Chapter Text
The call had come just after midnight.
Batman landed silently beside the taped-off perimeter. Two thugs were strung up between a pair of dumpsters. The webbing wrapped them tight from chest to ankle, thick white strands layered so densely they looked more like cocoons than restraints.
Beside him, Commissioner Gordon pinched the bridge of his nose, bleached by stress and fluorescent light.
“Don’t suppose this is one of yours?” Gordon asked without looking.
“No,” Batman said, examining the silk. “It isn’t.”
Batman approached silently. One of the cocooned men whimpered through the gagging layers of silk plastered over their mouths. The other man was unconscious.
He touched the webbing with a gloved fingertip.
It clung instantly, tightening the more he pulled.
Not synthetic.
Not rope.
Not glue-gun residue.
Organic.
Still slightly warm.
The webbing’s tensile strength was extraordinary — stronger than Kevlar at this density. A spider could produce silk with similar molecular structure, but not in this volume.
He cut a thin strip of the silk and loaded it into a sample vial.
Batman stepped in front of one of the unconscious men. He turned the cocooned man’s head gently. The skin at the neck had faint abrasions — tiny, needle-fine punctures.
Gordon frowned. “Bites?”
“Testing,” Batman corrected. “Something sniffed him. Checked his threat level.”
“Something?” Gordon echoed.
Batman didn’t answer.
To the left side of the petty criminals there were delicate spiral patterns on a brick wall, arranged in almost mathematical precision.
Batman stepped closer to the spirals, drawing a small ultraviolet lamp from his belt. The faint residue lining the webs fluoresced under the purple light, brightening into a spectral blue.
Each spiral was precise — too precise. Perfect radial symmetry. No breaks, no hesitations, no signs of struggle or panic. Whoever made these took their time.
Batman stepped closer to the brickwork.
The spirals weren’t graffiti. Not paint. Not chalk. They shimmered faintly when his cowl’s lenses shifted to low-light enhancement.
Silk. Thin, delicate threads arranged in fractal arcs.
A web-map.
A hunting pattern.
He leaned in, scanning the curvature of the lines. They followed airflow currents, temperature gradients—a predictive grid. Whoever—or whatever—spun this understood the city better than most of its own residents.
Gordon stepped beside him, coat rustling. “Any ideas? Because I’m getting the sense you don’t love this.”
Batman didn’t turn. “This was deliberate. Not a trap. A survey.”
“Of what?”
“Density. Sound. Movement.”
Gordon stared. “You’re telling me a giant spider is doing reconnaissance?”
“No,” Batman said. “Something far more intelligent.”
He followed the spirals upward. They reached nearly ten feet high. Whatever created them had jumped, clung, and anchored lines without leaving cracks or toenail divots. Weightless. Graceful.
His comm pinged in his ear.
“Batman.” Oracle’s voice was low but sharp—the tone she used when triaging disasters.
“I’m here.”
“I’ve got three emergencies. All happening at once.”
He turned away from the wall, already moving. “Go on.”
“Chemical breach at the Monarch facility—possible Scarecrow involvement. Nightwing’s responding but he needs you to intercept the shipment leaving the docks.”
Batman’s jaw tightened. “And the third?”
Oracle hesitated just long enough to get his attention.
Bruce’s jaw tightened. “Burnley?”
“Worse,” Oracle said. “Bowery. We’ve got six victims down, two in critical condition. No suspects on scene, but the injuries match the pattern we flagged last week—looks like someone’s trying to start a territory war. Red Hood and Robin are already headed that way though.”
He exhaled through his nose.
Gotham never rested. Not even for a ghost crawling through her shadows.
“Understood,” Batman said, stepping back from the wall. He gave Gordon a nod, who in turn waved to officers outside of the perimeter to take some more pictures of the scene before they would take the two muggers back to GCPD.
Batman would look over the pictures later.
“Send the route.”
A new path lit across the corner of his HUD—sharp angles, tight corners, optimized for speed. Batman holstered the vial of warm webbing and fired a grapple to the rooftop across from the alley.
He paused only once—glancing back at the perfect spiral webs glinting in the darkness like constellations pinned to brick.
A mind made this.
A hunter with intention.
And it was still out there.
He shot upward into the cold Gotham night.
***
“Oracle,” he said, already moving toward the fire escape ladder. “Patch me to Nightwing.”
“Baaats,” Nightwing’s voice drawled with too much energy for the situation. “You ever notice these crises always happen on the nights I forget to eat dinner?”
Batman vaulted from a ledge, cape snapping behind him as he soared across a thirty-foot gap. “Report.”
Sounds of fighting filled the channel—metal clangs, glass shattering, the whump of someone slamming into industrial piping. Nightwing continued conversationally, like he wasn’t in the middle of a brawl.
“Well, Monarch is doing that thing where all their emergency lights go ‘blaring techno rave,’ but with fewer glowsticks and more armed goons trying to ventilate me. I’m in the east purification wing. Looks like somebody cracked open a batch of Scarecrow’s test toxins.”
Batman landed on a rooftop and scanned the glowing facility below. “Chemical signatures?”
“Yeah, that’s the fun part.” Another grunt, then a thud. “It’s not full toxin—just precursor compounds, but enough that the workers are unconscious in creative yoga poses. Good news, no fatalities. Bad news, these guys—”
A metallic ricochet cut him off.
“—are hopped up on something. They’re not scared. They’re not anything. Which, honestly? Weird. Because usually the second they see me, there’s at least a guilty flinch.”
Batman crouched on the edge of the roof, cape curling around him as he surveyed the docks beyond Monarch. Ships moored along Pier Sixteen glistened under warehouse floodlamps like sleeping steel giants. Between them, trucks idled. Too many. All pointed toward the eastern gate.
A planned exit.
A shipment meant to move.
He spoke low. “Nightwing. Monarch was a distraction.”
“Yeah,” Nightwing answered between breaths. “I figured. Nobody breaks into Monarch to steal precursor compounds unless they’re mixing something somewhere else.”
“I will handle the Pier.”
Nightwing gave a theatrical sigh mid-punch—Batman heard the impact through the coms. “Of course. I get chemical death roulette, you get the scenic waterfront.”
“You hate the waterfront.”
“Not the point. Monarch smells like nightmares and wet battery acid. The waterfront at least smells like dead fish. It’s a step up.”
Batman touched down on a glass paneled roof and paused long enough to assess his trajectory. A transport truck was in motion. He needed to intercept it before it left the docks entirely.
“No seriously. I hate this. It’s dark, the plant layout is a maze, and the emergency lights are doing that creepy flicker thing that makes me feel like I’m in a bad horror movie.”
Then, dimly: “HEY! I’m on the phone!”A grunt. A clang.“Batman, I gotta go. These guys are rude.”
The comm cut as he launched into another fight.
Batman turned toward Pier Sixteen.
Alone.
The waterfront was colder than the rest of the city—wind slicing across the dark waves, industrial lamps casting long skeletal shadows across shipping containers.
Batman landed silently behind a row of crates, eyes narrowing as he scanned the pier. Oracle had given him the coordinates: a departing transport carrying unknown chemicals, likely connected to the Monarch breach.
He heard it before he saw it.
A low diesel rumble.
The truck’s headlights blinked on, sweeping lazily across the dock road like a predator’s eyes.
Batman stayed low.
“Oracle,” he whispered.
“I’ve got you on satellite.”
“Any guards?”
“Two on the ground, three in the truck. Heat signatures indicate armed.”
Batman’s boots made no sound as he moved into the shadow of a forklift. Somewhere overhead, a crane creaked in the wind.
The truck began rolling.
“Five seconds,” Oracle warned. “If it gets past the last gate, you’ll lose it.”
Batman sprinted.
He cut across the dock road and fired his grapnel—hook catching the rear axle. The line snapped taut.
Batman slid under the moving truck, cape tucked tight, body hugging pavement. Sparks scattered around him as metal scraped asphalt.
The undercarriage rumbled inches above his mask.
He triggered the magnetic clamps in his gloves and latched onto the suspension just as the truck cleared the gate.
“Batman?” Oracle asked, tension in her tone.
“I’m on it.”
He rolled out from beneath and hooked onto the side, boots catching a ladder rung. In one fluid arc, he scaled to the roof of the cargo bay.
Wind roared past.
He reached the cab.
With a sharp jab, he shattered the windshield.
The driver screamed.
Batman reached through the broken glass, seized the wheel, and jerked it sideways.
The truck fishtailed, skidding across the dock road, slamming into a row of empty crates with metallic screams.
Guards spilled out of the cargo hold, coughing amid smoke.
Batman dropped from the roof like a descending shadow.
One guard swung wide. Batman caught the wrist, twisted, and dropped him in a single motion.
A second raised his rifle.
Batman hurled a batarang—precision perfect. The man’s weapon snapped out of his hands and clattered across the pavement.
The third tried to run.
Batman didn’t chase him.
He simply fired a grapnel to the man’s ankle.
The thug screamed as he hit the pavement and slid across it like a rag doll.
Within forty seconds, all three were down.
The truck’s cargo bay stood open.
Batman approached it slowly.
Chemical canisters lined the inside—sealed, labeled, and strapped down. But that wasn’t what made him still.
It was the threads.
Thin, gleaming strands stretched across the interior. Delicate but deliberate. Mapping lines like those in the alley.
A web-pattern.
Not a full web—
He leaned in.
Something on the floor.
Small. Black.
A spider.
It lifted its front legs as if acknowledging him…
then vanished back into the cargo bay shadows with impossible speed.
Batman’s breath fogged slightly in the cold.
“Oracle,” he said quietly, “Nightwing’s status?”
“Still engaged. Pressure’s rising.”
“Robin and Hood?”
“Handling Bowery.”
Batman exhaled once.
He had unfinished business here, but his family needed him.
He turned, cape sweeping behind him.
***
The Monarch facility was a maze of cargo conveyors, hazard signage, and thick rolling clouds that caught the glow of security lamps like polluted halos.
Nightwing flipped over a railing, boots skidding across metal grating as a goon swung a sledgehammer where his head had been a moment earlier.
“Guys,” he said as he ducked the backswing, “I promise—there are better hobbies.”
He slammed a boot into the man’s stomach, grabbed the hammer mid-fall, and tossed it aside like a soda can.
Another goon lunged.
Nightwing side-stepped in a casual sweep. “You know, if Crane were here, he’d be so disappointed. You can’t even commit to the aesthetic. Where are the pitchforks? The creepy chanting?”
A third man jumped from an elevated walkway with a shout.
Nightwing groaned. “Oh good, the aerial act.”
He somersaulted beneath the falling attacker, let him crash into the catwalk, and used his momentum to whip both escrima sticks forward, cracking two helmets in rapid succession.
Oracle’s voice sparked in his ear. “Nightwing, interior temperature is rising. They’re heating the lock seals.”
“Great,” he muttered. “Because nothing screams stable like boiling fear toxin.”
He dove into a roll as a masked thug fired a taser rifle. Electricity flashed. Nightwing popped up behind a crate.
“Hey Oracle?” he said between breaths. “Tell me you’ve got eyes on the heat signatures inside.”
“Four in the containment bay, two outside drilling into the vent system. There are more, but those are the one’s closest to you. I’ve already cut exterior power to the heating coils, but they’ve brought their own.”
Nightwing winced. “Overachievers. Hate those.”
He sprinted forward, vaulted onto a pipeline, and slid down it like a gymnast, landing directly in front of two masked men kneeling at the vent junction.
They stared at him.
He smiled.
“Hi.”
They swung tools.
Nightwing smashed both heads together with a sound like clanging bowls.
It was chaos, but it was manageable chaos—his specialty.
He checked the chemical readings on his gauntlet briefly, noticing the creeping spikes. “Oracle, is there any chance Crane isn’t behind this?”
“Zero,” she said. “The schematics they pulled are all from his old archives.”
Nightwing groaned as another thug swung a thermal drill at his ribs. “Crane, buddy, therapy exists. It costs less than hiring twenty idiots with power tools.”
He flipped the man into a stack of canisters and exhaled hard.
Nightwing swung across a collapsing scaffold, flipping twice before landing on top of a cracked storage vat.
“Oh come on,” he groaned, “you guys couldn’t have found a LESS structurally sound place to do criminal science?”
Below him, fumes hissed into the air. The holding bay’s seal alarms rang a shrill tone.
He slid down the vat and sprinted toward the inner chamber.
Three men stood around a control panel, rigging portable heaters along the reinforced door.
Nightwing landed on the railing above them. “You really shouldn’t cook chemical compounds you don’t understand. That’s how supervillains happen. Or DARPA. Honestly, both equally terrifying.”
One thug aimed a stun baton.
Nightwing vaulted down, disarmed him, and spin-kicked him into a colleague.
He moved like electricity—
fast, bright, uncontainable.
But then the panel beeped.
A long, low chime.
Nightwing froze.
“Oh. That’s…not good.”
Oracle’s voice sharpened: “Nightwing, internal pressure is hitting critical. If they compromise that chamber—”
“It’ll blow fear toxin all over Monarch,” he finished. “Yeah, I figured.”
He darted toward the panel, fingers flying.
“Come on, come on—give me something to work with. You locked-down little nightmare egg…”
A blast rocked the far wall. Nightwing felt the shockwave in his teeth.
“Oracle,” he said. “Tell me that wasn’t—”
“It was the first chamber seal.”
He inhaled sharply.
***
Nightwing slammed into a railing, boots skidding on slick metal. A plume of chemical vapor hissed from a ruptured pipe, coloring the air sickly green.
He coughed into his mask. “Oracle! You still with me?”
“Barely,” Oracle said. “Half the facility’s comm relays are dead. You need to shut down the secondary ignition grid.”
“I would love to,” Nightwing said, ducking as a thug in a hazmat suit swung a wrench big enough to tear bone apart. “But I’m currently hosting a class called People Who Are Bad at Stopping Me.”
He flipped backward, landing on a catwalk with practiced grace. The thug charged again.
Nightwing sighed. “Buddy, look at your life choices.”
He snapped his escrima sticks together, electricity crackling along the ends, and swung them under the thug’s arm before he could react. A sharp jolt surged through the hazmat fabric.
The thug hit the metal grate face-first.
Nightwing winced. “Oof. Sorry, OSHA violation.”
Behind him, another grunt lunged, but Nightwing didn’t even turn—he simply angled his stick behind his back and jabbed it into the attacker’s ribs. A burst of blue light, a yelp, a thud.
“Oracle,” Nightwing said, stepping over two unconscious men.“How long do I have?”
“Four minutes.”
Nightwing groaned. “Fantastic. Plenty of time. Totally not panicking.”
“Uh-huh,” Oracle said dryly.
He sprinted across a catwalk as a massive pipe overhead burst, spraying pressurized steam in a piercing whistle. He shielded his face, sliding across the wet metal and vaulting over a collapsed railing.
“Okay,” Nightwing muttered, “if I die in a chemical explosion, someone tell Hood he still owes me twenty bucks.”
A figure dropped behind him.
Nightwing didn’t look back. “Not the best night for sneak attacks, guys.”
He spun his staff in a tight arc, swept low, and sent his attacker sprawling—only to realize the figure was bigger than the others. Armored. Moving with deliberate precision.
“New guy?” Nightwing asked.
The armored thug lunged with surprising speed.
Nightwing twirled his staff, deflecting a powerful blow. “Okay. New guy.”
The man swung again. Nightwing ducked beneath it, electricity flaring as he jammed an escrima stick against the man’s abdomen.
A flicker of resistance.
The suit insulated.
“Of course it does,” Nightwing muttered.
The man grabbed him by the throat and slammed him into a pipe. Nightwing choked, bringing both feet up to kick the man off him. He landed, grinning despite the sting in his neck.
“Alright, pal. Round two.”
Nightwing surged forward, bouncing off a crate, vaulting upward, twisting in midair, both legs striking the guy square in the chest. The armored thug stumbled, footing lost.
Nightwing followed up immediately—two rapid strikes to the helmet, a sweep to the legs, then he jammed both electrified sticks under the chest plate seam.
The armor lit with blue sparks.
The man stiffened, went rigid, then collapsed.
Nightwing panted, shaking out his arms. “Oracle… remind me to upgrade my voltage.”
“You just need to get to the control room.”
“On it,” he said, sprinting again.
He swung down two levels, rolled beneath a falling beam, then arrived at a reinforced door with a keypad melted by acid.
Nightwing stared. “Well that’s rude.”
He took three steps back.
Ran.
Jumped.
And kicked the entire door off its hinges.
Inside, a chain reaction of sparks danced across exposed wiring. A panel flashing red warned of imminent overload.
Nightwing crossed to it immediately, fingers flying across the manual shutdown sequence.
“Come on… come on…”
The facility groaned, metal contracting under strain.
Nightwing slammed his palm on the override.
The alarms shifted—pitch dropping. Lights dimming.
He exhaled.
“Oracle? Tell me that worked.”
“Secondary ignition offline,” she confirmed. “You stabilized Monarch.”
Nightwing leaned back against the panel. “Good. Because I am sweaty, tired, mildly poisoned, and someone definitely threw a wrench at my head.”
****
Perched upside down from a fire escape, the small figure hugged the metal frame with fingers and toes that clung like magnets.
He didn’t breathe loudly.
He didn’t move loudly.
He didn’t think loudly.
Because the human side was sleeping.
Dreaming.
Quiet.
And the spider wore the boy’s body like a second skin.
The cold Gotham wind rustled his dark, messy hair as he watched the tall figure in black armor on the rooftop below.
The spider didn’t know “Batman.”
Didn’t recognize symbols or names or reputations.
But it recognized patterns.
The man in black moved like a predator.
Like a threat.
Like something that wouldn’t stop chasing if the spider revealed itself too soon.
So it didn’t.
It stayed perfectly still—tiny fingers curled tight around the fire escape bar, small chest rising and falling soundlessly.
Eight invisible instincts whispered:
Observe.
Map.
Learn.
Avoid until ready.
The spider’s head tilted.
The spider lowered itself half an inch, pupil narrowing, body weight distributed with uncanny, feral precision.
It clicked softly in the back of the throat—a sound no human child could make.
It tasted the city through vibration and current. Threads lined rooftops and fire escapes behind him—tripwires of silk no human eye could catch without help. Each strand fed information back to him: footsteps, heartbeats, the rush of distant sirens. A thousand signals in a symphony only spiders understood.
The boy paused, head tilting sharply—listening.
Noise.
Movement.
Predators everywhere.
But none of them were the man in black.
The man in black was busy. Occupied.
The boy moved.
He crawled across the metal railing with animal fluidity, trailing silk from the back of his hand. He left no prints, no scent, no hesitation. Only a series of shimmering spirals hanging between rusted water towers and broken satellite dishes—maps of his expanding territory.
His spider side sought one thing:
Safety.
Safety in webs.
Safety in shadows.
Safety in high ground.
A memory flickered under the surface—warm arms, soft sweaters, a laugh like dawn breaking. The human child stirred, confused, reaching for a face he could no longer name.
The Spider buried the thought.
No. Too dangerous. Survive first. Remember later.
He sprang across a roof in a single, silent leap.