There were various medications that Batman had prepared in advance in the City Hall subway station, but he wasn't using any of them right now.
Even the bandaging was just roughly done by tearing a few strips from his clothes and tying them on haphazardly.
Batman still had to return to the Osborn Corporation; he couldn't let Harry Osborn discover any medicinal smells on him or traces of professional bandaging, or else he wouldn't be able to explain the series of issues that would arise from that.
The two identities of Batman and Peter Parker interacted with two different worlds, and Batman had no intention of dragging Harry Osborn into it.
The Batmobile had already crashed off the building and self-destructed, but fortunately, Batman still had another new car that he'd bought the day before yesterday when registering a shell company on Wall Street and setting up a trust.
Limping out of the subway station, Batman quickly adjusted his walking posture to make himself look merely disheveled and with some minor scrapes.
He drove straight to the Osborn Corporation, ditched the car on the roadside more than two hundred meters from the building, and then used his Batclaw to launch himself into the air.
When the Hulk had charged downward from the fifty-eighth floor, he'd held back almost no strength, shattering nearly all the glass windows in the building, which conveniently provided Batman with an entry point now.
However, he didn't enter the building right away. Instead, he rapidly climbed up the outer wall of the Osborn Building, removed the helicopter's rotor blades that were parked there, bent them, and tossed them aside to prevent those soldiers and General Ross from escaping in the helicopter once they woke up.
The helicopter's rotor blades were exceptionally tough, but they still couldn't hold up against the twenty-five-ton super strength belonging to Peter Parker.
After finishing that, Batman repeated his earlier trick: he jumped straight down from the rooftop, using the speed of free fall and the acceleration from the Batclaw to plummet rapidly, entering through the shattered window glass on the twentieth floor.
Professor Connors' lab was located on the twentieth floor. Batman made his way in familiarly, picking up the temporary regenerative stabilizers that Professor Connors had prepared.
These things were essentially meant to delay the process of organ failure, not to regenerate organs anew—they were fundamentally different from the regenerative agent that Professor Connors had used on himself.
Moreover, the stabilizers had already been in use for treatment for some time. On his way here, Batman had hacked into the hospital system and confirmed that there were no adverse effects.
The stabilizers had been placed by Professor Connors in a small refrigerated case, which hadn't been damaged in the earlier battle.
This put Batman at ease. He grabbed the stabilizers and proceeded downward through the floors at a normal person's pace, one level at a time.
"Peter!"
On the ninth floor of the Osborn Building, Harry Osborn navigated around piles of concrete rubble stacked together, shouting as he groped his way forward.
He carefully searched every corner of each floor he reached. The physical exertion, combined with his already weakened body, meant he'd only just made it to the ninth floor.
But Harry didn't stop searching for traces of Peter. Even though he stumbled along the way, tripping over various fallen lab equipment and wires countless times, leaving his knees bloody and bruised, he still gritted his teeth and persisted.
The reason driving Harry to do this was simple: in his eyes, Peter Parker had strategized for him, suing in federal court and pressuring the White House and Congress through Wall Street.
Moreover, Peter had personally taken that "Clark" identity proof and infiltrated the Osborn Building himself.
He couldn't just sit comfortably on the sofa at the Osborn Manor waiting for good news to arrive.
Peter had put himself in danger for him and was still missing. Harry had to find his friend, or he wouldn't be able to live with his conscience.
Whoosh.
A series of soldiers passed by him—these were the footsteps of the soldiers who'd been stationed outside the Osborn Building, now rushing upstairs as the commotion from above finally died down.
Harry Osborn ignored them completely, as if the Osborn Building, which had first been placed under military supervision and then erupted with massive noises suggesting the birth of a monster, had nothing to do with him.
"Peter!"
Harry's voice echoed in the empty stairwell, filled with fear and worry.
Just as he gritted his teeth, preparing to leave the ninth floor he'd already searched and continue up to the tenth, a weak voice suddenly sounded from not far away:
"Harry..."
"Peter?"
Harry Osborn whipped his head toward the source of the voice, stumbling over as he went, finally spotting his friend Peter Parker, bloodied and looking exhausted, leaning against the wall with a briefcase in hand.
"Harry, what are you doing here?"
Batman said in a voice that was half acting and half genuinely fatigued.
"Hey," seeing that his buddy wasn't missing any limbs and didn't have too many wounds, Harry felt half-relieved, "back in school when you got bullied, wasn't it always me who had your back?"
As he spoke, he slapped Batman's right shoulder, then draped Batman's arm over his own, supporting him as they headed toward the downward stairs:
"I told you, no matter what happens, I'll always stand by you, firmly and forever."
Batman's right shoulder was injured; he'd already reset the dislocated joint himself, but the damage to the glenoid labrum hadn't healed yet.
Now, with Harry's slap, a sharp pain shot through his entire body.
His powerful willpower kept Batman's facial expression from changing in the slightest; he could even spare the mental energy to answer Harry Osborn's various questions.
Batman didn't mention his big battle with the Hulk and the Lizard Professor. He only said that he'd come to the Osborn Building at the request of Professor Miles Warren and Harry, managed to evacuate the scientists from the building, and then got trapped due to collapsing floors and such until now.
"This briefcase has the stabilizers that Professor Connors made, right?"
After listening to Batman's fabricated lie, Harry looked at the briefcase in his hand and said.
"That's right." Batman nodded.
It had taken Harry Osborn nearly two hours to get from the first floor to the ninth, but now the two of them descended in just a few minutes.
"Give it to me, Peter." Harry took the briefcase from Batman's hand. "You need to get checked out at the hospital too."
Most of the blood from when Batman was in his suit had been wiped away, and his injured leg allowed him to walk normally, but Harry Osborn still felt his buddy was too seriously hurt.
Harry practically forced Batman into his car, drove him straight to Metropolis Hospital, watched him lie down on the hospital bed, and stayed until dawn to buy breakfast before leaving.
Over the next three days, Harry Osborn barely left Batman's bedside, forcing Batman to obediently stay in bed for those three days until repeated hospital checks confirmed he was fully recovered, and only then did he leave.
During those three days, because Daily Bugle reporter Eddie Brock had released all the evidence Batman had anonymously given him at once, it completely stripped General Ross of any ability to resist.
What awaited General Ross next was a military tribunal, inevitable imprisonment, and even massive compensation claims against the Osborn Corporation.
All of this was within Batman's expectations. He even used this opportunity to guide Harry into doing something else:
Taking advantage of the sharp drop in Osborn stock prices caused by General Ross's supervision of the Osborn Corporation, they aggressively acquired over eighty percent of the Osborn shares, regaining absolute control of Osborn.
Harry's repayment to Batman was an entire industrial park far larger than Parker Industries by several times, merging it into Parker Industries and causing an explosive growth in the production and orders of memory fabric.
This made Batman's assets skyrocket almost daily, simply because the demand market for memory fabric was so vast that even the expanded Parker Industries could barely keep up with supply.
Three days later, at night, in the warehouse of the old Parker Industries.
It was filled with various equipment, lathes, parts, and armor that Batman had custom-ordered based on his needs...
He was about to immediately begin making a new battlesuit, codename—Arkham!
--
Support me & read more advance & fast update chapter on my pa-treon:
pat reon .c-om/windkaze