Chapter 2030

"Ha, isn't this our powerful Arkham Knight? What? You became like this after only meeting Batman once?"

Scarecrow's voice came from the side of the door. Arkham Knight, who was repairing his arm armor, paused in his movements. He spoke in a cold tone, "How did those two hostages escape?"

After speaking, he turned his head and stared fixedly at Scarecrow. Scarecrow was startled, retreated slightly, and said, "You suspect me?"

"That kid the old man just found and Poison Ivy don't have such great ability. Don't refute me; I know them better than you do."

Scarecrow cursed in a low voice, then stepped forward and said, "Don't have such great ability? Do you know that kid pulled off the car door without even bending his elbow?! I thought it was that retriever dog from Metropolis who had come!"

Arkham Knight narrowed his eyes slightly and said, "You mean that young man named Peter Parker is a superhuman?"

"Otherwise, how could I have let them escape?" Scarecrow said through gritted teeth. "And that Poison Ivy—did you think I didn't try to use fear gas to control them? She isn't affected by any toxins at all."

"I have been spraying a small amount of fear gas on myself. That kid didn't collapse when he saw me for the first time, which shows he isn't an ordinary person. He is a Cat Getan freak just like you."

"He isn't a Gothamite at all." Arkham Knight turned away with an inexplicable expression.

He began to recall the details of his fight with Peter Parker in his mind. He remembered coming to Wayne Manor and seeing two figures walking out. He rushed up first to knock down Poison Ivy, then punched Peter Parker in the face.

No, he vaguely remembered seeing some flashing fine threads, very close to him, but when he tried to recall carefully, it felt very far away.

It was a bit blurry again. Arkham Knight shook his head. He knew his mental state had always been very unstable. The experiences of this year had caused his mind to almost completely collapse, and his memories had also become very distant, unable to distinguish the past from the present.

Peter Parker and Tim Drake were two different types of people. Arkham Knight was very certain that there was a strange, evil nature in that kid. Didn't Batman see it?

Click—a part on the arm armor was broken by him again. Arkham Knight threw away the thing in his hand with some irritability. The more he thought about it, the more wrong it felt. In the end, he only left Scarecrow one sentence: stay here and wait for the heat to pass, then he walked back into the rainy night.

Inside the Zhong Lou, Oracle's base, Poison Ivy stood behind Peter, watching him type on the computer, and said, "What are you doing?"

"Deleting surveillance."

"Deleting what surveillance?"

"Did you forget? I used that living drug to influence Arkham Knight's memory, making him think he knocked us both out and captured us."

"But any modification to memory isn't perfect. My symbiote isn't good at this either. He will notice something is wrong sooner or later, so I have to delete the surveillance of the Eye around the Batcave."

"But if you only delete the surveillance around the Batcave, even a fool could notice something is wrong, right?"

"It is precisely to make him notice something is wrong," Peter typed on the keyboard at high speed and said. "Besides that, I have to leave him some clues to attract his attention."

Poison Ivy looked astonished.

Ten minutes later, Arkham Knight looked at the door that had been violently opened. He lowered his head slightly to look at the place where the door had been pulled and deformed. The shape of the fingers that had exerted force could be clearly seen there.

It wasn't strong, there was no armor, and the size of the hand didn't match any of the famous super-criminal strongmen in Cat Getan City. Besides prying open the door, it hadn't caused any other damage, which was very suspicious.

Arkham Knight had to arch his body to squeeze through the crack in the door, which meant the other party's physique wasn't tall or large. And if they weren't strong and didn't have equipment to cooperate, yet could cause such great damage to the Zhong Lou's security door in an instant, it could only mean the other party was a superhuman.

Was Barbara kidnapped by a superhuman?

After walking in, Arkham Knight discovered the computer was still on. There were no signs of fighting around, no bullet holes, and Barbara's wheelchair was gone.

This meant that either Barbara had left on her own, or she had been subdued in an instant. Arkham Knight leaned more toward the latter.

Arkham Knight crouched down to look at the computer screen. He discovered it was the internal interface of the Oracle system. It seemed Barbara had indeed been kidnapped; otherwise, she couldn't have left without turning off the computer so carelessly.

Arkham Knight began searching within the Oracle system, wanting to find the surveillance of the Batcave at that time. After flipping through a whole row of file lists for a long time, Arkham Knight finally found the surveillance file for a similar time period.

Continuing to search precisely, Arkham Knight discovered that the surveillance footage for this time period was missing about fifteen minutes. The missing segments were very neat; clearly, they had been deleted manually.

Arkham Knight began to call up the access records of the Oracle system, and at the same time, the past began to surge into his heart.

At that time, Barbara was holding a cup of hot tea, turned her head to look at the crowd behind her, and said, "I added a special access right to the system I built for myself. As long as you enter your own names, you can call up the access records and operation records of the bottom-most interface."

"However, out of concern for your memories, I have to ask one more thing: no one can't remember their own name, right?"

The memories behind that began to become blurry again. The hazy light and shadow turned into a rigid and cold input box. Arkham Knight hesitated for a moment, and in the end, he entered a name—"Jason Todd."

About four months ago, he forgot this name because a voice kept asking him who he was, and once he made this sound, he would be in great pain, so he forgot.

Right, he should have forgotten it. Then where did this memory come from?

Arkham Knight shook his head hard, but this time it didn't work at all. He heard a voice say to him, "You didn't forget."

"No... no..."

The profound fear of pain erupted. Arkham Knight's arm began to tremble. He only repeated two sentences over and over: I forgot, I forgot, I don't remember, I don't remember.

"Training pain reflex?" That voice appeared again, but it quickly disappeared. Along with it disappeared all pain sensation.

At this moment, Arkham Knight even felt a certain euphoria from an overdose of painkillers. He wasn't a medical student, but he knew this was likely a massive secretion of dopamine and endorphins.

No, this wasn't right either. He had been injected with drugs that inhibited dopamine in order to make him feel more pain.

The dizziness became stronger and stronger. He couldn't help but support the table with his hand, took a deep breath, sat down, and leaned against the cabinet nearby for a few minutes before he recovered.

Standing up again, he stared at the access records displayed on the computer screen with a blurry vision, but it felt like a basin of cold water, making him instantly clear-headed.

There were three access records for the surveillance recording system.

Besides his own, there were two others. And after the second-to-last surveillance recording access record was a deletion record, and it was a complete deletion, without any backup records. This wasn't Barbara's style of doing things at all.

Looking at the last surveillance recording access record, a string of code was left here. Arkham Knight called up the input box, and after entering the code, a folder popped up. This was Barbara's common backup method.

After opening it, there were no video files inside, only a photograph. After opening it, it was a blurry portrait taken from a bird's-eye view. The face in the photo was Peter Parker's.

Arkham Knight's gaze fell on what Peter was holding in his hand. He was all too familiar with the shape of that syringe and the mark on it; it was the concentrated agent of Scarecrow's fear gas.

Zooming in on the picture again, Arkham Knight saw the familiar Bat symbol in the reflection on the floor in the corner of the picture.

In an instant, Batman's face flashed before his eyes. Batman had punched him down, broken his arm and ribs, but Batman had paused before the next step.

At that time, Arkham Knight had clearly seen the pain between Batman's brows and the confusion and chaos in his eyes.

Batman had been injected with fear gas? When? Who?

Or rather, who else could it be?

A raging fire burned up. Arkham Knight took a deep breath. Look, Batman, this is the good assistant you chose!

I want to see if you can still maintain that deep, hypocritical, compassionate posture when you see his true colors.

Arkham Knight looked at the computer screen again, typing on the keyboard at high speed, and began to search for Peter Parker's figure in the footage displayed by the Eye.

Peter Parker, however, had already entered the Iceberg Lounge. It was a mess here; tables and chairs were all collapsed on the ground, and the bar counter was shattered. The gang thugs lying around were groaning in pain, but more of them were the bar guests who had long since been drugged unconscious.

Clearly, Batman had just made a scene here.

Walking to the meeting room in the back, Peter Parker indeed saw the fat Penguin lying in the center of the restaurant. It seemed something had happened, and Batman hadn't had time to take Penguin away before leaving, but this played right into Peter's hands. It seemed he didn't need to go to the police station to find him.

Penguin's legs had both been broken, and he couldn't stand up at all. Peter Parker walked over and observed him for a circle. Penguin's eyes, with their heavy dark circles, rolled around, following him.

"Hello, Mr. Penguin. I am Peter Parker. Scarecrow sends his regards," Peter nodded at Penguin and said. "It was I who told Batman that you kidnapped his former assistant, kidnapped Barbara, and sold military equipment. I also gave the identification on the military vehicle to the FBI. Don't thank me."

Penguin's eyeballs were about to pop out.

"But I really didn't come to find you for this today." Peter knelt down beside Penguin and turned his head to look at Poison Ivy, who had walked in, saying, "Can you give him some anesthetic?"

"What do you want to do?"

"Perform a small surgery on him."

Poison Ivy hesitated, but still walked over. A vine pierced into Penguin's neck. Penguin's limbs began to relax gradually, but clearly, he still had consciousness.

Because when he saw Peter pull out a scalpel, he revealed an extremely terrified expression.

Peter slashed open the skin on Penguin's chest at high speed, then the lung lobe, and immediately after, he took out two capsules and buried them in Penguin's lung lobe.

Peter said while stitching, "Fear toxin remote-control capsule. Direct participation in pulmonary circulation is about five times the power of external inhalation. It burns the brain within 0.02 seconds, and the nervous system can't even react."

Tying a knot in the stitches at high speed, Peter leaned forward and looked down into Penguin's eyes, saying, "Do me a favor, please, Mr. Oswald."

On the rooftop of the bank on the financial street, which had a heavy Gothic architectural style, two dark shadows were speeding along.

"Harley Quinn has also gotten involved. This isn't good news." Batman's low voice dissipated in the wind. He said, "There are traces of her sabotage in the Cat Getan Police Department. She likely has been targeting Commissioner Gordon for a long time. Barbara going to find her father is exactly what she wanted."

"We can't predict every one of their conspiracies." Nightwing looked up at the giant moon still hanging in the low sky, which proved that this night had only just begun.

Suddenly, a light shone on his face. The two stopped their footsteps and looked at the giant screen on the building of the financial tower next to them.

After the advertisement on it flickered twice, it turned into a fat face with dark circles—it was Penguin. He opened his mouth wide and roared at the camera.

"Batman! I... you... I... just as you guessed! I killed Jason Todd! He's dead! Died miserably!!! Ha... hahaha!"

Arkham Knight, who was standing on the other side of the road looking up at the screen, froze.

The next second, he saw a red and blue figure appear on the rooftop of the building. A glowing fine thread flew past his ear, and a vigorous figure landed in front of Arkham Knight.

"Your story should end here, Jason Todd."

The voice under the mask belonged to Peter Parker.

A series of intense applause broke out in Schiller's Tower of Thought. Greed pointed at the screen and said loudly.

"The perfect way to attract attention at the start! Full marks! I say full marks!"