Chapter 326: Venom Robin vs. The Wasp
Batman and Venom Robin had spent the better part of an hour moving through nearly every accessible space in Pym Technologies, but they had never stopped tracking the two people who lived there. Every footstep, every word exchanged between Pym and Janet, every shift in the building's ambient sounds had registered and been filed away. When Pym and Janet pushed away from the first-floor table and headed toward the dining room, Batman knew exactly how many seconds remained.
He looked at Venom Robin.
One look was enough.
The symbiote matter erupted from Venom Robin's body in a single expanding surge, a black cloud that poured out of the dining room doorway and into the corridor beyond just as the far end of that corridor filled with two figures moving toward them.
Pym and Janet had been relaxed a half-second ago. They weren't now.
There was no time for eye contact between them. Their hands found the controls on their suits by muscle memory alone, and both of them vanished.
Not into thin air. Venom Robin tracked them all the way down — two figures shrinking from human scale to something smaller than a grain of rice in the span of a breath, dropping beneath the threshold of normal vision almost instantly.
Janet's wings were already moving. They caught the air and she pulled backward, one hand locked around Pym's arm, drawing him with her as she retreated.
"What is that thing?" she called out, her voice sharp and slightly distorted at her current scale — audible only because both Batman and Venom Robin had the sensitivity to catch it.
"I don't know! But it came for the Pym Particles!" Pym's voice came back at the same frequency. "This is a distraction — it has a partner!"
Venom Robin spread himself wide, filling the corridor, pressing the search. He kept his attention on the two miniaturized figures weaving through the air ahead of him.
"I'm handling this one!" Janet shouted at Pym. "Go confirm the particles are secure!"
She released him. Pym tumbled free and she swung her arm in a full arc, using the momentum to send him spinning toward the kitchen end of the building. Then she turned back.
"Hey! Over here!"
Venom Robin's mass shifted. He oriented toward her voice.
She was the size of a housefly and hovering in place, which made targeting her a practical impossibility for most opponents. Venom Robin had the tracking ability to keep her in focus, but the target was still nearly nothing — a speck of yellow and black trailing two faintly luminous points at her palms.
Whatever those points were, they didn't look like much. Two small bright spots, contained and steady, none of the wild arcing discharge that Electro threw around. No crackling. No spreading corona. Just two compact concentrations of bright yellow energy cupped in two very small hands.
In the moment before Venom Robin completed his assessment, Batman's voice surfaced in his memory — the briefing from before they had entered the building.
Your primary function tonight is to draw their attention. Your secondary function is to exit Pym Technologies quickly and cleanly using the evasion routes we covered. Move the moment you have their focus.
Venom Robin looked at the small bright points hovering in the air.
They didn't look dangerous.
He extended a tendril toward Janet instead.
"Ha!"
The energy discharged the instant his tendril came within range. It didn't arc or spread — it fired in a straight line, both points releasing simultaneously, and hit the tendril like two needles driven through the same spot at once.
The pain was immediate and total. Not the blunt concussive force of the Hulk's fist, not the diffuse burn of electricity — something precise and concentrated, like being stung by something that had evolved specifically to make larger creatures regret their decisions.
The tendril separated from his body and hit the floor still twitching.
Venom Robin contracted sharply, pulling his mass back into a more coherent shape. He chose the shape he was most comfortable moving in — compact humanoid, roughly the height of a young teenager — and reassessed.
He had made three consecutive errors in approximately ten seconds. He had not withdrawn on schedule. He had extended toward a target he hadn't properly evaluated. And he had underestimated what Janet van Dyne could do at reduced scale because her size had made her seem manageable.
The Wasp's power output didn't scale down with her body. That was the relevant fact.
He turned and ran.
The ant farm's ants were already responding. They converged from multiple directions, organized and coordinated, a living perimeter closing around him. He went through them on all fours, moving like something that had given up on dignity in favor of speed, driving toward the central atrium where the building's full height opened up above him.
"Surround him!" Janet commanded.
The hum built from somewhere above — not the patrol ants, but flying ants, a swarm of them responding to the command, pouring into the atrium from every level, black and dense, descending toward the floor where Venom Robin had stopped.
He stood in the column of open space at the center of the building. Moonlight fell through the atrium's glass ceiling directly onto him — the moon had shifted while they worked, and now it was positioned exactly above the shaft, pouring down in a clean vertical beam.
Venom Robin looked up at it.
He stuck out his tongue at Janet.
Then he tilted his head back, spread his arms, and let the moonlight fall across him completely.
The change was immediate and visible. Layer after layer of white matter emerged from the symbiote's surface — pale, bandage-like strips that wound themselves around him from the ground up, encasing him fully from feet to crown in overlapping coils of white. Not the Moon Knight configuration. Something simpler than that, and more raw — the symbiote drawing directly on the amplifying effect of concentrated moonlight, pulling more from itself than it could manage unaided.
The swarm of flying ants closed in around him.
Venom Robin, wrapped in white from head to toe, waited.
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