Chapter 327: Anthony!
Inhale.
The white wrappings coiled around Venom Robin's body stretched and compressed as his upper torso expanded rapidly beneath them. He had no lungs — the "breath" was a mechanical process, a cavity opening inside his body mass, drawing air inward through differential pressure. But the result was the same. His body swelled into a near-sphere, the moonlight-charged symbiote matter straining at its own surface tension.
The flying ant swarm was already on him — hundreds of them, moving in from every direction. Some landed on the expanded surface and began searching for purchase. Others went for the obvious targets: the seams around his mouth, the sockets where eyes would be on a human face.
On a human, that would have been devastating. Venom Robin was not a human. His eyes were aesthetic choices, not biological necessities. His mouth existed because he chose it to. A wave of flying ants crawling toward his face was, at worst, mildly interesting.
He even curled his tongue around a cluster of them experimentally.
Sour. Nothing like chocolate.
"Keep that up and you're going to burst," Janet said from nearby, arms crossed, hovering at eye level with the inflated sphere that Venom Robin had temporarily become.
Venom Robin shaped both hands into tendrils, looped them around his own swollen midsection, and mimicked the low register Batman used when he was being deliberate.
"You're right."
He squeezed.
The compressed air inside him discharged in a single explosive exhalation — not a shout, not a directed blast, but a full-body pressure release that hit the surrounding air like a concussive wave. The flying ants in the immediate radius were flung outward in every direction. Janet, hovering a few meters away, was caught in the edge of it and sent spinning.
He had borrowed the concept from the Hulk. He had watched Bruce Banner produce a shockwave that sent Professor Morbius tumbling through the air with nothing but his voice, and had spent considerable time afterward thinking about how satisfying that looked.
He didn't have the Hulk's output. Not even close. But the flying ants scattered, and that was enough.
Janet grew back to full human scale in an instant, shaking debris from her hair.
Her palms were already lighting up yellow again.
Venom Robin's head dropped between his shoulders. He crouched, pushed off the floor with everything he had, and fired a volley of black tendrils upward simultaneously, using them to launch himself toward the top of the atrium.
The moonlight enhanced version of himself hit the atrium's glass ceiling at full speed.
The glass exploded outward.
Behind him, Janet pulled up short as a cascade of heavy fragments rained down, shrinking again instinctively to thread between the falling pieces, then enlarging once more when she'd cleared them.
She hovered in the open space where the ceiling had been and looked out at the city.
Venom Robin was already gone, white wrappings trailing behind him as he sprinted across the rooftops toward Central Park, the moonlight pushing his speed well beyond what the symbiote managed on its own.
He glanced back once. No pursuit.
"Ha," he said to no one, and kept running. "Old Bat calculates the stress fracture points of glass panels. Like I needed help. Fifty tons, any glass, every time."
---
In the dining room, Hank Pym had arrived in approximately no time at all.
Janet had swung him in a full arc and released him at miniaturized scale, and at that size air resistance was essentially irrelevant. He had crossed the building at speed and arrived in the dining room just in time to see the hem of a wide black cape disappear around the corner between the dining room and the kitchen.
He went for the refrigerator instead of giving chase.
Pym Particles were not stored in any of the building's laboratories, and that had been a deliberate choice. He had experimented with Pym Particles long enough to understand that patterns of behavior were liabilities. If he made consistent trips to one specific laboratory, that consistency would eventually be noticed by anyone watching long enough, regardless of whether the particles were there. The laboratory visits would become the tell.
In World War Two, his first supply of Pym Particles had been stolen. He had no intention of repeating that experience.
The dining room was the answer. He was in and out of it constantly for coffee. The refrigerator was an ordinary appliance. Nobody who noticed Hank Pym walking to his own kitchen counter would consider it worth noting.
He threw the refrigerator door open.
One vial was missing.
"Thieves," he said. The word came out quiet and precise, which was somehow worse than shouting. "ANTHONY!"
The ant that arrived within seconds was a flying ant — responding to the chemical command before Pym had finished drawing breath. He pressed his control and shrank, grabbed the ant's leg, and pulled himself up onto its back.
"Move. Now."
Anthony launched from the floor and drove toward the corner where the black cape had disappeared.
"Faster, Anthony!"
The ant banked around the corner. Through the kitchen, through the window — there, a shape against the night, already outside and moving.
Pym sent the command and Anthony shot through the window.
Then Pym's stomach dropped.
The space outside Pym Technologies was occupied. Not by one bat. By hundreds of them — a dense, wheeling colony that had been circling in the dark, apparently waiting. As soon as Pym and Anthony cleared the window, the echolocation signals hit from every direction, and the nearest bats peeled off toward the flying insect carrying the tiny man.
City bats ate flying insects. Flying ants were flying insects. The logic was straightforward and impersonal.
"Dodge! Anthony, dodge!"
Anthony veered. A bat's jaws snapped shut on empty air half a centimeter from them.
"Good! That's it! Good—"
The next bat was coming from below. Anthony didn't have the angle. Pym felt the impact, the brief terrifying compression of being inside something's mouth, and then he triggered the expansion.
The bat's skull met his returning mass from both sides simultaneously.
The bat dropped. Pym dropped with it, already transmitting the summons for another ant.
"You are Anthony now," he announced as the new ant arrived and he caught its leg. "Let's go."
Anthony the Second was struck by a wing — not a bite, just a collision with a sweeping membrane — and went into a tumbling descent.
"Anthony the Third!"
Third lasted four seconds before a bat took it cleanly out of the air.
Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh — all gone. The bat colony was efficient and uninterested in his scheduling difficulties.
Pym pressed the other button.
He expanded upward as he fell — ten meters, twenty, thirty — until he was standing in the street at his full giant height, the top of his head well above the building's lower floors. He bent down and swept one enormous hand through the landscaping around the building's base, clearing it completely, looking for any sign of the intruder.
Nothing. Not a trace. The black cape, the figure that had been there thirty seconds ago — gone as if the city had simply absorbed them.
Pym straightened. He stood in the street for a long moment, a hundred feet tall, looking at the empty night.
Then he sat down on the sidewalk, which cracked under his weight, and stared at nothing.
After an extended silence, he drove his fist into the pavement. The paving stones compressed into a visible crater around his knuckles.
It didn't help much.
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