Chapter 6

Each day had carried a similar routine; of eating, training and returning to be locked up again. No part of the day out of his cell, was he ever left unmonitored. He'd hoped that there would be a day where any one of them would be less attentive, or perhaps decided that they trusted him enough to leave him alone. But no, that day hadn't come yet. And he wasn't about to risk any amount of the trust he had been trying to build with them, on a slipshod attempt. All or nothing at all...

So till that day came, he decided to pour himself more fully into the process. Dedicate himself completely to his lessons, to the point of skipping lunch to maximize the time he was allowed to spend out of his cell. The new skills he'd attained were strengthening him, allowing him to climb to greater heights than ever before, developing a better defense against attacks, and improving his own offensive strategies. All the while he'd think about how impressed Alfred would be with his progress - clinging hard to the hope that he would be back home really soon.

In the evenings, he would request to have his dinner in the mass hall, together with the rest of the members of the League. Sandra never prevented him from doing so, knowing full well that Bruce would have many pairs of eyes on him, and escape would be impossible. The main reason that Bruce had asked for meals with the others was that he wasn't getting anything off Sandra. She was like a brick wall and knew exactly how to respond to him without giving too much away. The rest of the men though, they looked like they might have slightly looser lips - and he wasn't wrong about that.

The only barrier he faced with the men was that a large percentage of the men did not speak the same languages that he did, and he had to familiarize himself with the different phrases that they used with each other in order to make simple conversations with them. Captor or not, he had to marvel at the master's ability to unite so many from diverse backgrounds and languages. All of them wholly dedicated to him and his purposes.

The men took a while to warm up to him, though he did his best to reach out. Small talk wasn't exactly his forte, but he'd do it if it meant getting some answers. After a while, some of the men began opening up to him and shared their stories. Most of the members had been joined the League self-voluntarily, most of them from conflict-rich nations, survivors of great calamity or were victims of government corruption. No matter how different in backgrounds they were, they all believed in the master's vision, and looked upon him like a messiah. Bruce, on the other hand, had been brought to Nanda Parbat against his will and didn't share their admiration for the master or the often brutal methods he employed in the name of peace. In their envy, they commented that the master could've chosen a more suitable candidate for the mission, especially one that could've been older. But in the same breath, they would say that they would not question his choices.

Sandra, on the other hand, was more often referred to by the men as Lady Shiva. When asked why, they mentioned it had something to do with her previous mission in Kolkata, India where she had been bestowed the rank of godhood by the locals. They didn't go into details, and neither would Sandra. But the name stuck nonetheless.

As for the master, Bruce had heard all kinds of stories about him, ranging from the amazing to the downright mythical. How he had rescued villages, taken down corrupt warlords, cleansed the land of evil. But all of them seemed to agree that the master was ageless and would not die. Some believed he was born of the gods, and others said he had died a thousand deaths, only to be reborn again. They sounded all kinds of crazy just talking about it. An immortal... an impossible concept, surely the master had managed to fool all his followers into believing such a thing was possible, but how? The mystery dragged on for days, and days to weeks, and weeks to months.

It was his hundred and forty-ninth day in Nanda Parbat when Sandra arrived at training looking less than well. She'd taken ill but insisted to carry on with the session. Bruce encouraged her to sit down while he carried on with his daily practice. Being of a half-mind, she decided to listen to him, and soon he found her asleep against one of the pillars. He watched her with her eyes shut for a whole minute, he knew his time for action had finally come. Finally... after waiting so patiently all these months, his one chance to work towards an escape had arrived. He took another glance at Sandra before picking up the sword that they'd been practicing with.

It was only the start of the day, and he knew the men of the League would be on the lower floors of the fortress. Crossing the room quietly, he made his exit into the large hall outside. He didn't have what he needed to open the lock to the balcony yet, but he'd been eyeing the wires that were holding up the lamps for some time now. He had it in his mind that he might bend one of them into shape, and hopefully, it would serve as a pick. Getting up to one of those lamps though would prove to be a challenge, except it was fortunate for him that Sandra had been training him in the art of what she called "wall walking". Wall walking involved focusing a good amount of inner strength to displace one's center of gravity, gaining momentum enough to shift vertically, just at the right time, in order to scale heights that would be impossible for a regular person.

Staring at the bulbous red lamps swinging gently from the ceiling, Bruce lowered his sword to his side, let out a deep breath and shut his eyes as he had been taught, allowing his other senses to 'feel' the length and breath of the room. Channeling all his strength to the base of his feet, he all at once let them fly. Running faster and faster around the hall as the wind whipped through his hair, he shifted his center of gravity downwards just as his feet left the floor. He could feel the surge of power that sent him in a vertical direction. The moment he began taking massive strides up the wall, he opened his eyes and kept his sight trained wholly on one of the many thin lines of wire. With a large kick, he sailed through the air, whipped out his sword, cut down one of the lamps. Then he let gravity take over, falling to the floor, rolling as he did to mitigate the force of the impact.

The moment the cut lamp landed on the floor, the flames within caught on to the rice paper and began burning it up. Bruce leapt over to put out the fire by stomping on the burning paper, and he went on to strip the cut wire from the rest of the frame before winding what he managed to attain around his finger. As for the half smoked lamp, he picked it up, and looked about the room for a place to hide it. He felt his time already running out, and he wasn't going to risk exposure of his already tenuous situation. The only place that the flattened lamp might fit under was where the large wadaiko sat. With a large heave, he tilted the drum over, shoved the lamp under it, and let the drum sit on it.

Wasting no additional time, he hurried back to the room and shut the door behind him. There was a huge sigh of relief to be heaved when he spotted Sandra still asleep against that pillar. He was safe for the moment. But now there was a missing lamp up top, and that half smoked lamp under the wadaiko. He hoped neither would be discovered in the time he worked out the rest of his escape plan. It was a small victory, but a significant one. He now had the piece of wire that he'd been gunning for since a couple of months before. All that was left was to apply what Selina had taught him about lockpicking on a lock he'd never worked on before.. and then, try to survive what was to come.