"Better than unlimited. Free. I build something in there, I test it against every scenario I can simulate, I refine it, and when I finally have a design that's actually finished, I bring the blueprint out here and build the real one with real materials. No wasted prototypes. No wasted money. No wasted time."
"That is an efficient application of the resource," NEXUS said. "Though I would note the dimension currently contains no fabrication equipment of its own. Everything present is an exact replica of what already exists in the manor and the surrounding radius."
"Which includes an empty cave that's a perfect replica of this one." Bruce activated the System again and stepped through into stillness.
The manor around him went silent and grey in that familiar way, colors slightly flat, sounds slightly absent. He made his way down into the cave's replica, empty of Alfred, empty of NEXUS's physical hardware, empty of everything except the shell of what he'd already built in reality.
*[POCKET DIMENSION: ACTIVE]*
*[TIME REMAINING: 24:00:00]*
Bruce looked around at the bare shelving and unused equipment mounts, identical down to the dust patterns to the real cave three levels above him.
"Time to build something real."
He spent the first six hours simply cataloging what he had and what he needed. Every hour in here cost him nothing outside. Every failed attempt could be scrapped without a second thought about the money or the materials. He sketched frame designs on a tablet, ran stress calculations by hand and checked them against the calculations NEXUS's shadow instance would eventually verify, and slowly built a picture of what the next suit needed to be.
Not spandex with a cape. Not tactical gear bought off a catalog and reinforced with ceramic plates. Something built from the ground up by someone who actually understood materials science at a level most of Earth's current engineering firms wouldn't reach for another thirty years.
His meta-knowledge gave him the destination. His training gave him the ability to actually walk the path there.
He started with the weave. A layered composite of carbon nanotube fiber and a graphene lattice, woven at a density that current manufacturing couldn't replicate at scale, but that he could produce in small batches using equipment he'd need to build himself first. The weave alone would stop most small arms fire without a single ceramic plate.
Then the plating. Not rigid ceramic that cracked under repeated stress, but a polymer matrix that hardened on impact and returned to flexible state a fraction of a second later. Adaptive rather than static. It would absorb a bullet's kinetic energy and distribute it across the entire plate instead of concentrating it at a single point.
Then the frame underneath the suit itself. A thin exoskeleton lattice running along the major muscle groups, not powered like some kind of mechanized armor, but passive, amplifying the force his own peak human muscles already generated. Every punch harder. Every jump higher. Every sprint faster, without adding meaningful weight or restricting his range of motion.
And the cowl. This was where his engineering genius and his meta-knowledge overlapped most completely. Thermal imaging layered with sonar pinging for tracking movement through smoke or darkness, a threat analysis overlay that fed directly from NEXUS in real time, and audio processing sophisticated enough to isolate individual voices in a crowded room.
Bruce worked through the night that wasn't a night, twenty four hours compressed into a single unbroken stretch of focus. By the time his timer hit zero, he had a complete blueprint. Not a finished suit. Just the design, refined through six full iterations built and torn apart inside the dimension where the only cost was his own time.
He exited back into reality at the exact moment he'd entered. No time lost. A full day of engineering work compressed into a blink.
*[PHYSIQUE: 100/100]*
*[MIND: 90/100] (Slight increase from intensive engineering work)*
*[SKILL UPDATED: ADVANCED MATERIALS ENGINEERING - 34%]*
The proficiency notification made him smile despite his exhaustion. Even engineering counted. Even this counted toward the same system that had once taught him karate from a picture book.
"NEXUS, I have a complete blueprint. I want to start real world fabrication tomorrow. We'll need specialized equipment, some of which doesn't exist commercially yet."
"I will begin sourcing what can be purchased and design what cannot," NEXUS replied. "Estimated time to first functional prototype: two weeks."
"Good. Because I'm not putting on the old suit again. Not for anything short of an emergency."
He looked at the torn Kevlar and cracked ceramic still laid out on the table. Nine years of preparation, and he'd still walked into a fight with Deadshot wearing something a competent engineer could have improved in a weekend if he'd just taken the time.
'Never again,' Bruce thought. 'Everything from here forward gets built the right way. No more shortcuts because I was too focused on the mission to notice the gaps.'
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