Chapter 387: The Hammer
"Robin. Describe the ritual Khonshu taught you. Use the method I taught you."
The Batwing moved without sound through the airspace above a stretch of dense African forest, the canopy a dark mass far below. Batman's voice was even, unhurried.
Robin scratched the back of his head immediately.
"Can I just draw it for you?"
Batman's posture shifted slightly. "Is it some kind of magic array?"
"I wouldn't exactly call it --"
"Don't draw it. We're not prepared to deal with whatever that activates, and we're minutes from Wakanda. Nothing extra. Nothing that can complicate the approach."
Robin accepted this, however reluctantly, and began talking instead. He described it haltingly, scratching his head at intervals as though the act of putting it into words made it harder to picture.
"It's less like a magic array and more like a circular maze. The lines that make it up don't match anything I recognize -- no religious symbols I know, nothing from the mythology I've read. But in the middle, a section of it clearly forms some kind of mark."
"What kind of mark?"
"A short-handled hammer."
"Wakanda." T'Challa rose from his seat and pointed through the port-side glass. "There. In that forest."
Batman pulled the controls. The Batwing banked smoothly and drove in the direction T'Challa indicated. Robin pressed his face against the porthole. From the outside there was nothing to see -- just forest below, continuous and unbroken, identical to the forest behind them.
Then the aircraft shuddered. A hard, structural shudder, as though the hull had hit something solid, though nothing was visible and nothing had struck it.
And then the view was completely different.
Where there had been forest there was now a mountain range -- dramatic, steep, and enormous, the peaks catching what little light existed at this hour. Beyond the mountains in the distance, buildings rose hundreds of meters out of the earth. The city was vast and unmistakably unlike anything Robin had seen -- glass and metal and geometry that didn't follow any Western design language he recognized, a skyline that belonged to a civilization that had been building its own way for a very long time. Even at this hour the city blazed with light. Aircraft moved between the towers, small and quick.
To one side of the city lay a wide agricultural plain. It should have been uniform and green. It wasn't. Robin's eyes picked out the pattern immediately -- irregular depressions scattered across the green in clusters, the flat regularity of farmland broken by dozens of craters.
Artillery shells. Someone had shelled the fields.
"Engage stealth mode," Batman said.
The Batwing's surface began to shift, its coloring adjusting until it faded into the dark sky around it.
"Stealth alone won't work," T'Challa said. "Wakanda operates a complete radar network plus an identification system built around Vibranium technology. Conventional stealth will be flagged."
Batman turned his head toward him. T'Challa looked at the control panel and then looked at Batman.
"May I make some modifications?"
Batman nodded without hesitation.
T'Challa's Vibranium claws punched through the panel housing and tore it open. The complex circuitry underneath was suddenly exposed -- layers of wiring dense enough to make Robin turn deliberately away.
"I need you to activate the sonic weapon, Batman."
Batman did it immediately. He didn't pause to consider that activating the sonic array would substantially compromise the stealth profile -- T'Challa clearly had a reason, and the instruction was precise.
T'Challa's hands moved with trained efficiency. He rerouted connections, adjusted a series of parameters, and spoke as he worked.
"I've modified the sonic frequency output to match Wakanda's identification system exactly. As far as their radar is concerned, we're broadcasting the correct signal. We won't appear on any display."
"That's not all you modified," Batman said.
"No." T'Challa didn't deny it. He closed the panel back as well as it would go. "I rewired the sonic weapon circuits. Damaged some of them. That was for Shuri."
"Shuri?"
It was the first time Batman had heard the name.
"My sister." T'Challa's tone didn't invite further questions.
Batman didn't ask any. He redirected.
"We take them apart separately. One target at a time."
T'Challa nodded. "Klaue wants the Vibranium. M'Baku wants the throne. Neither of them will get what they came for." He looked toward the forward glass at the distant city lights. "Take us up. We need a general picture of how Klaue's mercenaries are distributed across the ground. I had no time for detailed intelligence when I escaped."
Batman pulled the controls.
Fifteen minutes later they were back down, the Batwing parked quietly in a concealed clearing in the same mountain range. The three of them crouched around the middle of the cabin with a rough distribution map between them, drawn from what Batman had been able to observe from altitude.
"Over a thousand Wakandans are mining by hand," Batman said. His voice was low. "The mining operation is real, but it's secondary. The Wakandans are the actual leverage. As long as those workers are under Klaue's control, Wakanda's warriors can't move without risking all of them. That means M'Baku won't use the Wakandan military to push Klaue out -- not in the short term."
He looked at T'Challa.
"And M'Baku kept you alive instead of killing you when he had the chance. That's because he needs you. A puppet Black Panther, someone the Wakandan people would recognize as the legitimate heir. That's his mechanism for controlling the population without constant force."
T'Challa's arms were folded across his chest. His eyes hadn't left the map.
"Klaue holds the mining area. M'Baku holds the royal city. We understood this before we left." He traced a line between the two marked zones. "A divided Wakanda, and each of them holding one half. My first priority is infiltrating the royal city and finding a way to announce publicly that I've returned. At minimum that prevents Wakandans from treating us as enemies."
"Klaue and M'Baku are going to turn on each other," Venom Robin said, with a short dismissive sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"They will," Batman said. "Every alliance founded on betrayal collapses the moment the parties have to divide what they've taken. I recommend Plan Twelve."
T'Challa agreed.
Batman had prepared thirty complete operational plans for this engagement. The first step of every single one of them was identical: help T'Challa become the Black Panther. Everything else was conditional on that.
T'Challa looked at Robin -- who was sitting there in his golden-haired, blue-eyed mask, looking like an interested child -- then looked at Batman.
"Are you certain about bringing him? What we're facing isn't just Klaue and M'Baku. It's the forces they command. Wakandans won't kill me. But they won't show mercy to outsiders whose presence they can't account for."
Venom Robin grinned.
His hand went to his neck. He found the seam of the mask at the edge of his jaw, dug his fingers in, and pulled. The blond-haired boy's face came away in his hand.
What remained underneath was not a boy's face.
"Allow me to make a proper introduction," Batman said. "This is my capable associate -- the Moon Eclipse Knight. Robin."
T'Challa processed the title in silence. Then he reached up and placed the Vibranium faceplate over his own features, and the man behind it was gone.
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