"Batman?"
While confined within the "Ant Farm," the myriad of espionage skills Black Widow relied upon had been rendered useless by the building-block-like structure and the ant sentries. She could only hold out hope for a jailbreak assisted by someone—be it Hawkeye, Garrett, or even Batman.
Yet, when Batman actually stood before her, her immediate instinct was not to follow him out. Instead, she wanted to seize the window of opportunity provided by the confrontation between Batman and Ant-Man to make her own escape!
As a seasoned agent, Black Widow was an expert at catching fleeting opportunities. The moment she saw Ant-Man's body rapidly shrink, she went into motion.
Pressing her hands against the hospital bed, she vaulted up, her bare feet meeting the cold floor. The shards had already been removed from her soles, but the contact still brought a flare of tearing pain.
This time, however, she didn't make a sound. Her movements were fluid, unaffected by the agony. The screams and the limp she had displayed previously in the Ant Farm were merely a performance for Ant-Man's benefit. Now, there was no need for theater—she needed to focus on only one thing: flight.
She glanced up at Batman, who was hovering in the air with his black wings beating, seemingly to avoid Ant-Man's reach. Without a moment's delay, she grabbed the sheet from the bed she had just vacated and bolted toward the laboratory exit.
Clack-clack-clack!
Outside, ants were constantly receiving signals from Ant-Man and swarming toward the room. Giant ants, over a meter long and half a meter tall, filled almost every crevice of the spiral staircases and corridors. In the white haze of the detonated smoke grenades, these massive insects appeared as looming, indistinct shadows.
Meanwhile, in the lightwell surrounded by the spiral stairs, the buzzing of vibrating wings merged into a deafening drone. Even without looking, she knew hundreds of giant flying ants were standing by.
"Batman is no match for Ant-Man. I have to rely on myself to get out," she thought.
Standing in the corridor outside the lab, Black Widow couldn't help but frown. The path ahead and behind was blocked by giant ants, and she had nothing but a bedsheet. Trying to break through was pure fantasy.
As for the flying ants...
After only two seconds of deliberation, Black Widow pressed a hand against the glass railing of the corridor and hurled herself off the ninth floor.
Thump!
She wasn't seeking death. She plummeted for less than a second before landing squarely on the back of a giant flying ant. The insect buckled under the combined force of her fall and her weight, veering wildly as it began to drop.
Black Widow didn't waste a second. As she landed, she whipped the bedsheet a few times, twisting it into a tight rope, then lashed it out toward the sound of another flying ant. She wasn't trying to lasso it; she was using the sheet like a blind man's cane to help her navigate through the thick, white smoke.
Seeing that the ant beneath her could no longer support her, she leaped again, lunging toward the direction where she had confirmed the next flying ant was located.
Repeating this process four or five times, Black Widow finally landed barefoot on the ground floor of the Pym Technologies building. Here, the smoke was even denser—nearly impossible to see through. At the same time, the irritants mixed into the smoke grenades made her body react with violent discomfort.
Snap!
Black Widow shook the bedsheet out, unfolding it from its twisted shape, and quickly folded it over to cover her nose and mouth. Without water to dampen it, the dry cloth provided little protection, but it was her only option.
Once on the first floor, her movements became more guarded. She moved cautiously on her bare feet, hands groping forward through the haze.
Up on the ninth floor, in the laboratory that had served as Black Widow's temporary ward, Batman seemed to have no intention of dealing with Ant-Man, who had already shrunk and infiltrated the interior of his suit.
With a powerful flap of his black wings, he followed in Black Widow's wake, charging out of the lab. However, his target was not her, but another laboratory Ant-Man had just emerged from.
The previous night in the Batcave, Batman had suspected that Wasp's attack had agitated Venom Robin, and that the boy might have spawned an offspring under the stress. If that had happened, Ant-Man—even if just to track Batman—would likely pivot his research toward the symbiote in the short term, temporarily abandoning other projects.
Relying on his hearing and the residual scent of Hank Pym, Batman navigated through the smoke-filled air and located Ant-Man's personal lab.
Exactly as he thought.
As soon as he stepped inside, Batman moved toward an electron microscope where Ant-Man had been standing for a long time. Using sonar, he located a mass of writhing symbiote inside a sealed glass container next to it.
He snatched the container and the symbiote within, then strode out of the lab, preparing to fly after Black Widow.
But at that moment, a muffled scream erupted from Ant-Man, who had shrunk and burrowed inside the Vulcan Suit.
Amidst that scream, Ant-Man's size suddenly surged from an invisible, sub-atomic scale back to the size of a pinhead—large enough to ride a flying ant.
Bang!
A dull thud echoed from inside Batman's Vulcan Suit.
The first layer of the Vulcan Suit appeared to be standard armor, constructed from alloys and memory fibers. Compared to the liquid metal protective layer of the Arkham Suit, the Vulcan's defenses seemed quite rudimentary. Ant-Man had entered the interior of the armor with almost no effort.
Just as he was preparing to follow the internal circuitry and tiny conduits toward Batman's body, Ant-Man found himself in a hollowed-out section of the suit. Like the pillared halls of the Metropolitan Museum, the interior of the Vulcan Suit possessed a relatively spacious gap, save for the necessary support columns.
"Is this an internal defense system? Fire suppression? Air filtration?" Ant-Man muttered, looking at the interior that seemed vast from his perspective.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second before lunging toward the layer closest to Batman's skin.
But the moment his body was suspended in mid-air, fully exposed within the open space of the suit, the second layer of defense activated. It wasn't fire suppression, nor air filtration—in fact, it wasn't a conventional defense system at all.
It was... microwaves.
Functioning exactly like a microwave oven, the system used microwaves to rapidly vibrate water molecules, causing Ant-Man's entire body to heat up from the inside out. It was as if he had been dropped into a furnace!
Batman had named this the Vulcan Suit for this very reason—it was designed to emit microwaves internally, mimicking the forge of Vulcan, the god of fire and craftsmanship.
"Impossible! Who exactly is Batman? Is he the one who stole my Pym Particles during World War II?"
"Otherwise, how could he have found a way to counter me in just one night?"
Under the onslaught of the microwaves, Ant-Man's body temperature skyrocketed, the pain forcing a wretched scream from his throat.
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