Chapter 395: For Wakanda!
Batman had been steering the Noise away from the Vibranium mine for the better part of an hour, keeping one step ahead of each discharge while drawing the creature steadily northeast. He needed open ground with no Vibranium ore beneath it -- terrain where the Villain mech's impacts wouldn't disturb the deposits and risk accelerating whatever the Vibranium was doing to what remained of Ulysses Klaue.
The adjacent valley would do.
"Batman." The voice came from every direction at once, wrapping around the rocky walls of the valley and arriving at Batman's position from all sides simultaneously. "You know, when I transformed into this form I heard everything. Every sound on this continent. I heard the Vibranium calling -- it resonates constantly, did you know that? I heard Wakanda's people, their fear. I heard your heartbeat." The voice paused. "Steady. Strong. One beat after another."
The Noise entity had grown further since the mine. Its body was pink-purple and enormous, somewhere above a hundred meters in height when it chose to hold that height, though it didn't hold any shape for long. The matter composing it was visibly not matter at all -- it pulsed and shifted, its edges producing constant small ripples as though the boundary between it and the surrounding air was never quite settled. It was nauseating to watch at length.
"Get out of my way."
Batman shook his head. He raised both arms and launched everything attached to them at once -- batarangs and bombs in sequence, fire-based, cryo-based, toxin-based, solidifying gel, high-frequency ultrasonic emitters, flashbangs, low-frequency infrasound charges. He pulled items from his belt and threw them without pause until his hands were empty.
The Noise entity's approximate face produced something between a grin and a wound. It laughed.
"Nothing! All of it nothing! You're panicking! You've run out of ideas and you're throwing everything you have at once!"
The laugh wasn't pleasant. Nothing about the Noise was pleasant -- its voice was assembled from components that individually would have been unpleasant enough and together constituted something that pressed against the listener's nervous system like static held at high volume.
Klaue's original intention, before the transformation, had been to control the Vibranium mine. Then use those resources to escalate against M'Baku, and through M'Baku eventually take Wakanda. A concrete plan, efficiently structured.
The transformation had changed his priorities. Now he wanted to absorb enough Vibranium-derived energy to become something that no other force on Earth could match. The plan had expanded to include everything.
Batman kept moving through his field. The Noise followed, irritated, which was exactly the point.
"We could make a deal," Batman said, still moving, his voice carrying the particular flat quality of someone who has genuinely considered and discarded approximately forty other options.
"You want to bargain with me?" The Noise laughed again, its body flickering between two configurations. "Go ahead. Tell me what you're offering."
"Your mercenary force was a hundred and thirty people, not counting you. But the entire time, there was a woman traveling with the group. What can you tell me about her? When did she join the column?"
The Noise bent down. Its head -- which was larger than Batman's entire body -- descended to somewhere near his level.
"Heh. Is that your side of the deal?" The laugh this time was lower and more private.
Batman checked the Villain mech's position on his visor display without changing his expression.
"What do I get?" the Noise asked.
Batman held the silence for exactly one second. In a negotiation, never answer that question yourself. Let the other party define what they want, or you've already lost the leverage.
"What do you want?" Batman asked.
The laugh that followed was assembled from ocean waves, rolling thunder, and the rapid beeping of a cardiac monitor -- each component recognizable, their combination grotesque.
"I want the entire Vibranium mine."
"You know that's not possible," Batman said. "Choose something else."
BOOM.
The word landed at the same moment a distant impact reached them. Deep, resonant, single.
Batman had Peter Parker's hearing. The Noise was composed of sound and registered every frequency in its immediate environment as something close to direct sensation. Both of them caught it.
The Noise turned toward the horizon. The sky above the mountain range to the east was beginning to lighten -- the particular grey-blue that precedes dawn by twenty minutes, the sky not yet decided.
"Besides the mine," Batman said, "what do you want?"
The Noise's approximated face turned back toward him. What it produced could only be called a snarl.
"I want you dead."
The transformation had not been abstract. Batman had shoulder-rammed Klaue, sent him airborne -- and the Enchantress had chosen that moment to reverse time, throwing Klaue back toward the Vibranium mine with his sonic weapon still firing at full output. He had hit the raw ore at maximum discharge, and the Vibranium -- which responded to specific frequencies -- had absorbed more sound energy in three seconds than it had encountered in decades. The detonation had vaporized him completely.
What remained was his mind. His thoughts. His fury. All of it had merged with the released energy and taken the shape it now wore.
The Enchantress was nowhere. Batman was right here.
The Noise raised one arm. A column of focused sound the diameter of a large tree launched itself at Batman's position.
Batman hit the bat-claws and cleared it laterally.
Another wave of cascading noise followed immediately, filling the valley at shoulder height.
He was forced to dodge again, and again. The Noise pressed forward, taking advantage of the fact that in its current configuration it simply couldn't be reached -- any direction Batman moved was inside its operational range, and the terrain offered no cover that mattered at this scale.
The entity was enjoying itself. Its body shifted, one section of the pink-purple mass flowing toward its arm and taking on a different configuration -- a curved blade, enormous, made entirely of compressed sound.
It swept the valley floor with this blade from left to right, keeping the cutting edge close to the ground. Batman went straight up, the only available direction.
Below him, the Noise watched the small dark shape hanging in the air with the patience of something that has all the time it could possibly need.
The thunder from the horizon was coming faster now. The intervals between the impacts were closing, the separate beats merging into a sustained roll.
The Villain mech arrived.
The Wakandan pursuers who had been following it since the border came to a stop. They looked up at the hundred-meter entity swaying above the valley, and a few of them took involuntary steps backward.
"What is that thing?"
"I don't know," said the captain with the most beast-teeth on his necklace. "But I think we know what the mech came here to do." He watched a black shape drop from the sky, catch the mech's exterior, and pull itself toward the upper access panel. "It's here to fight that."
Inside the cockpit, Batman reached the pilot's seat and sat. The seat was the size that was useful -- the Villain mech had been designed from the beginning with two separate control systems. The standard system had scaled up with the Pym enlargement and was currently the size of a children's carnival ride. The miniaturized secondary system had enlarged to exactly the scale Batman could operate from.
The hydraulic actuators ran their sequence. The mech locked into combat configuration.
"The only detectable energy fluctuation in the entire region is in your location, Batman. I observe you are engaged with the creature."
T'Challa sent the message from a shadow on the inner edge of the royal city and waited exactly four seconds for the confirmation code to return. It came. He turned and ran.
Wakanda had television. It had music, entertainment, regular broadcasts -- ordinary life that had continued operating even after M'Baku took the palace. Normal people needed normal things to continue existing, and M'Baku understood that a city that had nothing to do would be a city that thought too much.
The anchor in the broadcast building had been running his morning segment when the studio door opened.
The figure that walked in was wearing a Vibranium suit. The faceplate was on.
The anchor's train of thought left the station without him.
"I am T'Challa." The prince removed the mask. He nodded once. "I need the camera."
The anchor held still for two seconds. His eyes widened incrementally. Then he stepped back from the desk, moved the camera on its mount, and aimed it at the man standing in the middle of his studio with a Vibranium faceplate in his hand.
T'Challa looked at the lens.
"Brothers and sisters of Wakanda." His voice was level. There was love in it, and rage, and neither one was performed. "I am T'Challa. Son of T'Chaka, guardian of Wakanda, Black Panther of our people."
The screens throughout the city -- in restaurants, in public squares, in living rooms and markets and guardhouses -- cut to his feed. The signal propagated outward from the tower and didn't stop at the city limits.
"Half a month ago, my father -- your king -- was murdered. Ulysses Klaue killed him. Klaue came for our Vibranium and killed the man who stood between him and it. And the one who opened the gates for him -- who brought the enemy into our home and helped his knife find its mark -- is the same person who now calls himself your king."
The screens multiplied T'Challa's face across every settlement in Wakanda. Border tribes. Mountain communities. The workers at the mine perimeter. The people in the shadow of the royal city who had been waiting for something to tell them what to do next.
"M'Baku sits on my father's throne. That does not make him a king. It makes him a man who purchased a throne with Wakandan blood and calls the transaction a reign."
T'Challa paused for one breath.
"I know what you're thinking. The city is under his control. The mine belongs to Klaue. Our people are being held. You're afraid. You're waiting for a sign."
He gave them the sign.
"My partner is fighting Klaue's forces right now. The hostages at the mine are free. And the man who calls himself your king is in his stolen palace at this moment, waiting for what he knows is coming."
"I am not asking you to fight for me. I am not calling an army. I am not promising anything that costs you something you cannot afford."
His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to.
"But I am going to tell you what I intend to do."
"At sunrise, I will enter the royal city. I will walk into the palace that should have been my father's. I will stand before the throne that was taken from our people, and I will reclaim it. I will do this alone if I must, because it is the right thing to do and the only thing that needs doing."
"But if there are still Wakandans who remember what dignity is. What honor means. What this land represents -- this land that our ancestors bled for and our children will inherit."
"Then at sunrise, stand behind me."
"For Wakanda."
The broadcast ended.
Wakanda went quiet.
Not the silence of shock or confusion. The silence that comes when many people simultaneously make the same decision and don't need to say it out loud. From the border settlements to the mountain communities, from the workers who had just learned their guards were unconscious to the people of the royal city who had been watching and waiting for a month, Wakandans rose to their feet.
No shouting. No noise.
They stood. They closed their hands into fists.
And they waited for the sun to come up.