Chapter 323: Goliath
Being a rising entrepreneur in New York for the past two months had obligations Batman hadn't fully accounted for. He spent the daylight hours cycling through several media interviews as Peter Parker, delivering the expected remarks about Parker Industries' contribution to the reconstruction effort following the invasion. The charitable arm had committed a substantial amount to civilian recovery, which made Parker a newsworthy figure whether he wanted to be or not.
It felt uncomfortably familiar — the daytime performance, the careful public face, the counting down of hours until he could stop being one person and become the other. Gotham had required the same split. New York was no different.
But when the sky darkened, Batman pulled on the Arkham suit and dropped into the city with Venom Robin at his side, the two of them swinging in the direction of Pym Technologies.
"Old Bat, shouldn't our priority right now be the Black Knight?" Venom Robin said as they crossed open air between buildings. "Track him down, corner him somewhere quiet, beat some information out of him?"
Venom Robin had considerable power at his disposal, but the Hulk and Batman occupied a category above what he could currently handle in a direct fight. The Lizard Professor was back on Bat Island watching over the red T-Rex, which eliminated another potential sparring partner. With the dinosaur threat resolved, Venom Robin was between targets, and his approach to this problem was consistent — find something formidable and hit it until answers emerged.
The dinosaurs hadn't counted. Aside from the giant horned T-Rex that the Lizard Professor had put down, the rest were just animals. Powerful, dangerous animals, but not the kind of challenge Venom Robin was looking for.
"Interrogation has limits, Robin," Batman said. "There's information you can extract that way, and information you can't. Right now we need the kind you can't."
They landed on the roof of Pym Technologies without a sound.
"You're going to let the Black Knight surface on his own?" Venom Robin asked.
"Yes. He and Kingpin don't know each other, but both connect to the Yami Kaze Group through separate threads. When those threads pull tight, Garrett will show himself." Batman located the rooftop ventilation access, released the panel, and dropped inside. "Hawkeye is still working the Japan side."
"If it were me, I'd have been done already," Venom Robin muttered, and followed him in.
The ventilation shaft opened into a vertical drop that ran the height of the building. Pym Technologies was thirty-two floors — modest compared to the sixty-six of Parker Tower or Oscorp's sixty, but what filled those thirty-two floors was unlike anything in either of those buildings.
Pym Technologies was built around a central atrium, a tall open shaft of space with a spiral staircase running its perimeter. Laboratories and equipment bays branched off on every level. The layout gave anyone in the ventilation system an unobstructed sightline through the entire structure.
Batman and Venom Robin had that sightline now, and what it showed them stopped Venom Robin mid-crawl.
"..."
From the first floor to the fifth, dinosaur carcasses were being processed.
Giant ants — each one over a meter in length — worked in coordinated teams, dismantling the bodies with their mandibles and the mechanical tool attachments fitted to their thoraxes. The efficiency was remarkable. Blood, bone, muscle, organ — every component separated and sorted, collected into designated areas. A second wave of ants retrieved the processed material and consumed it in an orderly queue, mandibles working steadily through the portions assigned to them.
It looked, in almost every meaningful way, like a functioning industrial operation. The only missing element was language.
Venom Robin absorbed this for several seconds. Batman watched his expression and read it correctly before Robin said anything.
"Old Man, can we take one?"
"Stay focused on the objective," Batman said quietly. "Move unnecessarily and you spend the next three years confined to Bat Island completing your full training before you set foot off the island again."
The tone was enough. Venom Robin pulled his attention back and closed his mouth.
"Understood," he muttered. Then, after a pause: "Where are the Pym Particles? Every floor looks the same from up here. It's all ant activity."
"Observe carefully. Our primary purpose tonight is reconnaissance — understand the building layout, identify where the particles are stored. Acquisition comes later. Theft is the secondary objective."
Venom Robin looked ahead. A patrol ant — half a meter tall and nearly a meter long — had stopped in the shaft ahead of them, antennae sweeping the air, reading chemical signals from its colony mates. Venom Robin stopped too.
He'd been about to say something else when a voice from below cut through the building's ambient hum.
"Janet, get me a coffee. I'm going to be up all night analyzing the dinosaur data and monitoring the ants that consumed the tissue samples."
Then came the sound — a deep, resonant vibration that moved through the structure itself, a sustained hum that Robin felt more than heard. The atrium filled with it.
In the shaft, both of them watched.
A man in a red and black tactical suit stepped into the atrium below. He was a normal height — six foot, perhaps six one. Then he wasn't. The change happened in the space of a breath. One moment he was standing at the base of the atrium looking up. The next he was twenty meters tall, filling the open space from the ground floor to the seventh, his head level with the laboratory bays on the upper levels.
Like the Goliath of scripture, standing in a valley and daring anyone to come down and meet him.
The giant reached across to the seventh floor and moved a large ant aside with one hand, revealing something beneath it — a small structure, roughly the size of a child's building block, that the ant had apparently been sitting on.
Batman had planned for this possibility.
When he had hacked S.H.I.E.L.D.'s internal servers months ago, three covert programs had been in active development. One of them was the Goliath Project — an enlargement application of Pym Particle technology. The moment Batman had read that file, he had understood that Pym Particles worked in both directions. The same mechanism that compressed mass could expand it.
He had named his contingency plan accordingly. Goliath faced David. Batman would be David.
He filed the confirmation away and continued watching.