Starting from scratch, Batman crushed my dream of getting rich

Chapter 508 Franky the Quintessential Quintuplets?
"So your father took you to Russia?"

"Him? No, he's not that brave. He's just an ordinary alcoholic with no proper job. He wouldn't survive if he went to a foreign country."

French exhaled a puff of smoke out of the car, his expression gloomy: "He forced me away from Marseille, away from my mother, to wander around other parts of France, never stopping. We changed hotels one after another, and I didn't even know where his money came from."

“Every few nights, he would take me out for a walk, smoke a cigarette, and tell me that he loved me very much.”

As he said this, Franky's gaze unconsciously drifted to the cigarette in his mouth, to the tiny red ember at the tip.

He seemed suddenly disgusted by it, and simply reached out and stubbed out the cigarette on his blood-stained coat—after all, he'd taken the coat by chance, so he wasn't too bothered.

He pulled up his trouser leg, revealing a dense array of shocking scars underneath. These were marks from cigarette burns, scars that could not be healed by honeyworms alone, permanent negative marks fixed to his body.

“Every time this happens, he burns me with a cigarette butt, so I know he doesn’t actually love me.”

"It's purely a birthing behavior."

Ma Zhaodi bluntly stated, "If this were Gotham City, I could already foresee the fate of your father and you. It's a good thing you two aren't locals there, otherwise there would definitely be another supervillain."

All three of them were taken aback. Ma Zhaodi's words were somewhat incomprehensible, but the act of "confiding" was something that made one want to keep quiet when not speaking, but once started, one didn't want to stop and just wanted to say it all. So Franky didn't press further and continued talking.

“I remember I kept trying to escape. I tried to jump on buses and trains, over and over again. I can’t remember exactly how many times I tried. I just wanted to escape back to Marseille and go back to my mother. But he always managed to catch me and bring me back. I could never escape.”

"I grew up slowly like this, and made some good friends, until one day I realized that I had grown up."

“My father couldn’t catch me anymore. I didn’t go to Marseille because I knew he would be waiting for me there, so I ran away to Russia.”

"The rest of the time, I went to New York and did underground business with Shirley and Jay."

The butcher continued driving, and the mother remained silent. Ma Zhaodi watched him quietly, and no one uttered a sound; they listened silently.

Franky lowered his head and quietly looked at the woman's face. Her face was still a little dirty, her fingernails were long and full of grime, and her muscles were tense. She seemed quite nervous, and her disheveled yet wary appearance was very much like his former self.

Loneliness, pain, and insecurity.

She is a superhuman, so she won't have any physical scars, but the pain will be etched into her soul and deep in her memory.

"The moment I saw her, I knew her true nature. She and I were both people who wanted to go home."

"Alone in a foreign land, we don't know how many compounds she was injected with after she was captured, how long she was tortured, or how many human experiments she was subjected to. But when we found her, she was under the table watching the TV intently. It was her hometown, her native language. I suddenly realized that I hadn't heard a single word of French in a long time."

"So I want to help her, and if possible, we might be able to take her home."

As Franky spoke, the woman's tense body gradually relaxed, and her slightly trembling eyelids and eyelashes returned to calm.

“Normally at this point, I should say a few words to her in Japanese, at least to comfort her.” Ma Zhaodi breathed a sigh of relief: “But you’ve already said everything you could, I’m glad, it saved me a lot of trouble—the one lying down, stop pretending to be asleep, get up.”

However, the woman remained motionless.

Ma Zhaodi listened intently, surprised, and found that her breathing had become even—she had actually fallen asleep. "Frankie, do you want a wife?"

"What do you mean?"

"I don't want to see you two-timing and end up being turned into five pieces by a superpowered person with a woodcutter's axe. I advise you to be careful with your words and actions in your love life in the future."

When the Chevrolet returned to the Black Robe Squad's base, it was already half an hour later—incidentally, Franky's trading location had been officially requisitioned as the Black Robe Squad's base, and thanks to Ma Zhaodi's Golden Pumpkin, he himself had no objections to this.

When the group got off the bus, Frankie deliberately stayed behind. He tugged at the woman lying on the back seat, who rubbed her eyes, then scrambled to her feet and followed him.

"Shirley, could you help her take a bath and change her clothes?"

"Oh? Who is this pretty girl?"

"The poor thing who was captured and used as an experimental subject, we don't even know her name yet—she seems unable to speak, but she can understand English."

Frankie gestured for the woman to go take a shower with Sherry, and the woman actually went over and grabbed Sherry's clothes.

"She's superhuman, she's very strong, so be careful."

"This is really unexpected."

The rough men in the black-robed squad weren't very meticulous, and they got ready quickly. In just ten minutes, they had changed their clothes and regrouped.

"What's our next step?" Breast milk asked first. "We have a lot of evidence now, including a batch of compound five, but it's still a bit thin. We should find another starting point, preferably some physical documents or video recordings."

“We still need to find someone who can handle the evidence.” The butcher shrugged. “But don’t worry about that, I know some people.”

"Are you going to the CIA? Colonel Mallory will never forgive us."

"Colonel Mallory has retired. I have my own plans, so you don't need to worry."

"Or go back to that mental hospital and find the lamplighter, or go find that Samarian hug—Old Ma, what do you think?"

"It depends on which side we feel is more important. The Lamplighter is the shadow of your past, and you seek him out for revenge; the Samarian Embrace is related to the Compound V transport network. In other words, if the Lamplighter's documents are correct, then it is related to the children and babies who are being injected with the compound to become superpowered."

Ma Zhaodi flipped through the book in his hand: "So, let's start choosing. Revenge first, or the children first?"

The group fell silent.

The butcher hesitated for half a minute, which was unusual for him, before speaking first: "Will you let us choose?"

Ma Zhaodi smiled.

“No, you have no choice,” he said. “No matter what you think, you have to come with me to save the children first.”

(End of this chapter)