Chapter 423: Prelude, Part Two
The Justice League had just been named. Batman did not immediately send anyone to Manhattan.
The Lizard Professor and Hulk were already moving -- working through warm-up patterns, rolling shoulders, cracking knuckles. Professor Morbius was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his eyes closed, either resting or running through something internally. Venom Robin was almost vibrating.
Batman looked at Robin for a moment, then pointed at Dr. Otto. Otto was standing in the center of the group in his lab coat, two mechanical tentacles extending behind him where four used to be, and the contrast with everyone else in the room -- the Hulk, the Lizard Professor -- was noticeable.
"Robin. Go to Bat Island. Equipment manufacturing area, boxes numbered 34 and 54. Bring them back."
"They contain what I've prepared for Dr. Otto."
Robin's expression went from impatient to interested in about half a second. He was already running.
Dr. Otto gave Batman a small nod and said nothing.
He had suspected it for a long time -- since before North Brother Island had been converted into a lab, since before any of this infrastructure existed, since the night Batman had fought the Anti-Venom entity and Otto had been close enough to observe the fight carefully. The movement patterns, the problem-solving approach under pressure, the specific way Batman made decisions when he had no margin for error. These things pointed somewhere. The suspicion had sharpened into near-certainty over the months since. There was nothing to say about it now. The moment didn't require it.
Several minutes passed. Then Venom Robin came back through the entrance at a run, both arms raised above his head, balancing two silver cases on top of each other -- each case roughly the same volume as Robin himself, which created a silhouette that was objectively funny even in context.
"Doctor, open them! What's inside?" Robin set them down with considerably less ceremony than their contents probably warranted and immediately craned forward.
His usual wariness around Dr. Otto had completely dissolved in the excitement. He was watching the latches like a child who has been told something good is in the box but not what.
Otto looked at Batman. Batman nodded.
The latches released with two sharp clicks.
Both cases opened at once.
The first contained a suit. Full coverage, form-fitting, the primary color a deep forest green with silver trim at the joints and collar -- designed to move rather than protect in the traditional sense, which suggested the protection was distributed through the material itself.
The second contained tentacles. Four of them, coiled in the case's fitted interior, the metal surface carrying a purple-black luster that reflected the lab's damaged lighting in shifting bands.
Venom Robin's eyes went very wide. He looked at the tentacles, looked at Batman, and said the first syllable of a word before stopping himself.
"It's Vibranium," Batman said, "but not only that. Theoretically the alloy should classify as Adamantium."
The hair sample from Wolverine's beard -- recovered from the gauntlet seam after their fight and submitted to Dr. Otto for molecular analysis -- had not yet yielded a complete synthesis formula. The gap in the formula was still real. But Batman had made his own attempt before the analysis was finished. The resulting alloy for the tentacles was not going to match Wolverine's claws in hardness. It wasn't Adamantium in the purest sense. But it was substantially beyond the capabilities of any conventional metal he had access to.
The lab around them was still largely wrecked from the Hulk's earlier exit and re-entry through the roof. Dr. Otto didn't wait for the space to be cleared. He removed his lab coat, pulled the green battle suit on over his clothes, and then connected the tentacles one by one to the interface points on the suit's back. The mechanical systems integrated and initialized. All four extended briefly, making small adjustments, and then settled into their rest configuration behind him.
"Old Bat." Robin's voice had returned to its normal register of barely-contained urgency. "Can we move now?"
"No."
Batman opened the portable computer interface on the Gargoyle suit's forearm panel.
Intelligence preceded every engagement. That was the rule without exception, and the fact that a large-scale urban battle had already begun in Manhattan a few miles away didn't change it.
Tony Stark had moved. His group was already operating. Batman knew this not from Tony's communications but from the listening array embedded in the Stark Industries building, which had been running continuously since installation. What it told him was that the assembled group in Stark Tower had no real command architecture -- the assignments had been distributed by consensus at high speed, which meant no one had oversight of the full picture. The individual pairings made surface-level sense. The coordination beneath the surface was essentially nonexistent.
The HYDRA soldiers and their four leaders all had assigned opponents. As a tactical picture it appeared balanced. Batman did not believe the picture.
He told the Justice League to hold position.
The escaped gamma creatures -- the Red Hulk, the Leader, the Green Goblin -- had not reappeared since the City Hall explosion. He had not found their trail. This was notable. They were somewhere, and they were not moving randomly. If Batman had to predict their objective, he would predict himself and the Hulk's group, not HYDRA's operation. Those individuals had personal scores, not ideological ones.
The Justice League staying on North Brother Island was also, therefore, a deterrent. The moment they moved into Manhattan, the Red Hulk and the others would have reason to emerge from wherever they were lying low, and the resulting complexity would make an already chaotic situation significantly worse.
He held position and watched the feeds.
Times Square.
Sandman had chosen the location carefully. The plaza was large enough that no surrounding building would significantly interrupt the airflow of a sandstorm at scale, and it was visible from enough angles to guarantee attention. He rose to his full operational size -- the kind of height where individual lanes of traffic disappeared beneath him -- and began the systematic demolition of everything within reach.
He had not been in the space for two minutes when a point of golden light appeared on a building top approximately a block away.
Several flickers of motion later, Electro was standing at the edge of Times Square.
"If you'd rather I not hurt you," he said, looking up at the rotating column of grit and debris, "I'd suggest stopping now."
"SHUT YOUR MOUTH." A face assembled itself briefly in the storm -- vast, distorted, recognizably Sandman -- screamed the words downward, and then dissolved back into the mass before Electro could respond.
The storm shifted and came at him. Sandstorm at velocity was not a trivial threat -- at sufficient speed the individual particles acted less like sand and more like high-grit abrasive at industrial force, and the volume behind it was enormous. Against unprotected skin it would strip tissue down to bone in seconds.
Electro's skin was not unprotected. It was not skin in any meaningful sense at the moment.
Since the verbal warning had clearly produced no result, he expanded.
The electrical charge across his body surface surged outward. Times Square's underground cabling was still partially intact despite the surface damage -- the infrastructure ran below street level and had been insulated from the structural impacts above. The building systems still carried current. These sources found Electro and flowed into him, and what had been a human-scaled figure of golden light grew rapidly into something that matched the sandstorm's scale -- a towering construct of branching electrical charge that continued expanding until it was large enough to make the engagement geometrically fair.
Then he drove himself into the storm.
The two systems met and interpenetrated. Inside the contact zone, the temperature produced by the electrical discharge was sufficient to affect the sand's crystalline structure at the grain level. Individual particles fused. Glass formed -- not molten, not a pour, but grain-by-grain conversion as the heat conducted through the mass. Sandman's material was being turned against itself, each crystallized fragment non-functional as the loose, flowing medium that gave him his mobility and attack capability.
The converted grains fell. They made the sound that glass makes when it drops on pavement, and they made it continuously -- a sustained crackling rain of the stuff, landing across a spreading radius as Sandman's volume visibly decreased.
He recognized the situation quickly and did the tactically correct thing: he stopped fighting and ran.
He had, however, misjudged one aspect of the encounter. The speed differential between a sandstorm and a fully converted electrical entity was not close. Sandman's storm-state was fast by any standard that applied to weather or conventional pursuit. It did not apply to lightning.
He went. Electro was already there.
He redirected. Electro arrived before the redirection completed.
This continued for approximately four minutes. When the last coherent grain that constituted Sandman lost structural integrity and dropped motionless to the street surface, the fight was over.
Electro had not sustained damage.
Iron Man found the Grim Reaper on the far side of Midtown, moving between buildings along a route that suggested he had specific addresses in mind. Tony identified him by the heat profile of the mechanical right arm -- a high-density alloy housing for the scythe mechanism, dense enough to stand out clearly against the ambient signatures of the surrounding block.
He didn't close to conversation range. He opened the engagement from altitude with sustained repulsor fire in burst mode, targeting the mechanical arm's housing joints while Grim Reaper was still trying to locate the source of the first impact.
This was also a one-sided fight.
Hawkeye did not find Baron Zemo. He found, instead, an entire HYDRA unit that had apparently been positioned to intercept anyone moving from Stark Tower toward Zemo's probable operating area. They had the distinctive silver weapons he'd seen at the Adirondacks, which were a different category of problem than the fists and edged weapons he'd been dealing with in the Yokohama operation. He adapted and continued working.
On North Brother Island, Batman had not moved.
He had the full picture now -- or close enough to full that the remaining gaps were details rather than structure. The accumulated threads from across the past several months had resolved into a coherent shape while he'd been watching the feeds.
Two years ago -- in the period before Nick Fury had assembled his secret team for the Latveria operation -- Japan's Darkwind Group had sent a North Pole expedition that discovered Captain America in the ice. The expedition had been quietly funded by Nathan Garrett, operating as a Level Eight SHIELD agent. Behind Garrett, the resource authorization had come from Nick Fury himself.
The sleeping Captain America had been brought back covertly. Shortly after, he had been deployed directly to Latveria.
The historical news record that Batman had pulled weeks ago showed the aftermath: a reported gas explosion in Latveria's capital, over four hundred dead, more than a thousand injured. The timing matched the collective memory gap shared by everyone who had been there.
HYDRA had the same record. And HYDRA had an operational interest in that event being made public.
The shape of their goal tonight was not a simple territorial seizure. Defeat the superhero community publicly. Force SHIELD's Latveria operation into public record. Rehabilitate HYDRA's standing in the resulting chaos. Occupy the city in the aftermath.
Then from there -- the rest of it.
That was the logic. Batman sat with it, eyes moving across the feed displays, and did not move.