through the ashes of his home, Bruce Wayne felt a precarious, fragile sense of being anchored.
The battlefield had shifted. The manor was gone. The Cain identity was publicly linked to a catastrophic attack.
But Batman remained.
And he was not alone.
Upstairs, unnoticed by either of them, a small, spider-shaped drone detached from the eaves of the house where it had been parked since the Spider-Army's departure. It blinked once, a tiny red light, and zipped silently off into the night, carrying its footage of the wounded Batman's arrival back to its creator.
In a sleek Manhattan penthouse, the former CEO of Oscorp, watching the news reports of the Kane Manor explosion with mild interest, received an alert on a private screen. He tapped it open, and a smile played on Norman Osborn's lips.
"How very interesting," he murmured to the empty room. "The bat survives. And he runs to a spider's nest for shelter." He steepled his fingers. "The plot thickens."
(End of Chapter)
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