Chapter 390: A Magnificent Castle and a Woman
Lincoln had been shot in the head a long time ago. The man pressing a converted hand against Batman's chest was not a historical figure but a living one -- the geologist Ulysses Klaue, the person most directly responsible for the state Wakanda was now in.
Batman's spider-sense was screaming.
Not only because of Klaue standing in front of him. There was something else -- inside the weapons factory behind him, out of his line of sight. A presence the spider-sense couldn't locate precisely but couldn't ignore. It was telling him to move quickly, deal with Klaue before whatever was in that building could interfere.
Pop.
The sonic weapon at the end of Klaue's arm made a sound like a bubble collapsing, and then the air in front of Batman filled with concentric rings of compressed sound, a wall of force accelerating outward.
The wave's path was briefly visible -- a shimmer in the dark air, there for half a second and then already arriving.
Batman couldn't break the sound barrier with his body. What he could do was read the direction of the force and move with it rather than against it, retreating hard in the same direction the wave was traveling while his cape simultaneously received an electrical charge and turned rigid. He gripped the inside surface and drove the hardened material downward into the mine floor like a vertical blade, a makeshift wall standing between him and Klaue.
The cape held. Batman released it, put his shoulder against the back of the barrier, and brought both hands up -- attempting to access the sonic weapon's electronic systems.
Four seconds. Five. He stopped.
The portable computer built into the Arkham suit couldn't detect a signal. There was nothing for it to find. In the moment Klaue had pressed the weapon against his chest, Batman had performed a rapid structural analysis -- sound emitter, electronic signal chain, command interface, housing. The weapon's internal architecture was exactly what he would have predicted. But there was no electronic signal present. Something was shielding Klaue from the outside. A protection he hadn't accounted for.
No time to work out why. He changed strategy.
He retracted the forearm computer, raised his arm horizontally, and pressed it against the back of the cape. The material softened again at his command, and Batman reshaped it into a narrow wedge -- the same profile as the cowcatcher on the front of a locomotive, designed to displace obstacles by directing force to either side rather than absorbing it head-on.
A locomotive's cowcatcher works because a locomotive is behind it. Batman was behind this one.
The sonic waves kept coming, filling the space between them, constant pressure against the wedged cape. The force was real and substantial and it didn't stop. But with the cape angled correctly and Peter Parker's raw physical strength driving forward, Batman moved through it -- one step, another, another -- the way an icebreaker moves through pack ice.
When the gap had closed to three meters, Klaue stopped.
His intention was to step back, create space, and switch the weapon's output from wide-coverage dispersal to focused-beam mode -- a concentrated strike instead of a wall.
He had barely registered the change in his own plan when the ground transmitted the vibration of rapid footsteps and his body left the earth entirely.
Batman's shoulder hit him center-mass.
Pop.
Klaue's trigger finger pulled reflexively as he went airborne. The focused burst discharged -- a column of concentrated force, far brighter and more defined than the dispersal waves, projecting from the end of his arm and swinging wildly as his body rotated through the air.
He tumbled toward the weapons factory. The focused burst swept with him, rotating across the building's exterior and then interior as Klaue spun. Where it touched, things detonated. Fire and structural debris fountained outward, and the chain reactions moved through the building one after another.
The thirty-three mercenaries inside had been moving toward the entrance when Klaue's first attack hit Batman. Now they were inside an erupting building, being thrown off their feet by shockwaves, and the gunfire that followed was random and reflexive, making the situation worse by the second.
Batman's expression didn't change. He let the cape fall back into its normal configuration and moved toward the factory entrance. The chaos was an opening.
He took one step through the threshold.
And then everything stopped.
Sound. Fire. Flying debris. The mercenaries mid-scream. Klaue still rotating through the air, the focused beam sweeping from his arm. Smoke from discharged weapons, suspended in position. Every element of the scene held in place as though a pause command had been issued to reality itself.
Batman stopped too. His foot was planted at an angle, mid-stride, and he could not complete the movement. He was still aware. He could observe. He simply could not move.
Then the footage reversed.
Fire folded back into its source. Debris rose from where it had landed and returned to the structures it had come from. Bullets that had left barrels traveled backward into chambers. Klaue, still in the air, began moving in the wrong direction, back toward the mine. The focused beam was still firing from his arm, blasting loose earth and rock as he traveled. Then an invisible force grabbed him and threw him -- hard, directed, deliberate -- into the mouth of the Vibranium mine.
The frozen moment ended. Batman could move.
He was not in the weapons factory.
The mine was gone. The jungle was gone. The smell of smoke and raw earth was gone.
Batman was sitting on an elevated throne in the middle of a large, ornate hall. Below him, on a wide polished floor, figures in elaborate costuming moved in coordinated patterns -- dancers, dozens of them, the light catching the fabric of their outfits in ways that suggested deliberate design.
A hand touched his face. Soft, unhurried, the back of slender fingers against his cheek.
He turned.
She was gold-haired and green-eyed. On her head, a crown of green. On her body, something that existed between armor and clothing -- rigid in its structure, soft at its surface, catching the light with the quality of metal but moving with the ease of silk. Green, against pale skin, framing a figure that was evidently the result of someone's very specific attention to detail.
Above the outfit, her face.
Batman had been educated in multiple languages across two separate worlds. He had read poetry in seven of them, philosophical literature in four, and medical taxonomy in three. He had encountered, in his own world, women who were by any reasonable standard extraordinarily beautiful. He reached for the vocabulary from all of that and found it insufficient.
Not merely beautiful. The concept of beauty itself, rendered in a specific arrangement of features. As though someone had calculated what beauty was abstractly and then constructed a physical instantiation of it.
"You're exhausted," she said. Her voice carried warmth and certainty in equal measure, both offered without demand. She leaned against his side, her lips close to his ear. "The world has already become what you wanted it to be. No crime. No injustice. No despair. Only peace, permanent and complete."
Her face turned toward his.
"Take off your mask, Batman."
"All hands -- prepare for atmospheric entry!"
Ben Grimm's voice filled the cockpit.
His eyes dropped to his hands on the controls and he saw that his index finger and middle finger had fused together. The ring finger and the little finger had done the same. His skin had gone rough and yellow-brown, the texture of stone exposed to decades of weather. His weight had increased to the point where the pilot's seat was groaning beneath him, its frame deforming, the shape of a functional seat becoming the shape of something that would not hold much longer.
The control stick snapped in his grip.
Susan Storm flickered -- visible, invisible, visible, the radiation doing something to the mechanisms her body relied on to stay solid. She had stopped noticing. She had a fire extinguisher and she was trying to hand it to Reed, whose arms had stretched in three directions at once to try to reach the controls after Ben's instrument failed. On the other side of the cabin, Johnny Storm was on fire. Not producing fire -- on fire, every surface of him burning steadily in a way that his spacesuit was not equipped to address.
All four of them, simultaneously, in the same voice:
"Oh, shit!"
The ship hit the atmosphere.
The entire vehicle ignited from the outside in, the friction of re-entry turning every surface to plasma. What had been a research aircraft became a fireball -- not a controlled descent, but a diagonal fall, trailing fire across the sky, dropping toward the ground below.
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