Chapter 399: The Bat Family and Wakanda's Brotherhood Pact
When Venom Robin learned that Batman had spent one of the Pym Particles -- the same vial he had been holding in reserve as a last-ditch counter to the Hulk -- just to deal with the Noise entity, he came very close to swinging the axe off his back and using it on Batman instead.
"Let's just take the Vibranium mine with us," Robin said. "The whole thing."
"I considered it," Batman said. "But with the Pym Particle used up, that option is no longer available."
Robin stared at him. "I said that as a joke. You actually thought about it?"
"It was a contingency for the worst-case scenario."
"This already is the worst-case scenario," Robin muttered.
Batman studied him for a moment. Something about the exchange felt familiar -- the shape of it, the attitude behind it. He thought back to the times he had left Robin behind on North Brother Island.
"When I've left you on the island before," he said, "you were always with the Lizard Professor, weren't you."
"And the Hulk," Robin said, scratching his head at the odd question.
Batman exhaled slowly. That explained the familiarity. It had the exact same energy as the Lizard Professor plotting to squeeze money out of Reed Richards for a private zoo after the full-wave projector fell into Batman's hands -- the same refusal to walk away empty-handed, the same stubborn accounting of every loss. Robin had clearly been picking up more than combat technique during those island sessions.
The thought was, against his better judgment, almost funny. Batman reached over and thumped the back of Robin's head lightly, then led him back up from the underground chamber and into the daylight above the royal city.
They had been standing on the roof of a building five kilometers from the central plaza for less than two minutes when the sound hit them -- a wave of noise rising from tens of thousands of throats at once.
"T'Challa! T'Challa! T'Challa!"
Venom Robin had been squinting at the engravings on the axe handle. His head snapped up the moment the chanting began, neck craning toward the plaza.
At the center of the open square, the figure in white ape fur was on the ground. Man-Ape M'Baku lay where he had fallen. T'Challa stood over him, arms raised toward the surrounding Wakandans.
The duel was over. T'Challa had won.
As the crowd's roar grew, the chanting shifted, the name giving way to something larger.
"Wakanda forever!"
"Wakanda forever!"
Wave after wave of sound crashed across the city. Fighter jets cut across the sky, trailing colored streamers. Fireworks burst overhead. An airship rose above the rooftops, and the enormous screens covering the face of the palace buildings all cut to the same image at once -- T'Challa, arms high, the city behind him.
The central plaza was where T'Challa had defeated Man-Ape. Now it was where a king was crowned.
T'Challa did not linger in the moment. While the crowd surged around him in celebration, he moved quickly, retrieving his clothes from where he had set them aside before the duel and fishing the encrypted communicator out of the pocket.
"Batman. Robin. Where are you?"
"Seven o'clock. Five kilometers."
T'Challa turned in that direction without hesitation. A moment later his voice came again, lower and direct.
"I'm coming to you."
He tucked the communicator away, bent low, and slipped through the celebrating crowd with the fluid precision of a man who had just remembered he had somewhere to be. Within moments he was moving across rooftops, leaping from building to building in a clean arc toward Batman's position.
He arrived fast, landed without ceremony, and immediately brought both fists together in front of his chest in a deep bow.
"Batman. Robin." His voice was completely serious. "I extend my most sincere invitation for you both to witness my coronation ceremony."
"If it's not a fight, don't call me," Robin said, the word "ceremony" alone triggering an immediate memory of being firmly stopped from picking at the gap in his teeth during a prior formal occasion. He shook his head with feeling.
"I'm not refusing out of disrespect," Batman said. "But we won't attend in person. We'll witness you become King of Wakanda from here."
T'Challa did not press it. He shifted direction.
"I've just received the report from the Vibranium mine. I know what happened there." He paused. "What I don't understand is how your mech grew to that size."
Batman said nothing.
Venom Robin answered instead.
"He used a Pym Particle. One of those things that's worth tens of billions on the black market and you still can't buy no matter how much you offer."
T'Challa went still.
Wakanda's borders might be closed to the world, but its intelligence operations were not. The royal family knew about Ant-Man, about Pym Particles, about S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Hulk. Wakanda had actually attempted to purchase a Pym Particle sample through a discreet intermediary during World War Two -- and Hank Pym had refused every offer regardless of price.
T'Challa understood exactly what he was being told. A Pym Particle was functionally equivalent to a strategic weapon. The kind of thing a nation would go to war over. And Batman had spent it -- without hesitation, without apparent concern -- to deal with a threat in a country he had visited exactly twice for a man he had met exactly twice.
T'Challa tightened his fist slowly. He knew, with complete honesty, that he could not have done the same.
"It was a tool," Batman said, as though the number on the price tag was genuinely of no interest to him. "What matters is how it's used. If I had to make the same decision again to give Wakanda its peace back, I would."
T'Challa was quiet for a moment. He did not mention compensation. He did not try to calculate equivalence. He said instead:
"Whatever the future brings, Wakanda owes you a debt that cannot be repaid. If the day ever comes that you are in danger -- wherever you are, whoever the enemy is -- Wakanda will come."
As he spoke, he reached into his suit and produced a bracelet of Kimoyo Beads. Not the stripped-down single bead he had given before, but a full ten-bead bracelet -- complete, unaltered, carrying the full spectrum of Wakandan royal functions.
"Take it. From now on, we are no longer friends."
Venom Robin's hand moved instantly to the handle of the greataxe at his back.
T'Challa's expression did not waver. He held the bracelet out to Batman.
"We are brothers. Friends exchange favors. Brothers never finish paying each other back."
Batman took the bracelet. His hand closed around T'Challa's and gripped it firmly.
"Until next time."
"Until next time."
Venom Robin rolled his eyes so hard it was almost audible. He had the distinct and irritating feeling that he and the old bat had spent the better part of two days working themselves to the bone for a man who was apparently content to call it even with a handshake and a bracelet.
An hour later, moving at an easy pace back through the Wakandan border jungle, Robin was still on it.
"I'm telling you, we should never have come. All that 'brothers' talk -- he thinks you're an idiot, old bat. Are you even listening?"
Batman thumped the back of his head again.
"We came to help. Not to negotiate a transaction."
Robin had clearly inherited something from the Lizard Professor that went bone deep, because he kept muttering under his breath the entire rest of the walk, right up until the moment they stepped into the clearing where the Batwing waited.
They both stopped.
Fresh footprints in the ground around the aircraft -- multiple sets, careful and deliberate. They looked at each other.
Both of them hit the Batwing at the same moment.
The aircraft was undamaged. But the cargo compartment contained things that had not been there before.
A single block of refined material -- massive, dense, roughly the same volume as the Villain mech before it had been enlarged. And several sheets of parchment.
Venom Robin snatched the parchment up and read aloud.
"Wakandan Royal Mining Charter... The bearer is granted the right, for the duration of their natural life, to extract from Wakandan territory a quantity of Vibranium equal to their own body weight. Once per calendar year."
He kept reading.
"My father once told me that some people's value cannot be measured in Vibranium. I always assumed he was speaking in abstractions -- until I met you. This Vibranium is given in Wakanda's name, not as personal compensation."
"Additionally -- I apologize for using the opportunity of adjusting the sonic weapon to access the Batwing's systems. I trust you had already noticed. It was the only way to arrange delivery after the fact."
"May our bond endure."
Robin tossed the parchment to Batman and turned to study the Vibranium block. His hands moved over it, testing the weight and density with the efficient estimation of someone who had spent enough time around heavy materials to develop an instinct for it.
"Five hundred kilograms. Already refined." He turned around. "T'Challa actually came through."
Robin had suggested taking the mine as a joke. He would never have followed through on it. But five hundred kilograms of processed Vibranium exceeded even what he had idly imagined.
Batman said nothing. He ran one hand over the surface of the metal, then turned and led Robin back into the cockpit without a word.
Seconds later the Batwing lifted from the jungle floor and climbed hard into the sky, shrinking to a dark point against the horizon, pointing north toward New York.
"Old bat," Robin said, after a long silence. "Did we just end up with an entire country as an ally?"
"Yes," Batman said.
Back in Wakanda, the coronation ceremony had begun.
T'Challa stood before the throne facing the gathered citizens of the royal city, and through cameras, the hundreds of thousands beyond it. When he spoke, his voice carried across the plaza with quiet force.
"People of Wakanda -- you know what we have just come through. We were at war."
"But we won. Not because of Vibranium. Not because of the legend of the Black Panther. Because someone stood with us."
The crowd exchanged uncertain glances. A handful of people seemed to understand, and leaned to explain in quiet voices to those around them.
"His name is Batman." T'Challa's voice filled the square. "Where he comes from, that name means fear. In Wakanda, from this day forward, it will mean something else."
Some faces showed impatience. T'Challa held up a single Kimoyo Bead -- the original one, the one he had given before the operation began.
"This was the token I gave him before he came to Wakanda. I thought it was a small thing -- a marker, a way for him to reach me if he ever needed to. What it became was the instrument by which I called for help when I had nothing left."
"Sorcerers. Monsters. A warrior with an axe who could have leveled this city. He and his allies removed every obstacle placed before us. He spent a Pym Particle -- a substance worth more than any sum Wakanda could name -- to defeat a threat that stood in our way."
"More valuable than Vibranium?" someone called out from the crowd.
"By a factor of ten million," T'Challa said without hesitation.
Silence fell over that corner of the plaza.
"And so today -- in the presence of Wakanda's ancestral kings, before the elders of the five tribes, before all of my people --" T'Challa raised his voice to carry across every screen and speaker in the city. "I, T'Challa, King of Wakanda, the Black Panther, declare --"
He took a moment to choose the right words for what he was about to say, and then he said them loudly enough for the whole country to hear.
"Wakanda's Vibranium shall never be turned against the Bat Family. Wakanda's warriors shall never refuse the Bat Family's call for aid. Wakanda's gates shall stand open to the Bat Family for all time."
"From this day forward, the Bat Family and the House of Wakanda are bound as brothers."
***
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