CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: THE NEXT PHASE

Taylor adjusted her mask and moved deeper into the warehouse, Spoiler close behind. Crates were stacked high against the walls, turning the space into a maze of stolen goods, smuggled weapons, and stripped-down tech. Workbenches lined the walkways, covered in half-assembled devices and scattered tools. Everything was arranged for quick sortation and distribution, a well-oiled operation.

But Taylor wasn’t looking for the standard fare. She was here to find out why Mark Richards had been guarding this place—why a metahuman lieutenant had been assigned to oversee whatever was important enough to keep locked away.

For weeks, she’d known the Calculator was refining something. Every encounter in the Narrows, every malfunctioning weapon she’d come across, had told her that much. Some devices had exploded in their users’ hands, others had shorted out at critical moments—but each time, the design had been improved. Tweaked. Perfected.

She had stolen one of those weapons from Penguin’s men. A compact sonic disruptor, its casing scorched from overuse, its inner components barely stable. A prototype.

What would she find in this warehouse?

Spoiler paused by a terminal, fingers tapping at the keyboard. “No logs,” she muttered. “Looks like they wiped everything before clearing out—or tried to, at least.” She huffed. “Cowards.”

At the far end of the warehouse, sectioned off with tape, Taylor found what she was looking for—a secured storage area, reinforced with thick steel plating and heavy-duty doors. It wasn’t part of the original structure. Someone had built it after the fact, sealing off whatever was inside. That alone meant it was worth protecting.

The door was already open.

“That’s it.” She stepped forward.

Spoiler sighed. “Why is it always the ominous, suspiciously sealed-off areas?”

Taylor ignored her, slipping inside. The space was larger than she expected. The floor was lined with cables, snaking between workstations cluttered with blueprints, half-assembled components, and diagnostic screens still humming with faint power. This wasn’t just storage—it was a workspace, though obviously for Penguin and his men.

And at the center of it all sat a single crate. Pristine, untouched by dust, its edges reinforced with thick metal bracing. No markings, no branding. Just a simple number: 27-3.

Locked. Expected.

Taylor reached for her tools, but Spoiler was faster, pulling something from her belt—a small explosive charge, compact and palm-sized. She pressed it into Taylor’s hand.

“It has a small charge,” she said simply.

Taylor didn’t hesitate. She set the charge against the lock, motioned for Spoiler to step back, and triggered it.

A sharp pop. A burst of smoke. The latch clicked open with a low groan.

Taylor pulled the swing doors back—and felt her stomach drop.

The malfunctioning device Penguin’s men had used was a toy compared to this. This was something else entirely. A scaled-up, industrialized version of the same weapon, nestled inside its crate and encased in protective foam.

Where the original had been the size of a small rifle, this was a machine. Taller than she was, its reinforced base built for stability, with heavy-duty connectors where power cables would attach.

Thankfully, it was inert.

But Taylor had seen enough of the weapon in action to know what it could do. The handheld version had been unstable, prone to catastrophic failure—but even in its broken state, it had been devastating. This? This was stable. Not a crude test model. A finished product, or something nearing completion.

And she didn’t need blueprints to understand what it was built for.

A weapon like this, deployed in the right location, wouldn’t just damage buildings. It would level them entirely. No fire, no explosives—just raw, concentrated sound, turning structural integrity into a suggestion, liquefying concrete, shattering steel.

The Calculator hadn’t just been refining handheld weapons for Gotham’s gangs.

He was perfecting a superweapon.

Taylor’s hands clenched into fists.

Spoiler stepped up beside her. “Okay… That doesn’t look good.”

Taylor exhaled slowly. “No. It doesn’t.”

She scanned the storage area again, her mind working through the implications. This warehouse was just a stop along the way—one of many. The gangs were testing the weapons, maybe even trying to figure out how it worked on Penguin’s orders, but they weren’t the ones making them.

So where were they coming from?

A weapon like this wasn’t built in a back alley or cobbled together in an abandoned warehouse. It needed specialized materials, precision engineering—automation. That meant a supply chain. A facility. Somewhere churning out parts, assembling prototypes, and shipping them to Gotham piece by piece.

That was the real question.

Tracking the shipments, tracing where these weapons were coming from, might lead her straight to the Calculator’s operation.

And from there?

Straight to him.