Ethan walked out of the hidden basement door, sealing it behind him with a click, betore he slipped through the halls and out into the night.
He headed to a nearby park in the area, it was well maintained as would be expected of a place in such a nice area.
It also lacked security cameras, which wasn’t surprising as the people who lived here wouldn’t want their perverse activities being recorded.
He sat on a bench under a oak tree, its leaves rustling faintly in the breeze that ran across his skin, prompting him to lean back and stare at the overcast sky while his mind replayed the events; knocking Renee out in the burning apartment and kidnapping her had been a necessary evil but it had complicated matters.
It had escalated everything, turning a minor homicide investigation into a full-blown manhunt that would soon mobilize the entire GCPD, because once they realized Renee was missing—likely by morning when she didn’t report in—they’d comb the streets, question witnesses, and piece together her last known location at Creedence’s apartment; though he doubted there was any evidence left behind in that inferno.
He could kill her to simplify it all, slipping back into the cell and snapping her neck while she slept, but the thought caused a hollow laugh to bubble up from his chest…
it was so boring, so final, lacking the thrill of complexity that had ignited since stealing his first power.
The laugh grew louder, turning manic as tears welled in his eyes from the overwhelming rush of frustration and exhilaration that built in his core, causing his shoulders to shake while he leaned forward and clutched his head, the sobs mixing with hysterical giggles that echoed through the empty park until he finally leaned back in the seat, wiping his face with a sleeve as the outburst subsided and left him breathing steadily again.
No, he wouldn’t kill her, because she wasn’t a criminal—her only “crime” was trying to make this shithole of a city safer, and ending her would close off too many paths, plus in some twisted way he respected her will to fight.
With that decided, Ethan leaned forward and started noting all the things he now knew: His hyperadrenal had a usage limit, likely linked to his cardiovascular system—the repeated activations caused arrhythmia from electrolyte depletion and muscle strain in his heart, so he’d need to continue developing the serum he’d planned, injecting it to enhance his baseline endurance and perhaps boost mitochondrial efficiency in his cardiac cells, allowing multiple surges without collapse.
The next thing he needed to fix was his versatility, because limited options had nearly cost him against Eric and Renee, so finding other metahumans and stealing their powers became priority, expanding his arsenal to handle threats like the one looming now.
The Dark Knight.
Who would almost certainly get involved once a detective went missing.
Ethan wasn’t a fool he knew that in an encounter with the Batman he would lose, even with his enhanced strength.
One thing that had been made painfully clear to him was his lack of ability when fighting.
He had only ever did it as a hobby and he never improved himself the way a true fighter would.
He would need to improve in that regard not being able to fight in close quarters severely limited him, and if he couldn’t fight Renée Montoya then he’d have no chance against the Batman.
He also still needed to pay a visit to the city hall server room and eliminate the camera records from the night of Creedence’s death, wiping any footage that might show him in the area before the police cross-referenced it with Renee’s disappearance.
And he had to do most of this before they realized she was missing, ideally within the next few hours while the city slept and shifts changed at the precinct.
Ethan smiled as the plan solidified in his mind, the challenge igniting that familiar thrill that caused his pulse to quicken.
This is going to be fun.
Ethan stood up and walked out of the park heading back to Gotham proper.
…
Ethan slipped through the shadows outside City Hall, the massive stone building looming under the Gotham night sky.
He had scoped the place earlier, noting the patrols and vent access points, usually he’d like to assign more time when doing something so risky but he didn’t have it, scaling the side wall he made his way to the roof of the building and he pulled himself up to an exterior vent grate.
He pried it open quietly, the metal giving way without a screech, and crawled inside the narrow duct, his body contorting to fit as the confined space pressed against his shoulders and chest, the Kevlar vest adding bulk that made his breaths come shorter but it wasn’t too bad.
The vent led him downward through the building, dust coating his mask and hoodie as he navigated the turns by memory from the blueprints he’d pulled earlier via a quick hack on his phone, the air growing warmer from the heating systems below.
He paused at a grate overlooking the main security room, listening to the two guards inside on their break.
“Man, you see that game last night?” the first guard said, a burly guy in his forties with a coffee stain on his uniform shirt, leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk.
“Yeah, total blowout,” the second replied, popping open a soda can that fizzed loudly.
“Knights got robbed on that last call, though.
Ref was blind or bought off.”
“Nah, they just suck this year,” the first laughed, crumpling a chip bag and tossing it toward the trash can, missing and letting it bounce on the floor.
“Speaking of suck, you hear about that new intern in records?
The one with the red hair?
The second snorted, nearly spitting his drink.
“Dude, she’s like twenty.
You’d break a hip trying.
Besides, my wife’s got me on a short leash after that barbecue last month, remember when I danced with her sister?
Thought I was done for.”
“Yeah, well, keep dreaming,” the first said, reaching for his radio but pausing to yawn.
“These night shifts are killing me.
Nothing ever happens here anyway.
Might as well be watching paint dry.”
Ethan waited until they both looked away, the first guard turning to adjust a monitor and the second checking his phone, before he kicked the grate loose with a muffled clang that blended with their laughter.
He dropped down from the vent, landing in a crouch behind them in his dark hoodie and mask, the shadows of the room concealing his form for a split second as he rose smoothly.
The first guard spun around at the noise, his chair scraping back as he fumbled for his gun on his belt, eyes widening in shock.
“What the—”
Ethan kicked the nearest chair hard, sending it sliding across the floor into the guard’s legs, the impact buckling his knees and toppling him forward with a grunt as he hit the ground face-first, his radio clattering away.
The second guard jumped up, drawing his pistol with a curse, but Ethan closed the distance in two steps, delivering a powerful punch to his gut that doubled him over, the air whooshing from his lungs in a wheeze, then followed with an elbow to the back of his head that cracked against his skull and dropped him limp to the floor.
The first guard pushed up from the ground, groaning and reaching for his fallen gun, but Ethan stomped down on his hand, pinning it before kicking him in the ribs, the blow rolling him over with a pained yelp as he curled up, clutching his side.
Ethan moved fast, zip-tying their wrists and ankles with restraints he’d brought, gagging them with strips of duct tape from their own desk drawer, then dragging their unconscious bodies into a storage closet at the back of the room, locking it shut with a key from the first guard’s belt.
He turned to the bank of monitors, the screens glowing with live feeds from cameras throughout the building, hallways empty at this hour except for a janitor mopping in the lobby far below.
He scanned the layouts quickly, pulling up a floor plan from the security terminal with a few keystrokes, his gloved fingers flying over the keyboard as he bypassed the basic password prompt using a default admin code he’d researched earlier.
The server room showed up on the basement level, marked as restricted access with its own dedicated camera feed that revealed a locked door and no guards posted outside, the interior dark except for the hum of machines he could almost hear through the screen.
He slipped out of the security room, moving down the dimly lit corridor with his back to the wall.
A patrol guard rounded the corner ahead, flashlight in hand, and Ethan pressed into a recessed doorway, waiting until the man passed before stepping out silently and wrapping his arm around the guard’s neck from behind, applying a chokehold that cut off blood flow to the brain, the man’s struggles weakening after ten seconds as his body went limp, allowing Ethan to lower him to the floor and drag him into an empty office, zip-tying him out of sight.
He continued downward via the stairwell, avoiding the elevators that might ping alerts, and encountered another guard on the lower level who was sipping coffee while checking his phone.
Ethan pulled the taser he’d taken from the security room guard,and he fired from the shadows, the darts embedding in the man’s back and sending volts through his body that made him convulse and drop, foam bubbling at his mouth before Ethan dragged him aside and secured him.
Reaching the basement, Ethan approached the server room door, its keypad glowing red, but he used a keycard swiped from the tased guard to bypass it, the lock beeping green as the door clicked open.
Inside, rows of servers stretched into the doom.
He heard voices from a small office at the back, two IT workers complaining as they typed at their consoles.
“This is bullshit, man,” the first said, a lanky guy in glasses leaning back in his chair.
“All this overtime because some fat detective wants footage, Like we don’t have better things to do.”
The second laughed, a shorter man with a beard, sipping energy drink from a can.
“Yeah, guy looks like he hasn’t seen a gym since the ’80s.
Probably tripped over his own gut chasing a donut.
And now we’re pulling all-nighters archiving this crap?
If he wants it so bad, let him come down here and dig through the drives himself.”
Ethan moved silently into the office, emerging from the shadows behind them, and slammed the first worker’s head down onto his desk with a crack that dazed him instantly, blood trickling from his forehead as his glasses shattered. Find the original chapter at NovelPing.
The second spun around in shock, mouth opening to shout, but Ethan grabbed him by the collar and rammed his face into the keyboard, keys crunching under the impact as the man slumped unconscious, a tooth loosening and falling onto the floor.
Ethan dragged their bodies to a corner, tying them with zip ties, then sat at the main terminal, pulling up the footage archives with admin access from the keycard.
He searched for the dates and times around Creedence’s death, locating the street camera feeds that might have captured him in the area, but when he tried to delete them, the system flashed an error.
*Deletion restricted: backup restoration in progress*
He attempted again, using command line overrides and even a quick script to force it, but the files refilled automatically from mirrored drives, the interface locking him out after three tries with a warning log that would alert admins in the morning.
He narrowed his eyes, considering possible theories: Perhaps the system used blockchain-like hashing to verify integrity, or AI monitoring that flagged deletions as tampering and pulled from offsite clouds, or even hardware-level redundancy with encrypted backups that prevented local wipes…
whatever it was, time was short, and he couldn’t crack it here without tools he didn’t have.
He lifted the lanky worker by the collar, slapping his face repeatedly until the man groaned and stirred, eyes fluttering open in confusion that turned to terror as Ethan pressed a gun to his temple, the cold barrel digging into skin.
The guy nearly shouted but Ethan clamped his hand over his mouth firmly, muffling the sound as he leaned in close.
“If you move or shout, I’ll kill you.
Try anything and I’ll kill you.
Do you understand?” The man nodded frantically, eyes wide with fear, sweat beading on his forehead that trickled down his cheek.
Ethan didn’t move his hand but asked through gritted teeth, “Why can’t I delete any of the footage?”
The guy mumbled against the palm, and Ethan eased his grip just enough for words to escape.
“It…
it can’t be done, the system is designed that way, any deletions just get refilled from backups automatically, it’s to stop evidence from going missing, like for court stuff, you can’t wipe it manually.”
Ethan pressed the gun harder, causing the man to whimper.
“Where are the backups located?”
“All in this building,” the guy stammered, “Everything’s onsite for security, no cloud because of risk of remote hacks.”
Ethan nodded, then cracked the gun against the man’s temple, knocking him out cold again with a thud as his body slumped back.
He stood there for a moment, weighing the risks, then decided he had no choice but to resort to drastic measures because partial deletion wouldn’t hold, and leaving traces meant the police could still link him to the scene.
He sneaked out of the server room quietly, moving through the basement corridors with his back to the wall to avoid any late-night staff, and found the janitor’s closet unlocked, rifling through shelves for materials: bottles of cleaning solvents that were highly flammable like alcohol and acetone, rags for wicks, duct tape to bundle them, and a few aerosol cans for pressure.
He gathered more from a maintenance room nearby, wires from an electrical panel, a timer from an old clock radio on a desk, and fertilizer bags from a storage bin.
Back in the server room, he sat cross-legged on the floor amid the machines and constructed a bomb methodically, pouring the solvents into a large container he’d found, soaking the rags in them and threading them as fuses, then wiring the timer to a spark igniter from one of the aerosols, packing the fertilizer around the core to create a makeshift explosive that would generate enough heat and force to melt the drives beyond recovery.
He couldn’t help but see the irony in what he was doing; trying to cover up a crime with another crime, going from murder to a terrorist act just to erase a few videos, a causal loop of his own making that made him pause for a second with a faint smile under the mask.
It didn’t take him long before it was ready, the device compact but potent, its timer set for ten minutes which gave him enough window to escape without rushing.
He linked it up to the igniter with a final twist of wire, then carried both the unconscious workers out one by one, slinging them over his shoulder like sacks and depositing them on the floor above in a hallway where the blast radius wouldn’t reach.
He was already out of the building by the time the explosion went off, slipping through a side exit into the alley, but the blast was bigger than he thought, a deep boom that shook the ground and sent a fireball erupting from the basement windows, shattering the first-floor glass in a cascade of shards that rained onto the plaza like glittering rain, alarms blaring immediately as smoke billowed into the sky.
(AN: Did he overreact?
Possibly, was it effective?
Definitely.
Through this route he effectively destroyed any chance of making a case against him with anything that isn’t circumstantial evidence.
Anyway hope you enjoyed.
Also I don’t wanna hear shit about the homemade bomb, It’s a superhero world okay.)
Support if you want.