Queens, as New York's second most populous borough after Brooklyn, had a crime rate that was no lower than Hell's Kitchen's due to its racial diversity.
After leaving Hell's Kitchen, Batman headed straight for Queens. His wide cape swept through the air over one narrow alley after another as he searched for any potential criminals that might be lurking there.
All the serial numbers that could trace the origins on the Stark Group weapons left behind by Black Cat had been ground off. The technique used was extremely professional, confirming it was the work of Shulman, the self-taught engineer and inventor.
"The sudden disappearance of an inventor—either it's a kidnapping, or he vanished willingly."
"Either way, it wouldn't leave no traces at all... Barbara, pull up all recent surveillance footage from Queens and Manhattan. Search for Shulman."
Batman said in a low voice to the Oracle AI equipped in the Arkham suit.
At that moment, he was standing on the massive Unisphere in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, fully activating Peter Parker's superhuman hearing to capture the sounds carried on the wind.
"Bang."
An extremely faint sound rang out in the distance, almost inaudible to ordinary people.
But in Peter Parker's ears, it was as obvious as a light in the pitch-black night. Batman immediately turned toward the source of the sound.
Drawing on his intimate familiarity with the entire New York map and his knowledge of the buildings, he calculated the echoes and quickly constructed a preliminary model of the sound propagation in his mind, locking the origin to the boundary area between an industrial zone and an old residential district a few blocks away.
"It's not a standard gunpowder weapon. The energy release is unstable, accompanied by an obvious tearing sound in the medium." Batman thought to himself. "It's an energy weapon, and a crude version at that."
Whoosh!
Batman leaped down from the Unisphere, spreading his cape in mid-air as he swiftly approached the source of the sound like a ghost.
Batman had heard similar sounds countless times while fighting against forces from Apokolips and Brainiac's minions, but compared to the energy weapons wielded by Parademons and the like, the one that had just fired was indeed a crude version.
Bang! Bang!
Two more gunshots rang out. Batman was closer now and could hear them more clearly.
Using spider silk that had been replaced with black for better concealment at night, Batman's figure didn't gradually descend under gravity's pull. Instead, his form rose higher and higher until he finally landed on the tallest building near the source of the sound.
In utter silence, a thin layer of goggles covered Batman's eye sockets, with a faint white glow replacing his originally pitch-black eyes.
At this moment, Batman bore no resemblance to the vampire rumors that had spread widely across New York, but those eyes glowing with white light made him seem even more eerie, like a ghost in the night sky.
Night vision, thermal imaging, and sonar were all activated simultaneously, and the Arkham suit quickly displayed the scanned images on the goggles.
Based on the Arkham suit's scan and X-ray vision, three dark figures were in a back alley, test-firing a gun with a bizarre design at an abandoned transformer.
Each time the gun fired, the muzzle erupted with unstable light, accompanied by obvious electrical arcs leaping about.
"Shulman's handiwork?"
Shifting his gaze elsewhere, there was no one else within a two-hundred-meter radius of those three guys.
The abandoned transformer had already been fenced off by the city, with danger signs posted, and this wasn't a residential area anyway.
Batman silently leaped down from the heights, using the darkness as cover. With a barely noticeable whoosh of wind, he landed behind the three men and tapped one of them on the shoulder.
The guy whose shoulder Batman tapped shuddered violently. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the pitch-black hand on his shoulder and let out a scream:
"God!"
His scream startled the other two companions into shivering as well, and they instinctively looked behind them.
Under the cover of the pitch-black night, Batman's faintly glowing white eyes, sharply pointed ears, and the eerie combination of his exposed chin caused one of them to scream again:
"It's not God, it's a ghost!"
Among the three, only the one who hadn't screamed—the relatively calm one—raised the weapon in his hand. A black-and-white bullet fired almost point-blank at Batman's face.
But the bullet hit nothing. The Batman who had been standing behind them vanished without a trace, as if he had never been there at all.
"Did you guys see that just now? A ghost was standing behind me..." The guy who had first had his shoulder grabbed said, trembling.
"I saw it, but it looks like I killed him?"
The one who had fired the shot said uncertainly, looking around. There was no sign of that dark figure anywhere.
"Let's head back quick. Just tell 'Horror' that we tested the weapon with no issues. I don't want to stay in this place any longer." The third one said.
The three agreed instantly and scrambled away in a panic.
None of the three noticed that Batman's figure was always circling around them, and in that brief moment earlier, bugs and tracking devices had already been planted on them.
"Horror? That's an adjective, but those three used it as a title."
"They were out testing the weapon, so they deliberately chose an abandoned transformer far from residential areas... Is Horror the one who made this weapon?"
"Is it Shulman? Or some other existence I don't know about?"
Batman's mind raced, and then he said in a low voice to the Oracle AI.
"And that bizarre black-and-white energy from earlier... Barbara, analyze the energy fluctuations from just now, the energy structure, and its spectral characteristics under red and ultraviolet light."
The three got into a car and drove for a full half-hour before stopping at the base of an apartment building.
Batman also landed silently on the rooftop of the building across from it.
"Bruce, after analysis, this energy shows cold absorption properties in the infrared band, while it's unusually active in the ultraviolet band."
During the half-hour Batman had been following the three, the Oracle AI had already conducted a preliminary analysis of the energy fired earlier.
"Continue the analysis, Barbara. No more reports for now—I'll check it myself later."
Batman said in a low voice, then opened the computer on the Arkham suit's arm and hacked into the New York police system to query recent rental and sales information for this apartment building.
The information on this building in the police system looked completely normal.
According to the police system, there were forty-seven households living in this building, with the most recent rental being three months ago, when a young mother and son moved in.
But this didn't match at all with what Batman was seeing.
The infrared and X-ray scans from the Arkham suit clearly showed that including the three who had just entered, there were only four people in the entire building. The other residents weren't in the building at all.
Looking at the pitch-black, lightless apartment building—where no lights had turned on even after the three entered—Batman didn't hesitate for a moment. With the extremely faint sound of his batclaw firing, he flew inside.
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