Chapter 397: Robin's Second Phase
On the screen inside the Villain's cockpit, the frequency distribution inside the Noise was no longer readable as a pattern. The newly absorbed sound waves were moving through the existing structure like invaders -- colliding with the established frequencies, competing for space that wasn't available. The older frequencies held their ground. The newer ones forced themselves in. When the volume of incoming sound exceeded the structure's capacity to organize it, the internal conflicts stopped being friction and became detonation.
The Noise's pink-purple body began to shake. Not the rhythmic pulsing that had characterized it since it formed -- this was irregular, without pattern. Certain regions of the outline were producing chaotic ripples. Brief fractures appeared along the outer boundary where the conflicting frequencies were concentrated, visible gaps in its structure before the body managed to push them closed.
It was fighting itself.
"What did you do?!" The Noise's voice was something different now. It was assembled from crying, from begging, from the sound of a fingernail drawn slowly across a blackboard at high amplification. The Wakandans watching from the ridge pressed both hands over their ears simultaneously.
The enormous pink-purple mass was in constant motion -- collapsing and reforming, collapsing again, the internal war producing visible instability. Batman used each collapse interval to collect data, targeting the read instrument on the reforming body, narrowing his focus toward the center each time the outer chaos briefly stripped back a layer.
The body had reformed over a hundred times before Batman found it.
The frequency at the absolute center of the structure. Klaue's original sonic weapon. The seed from which everything else had grown.
Batman sat still for a moment in the cockpit.
He closed his eyes. He drew one breath.
And then he spoke. Not through the mech's external speakers. Not through any amplification at all. He sat in the pilot's seat and let his voice exist in the enclosed space of the cockpit, using the chamber itself the way a musician uses a hollow body to project a note.
He said one word.
"Klaue."
The vibration traveled through the mech's hull. By the time it reached the exterior it was inaudible to any human standing in the valley. Completely gone.
But it didn't need to reach human ears.
The Noise went still.
Every sound wave that constituted its body -- every frequency from every layer of its accumulated structure -- had simultaneously received the signal they had all originated from. The first frequency. The original one. Klaue's voice, speaking Klaue's own name.
The Noise's mouth opened. It had something to say. Its body was no longer capable of organizing the intent.
The dissolution began at the center and moved outward in one-thousandth of a second. The pink-purple mass came apart, the component frequencies scattering, losing their organization, ceasing to function as a collective. The entire entity dispersed into the air of the valley.
What remained was the sonic weapon emitter. Small now, without the mass of absorbed sound holding it in a hundred-meter manifestation. It fell from approximately forty meters and hit a flat stone and broke into several pieces, the components scattering.
Ulysses Klaue had died when the Vibranium mine detonated. He had persisted as the Noise.
The Noise had lasted about twenty seconds longer than the Vibranium mine.
Batman climbed out of the mech and walked across the churned valley floor to the broken emitter. He crouched, looked at the pieces, held the longest fragment for a moment, then dug a hole in the soft earth with his hands and set the pieces inside it. He covered them.
"Don't move! Hands up! Stay where you are!"
The Wakandans who had been maintaining a cautious distance rushed in from three directions simultaneously, spears leveled.
Batman didn't say anything. He walked toward them.
He kicked the first Wakandan in the chest, a controlled strike that put the man backward into the loose earth without injuring anything vital. The second and the third went down the same way. The valley floor had been churned thoroughly by two hours of combat -- there were no solid surfaces left except a few intact boulders. The earth was soft and deep enough that being kicked into it didn't break anything.
He put all of them into the ground in about twelve seconds.
The three fighter craft above the valley opened fire when he started moving. He cleared each burst with a web-line to a rock face and was back inside the Villain mech's access panel before the third burst found his last position.
The mech powered on.
It stood in the valley for several minutes without moving. Then a panel in its lower section opened and a flat rectangular screen was ejected outward, landing several meters away in the soft earth.
The mech left at speed, heading toward the royal city.
The Wakandans who had been kicked into the ground helped each other up and gathered around the screen. They checked it carefully. It didn't appear to be explosive. One of them activated it.
"I am T'Challa--"
The broadcast. T'Challa's pre-dawn transmission, played from the beginning.
The captain with the most beast-teeth on his necklace watched it through to the end without speaking. Then he looked in the direction of the Vibranium mine.
Thousands of Wakandans were visible at the mine perimeter -- lying on the ground, or sitting, or slowly standing. The Noise's secondary discharges had reached them during the battle. Most of them were disoriented. None of them appeared to be seriously injured.
"He's not an enemy," the captain said quietly. "He's T'Challa's partner."
He looked toward the royal city, where the sun was just beginning to appear above the buildings.
Forty meters beneath the royal city, the fight in the chamber before the ancestral temple had found its rhythm.
Both fighters had axes. Neither one had anything in reserve. The fight was pure and simple -- raw force, measured in how many blows you could land before you ran out of the ability to land them.
At the outset, Skurge had the advantage. His combat experience was extensive, his technique refined, and his strength exceeded Robin's in the base state. In each exchange, Robin absorbed slightly more than he gave. His wrapping-cloth suit was becoming increasingly non-functional, large sections of it torn away by glancing blows and the shockwaves of blocked strikes.
Robin's grin was getting wider with every exchange.
Skurge brought the axe down onto Robin's shoulder.
The sound it made was not the sound of an axe hitting flesh. It was the sound of a blade hitting dense rubber -- a thick, resonant thud that absorbed the force and returned almost none of it.
Half of Robin's shoulder separated. The wrapping-cloth suit exploded off that section of his body entirely, and what it revealed was not what Skurge had been fighting for the past several minutes. The black symbiote body beneath the cloth showed white lightning-pattern fractures running across its surface, pulsing.
Skurge tried to pull the axe free.
It didn't come.
He looked down. He was about to put his boot against Robin's torso for leverage.
Robin's body was growing.
Not gradually -- immediately. One meter, one-point-two, one-point-five. The axe embedded in his shoulder was not being held by wound tissue. It was being held by the mass of the symbiote itself, which was expanding outward around the blade like a fist closing on something it intends to keep.
Two meters. Three. The proportions shifted into something else -- not a child's body, not a human body's scale, but mass and muscle in quantities that no organism built on normal biological principles should have possessed.
The tongue came out. Both hands came free. One of them closed on the handle of the axe embedded in Robin's shoulder. The other hand closed on Skurge's head.
"Have you ever played video games?"
The kick that followed was not a combat technique. It was a point of emphasis. Skurge traveled approximately forty meters before contacting the chamber wall, and the contact was definitive enough that the stone surface deformed.
He slid down it and landed on the floor.
Robin pulled the axe from his own shoulder, held it for a moment, then dropped it. He brought both hands up and closed them.
"If you have," he said, "you know that some bosses have a second phase."
He covered the distance in a single movement and was on Skurge's face before the Asgardian had finished his fall. The fists came down without pause or pattern -- pure force, applied repeatedly to the same target, the specific brutality of someone who has been restricted for too long and has finally found a situation where restriction is neither required nor appropriate.
Skurge's arms came up. They held for three exchanges. On the fourth, the sound was wrong, and they stopped coming up.
His chest had also changed shape.
Blood ran from the corner of his mouth and he spat more of it deliberately, clearing his airway.
"Amora."
He said it quietly. Almost to himself.
He had followed her for a very long time. He had done things he found objectionable because she asked. He had told himself, each time, that eventually the account would balance in his favor. That eventually she would see his devotion for what it was and respond to it.
She had left him here rather than taking him with her when the thunder came.
"Amora!"
The fist caught him mid-syllable and moved his jaw several centimeters to the right from where it had been. He tasted the remainder of the word rather than speaking it.
He let his arms fall. He closed his eyes.
Green light, from somewhere nearby.
One more fist came down and then didn't -- the impact replaced by a lateral force, something striking Robin from the side and sending the black mass across the chamber floor.
The Enchantress stood over Skurge.
She looked at the symbiote shape where it had landed, and her expression was unreadable in a way that suggested it was being deliberately controlled.
She slid one arm under Skurge's shoulders.
He opened his eyes and saw her face above him, and somewhere in the middle of everything his face produced a smile that had nothing calculated in it.
They vanished together.
***
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