Chapter 419: Peter Parker -- The Devil in a Suit
Dr. Otto's decision not to report the North Brother Island situation to Batman was deliberate. He had known since the Manhattan dinosaur invasion that four gamma creatures were sleeping in the underground levels of the City Hall Batcave. He had access to that information and had never forgotten it.
His reasoning was this: Loki had appeared via projection, using words and promises to try to pull them out voluntarily. Against that approach, Dr. Otto was reasonably confident they could hold. The more likely real objective -- the dormant creatures locked beneath Manhattan -- was a harder problem, and alerting Batman to the wrong location would only thin his response time.
He had, in this, correctly read the situation. North Brother Island's monitoring network ran continuous feeds back to Batman's systems. By the time Loki appeared in the lab, Batman already knew. He didn't need Otto to tell him.
His assessment of Loki's target matched Otto's exactly. The gamma creatures.
Batman hit the ground running before he had fully processed what he was going to do when he got there. He had Black Widow on one arm from the Adirondacks extraction, which was a problem he solved by finding a tall building on the approach vector and depositing her on the roof with minimal ceremony. Then he released every constraint on his movement and ran.
In the Gargoyle suit he didn't disappear so much as blur -- the deep blue and dark purple of the Vibranium panels blending into the city's ambient light, the shadow of his cape spreading and compressing with each launching stride as he crossed rooftops toward City Hall.
He arrived at the Batcave entrance and went through.
The green figure was already there. It had one hand pressed flat against the Leader Samuel Sterns's enormous cranium, lips moving in something just below audible speech. Whatever it was doing, it had been doing it for long enough to have produced results.
It looked up when Batman came through. "You move faster than I expected." There was no alarm in the voice. If anything, the figure sounded genuinely pleased, the way someone sounds when something they had predicted comes true at a slightly different time than anticipated.
It stood. It spread its arms.
And behind it, they all stood up.
Green Goblin -- Harry Osborn. The Abomination -- Emil Blonsky. The Leader -- Samuel Sterns. The Red Hulk -- General Thaddeus Ross. One after another, rising in the dim underground space with the heavy, slow energy of things that had been very still for a very long time and were remembering what it felt like to move.
The second underground level went from dark and quiet to something else entirely. The ceiling felt lower. The air felt different. Standing in that space suddenly carried a weight that had nothing to do with the gamma suppressant mist.
"A shame," Loki said, looking at Batman. "If you had arrived somewhat later, all four of them would have been fully converted." He said it without any attempt to conceal it, which was itself a kind of confidence. "That's the nature of prophecy, I suppose."
He shook his head slowly. He was watching Batman's feet shift -- the slight adjustments of weight and position as Batman assessed the room and the angles -- and he seemed to find it quietly amusing.
"From Wakanda to tonight, your habit of suspicion has always given you an escape. But I believe I understand you better now."
The green projection began to move backward. It passed through General Ross without resistance, its outline thinning.
"Attend to your immediate problem, Batman."
Then it was gone. Not a trace left.
Whatever Loki had been in that room, it was not the real one. A projection, the same as what had appeared on North Brother Island. The real Loki was elsewhere.
In the seconds after the figure's disappearance, Blonsky and Ross looked at each other. Both of them smiled. Both of them grew.
The transformation completed quickly -- Abomination and Red Hulk, filling the available space, the familiar scale of both of them pressing against the low ceiling of the underground level. The Abomination's bone protrusions ran along his spine. The Red Hulk's coloring bled into the dark.
The Green Goblin -- Harry -- split his mouth wide, showing teeth that were black at the root and sharp at the tips. "Nice to see you again. Pe--" He caught himself. "Batman."
At the wall behind them, the Leader had stopped advancing. He had pressed one hand against his own head. At the New Mexico base, he had already established that direct mind control was ineffective on Batman. He wasn't trying it on Batman now. He was trying it on the three gamma-enhanced figures in front of him.
The Abomination and the Red Hulk went under in under a second.
The Green Goblin was a different case. The two liters of stimulant compound that had been forced into Harry Osborn's system -- a dosage that would have killed an unenhanced person through overdose alone -- had done something to his internal structure that made him harder to reach. The boundary between Harry Osborn and the Green Goblin personality had dissolved somewhere in the process. The mind the Leader was reaching for had no clean edges to grip.
Harry's eyes sharpened. "You want to control me."
He crossed to the Leader in one step and brought one hand down on the Leader's enormous skull with the full intention of driving it into the wall. With the Green Goblin's normal strength, that hand would have put the Leader's head into the concrete up to his neck.
The Leader's head hit the wall and bounced. He wasn't even bruised.
Harry stared at his own hand. The expression that crossed his face was not surprise so much as fury turning inward, looking for an explanation. Before he could find one, the Leader's controlled Abomination and Red Hulk seized him and threw him.
Batman moved to intercept and caught him, setting him down without letting him hit the ground.
"What did you do to me?" Harry grabbed for Batman's collar. There was no collar on the Gargoyle suit. He redirected and grabbed for the cape instead.
Batman caught his wrist.
Meanwhile, the throw that the Abomination and Red Hulk had generated -- at anything close to their normal output, it should have produced a shockwave that sent Harry through the air fast enough to knock Batman off his feet on impact. Instead Harry had moved like a thrown adult human rather than like a gamma-powered projectile.
It wasn't only Harry. Both the Abomination and the Red Hulk were operating at a fraction of their normal output. Well above an ordinary man, but only that.
The Leader scanned the underground level and found it fast enough. A greenish mist, barely visible in the dim light, distributed evenly throughout the enclosed space. It was faint enough that the gamma creatures hadn't registered it as significant when they first woke, which was the point. Batman had anticipated this scenario before he ever moved the creatures into this space. The second underground level ran a continuous vaporized gamma suppressant at all times -- a permanent atmospheric condition the moment anyone without a filtration system stepped inside.
By the time the Leader had processed this, Batman had already closed the distance to the Abomination and Red Hulk.
The size difference was obvious. Both of them stood over two meters in their current forms, broad and dense in proportion. Batman came up to their chests. The Gargoyle suit's proportions didn't change that.
What the image actually looked like, watching it happen, was this: Batman stepped into the space between them, both arms going up and around at the same instant, locking across the backs of two necks simultaneously. One leg snapped out sideways and caught the Leader mid-lunge, sending him across the room. Both arms tightened. Two figures who, under any other circumstances in any other location, would have been catastrophic to fight, went limp and dropped.
Harry Osborn watched all of it from behind Batman's back. He was grinning, but his eyes weren't in it. The moment Batman's arms were occupied -- both hands holding the dead weight of the Abomination and the Red Hulk, no free limbs available -- Harry moved.
He backed away toward the exit of the second underground level. A few fast steps brought him up and through to the first level.
The gamma suppressant did not extend here. The first level of the City Hall Batcave ran something else entirely -- an atmospheric concentration of fear gas that had been part of the base's passive defense system for over a month.
It reached Harry the moment he cleared the threshold.
In the vision that assembled itself in front of him, Harry Osborn was sitting on the sofa at the top of Osborn Tower. The cushions were familiar. The room was right. Beside him on the couch, shapes he understood to be his wife and his child -- their faces wouldn't resolve clearly, the way the most important things sometimes don't in dreams.
Then the window shattered inward. Batman came through it. And in the few seconds that followed, Harry's wife and child stopped being alive, and Batman crouched in front of him and set his father Norman Osborn's head into Harry's lap.
Then Batman reached up and removed his mask.
The face underneath it was Peter Parker's. Composed, satisfied, almost amused -- the expression of someone who had arranged everything exactly as intended and found the results precisely to his expectations.
In the vision, the scene completed itself. Harry Osborn was locked into a basement room with the bodies. Peter Parker rode the elevator to the executive floor of Osborn Group Tower, walked to the large desk at the center of the room, sat down, and adjusted his tie.
The picture was immaculate. Respectable in every surface detail. A young man in a well-fitted suit, behind a large desk, running a successful company.
The Green Goblin's eyes went red.