civilwarnovels Chapter 3919 The Nameless Bat (89)
Chapter 3919 The Nameless Bat (89)
Chapter 3919 The Nameless Bat (Eighty-Nine)
The appearance of Super Brainiac in the mystery has cast another shadow over Batman and his team. They're like they've entered a world of stacked boxes, one on top of another, each stronger than the last. Anyone could have outmaneuvered the mastermind, but now the mastermind is making things incredibly difficult for them.
"So, the mastermind behind this didn't beat Brainiac, so they lied and claimed to be Brainiac? Then what about Batman? Why does it call itself Batman?"
"It's the same old story. It probably hasn't even fought a Batman before." Batwoman is very familiar with this routine. "It hasn't fought anyone, so it lies about who it is to try and make the other person hate it—it's such a childish trick."
“That’s certainly something worth discussing,” said the mechanical Batman. “I’m not trying to embolden anyone, but the fact that we’re all gathered here to discuss this shows that ordinary carbon-based life forms are naturally at a disadvantage against electronic life forms. They can have countless threads causing trouble everywhere, and we’re already struggling to deal with just one disaster. In the context of modern society, it’s even more difficult. Even if we could defeat them, it would be hard to completely eliminate them, and it wouldn’t even be considered a victory; it would only be a temporary reprisal.”
"And looking at the mastermind's opponents, Scarlet Witch's strength goes without saying. If Super Brainiac really exists, he must be incredibly powerful. Both of them defeated the mastermind head-on, even nearly destroying him, which is why he holds such a grudge. And if Batman did the same... which Batman is that strong?"
“It’s definitely not Night Owl’s gang,” Arkham Batman scoffed. “They’re all useless. If Night Owl’s universe had been attacked, he probably wouldn’t even realize it was a multiverse catastrophe right now; he’d be out there running around trying to catch up with everyone.”
“I think this involves a key issue,” Batwoman said. “This thing has a unique life form; it’s not entirely an electronic life form. It seems to be able to move within radio waves.”
“That’s right,” Batman immediately chimed in, “It can even connect to devices that aren’t connected to the internet, which proves it’s not a completely networked being, but more like an energy being. How is that possible?”
"Could it have achieved this effect through some kind of trick? For example, by manipulating others to connect devices that are not connected to the internet, making us think that it can operate on radio waves?"
“Impossible,” Batwoman said. “I was in Atlantis at the time, without any electronic devices on me. Yet it inexplicably activated a pager stored on a sunken ship in the Atlantean ship graveyard, attempting to control the Atlanteans. There was no network signal for thousands of miles around. I even suspect it came through the Earth’s magnetic field.”
"It can indeed hack into devices without a network. When my universe was hit by a hurricane, there was no network, not even electricity. But as soon as the door to my Batcave opened, it had already hacked in. This proves that it doesn't necessarily need a network to move."
"Even so, Scarlet Witch, Super Brainiac, and that suspected Batman were still able to give it a good beating. The first two are not surprising: one is a witch who controls the Scarlet Force, so she is adept at dealing with energy creatures; the other is a fellow member of the same race who knows the tricks of cyber life. Energy intrusion is not a big problem for cyber life, so it is reasonable that they can solve it."
"Batman is like the wrong answer mixed in with a pattern-finding puzzle—unless, of course, he also has a way to deal with energy creatures."
“I think we’ve gone astray,” Batwoman said again. “The key now isn’t the victim’s identity, but the identity of the mastermind. Can we use its radio-electro-like properties to further narrow down the possibilities of its true identity?”
The Batmen began to rack their brains, rummaging through their memories, trying to find a possible connection among the characters they had encountered in the neighboring world. Unfortunately, after searching for a long time, they found no useful clues.
“Actually, there aren’t many cyber life forms to begin with, and there are even fewer evil cyber life forms. And evil cyber life forms that can escape to another world must be quite famous in their original world,” said the main universe Batman.
“The most notorious evil cyber life form in the next world is Ultron,” said Batman Arkham. “I queued up for a dungeon before, and the Iron Man I met said that their universe had just fought Ultron, and it seemed like a lot of people died. Could it be Ultron?”
"It's not impossible. But the key is which universe's Ultron it is, why it went to that so-called central universe, and how it got here."
"How was Ultron born?" Batwoman asked.
The others exchanged bewildered glances, clearly unaware of the situation. Despite being perhaps the most notorious evil electronic lifeform in the neighborhood, it wasn't actually a top-tier villain. They didn't even know if this evil electronic lifeform had ever entered the Battle Realm.
“I have an idea,” said the Great Adventurer Batman. “I’ll ask Spider-Man; he’ll definitely know.”
After saying that, he brought up the Battle World interface and started messaging the Spider-Man he knew. Soon after, the other person bombarded him with a barrage of messages:
"You mean Ultron? I heard he's an artificial intelligence invented by Dr. Pym to assist him in his scientific research. But somehow he turned into an evil robot. We killed him once before, but he quickly returned, and it seems he updates himself every time, iterating to exploit the Avengers' weaknesses. We can never completely kill him, only temporarily repel him. Why are you interested in him?"
In the grand adventure, Batman didn't directly tell Spider-Man the truth. This was actually his habit: Batman was always about gathering information rather than revealing it. But it was precisely this habit that caused him to miss crucial clues.
The adventurous Batman sent Spider-Man's explanation to the other Batmen. The main universe Batman stroked his chin and said, "Dr. Pym is Ant-Man? They have a lot of mad scientists over there."
“It seems they need the virus kill more than we do,” Batwoman said.
"If that's the case, it seems to fit our speculation quite well. Does anyone have Scarlet Witch's contact information? We can find out if it's Ultron by asking her, right?"
"That makes sense. If some electronic life form were to harass the Scarlet Witches of the multiverse, they might talk about it in their group chat and then unite to destroy it. That way, they should be able to get the answer from any Scarlet Witch they ask."
The Batmen all started scrolling through their contact lists. The main universe's Batman had the Scarlet Witch's contact information from the neighboring central universe, so he asked her. But the reply seemed a little puzzling:
"Harassing my digital life? Sorry, I've received quite a few private messages and love confessions from people on various media platforms, and I genuinely don't know which ones aren't human. What's wrong on your end? Do you need any help?"
The main universe's Batman then remembered that the Scarlet Witch in the central universe was an internet celebrity. Don't be fooled by her focus on couples' accounts; the internet is full of all sorts of weirdos, and if you dare to post videos online, you'll be swarmed by flies. Besides, Wanda is a stunning beauty, so she's bound to be harassed by many.
Wanda, on the other hand, is someone focused on life, busy with work and raising her children every day. She probably doesn't have time to figure out who these people are, let alone care about them. That electronic life form was probably just someone she saw as a suitor, and she didn't take it to heart at all.
Since they couldn't get any information from the central universe, they tried asking other universes. However, there were too many people in the Battle Realm, and the probability of getting a specific hero in line was low. Only two or three Batmen had encountered Scarlet Witch, and even after asking her, they hadn't obtained any useful information.
Perhaps because Wanda was so powerful, the harassment this electronic life form caused her didn't actually become a real problem. For example, if she sent her love emails, Wanda would simply block the sender; if she frequently sent emails from different accounts, a simple "I don't accept any love emails" could cause the electronic life form's terminal to crash; even if she was controlling a speaker or computer to speak, a single "Shut up" from the other party could cause the electronic device's voice function to disappear from the world.
However, two of the Scarlet Witches admitted that they had indeed encountered such a thing. At the time, they thought it was a prank by some mutant hateer, because they had encountered similar things before and in most cases they chose to keep quiet and never made a fuss about it.
The current situation is different from what Batman and his team predicted: Scarlet Witch was indeed harassed, but because the difference in strength between the two was too great, Scarlet Witch didn't take it seriously; and because Wanda's past experiences were not good, when she encountered such things, she mostly chose to deal with them on her own rather than making a big fuss about causing trouble for anyone—especially those who had become mothers, who were even more cautious and timid compared to her strength.
This is not surprising to the main universe's Batman. He had long discovered that Scarlet Witch is the kind of person who can endure great injustices until she reaches a certain breaking point, at which point she will explode.
Although her outbursts were catastrophic, making her infamous throughout the multiverse, Batmen believe she was actually quite restrained. If an ordinary person had suffered what she did, they wouldn't be shouting "No more mutants!" but rather "The universe will be destroyed a thousand times over!"
Batwoman covered her forehead and said, "I really find it hard to call this reaction tolerance; it's more like numbness. But it's a good thing that things didn't escalate over there. Otherwise, if they discovered that the mastermind had come to our side and followed us, that would be a huge mess."
The Batmen were clearly relieved. While it was satisfying to see the mastermind behind their troubles being hunted down by the Scarlet Witch, if the Scarlet Witch and her allies had actually come after them, Batman would probably have had to go to church and pray to God for help.
However, this also makes the identity of the mastermind even more elusive. Although the Scarlet Witch and her allies have provided as many clues as possible, they still cannot determine the specific identity, with Ultron being the most likely candidate. But the Batmen strongly suspect that this Ultron may have undergone several iterations and has become less of a fully electronic life form.
Since the discussion about their identities had reached a stalemate, they had no choice but to start devising a strategy. The main universe's Batman spoke first: "First, we must find the root server of the mastermind. Although it has backups in other universes, destroying the main server will deal it a heavy blow."
“I have a question,” said the mechanical Batman. “Since it’s been said that it’s not a purely electronic life form, but an energy-based being, does the so-called server really exist?”
“Energy doesn’t come out of thin air, and there is no energy that can’t be consumed,” Batman Arkham said. “His activities must require energy to support them, and energy must have a source. It’s actually easier to deal with since it’s an energy creature. As long as we find the energy source and destroy it, depriving it of its supply, we can eliminate it sooner or later.”
“That’s one way,” the other Batmen agreed.
"The problem now is that to fully monitor Earth's energy activity, we need to build a magical defense network. But the other side is causing trouble desperately to prevent us from building that network. Without building the network, we can't stop them from causing trouble," said the main universe Batman.
“Then we can only cooperate,” Batwoman said. “We’ll focus our efforts on taking down a universe’s magical defense network, completely expelling the mastermind behind it, making it our base in the multiverse, and then slowly expanding outwards to take back all our territory.”