Heading inside the Museum, the five heroes were met with two thugs carrying large knives.
"This is Penguin's turf, freaks! We're gonna kill you for breaking in here!" The one in front snapped, rushing Penny as the one in the rear rushed Hilda.
Penny simply limboed gracefully underneath the first thug's poorly telegraphed knife swing and then grabbed him from behind before delivering a German Suplex that instantly knocked him out. As for Hilda, she took out a strange club-like weapon that resembled a tuning fork as it sparked with electricity, which she used to smack the other thug into the air.
"Ingenious piece of tech." Batman noted as Hilda smirked.
"Thanks, I call it the Amp and I can channel my Conduit powers through it."
With the thugs dealt with, the crew walked towards the entrance, only for metal bars to rise up in her path, sealing off the way to the lobby.
"There must be another electric lock somewhere," Batman said, diving through a window into a room on the right.
The others quickly jumped through after this to discover Batman had found the lock and was using the Cryptographic Sequencer to decode it, but saw it was being heavily distorted with static before the letters moved out of the box with the image freezing.
"I don't think I want you and those brats of yours breaking into my little home, Batman." Penguin taunted through the speakers.
"Of course, it would've been too easy..." Spider-Bat sighed.
"Something's blocking communications back to the Batcave. Penguin must be using military-grade communication disruptors. The only way to crack this security is to destroy them." Batman said.
"Smashing stuff sounds good to me." Ben said.
The five left the building and sprung into action, not realizing a young figure was watching from afar before silently following after them.
"They'll help me rescue my parents...I know it."
Splitting up to cover more ground, Batman went by himself to the nearby rooftop, finding the disruptor, which was being protected by six thugs that all stood in front of the device, admiring it and wondering what it did, oblivious to Batman's presence until one happened to turn, alerting the others as they all stumbled back in surprise and fear.
"It's The Bat!"
Not giving them time to defend themselves, Batman rushed in and dispatched the thugs, approaching the device.
"The jamming towers have three terminals attached. We'll need to destroy all three to shut them down." Batman explained to the others on the comms as he drove his fist through the screens on the device, one after another.
"Roger that, We've found the second terminal. Hilda and Ben split off to find the third one. Apparently, Hilda used her Electricity Conduit powers to sense the third terminal was underground." Spider-Bat called back.
As Batman moved to wait for his wards to return to the front of the museum, he suddenly noticed something in one of the alleys...a dead body with its head wrapped in bandages. Quickly gliding down to investigate, he scanned the body.
"The victim's face has been removed and the head wrapped in bandages. There have been three murders in Gotham over the last month with the same MO." He internally noted. "The press have nicknamed the killer the 'Identity Thief'. If he's now in Arkham City, I need to track him down and stop him."
Using his Detective Vision, Batman saw a splatter next to the body and scanned it to see it was blood from the victim.
"The attack left the victim bleeding profusely. The murderer is likely to have trace elements of the blood on them without realizing."
Filtering his cowl's scanner to track the victim's blood particles, Batman followed the trail, briefly stopping to destroy one of the TITAN containers Bane wanted destroyed with his Explosive Gel before continuing onward, soon coming across a frightened man, no doubt one of the Political Prisoners thrown in by Strange.
"Why did you kill him?"
"It wasn't me. I'm not a killer, I'm a plumber for God's sake. You gotta believe me."
"I don't have to believe anything. Tell me what you saw."
"There was this guy. He dropped the body there. He was weird looking, you won't believe me but...well, he looked like Bruce Wayne."
"WHAT?"
The prisoner nodded. "I know. Someone must have got to him. He was covered in cuts and bruises but I'm sure it was him. The poor guy must have had a target the size of Gotham City painted on him. Looked like he'd been attacked by pretty much everyone in Arkham."
Batman frowned. He couldn't have been the one to kill the victim since HE was Bruce Wayne and he was busy trying to stop Protocol 10 and the Joker. If the Identity Thief was somehow disguising themself as him, he needed to investigate this later.
Meanwhile, Penny and Spider-Bat had reached the second terminal to find thugs patrolling the area. Penny stealthily took out one half of the thugs patrolling while Spider-Bat webbed up the other half.
"Alright, let me at that terminal!"
The two worked together to smash and disable the terminal. Now all they had to do was wait for Ben and Hilda to finish on their end.
Ben and Hilda had made their way through the abandoned subway entrance, which is where Hilda was detecting the third and final terminal.
"How do these things even work underground?" Ben asked.
"Well, they're military-grade, right? Makes sense they'd work underground." Hilda shrugged.
The duo took out the two thugs guarding the tunnel to the subway trains, reaching the trains and heading down their tracks, finding a branching-off path where three thugs were looking at a poster. They defeated these thugs quickly and Ben saw one of the TITAN containers, burning it to ash with controlled flames.
"Another container down for Bane."
With that side mission done, the two continued to follow the signal, dropping down into a strange underground city, where they discovered five armed thugs guarding the final disruptor.
"I take three, you take two?"
Hilda nodded. "This'll be fun!"
Ben flew up stealthily onto one of the gargoyles before performing an Inverted Takedown on the passing thug, using the Sound Element to disrupt all noise around them so nobody could hear his screams for help before he was dangled upside-down by a vine.
Hilda hooked her Amp around a thug she snuck up behind's neck and slammed him to the ground before pinning him with restraints of pure electricity. She then formed a rock made of concrete and threw it at a passing thug's head hard enough to knock him out.
As for Ben, he finished off the last two thugs by manipulating the wind to slam them together, bashing their heads and knocking them out as he and Hilda went to the final disruptor and destroyed it.
"Alright, the others must have taken out their jammers as well. Let's regroup back at the museum." Ben said.
Batman had made it back to the museum and was waiting for his wards to return. He got his answer that they had completed their ends when he heard Penguin on the comms.
"What the hell is happening down there? Hello? Is someone gonna answer me? I give you one simple task: stick up a couple of freaking machines. And what? You couldn't even get that right? I hope Batman and his kids broke every bone in your stupid bodies. I hope you're lying there, desperately trying to breathe through fractured ribs and punctured lungs. And if you're not, you better summon whatever strength you've got left and run. 'Cause after I'm done with the Bat and his numpty brats, you're all next!"
"Situation sorted!" Spider-Bat said as he hung upside-down from a web before flipping off.
"That wasn't so hard." Penny smiled.
"Whoo! That was tight!" Hilda said as she and Ben came in as well.
The group of heroes entered the Museum once again and Batman jumped through the window to the next room, using his Cryptographic Sequencer to decode the unlock password.
"Open Sesame!" Spider-Bat joked as the heroes could now go on through.
However, right as they came through, a large T-Rex skeleton came at them with its jaws open, only to short-circuit, revealing it was a prop.
"Okay, who got scared by that, say 'Ay'." Ben said.
"I saw it coming with my Spider-Sense." Spider-Bat said.
"It won't hurt you. Do not worry." Penny reassured Ben as she squeezed his hand.
"Sorry, I guess I'm just scared I might be dying because Joker poisoned me and Batman..."
Batman put a hand on the dragon boy's shoulder. "We'll cure you, I promise."
"But what about you?"
"It's your safety and the safety of the people of Gotham that's my primary concern."
The five of them stopped at the stairs and saw three thugs beating one someone. Batman noticed the one doing the beating as the other two stood and watched was different from his comrades.
"He's wearing body armor. I'll need to hit him with quick, focused attacks to penetrate his defenses."
"Or you could just do this!" Hilda smirked as she fired a blast of Video Energy at the armored thug's head, instantly knocking him out.
"Awww, way to ruin the element of surprise!" Spider-Bat said as he and Penny took down the other two thugs.
Batman approached the victim. "You're safe... For now."
"Thank god."
"You might want to hold off on thanking Him until you've answered MY questions. Who are you?" Batman demanded.
"Sorry, man. I'm a cop. Gordon sent us in here. From the 13th Precinct, part of the strike team. Been in here since the beginning." The man explained.
"If Gordon sent you, you'll know the code."
"Oh, yeah! Yeah, he said... Oh, man. What was it?"
"The code. Now." Batman demanded.
"It's... 'Sarah'! He said to tell you the code is 'Sarah'." The cop answered.
"You're safe, officer." Batman confirmed again.
"It's Jones, heroes. Elvis Jones." Jones introduced himself.
"Nice to meet you!" Penny greeted brightly, before realizing something. "Wait, if those thugs were beating you, they must've found out your cover. What about the rest of your squad?"
"Gordon always said he was planning on sending your team in." Batman said.
"Yeah, he wanted to know what was going on in here. I guess we found out. There were ten of us. Hopefully, there still are." Jones said.
"Oh, man..." Hilda said worriedly.
"I told Gordon it was too dangerous to send you in. Stay here. If the rest of your team is alive, we'll find them." Batman assured him.
"Well, looks like it's time to go be heroes!" Ben said as they took off.
None of them noticed that the young shadowy figure was following them, hoping against hope they would be able to help him...
Sorry this one took so long. Inspiration tends to leave me at impromptu times and I get busy with real life.
Next chapter covers the Penguin's Lair as well as the meeting with Mr. Freeze and the boss fight with Solomon Grundy, followed by the Bat-Family getting a new member!
