Chapter 391: Amora
"Remove your mask. Stop holding yourself so tightly, master."
The woman was practically draped across Batman's lap, her fingers tracing the line of his jaw with unhurried ease.
"You've done it. You've made the whole world into exactly what you wanted it to be. You can finally allow yourself to rest."
"Enjoy this. You've earned every part of it."
Batman watched her face draw closer in silence.
At the last moment -- her full red lips a breath away from his -- he spoke.
"Where is this? Who are you?"
"Have you forgotten?" Her golden hair swept across his cheek as she tilted her head. "This is the palace you built for yourself when everything was finished. I am Amora. Your most devoted handmaiden."
"I don't recall having a handmaiden," Batman said. Something moved in his mind, a quiet warning pushing against the surface of his awareness. He wanted to look into her eyes. He didn't.
"You need to rest, my master." Her arms rose, her hands finding the back of his head, her fingers settling on the edges of the bat-mask. She pulled.
The mask came free. Her expression shifted -- a flicker of something that didn't belong on a face that confident.
Beneath the first mask was another mask. Identical.
She tried again. Another mask underneath.
Amora blinked slowly, setting aside the approach. Instead she brought both hands up and cupped his face, trying to angle it toward her -- trying to bring their eyes level.
In the instant before it happened, something in Batman's chest produced a wrong note. He redirected his gaze deliberately -- away from her nose and lips and down, along the pale curve of her neck. Below that.
Like looking into something bottomless. A depth that had no floor.
Amora smiled. She withdrew her hands with perfect composure, rose from beside him, and stepped down from the platform. She joined the figures moving across the dance floor below, and her body moved through the patterns the other dancers wove with the ease of someone who had never in her life been required to try at anything.
Batman watched.
Every figure on that floor was extraordinary. Every feature, every proportion, refined to precision. They moved in perfect coordination and the light found each of them in turn.
The only thing wrong with any of them was a spider resting on each person's collarbone.
Batman went quiet.
Amora danced for a long while and then climbed back up to him.
"Master." Her voice was soft and unhurried. "You've always kept your secrets guarded, always kept your vigilance in place. But I want you to understand -- in this place, none of that is necessary. No one will harm you here. No one will harm any of us." She leaned in close, lips near his ear.
"Spider --"
Batman's hand was around her throat before the word finished.
"Master --"
She made a sound of pain, low and strained.
Batman's expression didn't change. His eyes stayed on the line of her chin, not her face.
"Your objective is the Spider Totem."
"What totem -- I don't know what you -- master, let go, let go of me --"
Two tears moved down the curve of her face and struck the palace floor. They hit the stone and became something else -- small, solid, brilliant. Gold. Diamonds. Pearls, rolling across the floor with soft, musical sounds.
Batman looked at the floor. Then back at her chin.
"You're not a handmaiden, Amora." His grip tightened. Red lines bloomed across the white of her throat where his fingers pressed. "What are you?"
Amora ceased. No movement, no breath, no warmth. Her presence simply stopped.
Batman watched as her body became shadow and slipped through the gap between his fingers. Five meters away, at the base of one of the hall's great pillars, she reconstituted herself. The shadow pulled itself upright, took her shape, and was her again -- green crown, green outfit, the measured calm of someone who had never been in danger of losing anything.
She leaned against the pillar.
"You don't need to know who I am. But you're an interesting one. We'll have a better conversation another time, somewhere more suitable."
A pause.
"I suppose I should tell you, for that occasion. You can call me the Enchantress."
She kissed her fingertips and sent it toward him.
The dancers collapsed. Each figure dissolved into black shadow, the darkness flowing across the floor and rising to join Amora until it had all merged with her. Then she was gone. The palace came apart -- columns fracturing, the floor splitting, the high seat detonating beneath him -- and Batman dissolved into a scatter of bats that swept outward in every direction and disappeared.
Night wind. The smell of smoke, hot earth, and propellant residue.
Batman was standing in the weapons factory, outside the entrance to the Vibranium mine.
Enchantress Amora. His gaze moved through the dark toward the distant lights of Wakanda's royal city.
Throughout the entire illusion his mind had been clear. He had attempted to break free multiple times. He hadn't been able to. The only thing that had worked in his favor was the spider-sense -- active even inside that constructed world, steady against every attempt she made to bring his eyes to hers.
Her objective was the Spider Totem. She had failed here. So she would move to the next thing.
The answer came immediately.
The Black Panther Totem.
Batman was already reaching for his encrypted comm to warn T'Challa when something erupted behind him -- a noise that bypassed ordinary hearing and struck directly at the nervous system. Even Peter Parker's body registered it as violent nausea, a wave of dizziness that had nothing to do with fear or exhaustion.
He turned.
From the Vibranium mine's entrance, Wakandans were stumbling out into the open air. They had barely crossed the threshold when the noise took them. They folded to the ground without managing to call out, convulsing, foam at the corners of their mouths.
Above and behind them: a purple outline.
Enormous. Its upper edge extended above the mountain range itself, a hundred meters at minimum, perhaps more. It had no fixed shape. The noise was coming from inside it, and as the noise shifted -- converging and then scattering in different directions -- the outline shifted with it, pulsing and spreading like a mass of translucent material without fixed edges.
At its center, clearly visible, was Ulysses Klaue's sonic weapon.
The noise pushed itself into recognizable syllables. Words, fighting their way out of chaos and arranging into something close to language.
"I can hear sounds. I can feel sounds. I... I am sound. No -- not sound -- noise."
The voice was distorted and fragmented, but Batman could identify the original underneath.
Klaue. This was what had become of Ulysses Klaue.
Batman pressed two buttons simultaneously without pause.
The first opened the encrypted channel. "T'Challa. The Black Panther God is in danger."
The second sent a startup sequence.
Far away at Wakanda's outer border, alone in the still interior of the parked Batwing, the crab-shaped mech powered on.